The EscapeGoat Podcast

Matt joins me for a chat about his first impressions of the first two seasons of  The Sopranos  (1999-2007, HBO). He has just finished watching them for the first time, and I'm a massive long-term fan, so I couldn't resist getting his take on the early stages of the show! We also ramble a bit at the start about the current commercial state of cinema in late 2020, and somehow drift from  The Sopran...

In this episode, I welcome Isobel back to the show! After getting distracted with other topics (mostly, my recent rewatch of Season 3 of The Wire - minor spoilers for that show) we turn to an examination of the VERY dark comedy/drama movie Happiness (Todd Solondz, 1998). Skip straight to 34 minutes in for that. It's a fun conversation, but also touches on some very dark themes, as the movie does....

This week, I welcome Matt back to the podcast, to talk about a very unusual and much maligned semi-obscurity... the first series of a subsequently highly revered UK comedy, The Black Adder (1983, BBC Television). Is it as bad as its reputation suggests? And what did the following more acclaimed Blackadder series take from it... and what did they leave behind? Matt and I recall our childhood backgr...

For this episode... we present the unearthed EscapeGoat pilot! A conversation recorded in June 2019, with the thought of being a dry run for a potential podcast which eventually became this show! In this chat (recorded face to face in a very hot room), Rich and I talked about the then-recent finale episode of Game of Thrones  (2011-19, HBO) and what we made of it, and indeed some of the general di...

This week, I'm joined by Olivia, to discuss two respective childhood passions with some similarities - the Pokemon and Monster in My Pocket franchises!  We discuss our introduction to the brands as kids, our passion for collecting and exploring these worlds, and the origins, inspirations and symbolism behind the monsters in each series. Olivia talks about how her recent acquisition of  Pokemon Shi...

This week, I welcome back both Rich and Dru to the show, for an extremely enjoyable discussion of the classic Warner Bros Chuck Jones-directed Road Runner  cartoons! We have a general chat about why we think they're so brilliant, talk a bit about the context of their creation, and get shamelessly in-depth about some of our favourite gags from the series (particularly from the first 10 films in the...

This week, my friend Daniel joins me for the first time, to discuss a shared passion of ours, the stories of Roald Dahl! In the first half we focus pretty closely on discussion of Dahl's longish short story  The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar . In the second half, we broaden the scope to talk a little bit about Dahl's other works, particularly some of his more popular children's fiction, and their...

In our 10th episode, Cat returns to talk to me about how the US TV industry has been faring since we spoke in April, and a little bit about how US Politics is shaping up ahead of the November Presidential, and in light of the continuing COVID chaos. We then get on to the main topic of discussion, that of romantic comedy movies. We mainly focus on 500 Days of Summer (Marc Webb, 2009), When Harry Me...

On this episode, Matt returns, to discuss with me a film double-bill about the perils and pitfalls of getting ahead, knowing who to trust and being an older actress in the theatre world - that is, All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950) and Meet The Feebles (Peter Jackson, 1989). After that, we have a brief and hopefully mildly-amusing post-show chat about Star Wars!  0.00 All About Eve 0.56 Me...

On Episode 08 of the show, Rich returns! We chat for a while about some television we've been watching recently (and some old associations with it). We then move onto the meat of the episode - a discussion of the early (1987-1992) recording career of the utterly seminal US Alt Rock band The Pixies. We meanderingly traverse their discography, pick out some track highlights, and debate what the band...

On this episode, I sit down with my friend Dru to gush lovingly about the live-action/cartoon LA noir classic Who Framed Rodger Rabbit? ( Robert Zemeckis, 1988).  In Part 1, we blether on about various fantastic aspects of Rodger Rabbit,  the work of Bob Hoskins and Christopher Llloyd in the film, and some of the political resonances of Doom's plan and of the existence and treatment of the Toons i...

In this installment of the show, Isobel returns, and we discuss All Good Things , the classic finale episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994). We talk about what makes  All Good Things such an effective and emotional episode of television, and touch on its themes of trauma, healing and solidarity. We then move on to kvetch about a few things which arguably provide a less-satisfying ca...

In this episode, I'm joined by my friend Cat Hamilton, from LA. We talk a little bit about the current state of the US TV industry (which Cat works in), its short-term reactions to the current Covid-19 crisis, and the future directions it might evolve into, to survive. Speaking of evolution and survival, we then move onto the primary focus of the episode, in discussion of two sci-fi/AI-focused mov...

This week, I welcome Matt back to the podcast, and am also joined by Olivia Broome, to talk about  South Park  (1997-, Comedy Central) in general, as well as conducting a full episode-by-episode retrospective on Season 5 of the show, which aired over the course of 2001, and contains episodes including Scott Tenorman Must Die, Super Best Friends,  Kenny Dies and  Butters' Very Own Episode. We discu...

This week, I'm joined by Richard Gilbert to discuss a fairly broad swathe of Westerns. First, we talk Sergio Leone and the 'Dollars Trilogy', with particular focus on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Leone, 1966). We definitely touch on mythological tropes, and we probably get a bit pretentious. We then chat about the first three episodes of The Mandalorian (Disney+, 2019-) and especially how it ec...

In this episode, I'm joined by my friend Isobel McNally to discuss the television series Star Trek: Voyager (UPN, 1995-2001). Isobel and I discuss our childhood and adolescent Trek fandom, where Voyager sits in our regards, and how it's aged in our eyes, and those of the wider Trek community. We review some of our highlights (and lowlights) of the seven seasons of Voyager , and talk a little bit a...

Welcome to the first episode of a podcast about most things, flaws and all. And thus completely impossible to promote effectively or monetize. I'm your host David Faggiani. In this first attempt, I am joined by my brother Matt to discuss two pretty important pieces of Zombie fiction - the movie  Day of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1985) and the fictional oral history novel World War Z (Max Brooks,...