You're Dead to Me - Catherine the Great (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

Greg Jenner is joined by Dr Julia Leikin and comedian David Mitchell to learn all about the life of Catherine II of Russia, better known as Catherine the Great. Catherine’s story is full of contradictions and ambiguities. She was a German princess who became empress of all Russia, a ruler who believed in Enlightenment philosophy but championed imperial expansion, and a sexually open woman in the patriarchal eighteenth century. From her childhood in Germany through her marriage to the heir to the Russian throne and eventual coup against his rule, this episode charts the twists and turns of Catherine’s life, and asks what kind of ruler she really was.This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.Hosted by: Greg Jenner Research by: Jon Mason Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. Hello and welcome to Your Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are sailing along the Neva River to sojourn in 18th century St. Petersburg as we learn all about Empress Catherine II of Russia,

also known as Catherine the Great. And to help us, we have two great guests. In History Corner, she's based at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she lectures on modern European and Russian history. It's Dr. Julia Lakin. Welcome, Julia. Hello, thank you for having me.

Pleasure. And in Comedy Corner, he's a BAFTA-winning comedy writer, performer and broadcaster. You'd have seen him on all the telly Peep Show, That Mitchell Webb Look, Back, Would I Lie to You? And he's now a published historian because he's just written a very funny book, Unruly, A History of England's Kings and Queens.

If anyone deserves the epithet, The Great, it's David Mitchell. Welcome, David. Thank you very much. That's too complimentary. Alfred is the only great person in this country. Oh! I was told at school. No, Constantine the Great and Canute the Great would be the other greats. I do mention the fact that Canute the Great is named as great, but not according to Miss Brown. Oh.

She said it's just Alfred in England that's great, and I think it was because she thought the Canuta's a bit Danish He counts as a great Dane not the dog not the dog Alfred's the only great but Constantine. Yeah, as in the Emperor Emperor. He was crowned in York So he counts because he was crowned in York. He's one of ours. We can claim him. I see I think you're stretching a point Okay, all right miss Miss Brown is the authority, we'll go with Miss Brown. David, you are not only a history graduate, but you are now a published historian as well,

so I mean, the obvious worry for me is, are you coming for my job? Is this a coup? Yes, I wish to take over the past and redefine it to my own advantage, because that very much seems to be the spirit of the age. No, I've just written a funny book about kings and queens and then I will back off. All right, I will allow you that small amount of turf. But thank you for coming in. We are

doing kings and queens of a sort but we're meandering eastwards to Russia. So what do you know about Catherine the Great? Well, I did Catherine the Great for A-level, at which point she was less than 200 years dead. So, you know, it was practically current affairs. She was one of the enlightened despots. And the thing about the enlightened despots, there were sort of the virtue signaling tyrants who sort of told the world that they loved Voltaire and they thought that humanity was a thing that should be cherished, but they broadly allowed the repressive regimes that they inherited to continue. Quite an accurate summation, Julia, you are nodding.

The politically correct term now is enlightened monarch. Because they thought it was rude to them to call them despobs. Yes. You don't want to offend anyone with a large army. So what do you know? So this is the So What Do You Know? This is where I guess what our lovely listeners at home might know about today's subject. And I'm guessing they've heard of Catherine the Great. She's one of the great names from history.

But Catherine the Great is everywhere in pop culture. Recently we've been treated to Elle Fanning's performance in the hilariously raucous and wildly inaccurate TV series, The Great. But Catherine's been portrayed by such icons as Marlene Dietrich, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Bette Davis, even Catherine de Nerve, in the bizarrely named movie, God Loves Caviar. Ideal name for a film.

Um, she's everywhere, but what about the real history behind all the glitz and grisly drama? What made Catherine so great? Was she great? Are we happy with that word? Let's find out. David, we'll start with an easy one. What was Catherine's name and where did she grow up? She was German. Yes. And I think she was called Sophie. Oh look at you with your A-level knowledge. Yes. You can go home. I was going to say, I'm packing my bags. So Catherine was named Princess Sophia Augusta

of Anhalt-Zelps when she was born. She was born in 1729 in Pomerania in a little Baltic port called Stetten where her father, who was a Prussian army general, he was stationed there at the time. But Anhalt-Searst is actually somewhere closer to the middle. She was the eldest of five siblings, but only she and one of her brothers survived into adulthood. Catherine had what she described as a precocious education. She was taught religion, history, geography by a Lutheran priest. Sophia, she was a healthy, energetic child until the age of seven when she got a violent

cough that left her bedridden for three weeks. And when she finally got up, it turned out she had a curvature of the spine. Do you want to guess what the recommended treatment was by German doctors at the time? What are they suggesting for her? Right. Well, I mean, bleeding, obviously. First thing, bleed people. That's the rule in medicine, isn't it, until the middle of the 19th century? Pretty much, yeah.

If that doesn't help, well, they didn't think too much outside the box. You want some sort of horrendous bracing contraption, maybe, or stretching. That might work as well. You could use the things that they used in the castle to torture people, but not turn it up to the full level. Put it on mid-power. Just put it on the medical level. And then it comes out of two budgets, both the medical and the torturing budget. The torturing budget much larger. I mean, I think David is coming for both of our jobs. Yeah. budget much larger. I mean I think David is coming for both of our jobs. Yeah. But no, it's true her spine was realigned with the use of a harness and some other folk remedies.

So for example she was also rubbed down periodically with young maid's saliva and these folk remedies were supervised not by the local doctor but by the local hangman. So this may have led to a distrust of doctors later in life. I mean you wrote a memoir about your bad back called Backstory, which is a wonderful book. Have you considered a hangman or made saliva? I was suggested many remedies. It's one of the problems with having a bad back. Everyone's got their own solution.

But nobody suggested made saliva Yeah, you know, I don't know if you can get that on the NH She recovered her healthy on Sophia and aged about 14 or so. She's packed off to Russia with her mother Because she's gonna be a candidate for marriage to go and be essentially shown in front of this young heir to the Russian throne He's called Peter and who Russian throne. He's called Peter. And who is Peter? He's another German. Oh, and also her cousin. Well, so her second cousin, so not quite so scandalous. So his full name was Karl Peter Ulrich of Holstein. So later he became Grand Duke Piotr Fyodorovich, but

yes, like Sophia, he was raised in Germany and he was also the nephew of Empress Elizabeth of Russia, who in tribute to her deceased sister Anna, nominated him as heir to the Russian throne. He was also a direct descendant of Peter the Great, who was his grandfather. The Tsar of Russia is Elizabeth and Peter is the heir, who you might be marrying. What are you going to do to catch his eye? To catch Peter's eye and impress Elizabeth, his his aunt in Russia in the middle of the 18th century. Yes. So you're in it's a big palace but everybody sort of smells and is about to die of some

infectious disease because that's what the past was like. How do I seem both like a good partner in life but also overwhelmingly sexy. These are not questions I have the answers to. I found the dating scene quite stressful just in early 21st century UK. She's also learning everyone's names at court. She's learning everyone's dog's names. She's plugging herself into the gossip network and the efforts pay off. She was selected as the best possible wife for Peter. LS And of course, Sophia converts to orthodoxy. She takes the name Yekaterina Alexeyevna, which we Anglicize to Catherine. Elizabeth chose

the name for her in honor of her own mother, Catherine I of Russia. The two were married on the 21st of August 1745. CB Lovely. So we have Catherine and Peter and it's a match made in heaven. Or is it? I mean, Peter is not the great romantic catch. Do you know anything about Peter as a young man? No, I don't know much about this Peter. OK. Well, all I remember is that I don't think we're going to be hearing from him for the whole of this episode. That's fair. I mean, Julia, the word I'm going to use that's probably the kindest word is immature.

No, that's exactly right. He was immature. He enjoyed childish games, toy soldiers. He had rude table manners. He cared only for hunting, dogs, drinking, carousing, dressing up his servants in Prussian uniforms and making them parade around. Historians have referred to him as a parade-o-maniac. He just sounds like a standard monarch. They're all obsessed with hunting. If they only had invented the Nintendo earlier, the amount of wildlife that would have survived. He could also be quite cruel to animals.

Famously, he catches a rat chewing on one of his toy soldiers. How do you think he punishes the rat? I think he batters it with a shoe. He gives it a full court martial. Oh right. And then he builds a miniature gallows and hangs it. Well, I mean you say that that's cruel but in fact that's proper judicial protocol. Isn't it? Actually that's according the rat some rights.

Catherine finds the body of the rat dangling from the gallows. So yeah. What have you been doing darling? What is this? It's perhaps unsurprising David that sparks are not flying in the bedroom. Julia, they're not really getting along in the physical sense, are they? No, much to Elizabeth's chagrin they're not. Anyway, eventually after a decade of marriage, Catherine does produce and heir a son on September 20th 1754 and publicly Paul was recognized as Peter's heir, but in all likelihood he was the son of Catherine's lover, Sergei Siltakov. So they just chucked out the whole system. They just said this is a random German princess and her lover's child who's now head of the Russian royal

house. That's not the system, is it? Why is that okay? We don't know. So we don't know whether he was, whose son Paul was because he grew up to look a lot like Peter the third surprisingly. Okay, so that could have been makeup. They're certainly not going to encourage him to have a different hairdo when they're trying to forge legitimacy. What I'm

saying is I know that the Russians rig elections now. I didn't realise they also rigged primogeniture. Well actually no, there was no primogeniture. I mean, Peter the Great's law of succession got rid of primogeniture and the monarch could appoint essentially their own heir. And just to say, primogeniture is of course the traditional medieval law that the firstborn son will inherit the throne as long as they're legitimate. So in 1761 Empress Elizabeth dies and so in comes Peter III, the new Tsar, Catherine's husband. And what policies do you think he's enacting David? There's been a lot of limits on the movement of rats, definitely.

Julia, his policies are not awful. He's not terrible. Some of Peter's policies actually enjoy some support, but Peter was probably not cut out to be the monarch because he wasn't really that interested in governance, even before he ascended the throne, when he was kind of governing Holstein from a distance. It wasn't him, but Catherine the Great or Catherine

back then just Catherine. Catherine who was ably kind of stepping in and assisting him. This was so well known that foreign ambassadors had come to refer to her as Madame la Ressource. Madame the Ressource, that's a great nickname. Yeah exactly. Yeah so he's only really in power for sort of six months or so and already he's alienated everyone. I mean there's a light that she writes her memoirs later and she edits them a lot We're never quite sure at what stage she's writing things and then they sort of get added back in like, you know Little editions later, but she there's a very powerful line She says it was a matter of either perishing with or because of him or else of saving myself the children

And perhaps the state if I had orchestrated a coup to to take over Russia that is how I would retrospectively justify it. Yeah exactly. And it doesn't make it not true but I just say that is also what you would say whether or not it's true. How do you launch a coup? Obviously you need to get the army on side and then you occupy the TV and radio stations. So I shoot. And here we are the BBC we're already halfway there. There's a guy at the door with some caviar. Yeah, I mean, you're spot on. Get the army on side. It's half the battle. And Catherine does that incredibly quickly. That's right. So Catherine and her allies, they had been building up support

on her behalf throughout Peter's reign. And this wasn't very hard to do because she was quite popular and Peter was not. And her lover, Grigory Arloff, and his brothers were quite well regarded among the military regiments. And Nikita Panyin, the Grand Duke's tutor, but also a senior statesman, he had sought to secure political support for her as well. But then their plans were almost spoiled because one of their supporters got arrested, so the plan had to move up. She was awoken early in the morning on the 28th of June in 1762 at Peterhof by Alexei Arlov, so the brother of her lover.

And then they raced to St. Petersburg, where elite army regiments proclaimed her as empress and sovereign of all Russia's. Then she went to the Kazan church. She was proclaimed sovereign by the clergy. And then she reached the Winter Palace, where crowds cheered and soldiers swore oaths of loyalty to her there. Then Catherine puts on this guards uniform and rides to Peterhof to arrest Peter. And at first he tries to negotiate, but then he signed an unconditional abdication and Catherine wasted no time in arranging her coronation. So on September 22nd in 1762 at the age of 33, she was proclaimed to the Empress of Russia. So 1762 is the coup.

She sees his power and Peter is just out. He doesn't even know what's happened. And he wakes up one morning, you're no longer the Tsar. How long do you think he lasts, David? I don't sense he's around a year later, is he? No. Is he around the following Saturday? Pretty much no.

He gets eight days. Eight days? Eight days. Yes, well, he was. If he was, it depends what day of the week it was. Sure, sure. He's probably strangled by Gregory Orlov. Alexei.

It's Alexei. OK. So an Orlov brother, one of the five, they're interchangeable. They get drunk in a party. And then? No, no, no. Not interchangeable. One was a lover and one was a big fighter. And not interchangeable they get drunk in a party and then... No, no, no, one... not interchangeable. One was a lover and one was a big fighter. Not interchangeable.

You've got to pick the right brother for the right job. Exactly. Oh, I picked the wrong brother. I've got the plumber brother. The lover brother's trying to strangle me. This is a disaster. Alright, so let's talk about the Russia that Catherine has inherited. The state, the country, the people. Much like the early Beach Boys, it's all about the serf. What is a serf? How does serfdom work? Tell us about Russian society. So serfdom, it was both a social and economic system in Russia at the time. Serfs were peasants, they were bonded to states where they largely worked the land, but they also were the ones

who paid taxes and they provided the base for military recruitment. So, serfdom was a very important system. There were up to 10 million of them in a population of about 20 million. Now, Russia was mainly agricultural at the time, so the wealth of Russia very much depended on these peasant agricultural workers. And they lived in horrible conditions. They had very little freedom. They needed their owner's permission to leave their village, to take up certain livelihoods. They were legally forbidden from marrying who they wanted to unless they had their owner's permission from protesting against their owner's actions and they could be bought and sold. So as Catherine

put it, their lives or their souls weren't their own. And the institution of serfdom was an important political and economic question in Catherine's Russia. This was the question on which Catherine and the people who supported her, right, all of the nobles, really diverged on. Let's talk domestic policy, everyone's favourite. There are domestic reforms that she does pass, which do matter. They do have an impact, Julia. That's right. So using kind of her powers as an enlightened monarch with nearly unlimited reach, she does implement the sweeping program of reform.

So there's the 1775 provincial reform that draws the lines and the borders of the Russian empire and kind of rationalizes them. She established new courts, she created local boards of welfare to provide health care and education, she set up founding homes, mental asylums. She was particularly interested in the area of education. In 1786, she provided for the establishment of free schools

throughout the empire, although there was some limited take-up there for various reasons. We also associate her reign with a greater policy of religious toleration. We've talked about domestic policy, but she meddles in the election of the King of Poland and she knows him. David, how do you think she knows him? The new King? The King of Poland? The new one. I don't know, maybe they'd had a thing.

Yep. You're getting the gist now, aren't you? You're figuring out. He's a former lover of hers called Stanislaw August Poniatowski. And yeah, from bedroom to throne room, the ultimate sleeping away to the top. It's great, right? Fair enough. So she's interfering in Polish politics. Later on, she pretty much invades Poland and calms it up. And then there's the Ottoman Empire. They become a bit of a kind of adversary, Julia, don't they? The Russians and the Ottomans fought about 10 wars before the Crimean War. The Ottoman Empire wasn't just Catherine's adversary, but by seeing her intervention in Poland,

the Ottoman Empire gets particularly nervous about Russia's growing influence and searches out a pretext and declares war on Russia in September 1768. Now, since the time of Peter the Great, Russia had tried to get access to the Black Sea and also influence events in the Mediterranean. So Russia really devotes a lot of resources to this and comes out victorious. And she annexes it later in 1783. Right, in 1783. She annexes Crimea and then she kind of goes on this triumphal tour of the territories in 1787. This provokes the second Russian-Ottoman war because with all of these glorious military and naval exercises,

the Ottoman Empire suddenly gets angry, imprisons the Russian ambassador, declares war, and to make matters worse, Sweden declares war from the other side. Oh, not Sweden. And Sweden. Russia eventually defeats both and then also later carves up Poland a little more. Yeah, there you go. So enlightened monarch at home, fun loving war criminal away. Russia's getting vastly bigger. Yeah. From the starting point of being massive, it gets even bigger. But crucially further south, more access to the sea, which

is worrying all the other countries. And also further west, right? Right. Oh, west into the… Well, west… … along the Baltic, as it were, into Poland. Yes, exactly. So Poland doesn't exist, but also further east, right? So Russian encroachment in Siberia continues. There are these expeditions to the North Pacific and it sets up

eventually kind of the formal colonisation of Alaska. So you'd think that Catherine's huge success in terms of foreign policy and domestic policy that people would be delighted with her but there are actual several rebellions against her. Her son's always plotting against her but the most famous one is called the Cossack Rebellion. It's led by a guy called Pugachev I think. He genuinely rises up against it, Julia. And it's the largest rebellion in Imperial Russia before the 20th century. So Emelian Pukachov, he is a leader, a Cossack. Cossacks were autonomous communities of soldiers

across the Russian steppe and they served the Russian state as frontier soldiers. But by this time, they had very legitimate grievances on the state's encroachment in their traditional autonomy. So in 1773, Pugachev taps into this resentment and he raises thousands of supporters and they kind of plunder and massacre populations and lay siege to imperial strongholds. Now, what makes this particularly interesting was Pugachev's claim to be Peter III, Catherine's dead husband. So eventually this uprising is suppressed because the war with the Ottoman Empire ends and troops are sent in to put down the rebellion and Fugachev is handed over even by his own

followers. He's supposed to be quartered, but the executioner beheads him first. Accidentally. That sounds like they've ruined the opportunity of all that cruelty. Yeah. We've talked already about the paradox of the Enlightenment monarch. What kind of Enlightenment vibes is she giving off? She is an Enlightened monarch, but she's also a pragmatist. So I think we see this pattern that on the one hand she tries to rule Russia in this just and humane kingdom, but then she also keeps butting up against principles. So she kind of begins to recognize the political limits to her absolutism. And just to say that after the French Revolution, which had taken enlightenment principles to

its very extremes, there's a noticeable shift in Russia. So Russia, after 1789, becomes distinctly more conservative. I mean, the interesting thing, I think, is that not only is she interested in politics, she reads Voltaire, she reads Diderot, she meets him, she's writing too, she writes history books, she writes poems, she writes music and literature and theatre and her own memoirs, she's hugely productive as a creative force. But moving on, she has lots of lovers, we think at least 12, some say 17, but the greatest lover is Potemkin, or how do I pronounce it? Potemkin. First name Battleship.

Battleship, that's right. Strange Christian name. His parents, very unusual. Had a hamster called Battleship. Have you heard of this fella? I have heard of him. Of the man of the Battleship. And obviously the Battleship was named after him and so I'm assuming he's like a military guy. A big military guy that helped her and also had an affair with her.

A great love but more than that. He's probably the only lover who's on her intellectual equal, right? Is that fair? Yes, I think. Yeah, so he's almost prime ministerial to her. That's a very rude thing to say about the King of Poland. Sorry. That's a very good point. So the King of Poland was, you know, this kind of erudite, very well-educated European man of letters. And Piomkin is very clever, he's very smart,

he's very energetic, he's eccentric too, but they come from different worlds, so he kind of embodies this old Russian heroism, whereas Poniatowski, the King of Poland, is much more European. We haven't said that she comes to power aged 33, she rules for 34 years. Most of her romantic life she's older than her lovers. And the older she gets the younger they get. Fair enough. Let's talk about her final years then. So Potemkin dies, how much longer after his death does she die too? Well she dies in 1796 but I should say that the final years of her reign had quite a different tenor to the earlier part.

We talked about how the French Revolution and especially the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette closed the curtain on this more open-minded, enlightened Catherine. Before her death in 1796, she also participated in Poland two more times, won the Russian Ottoman and the Russian-Swedish War, and was even going to intervene in the French Revolutionary Wars in Italy. But she didn't because she died, inconveniently. And although her partner died in so many ways, Potemkin died in 1791, she had the young Platon Zuboff on her arm, so she was still recognizable as this energetic monarch. And her death, of course, was not as dramatic as legend. She collapsed in her toilet, her water closet, after what must have been a stroke, and she

had to be carried to her bed, but they couldn't quite lift her onto the bed, so she died 36 hours later on the floor. Oh. Yeah. And she was succeeded by Paul, who not only tried to erase her legacy, but revived the military tone of his father Peter III's reign and he brings back primogeniture, right? Of course he does. So male primogeniture, so this means more peaceful transitions, but this was the last time a woman ruled Russia. And what about her memory? He essentially suppressed any talk of her. Right, really? So there's no, even though her reign had

been very successful, he doesn't try and, because that would be more common, wouldn't it, to sort of derive your legitimacy from a previous successful regime? No, he derives his legitimacy by emulating Peter III. Fetch the Radgalos! Yeah, I mean, he doesn't survive on the throne very long either, because he's killed in favour of his son, Alexander I, who is much more kind of in line with Catherine the Great's reigns and then her posthumous reputation becomes a question of some debate. The Nuance Window! It's time for The Nuance Window. This is Dr. Julia gets two uninterrupted minutes to tell us something we need to know

about Catherine the Great. So without much further ado, Julia, take it away, please. Thanks, Greg. I just wanted to use this opportunity to unpack what exactly made Catherine great. So was it on the one hand her cultural aspirations, her enlightened views, her Republican spirit, or her emulation of Peter the Great's expansionism and desire to influence the political affairs of Europe. Now, in light of Russia's current war in Ukraine, it's difficult to uncritically celebrate

her imperial ambitions, particularly because Catherine's policies affected the territories that today make up Ukraine. And even on her own terms, Catherine was this immensely complicated, multifaceted figure, which is what makes her so interesting. And as I suggested in the century following her death, her posthumous reputation had already become this idiom in which the Russian Empire worked out its national politics. The celebrated empress was chastised by many, including Russia's national poet Alexander Pushkin. Now in the 21st century, Catherine II has been deployed as a propaganda figure for the Putin regime because Putin has depicted her as a foreigner who yearned to become Russian,

a woman who wrote that she will defend her homeland with her tongue and with a pen and with a sword, right? So echoing these military aspects of her rule and the appropriation of many parts of Ukraine, including Crimea, for the Russian Empire. This is a history that has not endeared her to the Ukrainian nation, so it's a topical reminder to ask whose perspective

a historical characterization celebrates. Much of what made Catherine such a celebrated figure, expanding the Russian Empire, gaining access to the Black Sea, developing the northern shores of the Black Sea, suppressing rebellion, acquisition of cultural artifacts. These all happened at great expense to the autonomy of others. So I'd say that current international politics really raises the question of whether this is a price that's worth paying for greatness. David, Catherine the Great!

Well the thing is I suppose you can only, you have to judge historical figures on their own terms and on her own terms she succeeded in her own aims. Well there we go we've learned all sorts of things about Catherine the Great. And listener if you want to hear more about another Empire Building Enlightenment Monarch you can check out our episode on Frederick the Great of Prussia with Stephen Fry in Comedy Corner so you can compare notes. And for more Ruthless Queens we also have fab episodes on N'Jingo, Evin Dongo and Agrippina the Younger. And remember if you've enjoyed the podcast leave a review, share the show with friends and make sure to subscribe to us on BBC Sounds we're called You're Dead to Me. You don't want

to miss an episode do you? I'd just like to say a huge thank you then to my guests in History Corner we have the fantastic Dr Julia Lakin from Royal Holloway. Thank you Julia. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure and in comedy corner we have the delightfully droll David Mitchell. Thank you David. Thank you for having me. And to you lovely listener, join me next time as we launch a well-timed coup against another historical subject but for now I'm off to go and convince Gwyneth Paltrow to invest in my new wellness company, Gob. You basically take the spittle from a maid and you rub it on the back and everyone gets rich. Hooray! Bye! Hello, I'm Sean Keevney and I'm back with a brand new series of Your Place or Mine from BBC Radio 4.

It's the show where a litany of wonderful guests try to tempt this recalcitrant traveller onto the runway to experience their favourite place on earth. Custard filled pastries everywhere as standard. I stayed in a place where that was their, they didn't put mince on the pillows, they put custard tarts. They'll try to tempt me with all the wonders and delicacies from their favourite place in the world, But will they succeed? There's an amazing lighthouse and there's a brilliant tour there by the guy who his family were the lighthouse keepers. The lighthouse family, if you will.

Listen to all new episodes of Your Place or Mine on BBC Signs. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply.