PastMaster: Reshaping History

Pompeii, 21 August 79 AD. Three days before Mount Vesuvius buries the town in ash, comedian Sallyann Fellowes is back for a Death Wish Speed Run, where the real goal is to lose the game as fast as humanly possible. The Game Master hands her a job anyway. A banker in the forum has just watched her total his wax tablets faster than his own clerk, and he needs her to find 8,000 sesterces that vanishe...

The Battle of Hastings turns 960 this week. On 14 October 1066, one afternoon on a Sussex hillside ended Anglo-Saxon England, kicked off the Norman Conquest and handed the crown to William the Conqueror. To mark the anniversary, we're revisiting our Season 4 episode where Keon went back to stop it, armed with a red leather jacket, a single sparkling glove and an unshakeable faith in the moonwalk....

London, around 470 CE. Uther Pendragon, future father of King Arthur, is holding a war feast in the smoking ruin of a Roman basilica, and he keeps sending his cup down the table to the Duke of Cornwall's wife. The Duke has noticed. Nick Horseman is back for another Death Wish Speed Run, and this time all three of us take turns at the same job: walk in as a nobody and get the lords of Britain to sw...

Ajaccio, Corsica, August 1790. Napoleon Bonaparte is twenty-one, broke, borrowing money from his mother, and home on suspiciously long leave while the island argues at knifepoint about whether it is French. Comedian Bennet Kavanagh arrives by boat as Pierre, a chevalier travelling with a mule, a mainland trading pass that marks him as a foreigner, and a wheel of Comté that has survived the crossin...

Chicago, 1926. Prohibition is on, 500 barrels of bootleg liquor are changing hands in the dark, and Al Capone is waiting on the delivery. Nick Horseman has stood in this yard before: three years ago it was his first PastMaster mission, and it ended with a cordial mob boss and none of the Scorsese gunfight he actually came for. This time he is going back into his own episode to fix it. The rules ar...

Comedian Caroline McEvoy returns to the PastMaster hot seat to tackle our first Side Quest of the year. It's the return of Death Wish Speedrun! How quickly and stylishly can you get yourself killed in the past? Caroline picked the Tudor era. GameMaster is on its stricter setting, with punishments if the player breaks the rules, and Caroline already clocking that “It's going to be hard for me to ki...

It’s 1985 and Wall Street is teeming with greed and corporate excess. Enter today’s guest Nikola McMurtrie, who is on a mission to climb the greasy pole while dodging sleaze, corruption and toxic masculine competitiveness. Armed with magic (in her own head at least), a *perfect* New Yoik accent and disarming offers of cocaine, she’s on a mission to uncover the rat at the heart of an insider tradin...

St. Petersburg, December 1916. Grigori Rasputin has the ear of the Tsarina, the loathing of half the aristocracy, and roughly a fortnight left to live. Comedian Daniel McKeon drops into the middle of it under the gamertag PoisonNecker56, to find out what a circle of well-born gentlemen intend to do about the Holy Devil. Daniel's qualifications for imperial espionage: a half-remembered GCSE module,...

Paris, October 1789. The Bastille has fallen, the king and queen are under guard at the Tuileries, and bread prices are on every tongue. Into this powder keg steps comedian Ruby Carr, with one mission: get a Parisian dentist's revolutionary porcelain dentures in front of the Académie des Sciences before a rival surgeon-dentist can smear them as brittle frauds. Her cover story? A sugar-free confect...

As The United States of America celebrates 250 years, we've sent our operative undercover to meet the Founding Fathers and make a few key changes... Philadelphia, October 1774. The First Continental Congress is wrapping up its final sessions inside the Pennsylvania State House, and 56 of the most influential men in the colonies are filing out into the street — tricorn hats, righteous indignation,...

Haarlem, the Dutch Republic, February 1637. Tulip Mania is at fever pitch, and comedian Sally Anne Fellows has been handed a single Semper Augustus bulb worth more than an Amsterdam townhouse. The job: sell it at auction for at least 5,000 guilders before sundown, pocket a fat cut, and get out before the most famous bubble in history finally pops. Sally's qualifications for surviving the floral go...

Patagonia, 1865. A boat called the Mimosa has dumped 153 Welsh settlers onto a treeless, waterless stretch of Argentine scrubland, sold to them as a lush green paradise where the Welsh language might finally escape the English. Comedian Sunil Patel, back in the time-travel studio, has been dropped into the colony as a pioneer with one job: keep Y Wladfa alive long enough to become a country. Sunil...

Bristol, 1348. The Black Death is two days from sealing the city, bodies are being carted through the mud, and a desperate merchant needs a sealed letter carried to London before the gates close. Patrick and Hugo McPherson, sketch comedy duo Pear, have three days, a horse, two silver coins, and an absolute refusal to begin the mission until the haggling is settled. Their survival strategy for plag...

Florence, 1480. The Palazzo Medici is blazing against the February dark, 500 guests in silk and masks are drinking like nothing bad happened two years ago in the Duomo, and Lorenzo de Medici's gold mask can't quite hide the limp. To celebrate three years of PastMaster, Ryan and Tan have dragged returning co-host Keon out of parental leave, handed everyone a plus-one from history, and gatecrashed t...

Wallachia, 1456. Vlad III has just retaken his throne, impaling stakes line the city's edge, and a scribe named Constantin has hidden the only written record of Vlad's chaotic first reign in a monastery outside Targoviste. Comedian Rohan Sharma has two days to find the Chronicle before armed men destroy it. A vegetarian with bad knees, anxiety, and self-described "wits and wiles," he is not the ob...

Qin Dynasty China, 212 BCE. Climbing into the time travel machine otherwise known as the Hen & Hound, award-winning comedian Caroline McEvoy steps foot in Qin Dynasty China. She’s been set a mission to solve the case of the falsely accused road builder. She is armed with only a lucky cricket called Dinky, 'passable' Mandarin and some speculative tai chi moves. Ahead of her lie confrontations with...

Greenland, 986 CE. Erik the Red has just established the first Norse settlement at Brattahlid, and comedian Ashley Haden has been living among the colonists for three months. The problem? A prominent farmer named Thorvald has accused him of stealing two sheep he never touched, and a public assembly called the Thing is happening at dawn. If found guilty, he owes compensation he can't pay, which mea...

Alexandria, 48 BCE. Caesar's forces are closing in, fires are spreading through the harbour, and the greatest collection of knowledge the ancient world has ever assembled is about to go up in smoke. Laura Lexx and Ron from the Lexx Education podcast have been sent back to save it. They run an education podcast. They know this history. It helps them not one bit. The mission is the Alexandrian Rescu...

Tikal, 741 CE. One of the most powerful Maya city-states at the height of the Late Classic period. Towering pyramids, elaborate blood rituals, and a head priest who has the king's ear and absolutely no interest in hearing about an upcoming solar eclipse from some random time traveller. Comedian Bilal Zafar has three days to navigate this. His toolkit: creativity, self-declared ruthlessness, and ro...

Samarkand, 750 CE. The Islamic Golden Age is in full swing, the Silk Road is the most lucrative trade network on Earth, and comedian Esther Manito has just been dropped into the middle of it with a mission to trek a caravan of silk from Samarkand to Baghdad. Easy enough — if you ignore the street-smart urchins, the uncompromising rulers, and the fact that the entire caravan has been poisoned. The...

Can the past be mastered? Is AI still cool? And where exactly has Keon gone? Season 4 was a big one — we pitted ChatGPT against Claude in a two-player electricity showdown, launched Death Wish Speed Runs (the game where you try to die as quickly and stylishly as possible in history), went live on stage twice, let the Thots TV podcast loose in a gothic horror, and sent a rapper to the Battle of Has...

If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive -- or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? Season 5 of PastMaster is here. New comedians. New eras. New ways to catastrophically misread historical situations. Same ruthless AI Game Master. The past will be mastered. Era: Special | Trailer GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmast...

The North Pole has gone very, very wrong. Father Christmas has swapped his "Ho Ho Ho" for a whiskey bottle and a whip, the elves are screaming, and the factory is belching black smoke into the Arctic sky. Merry Christmas from PastMaster. Laura, Elsie, and Meg from the Thots TV podcast return for a festive special that was supposed to be a sacred pilgrimage to Bethlehem in Year Zero. Instead, they'...

Northumbria, 687 CE. The nuns have survived Ryan's naked Jesus act and Nick's witchcraft-and-Christina-Aguilera gambit. Now it's Tan's turn. His character name is Wee Willy Winky, the Beast Master. That's the energy we're working with. The Death Wish Speed Run finale: Ryan tried blasphemy, Nick tried seduction, and Tan's approach is to demand that Claude let him summon a bear called Rufus. Claude'...

Northumbria, 687 CE. The nunnery that refused to kill Ryan is about to meet its next challenger. Nick has a plan. A sexy, dirty, witchy plan. Nick's opening move: introduce himself as Emily. The nuns take one look at his jaw, his build, and his beard, and are not convinced. So Nick pivots. He touches his beard "incredulously" and announces it must be "the witch I hung out with yesterday." In 7th-c...