and the enchanting beauty of podcasts.
It’s rare for me these days to be even with, or ever so slightly ahead of the curve, but one of those rare exceptions is for the beautiful medium of podcasts. I was in the dark with Joe Rogan at the very beginning and although I’ve recently fallen out of listening love for Marc Maron, his WTF Podcast truly took an emerging art form into the corporate stratosphere of a viable means of grabbing listeners, consumer product buying consumers yes, but listeners to other people’s life stories, anecdotes and, rather beautifully, long form, free spirited conversations and the very opposite of the 90 second infomercials that spoil our collective Matrix to a collective tedium.
From true life tales to true crime abominations, podcasts and me were always going to be a match made in heaven, being as I was that long haired college going reprobate who tweaked the dial of the most basic of transistor radios in the late 1980’s as, if you were steady of hand and had an ear for the faintest of sounds thousands of miles away, you could find “Armed Forces Radio” and the commentary of (American) football nowhere near its eventual peak of UK popularity. Football commentary, of the English variety, is so much more exciting than its televisual counterpart, I was an avid listener to “Talk Radio” here in the UK way, way before it became rebranded for a broader sporting base as “Talk Sport” and way before I departed that unruly and now boring ship we now have “Talk TV”, branded as an “alternative” (stop laughing!) television station to the dinosaurs in the mainstream media. There’s no alternative here. Just differing shades of the same jingoistic Establishment message of fear.
With a side helping of fear.
Whether listening to a game of football at 3am through the crackle and static of an impossible signal we were, in the 1980’s, receiving via the strict medium of witchcraft, or tall tales of alien abduction, inter-dimensional lizard creatures, bases on the moon or the eight records a well known “celebrity” would take with them to a desert island, radio shows have now become, largely, podcasts, and the Casefile podcast linked below is one of the very best and heartily recommended:
Welcome to Casefile: True Crime Podcast
In February 1960, the city of Manchester, New Hampshire, was rocked by the violent murder of teenager Sandra Valade…casefilepodcast.com
Case 236: Sophie Lionnet - Casefile: True Crime Podcast
COURT DOCUMENTS VIDEOS Stranger Than Fiction: The Nanny Killers Tortured to Death: Murdering the Nanny Mark Walton on…casefilepodcast.com
Case 236 and the horribly grisly case of the murder of Sophie Lionnet in 2017 is the latest release from the team at Casefile and a case I shall not spoil in any way. Why ruin the fun? Why ruin the enigma? Especially if you consider that the Australian man who created this series remains completely anonymous to this very day. Why ruin the enigma? Instead, I’ll heartily recommend the unhurried style and in depth analysis given to every heinous murder under the weekly podcast microscope (the recent 3 part series on the repugnant acts of serial killers Fred and Rose West here in the UK is an incredible, if difficult, listen) and rather pleasingly and way, way off topic, Case 236 introduced me to a new phrase, and if you can imagine my love for podcasts, well nothing pleases me more than a new set of words or a phrase!
The new phrase that so pleased me is: “folie à deux” which, according to Merriam-Webster Dictionary is:
“the presence of the same or similar delusional ideas in two persons closely associated with one another”
Our good friends at Wikipedia have a longer, yet clearer explanation:
“Folie à deux (‘folly of two’, or ‘madness [shared] by two’), additionally known as shared psychosis[2] or shared delusional disorder (SDD), is a collection of rare psychiatric syndromes in which symptoms of a delusional belief, and sometimes hallucinations,[3][4] are transmitted from one individual to another.[5] The same syndrome shared by more than two people may be called folie à trois (‘three’) or quatre (‘four’); and further, folie en famille (‘family madness’) or even folie à plusieurs (‘madness of several’).
The disorder, first conceptualized in 19th-century French psychiatry by Charles Lasègue and Jules Falret, and is also known as Lasègue–Falret syndrome”.
So there you have it, an enigmatic, anonymous podcast host from the wilds of Australia and an enigmatic podcast listener from the other side of the world, invite you to join them, should you be a fan of the true crime genre, into the folly of two horrendous, unspeakable, murderous criminals.
Shall we share the same real life madness, and make it a folie à trois?
Thanks for reading. There’s a cave of wonderous, rambling delights within my library here or alternatively, here are three recent examples of my most recent publications:
“The Whale” (2022)
“People are amazing!”.medium.com
Reds back to winning ways over a toothless Wolves
Liverpool 2 Wolves 0, 1st March 2023.medium.com
Graham Hancock and the “most dangerous show on Netflix”
Ancient apocalypse and historical amnesia.medium.com