Loremen Podcast - Mystery Bonus Episode - Robin Ince

Episode Date: September 7, 2023

*Now with fixed audio* We are having one of our patented (unplanned) Loremen series breaks.  So, we applied to the Lore Council and they agreed to release this juicy bonus episode from the vaults. Enjoy some previously Patreon-only extra stuff from our episode with the wonderful Robin Ince in April 2021. Plus join us for live shows... At the Bill Murray - 17th September https://www.angelcomedy.co.uk/event-detail/loremen-live-again-17th-sep-the-bill-murray-london-tickets-202309171830/ At Cheerful Earful Podcast Festival - 31st October https://www.designmynight.com/london/pubs/balham/the-bedford/cheerful-earful-podcast-festival-day-1 LoreBoys nether say die! Support the Loremen here (and get stuff): patreon.com/loremenpod ko-fi.com/loremen Check the sweet, sweet merch here... https://www.teepublic.com/stores/loremen-podcast?ref_id=24631 @loremenpod youtube.com/loremenpodcast www.instagram.com/loremenpod www.facebook.com/loremenpod

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James, how are you? Pardon? How are you, James? Ah, yes. Here we go. I have been on holiday and there was a swimming pool and I thought- This is a recipe for disaster.

I would like to swim in that pool. You fool, James. I know. You're a fool for disaster. I would like to swim in that pool. You fool, James. I know. You're a fool to yourself. I love it, though. I love swimming in water. In water?

Yeah. This just gets worse. It's my favourite thing to swim in, really. Oh, what happened? Well, I'll get to the downside later. On the upside, I've discovered that if I wear goggles and go underwater, I can see. I don't need my glasses. Okay.

I think you're the first person to notice that. Really? Have you been swimming in your glasses up until now? Well, I've been on the surface, sans glasses, everything blurry. Guessing where everything is. But you pop goggles on, it's still blurry above surface. Go underwater. It's almost 2020.

I don't think I could stay under there long enough to do a full eye test. Well, so I guess water does magnify a bit. Yeah. Does it? So it magnifies the exact amount your eyes need. I guess so. So instead of lenses, you could just have a little bit of seawater in front of your eyes. That's what you need to do.

Fill the goggles with seawater, pop them on with the water on the inside and walk around. Oh, God. But you'd be able to see for free. Yeah, it would sting. Yeah, but think of the money you'd save, James. But on the downside, affecting one of my other major senses, my ears filled up with water and I can't hear better. When my ears are full of water, it turns out I hear worse. Oh, it makes it worse, does it?

Yeah. So you can't hear anything I'm saying? No, I'm just guessing from context, from visual clues. That's incredible. You're doing very well. Yeah, I am down a well. Classic, classic banter from you there there classic hard of hearing banter so basically do you need a couple of weeks off to to recover james is that i do i am applying a traditional remedy that is olive oil based what at the moment to to melt to to melt the wax in my ear to release the water that's trapped behind said wax. You make it sound so delicious.

Tell you what, it also has rosemary and garlic in it, and it makes my ears smell like a delicious roast dinner. Honestly, it smells like a good salad dressing round here, round my face at the minute. So basically, what I need to do is invent ear goggles. Yeah. And wet glasses. Yeah. And wet glasses. Yeah.

And then I'll be, well, I could sack this podcast off. I'll be king of the hoops. King of the hoop? Yeah. King of the hoops. No, I'm pretty certain king of the hoops is the phrase. In that case, you take a couple of weeks off to work on those ear goggle projects that you're describing. Yeah. Fill up my dragon's den application and i guess we'll just stick out some uh some of the outtakes well some of the

formerly paywalled bonus episodes oh sorry bonus episodes we call them yes we call them bonus episodes we don't call them the bits that weren't good enough for the main podcast we call them bonus episodes as if that's better. That's right. Yeah, I think shove out gives the wrong impression as well. What do you want? Sluice? Yeah, like a home ear syringe kit that you could buy illegally off the internet. Don't do that.

Off the dark web. We advise you to not do that. And we are doctors. We are doctors, but we advise against it. I don't know about the olive oil thing. People have been doing it for thousands of years as a cure, but people also have been getting off with frogs as a cure for coughs. So here's a load of extra Robin Ince stuff.

I was going to mention Bertrand Russell. I was about to say friend of the show. He's not. But I'm sure I've done an impression of Professor Yaffle in a previous episode, which is pretty much the same thing, isn't it? For the benefit of anybody who isn't familiar with Bagpuss, there is a rather snooty bird character who you find out many years later was based on the philosopher Bertrand Russell.

Isn't that a great thing when you find out that those bits of, you know, it used to just be, hey, kids' television, were they on drugs or what, etc. And now that we've actually gone further into seeing things like the work of Postgate and Furman and of Eric Thompson, the richness of children's television in terms of the reference points, which mean nothing to you and which are not important that they mean nothing to you. But when you grow up, you suddenly find here is a – and I think that's a really great thing. I think that's one of the – I mean, in some ways, I will connect it to the folkloric idea,

which is all of these different things that can connect you to real, useful, and fascinating information and their richness still remains and their ability to educate still remains as well i think is a very beautiful thing yes i think you're right um when you revisit kids shows you either find them to be incredibly shallow and unsatisfying and they've lost all of the magical resonances they had for you when you were a kid or you discover that the like you say they have this weird depth to them because i don't know why we're continually surprised that kids shows are made by grown-ups with grown-up interests and that those things creep into the show and i do think

there's having worked on on a few kids shows that the what i always found interesting when i used to do more kind of writing for tv and radio was there was far more freedom in where your imagination could go. The limitations when you would work sometimes on late night Channel 4 current affairs comedy shows in terms of just the so few jokes that you were allowed. And then you get to work on a kid's sketch show and you could just run wild in a really interesting,

because I mean, Oliver Postgate's an interesting figure as well because in later life, one of the things he did for instance was um he he worked very hard with a charity that bought up all the poppies during the uh the war in afghanistan uh the second or third time not even sure what the delineation is between the number of conflicts that were there um he uh helped fund um buying up all the poppy farmers' poppies because what was basically happening was all these people who were, at that point, it was being used for the heroin industry, they were just having their crops destroyed.

And so this then led to poverty and all that. And he kind of looked into it and he's like, oh, okay. He was also connected with the kind of finding an acceptable way of dealing with the opiate industry without destroying the people who were just farmers who were just growing poppies. Wow, I didn't know that about Oliver Postgate. He's an interest. They're both, him and Fermin, both. I mean, that folklore that you see in Noggin the Nog is such a beautiful, I mean, that's

what I find interesting about when you start looking at folklore and you start to connect it to some of the landscapes you might have visited is that quality that it gives you which i've never i don't know what it is i've talked a lot about the last kind of trip i had before uh the the lockdown began was to storn away where i went to the stones of calanish and the stones of calanish are an older stone circle than Stonehenge and they're fascinating rock because it's that kind of rock which has many different... Quite chewy? It's really chewy, yeah.

This is one of the problems. Talking Hubba Bubba levels. It is delicious. Well, this is why Stonehenge, of course, has a fence around it now. It's nothing to do with the Druids. They found out how delicious it was there used to be a lot more this is god i don't know how moorish a henge could be just a little bit of black pepper on that dolman

when you touch those rocks there is that sensation that you get which is not really quantifiable where you get that sense of all of the time that has passed and you get a sense of all of the different events that may have happened there and the events that are yet to come and i think that that's one of the things that i like about a lot of the kind of when when when folklore and landscape connect is it is this way of suddenly you just get you you can have kind of visions really you you look across a landscape and sometimes like like in the Chiltern Hills, for instance, thinking about the fact that the reason it's made out of chalk is because this used to be a sea.

And, you know, you can go up to, you know, places like Matlock up in the Peak District and places there, you know, they have a coral, basically what's a coral reef, pretty much. It's a reef and all of those. And then when you connect that to these kind of you know all manner of different strange stories of hill people you know who would steal the horses and turn them into fabulous things or the kind of fiction of alan garner and people like

that and when you then go to the locations where it creates an incredible richness i i think which is which means the at all i don't know i know, I shouldn't have had that coffee, actually. Jack Kerouac was wrong. It's not performance enhancing at all. But it's that bit which allows you to have, in some ways, a vision which allows you also to still hold on to some form of sanity at the same time. Before, when you were talking about Grimsdyke and the idea that it would go across, you know, around the whole world

and thinking about 1857, could that really be true? And then you actually realise how the limits of travel that people had and the limits of knowledge. Yeah. And I think even when I was growing up in the 70s, like in this village, there was still, you know, the characters. There was a woman called you know he was known as old viley who lived in a little house that was filled with cats and when

my sisters were walking down to a farm one day just came up to them went there's a policeman down there who arrests little girls in blue anoraks they ran away screaming and she was this kind of strange quirky figure my godfather bob once gave her a lift in his car and then couldn't get rid of the the smell that had been left in the car and eventually got rid of the car and uh and there were there were still various people who lived around who carried with them stories you know that bit of this uh we don't quite know whatever happened to him but he he comes out sometimes late on a tuesday he waves at the moon and then goes back in the there was still you know even that in in the same way that in the uk you have that interesting

especially i think in in in the south of england if you look at the change in accents where you know watch any footage of kind of dennis potter going back to the forest of dean in the 1960s and you can barely understand what people are saying the the dialect there still wasn't that much traveling and many people might spend their whole life living in a village thinking wouldn't it be amazing one day if we started walking around that diet just to go to australia and we we could be there by february probably you know all of those things are and now we have this incredible influx of information and we find that many people as you said are wanting to return to it.

No, it's definitely flat. And you go, oh. It turns out there is a resistance somewhere in our minds. In the goodies file by the wonderful goodies, it came out at a time when there were so many, you know, the 1970s had so many kind of books about, you know, UFOs and ghosts and hauntings and things. And they had lots of parodies.

And the lovely parody about the shy ghost. And he was a shy man. He was known for being a shy man. And he promised that after he died, he would return and hide from anyone who visited the house. Cynics may scoff, but I can tell you now that his ghost has never been seen what's beautiful about that is i'm sure you've had this where when you sometimes talk to people who have have very kind of vivid and energetic beliefs in in some of the kind of you know

afterlife visitation things is is the brilliant logic in the same way the brilliant logic of of ufos you know one of the things that shows that ufos definitely visit is because they've never and things is, is the brilliant logic, in the same way the brilliant logic of UFOs, you know, one of the things that shows that UFOs definitely visit is because they've never been seen. Of course. And of course, it's because they are so technologically advanced and so intellectually advanced that they know to make sure. So it almost is less likely.

It's the Donald Rumsfeld Iraq War evidence argument that the absence of evidence shows the sophistication with which Saddam is hiding the munitions plants. Yeah, it's a great bit there, isn't it? Because people will often bring up the fact that that statement is philosophically useful, but less so when it's dealing with very specific, tangible weapons. As an idea of in terms of questioning- Yeah, when you're pointing at pointing a photograph an aerial photograph of not a weapon going there must be one there you might you're not doing philosophy super well also that may not have been sanam asane's ghost it may have been one of his lucky likey bodyguards

the lawmen drinking game that some of our listeners are more foolish listeners play whenever something turns to dust uh they have to take a shot. Because especially in stories James tells, the evidence that is presented is usually that the object that would have proven the thing happened crumbled to dust. To dust. And the absence of that object verifies that the whole story therefore must be true.

It simply must be dust. It must be dust. It must be dust it must be dust it must be dust i think i had one one odd serendipitous thing is my my grimsdyke up our way um yeah is where it's linked to oh balls i can't remember the name of the manor house. You don't want that. That's a medical situation. It's linked to the manor house. I can't remember the name of it, but it was Winston Churchill's other,

like during the war, it was the place where he went on moonless nights, I think, because the one that the crown was recreating was quite well lit right so they knew that the bombers would be able to see that one so we had like a secondary bolt hole and there's a apparently an underground tunnel from there to uh woodstock to blenheim palace which is where he was born and they always talk about there being these underground tunnels around there and underground tunnels is a classic part of folkloric fairy yeah yeah so is it said that churchill would be found scurrying down those holes maybe singing or did he make use of them to avoid jerry was that is that

the idea i think it just that he could pop home it seems to be the only reason for it sometimes you do wish that when it's late at night. Maybe we needed to feed that black dog. Robin, have you ever had a supernatural experience? Now, I know that you're a sceptic and a rationalist, so I'm nervous to ask. Well, no, I'm not, because I'm fascinated by why we see ghosts. And I really do find it. I don't think I ever have.

I remember staying down in Cern Abbas and my wife saw a ghost, but also knew it wasn't a ghost. But she did have that experience of when walking to the bathroom in the pub late at night. And I think it was the number of mirrors that were on, just enough reflective surfaces to do that wonderful trick. Because if you have a certain number of mirrors, ghosts appear.

You're going to call up a ghost. As we all know, I think it's seven. Can't be helped. Is the number of mirrors. Seven mirrors equals ghosts. That used to be the old BBC building where the comedy department used to be was one of those places where it had just enough doors

that were quite reflective. And the way that they closed would create that kind of just, not quite an infinite regress, but enough to at least find the face of some demonic monster. Lord Wreath's back and he's furious with what we've done with the place. And that's where jokes come from. So there is ghosts, eight mirrors jokes.

Yeah, in fact, you can watch any sitcom made between 1968 and 1985 and work out how many mirrors were in the writer's room. And it's... Some episodes I got it wrong and it was just ghosts

all the way through. No jokes at all. I don't think I've ever had any experience that has remained with me as a belief. But what I do get mentioning before about that kind of, you know,

the, the, the vision thing is, and it's the, the one that really sticks with me is, um, walking. It was,

I was doing science festival in Cambridge and I'd done a show on a Sunday night and it was just really quiet afterwards. I had a couple of drinks at the union and then went walking back to my my hotel and i walked past i can't remember it's called it's what it's one of the roads which just has an enormous number of those kind of beautiful old colleges there and it was so silent i'd just gone past the market square and i got a very vivid vision of basically hundreds of bicycles from the last 150 years. Like the idea that suddenly I was seeing, I think before we started recording,

mentioning that thing about the palimpsest of time. And it was like all of these different people and they're on top of each other. So it was kind of overlaid image of just all of these people cycling, these professors and these students and some of them 19th century and some of them 10 years ago. it was just it just kind of came to me and i'm fascinated by things like that where

every now and again i will get a uh something will just come into your mind that that bit where your imagination and it's a bit of your imagination you weren't even aware that you were imagining it kind of overlays itself into a point in your your senses where it's almost as if you are seeing it. So it goes, you know, it's not the same as that bit where sometimes a dream clings on for long enough that you have to really argue against it for a while. It's not quite like that. It almost does feel like a vision.

It does feel like, oh, there, that thing became a real thing, even though I know it didn't exist so i think that's kind of been the nearest i would have to any i mean that's what i generally think with ghost stories and that is we really once we start it's what i find fascinating about william blake you know william blake being able to live in have these different levels of reality and to have more than one reality because we are from from the point of our education onwards i think things are made again very linear and there is a single reality and i think it means that sometimes we don't play with all of the other realities that

our imagination conjures up and then because of that i think that can sometimes lead to people going this was definitely real because your your imagination has been so undermined that the fact it can be so rich is to create ghosts for you. I think I'm sort of on a similar page to you, Robin. I'm very interested in why people think they see ghosts. And in some cases, yeah, there is that dream thing, but there are other cases where it may be, and I don't for a second

think it is a actual person spirit or something like that but what is it it's like to say you don't believe in ghosts is to almost say that you don't believe in dreams yeah dreams aren't real but they are real it's just sort of it's just more of a semantics thing yeah it's it's a real it's the memory of a real sensory experience because there is that kind of leaden skepticism the sort of party pooper skepticism which and it's not like the skeptic slash atheist community is without its problems i suppose it's what william blake is complaining about with his capital r reason the sort of dull leaden reason that he despises but i think most of the skeptics i know and i'm interested in would just

love to see a goblin yeah i just absolutely living to just meet a little hobgoblin and we don't think it's going to happen but oh i'm ready for it it'd be fun like see i don't think i want to meet a hobgoblin i don't want to meet a hobgoblin no uh sounds a little racist i'm just i've just been watching american gods and that leprechaun is particularly violent as well so um but it is have you spoken to hayley stevens on this ever no no i don't know hey hayley's great she's and what you were just saying about the skeptic community she's written some very interesting stuff about her she's kind of she used to do stuff with michael marshall who's excellent who's uh um runs the merseyside

skeptics which is a really good skeptics organization because it is so much about understanding our needs and understanding when it becomes pragmatic and important. So they've done very good investigations into bullcrap cures for cancer, which are misleading people into a very dangerous place. I think that what we need to do to some extent is to loosen our sense that we have to be right.

So that moment you go, I'm telling you I saw the ghost of, or I'm telling you it breaks the second law of thermodynamics so it doesn't, that bit of realising, and in fact John Higgs' new book about William Blake is very good at looking at the psychology of Blake and looking at the experience of Blake and understanding Blake from actually part of, by understanding how the mind works

and how the fact that, you know, as you both know anyway, you know, we don't, we're not objective observers. You know, there is that thing which many philosophers have said before and now I think neuroscientists, psychologists, which is, you know, it's not that what we see just goes into our brain, it's read, that the mind meets the eye and it draws the picture. And I think neuroscientist psychologist, which is, you know, it's not that what we see just goes into our brain is read that the mind meets

the eye and it draws the picture. And I think all of those things that's, I think the older I've got, the more I've become fascinated because for a while, I think I would have been closer to what might be seen as kind of, you know, some loose sense of scientism. And now I'm more and more interested in why we have the stories that we have

and how useful they can be and finding that. And Hayley Stevens, who's a paranormal investigator, when she was young, she very much believed in ghosts. And now she doesn't, but she's fascinating in terms of going to investigate and finding out why we might have had experiences. And some of them are fascinating. Like, you know, some of them are, she has a very good knowledge now of plumbing. You know, of what, and she has a very good knowledge

of up and down currents in old chimneys. You know, all of those kind of things. But at the same time as well, it's never just about going, and thus I have proved. And of course I've worked with scientists, I think, who do have a very specific kind of view of science just does the research and it does the experiments and then it gives you the result. And I always think that is the dangerous thing, which I do think it is the best method of getting to a good result, especially when it comes to pragmatic things like vaccinations, etc. And dealing with diseases.

But I think also it's so important not to, again, it's that bit of the humanity of it, of saying, and there are egos involved, and there are also, just before this I was talking with someone about fMRI, you know, fMRI, the hope that we would find out by brain scans that bits of the brain did different things and we put together the jigsaw. And then you go, oh, bloody hell, it is more complex than that and there's all these connections but you can't you know immediately get rid of the fact that also there's institutions going we've spent a fortune on this and we look at sometimes some of the poor decisions that nasa has made and you look at

you know things like challenger you know decisions were made there which were not scientific decisions. They were decisions that were made for financial reasons and sometimes for ego reasons and for all of those things. And I think, you know, we lose so much of the story if we just turn it to we've got the facts and these have to be right because that's the system that we use. I'm afraid I'm looking at the time and I realise we haven't scored the the story well i don't think we've started yet haven't we um so i think uh we need to move to a rapid score section james because i know you have a hard out in about 10

minutes time yeah yeah okay i'll tell you i'll just very quickly say the story we were mainly going to talk about which we didn't about which was which was on Easter Sunday, it turned out someone was actually murdered in the village. And it's a very, very sad story involving a murder that was actually committed by the daughter of the boxer Jean Tunney, who had gone missing in Europe and then returned. And when her husband first moved into the village and said, I've lost my wife, people used to think, oh, that his wife had died. And then they found out, no, he literally meant he went to Europe and his wife disappeared and then she returned.

And then tragically, she killed him. And I picked up loads of bits of old news. I started to look for some news cuttings because I knew that I was doing this. And it's very interesting the way that it was written about because he was seen as a bit of a hippie who was known around the village as, which I've not found out from anyone that he was known around there. But it's an interesting way that the story was. It's a sad, it's a tragic story

with many kind of possibilities of reading in all different ideas about cults and whatever. But that was the story we were going to cover. Please go on to the scoring. Yeah, so that was the story Robin told me he was going to tell, which we didn't get around to because too many films were produced in the 1970s

for us to be able to fit that into the podcast. How much do you have to cut this down to, James? I hope literally you are, when you go out to look after the kids, that you're just kept in the shed until that moment. And then each time they just think that's a lovely image. And then each time they just think that it's kind of... That's a lovely image. And we should get him back to actually tell that story properly one day, shouldn't we?

I spoke to him at the Edinburgh Fringe and he seems like he's up for it. So maybe it will happen. Oh, well, then we could pretend that's a trailer for it as well. It could even be, in a way, it could even be a trailer for that if we had in any way planned this. Yeah, that would be a good idea. Next time, eh? Oh, come and see us live.

Yep, live shows. James' ears will be fine. Come and see a man wearing goggles across his entire face. Yeah, I'm going to get some mouth goggles in there. We'll see how that works. So that's the 17th of September in Bill Murray Islington. Yes. For Lawmen Live Again, or Lawmen Live Again.

It's not clear. It's not clear. And it's actually confusing that we've called it that, James. If anything, confusing. People don't know what it is. It's confusing. It's confusing. Fortunately, though, I found a pun that's baffling in every accent.

Yeah, well done. Well done. And then again, Halloween, the 31st of October, as part of the cheerful, earful podcast festival in South London's glittering Balham.

See you there.