Homeschool History

Greg Jenner is the historian behind Horrible Histories and the popular You're Dead to Me podcast, and with Homeschool History he has done something really smart: taken the same rigorous-but-funny approach and aimed it squarely at families. Each episode covers a single historical topic in about 15 to 20 minutes, packing in genuine facts alongside the kind of jokes that make kids groan and parents laugh out loud. The Battle of Hastings, the Great Fire of London, Ancient Egypt, Leonardo da Vinci, and Mary Seacole all get the treatment. The show launched during lockdown in 2020 and was designed to support home learning, but it has outlasted those circumstances because the format just works. The episodes are tied to the school curriculum in many cases, which makes them genuinely useful for revision as well as entertainment. Greg has a talent for finding the bizarre details that make history stick in a child's memory, like what Roman soldiers actually ate or how Shakespeare got into trouble. With 22 episodes and a 4.7-star rating from nearly 700 reviews, Homeschool History punches well above its weight for a relatively small catalogue. A spinoff series called Dead Funny History launched in late 2025 through the You're Dead to Me feed on BBC Sounds. The production quality is exactly what you would expect from BBC Radio 4. For families who want their kids to engage with history but find textbooks dull, this is the antidote.