PastMaster: Reshaping History

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. Keon has two objectives: keep King Harold alive, and get himself stitched into the Bayeux Tapestry. It's one of the most pivotal days in history. The day that changed the course of English history forever. And Keon is about to put himself front and center. The real Harold had just marched his army the length of England to beat Harald Hardrada's Viking invasion at Stamford Bridge, then turned straight round to face William less than three weeks later. He fell on Senlac Hill, and the arrow-in-the-eye legend owes a lot to the Bayeux Tapestry, a 70-metre embroidery that's now at the British Museum, back in Britain for the first time in almost 1,000 years. If Agent M's plan worked, there should be a moonwalking man in one sparkly glove somewhere in the middle of it. Good luck getting a ticket to check. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 swear on Uther's dragon standard before Cornwall storms out and half the hall follows him. Before each turn, a single six-sided die decides how many lords need to swear. Between the three of us we bring an encyclopaedic knowledge of card games, a very quick hand with a Rubik's Cube, a stare that bores into the soul and one extremely niche party trick, none of it built for early medieval coalition politics. The Game Master is back on hard mode, the benches are full of armed men who have been drinking since the rain started, and Merlin is somewhere in the smoke, quietly aware that none of us belong. Uther Pendragon belongs to the foggiest stretch of British history, the sub-Roman Dark Ages. Rome stopped defending Britain around 410 CE, Saxon settlers were carving out the east within a couple of generations, and Gildas, the nearest thing to a contemporary chronicler, never mentions a Pendragon at all. The Arthurian legend really gets going with Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae around 1136: a royal feast in London, a king who can't stop staring at Igraine, a furious Gorlois riding home to Cornwall, and Merlin at Tintagel making sure that nine months later there is a King Arthur. History needed a statesman in that hall and got three blokes from the 21st century with a six-sided die. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Medieval | ~470 CE | Londinium (London), England Featuring: Nick Horseman,comedian and rapper (The Rhyme Scheme, Edinburgh Fringe 2019) Contains: Strong language and some bloody early medieval violence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 crossing rather better than he has. The mission: get Pasquale Paoli to look kindly on the Bonaparte family before September's consulta decides which names on Corsica still matter. Pierre's declared skills, in order: a love of cheese, a way with horses, a fierce charisma, and the ability to hold a drink. This is a man who has looked at the birth of the Napoleonic era and concluded that it is, fundamentally, a hospitality problem. The plan runs on Comté, wine, and the confidence of someone who has never once been asked to leave anywhere. Corsica in 1790 was a wound that had not closed: France bought the island from the Republic of Genoa in 1768, broke the Corsican Republic at Ponte Novu the following year, and Napoleone di Buonaparte was born in Ajaccio that August a French subject by barely twelve months. Pasquale Paoli, the father of Corsican independence, had spent twenty years exiled in London and sailed home in July 1790 to a hero's welcome, which made the autumn consulta at Orezza the only room on the island worth standing in. The Buonapartes were minor nobility with a French education, no money, and a reputation for being French when it suited them. History records that Paoli came to loathe them and eventually ran them off the island altogether — but not for another three years, and not before somebody had to get through August. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Modern | 1790 CE | Ajaccio, Corsica, France Featuring: Bennet Kavanagh — musical comedian (Crank Up the Volume to a Reasonable Level, Edinburgh Fringe debut) Contains: Mild language. EPISODE LINKS Follow Bennet's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Bennet Kavanagh: Instagram 👉 @bennetkav Bennet Kavanagh 👉 https://bennetkav.com Play PastMaster yourself 👉 https://play.pastmasterpod.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 are Marty McFly, not Quantum Leap. He arrives as himself, at a moment already written, with another version of Nick Horseman walking about a few feet away, about to do something regrettable. Everything before this point is sealed and everything after it is fair game. His plan for improving on his own history runs on hindsight, a Game Master considerably stricter than the one that let him off the first time, and a firm conviction that the whole scene only ever needed a spark. Whether the past enjoys being edited by the man who lived it is a separate matter entirely. Prohibition ran from 1920 to 1933, and Chicago spent it as the most profitable illegal marketplace in America. The Chicago Outfit under Al Capone was pulling an estimated $60m a year out of beer, whisky and speakeasies, the North Side Gang under Bugs Moran was the only thing properly in its way, and the Bureau of Prohibition's Eliot Ness spent years trying to make a charge stick that wasn't tax. It ended in the St Valentine's Day Massacre, a federal conviction for accounting, and a body count nobody kept properly. None of which was ever built to survive a comedian arriving with hindsight and unfinished business. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Modern | 1926 CE | Chicago, United States Featuring: Nick Horseman — comedian and rapper (The Rhyme Scheme, Edinburgh Fringe 2019) Contains: Strong language and Prohibition-era gangland violence. EPISODE LINKS Follow Nick's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Listen to the original first — S1E13, Al Capone and the Windy City Wedding Whisky Plot 👉 https://pastmasterpod.com/episodes/s1e13-al-capone-and-the-windy-city-wedding-whisky-plot-ft-nick-horseman Nick Horseman: X 👉 @rociouspun Nick Horseman 👉 https://opencomedy.com/nickhorseman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 kill myself in the game”. Does hard mode in Tudor London actually make dying easier, or does it just make the AI meaner in more inventive ways Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices