Dr David Bramwell getting tricky.

Dr David Bramwell gets tricky

In mythology the trickster is a fascinating and often misunderstood archetype. Mercurial, cunning and amoral, his sole purpose seems to be to spread mischief and deceit. Newly returned from flaneuring en France, Dr David Bramwell comes to the Explorers Club in St Leonards to celebrate the prankster. Erica Smith volunteers for the 3-card Monte…

David Bramwell may be strange, but he is no stranger to the Explorers Club. Since he first arrived in St Leonards to talk about his book The Number 9 Bus to Utopia about his search for the ideal community, he has been a regular at Sarah Janes’ remarkable club night.

Recently he’s given up teaching to concentrate full-time on his other projects. He publishes an excellent series of guidebooks called ‘The Cheeky Guides’, he’s in a band called The Oddfellows Casino and he runs his own regular spoken word night, The Catalyst Club. I was delighted to turn on the radio the other day to hear him on The Museum of Curiosities with Sarah Millican and Holly Walsh. Dr Dave’s memes are spreading…

So, what are we going to learn about trickery?

“The past hundred years of British culture has been rich with real-life tricksters and pranks, from the great Piltdown Man hoax and the BBC’s spaghetti trees to the ‘rebranding’ of the RSC to the RDC (Royal Dickens Company) by Ken Campbell in the early 1980s, which led to a Scotland Yard investigation. More recently, society and its values have been the subject of ridicule and mischief from the likes of Banksy and Chris Morris.”

With a host of hilarious examples from the worlds of theatre, literature, archeology, art, TV and film, Dr Bramwell will take us on an entertaining slide-show lecture tour to discover if there is something of the trickster prevalent in the British psyche, and to show how tricksters – both real and fiction – help shape culture and society. The question is: can we trust him to tell the truth?

Dr David Bramwell is in St Leonards for the Explorers Club this Friday, 8 April. at 7.30pm.
Tickets are £5. Advance tickets available here.
More information about the event, including the mysterious St Leonards venue, is available on Facebook.

More information about David Bramwell is available here.

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