Bed

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 13 July 2020

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After a long journey, there’s nothing nicer for Katy than climbing into her own bed. It’s often the first major purchase we make when we grow up and leave home. Its significance was not lost on our ancestors. The bed was often the place where societal attitudes to sleep, superstition, sex, and status were played out, sometimes in dramatic form. So where did the bed come from, and what can this everyday object tell us about ourselves? A sleeper in early modern times believed that sleep was akin to death, with the devil waiting to pounce after darkness. So bed-time rituals were performed at the bedside and wolves’ teeth were often hung around the sleeper’s neck. Iron daggers were dangled over the cradles of infants at night to prevent them from being changed into demon babies. While we may have outgrown a fear of the devil, sleep expert and neuroscientist Prof Russell Foster fears the modern-day obsession that’s disrupting our sleep – our mobile devices. His advice? Prepare your bed for a good night’s sleep and defend it with a passion. Also featuring resident public historian Greg Jenner, and Prof Sasha Handley, expert on Early Modern History and sleep during this time. Producer: Beth Eastwood. Picture: Bed, Credit: Igor Vershinsky/Getty Images

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and trust me you'll get there in a moment but if you're a comedy fan
0:05.2	I'd really like to tell you a bit about what we do. I'm Julie Mackenzie and I commission comedy
0:10.1	podcast at the BBC. It's a bit of a dream job really. Comedy is a bit of a dream job really.
0:13.0	Comedy is a fantastic joyous thing to do because really you're making people laugh,
0:18.0	making people's days a bit better, helping them process, all manner of things.
0:22.0	But you know, I also know that comedy is really
0:24.3	subjective and everyone has different tastes. So we've got a huge range of comedy on offer from
0:29.8	satire to silly, shocking to soothing, profound to just general pratting about.
0:35.0	So if you fancy a laugh, find your next comedy at BBC Sounds.
0:40.0	This is discovery from the BBC World Service. I'm comedian Katie Brand and this is the
0:49.6	origin of stuff where I pay homage to those overlooked and sometimes underrated essentials of everyday life.
0:57.0	One of the great ironies of existence is that the times in your life when you are most able to lounge around in bed are also when your bed is likely to be at its smallest.
1:08.0	As a teenager you will never want to leave your cozy nest, but the nest is no bigger than your own body and may even be accessed by a ladder.
1:17.0	Then as you enter working life, you may stretch your pennies to afford a double bed,
1:21.0	but you'll be burning the candle at both ends and very rarely see it.
1:25.2	Then you move into middle age, and perhaps you can afford a lovely king-sized model with the kind of
1:29.2	high-tech mattress you need a mortgage for.
1:31.9	But you'll be passed out by 9 PM and then up at 5 to look after some
1:34.9	screaming children hungry for cereal and cartoons. And then oh cruel
1:39.6	cruel world you finally reach old age when you have all the time you like to enjoy a bed
1:44.4	the size of a modest yacht and suddenly you're in a residential care home back in that
1:48.7	single bed again. But then maybe we should count ourselves lucky to have a bed at all.
	...

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