Strombo is a Canadian talk show host. The 'Best Story Ever' video clips are part of his show. They are short videos featuring interesting and (mostly) funny anecdotes of well-known people, which might be of interest to the English language learner in the intermediate-to-advanced spectrum to develop their listening skills and which you can find here.
Here are a couple of examples of 'Best Story Ever' videos, showing American political activist Ralph Nader and Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin.
Ralph Nader
One day I came home from school and I was in the fourth grade to my mother, and I said, mom the boys are wearing long pants. I wanna wear long pants. I said if I keep wearing short pants, if I trip I'm going to cut myself and, you know, in cold weather it’s cold without long pants. And she smiled and said, Ralph, are you worried about being different? I was not to be persuaded so I unloaded my trump card. I said, mom their mothers let them wear long pants. And my mother looked at me again with her beautiful smile and said, well, they have their mothers and you have yours. And by the way, Ralph if you're ever gonna wanna be a leader, sometimes you have to turn your back on the pack. I never forgot that. I'm Ralph Nader and that was one of my best stories ever.
Ian Rankin
So I was at University, doing a PhD and suddenly got an idea for a crime novel. I, I thought how do I find out about the police? Went along to a police station and asked if I could speak to a couple of detectives. Sadly I’d been a student at the time, in the mid-eighties, I looked a bit like a tramp. Told them the plot of my novel and the two detectives said, well, we have a really great idea. Why don’t we pretend you're a suspect in an ongoing inquiry. What I didn't realize was these cops at this very police station were investigating a crime that was almost identical to the one I’d just told them about was going to be in my book. So they took me to an interrogation room. They interrogated me for an hour and a half. They got all the information online, on their computer. I didn't think anything of it. Went home that weekend, hadn’t got some great stuff from them, I thought. My dad said to me, you, you're crazy if they think you did it, and you were coming into the police station to play games with them. So I went back to the police station the Monday morning, asked for the two detectives and they said, yeah, you're the only suspect we have in an ongoing police inquiry. So that was a problem for me because what it told me was that when you do research as a novelist you tend to get into trouble. So for a while after that I didn't do any research, I didn’t look into the police, I didn’t get near the police because I did not want to become the only suspect in a murder inquiry. That's what happened to me when I was writing my first Inspector Rebus book. My name's Ian Rankin and that's my best story ever.
