Christmas Special 2016
The Infinite Monkey Cage
BBC
4.7 • 9.4K Ratings
🗓️ 27 December 2016
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Brian Cox and Robin Ince return for a very special Christmas edition of the show. They are joined on stage by Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, actor and writer Mark Gatiss, cultural anthropologist Deborah Hyde and the Bishop of Leeds. They'll be discussing the joys of the Christmas ghost story, and looking at the Victorian obsession with the supernatural. They'll be asking when studying paranormal phenomenon went from a genuine scientific endeavour, to the realms of pseudoscience.
Producer: Alexandra Feachem.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:02.0 | Hello and happy slightly after Christmas. |
| 0:06.0 | I'm Robin Ince. |
| 0:07.0 | And I'm Professor Brian Cox. |
| 0:08.0 | By the way, he always has to actually say Professor before his name |
| 0:11.0 | because otherwise people don't believe he is. |
| 0:13.0 | This is true, especially the bottom half of the internet is very much into... |
| 0:16.0 | How can you look like that and still be a professor? |
| 0:19.0 | Whereas I do look like a professor. |
| 0:20.0 | I'm all bald and skin condition with shabby knit wear. |
| 0:24.0 | It's good radio. |
| 0:26.0 | It's good radio, yeah. |
| 0:27.0 | We've been doing 14 series. |
| 0:28.0 | They can smell shabby off me now for the radio. |
| 0:31.0 | That's what those digital radios are for. |
| 0:33.0 | Anyway, so this is, welcome to the Monkey Cage Christmas Special. |
| 0:36.0 | Now, one of the many traditions of Christmas is the Christmas ghost story, |
| 0:40.0 | stories of MR James, H.P. Lovecraft, and of course, Charles Dickens, a Christmas Carol. |
| 0:45.0 | But are ghosts woo? |
| 0:48.0 | Or are they woo? |
| 0:50.0 | Yes, you see. |
| 0:52.0 | So today we just go, in fact, we have previously discussed ghosts on this show, |
... |
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