Out of the Ordinary

Jolyon Jenkins meets the people who believe in trepanning - drilling a hole in the head. They do it for what they think are good medical reasons. Many ancient civilisations practiced trepanning, for reasons we can only guess at, but in modern times the practice dates from the 1960s and attempts by people in the counterculture to expand their consciousnesses. These enthusiasts thought they could get more blood into the brain if the skull was a bit more elastic, and therefore get "high". Unfortunately they didn't always do it very well. and sometimes had to make several attempts before they penetrated the skull.

More recently, their focus has shifted away from blood, and towards cerebrospinal fluid. They argue that one role of CSF is to flush away the brain toxins that are implicated in dementia. Trepanning, they think, can improve the flow of CSF. Bits of their argument are potentially plausible, and they have at least one proper scientist on their side. And trepanning is, in itself, not an especially dangerous operation - most brain surgery starts with drilling a hole in the skull. But the medical profession won't take them seriously, and so they are forced to go to Ecuador to find a surgeon who will do it ... or do it themselves in their garage.

Are they dicing with death? Or are they up against a hidebound medical profession not prepared to look at the evidence?

Presenter/Producer: Jolyon Jenkins.

Across Britain, thousands of people have stopped paying council tax, water rates and speeding fines. They think they have the law on their side, thanks to the 1215 Magna Carta treaty between King John and the Barons. They argue that the present Queen has breached her obligations under the treaty and so has in effect deposed herself and even become a traitor. As a result, all laws passed by parliament are invalid, the courts are shams, and government officials are imposters. Instead, they swear an oath of allegiance to a group of members of the House of Lords.

The rebels meet in a Facebook group with 13,000 members. In truth, few people join the group because of an interest in constitutional history - most arrive there because they are in a desperate financial or legal situation, feel that the system is stacked against them, and are looking for a way out. The group offers a system to deal with the authorities that - if used effectively - will supposedly get them off your back.

For nearly a year, Jolyon Jenkins followed the group's members, even signing an oath himself. But does the system work? Over the months, members of the group become increasingly frustrated at the authorities' refusal to take their arguments seriously. The frustration eventually leads to a secret plan to seize a crown building, as they believe Magna Carta entitles them to.

Presenter/Producer: Jolyon Jenkins.

Jolyon Jenkins meets the people who want to swim a mile through freezing cold water. This isn't like a quick dip on New Year's Day - it takes about 40 minutes to swim a mile. As the swimmers battle the second law of thermodynamics, only the fit, or fat, will make it.

Some swimmers acclimatise by sitting in icy paddling pools in their gardens and sleeping without bedclothes. Others pile on the calories to build bulk. But apart from the danger of hypothermia, the risks are legion: cold shock as you enter the water, loss of brain function or motor control leading to drowning, and non-freezing cold injury that can leave sufferers with permanent pain in their extremities. Acclimatisation can even increase the risks, by lowering the temperature at which you start to shiver and generate heat. No wonder that not everyone thinks ice swimming is a good idea.

So why do the ice swimmers want to do it? Jolyon travels to the ice swimming world championships in Bavaria to find out.

Presenter/producer: Jolyon Jenkins.

Jolyon Jenkins investigates the network of private Christian schools in Britain that teach that evolution untrue, homosexuality is wrong, and that wives should submit to their husbands.

These schools use the Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) curriculum, originally devised by a fundamentalist Texan who thought that all education needed to assume the literal truth of the bible. The entire curriculum, including science, makes continual reference to God's plan. It promotes creationism, and the false idea that humans and dinosaurs co-existed on earth.

The system requires children to sit in "offices" - desks screened off from their neighbours - and work their way in silence through the "packets of accelerated Christian education" and then take multiple choice tests. The system requires no teachers, only "supervisors". Pupils do not usually take A levels but special Christian exams.

Although some pupils make it to university and have successful careers, Jolyon speaks to others who feel that the system has not served them well. Are ACE pupils being well prepared for life in modern Britain? For years, Ofsted has appeared to show little interest in the contents of the ACE curriculum but a few recent inspections of ACE schools suggest that this may be changing.

Presenter/Producer: Jolyon Jenkins.

For 50 years, one of the most powerful psychoactive drugs, LSD, has been illegal in Britain. The authorities do not want you to alter your state of consciousness. In 2016, the government passed a law banning all psychoactive substances except caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine.

But can you enter altered states of consciousness without drugs? Since the 60s, experimental "psychonauts", deprived of psychedelics, have been trying. Sensory deprivation, flotation tanks, hyperventilation, and light machines are just some of the methods that are claimed to be able to put you in trance states, expand your consciousness, or even produce spiritual experiences.

Jolyon Jenkins, who has never taken LSD or even had a spiritual experience, investigates, even going so far as to construct his own retro "altered states of consciousness induction device". Will his consciousness expand, or retain its current dimensions?

Producer/presenter: Jolyon Jenkins.

In a new documentary series uncovering stories from the left field, Jolyon Jenkins reports on the extreme treatments bald men are putting themselves through. They are commissioning laboratories in China to manufacture unproven, untested, and potentially dangerous drugs to cure their hair loss. Is it a hiding to nothing or will they succeed where the drug companies haven't?

Men have always gone bald but now they're not putting up with it. An explosion of online forums has created a "hair loss community". "It's a silent epidemic", says Spencer Kobren, founder of The Bald Truth forum. "Hair loss doesn't physically hurt, but we liken it to a cancer of the spirit". Kobren runs a weekly radio show in which callers express their pain and frustration. Joe isn't sure whether it would be worse to have actual cancer: "I'd rather have one or two good years of hair," he says. "I want to hear the birds sing, I want to walk on the beach, I want to be free of this terrible disease."

In an attempt to deal with encroaching baldness, some young men are reading up on the latest medical research into hair loss and seeking out chemists to manufacture molecules they hope will work. There's no guarantee that the chemicals they are buying are pure, and the buyers have no real idea of the correct dose; but it speaks to their desperation. Some of them report unpleasant side effects. Few of them can show convincing hair regrowth.

Presenter Jolyon Jenkins, a "hair loss sufferer" for two decades, investigates this subculture. Along the way he has a consultation for a hair transplant (£10-£15,000) and looks into "hair systems" - or as some call them, wigs. Does loss of hair really decrease a man's attractiveness significantly? And how did a normal part of being a man become a debilitating disease?

Annie, 35, wants a baby, but she doesn't have a partner. If she could afford it, she could go down the official and regulated route to a fertility clinic and get pregnant using donor sperm. But that could cost thousands of pounds. So instead, she's gone online and entered the world of unregulated sperm donation.

Jolyon Jenkins investigates this shadowy world. It's illegal to sell sperm, but some men are making a living doing so. Others offer free sperm in return for "natural insemination", i.e. sex. Some women report that men who start by appearing to offer free sperm, gradually exert pressure on them to have sex.

But what of those who want neither money nor sex in return for their sperm? Jolyon discovers the world of the "super donor" - men who compete to inseminate as many women as possible, in an acknowledged bid to spread their genes as widely as they can. Their activity can border on the obsessive."It is a bit like stamp collecting really," says one. "I devote three hours per day to it, through travelling to donate or arranging my spreadsheets or doing my photo albums of the children".

The risks to women and their children are obvious - sexually transmitted infection, hereditary conditions unwittingly passed on, and accidental incest between half-siblings. If women could afford to use the official channels, they would be much safer. Instead, they are being driven into the hands of sexual adventurers, serial liars, and hobby eugenicists.

Presenter/producer: Jolyon Jenkins.

Jolyon Jenkins meets the people zapping their brains with DIY electrical devices, lasers and electromagnets. They want to learn faster, dream better, and even have spiritual experiences.

Some of it might even work. There's evidence that putting a weak electric current through your skull can help you learn, and induce a "flow" state. The US military is experimenting with devices that seem to help snipers improve their marksmanship. One woman who tried it says that what she found was that "electricity might be the most powerful drug I've ever used in my life."

Such talk is just what the garage experimenters want to hear. Real drugs are hard to get licensed, but many of the experimenters hope that a strap-on electrical head gadget will be able to give the same kind of effects, but without having to go through the regulatory hoops. There's money to be made, they hope, from early adopters who see their brains as just another device that can be improved through a bit of hacking.

Producer/presenter: Jolyon Jenkins.

Build a better mousetrap, so the saying goes, and the world will beat a path to your door. But is it true? There are over 4,500 mousetrap patents but this doesn't stop inventors coming up with new designs - even though the basic spring-loaded trap was designed in the nineteenth century and, you might think, is unimprovable. Jolyon Jenkins talks to people who dream of riches from mousetraps, and one who has even managed it. And he invents his own, ultra-humane, hi-tech trap. Will it impress the professionals?

Presenter/Producer: Jolyon Jenkins.

Jolyon Jenkins reports on the men fighting a liberation war against what they see as female tyranny, and the separatist "men going their own way" - who've given up on women.

Such men take their principles from the film "The Matrix", in which only those who take the "red pill" see the true nature of reality, while those who take the "blue pill" live in ignorance of the true state of affairs - which, in this case, is that society is organised for the benefit of women, and that men are seen as disposable and worthless. We live, they think, in a "gynocracy", thanks to the remorseless march of feminism.

But the movement is split. Some of them think that there is still time to organise and fight back. They think that the system can be changed, and that relationships between men and women recalibrated. But others are more radical. They believe that male/female relationships are inherently toxic, the system is unbeatable, and that the only sane strategy for a man is to exit from the gynocracy while he still can, even if this means "living as a ghost" within broader society.

Producer/presenter: Jolyon Jenkins.