Grazing GOATs
Where do you stand on anything considered to be the "greatest of all time"...? For everything imagineered, cobbled together and fired out into an evolving culture, there’s a broad palette of opinions stretching all the way from bewilderment to be-wonderment and all that slots somewhere in between. The object of the Grazing GOATs podcast is to pluck individual entries out from those long lists of books, films, classical and contemporary compositions, poems, plays, paintings, speeches – frankly anything that sports a “greatest ever” lapel pin anywhere – and take a deeper dive to understand why they are (and if they should still be) counted among the greatest of all time.
Episodes
4 days ago
4 days ago
36 min
Think you know all there is to know about the World Cup’s origins? If so, you’ll know that before the birth of world championship football in 1930… there was world championship football. You’ll also know all about the one-armed fox in the box, the tale of the two-ball diplomatic crisis, the Battle of Buenos Aires, and the story of the Romanian midfielder who rose from the dead and scared the life out of his mum.
If all this is as baffling as the offside rule, however, part 1 of this Grazing GOATs bonus podcast explains how and why Jules Rimet got the world football ball rolling back in 1930.
Jun 24, 2026
Jun 24, 2026
45 min
When Beethoven's final symphonic offering ode-ed joyously in the Austrian capital in May 1824, few would've thought they were listening to the simultaneous apotheosis of a revolutionary composer and the extensive canon of Western music itself. Most would've been thinking about the cost of the interval ice creams and that weird bit at the end of the gig when some deaf old fella with a face like a freshly slapped derriere had a crack at 'conducting'...
Jun 11, 2026
Jun 11, 2026
38 min
"Probably the best film in the world...?" Many of us of a certain vintage will remember Orson Welles for the memorable marriage of his distinctive monotone with one of the world's best known adverts for Danish lager, but in 1941 he was a young man with no experience of filmmaking rewriting the filmmaker's playbook. Citizen Kane's mark could be seen in everything that followed, even if it didn't know its Rosebud from its elbow...
Jun 1, 2026
Jun 1, 2026
39 min
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy's "War and Peace" is the go-to titanic breeze block read for anyone sheltering from an atomic apocalypse, ploughing through a life sentence, or queueing for a Ryanair flight to Bydgoszcz. Tolstoy largely rewrote the entire novel and planned an equally weighty sequel which just goes to show what you can achieve when you don't own a telly or belong to a tennis club...
Jun 1, 2026
Jun 1, 2026
31 min
Sgt. Pepper reinvented The Beatles, reinvented the album, and reinvented the recording studio as the magician's infinite sound sandbox. It turned on and tuned into the vibe of the burgeoning counterculture, elevated the humble moustache, and ushered in a kaleidoscope-eyed era of colour, cosmic wizardry, and nausea-inducing curtain and carpet patterns. It also inspired one of the most ill-advised cinematic releases of all time...
Jun 1, 2026
Jun 1, 2026
6 min
Welcome to the Grazing GOATs podcast, a format dedicated to all the creative outpourings that float to the top of the critical pot whenever ardent culture vultures tinker with their lists and league tables of genre-defining greatest hits. Before we peruse the à la carte GOAT menu, here's an amuse-bouche of the whats, whys and where-is-this-goings. Welcome, and enjoy!