D:ream team of comedy and science
Robin Ince and Brian Cox make cerebral challenges fun
Nothing will deteriorate in the future”. As a quiz clue it’s more Only Connect than Tipping Point, but fortunately there’s no entrance exam for the Infinite Monkey Cage. Another clue: the answer is the title of a 1993 hit single by D:Ream. However, if you enjoy puzzles like that one – posed by GCHQ, but they do get harder – then it may be you enjoy the chat between the podcast’s hosts, comedian Robin Ince, and physicist (and keyboard player) Brian Cox.
If this seems just a little too cerebral, fear not, because as well as special guests of scientists and other eggheads, there’s always someone little more down to earth to ask the “stupid questions”.
It may be that episode titles (there are more than 150) may lend clues to what your own brain may be able to handle – ‘Does Time Exist? and ‘What Is Life’ seem potentially mind-melting, though Cox does make the heavier side of science, well, as simple as can be expected. However, ‘In Praise of Flies’ with guest “fly sceptic” David Baddiel, has a more straightforward objective of persuading us of these insects’ important place on our planet, while Grace Dent chews over ‘The Science of Cooking’.
Now on its twelfth series, Cox and Ince’s podcast comes in the formofaradiopanelshowcomplete with audience laughter (possibly of the nervous kind we all make to mask our incomprehension of a subject under discussion), although during lockdown the pair were joined by 200 audience members sat at home like “a brood of termites”, as described by Dr Jane Goodall.
That episode sees the celebrated monkey wrangler joined by comedian and “missing link” Bill Bailey (his wife’s
description, not ours), matching Ince for surreal but hilarious chat while Cox sports good-natured tolerance of the gentle mockery of his science.
Our simian relatives are a regular theme, the podcast’s title coming from the theory that an infinite number of monkeys bashing away at typewriter keys would eventually complete the works of Shakespeare, though other scientists have worked out that it would take longer than the age of the universe to get much more than a “to be or not to be”.
Other attractions include Matt Lucas on black holes, Lucy Beamont on bionics, Shappi Khorsandi on immune systems and Steve Martin and Eric Idle on The End of the Universe, by which time hopefully Hamlet may have been completed.
Oh, and hopefully aptly, the answer to the question all those words ago, was ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ by D:Ream – Cox’s band before he opted for a life of science.
Where did it all go wrong?
See infinitemonkeycage.com.