Answer Me This! - AMT308: Pink Hair, Sleeping Naked and Tom Jones's Knickers

Episode Date: February 19, 2015

Today we deliberate over careers, redundancy, hair dye and the Royals eating hot dogs. Jog over to http://answermethispodcast.com/episode308 to learn more about this episode.Send questions to [e-mail], or the Question Line (dial 0208 123 5877 or Skype answermethis)Tweet us http://twitter.com/helenandollyBe our Facebook friend at http://facebook.com/answermethisSubscribe on iTunes http://iTunes.com/AnswerMeThisBuy old episodes and albums at http://answermethisstore.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's Fifty Shades of Grey about the English summer Has to be this, has to be this Did the world really need a sequel to Dumb and Dumber? Has to be this, has to be this Helen and Ollie, has to be this Very exciting feedback to our last episode where we were talking about the fortunes of Grumpy Cat. Jess in Kalgoorlie in Western Australia says, I am someone who has a cat video on YouTube that has made money.

Our cat Luna is the star of the video, Luna falls into bathtub when as a kitten, she investigated the partially filled bath for the first time with hilarious results. And I can confirm, I can verify that indeed the results are hilarious. I didn't find them hilarious. I found them quite distressing because the cat was obviously not enjoying it. There was a distressing undercurrent in that the cat doesn't know when it falls into the bath that it's not going to drown to death.

It looks like it thinks it will never be able to get out again because of the sheer scrabbly sides. There is sheer panic on the cat's face. However, the dramatic irony of knowing that the cat's all right in the end, to me, rendered the video hilarious indeed. I still found it upsetting. And I thought of the mental scars that luna would have carried to this day well jeff says the video has 1.3 million hits which as it was uploaded in 2009 is not particularly impressive well how are our

2010 videos doing ollie uh most popular one has 15 000 views thanks for asking but it has earned us about 2 000 us dollars from various tv shows using the video and also from YouTube ad revenue. See, now that is the bit that is a bit freaky, isn't it? Because you know that obviously, don't get me wrong, Jess, you're obviously a responsible cat owner. You didn't deliberately try and drown your cat to get a funny video out of it. Although she was filming the cat about to do a thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but you're filming the kitten

because it's investigating the world for the first time. That's bog-standard cat owner stuff to do. She was expecting crisis. because it's investigating the world for the first time. That's bog standard cat owner stuff to do. She wasn't... She was expecting crisis. Why would you be filming the cat in the bathroom? Nonetheless, the issue is, does it incentivize people to put their cats in danger to raise revenue on YouTube?

Yeah. There is always that unsettling feeling, isn't there? There may be somewhere in the world it might. Anyway, $2,000 from a cat. That's okay, as she points out. Well, as she says, given this, I think that grumpy cat earning a hundred million is not that unbelievable given her popularity reach and being the face of friskies etc well that means that uh grumpy cat would be 50 000 times more popular than your cat yeah that seems plausible if grumpy cats got more

than one video yeah but 50 000 times more it's like 50 billion isn't it? Once you earn your first million as an internet cat, maybe the rest follows fairly quickly. Well, if you invest it wisely. If it's from tie-ins, though, that doesn't have to scale the same way, does it? That's true. I mean, how much does Grumpy Cat charge for an appearance? Could be a million a time.

It's interesting how the cat world mirrors the Hollywood world in other ways. Because if you're a young starlet, for example, and you want to get noticed, you have to pay for your own agent, own pr people and everything else you may be making money you're spending it all on your own stuff it's thousands a month isn't it to have the pr that gets you placed in magazines to make it look natural like you'd be there but then once you become grumpy cat once you become the cat everyone's talking about then kerching yeah unless grumpy cat spends it all on drugs and stuff. Well, inevitably. While talking of cats and bathtubs, we've had this question from Gavin from Devon, who says,

I have a cat that is generally clean, but there are bits of him that are always a bit dirty that he can't reach properly, like his nose and the back of his neck. Yeah, you know, the back of the neck is the only place that a cat actually can't reach at all. Back of the head as well? No, they can just about get to the top of the head with the paw, you see. But the paw doesn't go up and round, it doesn't disconnect to flex up to the back of the neck what about if you gave them a little scrubbing brush um so that's why you put the flea treatment there on the neck yes because they can't lick it off yeah is it the same with dogs yeah same with humans flea treatments yeah

can't lick it off your neck um he says ollie answered me this can i wash my cat and if so how do i go about doing it i know i'll get torn to pieces if i try to give it a bath perhaps there are some kind of cat wipes i can use there are cat wipes yeah well they're called pet wipes like wet wipes yeah i think people tend to use it with pedigree cats that aren't so good at washing every element of themselves anyway because they've got long hair that are getting on a bit so if you've got a pedigree cat that's like 15 and a bit senile yeah it's gonna have a lump of shit hanging from his arse and that's why you get the pet wipes but if you've got a pedigree cat that's like 15 and a bit senile yeah it's gonna have a lump of shit hanging from his arse and that's why you get the pet right but if you've got a tabby like i have i don't think you'd ever really have to use it i mean you just want her to be super shiny well i

don't know if gavin is obsessing about that i mean let the cat lick its own bloody neck do you know what i mean there's nothing i know but exactly it can't it's inadequate there's a reason it can't cats are obsessed with cleaning you know they're not I use the word designed slightly ill-advised. I don't want to have a discussion about whether they're designed or whether they evolved. But the point is, they're not designed to be able to clean the back of their necks for a reason, which is they don't really need to, so chill out about it, it's fine. Would there be like a little cat wash that your cat could run through, like a car wash that would be more fun than them getting into a horrible echoey cold bathtub?

I doubt a cat would ever find the process fun, but you are correct to say that the bath is a particularly scary place for them. Dogs usually hate the bath too, and I think noise has a lot to do with it. Yeah, which is why Luna, in the previous piece of correspondence we had, is scrabbling to get out of the bath.

It's a scary thing for a cat. They don't know what it is. So people do actually use a basin. If they'll fit into a basin or a sink, that's better. They can see over the edge. That must be comforting. Hello, it's Jasmine from Surrey. Helen and Molly, answer me this.

Would it be all right if I dyed my hair pink whilst I'm looking for a job in digital and social media? Is it out there enough for me to have pink hair, or is that a really bad move? And I won't find a job if I do that. Is it too out there? I wonder it might not be out there enough. Really?

Yes. Maybe she needs to dye a colour that is less popular, like racing green. You know, like an agar. The thing is, pink itself, I mean, even Pink the Artist now has blonde hair, doesn't she? She sees it as a bit passé. But she hasn't told us what the current state of her hair is if it's already dyed platinum and she was just going to put the

pink on top of it why not yeah if you're someone that who regularly dyes your hair though actually the bigger treat for everyone else in your life is just to let it go natural isn't it because it's quite nice to see what it was whereas whereas if i with my boring colored hair if i were to go to a job interview and i thought suddenly i better bleach my hair and then dye it pink, then I suppose I'd be wearing an artificial character that they might pick up on. Yes, OK, so that's the thing, isn't it, in Jasmine's question, which isn't just about the colour of her hair.

She mentions that she's going for job interviews in the field of digital and social media. Does she want to look a bit more exciting for them? I think what she's saying is she wants to look kooky and cool, but not too kooky that people think she's weird and just like a hashtag well that's a bit 2011 i think her concerns are well placed because no one likes a try hard well as far as i can tell um social media companies or actually companies that are looking for someone to do their social media for them tend to be companies that are staffed by older people who are web savvy enough to understand they have a need for that

but not savvy enough to understand that but she hasn't said that is the kind of job she's going no i know but she might be going for a cool startup where the boss is 22 she might be but hear me out i'm just saying if she's you know sending her cv far and wide trying to get that job i'm just saying in a lot of those places they're looking for someone who is kind of young and cool and hip enough that they create the impression they understand it more than everyone else in the office however they're also looking for experience and if you are too young and cool and hip then you obviously don't have enough experience in doing the thing they're doing well you have too much experience of personal vanity and not enough of work well possibly you want track record, don't you? And so I just wonder

whether pink hair pushes it a little bit too far in Look How Cool I Am. I want to give pink hair and surgical stockings to Vance. Here's an opposite tack, Jasmine. Why don't you go and get the haircut and the outfit of Mark Zuckerberg? The most successful social media-ist of all.

Boring, isn't it? A bit creepy, isn't it, if you turn up in exactly his outfit. Well, worked for him. I remember once when I was in an internet chat room when I was about 16 and I was trying to impress other people who were also about 16. This is in the days before broadband internet or web cameras. Did you know they were 16? Could they have been 45? They probably were.

I was describing myself and I meant to put that I had blue-green eyes, which is a slight extension of the truth my eyes are actually just blue but i thought blue green sounded more interesting and without realizing i actually wrote uh green hair and then like loads of people parted in like wow green hair you've got green hair and i was like oh fuck caught in a light i've got green hair yeah yeah just do it i'm just and i basically started to pretend to be a proper sort of green day style emo just because i thought well this is obviously making me more popular oh sweet it's that guy with the green hair have you ever tried dyeing your hair green and seeing if it had the same effect in real life do you think my hair

green would really work Helen you look like the Joker you would look like Cress well here's another question of careers uh it is from Baxter from Washington DC uh famously known he says as the birthplace of Helen's mother. Yeah, I think that is why D.C. is so famous. That's why people like to stop off and have a look around, isn't it? I bet this is where Alison Zaltzman first appeared in the world. He says, When I told my dad I intended to study philosophy at university,

his response was to ask, Are you preparing for a career as a graduate student? Is that a career now? Cool. I think is that a career now cool i think he was being glib i think he was being realistic well that's the nature of the question so let's see helen answer me this when you told your parents what you intended to study what was their reaction and what is your advice for students who will be telling their parents they want to study a subject that doesn't have an obvious career path okay well in answer to the second part i think you'd say well i want to study old and middle english was what i did study not a

useful thing although now i'm doing the illusionist it's sort of useful yeah but i think you say i'm going to do that an obvious career path i think it's fair to say that's kind of amazing that you are using your degree in your work it only took 12 years to become useful but it did um i think you you just say i'm going to do that but also on the side i'll be doing this and this to contribute to the career that i plan afterwards just make it look like you have a plan even if you're bullshitting i think that's right um but uh for the first part just bear in mind that my dad is a sculptor and my mother is his enabler and therefore it's not really up to them to tell me i'm wasting my life is it

it's not the most careersy job it's also not the nicest thing to say back to your parents if they were to say that to you so even though you can have that in your arsenal helen if your father had turned around and said i'm not going to do the south african accent do a little if he did hill hill hill hill hill hill hill i don't want you to waste he's not quite as vortrecker as that I don't want you to waste your life

in middle English he's basically become Arnold Schwarzenegger in my impersonation Helen I don't want you to waste your life like I have done I think what he would

have said was what are you going to do with that then okay but my point is had he said don't waste your life like I've wasted mine exactly as I've wasted mine.

If he'd said that to you, if he'd have said, bear in mind, I want you to have a job where you can support yourself in the future, what would your response be? You couldn't have actually said, well, it wouldn't be worth it. I think I would have, though. I can't remember what their reaction was,

but I think they probably knew. And also, I was on quite an academic track because of the kind of school that they had sent me to. And I think they would have been surprised had I gone for something vocational. So you're talking as if Helen went and studied, you know, like drama of the Japanese no theatre. Like she did an English degree at Oxford.

It's not exactly not mainstream or respectable. Yeah, but I specialised in things written before 1400, Martin. So when you say not mainstream and not specialised, there were poets I studied that none of the tutors had ever read my parents their position was kind of the maureen litman bt approach of you know he's got an ology i think the most important thing for them was that i went to university at all so they didn't have any particular interest really in the subject that i was choosing to study or even where i was going to go and do it it was more just that from their point of view they'd spent loads of money on my education going to private schools so that I went to

university I'm the only person still in my family to have ever gone to university and because they hadn't been that was their project for me was to go and that was the thing that they felt they'd missed out on and the only route we had about it was when I said when I was 18 I'm not really sure if I want to go to university maybe I'll become a dancer well no what I thought was at that time I wanted to work in the film industry yeah and I thought probably rightly that if I wanted to get into the film industry it would probably be better for me to go and spend four years working in the film industry so by the time I'm 21 I've got experience and contact you'd be awesome wells by the time you're 21 and they just flipped out at me they were just like well if you want to go and work in the shop family

owned a butcher shop I was like I didn't say you want to go and work in the shop, family owned a butcher shop. I was like, I didn't say I want to go and work in the butcher shop. I very specifically said I want to go and work in the film industry. In their mind, because my dad spent until he was 35 working in the shop, for them that was the life sentence I was giving myself by not going to university. This was the opportunity for me to broaden my horizons. When you're 18, you're told essentially by your teachers and career advisors that you're planning your life out.

The decision you make about what A-levels you're in, what university subject you're studying, where you go to university it's all bullshit it's going to dictate yeah it's going to dictate your set for life or your room for life and it's not it's not really true no it's not true university gives you the skills to actually like have a bit of initiative and and a bit of space to play around and fail and but if teachers and careers advisors didn't at least say that at least pretend that it had importance then everyone would choose to go and study rock music wouldn't they that's the problem so they're just trying to say look think about it a bit and that's the thing i think with parents saying in your case baxter look you know if you're going to go and do philosophy

realistically you know we're not saying anything wrong we're going to study philosophy realistically a possible career option for you is you're just going to spend forever chasing jobs in academia that don't really exist or do they well they're as much as anything testing your conviction that you want to do it they're not necessarily it might sound like they're being negative about it but they're actually just i think as parent i would be like that too i'd be like are you really sure that's what you want to do all they're doing is preparing you for the long series of no's that you may face afterwards yeah but also if you're going to an american university baxter then you can kind of move around subjects a bit whereas we had to choose definitely by 17 i had to choose but really when i chose my gcses at 14 my degree subject was subject genre you'd be moving into yeah

pretty much and therefore it makes more sense to actually do it when you're there so you know you don't have to be dead set on it but it's good to have limbered them up to that possibility already. And if you are at an American university, it probably helps to have a philosophical attitude towards your finances, certainly. Because by choosing to go to university, you are essentially promising to be in debt forever. Oh, remember when we went to university

and it was essentially free? There's a generation that hates us. I've got a question. Email your question to answer me this podcast at googlemail.com to answer me this podcast

at googlemail.com to answer me this podcast at googlemail.com to answer me, this podcast at googlemail.com To answer me, this podcast at googlemail.com So retrospectives, what historical events are we ticking off on this week's run of Today in History? On Monday, we bring you the real story of the mutiny on the bounty. On Tuesday, the anniversary of the day somebody invented the meatball, but who?

On Wednesday, the iconic British car that ripped off an iconic American car. On Thursday, how American Airlines invented air miles. And on Friday, the UFO sighting that gripped colonial America. We discuss this and more on Today in History with The Retrospectors. 10 minutes each weekday, wherever you get your podcasts. Here's a question from Ed from London in New York,

who says, Ollie, answer me this. Who was the first English-stroke British monarch to visit the USA? Does he think of himself as a king or a queen on a little journey to the USA? You want to see if he counts, yeah. I was really surprised by the answer to this, because I would have thought,

what with the Brits establishing America That perhaps at some point Yeah but we outsourced that To the Portuguese I get it but I thought at some point Maybe Queen Victoria or someone would have gone over there On some sort of visit But no, the first monarch to go to the USA

Was George VI Wow And the Queen Mum when she was the Queen, 1939. So George VI was the one who stepped in after the abdication, right? Yeah, King's Speech guy, stuttery dude. Stuttery. Colin Firth went to America. Colin Firth went to America with Helena Bonham Carter.

The Queen's Dad. The Queen's Dad was the first one to go to America, which is surprising, isn't it? I mean, I know, don't get me wrong, I know that they declared independence from us, so there's going to be a bit of a tetchy issue there for a while. I think there was bad blood for, you know... Hundreds of years.

Yeah, hundreds of years. But also, transatlantic travel was a real mission. Yeah. And it probably took more time than they could afford out of their day job. Do you think it was in the 39th because the war had broken out and they thought it was probably a bit safer there? Yeah, no. Let's go on a long holiday.

I miss eggs, let's go over there and get some. No, but it was, of course, related to the war it was exactly it was actually fdr invited them over seeing that we were about to become a country fighting against hitler when everyone else was succumbing and realizing that the us and the uk might have aligned interests you thought what cheer you up as a night out at the rockets there were some hot dogs actually wow and a hot dog banquet on his cottage lawn. Really? Yeah.

Just hot dogs? No, no, no. There were other things, but they were all very American-type things. Turkey and cranberry sauce, that sort of thing. But, yeah, it was a bit of a scandal at the time

because the papers were running op-ed pieces saying, this is no way to treat a royal because, obviously, the Americans always love the royals because they haven't got any. Were the royals eating hot dogs with their hands?

They'd probably never touched food with their hands before. There is, of course, no photo evidence of the Queen with a sausage in her hand because they didn't do that sort of thing in 1939 i bet the queen mother would have been great at that though she would have been wearing uh like pastel kid gloves with this like dripping hot dog in her hand like she was probably wearing one of those hats in the shape of a hot dog with the mustard sauce on it and everything she was very game she was wearing a chip and dip as a hat she was styling the queen mom she loved it because she wrote a letter which we do have i mean when i say we i mean the nation not me um which wrote a letter to queen mary saying oh the americans have such an informal sense of style and in their country homes quite

like the english so yeah she bloody loved it spring break um so yeah so they went over to uh to see fdr and elena and that was the first in 1939 and that was the beginning essentially of what we now call the special relationship and i didn't realize that was that recent either i knew that obviously the second world war was really the thing that the presidents and the prime ministers are referring to when they talk about a special relationship but i thought that had cemented a longer relationship actually no british monarch had gone there till 1939 it's a fairly recent thing yeah because the first british person to set foot in the usa happened a few years after columbus but before the year 1500 what did you just look around and be like oh god cold beer whatever back on the ship

they haven't put in disney yet the other thing as well of course is there were sensitivities around the fact that the king who just abdicated had done so because he was going to marry an American divorcee. Yes. So back home in Britain, it didn't necessarily play that well that they were going over to America because an American in the eyes of the British press had just nearly brought down the royal family. So that actually was quite a bold thing for George VI to do. He was like, ah, fuck it, what are they going to do? Maybe abdicate doubt it. I want a hot dog If I have to go all the way

to America to get it I will. Is that all they did? No they did a bunch of other stuff as well. What else did they do? Tea at the British Embassy that kind of thing. Tea at the British Embassy? What? That's like being at home that's rubbish. I know. It's like when Clinton came here and went to McDonald's with Kevin Spacey do you remember that? But then there are national differences between the McDonald's's so maybe if he was doing it maybe if he'd been

doing a global comparative study of all the places he had to go it was a weird thing it was it was at the labour party conference i mean it was blair spacey and clinton went for a burger at mcdonald's where was the labour party conference brighton or blackpool somewhere like that right because brighton there are lots of different places to eat blackpool not so many choices doesn't matter it should have been fish and chips shouldn't it it's in the uk i mean obviously the message it was sending was hey we're two left-leaning men of the people but i mean you know that was clearly skewed towards clinton wasn't it going to the mcdonald's didn't benefit blair doing that well i think we'd all benefit right now from a little intermission which today is from answer me this

episode 134 and that is available like all of our first 170 episodes, to buy at answermethisstore.com. Tim in New Cross says, Helen, answer me this. How did the fonts on Microsoft Word get their names? What a fascinating subject Tim raises. I'd love to meet Tim. Times New Roman, Ariel, Garamond.

Is it just the whimsical fancy of Bill Gates? He's not really a whimsical man, is he? The man who invented windows. Don't wish to be unfair. The man who said, I spot a trend here, let's ruthlessly commercialise it. That's not very whimsical. Garamond is actually really, really old. The inventor, Claude Garamond, he was born in 1480.

You're blowing my mind. It's like you're going to tell me That Louis XVI invented clip art It's possible So what about Times New Roman? Oh that was invented in 1931 When a famous typographer Called Stanley Morrison Wrote to the Times newspaper

Saying your font is ugly And your paper's a mess And they said alright Design us a better one Really? Their previous font was called Times Old Roman Presumably it was based on

Roman fonts Yeah And so they got Times New Roman. Presumably it was based on Roman fonts. And so they got Times New Roman. I went out with a font once. Go on. She wasn't my type. Martin's done a funny. If you want to send us a question with your voice, you can do so on the phone line, the number for which is...

0208 123 58 007 Or you can Skype answer me this. Hello, Nollie. Answer me this. I've been made redundant. I'm in hiding in PrEP. What should I do? Well, firstly, don't pull off an orange juice heist like Olly Mann would do in PrEP. Then you have a criminal record, potentially, as well as no job. Just because you've been made redundant that's not an excuse for crime. I presume the situation you're in

is you've just been told you're going to lose your job. It's not like you've literally lost it just now. You've been told you're going to lose it in a month or two months or whatever. Oh, we don't know. What I presume is that it's happened just before this call

rather than they are now redundant after serving their month. Precisely. I presume she's gone to prep because it's that moment where you think, I don't know what to do with myself. If I stay in the office, I'm going to cry or I'm going to say something I shouldn't.

So I'm going to just leave and go and sort myself out. And have a baguette. And have a baguette. Which I can identify with because it's happened to me twice. Really? Yeah, I've been made redundant twice.

When? The first time was my first ever job. It was a department at ITV that we both worked for for a bit. But the thing is, obviously because it was my first job, I was only 21 years old, the whole thing was a bit of an adventure you know what i mean that's how i felt about it i was like oh i'm getting fired is that what this is like and i sort of write this down exactly it was a bit like that you're looking around the people in their 30s who had mortgages and children who were you know a bit devastated

by life yeah and i was thinking i actually can't identify with that at this stage of my life because i'm just thinking, oh, well, I'll just get another job. Yeah. But nonetheless, even though there were people in that office who were taking the news very badly because our department was being closed down. Oh, so everyone was getting made redundant.

Everyone was. Slightly different circumstance then. It was slightly different. But there was a pret quite close by. There was. Enough room for everyone. We didn't go there. We went to the pub.

And I think that is the thing that British people would do when they're just told that all of them are going to lose their job collectively all go to the pub it was actually quite a fun evening out yes the second time was when i was a researcher at the culture show at the bbc which at the time was kind of my dream job loved it and again my expectation would be that i'd stay there for i thought i was quite good at my job you thought you were there forever i did but you were wrong and it's different because I was being told personally they didn't want to renew my contract it wasn't everyone's fired because they're in the department it was we've looked at our budget for next year and we've chosen not to re-employ you so that is a lot

harder to deal with because as I say I thought I was quite good at my job and I suppose I could tell myself or maybe it's because I'm slightly more expensive than the other people who do my job because i'm a few years older yeah but really i knew that if they really liked me they would have made a case to keep me so i thought okay they've you know they have chosen someone else over me it was just a contract that never happened to you before never as an only child yeah it was just a contract my contract ended yeah and they didn't renew it but like i said it's an ongoing show it's still on now so i could have expected to still be working on it that is a slightly softer blow i think than redundancy because when you know your contract's up for renewal in six months or a year there must be

a part of you that's like well it's probable that i'll stay here but i might not that's true but at least if you've been made redundant from a staff job you get redundancy pay yes like obviously i was being told that i'm gonna lose my job and not get paid anything for that so you couldn't go on a pret spree with all that sweet money well actually what i did do which i'm not advising you to do but i did uh is i couldn't face anyone in the office you smashed everything up i just thought i don't want to be the guy that's looking for sympathy about this but i can't just sit at my desk and not reflect on the fact that i've just had a conversation with everyone's boss about how they're not going to renew my contract so i i just couldn't be in the office it was about three o'clock in the afternoon

I made an excuse as to why I had to go into town you know I need to go and pick something up or whatever and I went and I went on a shopping spree which is a really weird thing for me to do because I'm not even into shopping particularly but I went to Liberty and I bought a camel colored duffel coat for 350 pounds wow that was that's an investment that's incredibly stupid yeah I mean the shopping thing it makes sense because it's an element of control That's incredibly stupid. I mean, the shopping thing, it makes sense because it's an element of control, isn't it? You've got control over things and you get to treat yourself. I can sleep under a bridge in this coat.

But you're saying I should have probably, you know, gone to Byron and got a burger rather than spent 350. Yeah, or got some video games or CDs, but not. I don't know, because Ollie still wears that coat. Anyway, I mean, it was a nice coat and it did make me feel better. I mean, I should have regretted it and I couldn't really afford it at the time nice coat and it did make me feel better. I mean, I should have regretted it and I couldn't really afford it at the time, but actually it did make me feel better

about losing my job. I thought, well, I won't be working for the BBC anymore, but I will have a nice coat. I think Anonymous Lady Who Called from Pret, at the risk of sounding like Perez Hilton here, you need to own this. You don't need to be defined by it.

You know, you have just been made redundant. You need to, as Martin was saying, you need to take control. Get yourself a hot redundancy wardrobe. I think, don't let it define you in the office. Don't let it be that everyone knows that the only thing that's interesting about you for the last few weeks is that you've been made redundant. Yeah.

Talk to a few select people about it, but people you really trust. Also be strategic. If you want to get another job in a similar field, now is the time to milk those contacts. Yes, exactly. Milk the contacts, get some sympathy, but don't be a sad sack if you go around draining everyone about it you've got to turn it into a positive because that's how you'll have to feel anyway if you're unemployed and looking for a job so start thinking positive about it now i think unemployment what am i doing next yeah don't think about what you've lost a whole world awaits you but at the moment

you can just have as many sandwiches as you can eat um by 350 pounds worth of sandwiches in the very short term um i would go from pret maybe go to the cinema in the afternoon because when you're unemployed that is the thing you're allowed to do and it's a glorious thing for a while it is a brilliant thing so that will feel like a treat as well as the best afternoon cinema treat you've ever given yourself oh there are loads i really i've got an instant number one i know what it is yeah okay all right on my 30th birthday i met my friend amy for lunch in brixton and then i went on my own to see the original girl with the dragon tattoo the swedish one i didn't know anything about it happy happy happy

no but i didn't know anything about it so I was like gosh this is thrilling and also vile it was in screen 5 at the Ritzy which is like having your own private cinema because it's all armchairs that recline a bit with a little table

next to them and no one else is there if the next part of this story is I then went into the screen next door and watched another film that's not just

the best cinema treat ever that's the best treat ever I then went into town and Martin proposed so there was a downer on the day but still not bad

yeah the second best one is when after guardian media talk i walked uh i had a nice walk uh up to the islington voo and i went to see hunger games again not knowing anything about it yeah and because i arrived in the dark i sat in one of the deluxe seats despite my ordinary ticket i do that as well but not deliberately that's a steal difference between us no no i think that that is a steal it's okay to get away with because once the film has started in fact because i always i always miss the trailers i was walking as the film because once the film has started, because I always miss the trailers, I was walking as the film starts. Once the film started, if those seats are empty,

no one is losing out by you not paying for that seat. I wouldn't have paid for the seat. It was pretty empty. Again, there were about five people there. So I think we were all, even though we weren't going to talk to each other, we were all like, yeah, daytime cinema club. This is cool.

Yeah, it is cool, isn't it? I went just a few weeks ago to see two films in the same day. Lovely, a double bill. A double bill in the afternoon which wasn't it was good and it was two very different films as well

I went to see The Imitation Game and then Leviathan what's Leviathan about it's a Russian film about bleakness that doesn't sound like your cup of tea

yeah it made me feel comparatively better about myself I suppose my best ever cinema afternoon treat was when I went to see Jurassic Park

at the IMAX in 3D last year wow amazing in the afternoon like the fact it was in 3D last year. Wow. Amazing. In the afternoon. Like the fact it was in the afternoon and it reminded me of childhood was what was amazing. I thought we really get to do that because I've got a proper job. Yeah.

Oh yeah. And that was the other great thing. I was on a work day. I was on my way into work. It was an afternoon. How much is a ticket? That'll be £17.50. Did I think that's outrageous?

No, I thought I'm fully employed and I'm at the cinema in the afternoon. I can afford it. I'm fucking serious. Just because you can afford it doesn't mean it's not a bit of a rip it made the floor there's ever so sticky it made it so amazing and i'd forgotten so many things about jurassic park like samuel l jackson is in it yeah he's got the cigarette and he smokes in it yeah yeah which wouldn't happen now would it's his character basically is this he has like an endless cigarette yeah this is clenched in his middle of his dialogue that's true and in jurassic world i

bet no one smokes no one will smoke in Jurassic World. Unless there's an evil one. Unless they're evil, yeah. It was the five obstructions. Thanks for asking. I'm trying to build a website to bring tourists to Radlet, but when I open it up on my smartphone or tablet something goes wrong

and it just looks a bit shit. Unlike Hertfordshire itself Well try building that website using Squarespace On desktop and devices it will look simply ace As well designed as Hertfordshire with all that lovely green space County of Opportunity and Stevenage Thanks very much to Squarespace for sponsoring this episode of Answer Me This. And also thanks be to Squarespace for making it very possible to build a nice website.

Eminently possible. They've taken doable and they've done it. They absolutely have done it, Ollie. They've done that. They've done that right. You can do it as well, listeners. You can go to squarespace.com, try out the two-week free trial, and then if you like what you see, then you can get 10% off Squarespace for a whole year

if you use the code ANSWER. Here's a question from Anonymous from Manchester, who says, I sleep naked and have done so for years, since before I went to university, so over 10 years. Okay, thank you for emphasising the length of time. I really needed to know how long, so I thought, oh, eight years, not committed. Let me be clear.

Fine, probably habit for life. Since boys to men will last in the charts. Over 10 years. I have got so used to sleeping naked that I struggle to sleep with clothes on, for example, when I'm staying over at a friend's, etc. It's interesting that you do make that decision. You know that it's going to be seen as a bit kooky or a bit distasteful to be naked in bed

when someone might walk in and see you. It feels a bit wrong when you're on away territory. But theoretically, at any point, someone might walk in and see you or just it feels a bit wrong when you're on away territory but theoretically at any point someone might walk in and see you wherever you are when you're in a hotel being burgled yeah exactly have some respect for the thief things during this time of sleeping naked i have got married over 10 years over 10 years since grand theft auto 3 over 10 years during that time since jamelia's superstar was a big hit My wife has always been fine with it We now have three kids My three year old son has got to an age

Where he gets up out of bed on his own in the morning Sometimes before anyone else is up And he comes into our room to wake us up To join us in our bed Or he wants to go to the toilet I see the issue I see where this is going For obvious reasons

I always find it uncomfortable lying naked in bed When he jumps into bed with us Or if I have to get up i have to move the covers so he doesn't see anything yeah but actually being haunted by an image of my father's penis was one of my first memories sharing a bath with him it's an informative memory for everyone when you're three it's just normal because you don't have that kind of body shame yeah i think well it's just curious isn't it yeah if you didn't see it then you'd want to see it when you're older and that's weirder yeah i definitely would not want to see that now. I was shocked to see my dad's calves three years ago.

It had been so long. My son is obviously getting older. Yes, that's how time works, isn't it? Over ten years. None of that Benjamin Button shit. It's obviously going to make things more uncomfortable, but I have two younger children who will probably go through similar phases as they grow up. I really do struggle to sleep with clothes on.

Really? Yes. Really? I really do struggle, Ollie.llie okay why must you question me all the time i really bloody struggle i thought about googling it but the word sleeping naked in children would automatically send interpol and my5 around to my house so ollie answer me this what should i do sleep with an apron on because then you're free and easy but you're covered at emergency times that's obviously ludicrous helen i think what he should do uh is work his way up uh from i mean perhaps start very small like a feather or some kind of sheath uh but then work upwards to pajama shorts i think the thing is what he's thinking is oh i can't sleep with clothes on he's thinking

he's got to wear a t-shirt and long bottoms or some kind of all-in-one or something yeah full-on pajamas you don't hat all you need is flappy pajama shorts that's it no they're airy they're not too snug i get claustrophobic in bed i get hot as well you feel more or less like you're naked but crucially you're not showing anyone your penis i think i have got something which is easier for him to bear because it does not involve having elastication around his waist it doesn't involve having seams between his legs which if he's so free and easy he might be sensitive to it is an old-fashioned night shirt and they do sell them because my brother wears them he's got some very fun stripy numbers but there you see it's pretty loose and billowy so

it's just like sleeping wrapped in a sheet but no i'd find that a bit hot you don't have to wear one that is made out of brocade when it goes all the way down to like your knees yeah but when you're in bed it's just gonna rock up but when your child gets into the bed you can drag it down your body sharpish here's another question about garments from peter from sheerness who says ollie answer me this do women really throw knickers at you yes they do sometimes i see people they're clearly listening to the show whilst they're on the tube and i'll be going up the up escalator, they'll be going down the down escalator and they'll just whip their pants off and throw them at me. Tell you what, if you need some pants for free,

just go on Charing Cross Road at 4am when Ollie's getting off air and there's just a pile under the window, isn't there? No, he means, do people really throw knickers onto the stage at Tom Jones and Rod Stewart and others at gigs? Or is it just a myth? It definitely happens. I mean, it's all over YouTube. But knickers are not very aerodynamic.

Do they put them on a paper aeroplane or anything? Traditionally, what they do is sort of lasso them around their head multiple times before letting go. Yeah, but you've still got to be close to the front, haven't you? You have, yeah. I think it's fair to say someone who is going to throw their moistened knickers at a pop star is probably enough of a fan to be in the first third of the audience. Well, they hate them so much they shouldn't be at that gig anyway martin was frowning had you always

imagined the knickers to be clean i think it's 50 50 you might buy them on the way there from an m&s in a station i mean realistically i think tom jones nowadays yes the audience are going to be bringing uh fresh knickers but i think back in the day well i was just thinking about i mean hey the dream is like for them to be moistened by sexual arousal and that's the gesture it's not the knickers are inherently sexy. It's the musk. But like a big pile of competing musk. Fuck. It just doesn't have the same appeal.

This is why bras are probably better because they're likely to smell less. You probably get a better lasso action. And you could give it to someone else. Exactly. If it was a nice one, you could give it as a present to your girlfriend, couldn't you, if you were Tom Jones?

Whereas knickers, you wouldn't give someone a second- knickers what happens to tom jones's knickers do they get swept off stage into some sort of big bin and burn i wonder whether it's like the royal family's gifts they get redistributed to the needy because you could watch them i mean how many people in an average tom jones gig ten thousand twenty thousand i went to see tom jones uh at cheltenham race coursecourse about a year and a half ago. He was excellent, by the way. Still got it.

Great voice. Still able to jump all the jumps. Yeah, that's an example of what it sounds like when a man does a bad Tom Jones impression. And how much knicker throwing was there?

I would say two pairs in the whole event. Really? Yeah. So not enough to have a permanent knicker monitor on charge. Anyway, Tom Jones

is kind of annoyed now about the whole knicker thing. Why? He doesn't like it anymore because he's trying to do, like, serious kind of country and gospel albums and he's in his 70s. Do the Support Act get any as well? Quite possibly. They get socks, I think.

Peter adds, if this does happen, why do they do it? Surely it's a combination of wanting to show your appreciation for the act, A, and B, in the sort of sordid days of rock and roll, signalling your availability for creepy sex. And C, getting a bit of air up there? No, I think just B, basically. Oh, really? Did you write your address on the back of the knickers or anything?

Well, it's a tradition, if you can call it that, that evolves out of Las Vegas, where until quite recently Tom Jones played for a week every month for like 40 years. Wow. What happened to make him stop? Oh, he's an old man. So?

He just doesn't need it anymore, does he? You have to remember that Tom Jones started playing Vegas. He was playing Caesars Palace back in the days when Elvis was a resident at Vegas as well. Tom Jones has had quite the life, hasn't he? And they were mates, as Tom Jones says, in literally every interview he ever gives. Well, Elvis is not around to refute that, is he?

That's exactly right, yeah. Me and Elvis, we used to enjoy a kebab together. Oh, Tom Jones was always bothering me. Ah, he was always asking me to go and play mini golf with him. The thing is, Elvis, obviously, credited with being the first sort of rock and roll star to make young women in the audience... Wear themselves?

Well, like, faint and scream and throw things like lipstick and things like that at you. Oh, OK. They discovered their pelvises thanks to Elvis. Indeed. But the thing with Elvis is he always has that kind of... ..undercurrent of, like, he's a good southern Christian boy. So you wouldn't actually throw erotic paraphernalia at him.

So what would you throw crucifixes then or something well no you just you just scream and like faint and stuff like kids do now for One Direction that's what happened

with Elvis right but Tom Jones was overtly sexualised like his songs were about let's have sex number one so is Rod Stewart

by the way you know if you want my body you think I'm sexy etc number two they're British so it immediately

has an ironic sense to it as well yeah they're more likely to be M&S ironic sense to it as well yeah they're more likely to be m&s knickers than sexy knickers well yes although in vegas it's the same crowd that would have gone and seen elvis that went to see tom jones and tom jones apparently he says was sleeping with 250 groupies a year at his height um so there was a genuine sense of here's my hotel key come back to my room and And that evolved into knickers.

And I think the reason it stayed knickers... How? Because that's a different exchange. He's giving them his hotel key rather than them giving him knickers. No, no, they used to throw their hotel keys at the stage. Well, that might hit him in the eye. Yeah, I don't know if it was pre-plastic cards. I don't know when Vegas got those. But anyway, point being, he was there for a long time

and it evolved into a thing. They might get demagnetised if there's a big pile of them. It was known that Tom Jones used to sleep with groupies. Groupies went to see him. They could go one step further with him than they could with Elvis. They wanted to show that they were not only a fan of, because it's normal, isn't it, to like... Like nowadays, people will throw a big inflatable

from the audience up towards Justin Timberlake or whatever. And it's just that sense that he's touched something belonging to you is what they want. Whereas obviously, if you're throwing. And it's just that sense that he's touched something belonging to you is what they want. Whereas obviously if you're throwing that, it's quite an intimate connection. And basically the very first time it happened, apparently he picked it off the stage and mopped his brow with it and made a joke out of it.

And he said in interviews since that that's what he regrets doing 45 years ago. Because now every time it happens, he has to play along with it. But actually inside he's like, fuck you, I'm singing a gospel song. But now that he's a bit older, songs about jesus now that he's a bit older though he could just pretend that he hadn't seen the knickers because his eyesight's going

yeah i suppose he could yeah this one like hits him in the face but i think in a way it's good that it's one of the things people say about tom jones because if i was him i'd rather it was that than either that i look like a cream egg that someone's drawn a face on it or that I'm on a shit TV show. I'd rather people talked about knickers. I reckon this might go back a lot further, though, than Elvis, because you have the precedent of people pelting bad acts with fruit. True. And little stones and stuff like that. So maybe to show praise, they would pelt you with nice fruit that wasn't rotten.

Yes. Nice stones. I see what you mean. I think, though, in the modern concert-going experience, there's a lot of stuff that isn't traceable back to anything beyond rock and roll. So, for example, holding your lighter in the air, now your mobile phone,

that is something that has only been around since probably the 70s. No! What about all the flaming torches and stuff when people were... When they climbed around at when people were the fool used to ask people regularly in king lear we're gonna do hey nonny nonny everyone lighters in the air the wind and the rain and with that we have reached the end of this episode of answer me this but please supply your questions for the next episode by emailing phoning or skyping and our contact details are on our website AnswerMeThisPodcast.com

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