Apocalypse Nigh

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Archive on 4: Apocalypse Nigh

BBC Radio 4 - Archive on 4, Apocalypse Nigh

Broadcaster Robin Ince explores our longstanding obsession with the end of days.

4 Extra Debut. Comedian and science broadcaster Robin Ince explores our longstanding obsession with the end of the world. From 2017.

In 2017, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists set its Doomsday Clock at two minutes to midnight, their judgement that humanity had moved closer to its own destruction.

It's a theme embraced in popular culture, from the surprise-bestseller, The Ladybird Book of the Zombie Apocalypse to armageddon-chic on the catwalk.

However while politics, pollution and the very real threat of terrorism may indeed have made our world less stable, Robin Ince considers whether our concern with disaster is also age-old and sometimes imagined. 

Using the archive, he explores our longstanding preoccupation with the apocalypse, from religion and science to comedy and drama, and what it tells us about the way we think.

Drawing on diverse sources from nuclear missile tests to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Orson Wells' infamous radio hoax, Ince discovers how destruction has been portrayed in different ways across the decades, with archive contributions from thinkers including physicist Richard Feynman and philosopher Noam Chomsky.

Robin hears from contemporary commentators with an interest in the darker side of human thought. Novelist Lionel Shriver and psychotherapist Susie Orbach explain what the apocalypse means to them.

Ince also searches the archive for practical advice in the event of catastrophe. He meets Professor Lewis Dartnell, a disaster-expert who explains how to reboot civilisation in the event of apocalypse.

Producer: Harry Kretchmer

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in July 2017.

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