PastMaster: Reshaping History

PastMaster
  • 5.0 (18)
  • Comedy
  • Updated fortnightly

If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? Welcome to PastMaster, the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, hosts Ryan and Tan are joined by a special guest comedian who is sent back in time with nothing but their modern knowledge and the shirt on their back. Under the guidance of a benevolent robot Game Master, they navigate to a different era each episode and find out if they’ve got what it takes to reshape the past. Will it be historically accurate? Will any of it make sense? Will they master the past? Tune in to find out.

  1. 14 Sept

    Napoleon and The Cheese Priest of Corsica ft. Bennet Kavanagh

    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

    Napoleon and The Cheese Priest of Corsica ft. Bennet Kavanagh

  2. 31 Aug

    Back to the Past-Future: The 1926 Chicago Do-over ft. Nick Horseman

    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

    Back to the Past-Future: The 1926 Chicago Do-over ft. Nick Horseman

  3. 17 Aug ·  Bonus

    Side Quest: Death Wish Speed run ft Caroline McEvoy

    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

  4. 4 Aug

    Wall Street, where greed is good, ft. Nikola McMurtrie

    It’s 1985 and Wall Street is teeming with greed and corporate excess. Enter today’s guest Nikola McMurtrie, who is on a mission to climb the greasy pole while dodging sleaze, corruption and toxic masculine competitiveness. Armed with magic (in her own head at least), a *perfect* New Yoik accent and disarming offers of cocaine, she’s on a mission to uncover the rat at the heart of an insider trading scheme. Will she succeed? You must listen to find out. Nikola’s show Mothman: A Romance Musical is currently (August 2026) playing at the Edinburgh Fringe. Find more about Mothman: A Romance Musical here: https://www.instagram.com/mothman_a_romance_musical And see more of Nikola’s work here: https://www.instagram.com/nikolamcm Era: Modern | 1985 CE | New York, USAFeaturing: Nikola McMurtrie, comedian, musician and dancer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    Wall Street, where greed is good, ft. Nikola McMurtrie

  5. 20 Jul

    Rasputin's Delicious Cyanide Cakes, ft Daniel McKeon

    St. Petersburg, December 1916. Grigori Rasputin has the ear of the Tsarina, the loathing of half the aristocracy, and roughly a fortnight left to live. Comedian Daniel McKeon drops into the middle of it under the gamertag PoisonNecker56, to find out what a circle of well-born gentlemen intend to do about the Holy Devil. Daniel's qualifications for imperial espionage: a half-remembered GCSE module, a genuine tolerance for vodka, an unbothered relationship with the cold, and a stated willingness to sell absolutely anyone out. Somewhere upstairs on the same street, the man everyone is whispering about is still very much alive. Rasputin was a Siberian peasant mystic who became the most hated man in Russia largely because he was the only person who could calm the haemophiliac Tsarevich. The court he attached himself to was already a slow-motion disaster: 1,300 people crushed to death at Nicholas II's 1896 coronation festival scrambling for free commemorative mugs, a wartime prohibition on vodka that wiped out roughly a third of state revenue overnight, and fifty jewelled Fabergé eggs going out at Easter while the bread queues lengthened. The legend has Rasputin eating enough cyanide to kill a dozen men, shrugging it off, absorbing several bullets and drowning in the Neva. The autopsy found no poison, no water in the lungs, and one contact gunshot wound to the forehead, which is a duller story and somehow a worse one. 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 | 1916 CE | St. Petersburg, Russia Featuring: Daniel McKeon — comedian, writer and storyteller (Boy Boss, Your Next Village Idiot) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    Rasputin's Delicious Cyanide Cakes, ft Daniel McKeon

  6. 7 Jul

    Teeth of the Revolution ft. Ruby Carr

    Paris, October 1789. The Bastille has fallen, the king and queen are under guard at the Tuileries, and bread prices are on every tongue. Into this powder keg steps comedian Ruby Carr, with one mission: get a Parisian dentist's revolutionary porcelain dentures in front of the Académie des Sciences before a rival surgeon-dentist can smear them as brittle frauds. Her cover story? A sugar-free confectioner newly arrived from Geneva, seeking dental expertise. Ruby's survival kit for revolutionary France: a winning smile she swears can make anyone do exactly what she wants, and a tin of sugar-free sweets for an age when most mouths were a disaster of rot. She installs herself as a Genevan lady of the top 2 percent and sets about charming a dentist who has every reason to distrust a stranger with peculiar manners. The problem is that this is Paris in the week after the March on Versailles, where accusing the wrong man of the wrong thing gets him dragged from his house by morning. Ryan takes the Game Master's chair (French accent very much included), and Claude is running realism strict. Whether British charm survives contact with a nervous, revolution-jittery Paris is the whole question. The real history is grim and fascinating in equal measure. The 18th century was a golden age for dentistry: Pierre Fauchard, the French surgeon crowned the father of modern dentistry, improvised his tools from watchmakers and jewellers and pioneered the porcelain dentures and braces that would define the field. By the 1780s Paris was perfecting the first real alternative to teeth carved from ivory or yanked from the mouths of the dead — the so-called Waterloo teeth, harvested from battlefields and cheerfully marketed as such. Ruby has a smile, some sweets, and a plan written in pencil. The birth of modern prosthetic dentistry has never looked less safe. 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 | 1789 CE | Paris, France Featuring: Ruby Carr — comedian, writer and director, and co-host of the Odd Jobs podcast. Her show BITE ME (Invisalign vs OCD) was nominated Best Show at Leicester Comedy Festival 2026. EPISODE LINKS Follow Ruby's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Ruby Carr: X 👉 @RubyICarr | Website 👉 https://www.rubycarrcomedy.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    Teeth of the Revolution ft. Ruby Carr

  7. 22 Jun

    Make America Great – The "true" story of the founding of the USA, ft Liam Heffernan

    As The United States of America celebrates 250 years, we've sent our operative undercover to meet the Founding Fathers and make a few key changes... Philadelphia, October 1774. The First Continental Congress is wrapping up its final sessions inside the Pennsylvania State House, and 56 of the most influential men in the colonies are filing out into the street — tricorn hats, righteous indignation, and a very tall Virginian named Washington who already looks like he's won something. Into this steps Abraham Starsen-stripes, a man who has arrived from the future with a musket, three pounds in his pocket, and an extremely ambitious CV. Liam Heffernan — podcast producer, self-described America obsessive, and the man behind "America: The Story of the USA" — has come on PastMaster to do one thing: become the first US president. His plan is to win over the founding fathers before Washington can consolidate power, using diplomacy, an eye-catching party trick, and a flexible definition of what counts as presidential gravitas. The Game Master notes that the path to the presidency typically runs through reputation and alliances, and probably not juggling. Liam disagrees. The First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia from September to October 1774, as tensions between the thirteen colonies and the British Crown approached breaking point. The Intolerable Acts, Parliament's punitive response to the Boston Tea Party, had united delegates from across the colonies in a way nothing else had managed. What they produced was a petition and a plan; what they didn't produce was a president. That role wouldn't exist for another fifteen years, which means there's technically still a vacancy, and technically still time to apply. 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 | 1774 CE | Philadelphia, United States Featuring: Liam Heffernan — podcast producer (host of America: The Story of the USA, Big Cheese at Mercury Podcasts) EPISODE LINKS Follow Liam's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Liam Heffernan: America: The Story of the USA podcast 👉 https://mercurypodcasts.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    Make America Great – The "true" story of the founding of the USA, ft Liam Heffernan

  8. 9 Jun

    Step aside Pokémon, it's Tulip Mania Time! ft Sallyann Fellowes

    Haarlem, the Dutch Republic, February 1637. Tulip Mania is at fever pitch, and comedian Sallyann Fellowes has been handed a single Semper Augustus bulb worth more than an Amsterdam townhouse. The job: sell it at auction for at least 5,000 guilders before sundown, pocket a fat cut, and get out before the most famous bubble in history finally pops. Sallyann's qualifications for surviving the floral gold rush: she's good at digging holes, brilliant at shouting her wares, and a self-confessed natural at choosing bright colours. Her actual plan is something else entirely. She decides the way to flog a priceless flower is to tell absolutely everyone she has it, swear them all to secrecy, and let the rumour do the selling. With the market wobbling and a day at most before the panic reaches Haarlem, the only question is whether a Pied-Piper sales pitch can outrun a crash that history already knows the ending to. Tulip Mania ran from 1634 to 1637, when the Dutch Republic had the highest per-capita income on Earth and a single flower bulb became a status symbol worth a fortune. The most prized varieties, the Admirals and the Lords, owed their flamed two-tone petals to a mosaic virus nobody understood at the time, and the rarest bulbs traded hands for the price of a canal house, a herd of livestock, or 15 years of comfortable living. It's widely called the first speculative market bubble: guilders changed hands in taverns over beer and tobacco, prices doubled on a whisper, and then in February 1637 the whole thing collapsed overnight. So what does a comedian do with a Semper Augustus the week before everyone discovers it's worthless? Exactly what you'd hope. 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: Early Modern | 1637 CE | Haarlem, NetherlandsFeaturing: Sallyann Fellowes — comedian (Leicester Square New Comedian of the Year, co-host of the Weird Biscuit podcast) EPISODE LINKS Follow Sallyanne's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Sallyann Fellowes: Weird Biscuit podcast GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    Step aside Pokémon, it's Tulip Mania Time! ft Sallyann Fellowes
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If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? Welcome to PastMaster, the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, hosts Ryan and Tan are joined by a special guest comedian who is sent back in time with nothing but their modern knowledge and the shirt on their back. Under the guidance of a benevolent robot Game Master, they navigate to a different era each episode and find out if they’ve got what it takes to reshape the past. Will it be historically accurate? Will any of it make sense? Will they master the past? Tune in to find out.

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