A Brief History of Failure
Seriously...
BBC
4.1 • 885 Ratings
🗓️ 14 February 2017
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
"Success is not final, failure is not fatal," said Winston Churchill. The American satirist Joe Queenan thinks he might be wrong. In this archive hour follow up to his previous programmes on Blame, Shame, Anger and Irony, Queenan rails against the very idea of failure. His sharpest attack is reserved for the supposed romance of defeat. From Braveheart in Scotland via the heretic Cathars in France to the pretend soldiers in Virginia still re-enacting the American Civil War, Queenan explores whether there may be something noble about losing a war.
"I'm in the south, at one of the many re-enactment battles of the American civil war that go on every year. Thousands have turned up to re-fight a war they lost. We don't do this in the north - it would be odd, and divisive, perhaps even inflammatory. But the memories of a conflict that took place over 150 years down here - they don't go away."
This is the first of two archive programmes from Joe Queenan, with A Brief History of Lust coming next week.
Failure features archive contributions from classics professor Edith Hall; historian Geoffrey Regan; writer Armando Iannucci; former political correspondent and Strictly star John Sergeant; plus music from Laura Marling, Viv Albertine of the Slits and rock and roll's greatest failure, John Otway.
The producer in Bristol is Miles Warde.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:06.0 | Things I've failed at. |
| 0:07.0 | Remembering to eat breakfast, replying to messages, |
| 0:11.0 | being motivated, sitting on my own and not applying to |
| 0:13.3 | message, sitting on my own and not picking up my phone |
| 0:16.0 | to call someone because I'm feeling a little bit lonely. |
| 0:20.2 | When all else fails, blame everybody else. |
| 0:24.0 | Oh, okay then. |
| 0:26.0 | I've always said that the healthiest attitude is just to say that everybody else in the world is an idiot. |
| 0:32.0 | That's American writer Joe Queenen. He thinks the British |
| 0:37.0 | relish the nobility of failure and he finds that totally |
| 0:41.4 | disheartening. I'm Riana Dylan and this is seriously. |
| 0:47.0 | We're walking up a windy muddy rocky hill in one of the most beautiful places in the world in the foothills of the Pyrenees where at some point in time somebody decided it would be a really great idea to put a |
| 1:08.0 | castle on the top of this hill because it would be really hard for anybody else to breach the walls of that castle. |
| 1:17.0 | And I suspect that in the 13th century there wasn't a convenient footpath. A brief history of failure, an archive hour about the human condition, and the romance of failure with music. |
| 1:50.0 | The presenter is the American writer Joe Queenen. |
| 1:54.0 | Some 13 years ago, while researching a program about my personal obsession with the romance of failure, |
| 2:02.0 | or what I dubbed failure sheik. |
| 2:05.0 | The producer made me huff and puff up a hill to see a castle situated in the south of France. |
| 2:12.0 | Two things on that journey immediately situated in the south of France. |
| 2:13.0 | Two things on that journey immediately became clear. |
| 2:16.0 | One, I was no longer a young man, |
... |
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