Death in Smethwick

Smethwick is an industrial town in the Sandwell district, in the county of the West Midlands, England. It lies 4 miles (6 km) west of Birmingham city centre. Historically it was in Staffordshire and then Worcestershire before being placed into West Midlands county.
In 2019, the ward of Smethwick had an estimated population of 15,246, while the wider built-up area subdivision has a population of 53,653

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to While that happened, snippets, brief excerpts, and history.
We sometimes do longer ones if I mostly the longer ones,
but I thought we'd do some brief ones as well,
just to whet your appetite for the main banquet of fact,
which is to come. And this ams in Smethic. We
had to visit Smethic because it's the law. Every podcast

(00:21):
you've ever come across has at some time visited Smethic,
and those that haven't, it's on their to do list.
Trust me, write to them ask I bet they'd be
silent in their reply, and silence is an admission of intention. Anyway.
It was a performance of the Sound of Music in
a theater and there was an elderly lady who visited

(00:41):
it because she particularly liked the Sound of Music and
found it one of the most interesting films that she'd
ever seen. However, during this showing of this epic performance
starring Julie Andrews, she fell asleep. She only awakened when
she heard the nun's chorus. At some point throughout the film.
The woman unfortunately assumed that she died and the nuns
were actually heaven. The angels and that the darkness that

(01:03):
surrounded her was in fact the pits of hell. It
took some convincing for this poor woman that she wasn't dead,
but she was in fact. In smethic, you can understand
her alarm.