Season 4 starts February 2025
SUDDENLY: a Frank Sinatra podcast
Merry Christmas. I'm back. See you soon. - Rabia suddenlypod.gay suddenlypod at gmail dot com
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SUDDENLY will return in 2025
SUDDENLY: a Frank Sinatra podcast
Hi, Rabia here. I have Long COVID and am struggling. I need time to process things and figure out how to best use my energy. Podcasting is good for me but very energy consuming, and I need to work out how I'm going to manage this condition. So Season 3 will end here for now and we will pick back up at some stage in 2025. In the meantime, enjoy this episode of Rocky Fortune. Wear an N95, run an air purifier, avoid crowds, do whatever you can to avoid both contracting and spreading this virus. I dig you the most xx contact: suddenlypod at gmail dot com
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54: The Man with the Golden Arm (with Spike Vincent)
SUDDENLY: a Frank Sinatra podcast
Melbourne's Medically Supervised Injecting Room (MSIR) in North Richmond opened in 2018. This was the result of a years-long grassroots campaign led by the local community, fed up with constant overdoses in the streets. The MSIR operates on principles of harm reduction which simply work and urgently need to be applied throughout the world. The stigma around drug use, and the criminalising of drug users, must end - and that begins with us. In 1955, Frank Sinatra made a historically significant contribution to the destigmatisation of drug use on film in Otto Preminger's The Man with the...
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53: Wake Up and Live, Part 5 - Giardina on Winchell
SUDDENLY: a Frank Sinatra podcast
In the final (?) part of our Wake Up and Live saga, Henry returns to the show to share his thoughts on Walter Winchell's legacy through the lens of the gossip landscape of 2024. Sources for this episode: * John Mosedale - The Men Who Invented Broadway (1981) * Neal Gabler - Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity (1994) * Snopes article on * Better Offline podcast hosted by Ed Zitron, * Rehash podcast, * Sullivan's Travels (1941) * Fresh Air (1999) * The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) * Scandal (1950) * Winchell (1998) * "" Henry Giardina, Hey Alma, 18 August...
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BONUS: The "Is Elvis Alive?" Conspiracy Theory + "The Elvis Files" (1991) (with Justin Gausman)
SUDDENLY: a Frank Sinatra podcast
For the last few months, Justin and Rabia have been co-hosting TCBCast After Dark, a deep dive into the seamy underbelly of the Elvis conspiracy world available only on the TCBCast Patreon feed. As they approached Part 6 of an exhaustive investigation into the truth behind the grifters who perpetuated the false "Is Elvis Alive?" conspiracy throughout the 1980s, and reached the infamous 1991 Bill Bixby TV special The Elvis Files, they decided to bring in Felix for a fresh perspective on the whole thing. Here, exclusive to SUDDENLY, is a 45-minute introduction in which Felix is caught up...
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52: Wake Up and Live, Part 4 - The Secret
SUDDENLY: a Frank Sinatra podcast
This week, we continue to act as if it were impossible to fail in part four of our exhaustive deep dive into Wake Up and Live. Picking up the story from the end of World War II, we look at the legacy of Dorothea Brande's book and the essentially identical self-help scam that generations of grifters have perpetuated on the world ever since. Wasn't this podcast meant to be about Frank Sinatra? Selected sources and references: Picture Search Video @ 139 Swan St, Richmond (IG: @) Teen Wolf (animated TV series) (1986) Stone Bros. (2009) The MousePack - Mickey and Friends Singing Classic Standards...
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51: Wake Up and Live, Part 3 - Dancing in the Dark
SUDDENLY: a Frank Sinatra podcast
The history books forgot about the 1944 radio adaptation of Wake Up and Live, a bizarre and disastrous production in which a fascist self-help book adapted into a comedy movie about duelling radio shows is adapted back into a radio show in which several other radio shows exist within the world of this radio show, and characters with real people playing themselves are altered back into fictional characters again. And THIS was Sinatra's second ever acting role of any kind, fresh off the back of the similary convoluted film Higher and Higher. On top of that, this was also the first time...
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50: Wake Up and Live, Part 2 - Machine Men
SUDDENLY: a Frank Sinatra podcast
Please note that the accompanying graphic for this episode has not been chosen lightly and is intended in the spirit of historical education, criticism and artistic commentary. In part 2 of our investigation into the saga of Wake Up and Live, we look at the original 1936 self-help book by Dorothea Brande, the toxic ideas that the book perpetuates and the author's ties to fascism and Nazism. To understand why fascism became popular in the United States during the 1930s is also to understand why Wake Up and Live became a bestseller. This week we take a close look at both, from the...
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49: Wake Up and Live, Part 1 - Mic Fright
SUDDENLY: a Frank Sinatra podcast
This week we begin a three-part investigation into Wake Up and Live. What is it? Good question. It's a 1930s self-help book, a musical in which a real-life journalist/radio host plays himself, and later, a radio drama adapted from the film. All these things interrelate in a way that's confusing to make sense of in 2024. Just beneath the surface of Wake Up and Live lies an elaborate and shocking story we'll fully detail over the next three weeks. Sinatra won't enter the story until Part 3. What the hell is all of this? You're about to find out. contact: suddenlypod at gmail dot com...
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48: Post Time
SUDDENLY: a Frank Sinatra podcast
***SPOILERS AHEAD - LISTEN TO EPISODE 47 FIRST*** It is now post time. Selected resources and links mentioned this week: * Follow on Instagram * video essay by Johnny Law & Order * TCBCast After Dark, Rabia's new side project with Justin Gausman, which you can hear by subscribing to the . * Art Cohn - The Joker is Wild (1955) * Chris Heath - Feel: Robbie Williams (2004) * Joe E. Lewis - "" (1948) * Joe E. Lewis - (1961) * Son of the Mask (2005) * Heckler (Jamie Kennedy, 2006) * * Episode of What's My Line with Joe E. Lewis, website: suddenlypod.gay contact:...
info_outlineThis week on SUDDENLY, an unbelievable true story. At age 19, Estonian-Australian immigrant Peeter Pedaja had his life changed by a Frank Sinatra film, THE KISSING BANDIT (1948). You will NEVER guess where this is going.
Born in 1931, Pedaja spent his entire Estonian childhood on the run from occupying Germans and Russians, including an exhaustive three-and-a-half year search for his lost family. He migrated to Australia by 18 and began hitch-hiking around the country - once riding a bicycle from Perth to Melbourne in summer, another time walking almost 300km in three days to win a bet.
At age 19, he saw THE KISSING BANDIT and was inspired. Brandishing a toy water pistol, he managed to hijack a motorcycle then hold up a couple in a car before being promptly arrested. “(Sinatra’s character) in the film never meant to do anything bad and I didn’t either”, he told the court. “I’ve been honest all my life and always will be.” He got off with a suspended sentence - and became known in Australia as “The Kissing Bandit in Real Life.”
And his adventures were just beginning.
In 1957, he turned up in Darwin having constructed a boat out of oil drums. Oil drum sea travel had become an obsession. Despite warnings that the craft was unseaworthy, he was absolutely determined to cross the Timor Sea and arrive in Indonesia. As he set off, nobody expected him to even survive the trip...
THE KISSING BANDIT is universally agreed to be the worst ever Sinatra film, so we got podcasting legend Tim Batt from The Worst Idea of All Time to join us for this episode. But it turned out that all this was just beneath the surface - and maybe it had something to do with the Worst Idea after all.
How this incredible story became lost to history is unclear. But you’ll hear all about it, for the first time in almost 50 years, on this week’s SUDDENLY.
Voice acting cast for this episode: Pete Rush as Peeter Pedaja, Lewis Worthington as Gregory Black, Henry Giardina as Capt. Peter Petersen, Spike Vincent as Capt. H.I. Phillips and Sue Marsh as Rosalie Pedaja.
Peeter Pedaja (sometimes spelt Peter Pedaja, alias Stanley Lexton) was born on August 24th, 1931 in Talllinn, Estonia to Rosalie and Johannes Pedaja, and died on October 17th, 1985 in Melbourne, Australia. If you know any more about his amazing life, we would love to hear from you.
UPDATE: Since the recording of this episode, I've since learned I was mispronouncing his surname. It's "pe-DAI-ya." I looked all over the internet for someone pronouncing it and went by what Google Translate told me, but that turned out to be wrong - sorry!
EMAIL: suddenlypod at gmail dot com
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