Where do you stand on anything considered to be the "greatest of all time"...? For everything imagineered, cobbled together and fired out into an evolving culture, there’s a broad palette of opinions stretching all the way from bewilderment to be-wonderment and all that slots somewhere in between. The object of the Grazing GOATs podcast is to pluck individual entries out from those long lists of books, films, classical and contemporary compositions, poems, plays, paintings, speeches – frankly anything that sports a “greatest ever” lapel pin anywhere – and take a deeper dive to understand why they are (and if they should still be) counted among the greatest of all time.
With the sun well and truly set on the 2026 World Cup and fans looking ahead to domestic league shocks and shenanigans, Manchester City’s likely banishment to the prison hulks of the English FA, and a return to Midsomer Murders reruns on ITV, we can charge up the flux capacitor in the old Daihatsu Charade, thrash the living daylights out of it to push it anywhere close to 88 mph, and travel back to World Cup competitions past to pick through their footballing and non-footballing highs and lows. The 1934 and 1938 tournaments played ideologically fast and loose with FIFA's vision of football as a politically neutral paean of global sporting brotherhood. Fascist grandstanding overshadowed both events, a harder, more uncompromising style of play took root and thrived, and an entire nation and its footballing pedigree vanished in a coercive act of 'union'. There was also the REAL World Cup final AFTER the World Cup final, the striker who got stuck in the mud, and the penalty taker with the ultimate wardrobe malfunction.
Then there was a whacking great global war and everyone packed their shorts away.
14 Sept 2026
The Stooges (album) - 1969
The first new Grazing GOATs podcast since the death of my dear old dad suitably harks back to his younger years, even if the vibe in question was a little left of his cultured centre. Dad would've had no truck with a band like The Stooges - he'd have more likely volunteered to drive a truck INTO a band like The Stooges, bless him... x
Released in 1969, The Stooges' studiously lo-fi debut power chord vomit was a gritty, grimy exposé of the dark, arrhythmically beating heart of the American counterculture. With Nixon's America shooting for the moon and basking in its global magnificence, The Stooges were the ugliest ugly ducklings in the swan pond hellbent on birthing a rock-and-roll Frankenstein's monster to "end the sixties". While other bands did their bit to make 1967 the Summer of Love, The Stooges single-handedly turned mid-'69 into a shiftless, ennui-driven summer of waking up from bad acid trips naked in a dumpster.
7 Aug 2026
BONUS EPISODE: On the Fundaments of GOATness
The concept of GOATness in any creative human endeavour is universal, contentious and open to an infinite stream of critical interpretation and revision. Generations of scholars, critics, receptive audiences, and intellectual wastrels like me who should probably be spending more time learning the rudiments of plumbing or tree surgery to cut down on bills I don’t want to pay have been fascinated by the shifting and expanding hierarchies we’ve built since time immemorial to recognise and rate our achievements against a perpetually evolving list of GOATness must-haves. This bonus podcast casts a critical eye over key elements of that perpetually evolving list and briefly marvels at the astonishing sprint speed of the average polar bear.
15 Jul 2026
The FIFA World Cup - Part 1
Think you know all there is to know about the World Cup’s origins? If so, you’ll know that before the birth of world championship football in 1930… there was world championship football. You’ll also know all about the one-armed fox in the box, the tale of the two-ball diplomatic crisis, the Battle of Buenos Aires, and the story of the Romanian midfielder who rose from the dead and scared the life out of his mum.
If all this is as baffling as the offside rule, however, part 1 of this Grazing GOATs bonus podcast explains how and why Jules Rimet got the world football ball rolling back in 1930.
24 Jun 2026
Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Ludwig van Beethoven - 1824
When Beethoven's final symphonic offering ode-ed joyously in the Austrian capital in May 1824, few would've thought they were listening to the simultaneous apotheosis of a revolutionary composer and the extensive canon of Western music itself. Most would've been thinking about the cost of the interval ice creams and that weird bit at the end of the gig when some deaf old fella with a face like a freshly slapped derriere had a crack at 'conducting'...
11 Jun 2026
Citizen Kane - 1941
"Probably the best film in the world...?" Many of us of a certain vintage will remember Orson Welles for the memorable marriage of his distinctive monotone with one of the world's best known adverts for Danish lager, but in 1941 he was a young man with no experience of filmmaking rewriting the filmmaker's playbook. Citizen Kane's mark could be seen in everything that followed, even if it didn't know its Rosebud from its elbow...
1 Jun 2026
War and Peace - 1869
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy's "War and Peace" is the go-to titanic breeze block read for anyone sheltering from an atomic apocalypse, ploughing through a life sentence, or queueing for a Ryanair flight to Bydgoszcz. Tolstoy largely rewrote the entire novel and planned an equally weighty sequel which just goes to show what you can achieve when you don't own a telly or belong to a tennis club...
1 Jun 2026
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - 1967
Sgt. Pepper reinvented The Beatles, reinvented the album, and reinvented the recording studio as the magician's infinite sound sandbox. It turned on and tuned into the vibe of the burgeoning counterculture, elevated the humble moustache, and ushered in a kaleidoscope-eyed era of colour, cosmic wizardry, and nausea-inducing curtain and carpet patterns. It also inspired one of the most ill-advised cinematic releases of all time...
1 Jun 2026
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