Two Toms, the terrifying Trocadero, and a tiny train.
15th September 2025
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Hello!
If all has gone well, then by the time you get this, I
should be half way through the filming trip. And I'm still writing the newsletter! We start with this week's Lateral: Luke Cutforth, Corry Will and Hannah Crosbie take on questions about sinuous streets,
sensational sportspeople and suspicious stories.
Also: the Lateral live show is now less than a month away, and the guests have been announced! On October 12, I
should be joined by Ria Lina, Iszi Lawrence, and Alasdair Beckett-King at the Clapham Grand, for our second live audience show. We've sold out the main stalls, but there are a few tickets left for the upper circle.
And this week, I've made an appearance over on TomSka and Friends, playing a ridiculous scavenger hunt for the TryHards series (strong language). This is a simultaneously unhinged and wholesome video, and I had a great time filming it.
And this week, I've made an appearance over on TomSka and Friends, playing a ridiculous scavenger hunt for the TryHards series (strong language). This is a simultaneously unhinged and wholesome video, and I had a great time filming it.
Right. With all those announcements done, here's the good stuff I've found on YouTube this week:
- For a couple of years in the 1990s, the Trocadero in London was home to one of the scariest immersive attractions ever created: Alien War, a guided, walk-through experience themed around the Alien movies where Things Go Wrong. This oral history
of Alien War is perhaps a little overdramatic -- I'd love to watch a longer, more relaxed video just chatting with the creators and crew, since the documentary-maker was able to track them down. Or even just an audio podcast with longer interviews! But it's worth watching both for the story, and for the joyful comments underneath from all the people who remember going there as kids and being scared out of their wits.
- Rohin Francis, from Medlife Crisis, talks about the patient that changed his entire career. This is an emotional monologue, told well, and worth twenty minutes of your time.
- What On
Earth Is This? continues to make lovely, low-key, less-scripted on-location videos: this time, the delightful world's shortest international railway.
And around the rest of the web:
- An engineer restores pay phones for free public use. Related: Australia's Telstra made all their public payphones free in 2022.
- The people stuck using ancient Windows computers.
Where "ancient" includes "the years when I was a kid", but, yeah, sure, fine.
- It was said that "the sun never sets on the British Empire". It will soon.
And finally, over on TikTok: "it's now been three years since I started my underground tunnel system". This TikTok channel is, no pun intended, a bit of a rabbit hole to fall down.
All the best,
— Tom
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