Chris Dobrowolski: Cardboard Tanks, Arctic Trips, and Fringe-Survival

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, screen rats.

Yes, I've still got a cold.

You could hear it in my nose.

I sound like a birbigb, or somebody else.

I don't know, who do I sound like?

I can't, I still sound like someone.

Today on Television Times, we're doing things a little bit differently.

In this episode, I talk to Chris Dobrowolski.

Now, he is an artist and a sculptor, and he does comedy sort of performance lectures.

He also has this current exhibition called Toy Stories, which is touring around the country.

Now, initially, this was supposed to just be a remote chat.

We couldn't get that to work.

So with Chris being an artist, I thought we'd do something a bit different.

So by digging through a big old drawer full of wires, I managed to sort of finagle a kind of connection between me sending him messages on Micah's normal, but also as a voice note on Beep, beep.

And him replying via Beep, beep.

So we've got this kind of back and forth voice notes podcasts for the most of it.

And at the end, I believe there will be a phone call.

I haven't yet to record it at this point, but it will be some kind of talk that we do have together, which I will try and mic up at the end.

It might be short.

We'll see what happens with that.

So that's what you're going to be listening to.

It's a bit different.

There'll be a bit less music in between and maybe less silly voices.

It's just a chat and it will be a bit odd at first, but I hope we can make something of it.

And with Chris being an artist, of course we should do it differently.

This is more of a weird conceptual podcast this week.

So try to think outside of the prism, the rectangle, the square, the square.

That's a good film by the way, all about art.

Everybody should see that film, fantastic.

So before we get to that, let's have a chat about art and modern art.

Is it shit?

Is it good?

Do you like what you like for the right?

And I'm talking bollocks, I don't know anything about art.

I can't have this discussion.

I know nothing.

I'm an absolute fucking heathen.

I'm just joking guys.

Art is art.

You like what you like, you don't like what you don't like.

I'm sure that's pretty much how it goes.

Not one of these people that can walk in a room and see a blank canvas on a wall for 80 grand and think that's anything other than bollocks.

But you know, each to their own, each to their own.

So when it became apparent that the remote recording wasn't going to work, I sent Chris the following message.

This is how it all began.

And I'll let you into every aspect of this podcast, even this part.

Okay, Chris, I've had an idea, because you're an artistic gentleman, what we could do instead of just sitting down and doing a direct chat, is we could do this via voice notes.

Now, if we do it via voice notes, we can also do it over a number of days.

So I could just send you a question a day, you can have a little think about it and then answer me back.

So it might be fun, might be a bit more original anyway.

So I can send you this voice note now.

And if you think this will work, then just answer this question.

I guess what we want from you first of all, is just a kind of little introduction about who you are, what kind of artists you are.

Just for the listener.

I don't know you, you're an unmet man, as I call them.

I like the idea of this, it's a bit different.

It'll be fun.

And it won't take any time out of your day.

If you're happy to like answer a question a day, for instance.

Well, before we get to Chris' question, we're gonna need our intro music and a funny sound effect, aren't we?

I should mention this week, I'm actually up in Edinburgh recording a bunch of these.

So that's why this one has been pre-recorded.

And that's why it's a little bit strange.

But anyway, enjoy the weirdness.

Art is the stored honey of the human soul, Theodore Dreiser.

Welcome to Television Times, a weekly podcast with your host, me, Steve Otis Gunn.

We'll be discussing television in all its glorious forms.

From my childhood, your childhood, the last 10 years, even what's on right now.

So join me as I talk to people you do know and people you don't about what scared them, what inspired them and what made them laugh and cry here on Television Times.

Hi, so my name's Chris Dobrowolski.

I'm an artist.

Well, my training is in artist, my training is in sculpture.

A lot of the work I've done over the years, especially in the early years, was vehicles.

So, for example, 30 years ago, when I was a student in the late 80s, early 90s, I built a boat from driftwood that I found in the River Humber and tried to escape from art college.

So I have a kind of love-hate relationship with art.

And a lot of the things, you know, like when you build a boat to escape from art college, then I built a pedal-powered car, for example.

When you make that sort of thing, they inevitably lend themselves to some sort of story, because they'll go on some kind of mini adventure.

There's always this tradition where you go into art colleges as a visiting lecturer to talk about your work.

And whenever I went into an art college to talk about my work, I'd always have these long-winded stories trying to explain what it was I did and why I did it, and mainly what went wrong.

So over the years, the storytelling has sort of taken over from the making.

So now what I do a lot is, instead of going into art colleges, now I go into like small theaters and art centers a lot and do these, well, I call them slide talks, but I think the official genre is a performance lecture, is what they're called.

So I do a lot of that to paying audiences, hopefully.

But sometimes I have to make things as well.

So like at the moment, I am in Stoke as an art technician helping to install this year's ceramics biennale, biennale rather, and the church.

So that's why it echoes, because I'm in a huge cavernous empty church.

So that's who I am.

Hi Chris, thanks so much for the intro.

I don't know a shit ton about art, and I have to put my hands up and say that upfront.

I have been to like the Tate Modern last year, and I took my kids and a lot of it I didn't understand, some of it I liked, I didn't know why.

My wife was a graphic designer in Canada, and she worked in one of the galleries there and showed me some quite odd stuff.

This might be a perfect time to go and have a look at some of Chris' work.

So I've supplied some links at the bottom of this episode.

So if you click on the Remnants of Utopia or the Austerity Miniature May Day Parade and others, you will see some of his work before we start talking about it.

I will also put a couple of pictures on Instagram.

So if you follow at TV Times Pod, you'll be able to see those too.

Your stuff I really am quite drawn to, because I loved all those kind of old toys and buses going around, televisions and stuff like that.

It just sort of pulls up my heartstrings a little bit.

And the Cold War rhetoric of some of it, I guess growing up in the same era as me, and all those kind of nuclear dreams and the fear of the three minute warning.

I mean, I can see that all in your work.

That's something I can observe, which is kind of probably quite obvious, but I am drawn to it for that reason.

And the scale electrics as well.

Oh my God, scale electrics for me was the present I never got, you know.

I always wanted to scale electrics.

And the only one I ever got was a kind of knockoff where the cars came off at the other end and didn't really do the thing it was supposed to do.

I think eventually there was one in my cousin's house in Milton Keynes and we used to go up to Milton Keynes and he had like the top of the range scale electrics.

And I was so envious, absolutely envious.

I always wanted one.

My little boy, my youngest is obsessed with buses.

So I showed him a couple of your videos of your art installations.

And they called installations your art exhibitions.

And he was drawn to them as well.

And I guess the only other thing I wanted to say was that your work with like televisions is quite good being on this podcast.

You've done that kind of thing.

And I wrote a musical version of this podcast.

There's that being, but I wrote something called Television Times in the nineties and I did set designs for them.

And they were just like sort of a whole front stage full of broken tallies and bits of old stuff.

And some of your art pieces really remind me of what I had for that vision.

So I'm drawn to a lot of it and I don't know anything.

So yeah, you can answer any of that or have a response to that and then we'll get on to some questions, some actual questions about television.

Right, unfortunately I'm back in the house now, so it's not quite as atmospheric and echoing as it was before.

There's the church.

Yeah, art, you know, I think, like I said, I think in the first message I sent you, I have a love-hate relationship with art, so I can probably identify with some of the things that annoy you about art.

A lot of it is rubbish.

Yeah, so I'm touring one of these performance lectures that I mentioned earlier called Toy Stories.

I try and illustrate some quite complicated things with toys.

The reason I like toys is that the art I do, it kind of like occupies this vague territory between real and unreal.

That's my kind of main obsession.

So Picasso had this famous line that I quote a lot where he says, Art is the lie that shows the truth.

The way I interpret that is that if you have a painting, for example, it's not the real thing.

It's an illustration of something, but it's also a kind of reflection of something in the real world.

So this reflection is supposed to then, you know, show you something about the real world that you hadn't noticed before.

So if you accept that there's a real world and an unreal world, the work that I do tends to occupy this weird kind of vague territory between the real and the unreal.

Toy cars, for example, you know, they're not real.

They're pretending to be real cars, but they're obviously also real objects.

So with this project I did with Skeletrics, for example, I sort of really played on that notion of halfway between being real and unreal.

And I built a giant Skeletrics set around a library and then spent two weeks photographing, well, meeting members of the public in the car park outside the library, photographing their cars and then turning the photographs into Skeletrics cars with them inside.

And then we had this huge race where, well, because the track went underneath all the library shelving and behind all the computers in the library so you can see them.

So you had to race them via a camera that was being towed behind a Skeletrics car on the back of a toy caravan.

I called it Selfie Slot Car Racing.

Now this, and there was also lots of like, all the librarians to do, pose for sort of cardboard cutouts of themselves, miniature cardboard cutouts of themselves.

So you see all the librarian staff as you go around the track in the camera, if that makes sense.

Anyway, the show that I'm doing starts with this, I don't know, socially engaged art project, but I take it to this ridiculous kind of self-obsessed egomaniac territory where I just start comparing the real world to, well the real world at the time was slightly peculiar because you had Boris Johnson in charge.

Famously doesn't tell the truth, so it's kind of like, well they always say they sort of like life imitates art, and for me it was kind of flick to switch in my head where the real world seemed more false than my stupid toys.

So that's what I've taken to the stage at the moment.

It's really interesting actually because I spoke to someone recently whose partner was a satirist and they had to give it up because they found the world impossible to satirize because it had become a parody of itself.

————————.

Talking about the real world and the unreal world, I was wondering, what would be a TV show that you saw as a kid, which actually opened that idea up to you?

What was it that you saw?

Maybe there was something you saw, maybe it was Rent a Ghost, maybe it was a show like that, that I watched, that showed you the difference between the real world and the unreal world and sparked your interest.

Is there a TV show that helped with that?

Yeah, TV shows that deal with the unreal and the real world.

I did get some thought to this, actually.

And yeah, one of the things that stuck in my mind was a children's program from the early 70s called Camberwick Green.

It was a bit like Trump, I think.

I'm sure it was like the same people that make Trumpton, which is a little bit more famous than Camberwick Green.

But with Camberwick Green, I think they were like animated figures that kind of like lived their lives each episode.

But it was really strange because it was bookended by this music box.

So every episode of Camberwick Green would start, they would introduce a character, but they would introduce the character by having them appear out of this really weirdly colored red and black music box that rotated as this music plays.

And of course, at the end of the episode, the same character would say goodbye and then disappear into this like dark hole of a music box.

So it was kind of like, I think that the setting for the music box was particularly weird because it was kind of like sitting on a desk somewhere.

I think there was like some spectacles or a magnifying glass and a lamp.

It was kind of like trying to say that this was a, in some ways the kind of the setting and its banality was trying to say that it was the real world and everything that happened to the character afterwards was this other world.

But of course, as you're watching it as a, how I would have been a four year old or a five year old, it's kind of like you're faced with this sort of like, where is the person going?

Where does the music box lead you to?

Which I remember finding quite terrifying as a kid.

I just looked at the opening credits to that show, Campbell and Gunn.

I definitely remember it.

I don't think I was an avid fan, but it certainly sparked something in me.

What I noticed mostly about it is, yeah, you're right, it's sitting on the desk and there's a magnifying glass.

It's obviously someone's office or whatever.

It's a lamp.

And the voiceover is very RP, isn't it?

It's very that 1940s kind of voiceover that like the guy who did Mr.

Men had quite a posh voice, didn't he?

That sort of 1940s, hello.

Welcome to Cambridge Green.

There's a, this is a music box.

It hides a secret.

Who's in there today?

What could it be?

You know, it's that kind of old fashioned 70s voice.

You don't really hear anymore, but it was all over children's telly at the time.

I used to watch something called Pickens or Pipkins, was it?

And Hartley the Hare was this like fucking, looked like it came out of a skip.

And it's got like two teeth and he's like, hey, I'm Hartley the Hare.

You probably remember that.

And there was a pig in there that was quite a, quite shockingly grotesque, should I say.

A lot of that stuff is very, it comes out the minds of druggie people in the 70s, late 60s, all of that stuff.

Magic Roundabout, Cambridge Green, it all looks pretty mad.

There was a show called Magic Box or something like that as well, which had a kind of music box kind of opening with some kind of, like, I want to say, like soft focus, coloured lens changes, all kind of quite weird, like Top of the Popsie, you know.

Chris knows exactly what this TV show is, and he'll tell us in a minute.

Because a lot of your work is dealing with those Cold War themes and that sort of feeling of like imminent, I don't know, oppression or death or destruction or something.

There's this threat hanging over everything.

And I wondered if, like me, there was something that when you were a kid that you saw, probably before you should have, that sort of shit the life out of you on television.

That could be a news story that you shouldn't have heard.

It could be a TV show that was way too creepy and you shouldn't have seen it.

I just wondered what that would be.

And I'd imagine the era that we both grew up in, there's an abundance to choose from.

Yeah, I think the one that was called Picture Box, I think was the one you're thinking of, because it was a program for schools.

So it was like a daytime television program, and had a particularly spooky theme tune to it, I remember.

Yeah, Cold War, I suppose, I mean, the most terrifying thing in the early 80s, I suppose, people of our age would have watched was the film Threads, post-apocalyptic nuclear apocalyptic bombing of, I think it was Sheffield set in, I know it was set in Sheffield, because about five years ago, I did a gig for one of these performers lectures in Sheffield.

Theatre Delicatessen and their venue at the time was actually famously closed down Woolworths in the middle of Sheffield.

It was famously part of a photo montage when the bomb drops in the film Threads.

And you see, well you don't see it, what you see is the front of Woolworths in Sheffield and then like a nuclear explosion.

So they always say it's the Woolworths that was blown up in Threads was where I did one of my gigs.

There was another piece of work that I made that I'll send you a link to later, which was called a miniature austerity May Day parade.

So it's like one of those red square parades full of trucks carrying adjit prop posters.

It's like a toy version.

So it's a lot of old toy lorries driving up and down to this kind of revolutionary music.

So obviously because I got this Polish name that was from Eastern Poland.

So it was the bit that wasn't invaded by the Nazis.

It was a bit that was invaded by the Soviet Union.

So we have this weird relationship to communism in our family because the dad's family was sent to Siberia by Stalin's NKVD.

And then they escaped when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union as well.

And then my dad went through the war fight in Nazis, but couldn't go back to post-war communist Poland.

But then, of course, he would have spent his time in sort of like the post-war Britain with all of the benefits of progressive left-wing governments from the late 40s and 60s.

When I made that piece of work, the miniature austerity May Day Parade, I read a lot about it and someone was explaining a lot of 19th century British history, which was all about making lots of concessions to working class people.

It was basically the upper class or the middle class were afraid of something like a French revolution happening in this country.

And also through the 20th century, Britain was always afraid of like a sort of Russian kind of revolution happening in this country.

So there were lots of different things to placate the working class through the 20th century.

But of course, now that we don't have this kind of external communist threat, there's nothing, there's absolutely no reins on the right sort of like, you know, basically making people from a working class background poorer and poorer and poorer.

You have this art piece called Hook Van Hollen to Vladivostok.

And I was reading about why you made that piece and your affinity with train sets and the fact that your dad went on a train and it only went in one direction, they never came back again.

Wow, that was all very heavy indeed.

But unfortunately, the thing I thought of was my own trip.

I have actually done the Trans-Siberian Railway.

In 2003, I have an audio diary of it, weirdly, where I literally did go on the train from Liverpool Street to Harwich, took the boat to the Hookah Holland and then made my way to Moscow.

And then I went across via St.

Petersburg.

I went all the way across to Vladivostok in a number of weeks, stopping off in Siberia in places that your dad would have actually been imprisoned, basically.

I'm there, like, you know, in some mad Russian fucking nightclub in 2003 in Siberia, in, like, Omsk or wherever.

And, yeah, floating around on Lake Baikal and staying in little hillside cabins.

And, yeah, it's a shame, isn't it?

Because now, obviously, people won't be able to do that because Russia's out of bounds and will be for a very long time, I'm sure.

I had to research myself there quickly, the NKVD Stalinist police force, because I always get it mixed up with a exhibition place in Moscow that I visited, it was called, I think it's like...

The VDNKH is the exhibition of achievements of national economy.

It's an exhibition centre basically glorifying all the things that was good about communism.

The agricultural stuff and blah-blah-blah for the people, and there's huge statues of everybody.

But my enduring image of that for myself was going there in 2003 and finding that inside every single one of those memorials were people selling tat, silly little fucking toys that you'd find in Poundland or whatever.

And it was just like, whoa, I'm no communist.

I'm certainly not right-wing.

But I was just like sitting there going, okay, now if they'd have realized what ended up in this place, you know, just commercial capitalist garbage, plastic, plastic, plastic.

So now with the power of technology, we can travel 20 years back in time to the year 2003 where I'm actually walking around the VDNKH in Moscow.

Here I am at the VDNKH, which is an old Soviet area that was built to show how amazing Russia was at that time, or the USSR, and all its achievements.

It's pretty grand.

It's very, very reminds me of Rome.

But the truth is, it's just covered these days in markets and capitalist shit.

At the moment, it's raining quite hard, so I'm taking cover.

But in the building I'm standing in, it's enormous.

It's just full of Sony products, and some of them probably aren't even real.

I'm no communist.

I don't agree with anything that happened here.

You can't help but feel that it all went wrong, and with Lenin's statue outside, it's just kind of a bit weird that they're just selling western shit now.

As I said before, it's quite a depressing place, almost like seeing the ruins of Rome covered in quicksaves.

Anyway, what if we were wrong?

So, Chris, yeah, it's intriguing to see your pieces and read the history behind them.

And I can actually physically feel a connection to it myself.

And also, I'm the same age as you pretty much, and I grew up with the Hornby train set.

I really wanted a Hornby train set, and my granddad got me one.

And we had that in the lounge, and I just remember putting all the little platforms together and how they clicked together and how it felt.

And, oh man, I got the Flying Scotsman.

I really wanted a Flying Scotsman.

They got all the carriages, and you hook them up.

It didn't quite hook up very well.

But yeah, there's a lot of affinity with that stuff for me.

I do feel very connected to it.

And thank you for the heads up on Picturebox.

I think you said it was.

I just saw the intro.

And yes, that is the show.

And for some reason, the presenter whose name escapes me is just standing there with a kind of weird smirk on his face.

Everything in the 70s just seems fucking creepy.

It all just seems creepy.

It's like a beginning of a horror film, all of it.

Okay, Chris, another television question.

This time, could you think of something you watched when you were a kid that was absolutely inappropriate for your age?

Right.

Inappropriate television programs.

Now, I think this sort of is a good answer, but it's maybe not.

I'm cheating slightly.

It's a kind of sideways, inappropriate television.

And I'm also cheating because this is told me second hand by my older brother.

But it was to do with my dad and his experience in the war and Jackanory.

So sometime in the early 70s, there was this episode of Jackanory where they talked about Wojciech the Bear.

So you've probably not heard this story.

It's a very Polish thing.

Basically, people like my dad, when they left the Soviet Union, they had to take this very kind of convoluted journey via Tashkent in Kazakhstan, across the Caspian Sea and then into Iran.

Then from Iran, I think it was Iraq, Syria, and then they were trained in Palestine as it was in Israel today, obviously.

Some group of these exiled Polish people managed to pick up a bear cub en route, and they tamed this bear and it became this pet.

And then this bear then went on to be this regimental mascot.

And apparently, there's all these sort of stories about this famous bear, and there are stories that they even trained this bear to carry ammunition around as the army went through into Italy.

At one point, they had to get the bear from North Africa to Italy.

There was no animals allowed on the ship, so they officially put the bear down in the paperwork as an official soldier.

So the bear became an actual recruit in this exiled Polish army, so they could get it on the ship.

And then the story goes on that the bear, kind of like people said, it's starting to think it was a human being, it would get drunk in a sort of like stereotypical Polish kind of way.

The bear liked cigarettes, but it used to eat the cigarettes.

And there are loads of sort of stories about this bear.

And it's quite sad, I think, in the end, because when the war finished, they took the bear to Scotland with them, because a lot of these Polish people couldn't go back to Poland like my dad.

And there was one section went to Scotland, and they took the bear with them, and they donated the bear to Edinburgh Zoo.

And I think the bear was around right up until the early 60s.

And they say that every now and again, these Polish soldiers were going to visit the bear.

And the bear would be caught, was like, by this point, what they reckon was depressed, but when people used to turn up and speak Polish to it, or play Polish music, suddenly the bear would become animated again.

And they used to throw it cigarettes, and it would suddenly become happy.

Anyway, this is that was the long story about this boy, Jack the Bear.

And somebody wrote it out as a book.

And then the book became one of those stories they read out every, or I suppose it was a bridge version, on Jack and Ori over the course of a week.

And my older brother said that when he was a kid, he used to, he listened to this every day.

And I think it was probably, I don't know, as a Friday, let's say, my dad must have come home early from work, whilst Jack and Ori was still on the television.

And he was half listening to this story, a very sad story for children.

The other thing about my dad is he learnt his, my mum always says my dad learnt his English on the building site.

So when my dad finally caught on to this, what Jack and Ori was about on this particular episode and the penny drops apparently interrupted my brother's children's television watching by saying, It's that fucking horrible fucking bear that was so fucking numb.

That fucking bear used to fucking rip open all our fucking tents, it would fucking steal all that fucking food and fuck and it was a fucking vicious, horrible fucking bear.

And my brother said he completely ruined the store of Jack and Ori.

That's a really great anecdote and actually very, very funny.

Wojciech the Bear, I'm going to check that out.

I did look on Wikipedia, there was a little bit of information on it.

I used to work with a guy called Wojciech.

I used to work with these two Polish guys.

One was called, he called himself Dave.

I didn't know his name was Wojciech for a very, very long time.

He had a brother who made the pizzas.

And the only anecdote I've got about that is not great.

He was a little strange, this fella.

I'm just telling you for fun.

I don't know if I'll put this in.

But he was making the pizzas in Pizza Hut when I worked there as a delivery driver in about 1999, 2000.

And I went up to him one day.

His name was Pete.

And I said, Pete.

His name wasn't Pete.

But I said, Pete, what were you listening to?

And he was like jingling about with his headphones on.

And I realized that the cable was just dangling.

There was nothing on the end of it.

He wasn't listening to anything.

And yeah, I don't think he was very well.

But Dave was really, really influential in my life for Wojciech.

He was one of the guys that told me, like, what are you doing here?

Why are you working here?

You don't need to work here.

Go and work in theater.

Go and work in sound.

Do something, you know.

He sort of influenced me to, like, leave that kind of lazy job and go and sort of, you know, chase something a bit more involved.

I mean, I don't know what I'm talking about.

Two Polish guys just because you're a dance Polish.

I don't have a lot of links to it.

I think I've only been to Poland twice, as far as I recall.

And the first time would have been on my Trans-Siberian trip in 2003.

My most endearing memory of it is finding a pizza express, which was called Pizza Marsato and having myself a Fiorentina, about as adventurous as I got back then.

So with that in mind, let's go back to 2003 and hear me walking around Warsaw.

Here we are in Warsaw, Sunday the 27th of July 2003.

So far, Warsaw has been pretty good.

I spent yesterday getting very hot in my jeans walking around.

So hot here, must be 30 something.

So yeah, now I'm walking through the park up to the old town.

Just been up the highest building in Warsaw, which was 30 floors.

But it might not be the highest actually these days, but it was built by the Soviets as a present to the Polish, which was a really nice building.

It looks a bit like the Empire State Building.

Anyway, so yeah, so far Poland has been pretty damn good.

Here today, wandering around, going up to the old town.

I went there yesterday, but today I'm going up there proper.

Let's have a good look around, know what I'm looking at sort of thing.

And tonight, I'm on the night train to Lithuania.

So that should be a laugh.

We rarely have sirens around here, that's strange.

I was already to ask Chris a question, a television question, when he texted me to say he had yet another inappropriate story about something he saw a bit earlier than he should have.

So let's see what he has to say about that.

This other television program I watched when I was about 11, I think, in 1979, and it was called Kitty Heart Returns to Auschwitz.

So it was an hour-long documentary about Auschwitz survivors return to Auschwitz with their son, I think, in 1978.

Yes, obviously she recounts all of her experiences there.

Now the strange bit, well, why it was inappropriate was that I think that following summer, I had a Polish cousin who came to visit.

We had all these Polish relatives on my dad's side who we'd never met.

So my dad never went back to Poland until 1980.

And the first contact we had was this cousin, Andrew, who came over just surprised, just turned up on the doorstep.

My mum answered the door and there was a tall, skinny man on the doorstep.

We're all really tall and thin in my family.

And we worked out this was a relative and he proceeded to stay the whole summer.

Anyway, he managed to persuade my dad that it was safe for him to go back and visit Poland for the first time since the war, the following summer in 1980.

So that was the reason we, my dad went back.

I mean, I think my dad and mum and dad had had friends who had gone back to Poland in the 50s, early 50s, I think.

One guy had gone back in the early 50s.

Then Stalin was still alive and he vanished.

He was obviously bumped off by the secret police.

So my dad was determined he wasn't ever going to go back there.

Anyway, cousin Andrew turned up and persuaded us it was safe.

And I think once he persuaded my dad that we were going to go back.

Then he...

I actually shared a bedroom with his cousin Andrew as well for that whole summer, which was really exciting.

Anyway, because he was a lot older than me and he was like, he had all the exciting stories about the world and telling me stuff in broken English.

So then he started to say, what do you want to go and see in Poland?

Because you're going to be coming next summer on a visit.

And of course, aged 11, your idea of the things that you wanted to do and see were basically as seen on TV.

Anything you saw on television was what you wanted to go and experience in real life.

And of course, Poland never, ever featured on the television.

So the only thing that I could associate with Poland and the TV was basically Kitty Hart's return to Auschwitz.

And so the first thing I said was, can we go and visit Auschwitz?

So not from any kind of like moral perspective, but just because it was cool, I'm ashamed to say.

So sure enough, a year later, that summer, we arrived in Poland, saw and met all these relatives we've never seen before.

And then about a few days in, a week into the holiday trip, there was this planned excursion by train from the look of all these Polish relatives all lived in the north of Poland and Auschwitz is in the south.

So we all en masse, well, about half a dozen of us made this trip to Auschwitz purely on the basis that that's what I really wanted to do when I was 11.

Now, the odd bit about it was that Poland doesn't have the same or especially in those days, didn't have the same sort of reverential relationship to the Holocaust that the rest of the world did or a lot of the world did.

So at Auschwitz, when we got there, there was a souvenir shop, would you believe?

And I can always remember, I can remember even, I would have been 12 then.

I even remember then there was something inappropriate about these souvenirs.

You used to get those little pennants or flags, sort of like a pennant on a stick coming down to a point.

And I distinctly remember you could buy in the Auschwitz souvenir shop, this drawing.

It was like a flag basically, with a picture of an emaciated woman carrying a dead baby in concentration camp uniform that you could buy to either hang in the back window of your car or obviously on your bedroom wall.

I knew it was bad and I had nothing to do with it, even aged 12.

But years and years later, my mum told me, for some reason we were talking about, we must have been talking about it.

And she did buy a souvenir that I must have somehow put out of my memory.

Years ago, in the 70s, used to be able to buy these like, what, they're like a little slide viewer, a novelty slide viewer in the shape of a television.

And I think she'd gone to America to visit her sister in 1977 and come back with these, like a blue and a red plastic miniature television that you click the bottom.

And as you look through this little hole and held it up to the light, you've got different views of these different places you went to in America.

Every kind of like tourist destination sold them.

And in the souvenir shop at Auschwitz, she'd seen one of those and just impulsively bought it to add to her collection.

And I'd forgotten it existed until about 10 years ago when it came up in conversation.

And she produced it from a drawer in her bedroom, this novelty pink television souvenir slide viewer of Auschwitz.

And I've got a picture of it.

I'm gonna send it to you because it does have to be seen to be believed.

Wow, Chris, I saw the picture of the souvenir from Auschwitz and I actually thought, I thought it was one of your art pieces that you'd actually made.

I cannot believe that was a real thing that you could buy.

That does seem pretty strange.

I have been to Krakow, but I haven't been to Auschwitz.

I was there on my own about four years ago and I decided it wasn't something I should do on my own.

It should be something I do with my wife's family because they're Jewish.

And I thought it's something that, you know, I don't know if she wants to do it, but it's something I guess you should see, right?

I mean, I've been to the museum in Hiroshima below the site of where the atomic bomb was let off in 1945.

And that was a tricky and hard thing to see and witness.

And it felt very, very real.

It made me very, very fucking angry.

I've also been to the museum in Wilhelmstraße in Berlin.

Topography Museum, I think they call it, something like that.

There's a lot of information there about people who were taken and terrible things done to them.

And I mean, you do have to see these things in your life, but they are so shocking, it's very hard to shake.

But the idea that there was like, you know, souvenir imagery of terrible things.

I mean, you don't go to Vietnam and get a poster of the girl with the skin falling off her or the napalm girl, you know.

I mean, it's just fucking horrific to think of.

I guess it was a different time, right?

They had different ideas and different things to worry about.

Probably just trying to make money to keep the thing going.

But yes, very interesting, very dark, hard to make a silly swerve into a television question now.

I mean, this is quite family-orientated in your end, and it's really, really interesting to hear all these stories.

And, you know, this is maybe a bit more of a serious one than I was expecting.

But to be honest, I know it's a little uncomfortable to listen to, and, you know, these stories aren't great.

It's the worst side of the human race, after all.

But I think it's important, and I think people should hear it.

And especially in a time where disinformation is rife and people are pushing all kinds of agendas, I think it's important that we can see where it goes when it goes really fucking wrong.

Oh, yeah, something else I wanted to mention.

Way back in, I think it was the year 2000 or 2001, I went to Dachau.

I wasn't there for any particular reason.

I was just simply on holiday, and it was around New Year time.

And I remember seeing a very, very uncool poster, something that is incredibly inappropriate.

And this was a poster.

Or an extremely popular fast food chain.

Now, it was on the road to the Concentration Camp Museum.

And this poster, I believe, for one of the big chains, I'm not sure if it was beep, beep, beep, or beep, beep, beep.

But it definitely said something along the lines of the second best thing to visit in Dachau.

It was a very, very bad form.

Why should their marketing have any concerns?

I mean, they're just using mass genocide to sell burgers.

And now back to Chris, who has something to tell us that's not completely unrelated to what we were just talking about.

So, an earlier show that I wrote was called, or an earlier performance lecture that I wrote, was called All Roads Lead to Rome.

What this was about was, my dad bought this new car in 1967 when my mum was pregnant with her second child, and I was the second child.

So basically, this car has been in the family ever since I was born, and I could never part with it.

I kept it for 40 years, and then eventually did this art project in it where I took the car to Italy.

So the car's got all of these family memories, and there's lots of photographs of me as a baby with it in the family photograph album.

And I took it to all these places where my dad had had his life-threatening, horrific experiences in World War II in the Italian campaign.

And I essentially went to all these places I'd heard about, my dad told me about.

And one of the most significant things he said was that at the end of the war, when the partisans killed Mussolini, they brought the body back to Milan and then famously strung the body of Mussolini and his girlfriend and several other members of the fascist government.

They strung the bodies upside down from the canopy of an Esso petrol station.

And obviously, with it being a petrol station, it was quite significant because the project was about the car.

So one of the places we had to go was this square called Piazzale Loretto in Milan.

Naturally, the place has changed a lot since 1945.

And it's now a big, busy interchange, sort of giant, complicated roundabout.

And so I filmed everything from the car window as we drove around the roundabout and then pieced it together with Google Street View and the historic photographs to try and find where the petrol station used to be.

It had been knocked down many years ago.

And I eventually worked out that where Mussolini had been hanging from the canopy of a petrol station is now a McDonald's.

Of course it is.

Why wouldn't it be?

One example of how the times move on.

I mean, I've read...

Have I got this right?

I'm not sure I've got this right.

Above Hitler's bunker is now a Chinese restaurant.

It's what he would have wanted.

See I'm just taking my subserv now and ask you something that I think you might be able to answer quite well.

I'm going to ask you a question, I think it will chime with you, because you are an inventive man, often using motors and whatnot in your pieces.

This is a new question, I haven't asked it before.

If you could take any invention from a television show and bring it into reality, what would it be?

So again, Steve, I'm going to answer your question in a bit of an indirect way about recreating something that was invented for television and bringing it into the real world.

Because I actually kind of did do that, but very vicariously through a close friend of mine.

I had this very good friend at art college called Giles.

And many years after we'd left art college and we were struggling artists, there was this point where my friend Giles said, I'm really fed up with making art.

And then we try and put it in an art gallery and try and sell it to other people and no one's interested.

So what I've decided to do, Chris, is do what you do and just make stuff I've always wanted.

I've always wanted a Dalek, Chris.

So you can get the plans off the internet is what Giles told me.

So he set about making himself this Dalek.

What they are is just like they're on wheels and you climb inside and they're made out of three sections.

So you have like a bottom section, which is sort of like the Davros section, then a middle bit that comes up to your chin and then the tank bit that goes over your head.

So he made my friend Giles, he made this whole thing and then just had no idea what to do with it until somebody saw it in his studio and said, oh, that'll be perfect for the performance art evening we have at this thing.

It was called Cabaret Melancholique or something.

It's a club in the East End of London and they asked him to come and perform.

And the thing is, my friend Giles, we met on a sculpture course and he's not a performer in any way, shape or form.

So he round me up and said, Chris, you should have been asked to perform at Cabaret Melancholique.

I was wondering if you'd give me a few pointers.

And I said, I said on the, this is on the telephone.

I said, Giles, well, I'm flattered obviously that you said that my opinion is that important.

So we can arrange to meet up and I'll come over and we'll spend some time in your studio, have a bit of a brainstorming session.

You know, I've got a few ideas.

Maybe we can introduce one or two other props.

I think it'll be really good after kind of like half a day.

I think we'll come up with a kind of 10 minute routine.

That'll be perfect.

And Giles said, I'm on in 30 minutes.

And of course I naturally said to him on the phone, you're on your own, you idiot.

Anyway, I didn't hear from him for about an hour.

And then he texted me back saying that he'd got a standing ovation.

I think what had happened is he got in a Dalek and just, his routine happened spontaneously.

He got in panicked and it was just basically, I'd describe it as Doctor Who meets Mr.

Blobby.

And he just careered into the audience and just knocked people flying.

And people loved it.

And then he just got inundated with all these other offers to take his Dalek to these other kind of like avant-garde events.

I think he was, he never got paid for any of this, no stress, didn't even get paid transport.

He doesn't drive either.

I think one of the places he went to was in somewhere out in Hackney, I think it was, which was about three miles from his studio.

And he pushed it, pushed it, got somebody to help him push it through London to turn up and do a similar event.

Anyway, then he asked me if I would be his roadie, if you liked, at the next gig that he was signed up for.

By this point, he's got transport.

And he said, all you have to do, Chris, is help me get into the Dalek and get me on to the dance floor, because obviously you've got to get people out of the way, and then also give my CD.

So he's got a musical accompaniment to this thing, in the end, give my music to the DJ.

So I thought, great.

Anyway, so I'm in the dressing room with my friend and he's getting in his Dalek, he's put the first section on, the Davros section.

Then I have to lift the second bit over him that comes up to his chin.

And then I could tell he was going through this kind of fright or flight process in his head, you know, he was getting stage fright.

And of course he's in a Dalek, no one could see him or anything.

And the first part of his procedure, he says, let's go to my berg.

And he had like four cans of beer and I had to give him beer to drink whilst he was, you know, just before he put the lid on the Dalek.

So he was on his third can and he says, okay, he was deep breathing and kind of centering himself.

And I put the top on and then I was away.

So I sort of like went out and sort of part of the crowd, sort of like make way for the Dalek, he's behind me.

I gave the CD to the DJ and he was off and he just sort of like shuffled backwards and forwards on the dance floor.

And then at one point there's a gun that is fixed to a CO2 fire extinguisher and he sets that off and it makes a lot of noise and a lot of gas escaping into this venue.

And people absolutely loved it.

They were screaming, shouting, all the phones came out, they were photographing, it was a massive hit.

I was quite surprised.

Anyway, then the music finished, now to get him back into the dressing room.

Make way for the Dalek, make way for the Dalek.

And now I've got to get him out of the Dalek.

So I took the top section off, the kind of tank turret bit and his head's there and he was ash and white.

And he was making this kind of painful breathing noise, a sort of like.

There's an inhaler.

He was having an asthma attack.

So then I had to sort of like find his inhaler in his bag and give him the inhaler while he's still inside.

He sort of goes, yes, it does happen most times I do this.

And then get him out.

And so, yeah, that was my experience of actually bringing some from, from an invention from television into the real world.

Thank you.

No, thank you Chris for that amazing anecdote.

It is really surprising how often Doctor Who comes up in this podcast.

I would not have thought that it would come up so much in just the few episodes that we have done so far, was it 15, 16 episodes.

It comes up all the time, but never as a prop.

So that's pretty cool.

What fresh hell is this?

What kind of racket is going on?

Hello Chris, how are you?

I'll take a photo of what I've got rigged up here.

It looks absolutely mental.

I was trying to work out how to record a phone call and I realized quite late that it's illegal.

I think it's massively illegal.

So you have to kind of work out how to do it.

Yeah, apparently you can't just like record it from a phone or it's called tapping, isn't it?

I guess.

I'm not sure if I phoned up one of Murdoch's newspapers, they'd, you know, walk me through it.

So yeah, thanks.

Thanks for doing Television Times Podcast, as we like to call it.

I just wanted to talk to you so we can have at least a couple of minutes of like back and forth and see how you feel about it.

And it's very different to the normal ones I do, Chris.

It's all weird.

I even found my old trans-Siberian diary and I put a couple of excerpts of that in when we were talking about Poland and Russia.

So, you know, it was all kind of worked out in a very strange way.

I didn't realize how much of my life revolved around television until I was pressed into answering the questions.

Yeah, it's like, it's sort of in the background of things, isn't it?

You're talking about a completely different subject, but it's kind of the kernel of the idea of what you're talking about.

And so many things I could visualize because I've been to all these places and stuff.

So it was like really, really cool to listen to you.

Yeah, yeah.

Because you mentioned Hiroshima as my only one of the texts, not funnily enough.

I went there as well about 20 years ago.

Yeah, it's horrible, isn't it?

I'll never forget seeing this.

Yeah, no, no, no, no, I know that museum as well.

It was, yeah, well, I went with a, I had a friend who's actually from Hiroshima and he was, he took me there, but it was, yeah, most of it's full of, I think, people's personal possessions, isn't it?

Because they couldn't find bodies, but they were finding, you know, bits that represented people.

And then years later, they donated them all to the museum, so yeah, very particularly poignant.

They knew they were going to get bombed, but they thought it was going to be a conventional bombing.

So they needed to demolish buildings to put fire breaks around the important buildings.

And the only manpower they had left were school children.

So all the school children were in the center of Hiroshima doing this demolition work.

It's absolutely horrific.

I remember seeing like, I just remember this satchel.

It was the items were fused together, weren't they?

It was like a sort of a watch fused to a leather satchel and someone's shoe fused to a rock or something.

It was weird.

It was all really horrible.

Absolutely awful.

I went out that night and I bought a Yamaha silent guitar from some Japanese music shop in some room full of tatami mats and wrote a song about it because I was just, I had to get something out.

You know, it's just something in me that needed to come out after seeing that.

It's horrible.

I mean, I haven't been to, I said Auschwitz or anything, but like afterwards, I sort of remembered that I'd been to Tung Els Look Prison as well, which is in Cambodia, the one where the Killing Fields is.

Pretty, that's not, that kind of, I guess is probably what Auschwitz was like when you were a kid.

I mean, it's just as it is.

And there's still blood and holes and blood on the walls and is not sanitized in any way.

There's no gift shop.

I was in Korea.

You do like a tourist trip to the border with North Korea.

Yeah.

And I was quite horrified to discover when I got there, there was, there's a fun fair.

Get off the coach and there's like a carousel.

Yeah, I've been there too, fortunately, unfortunately, I've done that trip.

And I said, you're not allowed, you have a little UN briefing beforehand, don't you?

Suddenly that it's on you if you, anything happens while you're there because, you know, it's volatile.

And they said, absolutely no photos.

So immediately I snuck a camera, it started snapping away.

But they have these, I don't know if they had it when you were there, but they had this like, like almost like a funicular train that goes under into the tunnels, you know, the the sort of tunnels that the North Koreans dug underneath the South.

No, I didn't see that.

When did you go there then?

What year did you go?

I was there about five years ago.

Maybe it's gone.

That was 2003.

Oh, right.

Have we got rid of it?

I didn't see a track.

I went to the tunnel, the incursion tunnel, they called it, but I didn't see a train.

It looked like Disneyland.

All these Americans got in it and they went down this tiny hole in a tube underground.

And I looked at it and I thought, yes, it's not for me.

Maybe I got the budget tour.

I think maybe I was at Universal Studios career and I didn't realize.

I just remember lots of signs telling people, be careful, there's mines everywhere.

And a couple of idiotic tourists jumping over the fence to take a sort of peace photo or whatever.

Yeah, I saw the minefield in the Falklands.

So I went to the Falklands once and interestingly, in the Falklands, they realized that a lot of area that's mined, they had a lot of land and not many people.

And they decided that it's quite dangerous, it cost a lot of resources to remove the minefields.

And they kind of decided that it would be more beneficial for other places in the world to have those resources to clear their mines, places where there was a lot more, there was a dense population.

And they said, we'll just leave our minefields.

We think that money would be spent otherwise.

She's very magnetic and stuff.

And they also followed that up with, and also our minefields are very good for tourism.

Who laid the mines in the Falklands?

Argentina.

It was Argentina left behind in the 80s.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Still there to this day.

I think I knew that.

Well, I kind of think of that as more of a sort of skirmish, like not a full on war.

I mean, it was, they call it the last colonial war, didn't they?

My only knowledge of the Falklands is via some story about Prince Andrew.

So I'll probably leave that one.

He went there, didn't he?

Oh, yeah, he did.

He was a helicopter pilot, wasn't he?

Oh, yeah, helicopter pilot.

As he kept saying in his interview.

Yeah, yeah.

So he's the only man that could stand on one of those Argentinian mines and not sweat.

She sent him there.

Anyway, we've been talking way too long.

Not too long, but you know, Chris is on his lunch hour and I just want to sort of say a couple of things.

I had no idea where it was going to go.

Definitely didn't think we'd be talking about Prince Andrew in the Falklands.

So that's what I like about this one.

It just goes wherever the fuck it goes.

It's hilarious.

All right, Chris, well, thanks for doing the pod.

You can listen to it next Wednesday.

Thanks, Chris.

Maybe I'll meet you one day.

Oh, I hope so.

We'll do this again.

All right, bye.

Well, if you've got this far, you can probably guess that I'm just going to delve quickly back into that audio diary from 2003 and try and find a little bit of me in Hiroshima.

Here I am in my room in Hiroshima.

It's a Tami mat.

It's very Japanese.

So it's a really simple room.

It's just like, it's not like the Riken that I stayed in in Hakone.

It's much smaller, but it's, you know, traditional Japanese accommodation.

It's just a futon and a room.

There's a telly, as always.

And there's air conditioning, which took a while to get working, but at least it's on now.

Because when I walked in, it was like a fucking sauna in here.

And I thought I was gonna die.

Well, that was my conversation with Chris Dobrowolski.

What more can I say?

Those were some quite interesting answers.

It took quite the turn, I wasn't expecting any of that.

I hope you enjoyed the episode, it was a little different from all the others, but sometimes you just gotta change it up.

And now to today's outro track.

So as I mentioned in my phone call, I wrote a song called Hiroshima Song, while I was actually at the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima.

Now, I was really affected that day, and I just started singing this song into a microphone that I was walking around with.

I think it was a mini-displayer.

And I used to just make up songs as I went along, and then I worked them all out afterwards.

This was not one that I wrote in any way on a musical instrument.

It was just in my head.

Got it down.

When I got to Tokyo, I recorded it.

So this was recorded in 2003, after my Trans-Siberian journey.

So this is Hiroshima Song.

Oh man, I was angry that day.

Someone wrote something really shitty in the visitor book, and it really pissed me off, and it kind of inspired that song, Hiroshima's song.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that, if it's possible to enjoy such a thing.

Well, that's all for this week, but you know what to do.

Follow the show, leave review, and come back next week for more.

See you later, and thanks for tuning in.