100 _They Were Keeping Skulls At The Bottom Of A University Basement_ Marc Fennell On Following Your

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I'm Mike Boris and this is Straight Talk.

Hey, we have this.

A skull of a Catholic cannibal sitting in our office

and we don't quite know what to do with it.

I'm sorry, what?

I'm going to need you to back this truck up a little bit.

I'm Mark Finnell.

You're very theatrical.

No, you are, you are.

It's the jazz hands, isn't it?

How did you become this creator?

When it comes to me and making documentaries and podcasts and whatnot,

I always say what I'm looking for is a small doorway into a big idea.

I get off on new ideas.

I get off on new stories.

As soon as I find a story or an idea that I'm intrigued by,

like I completely vortex on it.

I think history hides a lot behind politeness.

And I think there is an impolite version of history

that people don't like to tell.

Mark Finnell, welcome to Straight Talk.

It's lovely to be here.

Now, your name, you know, it's funny.

I haven't so much these days,

but during COVID period I listened to the ABC a lot.

And I like radio.

I love radio.

And your name keeps coming up.

I used to keep hearing your name on radio.

I'm unavoidable.

I'm like the plague.

Yeah, you're haunting me.

No, no.

On ABC, what was the capacity I kept hearing your name there?

Why would the ABC be saying Mark Finnell?

Well, there's a few things.

I mean, I've done a radio show for them for the last decade,

which is a tech show called Download This Show.

Yeah.

I started a podcast for them.

I started a podcast for them in 2020 called Stuff the British Stole,

which ended up becoming this sort of massive global hit

and it ended up becoming a co-production between ABC and CBC

and then we did a TV series.

And I think that would have in that kind of period

would have been around.

I'm one of these weird people who I don't actually work for the ABC,

but I'm sort of I do a lot of shows for them and SBS as well.

So I couldn't pinpoint it.

I mean, the other thing is I do a quiz show for SBS

that just plays every single night.

It's called Mastermind.

So I am literally like a rash.

I am around.

You're busy then.

I like to be busy, yeah.

So who's Mark Finnell?

He can take me back a little bit.

You look pretty young to me.

Thank you.

Flattery will get you everywhere, Mr Boris.

It always does.

But it's all relative too.

That means I flatter everybody who's a guest

because everyone's younger than me.

But if I go back, like how did you become this creator?

Okay, so I had a really unusual kind of start in media and journalism.

I actually...

When I finished high school,

I had a grand plan that I was going to be a graphic designer by day

and a filmmaker by night.

Don't ask me why there was a day-night separation,

like the world's shittest superhero.

And so I started doing graphic design and I actually,

the Australian Film Institute ran a young film critics competition

and being, I'm half Singaporean, so I have Asian work ethic,

so I entered three times and I won.

And I ended up going to...

And with three different names?

No, same names.

Look, they're entry processes.

Could do some work.

What can I say?

And it turns out I won.

And so I went to...

I went to Community Radio and said, hey, I can review movies.

And actually, I think the thing most people will first remember me for is

I was the movie guy for Triple J for many years.

And I think for a certain generation of Australians,

I'm probably best known as that.

But it all started with being a film critic

and eventually it turned into making documentaries

and interviewing people.

And I chuck a lot of stuff at the wall is the short version of it.

I can take you through all of it.

Hopefully something sticks.

Well, I mean, my life attitude is I've been lucky.

A few times I've been given really interesting opportunities.

And I think when you get...

I think when you get lucky, you actually have to work

to justify the investment that the universe has put in you.

So I do chuck a lot of stuff at the wall.

I do try a lot of things.

And I generally have a view to say yes.

As I've gotten older and had kids and I'm, you know,

I've just spent three months filming around the world

and literally I've got mild jet lag marks, so bear with me here.

But I do sometimes now think I actually don't have to say yes to everything.

I actually can.

I actually...

I can.

I can pick and choose a bit more what I do.

But my instinct is always, oh, yeah, I wonder if I could do that.

Let's try it and see what happens.

So do you ever commit?

Yeah, all the time.

All the time.

And I think some of it comes from like the first television show I did

was actually...

Do you remember the movie show with David and Margaret?

So when they left SBS to go to the ABC,

they recast it with a group of young people and I was one of them.

And I was 18 when I signed my contract, 19 when we started.

And it got axed before I turned 21.

And I do remember thinking, cool, so if I want to make stuff,

I want to make TV, I want to make radio for a living,

I'm always going to have to have at least two or three sources of income

because this is an unreliable industry.

And I've maintained that ever since.

I've never had less than three jobs at any one time.

But always in the same industry.

Pretty much, yeah, more or less.

And I think because of that mentality, I've always been of the belief

that you should always have multiple fingers in multiple pies.

And it's been surprising to me what's sort of stuck over the years.

Like if you told me that, you know, making documentaries or making podcasts,

if you told me that that would actually have become like a thing

you can genuinely live off, I would have been like, no, no, that's madness.

At the time.

At the time.

But now, I mean, I think the mixture of what I do is like I describe

what I do now is I'm just professionally curious and I turn them

into stories, whether they're television shows or podcast documentaries

for Audible or the ABC, whoever.

My job is to be professionally curious and work out how to take

that curiosity and turn it into stories.

That other people would like to buy into, would like to listen to

or read or watch.

And I think so long as I kind of maintain that curiosity,

as long as I'm finding stories and things, I'm like, actually,

I really do want to spend six months of my life exploring that,

then I'm doing okay.

But if you lose your sense of curiosity, if you lose your sense of excitement

about a story or a character or something like that,

that's usually the cue that you need to start chubbing your energies

in a different direction.

I find for me anyway.

I want to come back to a bit of curiosity in a second because I find

that is one of the most powerful emotions that we have,

particularly if you're in business, in a creative industry,

business and creativity, where those two together,

curiosity is like the most important ingredient, I think.

But I just want to quickly go back because you said something

really important to me, that you have this work ethic,

which is one of the reasons why you did a number of jobs

and you take it back to that part of you that's Singapore

and you're in Singapore.

You've got a Singaporean sort of work ethic in you.

Mum was going to be thrilled that you pulled that part out.

And that's your mum, right?

Yeah, totally, yeah.

So I often wonder, and I have a similar sort of work ethic

and it's the Greek side of me, but what I know now today

when I reflect on myself as having had done over a number of years

is that it's not so much a work ethic, it was more an insecurity.

Yeah.

And have you ever thought that through?

Do you think by osmosis you've inherited your mum's insecurity?

Don't stuff it up.

Yeah, I think it's actually, in fairness to both of my parents,

my dad was a small business owner.

He was a photographer throughout my childhood and I would spend

all of my summers hanging out with dad in studios while he took photos

and being his assistant.

So I grew up with a front row seat to a small business owner on one hand

and on the other hand, mum comes from a culture where, you know,

you look for a stable job.

Like all of my mum's family in Singapore, they are, you know,

all the kids, the successful ones, they ended up like,

you know, doctors and lawyers, like proper Indian jobs.

Sorry, I should say Singaporean Indian is the combination there.

And I think when I was young and I sort of embarked upon this media career,

I think it was challenging for mum to kind of go.

Totally.

What, like you could have been a teacher, which is, you know,

and I probably still would have been a teacher.

You are a teacher.

Well, in a sense, part of my job is that, yes.

But I think it is pretty consistent across first generation immigrants

of any culture, particularly in Australia, which is like your parents,

you really.

You really generally worked quite hard to get you here.

My brother and I are the first, my parents are the first generation

of either side of their family to actually get university education.

And my brother and I come along and I'm like, he says,

I'm going to be a rock star and I'm going to review movies for a living.

My mum in particular probably struggled with it for a couple of years

until she started seeing me on TV and having like a, you know,

being able to buy a house and, you know, the markers of suburban success.

Now I think it's quite different.

But it is.

You know, it is a career that has an inbuilt instability to it.

And you have to kind of, my advice to young people when they come to me

and talk about careers in the media and see the unusual mixture of people

I work for, you know, the public broadcasters or Amazon or whoever,

is try a lot of things.

Just try a lot of things because you don't know, A,

what you're actually going to be good at and you also don't know

what this industry is going to look like in five years' time.

So try a lot of things.

And I think you have, particularly in a media career,

it's very easy for people in media careers to rely on external validation,

awards or ratings or downloads or whatever it is.

You have to find joy and intrigue in the doing because if you don't have that,

you will make an amazing series.

You'll make an amazing book or whatever it is.

And there is no guarantee of success there.

But if you are finding joy in the making of it,

it won't feel like a failure.

The rest of the world may regard it as a failure or a massive success.

But I think the moment you become too reliant on external validation,

and I'm guilty of this as much as anybody,

you create this really, you actually are surrendering too much

of your self-esteem to something you cannot control.

And particularly, you know, ending up in on-camera careers,

it's really easy to sort of surrender your self-esteem to awards or ratings.

Or whatever external validation is de rigueur at the time.

And I think it's, generally speaking,

my advice is to like find joy in the actual making of what you do

and don't rely too heavily on the rest of the world to tell you if it's good or not.

And I think that's really good advice.

But at the same time, on the flip side of it,

sometimes if you're running a model that relies on advertising, for example,

and or audience sizes relative to advertisers coming on,

that's the media buyers, that's usually what they hone in on.

Oh, you won an award.

Not best.

Blah, blah, blah.

And also as a result of that, the audience is, you know, this big

and it's got this type of demographic.

Yes, we want to advertise on it, which therefore we'll spend money.

That usually drives how much money they're going to spend

and how often they're going to spend on you.

So you've got to sort of balance the two.

But I agree, in your person, you can't allow that to be the thing that defines you.

I should say I am the most obsessive person when it comes to metrics,

whether it's TV ratings on shows I make or download numbers on podcasts

and magazines.

I am obsessive about them, but I've realised over the years

that the success, I think it's particularly noticeable in television

because success in television is not, it is not,

there is not a direct line to the quality of the thing that you've made.

It is often about are you up against maths?

You know, it's about the entire ecosystem.

Is it after Anzac Day, like when people are actually home watching TV,

like all of those different factors come in.

And, you know, as a person that makes this stuff for a living,

I do.

I do pay attention to that.

But it's about sort of disaggregating the product and the person.

Yeah.

It doesn't define you.

Exactly.

And that's the difference.

And I think that took me a long time to work out.

So you said something really interesting because a lot of people, you know,

like whether it's journalism or media or any other thing for that matter,

some other sort of start-up, one of the things they can get quite exhausted

doing is trying everything.

Everything's a chance.

And you said earlier on, just do everything.

Just try everything.

But it can be quite exhausting.

It can be quite debilitating, particularly when nothing seems to be succeeding.

How do you manage that process?

Because especially when you kicked it off, when you were trying to do everything.

I mean, you had three jobs, but you probably were looking at a thousand different things at any one time.

Always someone's coming to you with an idea or you see an idea or you create an idea or you interpret an idea

that's something you've seen.

And all of a sudden you've got six things going on.

And like, you know, you're working till 10, 11 o'clock at night.

You're getting up again at six in the morning.

You know, you might be just together with a partner.

You might be just about to have a kid.

All these competing interests.

Yeah.

How did you work your way through that stuff?

Not always well.

Like to be real, anybody that pretends like they can juggle this stuff is probably lying

and definitely lying to themselves.

I've got two kids.

I've just spent three months on the road around the world filming a show.

It's not like the concept of work-life balance is like this nice ephemeral thing that I don't think.

It's really distinct for every person, every family, every combination.

To come back to your actual question about how do you manage it, I do burn out.

I usually don't realize it until too late.

I don't realize it until I've got this big long list.

I'm like, what the fuck did I do?

Or what do I do now?

Or what do I do now?

Because you're committed.

Yeah, exactly.

You can't.

I don't back out of things.

Like you just do them.

Yeah, yeah.

And you do them until three o'clock in the morning.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The last couple of years, I probably have hit this sort of moment where I've just been like, I can't do all of it.

I kind of had this conversation with some of the people I work with, which is I can do it all.

I just can't do it all at the same time.

So we can do that project, but you will have to wait until October.

And I think that's really hard because the sort of your scarcity mentality tells you, no, no, no.

Bite off more than you can chew now.

You'll be fine.

Just chew and get indigestion.

But actually, I found that when you've sort of reached a certain point, you actually can tell people, hey, I want to do this and I want to give it my proper attention.

And that means we can't do it till this point.

And if things go through the keeper, then that's okay.

But the key for me is that having multiple things on the go actually, for me, and this is maybe a weird me thing, I think it actually protects me to a degree because you can't guarantee success of anything.

Whether it's a television series, a podcast, or whatever it is, you can't guarantee success of anything.

So if you pour your heart and soul into something and it works, fantastic.

If you pour your heart and soul into something and it doesn't perform the way you think it will, in a sense, it's okay because you've got two or three other things that you move straight on to.

What it prevents for me is it prevents wallowing.

And I've had a few times over the past where you're like, oh, you didn't get a project up that you wanted or you did and it didn't work.

I'm probably quite prone.

And the constant buzz of new ideas and new creation does two things.

One, it protects me from stopping and going, oh, that's really sad.

But it also means that that continual dopamine bump of finding a new idea or a new character or something that you're excited by, that dopamine bump is always either in the ascendancy or you're just coming down off it.

And I find that's really helpful for me.

Like I get off on new ideas.

I get off on new stories.

As soon as I find something.

A story or an idea that I'm intrigued by, like I completely vortex on it and that you need to capture that buzz.

You need to capture that energy in that moment because that's where all the possibilities for what that can become live in that moment.

If you let it sort of, if you go, if you push it to one side too, you know, too quickly, you're sort of sacrificing the sort of creative energy.

And I'm always wary about letting go of that.

So for me, it kind of busyness, there's too busy, there's burnout, but there is also a kind of a natural rollercoaster that comes with it.

You should kind of embrace to a degree.

It seems to me, and I sort of go through the same processes sometimes, you get addicted to the dopamine.

Well, you get addicted to the buzz that you get out of a new project, particularly when you first start it and you first start talking to other people about it.

And you get cross sort of fertilization from people, that whole buzz, everyone's getting the buzz and, oh, wow, it sounds like great.

Let's do it.

And you start reading about it and you get more excited, more and more excited.

That actually helps you in relation to other stuff you're doing too, sort of drags the other stuff along with it.

Yes, it does.

It totally does.

I think people-

Because you can get tired on the other stuff.

Exactly.

And I, like this, and I, one of the things I've realized is I, working at projects at different stages is really helpful.

So I've just come off the back of shooting around the world for three months.

But at the same time-

At the same time, I was, for a new show for the ABC next year, but at the same time, I was finishing off a three-part series that I've done for SBS and it was at the tail end.

And I was looking at all these, like, quite, you know, I was looking at quite a finished product and looking at the finessing that we're doing at the end.

Just stuff in post.

Stuff in post.

Yeah, exactly.

And so I was like, and I remember watching the stuff.

I was sitting in a hotel room in the Amazon of all places watching something that I'd shot in WA around this time last year.

I was like-

That's a good idea.

We did do that.

That worked well.

I wonder if that idea for, you know, a shot or a sequence, I wonder if that can, we could do something similar on this thing that I'm shooting tomorrow.

So there's a little natural benefit from having projects at different stages at any one moment and letting them cross-pollinate each other.

You know, when it comes to me and making documentaries and podcasts and whatnot, I always say what I'm looking for is a small doorway into a big idea.

So one sort of-

You know, one really accessible one-line idea that you can say to people and they lean in and go, really?

And that door, and the way to know if that's actually going to be a worthwhile project or worthwhile series is what does it open up?

You know, so stuff the British stole is like, you know, objects taken in the days of the British Empire.

When you scratch the surface on them, it actually tells you how the British Empire really operated and how it changed our lives today.

It's a small quirky idea that opens up something big and that's often what I'm looking for.

And as you get-

When you get too deep into making anything where you've got mountains of interviews, it can be easy to kind of just your eyes get crossed and you go, I don't really know what I'm doing anymore.

It's helpful to be on the other trajectory on something else to remind you that these things only work if there's a simple, clear idea you could explain to an audience and then it has to go somewhere and unveil something bigger.

How important is it to you to be an adventurer?

I mean, like you're not climbing mountains, but you are climbing mountains.

So you are taking risks and you are pushing boundaries.

It's funny because I, if you ask my wife or my kids, they'll be like, dad, you couldn't get past the first level of the Eiffel Tower.

You have a shocking fear of heights.

I'm like, I'm not, I'm actually basically quite a risk averse person.

But if I think something's going to be worth-

Traditional risk.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

If I think something's going to make, I will also do just about, no, I was about to say I'll do just about anything on camera.

That's not true.

I won't.

But I do think that if I think going to the edge of a cliff.

Or a desert or a jungle is going to help an audience understand something better, then I'll absolutely do it.

Provided the money's there.

You know, like I, this series that I'm working on, which is the next series of Stuff the British Dole comes out next year.

We literally did deserts and, you know, cliffs and islands and the Amazon jungle.

And it's like, but it's not just for the sake of being an adventurer.

It's for the sake of telling a story and making sure that people who are sitting there eating their dinner at 8 o'clock at night on a Tuesday.

Who are paying 10%.

Who are paying 10% of their attention, which is usually the amount of attention we pay to television.

It's, it's, it's my job to bring you into a random chunk of history.

And part of that is about taking them on an adventure.

It's not really about me going on an adventure.

It's about taking them on an adventure.

And I take that quite seriously because that's, that's, you know, why we live in an era where there's so much media.

Like there's tons of it.

I'm competing with Netflix, Amazon, with everybody, right?

If as a, as an Australian television production, you have to.

You have to compete with what everybody else in the world is offering.

And I think part of that is about offering something that hopefully stands out.

And I will go anywhere and show anything if I think it'll help an audience understand the story that I'm, that I'm trying to tell.

It's amazing.

So all these various platforms, Netflix, Stan, all of them, Channel, ABC, whatever, they're, they're, they're all telling stories.

I mean, all the shows are about storytelling and storytelling has become a big thing.

And I mean, once upon a time, no one actually talked about storytelling.

As an art.

Yeah.

That's what you've been doing for a long time.

Where does that come from?

Like, have you always been someone who liked to tell, like, share your stories and or your interpretation of things that are stories to other people?

No.

What I want, what I did do, what I do recognize I did from very young was listen.

Because actually I'm not usually telling the stories for myself.

It's usually when you make documentaries, actually what you're doing is you're curating other voices.

And, uh, and that's the thing that I've learned quite early that I did.

And I always feel weird saying this in interviews because when I hear I'm just rabbiting on about me, but one thing I realized very early on is I loved listening to other people tell their stories and I love, and I loved creating an environment where people felt comfortable sharing with me, um, their life experience.

So for about eight or nine years, I did a current affairs show for SPS called The Feed and my primary job was just talk to famous people.

And I loved the challenge of.

People look down on celebrity interviews.

I love the challenge of them because usually those are people that are bored.

They've, uh, they've tell the same stories a thousand times.

And I love the challenge of you've got 15 minutes with Tom Cruise or Jamie Lee Curtis, whoever it is.

How do you create an environment where they feel comfortable showing an authentic side of them and they're intrigued enough to want to offer something of, of, of their life to a random Australian that they have no reason to care about?

I like the challenge of creating environments where people feel comfortable.

Sharing something that feels that is identifiably authentic, not just to them, but to the third person in the room of any conversation, which is the audience.

And so that's probably the thing I port with me, um, in, in, throughout all of these, which is like, it's not just about me telling a story.

It's about me painting a story with other, with other people's life experiences.

And with that comes a bit of a responsibility, you know?

So I think it's, it, it actually starts says the guy who's rabbiting on about himself with listening.

You're actually getting.

You're actually getting others to tell the story to you.

Yes.

Which you're then sharing with the rest of the audience.

So you're not the storyteller.

They're the storyteller.

You're, you're curating the storyteller about, and the, and the theme and all that other stuff.

But you actually sort of want to sit back and listen to their story anyway.

Yeah.

It's, it's interesting.

As an interviewer.

At the end of the day, I still have to kind of piece it together.

Yeah, yeah.

So there, it is, it's sort of both.

Um, but I love the, the, you know, when, when the camera's all set up and ready to go, it's, it's really, it's this, right?

This is the thing that matters, right?

And so.

I love that.

Then there's the other part of my job, which is like sitting there with mountains of footage and going, all right, how do I arrange this in a way that somebody has, who, you know, you always have to assume the audience don't care about whatever it is you're doing.

How do I arrange this in a way that they want to get on board with?

They want to go on the adventure.

They want to get to know this person.

So they're, they're almost two completely different jobs in a way.

Have you always been prolific?

Because, I mean, you are, you're prolific in what you produce all your life.

I mean, it's an interesting observation that I would like to make is that, uh, that I find interesting for myself.

I don't know if it's interesting for our audience, but, um, people who I find are successful, successful people that I interview or successful people I've been involved with.

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Tend to be quite prolific.

They tend to speak quickly.

Yeah.

And prolific means you get a lot of content out at the same time.

Yeah.

You know, like really quickly.

Yeah.

And often and regularly.

And without interruption, et cetera.

And one of the things I've noticed about you is you are one of those people.

And you have, that is a hallmark for me of successful people that I've known.

It doesn't necessarily mean it's a condition precedent, but it's a hallmark of people I've

known.

And right from the very get-go, when you first sat down in that chair, that you have been

prolific in your content towards me.

And do you know that about yourself?

I do now.

It's interesting.

It's interesting.

I.

I did a show for the ABC many years ago, which was, it was called Hungry Beast.

It was a very unusual program.

It was run by Andrew Denton and he, he basically brought on 19 young people and gave them this

plum time slot after Spicks and Specks and, and said, just tell me something I don't know.

That was his instruction to us.

Tell me something I don't know.

And you've spoken to Kirk Docker, who was also on that show.

So we're, we're part of that same cohort and everybody's experience of it was slightly

different.

But I remember the first season.

I couldn't get a single story up.

I just, I just kept pitching and pitching and pitching and nothing could get up.

And I got, I was probably a right pain.

But I, my solution to that, I was definitely like whinging about it in season one, but

my solution to that was to become militant.

I was like, I am going to look at every hole available in this show and I'm going to work

out what it's missing.

And I'm going to try and pitch something that fits into that.

But it wasn't just militant out for my own benefit.

I realized on that show.

The key to success is actually not trying to do it by yourself.

It's collaborating.

So I would find other people that worked on that program who I had aligned tastes and

go, all right, you, you and you, let's make something together.

And I've, that's probably the thing I've, I've carried, like, I, I get that I make a

lot of stuff, but the only way I can make a lot of stuff is I build relationships and

partnerships with, um, with people that I like to work with and we collaborate.

If I was doing, if I was a one man band.

And trying to do everything by myself, I couldn't do it.

What does work for me is building, finding your tribes, finding your combinations of

people and working and having them run, you know, collaboratively.

So, um, House of Skulls, the, the, the podcast I've got at the moment, I worked with, um,

a producer, Pallavi, um, who's in New York and we, we, we worked on it together.

Um, I've got a series for SBS coming out later, uh, with Corinne, who's based in WA.

So I work, I make partnerships with people that, um, that we both work with.

We both feel like we get something out of, that's the way to do it.

It's not just make a lot of stuff, which is probably how I made it sound earlier.

It's find groups of people that you get, make each other better and then what, and make

sure you invest as much into them as they do into you.

And that's how I managed to make so much stuff across the year.

It's not me, it's not me alone.

It's me working with different combinations of people spread out really actually around

the world.

Um, and cause I, you know, I'm sort of maintained that.

Um, at various different points, people have asked me why I haven't set up my own production

company and, uh, why I don't run, run a business myself.

And the reason is because I can achieve more if I partner with, you know, uh, an ABC or

an audible or, you know, BBC, I can achieve more if I partner with organizations around

the world than I can, if I just try and build everything myself.

And that's been really helpful.

And, and, and I learn from people.

I learn from, you know,

Canadian production companies, I learn from working with people in the UK, I'm better

because of those relationships.

And I think that's been the key to how much stuff comes out.

It's not just one person.

It's about relationships.

Well, that you've, that means you've worked out a way how to leverage yourself into being

prolific by, by not by using, but by having collaborations and, or sharing the burden

with everybody.

By the way, can I ask you in turn, you said early on, and I love this whole concept of

curiosity.

It's a big thing for me.

Um, that's how I run my life.

Um, curiosity, um, is probably the starting point in terms of shows that you, or things

you've, you've either collaborated on or you've created yourself.

In terms of the House of Skulls, what was the curio, curiosity piece of that that got

you to do that or even started the thought process?

Yeah, it was, it's actually classic this, because I was doing an interview with a retired

priest for something else.

And he just casually mentioned that.

One day he got a phone call from the US saying, Hey, we have the skull of a Catholic cannibal

sitting in our office and we don't quite know what to do with it.

A Catholic cannibal.

A Catholic cannibal.

And he was like, I'm sorry, what?

And he mentioned it so casually that I was a bit like, sorry, what are you talking about?

And he's like, yeah, apparently there's this room in the basement of a university in America

that has hundreds of human skulls from all around the world.

I'm like, sorry, what?

He just, he said it, it's, you know, when people just say something in passing and they

just roll on and you're like, I'm gonna need you to back this truck up a little bit.

What are you talking about?

And he just like, I, he, that's all he knew about it and then he rattled on and we talked

about other things.

And as soon as I got off the phone with him, I essentially like cleared my afternoon and

I just vortexed on this thing.

And it was a, it's.

Obsessed.

I became completely obsessed, absolutely obsessed.

And I, um, it was called the Morton Cranial Collection.

It was this one guy who leveraged his networks of people all around the world to collect

human skulls.

And the reason he was doing it, he was trying to prove a theory, which is that you and I,

all of us, we're actually not one race, we're different races and different, uh, races have

different brain sizes, which means there's a hierarchy.

And he was basically trying to prove essentially white people are the smartest, brown people

the dumbest.

What, what, what, what period is this?

So this is the 1900s.

Okay.

Okay.

Go on.

And so.

So the story is the collection still existed and it wasn't just sitting in boxes.

In 2014 they built a classroom at the university of Pennsylvania and they put them on the walls,

kind of not thinking that people might have an issue with this.

And so the thing that stood out to me is, okay, firstly, why did he put it together?

Oh, sure.

But also what do they do with it now?

And each one of those skulls was a person and each one of those skulls has a story and

each one of those stories paints a picture of the world at a particular moment in time.

And that was the starting point.

And I remember writing down the House of Skulls

because I knew from the beginning that's what we were going to call it.

Titles either come really fast or they take forever is my other advice

for anybody making things.

If you have a title, write it down.

And it was the curiosity.

I realised very quickly that the engine of pick a different skull

and try and tell the story of that skull,

these are people that had become specimens.

And so my kind of mission was if I could take what little detail we have

of those skulls and try and return their story back to them,

find out what happened to them, how that ended up in that collection,

I could tell a very big picture about, well, firstly about race

because this guy, his theories ended up influencing a whole bunch of lawyers

and doctors throughout America.

It's kind of the beginning of this.

It's kind of a crucial part of the story of race, not just in America

but around the world.

But it's also a story of medical science because we're all the beneficiaries

of centuries of medical science.

It was built on grave robbing.

That's how they learnt about our anatomy.

That's how they learnt about, you know, which bone is connected

to the which bone.

So our medical science that we benefit from every day has this really

grotty history that we don't really like to acknowledge.

So it's also a bit about that as well.

And so it's a strange, you know, one strange little chapter,

like footnote in history, but it connects to big things.

It's about race.

It's about science.

It's about history.

It's big things that actually do shape.

It's about history.

It's about our lives.

And there are skulls in that collection from every corner of the earth.

There are skulls from Greece.

There are skulls from India.

There are skulls from Tasmania.

There are skulls from everywhere.

So it was inherently global and incredibly niche at the same time

and I always look for stuff.

I always look for stories that they may seem small but they get very big

very fast and they tell very big stories.

You know, it's quite fascinating you started to tell me about that

because as you were speaking, I was thinking about something

that not many people know about.

But, and perhaps you do, but in the 19th century,

the general view was a black person was not as intelligent

as a white person in that their brain didn't function

and or perform the same as white persons.

And in fact, that their brain was not as big.

Yes.

And that was in the, as I understand the history,

it was the 19th century anyway.

And I'll tell you in a minute how I understand this.

But there was a guy, a Russian guy called, I mean, he was a,

a zoologist and, but in particular, a marine biologist,

did a lot of marine studies.

But one of the things he was famous for, allegedly famous for,

his name was, I should hopefully get his name right,

his name was Nikolai Mikulovitch McClay.

And out of Sydney University, there's a McClay museum.

And in that museum are a number of brains of various dolphins

and sharks and all sorts of things.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Right.

And his biggest claim of fame, whilst he was living in Russia,

because he ended up living in Australia,

is that he proved in Papua New Guinea that the black man's brain

is not inferior to the white man's brain.

And actually, because at the time, the legislation,

the world didn't allow people to, black people to vote,

all sorts of things.

It was, you know, society was crazy on the basis of inferiority.

And he was the first person allegedly to prove that this is not the case.

And, and, and they actually named one of the coastlines of Papua New Guinea

after this guy.

There's a coastline called McClay, McClay Coast.

And his name is Nikolai Mikulovitch McClay.

And I'll tell you the reason why I know who he is.

Is he your third cousin?

Is that what this is?

No, he's not.

He's not.

But I tell you what, I tell you what's interesting about him.

When he came to Australia, he needed a place to conduct his studies.

And the New South Wales government, because this is before Federation,

the New South Wales government raised money by subscription to build a house

out of the local stone, sandstone, which was like a hundred meters away

in a place called Greenpoint in Sydney.

Built this guy a house where he could conduct his studies on a beach

where he could collect fish, et cetera, and various sharks, et cetera.

And it was the first,

first in the Southern Hemisphere, but the second in the world

of marine biological station.

And they put him in there.

And at this stage, no one lived in the area.

And this beach is a Kamco beach just beyond Watson's Bay at South Head.

And that's where I live today.

That's my house.

No.

The house was built in 1878 or something like that.

And I live in that house.

And that house has a permanent conservation order.

And I allow people to come in there once a year to inspect the house

and look at the room,

which has a permanent conservation order where he used to do his experiments

and cut shit up.

And what's interesting in this house on the top level,

in every room on the top level, it has skylights.

So no one had skylights in those days, by the way.

But he put skylights in these rooms that faced the arc of the sun.

Yeah.

So that the sunlight would come directly through and he'd move

after a couple of hours into the next room and continue to his experiments

and he'd move to the next room.

And each of my rooms in the house on the top level, on the second level,

have,

these weird looking skylights.

And I actually rebuilt the house in conjunction with a well-known

conservation architect.

But it's quite intriguing.

This guy was very, very famous.

And he ended up marrying the Premier's daughter in New South Wales,

who, he was a good networker, he married the Premier's daughter and he went

back to Russia and he died, unfortunately, from lung problems.

But which is the reason he came to Australia, to get away from the

Russian weather.

Yeah.

And what you're talking about, the House of Skulls, is quite interesting

because he was getting inside in human skulls to prove a point.

Yeah.

And your point is that someone else was going around the other way.

Well, he is a, I mean, this is perfect.

This is bizarre.

No, it's brilliant because he is a response to Morton's cranial collection.

So you are living in essentially the response to.

Do you want to make an episode of my joint?

I mean, if I'd known about you months ago, we would have.

You didn't know about me months ago?

What's wrong with you?

I didn't know about you.

I didn't know about your bloody house.

That's incredible.

That's mad, eh?

That is.

So that.

That's why I love these stories.

Yeah.

And this is the thing.

It's, they're mysteries.

Like I think, I always say with this stuff, like nobody wants,

nobody wants a lecture on decolonialism or race.

Nobody wants that, right?

Yeah.

Certain people do.

Most people don't.

But people love a treasure hunt.

People love a mystery.

And part of my job is to, you know,

locate these aspects of history and go, how do I, how do I intrigue?

How do I, how do I control the flow of information so that it becomes,

and you do this innately, like it's even the way you were telling that story.

I'm like, where's he going with this?

Where's he going with this?

Right.

Arranging it in such a way that there's a little bit of information deficit,

this vacuum where questions.

Purposefully.

Exactly.

That pulls you through.

And I love that.

I love that, that creation of that,

that feeling where people don't quite know where it's going or why it's going

there, but you do feel this momentum.

You feel this momentum pulling you through.

That's fun.

I've always loved doing that.

Mark, you're, you're, you're, you're very theatrical.

No, you are.

It's the jazz hands, isn't it?

But you are, you're very theatrical.

Even your face is theatrical, to be frank with you.

I mean, that's what you're born with.

I mean, you can't help that.

You know, it's a good thing, particularly in terms of.

I want to get endorsed on LinkedIn for theatrical face.

But we shouldn't put that out there.

No, but they need movement.

But like, but how important is theatre in what you do?

You know, like you just talked about intrigue.

And I mean, all parts of theatre.

I don't mean just the facial expression, but the whole, the whole theatre.

I've never been asked that question before.

Um, I guess it is quite important, isn't it?

Otherwise you might lose me.

Yeah, yeah.

No, no, no.

You, I don't, it's, I'd never really thought about it before.

Um, I guess, yeah, I think there's always a challenge with, because what I deal in is,

is factual storytelling, right?

I'm not making stuff up.

But there's still theatre attached to facts.

Yeah.

But I think there's a, there's.

There's always a delicate dance with those things, right?

Where you, I spend a lot of time looking at, you know, writing out treatments and looking

at edits and scripts and stuff like that and just removing.

Because if you remove a piece of info, like you remove information, what you do is you

create questions.

And I think a lot of the work that I do, even like when I'm telling a story or if I'm putting

together a documentary, is like, it's working out, only ever tell the audience what they

need to know when they need to know it.

When it becomes important.

Because when, in that moment, uh, in that moment, you find the audience is most receptive

to the idea, right?

The way you held, like you could have told that story the other way around.

You could have been like, so the house I live in belong to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, but

you know, which is that, that piece of information is so satisfying, it's so, it's so, um, delicious

if you put it at the end.

And I think there is an, uh, um, an, I think there is a nature about people.

Some people know when to hold off when something, and comedians do it, which is know where the

punchline actually lies and where the, where the payoff actually lies and know when to,

to put the right, you know, sow the right seeds at the right moment.

So not too far ahead because they'll, they'll forget about it, but not too late because

that it won't have an impact.

I think there's a lot, there is a bit of that, that I, I love.

Okay.

And, and I've sort of acquired it over the years.

When I was at Triple J, I did these little movie reviews were like two minutes.

They used to sit in between songs.

And I always used to say to people, the trick to writing that kind of radio is imagine you're

talking to a, uh, imagine you're in a very loud pub and you're talking to a friend who's

a little bit drunk and not really paying attention to you because you learn really quickly.

What's the one thing I can say to get your attention?

What's the next thing I can say to keep you pulled, keep you pulled because you've got,

you, you've got so much other pieces, you know, things competing for your attention.

And I probably, I still spend more time now thinking about what my opening line is or

what my opening, you know, pre-title sequences, because that's the thing.

Where you, you, you are buying audience, you are buying audience's attention and you buy

inch by inch by inch by inch.

You don't buy like, unless you're people, you're making something for the cinema where

people bought a ticket and they're like, they're stuck in there in broadcast media or digital

media, you only really own the next 10 seconds.

And then you have to keep giving people reasons to listen, to watch.

Right.

And I think the, the, the way you learn that is by talking to people a lot and paying

attention to their face and working out, are they bored?

Are they bored?

This is, are they eyes closing ever?

I know I've got them.

They're excited.

Like you could, I think you, that's the only real way to learn it.

Like you've got to watch people's faces.

You've got to tell lots of stories all the time and then watch their faces.

And, and whenever I have an idea for a new series or something, I tell people, I'm not

like one of those people who's like, I can't possibly tell people about my new project.

It's secret.

My thing is you go, you don't tweet about it, but you have a group.

But prosecute it.

Yeah.

But like.

Exactly.

Say to people, so I heard about this story about a, there's a room in a university that's

filled with human skulls and just like watch their face.

And then they're like, they're like, well, that's boring.

Or sorry, there's a what now?

That's what I'm looking for because that tells me how to shape it.

You know, in six months time, I've got a bunch of interviews and I've got to lay it all out

and I've got to cut a trailer for it.

That people's initial reaction when you explain the idea is how you know where the shape of

the idea should live.

And I think.

You know, we, there's all these apparatus of producing something where they're, like

I said, trailers and edits and stuff like that.

But actually, if you know where people, what the, what was the thing you said that hooked

you?

What was the thing you said that took somebody else?

Remember that, bottle that, keep track of that because you're going to have to replicate

that in a trailer, in an ad, in a one sheet, whatever it is in six months time.

And I think it's, that's another reason why it's important to like, when you're excited,

capture it, record it, not just the content, but why you care.

Is that worth you in the title?

Because I mean, no, because of the title, like the title is important.

Like, like you said, you want to write down straight away, particularly the moment you

got excited.

I mean, people out there setting up businesses and they're looking for a business name.

You've got to prosecute the name to other people and see how they respond.

Yeah.

The best, I mean, the best example of that for me has been Stuff the British Style because.

It's a great name.

Well, it depends who you are, right?

So that, that title has been instrumental in making that show a hit.

Like it, the biggest audience for that show is in the US.

And outside of Australia and Americans get it.

People in any country that was colonized, get it.

You try going around London and booking locations with a show called Stuff the British Style.

Ooh, it's very hard.

So that title, you know, was the first thing pretty much that like, I was like, that's

what it, I mean, you have to call it that.

And it was instrumental in making it what it is, but it, it creates real problems.

Like, you know, he's trying to get people to, British people to talk to you that, oh,

it couldn't possibly be at a show with that name.

Yeah.

So isn't that a good thing?

I think it's.

You have to upset somebody.

Well, I mean, the thing with that show is I think history, particularly the history

of the British Empire hides a lot behind politeness.

And I think there is an impolite version of history that people don't like to tell.

And it has to be told because all you need to do is go ask the other people, the people

that were colonized, and they'll tell you a very unvarnished version of their history.

And a big part of that show is, is like, once you've got your object in a museum and

how did it get there?

The real thing.

Is how did it get there?

And when you start telling a story of how did this object get in the museum, what you've

got to tell is a story of like, what happened when the Britain, what happened when the British

went to Kenya?

What happened when they went to Australia?

What, what do they do?

What happened when they went to Greece and they.

Yeah.

Got the marbles.

Exactly.

I sat on a plane once with Richard Branson and an archetypal entrepreneur who's great

at coming up with names, a virgin.

And I said to him, cause I was actually looking for a name for a business that I was about

to start, which.

A company called Wizard.

And he explained to me, I was lucky enough to sit next to him, he explained to me that

the name Virgin was premised on something that was controversial at the time.

Like, you know, no one said the word Virgin at the time we come up with Virgin Records.

And he said to me a couple of things, Mike, it doesn't matter with half the people don't

like it, half the people do like it.

He said, at the end of the day, people got to remember it.

Yes.

And then, then they'll like it if you, what you give to them off the back of the name

is something.

They like.

So get a name that they'll remember.

So don't go around sanitizing it.

Oh shit, that might offend this mob or that might offend that mob.

You know, you know, like that, that's, that doesn't make sense.

It doesn't matter if you offend half and half like it or whatever, just as long as they'll

remember it, then it's the delivery of the product that they like.

Yes.

And I thought that, and he also says something quite interesting, you know, like in, in,

you know, Stuff the British Stole, there's something quite significant in those, in that

title.

Stuff is a very good word.

British is memorable.

Stole is quite emotive.

He said to me in a word, in his name, in the word Virgin, he said, there are letters I

like to hear in a name to be memorable.

And he said, they are strong letters like Virgin, like the R, the V.

There's a sharp letter.

Yeah.

Those two syllables and, but the sharpness of the letters make you, you, you get a sense

of feeling out of it.

And what you just told me, the Stuff the British Stole, there's emotiveness in there.

The British is, well, British and Stuff is quite, quite, you know, they're, they're

covers a broad spectrum and, and, and it also says, well, what does he mean by stuff?

Yeah.

I think that's a very powerful title.

And then titles, mate, titles sell shows at the end of the day.

Totally.

I don't give a damn, but the titles, titles, that sounds like a show, I don't give a damn.

There's, there's.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But like, but it's funny.

People are always saying, oh, I've got this name for my new business.

It's a startup, blah, blah, blah.

But I can't work out the name.

And they, and I look at it and I go, my God, like you sanitize it so much.

You're worried about what everybody thinks.

Right down the first thing comes to your mind.

Like you do in your titles.

Yeah.

Can I just ask you a final question, Mark?

So what are we in, what, what series are you in right now?

Are you in the, which, which series are you in?

You've got so many things going on.

What, what is your main series right now?

What has gone away?

Well, House of Skulls is out now.

So that's on Audible.

That's on Audible.

That's exclusively on Audible.

I've got a art heist series about this wild art heist that happened in WA that leads you

to Manila and New York and LA.

And, and, and.

That's from London that comes out on SBS in October.

That's called The Mission.

And then next year, season two of Stuff the British Doll will be on the ABC in Australia

and CBC in Canada.

Awesome.

Yeah.

Mark Fennell, this has been a lot of fun.

Good.

I was, pleasure's entirely mine.

I'm glad to be you.

Lovely to meet you, Mark.

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