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THE INFINITE MONKEY CAGE When is a strawberry dead? You’ve probably never considered this before, even as you’ve chewed and digested one, washing it down with a dollop of cream and a slurp of Pimm’s. Thankfully, you don’t have to give it much thought as the plight of this most summery of fruits is a regular topic for discussion on the award-winning BBC Radio 4 show THE INFINITE MONKEY CAGE. Running since 2009, the massively popular show is steered through conversations that cover the whole gamut of scientific thinking with an irreverent yet respectful touch by its hosts, comedian Robin Ince and astrophysicist Brian Cox. The pair are regularly joined in these scientific diversions by academic and comedic guests – including some who are both academic and comedic – to pick apart the latest theories in our understanding of the world in a way that’s easily accessible and quite funny. Reality, climate change, the maths of love, artificial intelligence and race are all on the agenda, as well as the regular staples of quantum theory and cosmology. And strawberries. So how does a radio talk show about science come to command a global army of fans (‘Monkey Cagers’), regularly fill out auditoriums on live tours and become one of the BBC’s most downloaded podcasts – all without the aid of pretty pictures of stars and galaxies? Undoubtedly Brian Cox’s star appeal (geddit?) is a major factor, as is the stature of their guests: Richard Dawkins, Stephen Fry, Patrick Stewart and Alan Moore have all ventured inside the Cage at various points. But to dismiss the show’s popularity as being solely down to Cox’s celebrity presence is to miss the point about our own curiosity and desire for knowledge. “That’s a real underrated thing,” says Robin Ince in response to this question about human inquisitiveness. “There’s been a huge presumption of the stupidity of people and the lack of curiosity, but if you give them something to be curious about, I think more often than not they will rise to that.” There’s also a lot to be said for the hosts’ chemistry in why the Monkey Cage proves so popular, which brings a Pythonesque edge to proceedings. Ince frequently pokes fun at Cox’s ‘rock star’ past and newfound popularity as the poster boy for popular science, while Cox seems to enjoy being let off the leash to tackle new problems and quiz guests with youthful glee. English and Drama graduate Ince also acts as a bridge for the lay listener without a scientific background: what he calls a “keen idiot” – someone who’s very interested in science, but doesn’t know very much about spontaneous symmetry breaking in the electroweak sector of the standard model. Put simply, the beauty of the Monkey Cage is that they make ideas just exciting enough that you want to go the next step yourself. “One month you’re getting letters from farm labourers, the next month you’re getting a note from someone who’s won a Nobel Prize” “You can be serious without being po-faced, and you can also be frivolous sometimes with big ideas,” says Ince. “And we’re not trying to do anything more than just excite people as much as Brian and I are excited by the idea ourselves, and I think that’s why it works. Overall, the passion and the genuine excitement about ideas will infect people. What we’re hoping is that people go ‘Oh, right, I need to know more about that’.” “We don’t really script it,” continues Ince in explanation of the loose, relaxed feel of the shows, which stops them feeling too weighty. “Basically, we sit down and decide what the various ideas and themes are going to be for a series, and then we just leave it. When we’re recording, we normally don’t get past the first section, but we always imagine there’ll be this almost narrative-arc of science… but then Brian asks the wrong question first and we’re all over the shop.” This is an approach that encourages you to open your mind to things you’ve not considered before – like gravity being a quirk of the curvature of spacetime rather than an actual force. It also attracts a fairly eclectic range of interested listeners, as Ince explains: “We get people who are your Radio 4 listeners – you know, a 53-year-old listening to The Archers while painting their croquet set, or whatever it is – and we actually get truck drivers writing to us because they listen to it at night; they’ve either downloaded it or sometimes they’re listening to it on the late-night repeat. One month you’re getting letters from farm labourers, the next month you’re getting a note from someone who’s won a Nobel Prize.” It must be a fine line to tread, therefore, in treating their listeners with respect and not coming across as overly preachy. “We weren’t overly conscious about it [from the outset], but we wanted to make sure we didn’t talk down to people,” Ince confirms, which mirrors the way he views his stand-up routines. “I think, in terms of the way that I approach an audience, it’s the same; which is that I don’t presume. We wanted to make the kind of show – and I think I hopefully do the same in stand-up, and Brian does the same in his documentaries – which is, you give everyone enough information that they are able to get some kind of image, some kind of vision, some kind of understanding of what is going on.” With The Infinite Monkey Cage’s next appearance coming live on the main stage at bluedot, it would be safe to assume that the subject of Brian Cox running around on the dish of the Lovell telescope in a music video will be on the script. “Oh, of course I’ll be mentioning that D:Ream single no one remembers,” laughs Ince, who has his own reasons for feeling that this particular Monkey Cage will be a special one. “The last time I can remember having that sensation – that really physical sensation, in your mind, in your stomach – of seeing something of such beauty, was the Grand Canyon! And the Lovell telescope is something man-made by humans, and it’s remarkable. You are looking at a lot of human minds and a lot of endeavour, and you’re looking at something that came from a war; something that has the ability to pick up those radio waves, to understand pulsars and quasars, that’s rooted in some of the worst sides of humanity – but still, something that positive comes out of it.” Now, about those strawberries… infinitemonkeycage.com WRITTEN BY CHRISTOPHER TORPEY LOVELL STAGE FRIDAY 32 | EXPLORE
“I Something in the revered author’s work had don’t like Alderley Edge,” said a friend of mine last night. “I don’t like it because of Alan Garner.” I could see in her eyes that she meant it. convinced her that an area of sought-after Cheshire real estate might harbour elemental forces that were better left untouched. It might not have been the glowing TripAdvisor review that Cheshire’s tourism chiefs would wish for, but there’s no denying the tribute to the power of Alan Garner’s extraordinary imagination. When Garner set his first novel, The Weirdstone Of Brisingamen, around Alderley Edge, he didn’t choose the sandstone escarpment’s environs on a whim. It was the landscape in which the stories he’d heard all his life were embedded. For him, it was an area rich in family history – vivid with a sense of generations walking the same paths, caressing the same stones. The book was the first transmission from a mind that was – and remains – attuned to stories that seem to seep out between the cracks in this very specific patch of earth. Since 1957, Garner has lived in Toad Hall – a medieval house a few miles south west of Alderley Edge, just beyond the shadow of the famous Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank. The telescope itself features in his 2012 novel Boneland, and Garner has spoken about the way the immense construction scoops up signals from the furthest depths of the universe’s past. As both an engineering wonder at the bottom of his garden, and a doorway opening onto a different perception of time, the telescope could almost have been built to form the backdrop to Alan Garner’s literary life. “When I found Alan’s work, it was a moment of connection. It was someone speaking the way I needed to be spoken to” FIRST LIGHT ALAN GARNER AND DEEP TIME It seems only right, then, that bluedot should pay tribute to Garner, which it will when the journalist and novelist Erica Wagner joins the director of the Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre, Teresa Anderson, for an onstage conversation about his work. Wagner has recently edited the book First Light, an anthology dedicated to writings about Garner by an eclectic array of contributors and, for her, it’s an opportunity to reconnect with a landscape and a subject that are both close to her heart. “I can’t wait,” she tells me. “It’s been too long since I’ve been to Jodrell and it looks like a fantastic festival. And also Teresa Anderson is one of those people who best demonstrates the idea that there really doesn’t have to be any kind of divide between the world of art and the world of science. One of the things I love about Jodrell is they really believe in breaking down those barriers, as do I.” While many British readers encounter Garner’s work at a young and impressionable age, Wagner’s story is different. Having grown up in New York, she moved to Britain 30 years ago, and it was while she was literary editor of The Times that Garner came into her life. “Garner isn’t really read in the United States in the way that he is here,” she says. “He’s considered a classic author here, someone who people read when they’re young, but I was not one of those people. So when The Stone Book Quartet was republished and sent to me at The Times, I was extremely struck by it. “The thing that drew me to Alan’s work, aside from his wonderful writing, was that the books occur in a real place. If we think about C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, or Tolkien’s Middle Earth, or even George R.R. Martin’s Westeros, they’re fantasy places. There may be maps in the front of those books, but they’re not places you can go. But the map at the front of The Weirdstone Of Brisingamen is a map of Alderley Edge so, to me, he belongs to a much older and truly magical tradition of acknowledging that there is a spirit of place that is real. That was something I was already interested in, so when I found Alan’s work, it was a moment of connection. It was someone speaking the way I needed to be spoken to.” It was the beginning not only of a relationship with Garner’s work, but of a friendship that Wagner values to this day. “I went to interview Alan for the newspaper, and as a result I became very friendly with him and his wife, Griselda, and also got involved with The Blackden Trust, which they set up to support the educational work they’ve always been involved in. This is work that goes along with his writing, and includes the archaeological explorations that have happened around their house – a site that has been inhabited for at least the past 10,000 years.” When Wagner and Anderson hold their bluedot conversation, the book First Light will serve as both reference point and talisman, representing as it does the hold that Garner’s work has on so many minds. Not only were the likes of Margaret Atwood, Stephen Fry and Philip Pullman eager to commit their thoughts to paper, but the book owes its existence to the individuals who contributed to its crowdfunding campaign. I suggest to Wagner that, although being a fan of a writer is one thing, editing an entire book dedicated to that one writer seems another order of fandom altogether, and I wonder what prompted such an act of devotion. “The simple answer is I was asked to do it,” she replies. “Alan turned 80 in 2014 and I had always been aware that there was a kind of network of people who felt very strongly about him. I would meet people in my literary world and say, ‘Do you know Alan Garner’s work?’ and they’d go, ‘Oh my God, yes!’ So I had quite a network of possibly unlikely people, but a lot of them were just names on my radar until this amazing project came about. “Then the wonderful crowdfunding publisher Unbound, together with The Blackden Trust, asked if I would edit this book. We had to raise the money but that happened incredibly quickly. It was wonderful to know, even before the book was published, that there were already these hundreds of people supporting it and eager to receive it.” But what is it about Garner’s work that so inspires people? Wagner is unequivocal in her response. “I think that there is no living writer like Alan,” she replies. “The way in which he has ploughed his own furrow, really doing something extraordinary with history, science and language, is just like nobody else. And perhaps that’s partly been his problem. At the beginning of the 21st century, everyone wants to say, ‘If you like X then you’ll like Y’, but he really is sui generis.” If anyone has the authority to make such a statement, it’s Wagner, but even my friend’s apparent unease at the thought of visiting Alderley Edge is testament to Garner’s singular vision. He is, so she says, a little too good at unearthing the mysterious power of place. But while she may not be impacting on the county’s visitor figures any time soon, it seems that many more are eager to make a Garner-inspired trip, and there’s no doubt that Alan Garner is a writer that Cheshire can be proud to call its own WRITTEN BY DAMON FAIRCLOUGH PHOTO BY JANIE AIREY CONTACT STAGE SATURDAY 33 | DISCOVERTHEBLUEDOT.COM
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Page 4 and 5: OBSERVE. MUSIC. ART. TRANSMISSION.
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Page 10 and 11: JEAN-MICHEL JARRE “Jodrell Bank i
Page 12 and 13: GWENNO When polka-dotted trio The P
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Page 20 and 21: lovell stage highlights UNDERWORLD
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Page 27 and 28: LONELADY LONELADY is on the move.
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Page 31: oots stage highlights BARRY HYDE |
Page 35 and 36: BRIAN ENO The ambient legend and re
Page 37 and 38: CONTACT STAGE HIGHLIGHTS HELEN KEEN
Page 39 and 40: Explorers of all ages will be well
Page 41 and 42: CLOSE ENCOUNTERS Dissecting the sci
Page 43 and 44: LOCATION BLUEDOT IS HELD AT: Jodrel
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