Seances, Science and Art - A Haunting, A Telepathy Experiment, and an Exhibition of Supernormal Art.
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 20 October 2020
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How a Croydon housewife baffled a 1930s ghost hunter - the author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, Kate Summerscale, talks to Matthew Sweet about her discovery of a dossier of interviews about a poltergeist "terrorising" Alma Fielding which made headlines in the 1938 Sunday Pictorial newspaper.
30 artists interested in seances and spirituality are on show in an exhibition co-curated by Simon Grant and the Drawing Room Gallery in partnership with Hayward Touring.
Plus we return to a radio experiment in telepathy and a 1920s on air seance with psychologist Richard Wiseman, author of Paranormality amongst many other books. Can you sense what card he is holding?
Kate Summerscale's latest book The Haunting of Alma Fielding is out now and is being read as Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4 from October 24th.
The Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition Not Without My Ghosts: The Artist as Medium developed in partnership with Drawing Room, London runs there until Nov 1st, then it is at Millennium Gallery, Museums Sheffield 19th Nov - 7 March 2021, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea 20 March - June 13 2021, Grundy Art Gallery Blackpool.
The 1927 BBC telepathy experiment with Sir Oliver Lodge described by Richard Wiseman was listed in the Radio Times and you can read about it here: https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/1a8b7f91de874debaa392671d7542ea3#
This episode is part of BBC Radio 3's residency at the Southbank Centre and the BBC Culture in Quarantine initiative https://www.bbc.co.uk/arts
In the Free Thinking archives and available as Arts & Ideas podcasts are episodes in which Matthew Sweet goes ghost hunting in Portsmouth https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09dynj0 Shahidha Bari discusses ghost stories and Halloween with curator Irving Finkel, writers Jeremy Dyson, Kirsty Logan, Nisha Ramayya and Adam Scovell https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0009t19 Matthew Sweet looks at the history of magic https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000kvss and at Piranesi and disturbing architecture hearing from guests including Susanna Clarke and Lucy Arnold https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000mlgh and at mystics and reality hearing about spiritualist Daniel Dunglas Home from New Generation Thinker Edmund Richardson https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07f6r54
Producer: Alex Mansfield
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | 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, 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 is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.9 | Is there anybody there? |
| 0:35.1 | Well, you are, aren't you? |
| 0:36.5 | I can sense your presence. |
| 0:38.1 | You're just the sort of listener we like for the Arts and Ideas podcast, |
| 0:42.0 | attuned to disturbances in the ether, |
| 0:44.9 | up for a seance or a bit of table wrapping or an ESP test. |
| 0:49.1 | So be ready to make contact with me, Matthew Sweet, |
| 0:52.7 | just after this message. |
| 0:55.7 | But you must concentrate. |
| 1:04.4 | Concentrate. Why does music move us? How does it do it? Well, if these are questions that have been firing you up, I've got the very podcast for you. I'm Tom Service from BBC Radio 3 and from Schubert's symphonies to video game |
| 1:12.9 | music from how to start a piece of music and when to end it. From background music to |
| 1:18.2 | bird song, from Beethoven to Beyonce, from Bach to the future. Thank you very much indeed. |
| 1:24.6 | The listing service podcast is your guide to how music works, |
| 1:28.7 | and all kinds of music too, the mastery and mechanics behind the magic. Just search for |
| 1:34.8 | the listening service on BBC Sounds and learn more about the music we all love. |
| 1:41.1 | I'm just looking through the 11th of February 1927 edition of the Radio Times. It's not so different from the current issue. There's this week's good cause. There are listings for dance music shows and concerts from the Albert Hall. There are adverts for high-backed chairs. But what's this? Wednesday night at 11 o'clock, an experiment in mass telepathy. |
| 2:04.6 | Five people in a BBC studio staring at things and thinking about those things and hoping that |
| 2:11.6 | their thoughts are going to go roaring and buzzing through the ether into the minds of the listeners. |
| 2:17.2 | And we want to recreate this experiment on this programme and roaring and buzzing through the ether into the minds of the listeners. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.