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It Burns
- The Scandal-Plagued Race to Breed the World’s Hottest Chilli, An Audible Original
- Narrated by: Marc Fennell
- Length: 2 hrs and 52 mins
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It Burns
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Publisher's Summary
Winner of the Silver Narrative/Documentary Podcast Trophy at the 2020 New York Festivals Radio Awards
Nominated for the 2019 Rose D’Or award for Audio Entertainment
Please note: contains mature themes and graphic imagery.
Written and hosted by Marc Fennell, It Burns is the story of a 10-year scandal-plagued international competition that will take listeners from the Australian Coast to South Carolina (via an Indian Research Facility).
It’s a war filled with larger than life characters. There will be sledging, accusations of cheating, theft and performance enhancing drugs. And allegations that Australia was cheated out of a Guinness World Record. In the process of charting the scandal-plagued race to breed the world’s hottest chilli, the audio documentary lifts the lid on the subculture of ‘Chilli-heads’, hardcore chilli fans spread across the globe who compete in chilli eating and breeding competitions.
The internet is filled with videos of grown men being reduced to tears by a square millimetre of chilli. The docu-series asks: what motivates someone to breed and eat a demonic nugget that is so hot it no longer has flavour? At what point does this stop being cuisine and start being an endurance sport?
This humorous series shows that all this has never really been about chilli. It’s been about how people use pain to shape themselves, define themselves and make themselves feel alive.
What the critics say
"It’s so full of weird twists and turns that I binged the entire five episodes in one go during a road trip." (PedestrianTV)
"A mental image isn’t hard to conjure when your headphones swell with the frantic splutters and gags of chilli eaters in pain, or the guttural aftermath of Youtuber Ted Barrus’s infamous Carolina Reaper chilli “bong rip”. Heed Fennell’s warning in episode one: “You might want to think twice about eating while listening.” (Broadsheet)