D.C. Thomson & Co. Ltd.

Hello and welcome to The Stushie, the politics podcast from DC Thompson that helps you be better briefed.

I'm Andy Phillip, head of the politics and public affairs team across The Courier and the Press and Journal titles.

Last week was all about council reform, so today we're looking at the companion piece in the SNP's surprise package, The Future of the NHS.

Okay.

So at DC Thompson, which is the umbrella company that Stylist is part of, we did this as part of a project with Stylist and their local news.

And with Stylist, it was quite easy because I could pick a voice on 11 Labs, dabble, have half an hour listening to all these voices say nice things.

But with local news in Scotland, it was really important that actually we cloned their voices.

My son has always been a keen reader, starting off with dinosaur reference books, football annuals like Shoot and probably his favourite around the age of 10, The Bruins or Earl Willey.

The last two are DC Thompson classics.

And you've given us a really, really lovely list.

And thank you very much indeed for talking to your son about that.

Why do you say 64 pages?

That was just it was this odd little, you know, you know, Commando comic still going from DC Thompson.

That format is a 64 page thing.

And the reason it's that small digest size is because when this was all owned by newspaper publishers, there was a strip of paper at the end of the roll.

Yeah, because she says...

She went to work for DC Thompson.

Yeah.

Who made a lot of these magazines, including Dandy, Be Known, others.

And Jackie was named after her, apparently.

Well...

She said she was told by the people that ran DC Thompson, what were they called? Two old men, old Dundee men, very serious.

They told her that they'd named Jackie Magazine after her because she was the youngest employee, which is amazing.

And I'm not right.

DC Thompson was very private.

It was run

very

Well, I suppose it was a bit like Northern Ireland then.

It

was also a closed world, the world of DC Thompson.

Extraordinary.

Hello, and welcome to The Stooshie, the politics podcast from DC Thomson that helps keep you better briefed.

I'm Sean O'Neill, and on today's episode, I'll be speaking with Lara Bird, the SNP MP for Arbroath and Broughty Ferry, who was elected to Westminster in June at the by-election to replace her outgoing SNP colleague, Stephen Gethins, who has taken his seat at Holyrood.

Um, thanks for joining us on the show, Lara.

It wasn't really books, it was comics.

D.C. Thompson, God bless him, and Dundee were the purveyors of literacy to generations of working class kids in Scotland and beyond.

And I went from the kind of really, Bimbo was the one I remember getting first when I was very young, the Bimbo pre-five.

Then you moved on to the Beano and the Dandy.

Hello, and welcome to The Stooshie, the politics podcast from DC Thomson that helps you be better briefed.

I'm Andy Phillip, hosting our first episode of the new run of weekly episodes, taking us all the way up to Christmas.

Labour conference has come and gone with notable speeches from two new leaders.

But Dundee in a way can be seen as a bit of a microcosm for some of the most extreme kinda needs that the country has.

You know, we have an economy that's not working properly, uh, for people.

We have just reports today in terms of the number of people who are queuing up for, for jobs, you know, uh, for, uh, 35 applicants for every position, um, that, that are, are out there reported in, um, the DC Thomson Press just today, um, real economic challenges in the city.

And what we need to make sure is that we get the skills system in place to allow people to get into those, to get positions, and that's about also attracting investment on the basis of skills that we have.

Um, our skill system just isn't working.