Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music

when it's out of ice cream.

Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.

Hello, today we'll be exploring what it means to be working class.

Is it purely a matter of what we earn, or is it a question of what we do?

Is it something we call ourselves or a label that other people might attach to us. And in these times of shifting economic

certainties, can we even know for sure? Here are a few of the questions I'll be putting to my

guest, the historian Alison Light, the musician Eliza Carthy and the writer David Armand. David, you grew up

in Newcastle just across the water in your new book, The Tightrope Walkers, you explore what it was like growing up here in the 1960s. Would you describe it as a working-class city?

I guess it was. It was a working class in the sense that when I was growing up, there was shipbuilding, there was engineering everywhere, there was coal mining.

But for me, growing up in that kind of context, we often think that the working class has been a kind of monolithic thing

but actually it was really multifaceted much more interesting and complicated

than it's sort of given credit for and I never thought of myself as working class until I went to university

and people said oh you're working class I said no

yeah that's right I didn't know what it meant really yeah working class until I went at university. Absolutely. And people said, oh, you're working class, I said, no.

Yeah, that's right. I didn't know what it meant, really. Didn't know what it meant, or didn't identify with it? I think both, because they were saying, yes, you come from a working class background. And I thought, well, yes, you know, I've got uncles who work in the shipyards, I've got uncles who work in the coal mines. but I've got printers and my family I've got merchant salmon with my family

I thought it's more

interesting than that. Alison, what about you? Your book is called Common People, The History of an English

family, makes me think that I can guess how you might identify yourself, but would I be right to say

you'd consider yourself working cars? No, you'd be completely be completely wrong and I come from the working classes I have long history

identifications brother still living in the town where I grew up and so on but I think as a writer

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