‘I’m having the time of my life’ - Shropshire-born classicist and TV star Mary Beard on her new podcast
Chatting to classicist Dame Mary Beard makes you incredibly jealous of all the students who had her as their professor at Cambridge University. Thoroughly engaging, her hands flying thoughtfully as she teases out ideas, the Shropshire-born 70-year-old and Fellow of Newnham College is beguiling and quite, quite brilliant.
So it’s good news for us all that she’s launching a new podcast, Instant Classics, alongside The Guardian’s culture writer Charlotte Higgins. "'Why haven’t we done it before?’ Is the question I’m asking myself,” she says, full of mirth, when quizzed on why now is the moment to join the (some would argue) swollen ranks of podcasters.
“The ancient Greek and Roman world is so with us. It’s in our newspapers when they find something at Pompeii, it’s in our language, it’s in our literature, on our theatres, and there isn’t really a podcast, or anything actually, that takes that whole thing – what it was like then, how we understand it now, what the myths mean – and just works it over in a way that’s fun, accessible, but also with a bit of bottom to it,” explains Beard, who grew up in Much Wenlock.
Yes, there’s some great stuff on telly and radio about the Greeks and Romans (“I’ve done some!”) but often, much of it is too reverential for her liking. With Instant Classics – there’s a parallel book club running too, reading The Odyssey by Homer, ahead of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation, out next year – the plan is to show people “the ancient world’s got more for them than they realise”.
“It’s not just stories of wars and battles and the fall of the Roman Empire,” she says. “It’s stories about what women got up to, what women wrote, what it was like to be a child, what was it like putting on a toga? Those seem like terribly trivial questions, but they open up absolutely amazing vistas on how you understand the past,” says Beard, who retired from Cambridge in 2022 and still lives in the city.
