Would you believe it? This week's guest President is the marvellously inquisitive Robin Ince — comedian, broadcaster, author and co-host of the hugely successful The Infinite Monkey Cage. Robin returns to the Presidential shed armed with an insatiable curiosity and the sort of mind that delights in asking impossible questions before wandering happily off in search of even stranger answers.
So pull on your gloves and join us for another ramble as President Ince guides us through three destinations selected entirely at random by Tony's enchanted bingo machine. Above it all, the reassuringly omniscient voice of Sir Stephen Fry keeps watch while the rest of us attempt to keep pace.
Our first destination is 121: Epistemology – The Theory of Knowledge. A gentle way to begin. Should we spend our lives theorising about knowledge, or simply acquire it for the sheer joy of doing so? Before long we're blagging our way through a wine tasting, discovering why Coca-Cola appears to light up the brain in extraordinary ways, and pondering how something can be both a myth and simultaneously true. William Blake joins the conversation, as does the surprising revelation that horse riding may be considerably more dangerous than recreational drugs... and, under the right circumstances, can even persuade you to resign from your job.
Next, the machine presents 464: Not Assigned (Formerly Spanish Dictionaries and Grammar). Remarkably, none of the ramblers have ever been to Spain... until two of them suddenly remember that they have. This happy confusion allows us to revisit the gloriously ill-fated BBC soap Eldorado before wandering into tales of a cathedral whose architect met an unfortunate end at the hands of his own creation. Along the way we ask whether Christianity owes more than a passing debt to hallucinogenic mushrooms, leaf through The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, and somehow uncover Franz Kafka's alleged collection of pornography.
Our third and final stop is 417: Dialectology and Historical Linguistics. Wilfred Pickles gets the ball rolling before we discover why modern American English may actually be closer to Elizabethan speech than many realise. We also learn why people from Tokyo often think everyone in Britain sounds like Chaucer, and finally tackle one of civilisation's great unanswered questions: precisely how much money does it take for your chicken to become a fish?
And then it's back to the Presidential shed, where the dictionary remains open, the bingo machine insists it knew exactly what it was doing all along, and knowledge—useful or otherwise—has once again increased considerably.
Presented by Paul Carmichael & Allan Lear
Music composed and performed by Michael Livesley & Andy Frizell
The voice of Pwfthhh- Michael Livesley
www.michaellivesley.com
Series Producers- Erica Lear and Mark Hutchinson
Producers- Alan Dyebing & Stuart Morris
Series Executive Producer- Mark Strickson
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