“When you’ve got a relationship with a writer who just gets what you’re up to…

You just have the feeling that I can be really funny in this.”

NIGEL PLANER is an actor, singer, songwriter, and author - amongst many other attributes - and is forever associated with his role as Neil in the 1980s cult comedy series The Young Ones.

Today we are talking about Nigel’s latest book, Jeremiah Bourne In Time as he takes me on a backstreet alley tour of London between Waterloo Station and London Bridge, through pungent smells of skunk and wee, to reach those discreet parks, gardens and spaces that are very much a part of a Londoner’s London, and form the backdrop to Jeremiah Bourne’s time travel adventures.

Nigel reflects on a London cafe where

“The service would be glum and the tea would be real.”

Nigel admits to getting obsessed with the idea that “we inherit memory - rather like birds fly south, how can they know how to? “ And, influenced by Rupert Sheldrake’s ideas on morphic resonance (for which Sheldrake is criticised by many leading scientists as being a pseudoscience notion), Nigel has enthusiastically and imaginatively embraced the concept that you could inherit memory to travel in time, and his protagonist, a young 17-year old Jeremiah, travels between 1910 London, the present (2019), and an imagined future after, not one, but two digital meltdowns, while in search of his mother using memory as his mode of time travel.

On our walk and talk, Nigel is observing London’s history from a refreshing angle, while discussing the symbolism of Dr John Dee’s black glass; the contradictory ideas of the New Age academics of 1910 from socialism to eugenics, nudism to necromancy, a present time of mobile phones, apps and step-family, and a future time post digital meltdown of vitrification and steam punk.

“It’s not your normal stand on a plinth and look grand, statue.”

(Talking about John Keats’s statue at Guy’s Hospital)

On a personal level, Nigel reveals why he loves playing “the baddie”, and what happened when he bunked off to India at 18 years old without a word to his parents and was “sick as a dog”.

“It’s not the easiest place to visit but it’s absolutely thrilling.”

To find out more about Nigel Planer check out his…

Website: https://nigelplaner.co.uk/

GET INVOLVED in The Time Shard Chronicles and make a PLEDGE at: https://unbound.com/books/jeremiah-bourne-in-time/

Twitter: @NigelPlaner1

Instagram: @nigelplaner1

Facebook: @nigelplanerofficial

Dramatised audio version of Jeremiah Bourne in Time can be found on Amazon Audible OR at Big Finish Productions: https://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/jeremiah-bourne-in-time-1769

LISTEN to Nigel’s spoken extracts from the book on Twitter, Instagram, OR at https://unbound.com/

To find out about your podcast host EMMA you can go to https://www.travellingthrough.co.uk/

A big thanks to MARISKA Martina at https://www.mariskamartina.com/ for creating our wonderful podcast jingle!