Ray Alan, a working ventriloquist himself, hosts this 1986 Channel 4 documentary tracing his own craft back to its origins as a religious practice: the Greeks called it gastromancy, believing the stomach-produced sounds were the voices of the dead, and the Pythia at Delphi reportedly used the technique to deliver prophecies. Alan traces the word itself to the Latin venter and loqui, belly and speak, before moving from temple to stage, showing how throwing one's voice turned from oracle work into comic performance. Archive clips of well-known ventriloquists illustrate the technique and its stagecraft, though a few have been cut from this upload to satisfy copyright rules. Alan, presenting from inside the profession rather than as an outside narrator, focuses on the mechanics performers actually rely on: voice control, misdirection, and the timing needed to make a puppet seem to think for itself. The film stays a straightforward historical account of one narrow performing art, told by someone who spent his career practicing it.