The Show That Finds the Intrigue Lurking in the Everyday

Society has changed in monumental ways, the British historian Ruth Goodman observes, since the days “when we used scouring sand and wood ash to do the washing up”—and some of that change was “a direct result of new dishwashing techniques.” Her podcast “The Curious History of Your Home,” produced by the history-focussed Noiser network, examines the seemingly humdrum stuff of domestic life with the aim of uncovering its evolution and significance; “Dish Washing” explores the world-historical power of dish soap. The episode opens with Goodman describing an afternoon in 1520, as the kings of England and France meet at a lavish outdoor summit, complete with jousting, attended by twelve thousand revellers. Do we hear about the jousting? No. “Rather than heading to the tiltyard with the other spectators, let’s follow the servants,” Goodman says. Directing us to a scullery of our imagination, she tells a tale of golden plates and grubby cookware, and hundreds of servants, many scrubbing with literal grit. Then she describes how dishwashing history was shaped by, among other things, coal fires, the whaling industry, and a World’s Fair. At the episode’s end, she entreats us to consider all this the next time we load the dishwasher. “I hope I’ve convinced you by now—it’s the little things that really matter,” she concludes with satisfaction. “In the next episode, we dig into the surprising history of forks.”

Many of us already contemplate the stuff in our homes quite intensely, from the well-researched sofa to the with-us-for-life heirloom umbrella stand, but Goodman takes domestic contemplation to a whole new level, from a perspective that spans the globe and seems to rival geologic time. With thirty-one half-hour episodes, “Curious History” is bountiful, and offers something that I appreciate during times of sociopolitical mayhem: engaged specificity without acute newsiness, and escapism without brain rot. We learn about the practical (ovens, windows, clocks), the conceptual (home security, dinner parties, board games), the bestial (cats, pests), the digestive (coffee, beer, toilets). Her subject, essentially, is life, and the way that the business of eating and sleeping and wearing clothes and so on has shaped human history.

Goodman is the author of several well-received books with titles such as “How to Be a Tudor” and “How to Behave Badly in Elizabethan England: A Guide for Knaves, Fools, Harlots, Cuckolds, Drunkards, Liars, Thieves, and Braggarts.” She’s done a great deal of historical reënactment, at British heritage sites and on television, and clearly relishes it. Here she begins each episode with a re-creation of a startling scene from deep history or legend—the unearthing of a frozen rug from a Pazyryk tomb in Siberia, say, or a Han-dynasty eunuch observing a wasp in a palace garden. Then she proceeds through time and place, taking us on a magic-carpet-ride tour of domestic innovation. Goodman narrates her vivid stories alone, without interviews, field reporting, or other conventions of American documentary podcasting. The series is sound-designed with a subtle hand; a little music and a few tasteful effects, like a faint tinkling of ice picks in Siberia, help transport us. Listening to her reminds me of what I love about travel: the continual reminder that other people do things in ways we might never have imagined.

Sometimes Goodman seems a little too audibly aware of the enchantment of her formula. Those moments can veer into what I think of as “Radiolab” syndrome—gee whiz to the extreme. In “Curious History,” this often takes the form of overemphasis, in writing and especially in tone. “Lights” opens on a summer day in 1879 in Cantabria, Spain, where a local landowner and amateur anthropologist, Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, is taking his eight-year-old daughter exploring. They venture into a cave, where he lights two charcoal lamps and “hands one to Maria, her eyes widening as they focus on the flickering flame,” Goodman says, with the gather-round-children dramatics of a proud storyteller. Maria races ahead, finds something, and excitedly summons her father. “De Sautuola smiles indulgently,” Goodman says, chuckling, describing how he goes to see “what has fired her imagination.” She continues, “Then he holds up his own lamp—and sees them. Bison and red deer, boar and horses. . . . De Sautuola is astounded.” These turn out to be the first cave paintings discovered in Europe—astounding, indeed—but we’re there for the lamps. The artists were able to see in a dark cave, Goodman tells us, because forty thousand years ago “our ancestors figured out that if you burned animal fat in a stone receptacle you could have light without too much smoke.” From there, she moves on to ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, and Tudor England, where inexpensive rushlights were made of reeds dipped in fat. (“I’ve made many a rushlight in my day,” Goodman says with a laugh. “All in all, they’re pretty rubbish.”) Later, she transports us to King Louis XV’s Yew Tree Ball, a costume party at Versailles, where mirrors reflected the light of thousands of candles and “Death himself,” scythe in hand, nibbled on a canapé. (We don’t know where Goodman gets these details; we just sit back, enjoy the regaling, and hope she’s right.)

As each episode proceeds, we marvel at the ways in which humans have stopped at nothing to make life more comfortable, richer, brighter, less disgusting. It’s invigorating stuff. But, even as I marvelled, Goodman’s presentation style got me increasingly agitated. Emphasizing words willy-nilly (“from breathtaking mountain gorges to unearthly desert landscapes”) and laughing at unfunny moments (making many a rushlight) can induce peevishness in a listener. I began to suspect that Goodman’s intonation was related to having been on television—that she’d internalized a supercharged style for an audience distracted by visuals. I pictured her as a Lucy Worsley-style “Follow me for palace intrigue, here on PBS!” type. I decided to investigate.

For more than a decade, Goodman appeared in a series of BBC history-of-daily-life documentary shows—“Victorian Farm,” “Edwardian Farm,” “Tudor Monastery Farm,” and so on. In each, she’d spend a year in period costume toiling away at an era-specific farmhouse, explaining her domestic activities (firing up a coal stove, plucking a turkey) alongside two archeologists who worked the land. (In other series, they took on castles and steam trains.) In the wonderful British mode that trusts audiences to find real things inherently interesting, without American-style reality-TV foofaraw—they’re not competing with one another, or gossiping to the camera—the shows present Goodman and her two companions undertaking an astonishing range of hard labor and logistical challenges, using the era’s tools and technology, eating its food, wearing its clothes, consulting its manuals, playing its games. Goodman narrates her efforts with mile-a-minute focussed attention, whether she’s in a stream, beating laundry with a paddle (“What you’re doing is forcing molecules of water under tension through the fibres, and it just physically, mechanically dislodges the dirt! It’s the bashing that does it”) or cheerfully preparing a sheep’s-head stew (“This is one of the most gruesome things I’ve ever had to do!”), and I realized that her pedal-to-the-metal gusto, and even her eccentric word emphasis, are how she actually talks. (“I don’t know if I’ve ever actually stretched a pig’s bladder before,” she says while sealing a jar.) Her manner, I think, is just the classic awkwardness of a smart person absorbed in doing her thing.

When I listened to “Curious History” again after watching these shows, Goodman sounded like an enthusiast, full of fun info she wanted to share, and I trusted her. Rather than resisting, I was on her side. I was amazed that I could so thoroughly change how I reacted to the sound of a podcast narrator—and especially because of a TV show. I recommend all of it. In the “Dish Washing” episode, Goodman says that an urge to learn about dishwashing before the invention of dish soap is what led her to the study of domestic history in the first place. When she started off as a historical reënactor, more than thirty years ago, a colleague told her that people in the Tudor era didn’t wash their dishes—they just let dogs lick them clean. “People would surely have been sick all the time!” Goodman recalls thinking. “What about people who didn’t have dogs? So I started digging.” ♦