Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids

the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.

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Hello, hello and welcome to this special edition of Free Thinking from the Watershed in Bristol.

Were the guests of Slapstick, the festival for the last decade,

has been celebrating the noble art of the kick in the pants, the pie in the face,

the pouring of molasses into other people's trousers, and the long, vertiginous walk over a moving girder.

Here, over the last ten years, lovers of visual comedy have seen them all and done one or two of them as well.

And in slapstick's tenth year, festival goers have gathered to

celebrate a moment that occurred ten times that length of time ago. The moment 100 years ago

when a young British comic stepped out in front of a camera for the first time with a cane,

a battered Derby hat, and a jacket and trousers clearly tailored for somebody else entirely.

The film was Kid Auto Races. The character would become known as the tramp,

and the comic was Charles Spencer Chaplin.

The following year, it was said, the world caught Chaplinitis.

The symptoms were extraordinary, crowds of thousands

turning up to greet him, an apparent mass hallucination in which he was reported to have appeared

in 800 places across America. He was, it was said, the mob god. We've never quite stopped

...