I very much enjoyed the Dopplegänger radio story, and I found myself especially enjoying the way it was told!

The program opened with a guest who could do imitations of Ira. I found it very confusing, because I am not very familiar with Ira so to me they did sound very much alike. In this way the program was able to immediately get the idea of a dopplegänger across, and to further set the tone for the reset of the show.

The whole idea of the story was that there was a rumor that pork bung was being passed off as calamari. A very interesting question, however the way the story was told was even more interesting. The speaker opened by talking about how he had heard the rumor form a friend, who had heard it from a farmer, who had heard it from a meat packing worker. The story went that there was a box of big bung labeled “Imitation Calamari”.

At this point there was an aside in which the speaker asked the question “Do you know what this means?”. It means that people somewhere are eating pig bung and enjoying it, and that is the punishment for not having a handle on where our food came from. This point was interesting, because it could to the sound of people dining at a restaurant. That cut really set the mode, and made me visualize what was occurring.

As the story continued when big questions were being asked, curious music play in the background (kind of like investigation music i guess). This also set the tone of the piece further in my opinion.

The way the speaker spoke also was a really nice part of the piece, he sounded like a genuine person, almost like a friend sharing with us an interesting story. It wasn’t a news story, it was just a fun conversation about an interesting curiosity. The way he spoke really kept me interested in the story, he was building up to things and alluding at other things. It was awesome!

Midway through the piece there was a very interesting paradigm shift in which the speaker talks about how he is actually rooting for the bung to be a passable substitute for calamari. Its interesting, because it made me as a viewer wonder how I felt about it, because at first I was disgusted, but then the speaker kind of led me around until I was thinking hmmmm that would be pretty cool if there was some truth to this story after all.

The climax of the story was setup very well. They had two plates one with fired bung and one with calamari, and the idea was for the people to guess which one was correct. They were recording this part. Now it came out perfectly that one guy thought one pile was the calamari while the other thought the other pile was a calamari, so they both tried their respective piles at the same time. That was too perfect of a setup, and in my opinion made me question if they had just made up that part? Because there was so much tension there, who had eaten the bung?? What did it taste like, it really brought me to the edge of my seat.

Another interesting thing I noted while listening to this piece was that the speaker would play some of his interviews, but then he would cut in his dialog about the interview, it was interesting in that we were learning more, but as a listener sometimes I found it confusing. Overall it was very interesting listening to the their techniques in telling this fascinating radio story!

[contact-form]