Origin Story

Tickets are flying out of the door for Ian and Dorian’s biggest live show yet at the stunning Union Chapel in London’s sophisticated Islington on Tue 1 Sept.

A spectacular Gothic Revival church on Upper Street, the Union Chapel is a breathtaking venue just a few moments’ stroll from Highbury & Islington Tube – and therefore close to Euston and King’s Cross for the Not-London crowd. As well as the Victoria Line, it’s on the Mildmay Overground so whether you’re in leafy West London or sourdough-and-cold-drip-coffee East London you can be there and home with ease.You can buy tickets here, or Patreon supporters get exclusive discount, so now is as good a time as any to sign up: https://www.patreon.com/c/originstorypod

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Tickets are flying out of the door for Ian and Dorian’s biggest live show yet at the stunning Union Chapel in London’s sophisticated Islington on Tue 1 Sept.

A spectacular Gothic Revival church on Upper Street, the Union Chapel is a breathtaking venue just a few moments’ stroll from Highbury & Islington Tube – and therefore close to Euston and King’s Cross for the Not-London crowd. As well as the Victoria Line, it’s on the Mildmay Overground so whether you’re in leafy West London or sourdough-and-cold-drip-coffee East London you can be there and home with ease.You can buy tickets here, or Patreon supporters get exclusive discount, so now is as good a time as any to sign up: https://www.patreon.com/c/originstorypod
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to a bonus episode of Origin Story. For the first time, we’re revisiting an earlier episode to ask what we got right and what we got wrong about the subject. Just before the July 2024 election we profiled Labour’s PM-in-waiting Keir Starmer and made some cautiously optimistic guesses as to what his government might look like — the promise and the pitfalls. Well, it turned out to be mostly pitfalls. As Starmer steps down and Andy Burnham steps up, we perform the autopsy.

Did Starmer have fundamental personal weaknesses that doomed him to failure? What happened to the moral principles and managerial competence that defined his career before he became Labour leader? What mistakes did he make and what opportunities did he miss? Has Starmer killed the theory that a boring technocrat is the antidote to right-wing populism? How did he become so hated? What legacy has he bequeathed to Burnham (it wasn’t all bad news)? How much of this can we blame on Morgan McSweeney? And is it fair to call Keir Starmer the worst Labour prime minister ever? The ghost of Ramsay MacDonald certainly hopes so.

Join us for an in-depth reflection on what went wrong for Starmer and the lessons we can learn about what it takes to be a successful prime minister in the 2020s.

• See Origin Story live at the Union Chapel, London on September the 1st

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

www.podmasters.co.uk

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Welcome to the finale of season nine of Origin Story. We’re wrapping up the season by telling the thrilling, misunderstood story of the Luddites and how their name became an insult synonymous with ignorance, reaction and fear of progress. You can’t get much more Origin Story than that.

It was November 1811 when textile workers in Nottinghamshire first began breaking machinery in the name of a mysterious figure called Ned Ludd. The movement spread through neighbouring counties and reached its dramatic peak in Yorkshire, as these secretive activists waged guerrilla warfare against the factory owners who were destroying their livelihoods.

Soon, England was in a frenzy over the Luddite threat. Led by Tory prime minister Spencer Perceval and the decadent Prince Regent, the ruling classes feared a French-style revolution. As Luddite violence escalated from machine-breaking to arson, food riots and assassination attempts, the state responded with spies, torture and show trials. Swathes of industrial England fell under military occupation. In the midst of all this, Perceval himself was shot dead in the House of Commons. Yet by February 1813 the Luddite fire had burned out and the bosses appeared to have won.

It was only in the 1950s that “Luddite” was turned into a general insult, even as revisionist historians of the English working classes started to tell a different story about the motives of the machine-breakers. Amid rising hostility towards Big Tech and AI, the legacy of the Luddite rebellion feels surprisingly relevant more than 200 years later.

Who were the Luddites? What was going wrong in England in 1811 to inspire such a viral rebellion? Were the Luddites targeting the machines, or the industrialists, or the state itself? Was their uprising really a failure or did it pave the way for fairer industrial relations? What does it mean to be a neo-Luddite today? And can the true history of the Luddites ever prevail over the crude stereotype created by their enemies?

• Special offer! Get 20% off any vehicle history check at carVertical.com/OriginStory

• See Origin Story live at the Union Chapel, London on September the 1st

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Reading list

Books

• Kyle Chayka – ‘Rethinking the Luddites in the Age of A.I.’, New Yorker (26 September 2023)

• Kyle Chayka – ‘The Age-Old Urge to Destroy Technology’, New Yorker (8 April 2026)

• F.O. Darvall – Popular Disturbances and Public Order in Regency England (1934)

• Carl J. Griffin – ‘Luddism, Machine-Breaking and the Swing Riots’, Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique (2025)

• J.L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond – The Skilled Labourer, 1760-1832 (1919)

• Eric Hobsbawm – ‘The Machine Breakers’, Past & Present (February 1952)

• Brian Merchant – Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech (2023)

• Kirkpatrick Sale – Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War Against the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age (1995)

• Tech Won’t Save Us: The Real History of the Luddites, presented by Paris Marx (28 September, 2023)

• Malcolm I. Thomis – The Luddites: Machine-Breaking in Regency England (1970)

• E.P. Thompson – The Making of the English Working Class (1963)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

www.podmasters.co.uk
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Welcome to Origin Story. This week we’re doing something different: the history of paranormal investigations and what it says about the relationship between evidence and belief.

In 1848, two sisters in Hydesville, New York claimed to be contacting the spirit world. Within a couple of years spiritualism was a popular craze on both sides of the Atlantic, with seances attracting luminaries from Queen Victoria to Charles Darwin. But could it be proven beyond doubt? In 1883, a group of scientists and intellectuals launched the Society for Psychical Research to find out, but from its inception there was tension between the genuine sceptics and the instinctive believers. However many hoaxers they debunked, even the sceptics encountered things they could not rationally explain.

The mass grief of the First World War created a new appetite for spiritualism, spearheaded by the world-famous author Arthur Conan Doyle. Meanwhile in North Carolina, J.B. and Louisa Rhine proposed that these uncanny goings on were not evidence of ghosts but of untapped powers in the human brain: Extra-Sensory Perception. Concepts like telepathy and telekinesis swept through popular culture while scientists explored their potential as weapons in the Cold War.

In the 1970s, Connecticut couple Ed and Lorraine Warren became the world’s star investigators. In the era of Carrie, The Exorcist and spoon-bending celebrity Uri Geller, there was a huge audience for this kind of thing, bringing money and fame to the most prominent spook-hunters. Events such as the Amityville Horror and the Enfield Poltergeist still inspire fascination today, despite the investigators’ extremely dubious methods. Was the truth-seeking mission of the Society for Psychical Research destined to end up as a license for grifters?

How did spiritualism bewitch the Victorian era, including some of its most eminent scientists? Are psychic powers any more credible than ghosts? Why was the creator of the ultra-rational Sherlock Holmes so boundlessly credulous about the spirit world? What can the field of the unexplained teach us about cognitive biases and conspiracy theories? Is it really possible to apply scientific rigour to paranormal phenomena? And why, when almost 150 years of investigations have produced no solid evidence or theoretical basis for them, do so many people still want to believe?

This is a thrilling story of faith, doubt and fraud, featuring Harry Houdini, George Eliot, Marie Curie, Carl Jung, Helena Blavatsky, W.B. Yeats, Winston Churchill and (possibly) the Devil himself. Don’t have nightmares.

• Special offer! Get 20% off any vehicle history check at carVertical.com/OriginStory

• See Origin Story live at the Union Chapel, London on September the 1st.

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Reading list

Books

• Edward T. Bennett — The Society for Psychical Research: Its Rise and Progress and a Sketch of Its Work (1903)

• Ruth Brandon – The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1983)

• Edmund Gurney, Frederic W.H. Myers and Frank Podmore – Phantasms of the Living (1886)

• Renée Haynes – The Society for Psychical Research 1882-1982: A History (1982)

• Oliver Lodge – Raymond; or, Life and Death (1916)

• Roger Luckhurst – The Invention of Telepathy 1870-1901 (2002)

• Ben Machell – Chasing the Dark: Encounters with the Supernatural (2025)

• Janet Oppenheim – The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914 (1985)

• Guy Lyon Playfair – This House Is Haunted: The Amazing Inside Story of the Enfield Poltergeist (1980)

• Harry Price – The Most Haunted House in England: Ten Years’ Investigation of Borley Rectory (1940)

• J.B. Rhine – Extra-Sensory Perception (1934)

• Michael Shermer – The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies: How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (2011)

• Upton Sinclair – Mental Radio (1930)

Articles

• A.P. – ‘“Amityville Horror” amplified over bottles of wine, — lawyer’, Lakeland Ledger (27 July 1979)

• Angie Barry – ‘The Warren Case Files: Fact or Fiction?’, Criminal Element (31 October 2017)

• Stefan Beck – ‘A Night with The Conjuring’s Ed & Lorraine Warren’, Daily Beast (18 August 2013)

• Paul Byrnes – ‘The Devil Among Us’, Sydney Morning Herald (12 July 2013)

• Casey Cep – ‘Why Did So Many Victorians Try to Speak with the Dead?’, New Yorker (24 May 2021)

• Kevin Dolak – ‘The Slippery Truth About “The Conjuring: Last Rites” and Ed and Lorraine Warren’, Hollywood Reporter (10 September 2025)

• Neil Genzlinger – ‘Lorraine Warren, Paranormal Investigator Portrayed in ‘The Conjuring’, Dies at 92, New York Times (19 April 2019)

• Kim Masters and Ashley Cullins – ‘War Over ‘The Conjuring’: The Disturbing Claims Behind a Billion-Dollar Franchise’, Hollywood Reporter (13 December 2017)

• Sean Thomas – ‘What’s Happened to Weird?’, Guardian (14 June 2004)

• Neda Ulaby – ‘The demons in “The Conjuring” movies may not be real — but the family tragedies are, NPR (5 September 2025)

• Neda Ulaby – ‘Who Were the Real Ed and Lorraine Warren of “The Copnjuring” Franchise?’, NPR (9 September 2025)

• Laura Zornosa, ‘The True Story Behind the Netflix Documentary The Devil on Trial’, Time (18 October, 2023)

Films

• Carrie, written by Lawrence D. Cohen and directed by Brian Da Palma (1976)

• The Conjuring: Last Rites, written by Ian Goldberg et al and directed by Michael Chaves (2025)

• The Devil on Trial, written by Chris Holt and directed by Charvi Bajaj (2023)

• The Exorcist, written by William Peter Blatty and directed by William Friedkin (1973)

• Ghostbusters, written by Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis and directed by Ivan Reitman (1984)

• Late Night with the Devil, written and directed by Colin and Cameron Cairnes (2023)

• Panorama: The Enfield Poltergeist, BBC (13 November 1977)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

www.podmasters.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices