Melvyn Bragg steps down from presenting In Our Time

I looked, and there's more than 1000 available episodes of IOT on the BBC, they're all (at least every one I've heard) brilliant.

I'm curious if anyone here has any particular favourites?

I remember really enjoying the Plankton episode because it took me the classic IOT route of "That doesn't sound interesting, but I'll give it a listen" to looking up all the reading list.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001r1t5

There is an episode on the Epic of Gilgamesh which is absolutely fascinating. Highly recommended.

I'll do the opposite: The P vs NP episode is aboslutely horrid. Probably the first and last time that they had any informatics people on the show. One major issue is that the experts didn't explain what we mean by "hard". Melvyn thought, as normal people do, that 'hard problem' means you've gotta be real clever to solve it, not that it takes a lot of steps to solve (and how the number of steps increases as the problem gets larger). When they had the example of purchasing Christmas gifts as a stand-in for maximum bipartite matching, coupled with Melvyn's misconception, the train wreck was a fact.

That's my memory of the event, that was a frustrating lunch walk.

I recently listened to the episode on The Antikythera Mechanism and found it quite fun - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0024x0g

Also, I wanted to mention something interesting - back when LLM-driven applications were just emerging, someone posted on Hacker News about how they categorized In Our Time episodes using the Dewey Decimal System with LLMs. Cool stuff - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35073603

Calendar was brilliant. I think it was the first time I fully appreciated the misery of the human mind in the face of various orbit periods that aren't simple integer ratios of one another. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00548m9

Great Fire of London too. Pepys burying his cheese! https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ft63q

Politeness. Social barriers were coming down, you were interacting with people of different rank, how do you not get into a swordfight? Also, the letter from the wife complaining about her husband! https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p004y29m

I think they did all the big interesting things in history and then struggled with a lot of minor events that were hard to find interesting angles on.

IOT is great, but there's a distinct lack of computer subjects which has always seemed like a big omission. There are multiple episodes on obscure medieval people, but not a single one on Open Source Software, for example.

In 45 minutes assuming only the education of the (wo)man on the Clapham Omnibus explaining P vs NP is always going to be extremely difficult.

I've never made the mistake of thinking that after a 45 minute episode of in our time on, say, Cyrus the Great, that I'm now in a position to write an essay on the man. I would assume that none M/NS/CS types don't make that mistake after listening to the episode on P vs NP.

Yes, that one was the first I thought of as well.

As I've listened to more and more of it, I start to gravitate not to particular topics, but to particular experts. There are many guests who are regulars when topics in their field come up, and the good ones make any topic in that field interesting. For instance, if there's an episode about religious history and Martin Palmer is on it, it's bound to be a banger (listened to one on Augustine's Confessions recently, for instance, and it was great). Same with Ancient Greece and Paul Cartledge and Angie Hobbs. If I'm looking for something to listen to, I just put one of those three into the search field of my podcast player, and I'm never disappointed.

I love this one and actually posted the wiki to the The Antikythera Mechanism here (although didn't get traction unfortunately).

You might like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rd7MrGy_tEg

The Photon

Climate Change

Cryptography

Electrickery

The one about Shakespeare featuring Harold Bloom.

I'm not sure what the goal was here, that's not what I'm saying.

I can't pick a favourite, but "Consciousness" (1999) definitely sticks in my mind as one of the most amusing due to the prickly debate.

The one about Victorian sewers is fantastic.

Shameless plug, but I have a podcast about the history of astronomy and did an hour long episode on the Antikythera Mechanism a little while back if you're interested in more detail: https://songofurania.com/episode/022

One of my favorites was the one on the evolution of crocodiles [1].

Aside from being surprisingly fascinating, I thought the guests were excellent. IOT's academics can sometimes be bone dry (sometimes not a problem if the subject matter is good, but sometimes it can sink the episode), and in this episode all three guests were both energetic and articulate, and there was some good banter.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000zmhf

That was the first episode i listened to and got hooked after that.

Crocodiles

The Taiping Rebellion

I remember one about randomness/probability was my favourite