A year closes… And a time capsule opens
Americast
BBC
4.3 • 3.1K Ratings
🗓️ 31 December 2024
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On a fateful Thursday evening in November 2023 - to mark a year to go until the election - Justin, Sarah, Marianna and Anthony made predictions for our very own Americast time capsule. Not to be opened until after Americans had gone to the polls in 2024.
Who accurately predicted which presidential candidate would drop out of the race, and who said one of the candidates would undergo a health scare? Which issues did we think would dominate the election and why?
In this episode we open the time capsule and find out which of our prognoses came true, which of them turned out to be a nothingburger, and what we can learn about this historic election year.
HOSTS: • Justin Webb, Radio 4 presenter • Sarah Smith, North America Editor • Marianna Spring, Disinformation and Social Media Correspondent • Anthony Zurcher, North America Correspondent
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This episode was made by Rufus Gray with Joe McFadden. The technical producer was Ben Andrews. The series producer is Purvee Pattni. The senior news editor is Sam Bonham.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:04.8 | Hello, now, this is a rather special episode. |
| 0:07.6 | It is a big day for us on AmeriCast |
| 0:10.1 | because the time has finally come to open our famous AmeriCast time capsule. |
| 0:15.4 | If you've been listening to us for the last year or so, |
| 0:17.8 | you may remember that we introduced this concept |
| 0:19.9 | way back in November |
| 0:21.0 | 2023 with these immortal words from Justin. |
| 0:26.4 | There is a time capsule element to today and the rather good idea that we've had, we have |
| 0:32.4 | gimmicks, don't we, on America, some of which, frankly, don't last beyond one go. But some of them do. And the whole |
| 0:40.9 | business of putting something away and looking at it in a year's time, I think is a really good, |
| 0:45.9 | it's actually a good thing for journalists to do anyway, because we often say things are |
| 0:48.8 | incredibly silly and we're able to sweep them under the carpet. But anyway, we're all going to |
| 0:52.6 | put something in the box, as it were, the time capsule and then unearth it in a year's time, if we're able to sweep them under the carpet. But anyway, we're all going to put something in the box, as it were, the time capsule and then unearth it in a year's time if we're all still around. |
| 1:02.7 | Well, conveniently for Justin, we are all still around, even though that feels quite a long time ago. |
| 1:08.8 | And spoiler, that Justin wasn't actually playing the harp |
| 1:11.2 | during that very poetic introduction. |
| 1:14.6 | But we have kept talking about the time capsule quite a lot. |
| 1:17.6 | And so, as Justin said, |
| 1:18.8 | we want to see whether the incredibly silly |
| 1:20.9 | or not so incredibly silly things that we said |
| 1:22.9 | actually did end up coming true or not. |
... |
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