Cheese & Pickle, available here

Will Maclean (The Apparition Phase) and Joel Morris (Charlie Brooker’s Wipe, Philomena Cunk) are writers working on a paranormal podcast between jobs. They put it aside for a while because they can’t find anything that hasn’t already been mined to death. Then they mention the idea around some friends, and one of them tells them a story about something that’s haunted him for years.

Broken Veil is a podcast that walks a very fine line, waltzing through the ambiguous spaces between fact and fiction. Maclean and Morris are uniquely equipped for this, both writers whose work doesn’t so much break genre boundaries as shatter them. They’re an instantly likable pair of presenters too, refreshingly low key and calm but with the relaxed, enthusiastic spark of every great sceptic/believer double act. They also, and this is crucial to the show, get out of the way. These early episodes especially are essentially hosted monologues, and we hear more from Tony than them, as we should.

It’s a great, offhandedly unsettling story too. Tony is an actor and gets offered a movie role conditional on passing a medical. The directions he’s given lead him to a very odd building outside London, in the negotiable, not-quite-spaces of Essex. Something feels… off, and that sense of wrong is focused by the reassuring banality of the location. By itself it feels unsettling but as the episode crests, we get the moment everything turns upside down:

He was sent to the wrong place.

By who, or why isn’t what matters at this stage. What does is that sense of unease that horror and supernatural fiction does so well. it reminded me of the definition of the ‘Oz Factor’, the sense of unreality reported in many paranormal or UFO encounters. It’s a controversial element of a controversial subject, and the best description of I’ve found is this from the Wikipedia page of Jenny Randles, the UFOlogist who coined the term:

‘She coined the term, ‘Oz Factor’, describing the odd state of consciousness involving changes to the perception of time and space, during which strange phenomena and close encounters can occur.’

It’s an almost impossible feeling to capture but some of my favourite pieces of culture do. Picnic at Hanging Rock, notional UK county Hookland, recent BBC series The Listeners and now Broken Veil are all on that list. It’s a show that’s cheerful, slightly crumpled and grounded. It disarms you, drawing you into the story the same way Joel and Will are drawn in by Tony. And like all three, it leaves you on the outskirts of the truth, fascinated, worried and completely hooked.

Verdict: The strongest first episode I’ve heard in a long, long time. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart

 

 

 

Recommended Research

Joel Morris

https://joelmorris.substack.com

Will MacLean

https://www.instagram.com/willmacwriting/

Jenny Randles

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Randles

Picnic at Hanging Rock

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picnic_at_Hanging_Rock_(film)

Hookland

https://hookland.wordpress.com/

The Listeners

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m0023h95/the-listeners