"7000 horses are being flown across space..." - Cautionary Questions #2
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Pushkin. Hello and welcome to our second Cautionary Questions episode. I'm Tim Harford. You are our loyal listeners. You have sent in your questions and we are going to try to provide some answers. This episode, I am delighted to be joined by composer, sound designer, representative of you, our listeners, representative of the people,

Pascal Wise. Pascal. Hello, Tim. This is very exciting, isn't it? It's so exciting because you were with Cautionary Tales from the beginning. Do you remember when we sat down in my producer Ryan's apartment? In his apartment, yeah. And we talked about airships and what are airships going to sound like? What's the music going to sound like? Yeah, and then I went off to record a hairdryer or something, you know, whatever was required. Yeah.

I feel like I'm like a kid who's been allowed into the cockpit for this episode. Although, having said that, that's a really bad sort of analogy, isn't it? Because we did an episode about it. Yeah, and it didn't go well at all. So let's hope we... You've set the bar low there, so that's good. So hopefully we're not going to crash on this one. MUSIC PLAYS

On our last Q&A episode with Jacob Goldstein, we invited people to tell us what they thought of cautionary conversations. So what about the episodes where we're not doing a fully mixed, fully composed, narrated story, but we're doing something else, like having this kind of conversation or talking to an author. And we got a lot of

A lot of opinions, a lot of feedback. So, Pascal, you've got some of them in front of you. Yes. Now, Tim, for this, I would like you... It's a bit of an exercise for you. I want you to imagine that there's a bowl of chocolates in front of us, OK? OK. You got that in mind? I'm liking that already. I don't want to stress your imaginative skills. Because Ruth Ware...

Alice, our producer, is telling us it is the Ruth Ware, the novelist. OK, that had not hit my radar. Well, she sent a great email in with a little analogy for us. I do enjoy the cautionary interviews, some more than others, depending on the person you're speaking to. But I think perhaps the issue is they're quite a different pleasure from the cautionary tales.

I'm sure I'm not the only podcast addict who gets a pleasurable little ping of dopamine when I see there's a new episode of my favourite podcast. But that can turn into slight disappointment when it's not what you were expecting. I suppose it's a bit like picking your way through a box of chocolates and going, chocolate, chocolate, chocolate, olive. I mean, I like olives. I like them a lot.

But if I've been promised a chocolate, I may not be in the best frame of mind to enjoy the olive. There you go. I could have offered you a bowl of olives, but I went chocolate. You can tell she's a novelist, can't you? Thank you so much, Ruth. Yeah. What I've been trying to do when a cautionary conversation appears is I try to make it seem a little bit like a cautionary tale. I try and write a little bit of narrative up at the front to make it seem as close as possible to the original.

It's a really good point, isn't it, about expectation. I mean, I really recognise that sort of dopamine hit, which, of course, all our technology at the moment seems to be entirely based on. Yeah. So maybe we should be teaching people to resist. You should enjoy the olive. Don't be controlled by the steady flow of chocolate. We invited people to keep writing in about this question of the cautionary conversations versus the full-fledged cautionary tales. Any other thoughts? Yeah, definitely. We've had a really good response, actually. And obviously that one...

is pointing to the idea that we should sort of flag this up. Again, dopamine management. Other people, like Nada and Sandra, they were very keen on the traditional episodes with full sound design, you know, full stop. They love those and didn't really want the conversation episodes. Yeah, fair enough. And then, you know, there are lots of listeners who are just very happy with the current setup. Kira says, all of your episodes are thoroughly enjoyable and incredibly enlightening. Right, OK.

She's so wise. Ed Midden from Arlington chimes with...

Okay. So it's like a mixed box of chocolates. Any others? Yeah. Sammy Mäklinen, and I hope I'm pronouncing that somewhere in the ballpark. Mäklinen, maybe? Mäklinen, yeah. We apologise to everyone whose name we're mangling. We do our best. Sorry about that.

Sammy went to the trouble of making us a chart, which you will love, Tim, because you love a chart, don't you? I've seen the charts. Tell us about the charts. Okay, so, well, as far as I understand it, I think you will probably have a deeper understanding than me, but it shows how the conversational format has grown over the life of the podcast. Yeah, so I enjoyed Sammy's graph. Alice sent it on to me.

What Sammy did was to show what proportion of the show is now cautionary conversations rather than cautionary tales, which is fair enough. That's a question to ask. But for me, I would also have liked to have seen just the absolute number of cautionary tales. But I think I have it from memory. In 2019, we did eight. In 2020, I think we did six.

In 2021, I think we did 16. And in 2022, I think we probably did 18. So we're trying to do 20 a year now. Of the fully fledged. Of the full fledged, fully mixed. And the aim is to get something out every two weeks. So obviously 20 doesn't quite cover it. So then you would need these questions.

conversations that we're having now, you and I, the Q&A episodes, some reruns, some cautionary conversations. Otherwise I'm just going to fall over. Yeah. I mean, I can't write them. Andrew, of course, Andrew Wright writes some of the episodes. There's a limit to how much he can write. There's a limit to how much I can write. There's a limit to how much you can compose and mix. So really the choice is not...

Could we have some more cautionary tales instead of these cautionary conversations? Sorry, we can't write any more cautionary tales. About 20 a year is about the limit. The question is, would you like some cautionary conversations on top of those

or not. Thanks everyone for writing in. I mean, I acknowledge that everyone who bothered to write in, they'll have their own view. And they wrote in in response to a conversation episode, a Q&A episode. So people who despise such episodes won't have even been around to respond. And then, you know, there's more jazz in it for you, isn't there? In terms of when you get someone else in the studio, there's more of an improvisation. You're being pulled in different ways. The others are written and set. And, you know, we know what's coming. Whereas

It's really interesting to hear different brains and different brains interacting with you and encouraging the conversation in different directions. Yeah, it's a different thing. Now, let's move on to D&D. Of course. Dungeons & Dragons, why not? The look of excitement and relief on your face. I used to play D&D and I can't remember too much about it other than I did have an 18th level monk. Does that mean anything to you? It does mean something to me, but you say you used to play D&D. I've played D&D twice in June.

And we're recording this conversation in July. Oh, my God. I'm not going to take you on. I'm a current player, for sure. Are you a dungeon master? Sometimes I'm a dungeon master. So the dungeon master, for people who don't know, is the kind of referee, stroke storyteller, stroke arbiter, the director of the drama, if you like, while the others are the actors in the drama. I mean, there's no precise analogy. So, yeah, D&D has got some of our listeners very interested to hear more. Norwyn...

That's a good D&D name, isn't it? It's good, isn't it? Yeah. I can't believe you would think of yourself as lawful neutral. You might need to unpack that one. I've listened to a lot of your stuff on the radio and your podcasts and even read a book and you're clearly good.

I also suspect the UK government would consider you chaotic rather than lawful. I'm not even sure we should unpack this. I think people who know what Norwin is talking about know, and if you don't know, you don't know. All I'd say is, yes, as I mentioned, I'm not really a D&D player. I play other games, and other games do not have...

I'm not hedging. I'm completely consistent with what I told you 45 seconds ago. Oh, I can't remember that far back. Fair enough. Fair enough. But yes, I'm very flattered that Norwin regards me as chaotic good because chaotic good is you're the rule-breaking good guy. This is definitely the coolest of all the alignments. I'm not going to let you out of the dungeon quite yet, I'm afraid, because the D&D thing did spark quite a few questions from the listeners. Ryan Kennedy and his son Ian were in touch earlier

Hello, Mr Harford. My youngest son and I are huge fans of Cautionary Tales. Ian is eight and really looks forward to each new episode coming out. We listen to your show every time we are driving somewhere to go camping or hiking together. And we each have a question for you. From me, have you ever thought about doing a Cautionary Tales podcast episode specifically for kids who like to listen to your show?

And from Ian, Ian loves D&D and after listening to your first question episode would like to know what is your favourite D&D character class and why? So thank you for your time, for such a great podcast and for your fantastic books.

Ryan and Ian Kennedy, now your best friends, I would imagine. Yeah, yeah. That's a lovely email. Thank you. So I haven't considered doing a Cautionary Tales podcast specifically for children. I know there are quite a lot of quite young people who listen, which always makes me worry a little bit because, I mean, these really are stories for grown-ups. Some of them are horrible. Some of them aren't.

But my son, who is 11, he was photographed glued to the Cautionary Tales table read. The table read is basically like a rehearsal where we kind of explore things. I was doing a table read at home and he was lying on the floor outside my study with his ear at the bottom of the door listening to me read this story. And the story in particular is about...

This guy who murders his own son. It's the most horrific episode, but he was completely hooked. So yeah, I think about that. I have written a book for children, which is not yet available in the US and Canada, but is available in most other places, called The Truth Detective. So if there are any 8 to 13-year-olds listening and they want a bit more of me, they can get a copy of The Truth Detective and have fun with that.

And Ian's question was, what's my favourite character class in D&D? I'm going to say a fighter. The reason I say that is because I actually find Dungeons & Dragons to be quite complicated. I prefer simpler games that are more about the narrative, the storytelling, the description, all of that, and less about...

all the complex rules, and fighters have the simplest rules. So I tend to stick with a fighter when I can. First person, shoot him up. Exactly. So here's another question from Mary, who's a Brit living in France and who sends...

Some kind words. Get ready, Tim. Oh yeah, I like kind words. Yep. Hello. I'd just like to start by saying thank you for Cautionary Tales. I've recommended it to a lot of people and I look forward to the new episodes when they come out. My pleasure. Thank you. Right. Come on, a question. Here we go. A question I ponder is, why do board games, and especially role-playing games, have such a geeky and often negative reputation?

I think it's much more socially acceptable in France to be a role-player gamer, and indeed any kind of gamer. I know lots more people who talk openly about them in different kinds of social circles. Can't quite get my head around why in the UK regularly playing board games with a bit of strategy or role-play games seems to somehow marginalise you. After all, they're all sociable activities that you do with your friends. Anyway, makes me ponder. Thanks again for the podcast, Mary.

Wow. Great question. It is. It is. I did do some thinking about this. About 15 years ago, I wrote a magazine cover story for the Financial Times that partly involved me going to Germany to the biggest board game conference in the world at Essen, where there's just these huge, huge conference centers full of board game geeks and interviewing the board game geeks about the board games.

And one of the questions was, how come board games are so big in Germany and so relatively small in the UK and the US? And I mean, I think the best answer I've got, it's a historical accident and these things feed upon themselves. So if you have a board game culture, then the newspapers are kind of interested in board games. And so...

a new board game comes out, people actually review it. So it gets reviewed in the newspapers. It's a good board game. That means that there's more mileage in making a good board game. So the board games get better. Or board games that win a prize in Germany are guaranteed. It's like winning the Booker Prize in the UK. You're instantly guaranteed to sell half a million copies because you won the game of the year. And so there's this virtuous circle. And then just in terms of people's own social activity, is it acceptable?

after you've had people over for dinner to crack open a board game. I think back in the day it would have been quite common for a certain kind of English person to suggest a game of bridge.

But I think it's less weird now. I've got lots of friends who are happy to try a board game. So, yeah, I don't think I have a better answer than that, which is that success breeds success in this sort of thing. I wonder if things like Stranger Things, you know, the television series, which features a bunch of kids quite obsessed with D&D. I mean, I wonder if that, you know, sparked any interest. I certainly know quite a few kids around the 10 to 14 age group.

Sons and daughters of friends of mine who are really into it. And I'm always quite surprised because I feel like they've picked up something from my childhood. I think, wow, you know. YouTube as well. So there are live play channels for D&D and reviews of board games on YouTube, all of that. So, yeah, the hobby is bigger than it's ever been. The next question, Tim, comes from Peter, who's in Calgary. And he asks...

Tim, what do you feel is the most pressing problem we need to solve as humans and how substantial is any progress we've made? I guess the interesting thing about this is that if we have made a lot of progress in solving it, it no longer becomes a pressing problem. So the foot comes off the gas a bit. So I did discuss this in my book, The Data Detective Stroke, How to Make the World Add Up. If you go back 100 years...

I think the most obvious problem that the human race faced was infant mortality, which is the polite way of saying babies and young kids dying. And it was an incredibly common occurrence. So if you imagine a class full of 30 kids who are going to show up to kindergarten at the age of four, and these 30 children have just been born, perhaps a quarter of them, perhaps eight, will never make it to kindergarten.

because the mortality rate is so high, so many children would have died immediately after childbirth, in childbirth or from these diseases. That would have been the situation in the early 19th century. In this country or globally? That is the global average, but it would have been true most places. But now the global average, I think it's less than one, would die under the age of five out of 30. And that is globally. That is including the very poorest, most deprived countries in the world.

So I would say if that's the most pressing problem that the human race faced, that problem has not been solved, but we've made the most incredible progress. But then you just turn it around and say, well, maybe that's no longer the most pressing problem. Maybe the most pressing problem is fascism, or maybe the most pressing problem is climate change or the risk of nuclear war. Who knows? But that's the one that springs to my mind. And it's not as pressing as it used to be, thankfully. The writer Oliver Berkman says,

argues that instead of making to-do lists, we should make done lists. At the end of every day, you should make a list of all the things you've done. It's just much more uplifting. And so maybe infant mortality is on the done list rather than the to-do list. But we shouldn't forget that we have made that progress.

Yeah. Oliver is an intriguing writer and I've got a question relating to him later. OK, well, we will come to that after the break, but not immediately because the first thing we are going to do after the break is, Pascal, I am going to start asking you some questions because I am very curious about where all the magic comes from. Cue sound effect off screen. Stick with us. We'll be back in a moment.

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We're back. It's me, Tim Harford, host of Cautionary Tales. And if I am the heart of Cautionary Tales, perhaps I am, Pascal Wise is the soul of Cautionary Tales. Pascal is our composer. He does the sound design for all the episodes. He's been with Cautionary Tales right from the start. Before even a word of any of these episodes had been written, Pascal and I and the producer Ryan were talking about

you know, what does an airship hangar full of rats sound like anyway? And so, Pascal, you are such an important part of the way Cautionary Tales sounds and what people love about the show.

How do you do it? How does it happen? Just talk me through the process. I mean, often, actually, in the cut and thrust of our production schedule, oftentimes I've not really had much of a chance to look through the script before I get, as I say, you naked. It's you in the studio reading the whole show. Yeah. And I just get that as what we would call... You get the audio, basically. Yeah, just the audio of you having read out the entire episode, what we'd call a stem, I suppose, in audio terms. And...

It's interesting, having done so many episodes, a lot of things happen very instinctively now for me, but they deserve, I suppose, a little bit of unpacking. Because what I do with that, and often I'm doing this away from the script, I just play it and I...

drop little markers in on my computer, which is playing the audio, so I have a timeline with you speaking. And I just start to drop in thoughts about what I'd like to hear at any given moment, you know? And those markers, as I would call them, will kind of come into two categories. Some will be music and some will be sound effects or sound design. And one of the great things about podcasts, you know, you look at the sort of size of this operation, they're quite a small team and I'm handling...

effectively everything that happens in sound after you. So I can play around with the relationship between those two things. But fundamentally, the first thing I've got to do is think, well, what do we want to hear here? Do we want to hear anything? Or is this something the listener will happily imagine? And of course, you know, when you're doing music and sound design for something which is

only. There's very rarely a moment that you kind of have the stage to yourself. I mean, I suppose the theme tune is the only spot where there's a little moment where the one is just listening to music. Yeah. Which I should, sorry to interrupt, but the theme tune is magical. And I vividly remember...

I was on holiday with some family and so I'm on some Italian hillside with a glass of wine. I was sent the draft of the theme tune and I said, you know this podcast thing that I may be doing

I've just been sent the music. Let's all have a listen. And just clicking the button on my phone and all of us gathering around the phone and just hearing through the tinny speakers the Cautionary Tales theme. And it was magic. Everyone was like, wow, that sounds really good. I don't have the vocabulary to explain why it sounds really good, but trust me, it sounds really good. Oh, well, thank you. I mean, yeah, sometimes you...

Sometimes you get it lucky and your first idea kind of fits. I mean, I think the theme had to indicate a certain sense of kind of jeopardy or drama without being overtly kind of grim because, of course, there are so many different kinds of tales. So it has to be kind of quite multi-purpose. Yeah.

I think somewhere in the back of my mind would be the music to Tales of the Unexpected, you know, the Roald Dahl stories. There's a sort of vintage about it. Yes, there's a kind of Victoriano kind of wind-up music box element to it. There's a moment where it gets a little bit widescreen and goes almost sort of Bond-like. And, I mean, there are other things that you do, an episode that you've mixed together,

And this is an epic three-parter about the creation of the V2 rocket. I don't want to talk too much about it, but there's a scene where there's a high-pressure meeting with Heinrich Himmler.

who is arguably the most evil man of the 20th century, and there's a lot of competition for that. And you just made it sound so frightening in ways that I cannot put my finger on, just the echo, the sound design. We had these wonderful actors reading these lines. The rhymes are a matter of historical record. There's just something chilling about the effects, the mixing. Himmler's command centre had the nickname The Black Lair.

At first, a few concrete bunkers, hidden from air assault by the Polish forests. It had grown. Low wooden buildings were scattered through the trees, heavily camouflaged. There was even a command train parked up on a ramp. SS guards were everywhere. It was the kind of place people were summoned to, never to return.

Even the self-assured von Braun was unnerved by the prospect of meeting the most sinister man in the Third Reich. Himmler received von Braun behind a simple wooden table. "I must confess that I felt a bit jittery when I was shown into his office, but he greeted me politely and conveyed rather the impression of a country grammar school teacher than that horrible man who was said to wade knee-deep in blood."

Heinrich Himmler was making his play. The SS was launching a hostile takeover of Peenemünde and the entire rocket program.

Von Braun pushed back. Yeah, it's funny, isn't it? There are some times when pressure, you know, what a necessity being the mother of invention, but when pressure of time to do things sometimes leads you to a quick solution, which is actually really effective. Because...

When one of the world's most evil men gets ushered onto the script, it's very tempting to reach for the Wagnerian orchestra or whatever. Which is just what he would want. Yeah, exactly. I'm not playing that game. And get sort of 12 French horns up and running. But in this case, it came down to just a very uneasy, very low humming performance.

background sound. There's something just rumbling down in there to unsettle the listener. It worked for me. And I'm curious, is there an episode that sticks in your mind as being either particularly satisfying to work on or particularly difficult, one that you got through and just thought, what on earth am I going to do with this? This is very hard. Well, that's a very good question because there's a real pain and pleasure principle at play with cautionary tales.

In that every time we move on to the next episode, we reset the clock. You know, literally one week I'll be doing The Charge of the Light Brigade and the next week I'll be doing Clive Sinclair. Now, that's incredibly refreshing and fun because, you know, literally I can kind of just chuck everything off the desk and start again.

But I suppose it's in a sense labor intensive in the way that, you know, when you're working on a long form in any given story, what tends to happen is you build up a library of things that are repeatable and usable. And there is an element of that in cautionary tales actually because we do often return to subjects, you know, like quite often we end up on an airplane in cautionary tales.

But to go back to your actual question, I often do open up an episode and you'll say something casual like, you know, 7,000 horses are being flown across space, you know, and...

And it's like, oh, God, I've got to... Oh, dear, really? I've got to do that now? And I sort of start reaching for stuff to pull it in. Sometimes I kind of, you know, I dread that moment of thinking, oh, God, I'm going to have to build a massive world here. Yeah. But more often than not, it's exciting. I mean, there are so many different episodes that had different really nice challenges for me.

The Clive Sinclair episode, I really liked kind of trying to dig into the synthesizer world of that era, not least because I was a ZX81 owner. That was Clive Sinclair's second computer.

The Clive Sinclair episode being the false dawn of the electric car, which I think is still one of our most popular ever episodes. So you did your job on that one. Oh, great, yeah. So I found it very redolent and I really enjoyed trying to get us into that time. And that's a really key thing in Cautionary Tales. Because it moves through time, there's a really interesting question every episode. It's like...

What are the kind of signature sounds of that period? What would things have sounded like? In what way would they be different? What will listeners be expecting if we're in, you know, 1920s New York? How is that different from 1980s London, you know, if we're in a restaurant or something? Actually, my favourite episode in terms of the sound design is...

was the one about Claude Shannon and Ed Thorpe going to Las Vegas. And I think it's partly because it seemed to be very unpromising. It wasn't, I don't think it was my best work in terms of setting scenes or telling a story. It was a little bit more of an essay than a story in some ways, and you just did wonderful work on that. Very briefly, there was a gift in that episode there, which was that part of the...

clever machinery that Shannon developed for predicting the outcome of a roulette wheel involved a guy having a little earpiece in that played a little scale and of course you know that was you long for moments like that because it's you know when you open an episode up you've got infinite possibility and then if something in the story tells you something musical it's like brilliant it's like that's the way I've got to go and suddenly you know your ideas flow from that it's great to have a little peg like that

Well, thank you, Pascal. Thank you for answering my questions. Thank you for putting the listeners' questions to me. Do you have a question for me? Anything you wanted to ask me while you're here? Yeah, I've got a meta question for you. OK, best kind of question, maybe. Yeah, this is going to have you kind of walking up and down an Escher staircase for the next...

three days. So you've now done a podcast called Cautionary Tales for what, nearly three years now? Is it three? It's more than three. It's about 50 episodes, maybe 60 episodes now. So since the Victorian era, basically. So what cautionary tale would you tell about making a podcast called Cautionary Tales?

Yes, that's very meta. Well, and the obvious thing to talk about is the mistakes that I've made over the time I've been writing. But rather than pick out specific mistakes, because we do make mistakes, you know, we get things wrong, we accidentally get a fact wrong. I guess what's on my mind at the moment, just to get very personal, is I absolutely love writing cautionary tales, but it just takes too much time.

And so it's a question of how do I divide my time between writing something like Cautionary Tales and doing something else I might want to do, like writing a book. And I guess the Cautionary Tales is a man who loved his podcast so much that he couldn't let go of it. Well, actually, you know what? Quite a few listeners are really interested in this. And it does, again, I mentioned Oliver Berkman earlier on. He wrote this wonderful book called 4,000 Weeks, which is about...

how to live your life wisely, I suppose. Yeah, in the very limited time that we have. And he's, you know, a lot of the questioners are fascinated by, you know, I think they think there must be like four Tim Harfords because they don't quite understand how you do all that you do. I mean, there are kind of two Tim Harfords because Andrew Wright writes half the scripts for Caution's Tale. So he does, yeah, he does all the good ones.

Obviously, in your writings and in cautionary tales and elsewhere, you have come across, consumed and investigated so many different kinds of life hacks and self-help things and ways of operating and dealing with the myriad problems we face. And I wondered, you know, what has stuck? Because I asked Oliver Berkman the same thing, you know, having tried so many ways of organizing your life and experimented with them.

What really remained as something that you now routinely do? There's so many different things. There's no one hack, is there? Because life is complicated. One piece of advice that I think people underrate is looking ahead more often and more thoughtfully.

then seems sane. Like, what have I got to do tomorrow? What have I got to do this afternoon? What have I got to do next week? What have I got to do the week after that? What have I got to do over the next three months? And just keep doing it and keep asking the question. And it's not because these things can be controlled, because they can't be, and unexpected stuff happens all the time. But if you're looking ahead and you just see, oh, it's going to be a bit of a crunch towards the end of next week. Yeah.

You just, you know what's happening and you can be calmer and you haven't got this sort of sense of something's out of your control and you're not quite sure what it is. It's like going into the shed, isn't it? You know, don't let the rat snore away. Get in there and face it. One thing I would say though, and I've been thinking about this kind of thing for a long, long time. I've read a lot of productivity books. I've written a lot of articles for the FT about getting things done and being productive. There is no

hack there's no piece of advice there's no maxim that I could give you that I couldn't then retract or give the counter example well that's why the bookshelves are you know so heavily stocked no one's obviously got the right answers because self-help shelves are groaning aren't they absolutely Carl Jung famously wrote a letter to a patient who asked him about this and he said what you're asking me for is to be told how to live your life and I can't tell you how to live your life

So, Pascal, it has been such a pleasure. Thank you for joining us on Cautionary Tales. Thank you. I mean, so great to be in the cockpit. I'll return to my seat in economy now. I'm going to make some sounds. Yes, either the cockpit or economy. Probably a very bad place to be, given what happens to aeroplanes on Cautionary Tales a lot. Thank you to everybody who sent in their questions to tales at pushkin.fm. That's T-A-L-E-S. Keep sending your questions in.

really about anything you want, about Pascal, about me, about Cautionary Tales, about anything. We will have the wonderful Jacob Goldstein back in the studio soon enough. He is an expert on podcasting, entrepreneurship, technology, problem solving, finance and economics. So if you have any particular questions about those subjects, send them in. But anything, really. And thank you so much for listening to Cautionary Tales.

And thank you once more, Pascal Wise. Great pleasure. Thanks, everyone. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fiennes, with support from Edith Ruslow. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Guttridge, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright.

The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Brian Dilley, Greta Cohn, Leet Almalad, John Schnarz, Carly Migliori and Eric Sandler.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It was recorded in Wardall Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Go on, you know it helps us. And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.

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