Recall: How to Start a Revolution: Recent Episodes

CBC Podcasts

The 1950s & 60s saw a wave of radical movements. Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution. The Black Panthers. Quebec and Canada had the FLQ — a showdown that dissolved into crisis. By October 1970, there were soldiers in the streets, communities on edge, kidnapping and terror in the headlines. But those frightening weeks were just the crescendo of a wave of terror and violence that was nearly a decade in the making. This series will reveal the stories of that time through immersive storytelling and the people who lived it: the bomb disposal expert on defusing live explosives, the survivors of terror, their families, and the radicals themselves.

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A TV crew offers 12 ordinary people the chance to take part in the adventure of a lifetime. But there’s a catch. The audience knows everything but the contestants are kept in the dark. As the cameras roll, no questions are allowed. Split Screen: Thrill Seekers is a new 6 part series that exposes how a TV show left contestants struggling to trust what’s actually real.

Host Nick van der Kolk (Love + Radio) asks: does reality TV only succeed when it exploits those involved? He talks to the set designers, crew, and the contestants themselves to learn what it took to permanently distort their sense of reality.

Welcome to Split Screen, an examination of the utterly captivating, sometimes unsettling world of entertainment and pop culture. From reality TV gone awry, to the cult of celebrity, each season of Split Screen takes listeners on an evocative journey inside the world of showbiz. Ex-contestants, producers, and cultural critics uncover complicated truths behind TV’s carefully curated facades, and question what our entertainment reveals about us. Split Screen: sometimes reality is twisted.

More episodes are available at: https://link.chtbl.com/shMGI3EQ

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For years, players have been too afraid to talk about it. But now, the truth about a broom that almost destroyed curling is finally coming out. In Broomgate: A Curling Scandal, semi-professional curler and fully professional comedian John Cullen (Blocked Party) is exposing the unbelievable, never-before-told scandal that rocked the sport of curling. Yes, curling. More episodes are available at: https://link.chtbl.com/-IRFrtx7

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From the BBC World Service and CBC Podcasts comes Hollywood Exiles. Host Oona Chaplin tells the story of the decades-long campaign to root out communism in Hollywood. It’s a campaign that eventually drove her grandfather, Charlie Chaplin, and many others out of tinseltown. Hollywood Exiles is a tale of glamour, duplicity and political intrigue that reverberates to this day. It’s the story of how Tinseltown became an ideological battleground. The toll of the fight was enormous – reputations, careers and families were torn apart by the campaign to drive communists from the movie business. More episodes are available at: https://link.chtbl.com/CRPru5Ys

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Throughout its reign, the British Empire stole a lot of stuff. Today the Empire's loot sits in museums, galleries, private collections and burial sites with polite plaques. But its history is often messier than the plaques suggest. In each episode of this global smash hit podcast, Walkley award-winning journalist, author and genetic potluck, Marc Fennell, takes you on the wild, evocative, sometimes funny, often tragic adventure of how these stolen treasures got to where they live today. These objects will ultimately help us see the modern world - and ourselves - in a different light. This is a co-production between the ABC and CBC Canada. More episodes are available at: https://link.chtbl.com/KCVqVBcl

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In 1985, at the height of the Black Power era, police dropped a bomb in a Philadelphia neighborhood. Their target? A family of Black radicals known as ‘MOVE,’ who found themselves ensnared in a city — and nation’s — domestic war on Black Liberation. Over seven episodes, host Matthew Amha investigates the events that culminated in the MOVE bombing, and the long afterlife of a forgotten American tragedy. More episodes are available at: https://link.chtbl.com/GQLlE27S

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John and Amanda have lived on the fringes their whole lives. They’re on welfare, living with John’s grandma, and struggling with addiction to opioids and Dungeons and Dragons. They’ve followed crooked paths to this point. John played in heavy metal bands and dabbled with Satanism. Amanda left home and discovered heroin before her 18th birthday. The couple converts to Islam in an attempt to turn their lives around. But things take a wild turn when a mysterious figure enters their lives and draws them into a web of conspiracy, deception and terror. More episodes are available at smarturl.it/pressurecookercbc

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The Secret Life of Canada is a podcast about the country you know and the stories you don't. Join hosts Leah-Simone Bowen and Falen Johnson as they reveal the beautiful, terrible and weird histories of this land. The Secret Life of Canada is back with season 4 and in this episode, you’ll hear the story behind a now famous "before and after" photo of a little boy who was taken to residential school in Regina, Saskatchewan. Who is this boy? Where is he from and what happened to him after he was taken away from home? More episodes are available at http://hyperurl.co/secretlifeofcanada

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The Flamethrowers captures the punch-you-in-the-mouth energy and sound of right-wing talk radio. Host Justin Ling takes us from the fringe preachers and conspiracy peddlers of the 1920s to the political firestorm that rages today. With humour and candour, Ling examines the appeal of broadcasters like Rush Limbaugh, who found a sleeping audience, radicalized it, and became an accidental kingmaker — culminating in the election of Donald Trump. More episodes are available at smarturl.it/theflamethrowers

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In response to the kidnappings of James Cross and Pierre Laporte, the federal government invokes the War Measures Act. And when the body of Pierre Laporte is discovered, popular sentiment turns against the FLQ and leads to the collapse of the group.

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With the kidnappings of James Cross and Pierre Laporte, the FLQ earns the headline attention it craves, and creates a national crisis in the process.

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Pierre-Paul Geoffroy and Bob Côté were at opposite ends of the busiest period of FLQ bombing activity. It began in May 1968 with a bomb at the 7-Up factory, and ended in February 1969 with the explosion at the Montreal Stock Exchange. Geoffroy was planting the bombs, Côté had to defuse them. For both men, the period took a toll.

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The FLQ's campaign for liberation did not spring from a vacuum: radical Québec separatists were inspired by and in turn inspired decolonization movements around the world, including the Black Panthers.

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Pierre Vallieres taps into the anger and alienation felt by Francophone Quebecers by penning a book of essays that earns him comparisons to Malcolm X and Che Guevara. The revolutionary text inflames separatist sentiment, cements Vallieres’s position as the intellectual and philosophical father of the FLQ… and is held up in the courts as evidence of his guilt in earlier FLQ bombing campaigns.

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The story of how a Hungarian born, Austro-German raised, ex-French Foreign Legionnaire became a radical Quebec separatist demonstrates the allure of the FLQ message in the political tinderbox that was Montreal in 1964.

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The 1960s began as a time of promise for Quebec, with the feeling that the province was throwing off the shackles of its parochial past. But despite plenty of reason for hope, the seeds were being sown for radical revolt, and by 1963, Montreal would be shaken by political violence. We meet the victim of an early FLQ bombing, and dig into how her story was lost to history.

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Introducing Recall, a series about history that is still hot to the touch. The first season, How to Start a Revolution, explores the story of a groundbreaking political movement that rocked Canada in the 1960s. Host Geoff Turner will examine how the movement grew from a global spirit of liberation and how the dream of revolution became a nightmare of bombs, kidnapping and murder.