Detritus

Detritus welcomes its first ever guest, as John and Jack are joined down the wire by fine scribe, former culture editor of Tribune and regular Guardian contributor, Fergal Kinney. Following up on a recent collaborative retrospective for The Quietus alongside Claire Biddles, Fergal helps us navigate a deeper-dive into the mad, mad world of Robbie Williams’ 2006 baffler, ‘Rudebox’.

Notorious as Robbie’s first notable flop, as well as for it’s title track’s references to TX Maxx, Michael Jackson and the Special Olympics - all of which nonetheless helped it make serious impact in Germany - Rudebox rema...

Detritus celebrates its first Halloween season by treating ourselves to a seance with one of television's greatest-ever tricks: Ghostwatch. First broadcast 'live' by the BBC in 1992, this one-off drama shattered the national psyche so profoundly that it was banned from broadcast for a decade afterward. John and Jack revisit this iconic haunt, in which recognisable television personalities blend with slightly plummy actors pretending to be proles, spending a chilling evening in council housing beset by ghosts, ghouls and things that do bumps in the night (Craig Charles)

Send your impressionable children to bed before the watershed and...

Following the global phenomenon of Little Britain, comedy superstars Matt Lucas & David Walliams returned on Christmas Day in 2010 with Come Fly With Me, reflecting their sudden international stardom with a new series keen to prove just how bloody funny airports are!

Dialling down the fake vomit, adult lactation and relentless catchphrasing of their best-known creation, but maintaining the fat suits, crap wigs and blacking/browning/yellowing up beloved by the British public, Come Fly With Me provides John and Jack the perfect opportunity to revisit a one-and-done series of pure televisual detritus, while also considering their own...

Widely regarded as the greatest television show of all time, The Sopranos premiered in 1999, changing the landscape of popular culture with its ambitious, uncompromising portrayal of modern American life in a state of malaise. The Sopranos: Road To Respect was released in 2006 and changed the ambitions of spin-off video games with its similarly uncompromising portrayal of punching people in the head, aimlessly walking around an empty strip club and occasionally being visited by the ghost of a wiseguy.

Sopranos devotee John and Sopranos casual Jack wake up this morning to visit recreations of iconic Sopranos spots like...

Calling all fashionistas, gussy yourselves up for possibly the most fabulous episode of Detritus yet! John and Jack transport back to 2015 to revisit the impact of…. The Dress. Discovered on the racks of an outlet mall in the North West of England, then finding global infamy via Tumblr, Facebook and Buzzfeed, no evening wear has made such an impact on the culture since Marge’s candy-pink Chanel suit hit the Springfield Country Club. But is it blue and black, or white and gold? Or some other variant that certain people (Lady Gaga) claim to see, presumably for attention?

A...

E10 - Pod’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!) - Oasis, Be Here Now & Magical Pies

All around the world, you gotta spread the word… Because Detritus has reached a monumental TEN transmissions. If this podcast were a vintage prestige HBO television show, that landmark would usually signal a season finale. However, we all know podcasts have to LIVE FOREVER, so instead we’re treating ourselves to a lengthy dissection of Oasis’s legendarily indulgent 1997 folly, ‘Be Here Now’; albeit still coming up shorter than the album itself, assuming you discount all the complete bollocks talked for the first twenty minutes...

There's no pod like home, there's no pod like home... John and Jack tap their heels together to explore the century-long fallout from one of the world's most recognizable pop-culture artifacts, The Wizard of Oz; a film so significant that one of your hosts can apparently recount the entire plot without having ever seen it. But don't worry, that's not the whole episode!

Finding extensively studied yet genuine horror in 1985's unremittingly bleak Disney spin-off 'Return To Oz', and at least slightly more fun in 1978's NYfuckinC African-American reimagining 'The Wiz', the margins of the Oziverse provide...

Detritus reaches the inglorious finale of what some (us) are calling The Summer of Love trilogy. After the deeply British, hazy rave memories of Fatboy on the beach and a wide-eyed Keith Allen emerging from an MRI tube, we're turning back the party clock a decade, sailing across the Atlantic to sniff the already past-it chemtrails of ELECTRONIC DANCE MUSIC. Or EDM, as they call it. Was this really the most significant countercultural youth movement in America since Grunge? Or was it really a load of old shit?

John and Jack spend time with two films: 2015's...

Detritus’ inadvertent Summer of Love continues to unfold with a revisit of Drugs Live - The Ecstasy Trials, Channel 4’s CONTROVERSIAL 2012 study of the effects of MDMA on the human body and mind...

With the legal support of the British government and top scienticians, witness a lovely lady priest, an SAS soldier, a Lib Dem secularist, Lionel Schriver, and Jack’s arch-nemesis, Keith Allen, each willingly lying down in an MRI tube, draining their brains of serotonin for science and your personal entertainment. With slightly less medical rigour, the Detritus Madheads get to grips with ecstasy nation, then a...

John and Jack return from their summer break, tanned and thriving, only to take a trip to the beach. Which beach? Brighton Beach, for Fatboy Slim’s Big Beach Boutique II. The good news? You’re invited! The bad news? So is everybody else, and there are already 250,000 people in the mix, all of them gurning, pissing in the sea and singing along to The Sexiest Man In Jamaica.

With a quarter century’s worth of distance, Detritus revisits the free party to end all free parties, as Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim, aka Quentin Leo Cook, aka DJ...

The 'Detritus Boys' return from their summer break with a razzlin', dazzlin' fifth episode at Jack's insistence, leading John to the West End, Broadway, Tokyo, Hamburg, and your home VHS collection to discuss Andrew Lloyd Webber's blockbusting, standard-bearing mega-musical hit, CATS.

Recorded weeks before Lord Lloyd Webber raised the muthafuckin' alarm for the future of musical theatre, having witnessed his recent CATS reboot be mercilessly put down, we consider the legacy of the Rum Tum Tugger, Old Deutoronomy, Mungojerrie & Rumpleteazer, Munkustrap, Grizabella, Bustopher Jones and especially, Mr. Mistoffelees. They thought he was on the roof... but he...

In defiance of the escalating allegations that the Detritus podcast is “too niche” or even, “too masculine” (?!!?) John and Jack succumb to World Cup fever while they still can, tackling England’s rich, often irritating history of pop singles in support of Our Brave Lions. Featuring appearances from legends adjacent to the game including Ant & Dec, Dizzee & Corden, Bell & Spurling and the Spice Girls & Echo & The Bunnymen & Ocean Colour Scene & Space & Johnny Marr, and er, Keith Allen. This is a bumper-sized summer special, clocking in at 90 minutes, plus hydration breaks! ;-) ;-) Real footeh fans will know!

EPISODE 3 - LOVE THEM HOE’S

The course of young love never did run smooth. In 2003, the burgeoning romantic relationship between Eamon Doyle and Nicole Francine Aiello came to a sudden end, leaving the streets of Staten Island agog with grief and gossip for at least an hour. Less than a year later, whispers of this tragedy had found momentum back in Europe, stubbornly occupying the Top Of The Pop charts for weeks and weeks on end…

Following their initial, unmistakeably British transmissions, John and Jack wade across the pond to investigate the 2004 call-and-response scandal of E...

John and Jack mark a significant milestone for the Detritus podcast - a second episode - by traveling back to an early peak of their individual and collective powers, the year 2007.

At the advent of the smartphone, in the hinterland between the old and new internet, Detritus dives into what’s left archived from BBC Switch - the public broadcaster’s well-meaning, ham-fisted attempt to reach out to the yoof of the day. Here, they’re reintroduced to the archetypes of the era - Hoodie! Plastic! Nu Raver! Drama Teen(?!) - concluding with a deeper dive into the ph...

For the debut episode of Detritus, John and Jack lock and load their podcast pistols and take aim for Autumn 2003, in order to witness the country’s leading stoic showman and positive mentalist, Derren Brown, leave a bullet hole in television history with his craziest stunt yet! It’s ‘Derren Brown: Russian Roulette’.

Forget the sinister fake fan networks, bot accounts and ‘visibility’ of today’s rising stars. Brown was determined to win over his public the old-fashioned way - by threatening to shoot himself in the fucking head on television. It’s the highest of stakes, and only a quiet...