The Hot Docs Podcast Festival returned for its eighth run this October in Toronto, delighting audiences with a chance to see their favourite audio show recorded live and in person. Throughout the four-day festival, the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema welcomed guests, including Margaret Atwood with the podcast The New Yorker: Fiction and Chris Morocco with Dinner SOS.
Among the incredible talents were CBC’s The Secret Life of Canada podcast hosts Leah-Simone Bowen and Falen Johnson. Their show discusses various topics surrounding Canadian history regarding crime, social injustices, food, entertainers and more.
Bowen and Johnson were also joined by their guest hosts Brandon Hackett and Sharjil Rasool, as well as musician Andrew Penner.
The duo delighted its audience throughout their hour-long performance, highlighting Canada’s past, from railway and bank robberies to board games and Barbie dolls. While the podcast aims to spotlight integral pieces of Canadian history, it also helps listeners digest the sometimes hard-to-hear information with comedy bits and punch lines.
The show began with a discussion on Bill Miner, the first person ever to rob the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR).
However, Miner was not the first Canadian to commit train theft, as his reputation often suggests, as that occurred on the Great Western Railway 30 years prior. Bowen and Johnson explained that Miner was arrested and charged for his crimes years after his first CPR robbery in 1904 but managed to escape from the British Columbia Penitentiary shortly after. Miner later died in prison in 1913, having escaped two additional jails before being incarcerated for a fourth and final time in the state of Georgia. It was also Miner who invented the phrase “hands up!” during one of his many career railway robberies.
The second criminal Bowen and Johnson shed light on was Montreal’s Monica Proietti, better known as “Machine Gun Molly.”
Her family was no stranger to crime. Proietti’s grandmother ran a crime school for children in Montreal’s Red-Light District. She grew up in poverty and eventually married a man who was twice her age, Anthony Smith, at the young age of 17.
Years down the line, Proietti found herself struggling to support her three children as Smith was deported in 1962. She resorted to bank robbery as a means to an end and allegedly stole up to $100,000 over the course of 20 break-ins. Proietti was shot twice and crashed her vehicle in the midst of a police chase during what was rumoured to be her final planned robbery. This resulted in her death at age 27. While her story is heartbreaking, the podcasters explained that her career is an important piece of Canadian criminal history.
The show then transitioned into their next chapter of Canadian background and culture with a segment on board game trivia. Bowen and Johnson had Hackett and Rasool compete in a head-to-head match-up on the history of beloved Canadian games. The pair quizzed the guests on their knowledge of Trivial Pursuit, Balderdash and more.
This game show added some light and humorous conversations to the performance, as well as extended an invitation for audience participation.
Bowen and Johnson closed the show with an unbelievable lineup of Canadian Barbie doll pictures. There were various unsettling connotations hidden behind these toys and their manufacturing history. Some of the dolls included Tim Hortons Hockey Barbie (2020), the 1988 Rocky Mountaineer dressed Canadian Barbie, Olympic Fan Canada Barbie (2000) and “Inuk” Inuit Northern Canada Barbie (1997).
The show was a great success, with the audience expressing genuine reactions to the horrors and comedy behind Canada’s hidden past. While you may not find all of this information in your history books, Bowen and Johnson know how to put on a great show and educate their listeners on fascinating tidbits of information.