Robin Ince’s Blooming Buzzing Confusion

We learn a lot about Robin Ince this afternoon. For a start, he has a lot to say. In recognition of this, he talks very fast to make sure he says it all before we leave. He even has an alarm clock to remind him to finish up. And he still overruns.

As fans of Ince’s BBC Radio 4 show The Infinite Monkey Cage won’t be surprised to see, his major preoccupation this year is science and human biology (specifically, the mind) with some characteristic forays into literature, fatherhood and social convention. Just how do you politely decline a friend’s offer of breastmilk cake?

A perk of the job, Robin’s just had an EEG—or electroencephalogram—brainscan and his peculiarly large corpus callosum has got him thinking. Literally. He ruminates on the power of music to mess with his neuro electrics, puzzles over a capuchin monkey’s inability to recognise its own face and likens fans of meta-TV tripe like Gogglebox to sea squirts, known principally for imbedding themselves in a comfy underwater crevice before eating their own brain.

It stays just the right side of performance lecture at times and Ince has pocketsful of gags, asides and impressions to keep it light including a mildly vexed Brian Cox ("'You sound like Deepak Chopra!' is about the worst insult he has”) and a thundersome Brian Blessed in full show-off mode.

Despite his assertions to the contrary, Ince isn’t the 45-year-old grump he claims, revealing himself a quicksilver gagsmith with deep-seated interests in the world around him. Fascinating, in a funny way.