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A weekly British podcast about news, politics, culture, faith and the peculiar things people do. Mark and Pete tackle the big headlines and the smaller stories that probably tell us rather more about ourselves than we’d like.
Theme music : Title Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0
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Dolly Parton has died at the age of 80, and in this episode of Mark and Pete we pay tribute to one of the most remarkable, successful and strangely universally loved entertainers of the modern age. Singer, songwriter, actress, businesswoman, philanthropist and owner of rather more rhinestones than most regional theatres could manage between them, Dolly Parton became something far bigger than a country music star.
Born into poverty in rural Tennessee as one of 12 children, Dolly went from singing in church and appearing on local radio to becoming one of the biggest names in American music. She wrote thousands of songs, sold more than 100 million records worldwide and gave us classics including Jolene, 9 to 5, Coat of Many Colors and, of course, I Will Always Love You.
And that last song alone has quite a story.
Dolly wrote I Will Always Love You as a farewell to Porter Wagoner when she left his television show to pursue her own career. Elvis Presley later wanted to record it, but his manager demanded half the publishing rights. Dolly said no. Politely, naturally, but no nonetheless. Years later Whitney Houston recorded it and turned it into one of the biggest-selling singles of all time. Sometimes keeping hold of your copyright is quite a good idea.
But Dolly Parton’s legacy is about far more than music.
Her Imagination Library has distributed hundreds of millions of free books to children around the world. She donated substantial sums to hospitals, disaster relief and medical research, including funding that contributed to work behind the Moderna Covid vaccine. Dollywood became one of Tennessee’s biggest tourist attractions and major employers. She seems to have understood something many wealthy celebrities rather miss: having an enormous amount of money gives you the opportunity to do an enormous amount of good.
So why did almost everybody like Dolly?
That is perhaps the more interesting question.
She was flamboyant without seeming vain, famous without appearing remote, deeply Christian without pretending to be perfect, and enormously successful while retaining the ability to make herself the butt of the joke. She once observed that it cost a lot of money to look this cheap. There are entire celebrity careers that could have been improved by that level of self-awareness.
In this episode, Mark and Pete look back at Dolly Parton’s extraordinary life, her Christian faith, her songwriting, her business instincts, her generosity, Dollywood, the Imagination Library and the extraordinary cultural reach of a woman who began life in a one-room cabin in Tennessee.
A genuine American original.
And yes, inevitably, we will always love her.
Britain’s obesity crisis is getting worse, and the latest figures suggest younger adults are gaining weight faster than ever. According to the King’s Fund, obesity rates in England are now at record levels, with around 30% of adults living with obesity or severe obesity, roughly double the proportion seen in the early 1990s. Among 16 to 24-year-olds, the rise is even more striking. Around 18% are now obese or severely obese, compared with just 6% in 1993.
Hence the title of this episode of Mark and Pete: Gross Britannia: Britain Is Getting Fatter.
Cheerful stuff.
But beneath the slightly rude title sits a serious question. What on earth has happened to us?
This is not simply a matter of people becoming greedier, lazier, or somehow morally defective because they have discovered crisps. The environment around food has changed enormously. Ultra-processed food is cheap, convenient, heavily marketed and everywhere. Portion sizes have grown. Delivery apps can now bring a week's worth of calories to the front door before you've found your slippers. Many jobs involve sitting down all day, entertainment involves sitting down all evening, and even shopping can be done while remaining impressively horizontal.
And then there is poverty, stress, sleep, mental health, childhood habits, lack of exercise, local environment and, increasingly, medication.
The arrival of Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro has changed the obesity debate dramatically. These drugs can help some people lose significant amounts of weight and may prove enormously important medically. But do we really want the national plan to be: create an obesogenic culture, then inject everybody afterwards?
That seems, well, slightly backwards.
The King’s Fund says England has had 14 government obesity strategies since 1992, while obesity has continued to rise. There are now thought to be around 14 million adults in England living with obesity or severe obesity, with vast consequences for diabetes, heart disease, joint problems, NHS demand and public spending.
So what should actually change?
Do we regulate junk-food advertising more aggressively? Improve school meals? Make healthy food cheaper? Encourage walking and cycling? Teach cooking properly again? Restrict portion sizes? Tax sugar harder? Or is government already interfering quite enough in what people put on their plates?
There is also the awkward personal question of self-control. Christianity treats the body as something significant, not disposable. Food is good. Feasting is good. Enjoyment is good. But being dominated by appetite is something else.
So this episode asks what Britain should do about obesity without shaming people, pretending weight is simple, or handing responsibility entirely to either government or the individual.
Because clearly what we are doing now is not working.
zE-scooter accidents in Britain are rising sharply, with hundreds of riders and pedestrians suffering serious injuries and hospitals seeing a worrying increase in children hurt while using electric scooters. They are fast, cheap, convenient and now thoroughly woven into city life. They are also, increasingly, a menace on Britain’s streets.
In this episode of Mark and Pete, we look at the growing problem of e-scooter injuries, road safety and regulation in the UK, and ask whether it is time riders had to prove they can actually use one before being unleashed upon the rest of us.
Recent figures from three major children’s trauma centres in England make grim reading. Between 2019 and 2024, 477 children were treated for e-scooter injuries, with cases rising from fewer than ten in 2019 to nearly 150 in 2024. The average age was just 12. Around a quarter suffered head injuries, almost one in five suffered facial injuries, and fewer than 2 per cent were recorded as wearing helmets.
Nationally, the picture is scarcely more reassuring. In 2025 there were 1,377 reported e-scooter collisions in Great Britain, resulting in 1,477 casualties, including 484 people seriously injured and ten deaths. And because many incidents never reach the police statistics, the real total is almost certainly higher.
The oddest part of all this is that privately owned e-scooters are still generally illegal to ride on public roads and pavements, while rental schemes operate under special rules. Britain has therefore managed to create the perfect regulatory muddle: thousands of machines being sold, thousands being ridden, and a legal framework that seems to hover somewhere between prohibition and a shrug.
So what should happen?
We ask whether e-scooter riders should have to earn some form of competency badge or basic licence, perhaps rather like the old cycling proficiency test. Nothing elaborate. A little Highway Code knowledge, some practical riding, braking, signalling and basic road awareness. In other words, evidence that the person travelling silently towards you at 15 mph has at least met a traffic cone before.
Would compulsory helmets help? Should scooters carry visible registration? Should there be age limits, insurance or proper enforcement?
E-scooters are probably not going away. The real question is whether Britain can make them useful without turning every pavement into a low-speed obstacle course.
Ferrari’s first electric car has arrived, and the Ferrari Luce is causing exactly the sort of argument you would expect when the most famous maker of roaring petrol-engined supercars decides to plug one into the mains. The new fully electric Ferrari Luce has more than 1,000 horsepower, four electric motors, a top speed of around 192 mph and a claimed range of 329 miles. It will cost about £440,000 in the UK. Which is quite a lot to spend to avoid buying petrol.
But even that figure was comprehensively upstaged when the unique Ferrari Luce “Chassis 0” was sold at Monterey Car Week for an astonishing $40 million, around £30 million, setting a world record for a new car sold at auction. The proceeds are going to educational projects through the Ferrari Foundation, so at least somebody has managed to spend £30 million on a car and emerge looking reasonably public spirited.
In this episode of Mark and Pete, we ask whether an electric Ferrari can really still be a Ferrari. For generations, the Prancing Horse has meant noise, petrol, cylinders, exhausts and that unmistakable Ferrari engine note. The Luce has none of those. Instead Ferrari has developed a system which uses the genuine vibrations and sounds of the electric drivetrain to give the car its own character. No recorded V12 noises being piped through the speakers, thankfully. There are limits.
The numbers are certainly Ferrari-ish. The 1,036 bhp Ferrari Luce does 0–62 mph in around 2.5 seconds, has a 122 kWh battery and, unusually for Ferrari, has four doors and five seats. Former Apple design chief Jony Ive was involved in creating the interior, which rather pleasingly includes proper physical controls instead of turning the entire dashboard into an enormous touchscreen.
But Ferrari itself is being cautious. It now expects fully electric cars to make up only around 20% of its range by 2030, rather than the 40% previously envisaged.
So is the Ferrari Luce a glimpse of the supercar future, an engineering masterpiece, or a beautifully made solution to a problem Ferrari owners never actually had?
And if you had £440,000 spare, would you buy the electric Prancing Horse, or demand twelve cylinders and some proper noise?
Tomato sauce spill, Swaffham traffic, Norfolk news, lorry accidents, road closures and one enormous quantity of ketchup are the unlikely ingredients in this episode of Mark and Pete. Because sometimes the great machinery of world affairs pauses for a moment and Britain gives us the news story we actually need.
A truck carrying tomato sauce overturned near Swaffham in Norfolk, spilling its load across the road and leaving emergency services with the sort of clean-up operation nobody quite expects when they start a shift.
Yes. A truck load of tomato sauce.
There was disruption. There was a road closure. There was an impressive amount of red stuff where red stuff really shouldn't be. And somewhere, presumably, there was a very unhappy person looking at several thousand meals' worth of tomato sauce spreading itself across Norfolk.
Naturally, Mark and Pete approach this important breaking story with the journalistic seriousness it deserves.
Which isn't very much.
We ask whether motorists were able to ketchup with the traffic, whether police managed to get to the sauce of the problem, and whether stranded drivers were left stewing while the clean-up operation got under way. Did anyone relish the challenge? Was the driver in a pickle? And why, at the crucial moment, was there apparently no articulated lorry carrying several tonnes of chips coming in the opposite direction?
An opportunity missed.
But beneath all this nonsense, and there is quite a lot of nonsense, there's something rather wonderful about British local news. The world may be worrying about wars, elections, artificial intelligence and the future of civilisation, but somewhere in Norfolk a road is covered in tomato sauce and somebody has to sort it out.
Count Binface, Nigel Farage, the Clacton by-election, UK politics, protest voting and the strange state of British democracy are under discussion in this episode of Mark and Pete. Because something rather extraordinary has happened in Clacton. Count Binface, a man wearing a silver costume with what appears to be a bin on his head, came second.
And not just “came second” in the sense of receiving 87 votes, including his mum and somebody who misunderstood the ballot paper. He received nearly 9,500 votes, around 27 per cent of those cast.
Nigel Farage comfortably won the Clacton by-election, taking more than 22,000 votes and around 63 per cent of the total. But with Labour, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats not fielding candidates, thousands of voters faced an unusual choice. And an awful lot of them apparently looked at Count Binface and thought: yes. That'll do nicely.
So why did people vote for him?
We look at the long and rather glorious British tradition of satirical election candidates, from the Monster Raving Loony Party onwards, and ask whether voting for a comedy candidate is merely a joke or actually quite a serious form of political protest.
Because there is something going on here.
British voters are increasingly dissatisfied with mainstream politics, political parties and politicians themselves. A vote for Count Binface can be funny, certainly, but it can also mean: none of you represents me. It is rather more emphatic than spoiling the ballot paper and considerably more entertaining.
We also examine who Count Binface actually is, where the character came from, his previous election campaigns and some of his splendidly ridiculous manifesto promises. Then comes the obvious constitutional question.
Could Count Binface become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom?
Technically, Britain doesn't directly elect a Prime Minister at all. The Prime Minister must be able to command the confidence of the House of Commons. There is, as far as we can establish, no constitutional prohibition on having a waste-paper basket for a head. Westminster has somehow neglected to legislate for this contingency.
But underneath the jokes is a serious question about British democracy, protest votes, Nigel Farage, Reform UK and public trust in politics.
When more than a quarter of voters choose the man dressed as an intergalactic space warrior, perhaps the interesting question isn't why they voted for the joke candidate.
Perhaps it's who the joke is on.
Mark and Pete: faith, life, current affairs and the occasional bin-headed parliamentary candidate.zz
Total Eclipse: Now I Understand the Fuss
Total solar eclipse 2026, Spain, eclipse chasing, solar eclipse photography and the extraordinary experience of totality are at the heart of this episode of Mark and Pete. Pete has now seen his first total eclipse of the Sun, in Spain on 12 August 2026, and has come back with a fairly straightforward conclusion: everyone should see one. At least once. Preferably somewhere with decent weather and a nearby supply of coffee.
Because a total solar eclipse is not really like seeing a partial eclipse, only slightly better. It is something else altogether.
We talk about what actually happens as the Moon gradually moves across the Sun, why 99 per cent coverage still isn't the same as totality, and that peculiar moment when daylight suddenly begins to fail. The temperature drops. The colours change. The world looks wrong. Then comes the diamond ring, the last brilliant flash of sunlight disappears, and suddenly the solar corona is hanging in a darkened sky.
And yes, Pete photographed it.
We look at some of the science behind the eclipse too: Baily's beads, the diamond-ring effect, solar prominences, the corona, and why eclipse glasses are absolutely essential during the partial phases. Looking directly at the Sun is not one of those occasions when optimism is an adequate safety procedure.
But there is another question. Why does a total eclipse affect people so deeply?
Human beings have watched eclipses with fear, wonder and fascination for thousands of years. We now understand the astronomy. We can predict an eclipse to the second and calculate precisely where its shadow will fall. Oddly enough, knowing how it works doesn't make it less astonishing. Perhaps it makes it more so.
For Christians, there is something wonderfully appropriate in the words of Psalm 19: “The heavens declare the glory of God.” Creation is orderly, immense, beautiful and, every now and then, capable of stopping us in our tracks.
And if you missed the 2026 total solar eclipse, there is good news. Another total eclipse crosses southern Spain and Gibraltar on 2 August 2027, with an even more spectacular path continuing across North Africa and the Middle East.
So should you travel to see a total solar eclipse?
Pete didn't really understand why people did.
He does now.
Mark and Pete: faith, life, current affairs, and two blokes attempting to make sense of a very strange world.
£50,000 or £1 Million? The Coin Toss That Reveals How You Think is a fascinating look at decision making, risk, money psychology, behavioural economics and the strange things our brains do when a large amount of cash is suddenly dangled in front of us.
The dilemma is beautifully simple.
You are offered £50,000 guaranteed. You can take it, walk away, and quite reasonably feel that life has improved.
Or you can flip a coin.
Heads, you get £1 million.
Tails, you get nothing.
No second go. No best of three. No rather hopeful suggestion that perhaps the coin landed on the edge.
So what would you do?
Mathematically, the gamble is enormously attractive. A 50% chance of £1 million gives it an expected value far above the guaranteed £50,000. Yet plenty of people still choose the certainty. Others would flip the coin before the person offering the money had quite finished the sentence.
And that is where things get interesting.
In this episode of Mark and Pete, we explore risk aversion, loss aversion, expected value, probability, financial decision making and the psychology of money. We look at why people often prefer a smaller guaranteed reward over a much larger uncertain one, and why the answer may change completely depending on your age, wealth, debts, family responsibilities and general appetite for catastrophe.
Because £50,000 is not just a number.
For one person it might clear the mortgage. For another it could wipe out debt, pay for education, provide a deposit on a house or simply create breathing room. Suddenly the supposedly irrational decision to avoid the gamble starts looking rather sensible.
Then again, turning down a 50% chance of becoming a millionaire is not exactly an easy thing to explain to yourself afterwards.
We also bring a Christian perspective to the question. Scripture has plenty to say about money, wisdom, stewardship, contentment and the dangers of greed. It has rather less enthusiasm for making life-changing decisions because a shiny object has appeared in front of us.
So this is not really an episode about a coin.
It is about certainty, fear, ambition, prudence, greed, wisdom and what money reveals about the way we think.
And perhaps the most awkward question of all is this:
Would you still make the same choice if the money were actually sitting on the table?
UK petrol theft, fuel drive-offs, rising petrol prices, shoplifting, retail crime and the cost-of-living squeeze are at the heart of this episode of Mark and Pete. Drivers are leaving filling stations without paying in growing numbers, retailers are reporting increasing theft across the board, and the obvious question is beginning to look rather difficult to avoid: why do so many petrol stations still let us take the fuel first and pay afterwards?
Industry figures suggest fuel theft is now costing UK forecourts enormous sums, with incidents rising sharply as petrol and diesel prices have climbed. Some cases are organised and deliberate. Number plates may be obscured or false, vehicles filled and driven straight off. Others appear to involve first-time offenders, which makes the whole thing rather more interesting, and more troubling.
Is this simply crime responding to opportunity? Or has the squeeze on household finances persuaded a small but growing number of otherwise ordinary people that stealing fifty or sixty pounds of petrol is somehow different from stealing fifty or sixty pounds from a till?
It isn’t, of course. The eighth commandment remains admirably free of footnotes.
We also ask why Britain has not moved much more decisively towards pay-before-you-pump systems. Plenty of filling stations already require a bank card to be authorised before fuel is dispensed, so technically it is hardly moon-landing stuff. Yet many forecourts still operate on trust, helped by CCTV, automatic number-plate recognition and the hope that the customer will wander inside and pay.
And wandering inside is rather important, because modern petrol stations make plenty of money from coffee, sandwiches, sweets and assorted emergency purchases which somehow cost twice what they did before you entered the building.
But fuel theft is only part of a much wider story.
Shoplifting and retail crime have risen dramatically in Britain, with retailers reporting hundreds of thousands of offences, organised gangs targeting high-value goods and shop workers facing alarming levels of abuse and violence. Food, alcohol, cosmetics, meat, coffee, confectionery and other easily resold goods are increasingly attractive targets.
So who is doing it? The answer appears to be a mixture: organised thieves, repeat offenders, opportunists and some people who may never previously have regarded themselves as criminals at all.
This week we ask whether rising prices are merely exposing an old problem or creating a new one, whether retailers need to redesign the way we pay, and whether Britain has quietly become rather too casual about stealing.
zRaleigh bikes, the future of Raleigh, Accell Group insolvency, British bicycle history, the Raleigh Chopper and the decline of iconic British brands are at the heart of this episode of Mark and Pete. Raleigh has been part of British life for well over a century, but now the famous Nottingham-born bicycle name faces a very uncertain future. Could Raleigh really disappear? And if it does, what exactly are we losing?
For generations, Raleigh was simply the bicycle. Not a bicycle brand among many, but the bicycle you knew. Children wanted a Chopper, teenagers wanted something faster, adults rode Raleighs to work, to the shops and, quite often, into a hedge because bicycle brakes in those days seemed to regard stopping as more of a suggestion.
Founded in Nottingham in the nineteenth century, Raleigh became one of the great names of British manufacturing. At its peak it was producing enormous numbers of bikes, exporting around the world and employing thousands of people. The Raleigh Chopper became a genuine cultural icon. Then there were the Grifter, the Burner, racing bikes, touring bikes and the sort of sensible three-speed machine your grandfather could ride while wearing a jacket and tie, apparently without breaking sweat.
But the modern bicycle business is a very different beast.
Raleigh is now part of the Dutch-owned Accell Group, which has run into serious financial trouble after years of debt, changing demand, excess stock and a post-pandemic bicycle market that has proved rather less buoyant than some investors had hoped. The result is insolvency proceedings, possible rescue bids and a deeply uncertain future for some famous cycling names.
So we ask whether Raleigh can survive, and perhaps a more awkward question: when does an iconic British company stop really being British?
If the factories have gone, the ownership has gone and production has moved elsewhere, does the badge still matter?
We think it does.
Brands such as Raleigh are part of the texture of ordinary British life. They carry memories with them. First bikes. Scraped knees. Christmas mornings. Cycling to school. And, yes, those magnificent Choppers with handlebars apparently designed by somebody who thought steering should involve upper-body exercise.
This week we look back at Raleigh’s extraordinary history, examine what has gone wrong and ask whether this really could be the end of the road for Raleigh.z
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