Meet Catherine O'Flynn and Peter Fletcher. Cath's first novel, What Was Lost was set in a shopping centre much like the one where we did this interview. Husband Peter has been documenting his sneezes, and spills the beans (and elastic bands) on what it was like working as a postie. What with magma dragons and [...]

Author Naomi Alderman drops in this week. You might recognise her name from her award-winning work Disobedience and a new but already highly-acclaimed novel The Lessons, currently 'Book at Bedtime' on Radio 4. But not just that! She's a gee-eek. She really is. She was the lead writer on Perplex City, she's a high-flying games journalist [...]

"I look for aliens" is how high-flying young astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell describes his work, and we hear the wheres and hows of that search in this week's episode. During the fascinating chat Lewis explains how aliens might resemble anything from bacteria to "sky whales", Roo has a question about methane, and Leila jumps at the [...]

Comedian and columnist Shazia Mirza drops in for a chat this week and we have a great time hearing about her former life as science teacher, her experience of playing the Edinburgh Festival, and what her parents think about what she does... Dave's similarly-voiced brother Simon joins us too, fresh from the Games Developer's Conference in [...]

It's 25 years of Back to the Future! To celebrate, we're joined by the geeky and innovative stand-up comic, Paul Kerensa, whose 2005 Edinburgh show "Back to the Futon" involved a real-life DeLorean and a Gray's Sports Almanacful of in-jokes. Since then Paul's been focused on collecting and comparing every moment in time from every [...]

Our guest this week is comedy writer and cartoonist Andy Riley, the twisted mind behind the Bunny Suicides books and the Observer's comic strip Roasted, as well as loads of great TV and radio comedy. While we were chatting, Andy drew some amazing cassette cards for us (watch a video of him drawing them and a [...]

We chatted with artist Sydney Padua this week. Sydney's animated creations appear in loads of blockbuster movies, but she's a star of the small screen too - you might have seen her extremely funny web comic Babbage and Lovelace doing the rounds lately. With Ada Lovelace Day coming up very soon, Sydney tells us about [...]

You might recognise Zeb's voice from Radio 4 news, continuity announcements and the iconic Shipping Forecast. He's also very funny and, unexpectedly, looks like he should be in a boyband. We also hear about Roo's hobbity holiday in the New Forest and Leila's trip to Decode Lab at the V&A. Dave comes back from India loaded [...]

Pepys blogger, Pretend Office worker and former Aardman animator Phil Gyford was kind enough to not only bring himself to Shift Run Stop towers, but also his Mega Drive. We natter with the Internet's Dave Green about the BAFTA Film Awards (which Roo also went to) and dorkbotlondon (which Leila also went to). Leila meets a previous [...]

What if you could play a game of Friends? Or The Wire? What would that be like? We saw Duncan at Playful 09 and were instantly hooked by his idea that dramatic storytelling and video games could merge in a new interactive concept called "Fictive Worlds". Duncan also shares his experience of developing the first [...]