Catastrophe history with a record shelf nearby.
This Is A Disaster follows Peter, Lee, and recurring guests through wrecks, hijackings, nuclear accidents, failed festivals, and other calamities. The tone is researched but loose, with gallows humor, Canadian asides, and music talk stitched into the aftermath.
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This Is A Disaster is disaster history told by people who sound more curious than solemn. Peter and Lee frame each episode around a calamity, then let the conversation breathe, swerve, and snap back to the facts. The show covers ship explosions, train crashes, hijackings, nuclear accidents, failed festivals, and even a Def Leppard-shaped turn through music history. It is not tidy. That is part of its texture. The storytelling often moves from a historical detail into a joke, a callback, or a small domestic aside before returning to the terrible chain of decisions at hand. Episodes about the SS Viking and the Almonte Train Disaster linger on weather, visibility, procedure, explosives, speed, and missed safeguards. The Yodogo Hijacking episode widens into political factionalism and student radicalism. The SL-1 episode brings reactor mechanics into a room full of innuendo and music chatter. Woodstock 50 and Def Leppard show the same appetite for cultural wreckage, where bad planning, nostalgia, fame, and myth-making can become their own kind of disaster. Peter and Lee are named as co-hosts in the excerpts, with Craig and Nuclear Norm appearing as special guests. The guest episodes add a second current: sidebars that can compete with the main story without fully derailing it. The show also treats music as more than a closing gimmick. Songs, radio memories, MuchMusic, MTV, Bandcamp, and era-specific listening habits keep appearing around the historical material. That music angle gives the bleakness a strange companion piece. The humor is blunt but not careless in its function. It creates enough oxygen for stories involving death, injury, mental health, political violence, and institutional failure. At times the show feels like friends in a studio daring each other to keep going through the darkest part of the notes. At other times it settles into clean explanatory mode, walking through causes and consequences with surprising patience. The pacing favors digressions, but the subject always comes back into view. This Is A Disaster works best for history listeners who like their research conversational, morbid, and musically literate.
Made for: For listeners who like disaster history, dark comedy, music references, and conversational research that does not sand off the grim parts. It fits people comfortable with serious subject matter handled through blunt, irreverent banter.
What sets it apart: The show pairs catastrophe storytelling with recurring music talk, turning each disaster into both a historical case study and a strange listening prompt. Its loose co-host chemistry and guest sidebars make the research feel social without losing the chain of causes.
We go on a journey through the history of disasters: Some man-made, some natural, some modern, some ancient, and all devastating. Listen as we discuss the catastrophic events that changed the trajectory of human history. Each episode wraps up with our recommendations for musical pairings to the story just told.
Peter and Lee can take you from missing railway flares to a proposed ban on sleet.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A seal-hunting voyage grows ominous as ice, cigarettes, and shipboard explosives converge aboard the SS Viking.
The SS Viking disaster builds its pressure from an uneasy mix of routine and warning: heavy ice off White Bay, a captain settling the ship against the ice for the night, and notices being prepared about explosives on board.
Nuclear Norm traces Japan's communist splintering through Soviet pressure, student politics, backlash, and loose comic banter.
Nuclear Norm follows Peter and Lee through the ideological turns that split Japan's communist left, beginning with the Japanese Communist Party's Soviet backing even as arguments continued over how to win people over.
A curve, icy tracks, and missing flares turn railway routine into disaster.
A railway disaster is traced through small choices made worse by sleet, icy tracks, a curve, and a troop train still moving at 40 kilometres an hour after its engine power had been shut off. The missing railway flares carry the most weight.
A loose, funny visit with Def Leppard, Pyromania, and the music-video era when waiting was part of listening.
Def Leppard's shift from Pyromania toward the world of Hysteria gives this episode a clear backbone, but the livelier thread is the way music once reached people through television.
A playful SL-1 review that turns reactor mechanics into the hook.
The SL-1 disaster is handled as nuclear history with a mischievous ear. Peter, Lee, and guest Nuclear Norm move from loose studio banter into Christmas 1960, when SL-1 had been shut down for the holiday and its central control rod was manually disconnected.
Overlooked lives, read from the sources, talked through warmly.
Mike Duncan narrates Rome's full history solo, from Aeneas to Romulus Augustulus's exile in 476.
Craig Baird traces the SS Viking from its 1882 launch in Christiana, Norway to its use in Arctic sealing and Bob Bartlett’s earlier expeditions, including the 1882 Fritjof Nansen voyage.
This Is A Disaster uses Japan Airlines Flight 351, the Yodogo hijacking of March 31, 1970, to connect airplane hijackings with Japan’s postwar politics.
Peter and Lee cover the 1942 Almonte train wreck on the Ottawa Valley local, where freezing rain, a leaking boiler, and five extra wood coaches slowed Canadian Pacific Railway train 550 to a dangerous crawl.
Lee traces Def Leppard from Sheffield in 1977 and Pyromania in 1983 to Rick Allen’s 1984 New Year’s Eve crash on the A57.
This episode of This Is A Disaster follows the SL-1 accident at Idaho Falls, Idaho, inside the Idaho National Lab and the old National Reactor Testing Station.
Bull Island's 1972 festival reportedly had six outhouses for roughly 275,000 attendees, with 400 commissioned toilets stranded at Chandler Raceway.
Peter and Lee announce that This Is A Disaster will return in pre-recorded seasons after missing their promised October 2021 return.
This Is A Disaster’s Episode 51 traces how a storm overtook the 1979 Fastnet Race, a 700-mile course around Fastnet Rock.
A podcast exploring historical disasters, both natural and man-made, with musical recommendations.
The hosts discuss their podcast about historical disasters and introduce an episode on the Woodstock 99 disaster.
The hosts discuss a studio remodel and tease future content before introducing a mini-episode about a disaster.
The hosts introduce their podcast about historical disasters and discuss housekeeping, including a running narrative and recommendations for new listeners.