Originality Armageddon

Bonfire night, November 5th 2015, 9.30pm. An agent fires off an email. An author is accused of plagiarism. His new book lies ready to be pulped.

In the first of a new series of Sideways, Matthew Syed asks why we’re doomed to be unoriginal and why it hurts so much to be, well, not that special.

In 1998, Hollywood directors Matthew Bay and Mimi Leder went head to head with suspiciously similar disaster movies - Armageddon and Deep Impact. Allegations of late-night spying flew around. But could there have just been something in the air? Matthew reveals that, four years earlier, fragments of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 Comet smashed into Jupiter and right into the American consciousness.

This is the thing... As Matthew discovers, our brains are wired for unoriginality, we evolve as a collective brain, absorbing our shared cultural cues and looking for what has worked in the past. But if that’s the norm, why do we feel so disappointed when our ideas seem unoriginal, when someone else beats us to it? And is there a way out of this - to rekindle our originality?

With author Ian Leslie, Kristen Lopez, TV editor for Indiewire and pop culture critic, Dr Michael Muthukrishna, Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics and Nick Groom, Professor of Literature in English, University of Macau.

Presenter: Matthew Syed Producer/Series Editor: Katherine Godfrey Executive Producer: Max O'Brien Music, Sound Design and Mix: Nicholas Alexander Research and Development: Gavin Haynes and Madeleine Parr Theme Music: Seventy Times Seven by Ioana Selaru A Novel production for BBC Radio 4