OF all his many projects over the last decade – ranging from alternative guide books to Brighton, to his musical project Oddfellow’s Casino – David Bramwell admits The Catalyst Club is the one which has given him the least headaches.

“Maybe eight years ago I remember sending an email asking whether anyone wanted to do a talk,” says Bramwell, who is launching a new podcast to mark The Catalyst Club’s tenth birthday.

“Now we always seem to be booked up three months in advance. In a sense it is one of the easiest projects I have ever undertaken.”

Part of that may be down to The Catalyst Club’s simplicity. A typical night sees three people talk for 15 minutes about an interest they feel passionately about. The remainder of the night is spent in a Q and A session – reminiscent of the French debating salons of the 19th century.

The subjects of the talks can range wildly, from hypnosis to canned meat, swearing to shark attacks, the origins of Christianity to why reunions are a bad idea.

Bramwell believes the essence of a good Catalyst Club talk is having a focus and a genuine love of your subject.

“It’s important not to try to pack too much into one talk,” he says. “Less is more. If you’re a fan of Nick Cave and want to do a talk on him it’s best to focus on one album or his moustache. It gives much more scope and time to be playful.

“It’s good to speak from the heart too – all the good talks have a personal connection with the subject matter. Sometimes when we have professional scientists speaking you get the feeling there’s an emotional disengagement with the material as they have been exploring it for so long.”

Bramwell is among those who have used the format to test out his own projects and ideas, with his recent book The No 9 Bus To Utopia starting life as a series of talks, and its forthcoming sequel and show The Haunted Moustache also developing through the club.

“With a 15-minute talk you need a beginning, a middle and an end,” he says. “It really helps put a book together and can be a good platform for people to try out something bigger.”

In recent years Bramwell has taken the format out on tour to summer festivals and into London – although he admits without the local link to the area it can be hard to build a new audience.

This is part of the thinking behind the new Odditorium podcast, which will be launched on Thursday.

“We thought if the podcast becomes popular people may start their own clubs of their own accord,” he says. “There’s no copyright on the name – I don’t want to own it. It should be shared.”

Bramwell will present the podcast accompanied by sidekick Dave Mounfield of Count Arthur Strong’s Radio Show fame. The aim is to focus on the less visual talks, and include edited post-presentation discussions too.

“We had a wonderful talk in November called the Cabinet Of Curiosities,” he says.

“It was about a collector who showed us 100 slides from his collection – the novelty was that it was a mixture of fantasy and fact. He had an object he claimed was a tool Neil Armstrong used for picking things up on the moon – but you didn’t know if it was false or true. It was all about our relationship with objects and how our perception changes with what people tell us about them. It was so heavily driven by images though it would never work as a podcast.”

Launching the tenth anniversary podcast are a pair of Catalyst Club regulars – Colin Uttley who will be talking about the history of ghost trains, and musician Sarah Angliss on 1980s armageddon enthusiasts.

Already available on the website at oddpodcast.com are Rob Brandt on the History Of The Martini, George Egg talking about Anarchist Cookery, Mathilda Gregory on Werewolf Erotica and John Higgs making the case for St Albans being made the patron saint of England.

As well as a further Ten Years show on Thursday, March 26, Brighton writer Marcus O’Dair will be hosting a Catalyst Club special on Thursday, February 5, talking about his new Robert Wyatt biography Different Every Time.

As for the future of the Catalyst Club Bramwell wants to leave the format well alone and stay where he is.

“It’s so easy to kill things,” he says. “I’ve seen it happen before in Brighton where events have grown their audiences and received Arts Council funding, but something essential has been lost.

“We have a sense of intimacy in the Latest Music Bar, which has always treated us well and with respect. There are different ways to grow and be successful – by offering more to audiences rather than moving on to somewhere new."

Ten years of The Catalyst Club at the Latest Music Bar, Manchester Street, Brighton on Thursday, January 29