What is Festival of the Spoken Nerd?

Festival of the Spoken Nerd is the UK science comedy phenomenon that will feed your brain, tickle your ribs and light your Bunsen burner. Not just live performers, they also make radio shows, TV appearances, DVDs, downloads, YouTube videos, podcasts and books. Full Frontal Nerdity guaranteed!

The trio of stand-up mathematician Matt Parker (Discovery Channel Outrageous Acts Of Science, Numberphile), experiments maestro Steve Mould (ITV1 I Never Knew That About Britain, BBC1 Britain’s Brightest) and geek songstress Helen Arney (BBC2 Coast, Comedy Central Stewart Lee’s Alternative Comedy Experience) mix astonishing science with statistically significant comedy, plus experiments that electrify their audiences – sometimes literally. Here’s what people are saying about their live shows.

Since their first smash hit tour Full Frontal Nerdity, the Nerds have filmed three shows for DVD and download, created the first truly “experimental” comedy show for BBC Radio 4, featured on three episodes of BBC Two’s QI and racked up hundreds of millions of views on YouTube for their experiments, songs and stand-up. The Nerds have performed all over the world, with shows in Las Vegas and New York, at Shakespeare’s Globe, London’s Science Museum, Hammersmith Apollo with Robin Ince and Professor Brian Cox, The Royal Albert Hall with astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield, Assembly at the Edinburgh Fringe, Soho Theatre, The British Library, Latitude and Underbelly Festivals and all the major UK science festivals. In 2018 they headlined ThinkerCon, the first international meeting of science and education content creators at the US Space and Rocket Center in Hunstville, Alabama.

Since touring across the UK to over 50,000 nerds and non-nerds, the “resplendently nerdy trio” (The Times) have created two more live shows, Just For Graphs and You Can’t Polish A Nerd, and recorded them for DVD and download. During the global pandemic, they launched a new podcast based on their monthly nerdy new material night. A Podcast Of Unnecessary Detail reached No. 15 in the iTunes comedy podcast charts in the first week, and the start of their current Season 3 pushed them well beyond 1 million downloads.

The first book from the Nerds, The Element In The Room, is out now in hardback, ebook and audiobook,  published by Cassell. You can hear all three Nerds in the audiobook version of Domestic Science, the BBC Radio 4 show where listeners get their hands on bite-size experiments that explore the science all around us, available on all the usual audiobook and digital download platforms.

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