Nostalgia Interviews with Chris Deacy

My guest this week is Cameron Tucker, Head of News and Content at KMTV.

Cam and I begin by chatting about the BFI-funded series Generation Why that we both worked on in which we made sure young people from across the UK were fully represented. We find out why the series has been so transformational, and has helped us look beyond the world we know.

We talk about how the world is both bigger and smaller, and we find out about Cameron’s love of travel. He was born in Manhattan but grew up in Hong Ko...

It was a great pleasure for this week’s Nostalgia Interviews podcast to meet fellow podcaster Harry Bowles. Harry has been running his Nerds Against Normality over the last few months.

We talk about how the podcast has evolved, and the reason for looking at the relevant algorithms. We find out about its reach, the prime time for podcasts and the right time to send them out. We find out what the format is for each podcast which will e.g. include a review of a film, and we discuss whether a film can be ruined by the wa...

It was a great pleasure for this week’s Nostalgia Interviews podcast to meet screenwriter, author and award-winning podcaster Mark Stay.

We begin by talking about Herne Bay and its cultural dynamics and learn that Mark has always been drawn to creativity, with Star Wars playing a formative influence. His teachers encouraged him, and Mark discusses the importance of reaching out to people in the know, and the time Mark bottled it when a director once rang him. We chat about what happens when you interact with ‘famous people’ and we find out why it’s the people two thir...

My guest this week is Numi Gildert who is the cohost with Rob Wills of the Drivetime show on KMFM. Numi has a robotics engineering background (including a PhD) and always loved consuming radio when she was young. She grew up in Macclesfield and listened to Silk FM, and later enjoyed Chris Moyles on the Radio 1 Breakfast Show when she was nine.

Numi reveals that she always had a flair for performance and had pragmatic parents who worked in the corporate world. Numi loved science and anything Japanese including anime and manga. We find out how she then...

David Cloake is a former professional DJ whom I have had the great pleasure to know since working at Cabin FM. We learn about David’s career in radio, beginning with a chat about the pre-digital radio world. We find out how David got into radio, starting at Southern Sound, about the advice he received from other presenters, and how he received elocution lessons.

David’s first full time radio gig was at Northants Radio where he did the Drivetime show, and we learn that David followed a traditional route. We discuss the changes that came about after the...

My guest this week is Max Barrett, who works as a sales and marketing manager at his family business in sustainability, helping design engineers make more sustainable decisions. Max has a filmmaking background and broadcast journalism, too, and has previously presented film reviews on BBC Radio Kent, and we talk about the way we keep archives of our film reviews.

Max grew up in Kent, and has lived in Canterbury since he was 16.  There is also a South Wales connection as his mother is from Swansea. We learn that Wales and Medway are gravitational pulls for him, and w...

This week's guest is Yvonne Howard, an educationalist, creative practitioner, and artist-writer. Yvonne grew up in Leeds in a challenging environment and turned to writing to process the events from those days. Yvonne left school at 15 with no qualifications. She returned to education in her late 20s, building into her first degree personal experiences on diversity and exclusion issues. She then worked in conflict resolution, adult education and community relations in east London.

I first met Yvonne in the 1990s when she was studying for a British Academy-funded PhD in Lampeter on mediation, social inclusion and community cohesion...

My guest this week is Nina Kuryata. Nina is a journalist, editor, media consultant and writer who, from 2011-19, was Head of the BBC News Ukrainian Service. I spoke to Nina on Ukrainian Independence Day in August to talk about her first novel Dzvinka (The Call) and to learn about what it means to be Ukrainian in the last days of the USSR and to discuss the role of independence. 

Nina refers to the trauma in not being allowed to be oneself and about how her creative journey has followed through since childhood. She talks about various stereotypes a...

My guest this week is presenter, video coach and former TEDx curator Liù Batchelor, who refers to the 'wiggly' journey she has been on. She has always felt unclear about what she wanted to do, while at the same time being driven. We talk about the way people see us and whether it encapsulates our own sense of who we are, and Liù speaks about the importance of being present.

We also talk about the cringe factor involved when watching our old presenting and why Liù is a ‘learn by doing’ type of person. She can relax more and mor...

My guest this week, for my 200th Nostalgia Interview, is Christina Kim. It was terrific to catch up with Christina, who is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics, before I left the University of Kent in July 2024.

Christina begins by remembering the visa issues that consumed her time upon arriving at Kent just over a decade ago and how it took a while to work out who everybody was in the School of European Culture and Languages at the time.

Christina grew up in Los Angeles and went to university in Boston and was doing a postdoc in...

My guest this week is Eleni Kapogianni who I have known for about a decade. Eleni lectures in Linguistics at the University of Kent, and we talk about the big role that film (and film dialogue) plays in her research. Storytelling and fiction is a big hobby for Eleni, and we discuss the permeable nature of the work-life balance and find out about her work in pragmatics and discourse analysis, and how discourse is shaped by societal trends.

Eleni talks about growing up in a seaside town in Greece and living on her grandparents’ farm. Her parents are bo...

My guest this week is Gabriel Morris, Video Journalist at KMTV. We begin by talking about our Cardiff connection, and learn that Gabriel, who is originally from Hertfordshire, studied Geography in Liverpool and went into broadcast journalism. We find out where the spark for broadcast journalism came from, having grown up as a child with watching BBC Breakfast News each morning.

Like me, Gabriel used to pretend he was reading the news from teletext. We also learn why Gabriel likes to watch himself back, and he gives away one of his tricks of the trade.

Gabriel...

My guest this week is actor and stage combat instructor Duncan Woodruff who did a History degree at the University of Kent about fifteen years ago. We learn that Duncan had a plan from when he was at school to go into acting, and that his work in fight directing was more serendipitous.

Duncan used to take part in the Dickens Festival Play every year in Broadstairs, and we talk about the relation between the director and the actor and the way actors can interact on a stage in a way they can’t in a film with an...

My guest this week is Sofia Akin, journalist and main anchor at KMTV's Kent Tonight, and (as we learn in the breaking news at the end) who is about to join the BBC as a Broadcast Journalist.

We learn that Sofia, who is from West Sussex, started out as a video journalist, and she talks about how no two days are the same. Sofia gives the example of a current story at the time we recorded the podcast regarding the bombshell defection of Natalie Elphicke MP from the Conservatives to Labour.

Sofia talks about being one’s...

My guest this week is Andy Richards, Channel Director of KMTV. Born in Guernsey in 1982, Andy reveals what it was like to grow up on a small island. The first film he saw was ET and Andy discusses the importance in those days of Blockbuster Video where he worked when he was 18, and we learn about the migration in that era from VHS to DVD.

We talk about the success of particular films from those days, such as The Shawshank Redemption, the role played by technology including AI, and we talk about the importance of theatre.

...

My guest this week is Abby Hook, Assistant News Editor, journalist and presenter at KMTV where she has been based for the last two years. Abby talks about the demanding nature of journalism and how you have to love it to do it, and we learn that she grew up regularly doing drama.

Journalism wasn’t the route Abby thought she would originally follow, and she discusses how much she loves learning, and we find out why Abby doesn’t want people to recognize her for doing just one thing.

We talk about the way we pres...

My guest this week is Professor Paul Badham who for many years was Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Lampeter, where he began his career in 1973. His own father had done an English degree there before studying Theology at Oxford and whose own writings were influential on Paul.

We find out how Paul got interested in his seminal research on life after death, which hadn’t been a central plank of his studies beforehand. He mentions Penny Sartori’s work in terms of gathering the relevant evidence and we find out about other students of his who have...

My guest this week is Henrik Schoenefeldt, Professor of Sustainable Architecture, who has been at the University of Kent since 2011. He was at Cambridge prior to moving to Kent and we learn about the role of sustainability in architecture from an historical perspective, such as from the Victorian era.

Henrik grew up in Germany in a former industrial city, a site of industrial heritage, and indeed he grew up in a house on a former industrial site.

Henrik reflects on how Covid and Brexit prompted a lot of thinking regarding identity, including his own future in...

My guest this week is Sabrina Mei-Li Smith who lectures in Creative Writing at De Montfort University in Leicester. Sabrina has written a novel set in the mid-1990s and some of the research behind her novel is heavily connected to the themes of nostalgia and identity. 

We learn about the way Sabrina examines themes of race and gender within the accepted narrative that surrounds the rise and demise of Britpop, the emergence of 1994's Criminal Justice Act, and the standardization and neutralization of alternative lifestyles. 

Sabrina also has an exhibition as a work in progress, wh...

My guest this week is Sally Bernard who was a schoolteacher for many years, currently living in Deal, Kent. She originally wanted to run an antique shop but her father played a key role in the career route that she followed.

Sally talks about her involvement with Sure Start, and why she disagreed with the late Glenys Kinnock on reading by osmosis. We learn why Sally wanted to be a better teacher than the teachers who had taught her, and Sally also reflects on the nature of the teaching experience.

She went to the Open University...

It was a great pleasure for this week’s Nostalgia Interviews podcast to meet Sally Nicholls who was at Lampeter from 1992-95 where she studied Welsh.

Originally from Llantrisant, Sally grew up in the countryside, and she talks about her passion for horse riding, which she even accomplished in India. Sally could have gone to university in Bangor, North Wales, but ended up in Lampeter, a place with which she fell in love. Living in a Welsh speaking community was an extra bonus.

We learn that Sally cannot ever remember not speaking Welsh and has been wo...

It was a great pleasure for this week’s Nostalgia Interview to meet Safeer Khan. Safeer is Imam at a mosque in Gillingham where he has been based since 2014.  He leads the prayers every day and takes classes at the mosque. We learn about the Indian origins of his Ahmadiyya community which has about 35,000 members in the UK.

Safeer talks about misunderstandings around caliphs and the role of the mosque as helper for the wider community and the importance of challenging misconceptions. We discuss Islamophobia, and how Safeer tries to combat that, and Safeer recounts confrontations he has exp...

It was a great pleasure for this week’s Nostalgia Interviews podcast to meet Simon Smith who was at Lampeter from 1988-91, where he studied Religious Studies, and then stayed on for the Interfaith Studies MA.

Simon worked in a bank for six years before going to university, and we find out why he chose Lampeter of all places, and he reflects on the shape of the department of Theology and Religious in those days. He talks about how he could never have expected to write an essay on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy before embarking on h...

My guest this week is Louise Naylor, who spent 34 years at the University of Kent before retiring in September 2023 as Director of Education. Louise started on a one year temporary lectureship in 1989, and we talk about the role of serendipity and opportunity and the recipe for staying the course and how one can never be prepared for everything that arises in a teaching context.

The best teaching is when the teacher is continually learning, and we discuss the performance side of education which is two-way. Louise reflects on how people often tell us when we get things wrong...

My guest this week is Matt Harrington who studied English at Lampeter from 1991-94. There are many great undergraduate reminisces here, beginning with a recollection of the circumstances around our graduation in July 1994.

Matt worked in a bookshop post-Lampeter and then as a junior copywriter, and he talks about how this enabled him to write with economy, and how that played out in his student days when it came to submitting essays.

Matt reveals how he managed to avoid reading lots of Victorian novels, and why he gelled with his peers because we were all arts...

My guest this week is James Grindrod who was in Lampeter from 1993-96 where he studied Single Honours History. James talks about the impact of what he did on his life and career, and how learning is not just something that stops when you finish your full time education.

We discuss different lenses of looking at the past, including how we might have once thought that things were ‘getting better’, but that the events of the last decade or so might militate against that way of looking at history.

James talks about always having been a nost...

This week’s episode is a Christmas special as I am joined by someone else who has made Christmas their research project in recent years. Lucinda Murphy and I had never met before we recorded this interview in London in October 2023, and there are many parallels and synergies which make this a really compelling discussion around the ‘meaning’ of Christmas.

Lucinda began her doctorate at Durham on Christmas in 2016 at just the time that my own Christmas as Religion was published. Lucinda talks about how the impetus for her work was that so little has been written on contem...

My guest this week is Henry Jeppesen, a freelance literary translator, who studied Single Honours Swedish at Lampeter from 1993-97. We learn about Henry’s Scandinavian background, find out why he fell in love with Lampeter and what happened on his Year Abroad.

In his time at university, Henry sat on the Ents Committee and remembers seeing Zodiac Mindwarp and Doctor and the Medics perform – though we learn that he didn’t quite manage to bring Oasis or Blur to Lampeter!

We learn about the impact Lampeter had on Henry, including the Students’ Union, and Henry reflects...

My guest this week is John Wills, Professor of American Media and Culture, who has been at the University of Kent since 2005. We discover that John owns various consoles and machines from the 1970s onwards and we find out where his academic interests, e.g. in video games, have come from.

John talks about how the things he is interested in emanate from his teenage years, as with cataloguing films, and we discuss defining oneself and having an attachment to something, and the way it can lead to academic pursuits.

John also worked in a video...

It was a great pleasure for this week’s Nostalgia Interview to meet Katie Marquis. Katie runs Dance Warehouse, a dance school in Canterbury where she was once a pupil. We find out how Katie has realized the three dreams she set herself as a child, and how she is very focused and determined as a person and we talk about the inevitability of the route she has taken.

Katie is originally from Canterbury but her family moved to the Netherlands when she was two. She went to the Royal School of Ballet when she was aged sixteen an...

My guest this week is Chris Solomon, a Physicist who worked at the University of Kent from 1995 until 2020. He specialized in the area of facial recognition and subsequently started a company called Vision Metric which has been his main focus.

We talk about the interdisciplinary nature of research, and what he learned from studying Physics, and how it didn’t directly affect the way he lived his life.

Chris was a good footballer as a boy and was into mathematics. He was born on Hayling Island near Portsmouth and grew up around Brighton.

We le...

My guest this week is Gary Bunt, Professor of Islamic Studies at University of Wales Trinity Saint David. Gary and I made a reverse academic journey as he was an undergraduate student at Kent before moving to Lampeter in later years, whereas I started at Lampeter and moved to Kent.

The first half of our conversation relates to a less known aspect of Gary’s life in which he had a radio career in BBC production, including working with Brian Matthew. He met artists like The Specials and John Lydon when they were promoting their records. 

Gar...

It was a huge privilege for my latest Nostalgia Interview to meet Anne Pőnisch and Vicky Tomlinson, daughters of John Roland Lloyd Thomas who was Principal of Saint David’s (University) College for nearly a quarter of a century from 1953 until the mid-1970s.

Anne and Vicky remember the days of living behind the College Chapel with its spiders, attics and cellars in an age when students wore academic gowns and had to be back home at around 10pm. They paint a fascinating picture of Lampeter from a different age.

We talk about how SDC was...

My guest this week is Kate Heffner who is doing a PhD on women in science fiction fandom in the History Department at the University of Kent.
Kate talks about the untraditional nature of her research and reflects on the women who wrote on the ways science and literature could coalesce as well as about the importance of the early printing process.
Born and raised in Long Beach, California, Kate then moved to Iowa where she did a degree in English Literature and then undertook a Masters in Library and Information Science. She was a first generation college...

In a special edition of my podcast this week, Craig Braddick has interviewed me to talk about growing up in the 1980s with Radio 1 and then with Radio 2 into the 90s and beyond, and how being a contestant on Blockbusters guided me towards my own broadcasting career.
I talk about the significance of 1981 – the year I started listening to Radio 1 – and Bucks Fizz winning Eurovision and how, during my schooldays, the charts on a Sunday mattered in the school playground. We also talk about whether the presenters of the day really represented what was going on in the wider worl...

My guest this week is Terry Lindvall, the C.S. Lewis Chair of Communication and Christian Thought at Virginia Wesleyan University. Terry talks about his seminary background, looking at religion and popular culture, and we find out about Terry’s academic history and his work in history, theology and communications.

We discuss how both of us have been influenced by H. Richard Niebuhr’s seminal work on Christ and Culture, as well as the role of censorship and why, as Terry attests, the church should be using movies as they employ parables. He talks about the importance of show...

My guest this week is Chris Cotter who lectures for the Open University and has a rich background in podcasts. He co-founded the Religious Studies Project podcast in 2012, and we talk about our thoughts on podcasts and why academics want to discuss their research.

Chris comes from near Belfast, where his father is a Church of Ireland minister, and moved to Edinburgh in 2004 initially to do a degree in Physics. He had discovered amateur dramatics at the end of high school and was also involved in a band, performing Shakespeare and other plays and came to the conclusion...

My guest this week is Krysia Waldock, who is doing a PhD at the University of Kent that straddles various disciplinary areas. Krysia is based in the University’s Tizard Centre and has an undergraduate background in languages.

A diagnosis of autism led to Krysia doing a Masters in Autism, which in turn resulted in her doing a doctorate, something she never thought she would do, where she is looking at religion, disability and people who are marginalized.

We talk about the barriers, often institutional, that have been set up in terms of disability, and the no...

It was fantastic to catch up with Steve Jacobs, a retired Senior Lecturer in Media, Religion and Culture at the University of Wolverhampton, for my latest Nostalgia Interview. Steve and I were at Lampeter together from 1991-4 where we both received the same degree classification, and Steve recalls the way in which we received our results.

Steve worked in Religious Studies at Wolverhampton initially on a fixed term contract at a time when the subject was not well supported. We learn how he made the shift to Media, and his motivations for doing it, and how doing Chris...

My guest this week is Becky Jefcoate, who like me was at university in Lampeter from 1991-94 where she studied Archaeology and English Literature. We find out how Becky ended up there and why her school teacher had misgivings about doing Archaeology as a single honours subject.

We talk about how Lampeter was a place you knew pretty quickly whether you were going to fit in or not and how it attracted a certain type of self-sufficient person.

After university, Becky moved to London and we learn about her time working at the Cartoon Museum as...