SOUNDS PECULIAR
Asa medium, podcasts have been enjoying something of a boom over the past few years. The democratisation of quality media production through high-specification computer equipment has allowed a plethora of previously marginalised voices their own access to what were once quaintly called ‘the airwaves’.
In the past, broadcasting (reaching a wide audience from a single source) was heavily regulated and controlled, mainly through frequency scarcity: only those authorised or licensed to have access to the airwaves were allowed to broadcast. In UK terms that, initially, meant the BBC, with commercial stations coming along in the 1960s.
In terms of radio, there have been amateurs since the invention of the medium, reaching a crescendo with the off shore ‘pirate’ pop station of the 1960s that ultimately led to the BBC launching Radio 1. For the longest time, Radio 4 (or NPR in the US) has been the default home of quality ‘spoken word’ content, whether that was drama, current affairs, or documentary radio.
Now, anyone with a microphone and an iPad, laptop, or computer and the right software can produce a decent podcast and launch their work onto a waiting world. Not all of them are good, while many are far better than you might expect, sometimes surpassing the productions of ‘legitimate’ broadcasters like the BBC or NPR. When it comes to fortean topics, there are a host of podcasts out there, ranging from the polished and compelling to the amateurish and downright weird. SOUNDS PECULIAR will be your insider guide to the best of the current podcasts dealing with fortean topics: all you have to do is sit back and listen... Podcast: Scamapalooza (www.conman.com.au/tag/ podcast) Host: Nicholas J Johnson Episode count: 40 Format: Interview-based discussion-show Established: July 2015 Frequency: Weekly Topics: Cons & conmen, fake science, magic, crime N icholas J Johnson is a practising magician, comedian and writer from Australia. He has done a series of live shows in Melbourne, Edinburgh and elsewhere, part of which involves exposing scam artists and the techniques they use to con the gullible, and has appeared on current affairs and news programmes as an expert on fraud and deception, revealing the tricks of the con artist’s trade. He runs the online Scamopedia, a repository of the greatest cons, swindles and deceptions from history and the headlines. His podcast, Scamapalooza, is an offshoot of the website.
The podcast is wide-ranging in subject matter, but at the heart of most episodes is human gullibility. Some recent fortean subjects covered include an in-depth, two-part interview with Spyros Melaris, who claims to have been behind the infamous Ray Santilli ‘alien autopsy’ hoax; online romance scams; the perils of identity theft; and the offering of cash prizes to prove psychic powers.
A lot of the focus is on human nature and our propensity for being fooled; that’s how magic tricks work, but the same techniques are used by scam artists and conmen, whether they are out for money, attempting to fake the presence of aliens or convince us of the reality of psychic powers. Perception and illusion are at the heart of these subjects – and they are at the heart of Scamapalooza.
A number of episodes have tackled movies about deception, including Orson Welles’s F For Fake, Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon, film noir classic Nightmare
Alley and, of course, The Sting, with Paul Newman and Robert Redford. The two Now You See
Me magic heist movies are also examined, and get a mixed reaction.
Of particular interest to FT readers is Episode #17 on the
He exposes scam artists and the techniques they use to con the gullible
Cottingley Fairy photographs created by two Victorian girls, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffith, who fooled Sir Arthur Conan Doyle into believing in them. Melbourne-based pop culture broadcaster Sarah Baggs joins Johnson to explore the case in some depth over 40 minutes, taking in photographic experts who were convinced of the images’ genuineness, Spiritualists and theosophists who all promoted the pictures as proof of the existence of the supernatural. The discussion explores how the photos came to be created, the background of the two girls behind the deception, why the public of the early-20th century were so desperate to believe in the existence of fairies and why certain forces conspired to maintain the deception. It also takes in how the story lasted so long and the efforts undertaken to prove the photos were fake – which took a ridiculously long time.
“What surprised me most about Sarah Baggs’s visit was not that people believed the hoax but the reasons why,” said Johnson. “From Conan Doyle’s desire to prove that his fairyseeing father wasn’t insane to Edward Gardner, the leader of the Theosophical movement, who refused to believe mere girls could be so devious.”
A later episode (#24) tackles Conan Doyle’s ‘frenemy’, escape artist and magician Harry Houdini, who spent a lot of time debunking fraudulent psychics and spirit mediums. With John Cox, creator of the Wild About Houdini website, Johnson discusses the 1924 case in which Houdini went head-to-head with Mina Crandon, a Boston medium infamous for her highly sexual séances. In 1924 Scientific
American magazine offered a cash prize for proof of paranormal activity, which drew Houdini into a mission to test Crandon’s claimed abilities. The public willingness to believe in Crandon was so strong that many saw Houdini’s proof that she was faking the events during her séances as evidence not of deception but of Houdini’s own attempt to sabotage the test itself.
The subject matter of Scamapalooza roams far and wide, but it is consistently concerned with the central fortean question of how people perceive the world, and how they can be fooled into willingly believing in the impossible.
Strengths: Loose, conversational style draws the listener in; Johnson clearly knows his stuff.
Weaknesses: Sometimes goes down a tangent, drifting from the main subject.
Recommended Episodes: #11 Just a Little Prick (Autism vaccine controversy); #17 The Cottingley Fairies; #23 The Sun and the Moon (Newspaper hoaxes); #24 Houdini and the Medium.
Verdict: An addictive and engaging series of discussions of fortean interest.