Damn Interesting

Damn Interesting is a narrative nonfiction show in which each episode is a finished written story, read by a narrator and set to music and sound design. Its stories also appear as articles on DamnInteresting.com, and the project dates its first published writing to September 2005. That background shows. The scripts are exact about places and dates, quote letters and records, and move from scene to scene the way good magazine prose does. The closing credits name the writer, sometimes an editor, and the narrator, plus Alan Bellows, who handles sound design and has also written and scored episodes. Jennifer Lee Noonan narrates several stories and wrote one. Other credited writers include Marisa Brooke and Jackie Meade. The range stands out first. One episode follows Barney Curley, a racehorse owner whose trainer, Liam Brennan, taught him to keep his business to himself, toward the Yellow Sam betting coup at a small 1975 race in Bellewstown, about 15 miles north of Dublin. Another is set in turn-of-the-century New York and covers the misfortunes of a pharmacist named Edmund Lawal, as well as a school health effort that picked swollen adenoids as the one affliction to treat. A third moves from Iceland's passion for genealogy to Hans Jonathan, whom Henrietta Schimmelmann tried to have arrested after a letter from Denmark's ruler threatened her hold over the people enslaved in her household. Science stories get the same narrative treatment. 'Journey To The Invisible Planet' starts with Isaac Newton calling action at a distance an absurdity, then reveals that the theory he objected to was his own. It goes on to Le Verrier, who told the French Academy of Sciences in 1860 that careful observations pointed to a new planet, Vulcan, orbiting close to the Sun. Conflict and survival fill much of the rest. 'From Where The Sun Now Stands' opens with a surrender on the prairie of what would become Montana in October 1877 and recounts the White Bird battle, where the cavalry lost their bugle calls and a civilian leader was first into the retreat. 'Dead Reckoning' puts the listener aboard HMS Wager in a Drake Passage storm in April 1741, with the gunner John Bulkley on watch as an enormous swell washes him across the quarterdeck. That episode recommends headphones. The humor is dry when it appears, as in a local's jab about a leader who led going in and led going out, or a closing limerick about slow horses and surly bookies. The closing credits also carry plain appeals for donations, a reminder that the production depends on them. A good first listen is 'There Once Was a Man Called Curley', where an amateur race on a quiet summer day becomes a coup later called the greatest gamble in racing history.