Rich Hall is hosting a new BBC podcast about streakers – and reveals he once ran naked across his university campus.

Confessions Of A Super Bowl Streaker focusses on Liverpudlian Mark Roberts, aka Captain Cock, and his attempts to conquer ‘the holy grail of streaking: the Super Bowl’.

And in one of the six episodes of the Radio 5 Live podcast, released on BBC Sounds today, the comedian relives his own experiences of streaking.

It came when he was a journalism student at  Western Carolina University in 1974. Reading how 125 students at a rival university set a national record for streaking, he told fellow undergraduate Dwight Sparks: ‘We can beat that!’

Sparks later told North Carolina’s Our State magazine: ‘Rich was just a man possessed after that. I don’t think we thought it would be easy getting people to take their clothes off and run outside naked…  but for the next few days, that was Rich’s total focus. He somehow talked people into doing it.’

Speaking on the Radio 5 Live podcast – part of a wider series called Sport's Strangest Crimes – Hall recalls: ‘The University of Maryland had just set a streaking record and I wanted to instil some school pride because our basketball team was lousy and the football team was lousy and I wanted to put our school's name on the map.

‘So I organised a streak, some adamant volunteers, and some people had to be coerced.’

The Our State article tells of how Hall got himself into an elevated position and used a megaphone to try and get people on board.  ‘Who knew that would transcend into standing on a stage now with a microphone,’ Hall considers. ‘I played on smaller stages, trust me.’

Speaking of how he lead the streak itself, he says: ‘I threw the door open. I ran out. And I do remember thinking "what if everybody else just decides not to do it and it's a big practical joke and they just sent me out running naked across the campus"

‘But I took off and look behind me and yep they came pouring out And there was a lot of clapping and cheering coming out of the windows of the dormitories. There were definitely people standing outside cheering us on. 

‘It was really cold. It was dark. It was windy, there was snow on the ground… We got back to the dorm, [did a] head count, so to speak, and realised that we had more streakers than at the University of Maryland.

’It was reported in the paper, and then the next day we were officially recognised as holding the world record for most streakers. The record only lasted a few days. It did set off a storm of streaking across the country because I think a lot of schools realised that, "Oh, it's competitive now. Well, we can break that." 

Hall, now 71, said he had forgotten about the incident until podcast producer Elle Scott unearthed the story. 

Confessions Of A Super Bowl Streaker – part of a wider series called Sport's Strangest Crimes –  largely revolves around Roberts, who first streaked at the World Rugby Sevens in Hong Kong in 1993. 

In the following 33 years, he got naked at more than 500 events across 23 countries, including the Champions League final, Commonwealth Games 100 metre final and Wimbledon men’s final.

Roberts tells the podcast his motivation is ‘to entertain tens of thousands of people in that stadium, and… to put two fingers up to authority.’