Absolute Units
The Museum of English Rural Life podcast. We're exploring the fascinating, surprising, and moving backstories of our collections, to tell the story of the English countryside.
Absolute Units
Welcome to the Museum of English Rural Life podcast
It's just like all the other podcasts you love, but instead of trying to sell you mattresses and underwear we're explaining everything you always wanted to know about the history of rural England but never knew to ask.
Why the name? Well, we're known for the Internet's most famous sheep, an 'absolute unit' who first went viral in 2018. But ask any of our staff and they'll tell you everything at The MERL is worth that level of fuss.
So join us for a very special pilot season, coming mid-to-late March. We'll be covering topics ranging from square cows to big hogs, to how a museum is like a documentary, and why farmers are using infrared technology to count insect wingbeats in their fields.
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Absolute Units is hosted by Ollie Douglas, Katie Bergen, and Joe Vaughan, and made possible through the generous support of Arts Council England. Theme tune by Tai Dawson.
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Ollie Douglas: Wait a minute. So you'll introduce yourself.
Joe Vaughan: No, you introduce yourself. We'll do the, "okay, let's do it."
Ollie Douglas: Okay.
Joe Vaughan: We'll do that. And then-
Ollie Douglas: -the theme tune, and then I'll introduce myself-
Joe Vaughan: -and I'll introduce yourself and then-
Ollie Douglas: -I'll talk about weird and wonderful collections.
Joe Vaughan: You do that bit.
Ollie Douglas: Yeah.
Joe Vaughan: Let's, let's do it. Ollie?
Ollie Douglas: Joe? *laughter* It's terrible!
Joe Vaughan: Ollie.
Ollie Douglas: Joe.
Joe Vaughan: Let's do this.
Ollie Douglas: I'm Ollie Douglas and I'm curator at the Museum of English Rural Life here at the University of Reading.
Joe Vaughan: And I'm Joe Vaughan, the social media person who posts big hogs on the internet.
Ollie Douglas: I've been working with the weird and wonderful collections of the museum for over 16 years now, and we've just had the opportunity to record our first pilot series of the absolute unit podcast.
We'll be digging deeper into just some of these histories and themes, and I'll be doing that with my wonderful colleague, Katie Bergen. She and I will be finding out specifically about old technologies, and I'm afraid we haven't been, as Joe will tell us, not very good with the new technologies, have we Joe?
Joe Vaughan: No, but we do have some amazing sound effects on this new one. *accidental trombone sound effect* Oh no.
Ollie Douglas: Anyway, once we sorted out our technical hitches, we'll be launching our podcast in mid to late March. The first of our four episodes will be with, uh, I think we're billing him as the. Father of the absolute unit. He's not actually a mid century ram, but he's a digital and social media guru Adam Koszary. Some of you may have heard of him Anyway, you'll hear us very soon wherever you get your podcasts.