Who really killed Jack Royal? (It’s 1990 and it’s Robbo vs the Really Wild Show) Artwork

Everyone Dies In Sunderland: A podcast about growing up terrified in the eighties and nineties

Everyone Dies In Sunderland is a podcast about growing up terrified in the eighties and nineties. Ah, the good old days. People left their front doors unlocked. Children played out in the street. Everyone got burgled. Children got murdered, like, most days. Then there was Mad-Cow Disease and the Animals of Farthing Wood. It was a truly terrifying time to be a child. And those children are adults now. Adults with children and mortgages and Senseo Machines and jobs with actual responsibilities.And three of them have started a podcast where they laugh nihilistically at their own childhood trauma. Each week John, Gareth and Claire travel back to a year of their childhoods in North East England - like a True Crime Geordie Quantum Leap - and talk about what scared and scarred them that year, taking a closer look at one of the notorious crimes which were happening within walking distance of their childhood homes while they were watching Going Live.

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Everyone Dies In Sunderland: A podcast about growing up terrified in the eighties and nineties

Who really killed Jack Royal? (It’s 1990 and it’s Robbo vs the Really Wild Show)

January 01, 2022 • Everyone Dies In Sunderland • Season 2 • Episode 8

Close to midnight on March the 19th 1990 the doorbell rang at the home of Gateshead science teacher Jack Royal. As he looked though the porch window to see who it was, he was shot in the face at point blank range.

Jack had enemies – he’d twice stood trial for murder – but over 30 years later, we still don’t know who killed him. But we do know it wasn’t Andrew Adams, which is a bit of a shame for Andrew Adams, who spent 14 years in prison for the crime

This is the story of how in a blink of the eye “a good looking lad who could pull the girls” can wake up in bed – having indeed pulled a girl the previous night - to find his house surrounded by the police, endure armed police storming his mother’s death bed, and end up in prison for stealing a pair of trousers having been denied compensation for a decade and a half in jail for a crime he didn’t commit thanks to an “incompetent defence” from his legal team (that’s an actual quote from the Criminal Court Review Commission).

We also revisit 1992, a time of putting cockerel-shaped reflectors from breakfast cereal packets in the spokes of your Raleigh Street Wolf, Astrofarm, the Freddie Mercury tribute concert and the robbing of Benny Hill’s grave!

Claire calls Colin the Caterpillar “a twat”. Gareth gives John man flu. You don’t want to know what Claire thinks her majesty the Queen has.

We also have time for a game of Nick Hancock-era Room 101, which we’ll just call “Robbo vs The Really Wild Show”.

You can reach us on email everyonediesinsunderland@gmail.com, on Twitter at @everyonediespod, on Facebook and Instagram. Why not tell us about your worst ever housemates?

We recorded this at the exact same time as an episode of Namely 90s which you can check out here. Coming up, we’re doing Mas Debaters so look out for that too! Mentions in the show to Hallmark of Greatness and 100 Things We Learned about Film.

Our theme music is the song “Steady Away” by Pete Dilley and can be found on his album Half-truths and Hearsay which you can/should buy/stream here:

https://petedilley.bandcamp.com/album/half-truths-and-hearsay

Oh god, it’s New Years