For forty minutes, four females sitting equidistantly in a row regurgitated statements collected from breakfast time TV, social media, overheard conversations, rolling news, tabloids and newspapers. Topics ranged from the momentous to the bathetic, including abortion, gay marriage, sexism, parenting, porn and pantomime to name a few. At times, their collective voices were shrill and insistent, but more often measured and clipped. At other times, some dropped out of the rant, as if incapable of carrying on. By such means, Basic Training offered a stark dissection of popular discourse, creating a space within which the audience could confront the platitudes they hear and often repeat on a daily basis, and where they could negotiate information that is polarized and contradictory. Disturbingly, the show suggested that what any individual may think and say is a ventriloquism of patterns of thought and feeling that have already been mediatised and institutionalised.