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, 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 is 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.

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For 200 years, they were a specter haunting the developed world.

They metamorphosed, sometimes pictured as a starving mob, then as the deferential crowd, the

begrimed and exhausted subject of innumerable documentaries such as the Road to Wigan

Pier, or hymned as to carnivite workers. And yet at some point, the working class and poor

began to fade from the imagination, blame the decline

in the great industries of coal, steel and shipbuilding perhaps.

After all, it's easier to imagine the factory worker or coal miner as an icon than the

delivery driver or the office cleaner.

But earlier in the 1930s, for example, the poor

and the working class began to invade the cinema.

I went to bed early. I had a baby very bad. In the morning, instead of getting up for the

children for school, I had been awake all night. I let the children lay as the baby went to sleep for the first time.

So our little black dog kept running about. So I must have dosed off with the baby.

...