Jam Tomorrow
Out of the ruins of the Second World War, the British people were promised a better world of free healthcare, quality housing and good schools. What happened to these promises of Jam Tomorrow? In a new series from the makers of Oh God, What Now?, Ros Taylor explores how the postwar dream was betrayed – and how we can win it back. Follow Jam Tomorrow on Twitter
Episodes
May 14, 2024 • 44 mins
In their heyday women’s magazines sold 12 million copies a week. And at their best, these magazines changed women’s lives. They advised, they inspired, they gave us a glimpse of a different way of being — and that was as true of Cosmopolitan as it was of the feminist magazine Spare Rib.
In our Season 2 finale, Ros Taylor talks to Sam Baker, who edited Just Seventeen, Company, Cosmopolitan and Red, about what it was like to play ...
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April 30, 2024 • 26 mins
When it comes to intervention in the Middle East, there is one word that sums up British hubris. And that word is Suez. But did Britain learn from one of our most infamous mistakes in the Middle East? Far from it. From opposing the construction of the Suez Canal, then repeatedly going to war to defend it, and most recently bombing Houthi rebels trying to disrupt Red Sea trade, Britain is preoccupied with this vital shipping route —...
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April 16, 2024 • 38 mins
In our latest look into postwar history: decriminalising homosexuality. In 1967 — for the first time in more than 400 years — two men over 21 were legally allowed to have sex, in private, with each other. But the fight for equality was very far from won.
Campaigner Peter Tatchell and Hugo Greenhalgh, whose book The Diaries of Mr Lucas: Notes from a Lost Gay Life is published this month, tell Ros Taylor what life was like for gay me...
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April 2, 2024 • 41 mins
Coal: filthy, dangerous, and vital to Britain’s economy — but not any more. What did coal mining really mean to people? And why is coal so key to the biggest issues in politics — from the founding of the NHS, to Thatcherism, and even the issue of who should take the blame for the climate emergency?
Ros Taylor talks to Joerg Arnold, a historian at the University of Nottingham, and Ian Winwood, whose family were coal miners in Yor...
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March 19, 2024 • 37 mins
National service has become part of the mythology of a braver, stronger Britain, where young men did their duty for their country and ended up having a damn good time doing it. But did they? What did people really think of National Service — and why were so many of them utterly relieved when it came to an end?
Ros Taylor talks to Richard Vinen, a historian at King’s College London and author of National Service: A Generation in ...
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March 5, 2024 • 29 mins
Swish… thwack. After the war, one British tradition continued unabated: beating children in schools. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that it was completely outlawed. Why was the UK so attached to corporal punishment and what it did it take to change the law?
Ros Taylor talks to journalist Andrew Brown, who was beaten as a boy, and University of Sheffield historian Heather Ellis about why beatings were seen as an important preparati...
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February 20, 2024 • 36 mins
After the War, Britain was broke and broken – even broker than France. America was faced with a stark choice: invest billions in a shattered Europe or watch its citizens go hungry, or worse, Communist. So how did the Marshall Plan come to be? And what sort of Britain did it rebuild beyond the Welfare State?
Ros Taylor talks to Benn Steil, director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and milit...
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February 6, 2024 • 29 mins
Ros Taylor’s exploration of Britain’s postwar identity crisis continues. After the War, Britain was broke and broken. Between 1947 and 1981 over a million Britons left for a new life in Australia, some for just £10 passage. Ros looks at the lives of the ‘Ten Pound Poms’, their conflicted identities, the legacy of the racist ‘White Australia’ policy… and how a country that was once desperate for (white) migrants became a role model ...
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January 23, 2024 • 40 mins
A new fortnightly series of Ros Taylor’s exploration of the post-War promises Britain made to itself… and whether they were kept. In this edition: the quest for cheap, easy-to-access, stigma-free contraception wasn’t the simple progression to female freedom that you might think.
The wartime emancipation of women – not just into work but into “fraternisation” with American servicemen – created a stereotype of “loose” women and racis...
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December 1, 2023 • 7 mins
From the producers of Jam Tomorrow - a brand new show looking at the tectonic shifts in global power occurring right before our eyes, called This Is Not A Drill.
Presented by ex-BBC News host and Washington correspondent Gavin Esler with a series of co-hosts including Oz Katerji, This Is Not A Drill takes a look at the expanding threats to global stability from Ukraine to the Middle East to China; exploring the dangers, corruption...
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June 21, 2023 • 36 mins
A Jam Tomorrow special: Identity cards. What happens when principles come up against panic? When a high minded determination not to collect private info runs up against a society which depends on data? Ros Taylor charts the history of “show us your papers” from wartime security concerns to football hooliganism, benefit fraud crackdowns, Blairite control freakery and our modern obsession with asylum seekers.
Speaking to experts incl...
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February 20, 2023 • 38 mins
Season finale: Since the War, Britons experienced an explosion of choice in food, services, work, utilities, even belief and sexuality. But did ever-increasing choices really lead us to the promised land? Why are we lost in a maze of competing phone contracts, train fares, and “options” from schools and hospitals – where choice is bewildering and meaningless?
In the last episode of this season, Ros Taylor finds out how choice and c...
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February 13, 2023 • 39 mins
The post-war dream was anchored in ideas of Britain as a Christian nation. Now we’re a polyglot country of different faiths and none. Can religious belief still tie Britain together? Should we want it to? Ros Taylor looks at the Church of England’s journey from its unifying role in the Second World War to its search for a new identity in a world of charismatic evangelicals, shifting sexualities and new ethnic communities. Does the ...
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February 6, 2023 • 42 mins
Britain’s class system is rigid and incomprehensible – and education keeps it that way. Why do so many of us think we’re working class when we’re not? Why do we still believe in making it through hard work, yet hate social climbers?
After the War, we told ourselves we were on the way towards a classless society. Ros Taylor talks to people as diverse as campaigner and educationalist Melissa Benn and class commentator Peter York to f...
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January 30, 2023 • 38 mins
How the housing dream was betrayed, and how to fix it. Council houses fit for the wartime generation gave way to a “home-owning democracy”, but we priced the young out of home ownership and refused to build the properties they need. How did Britain screw up housing so badly?
From prefabs to Poulson to Thatcher’s Right to Buy and NIMBYism, Ros Taylor finds out how Britain’s approach to housing went so very wrong. Along the way, Neil...
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January 21, 2023 • 51 mins
How Britain’s postwar dreams were stolen… and how to win them back. This time: The NHS was the prize for all the pain and sacrifice of the Second World War. When did we accept that it would be a service in perpetual decline? Ros Taylor talks to experts from senior policy planners to Casualty scriptwriters to discover how the NHS became a huge entity in permanent crisis – why it holds such a grip on our collective imagination – and ...
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January 16, 2023 • 57 mins
How did Britain’s dreams of a new postwar world go unfulfilled? And what does that mean for us today? In the first of a new documentary series from the makers of Oh God, What Now?, Ros Taylor looks at the legacy of the War itself. Ιdeals of the Blitz Spirit and dreams of wartime heroism still shape everything from pop culture and entertainment to the Brexit debate. But the truth of the War is more complex and less comforting. What ...
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January 13, 2023 • 46 secs
Out of the ruins of the Second World War, the British people were promised a better world of free healthcare, quality housing and good schools. What happened to these promises of Jam Tomorrow? In a new series from the makers of Oh God, What Now?, Ros Taylor explores how the postwar dream was betrayed – and how we can win it back.
Follow Jam Tomorrow on Twitter
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