Bunkum & Ballyhoo: A Podcast About Bullshit

[BomberPat]

 


My brand new podcast, Bunkum & Ballyhoo, is all about showmen, con artists, grifters, hustlers and liars throughout history - from pro-wrestling to politics, and from the sideshow to pseudoscience, and everything in-between.

Episode 1 is just a breezy 14 minutes, perfect for a short commute or a potter to the shops, if you want to to do either of those things while listening to me talk about fascism. It looks at Johannes Van Der Walt, the "Masked Marvel" of South African wrestling, who went from wrestling superstar to a martyr for apartheid and white supremacy.

It's available in all the usual places - Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon, etc. - so please give it a listen, rate and review, and everything else that every podcast encourages you to do.

Spotify: bit.ly/3MwwuzC

Amazon: amzn.to/3MuC9Gx

Apple: apple.co/3XwoUeA
 

[RedTwoster]

This fits perfectly into my journey home tonight, so I've downloaded it. Looking forward to hearing it Pat, it sounds interesting!

Edited September 5, 2024 by RedTwoster

[RedTwoster]

Sorry for the double post! That was really interesting. I wasn't familiar with the story, and you did well to squeeze all of that into 15 mins. The audio - for me at least - had a bit of an echo to it, though. I'm not sure what you're using to record/edit - but Adobe has a really good AI tool to enhance audio and remove that kind of thing (https://podcast.adobe.com). 

It's only a minor issue though - I'm looking forward to episode 2!

[BomberPat]

11 hours ago, RedTwoster said:

The audio - for me at least - had a bit of an echo to it, though.!

Thanks for pointing this out- my new mic is ridiculously sensitive, and it seems like one of the settings that I was using to mask it picking up a lot of other noise also seemed to add that echo. It wasn't as obvious to me listening to it back on Audacity, but I can hear it on the finished podcast. I've tweaked things some more, and episode 2 should sound better.

[RedTwoster]

How often do you plan on releasing episodes? I'm genuinely looking forward to the next one. I know these things are a bit of a nightmare in the early days (audience building takes time), but you're on to a winner, I suspect - so I really hope you keep at it. 

[BomberPat]

On 9/10/2024 at 3:47 PM, RedTwoster said:

How often do you plan on releasing episodes? I'm genuinely looking forward to the next one. I know these things are a bit of a nightmare in the early days (audience building takes time), but you're on to a winner, I suspect - so I really hope you keep at it. 

Thank you! 

Episode 2 came out today, it should be on Spotify and all the usual places now. 

In this one, continuing the theme of professional wrestlers who made dubious choices in World War 2, I'm talking about Eric Pleasants, a wrestler from Norfolk who ended up fighting for the Nazis, and then imprisoned in Russia.

 

I sketched out a release schedule this morning, and while it's not set in stone, I plan to release an episode roughly once every two weeks from now on - schedule and time to record permitting - with everything coming out a week early on Patreon (www.patreon.com/patrickwreed), as well as bonus episodes being released to Patreon at the same time as the main episode is released.

I hadn't really intended to do a run of episodes that all have World War 2 themes, but that's inadvertently given me a bit of structure, and I'm going to stick with that - I'm aiming to do 5 or 6 episodes with a loose theme, then take a couple of weeks off, and return with a new theme. 

[BomberPat]

Bumping this one because I'm getting to the end of series 1, and haven't plugged this since Episode 2.

Episode 3 was about "The War Magician" Jasper Maskelyne, a music hall magician who worked on spy gadgets and camouflage during World War 2, and who has had two books written about him and how he used conjuring tricks and smoke and mirrors to fool the Nazis and turn the tides of the war. And, because that's what this podcast is all about, why that's all bollocks and he did nothing of the sort.

Episode 4 was about The Hitler Diaries, the infamous hoax that fooled the world's media and one of Britain's leading historians into thinking that our understanding of Nazi Germany and its leader would have to be entirely rewritten, and how one of Britain's worst historians, the far-right Holocaust denier David Irving, seized the opportunity for some publicity.

And Episode 5 was released today, a Halloween special all about Orson Welles' War Of The Worlds radio broadcast, and the stories of it causing mass panic all over America - was that their intention? Or did it even happen at all?