Rob Newman’s Total Eclipse of Descartes

Comedian Rob Newman’s career has been built on crafting comedy from all things esoteric, and his new series is a whirlwind trip through 3000 years of serious thought to see whether any of it can be usefully applied to surviving modern chaos. If at times the tone veers a little close to a self-consciously hip substitute teacher, particularly when Newman relates details from the history of education policy, you nevertheless get plenty of silly jokes alongside your thought experiments and philosophical debate.