BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts

There we go, we're up. Should we call John?

Hello, I'm Louis Thoreau and welcome to my new podcast series for Radio 4 grounded with

Louis Thoreau.

I'll try and keep this one a bit shorter. Like you, I'm in lockdown, but as it turns

out so too are many people I've always been keen to talk to, which leaves me with a laptop,

a dodgy microphone and the vagaries of the interweb to try and make a connection. This

looks promising. Hello, there's John.

Yes, it's working. I'm relying on my guests to record their half of our conversations.

Is the beat of flickering yes and it seems to be perfect at stopping just before the

red?

And we get to see each other via state of the art video conferencing software downloaded

from the Nether regions of the web.

If somebody talks, does the machine somehow know? Like when you talk to just then, Louis,

you came up full screen. Is that how Zoom works?

That's one of the options. Zoom must be making so much money right now. Don't you think?

I don't quite understand why everybody suddenly like jump shit from Skype and FaceTime.

My first guest is someone I've known and admired for many years, who's pursued similar

interests to me, a kind of professional doppelganger or even rival. A documentary maker

who chronicles the weird, an author who delts into the darker areas of our society, and

more recently a Hollywood screenwriter of some repute. He grew up in Cardiff in a Jewish

family and now lives in upstate New York. He is of course John Ronson.

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