Answer Me This! - AMT386: Dirty Doormats, Sitcom Sets, and Handheld Indulgence Ice Cream

Episode Date: June 5, 2020

Beloved listeners: as we've said in the past, AMT doesn't tend to discuss current events, as we know a lot of you turn to the show to give yourselves a brief break from dealing with reality. We hope you're holding up and finding ways to be productive. Meanwhile, here's AMT386, a hearty plateful of low-stress chat about topics including wedding snubs, Magnums vs Soleros, lava lamp liquids, and getting your sex toys back from your ex's house. Find out more about this episode at . Send us questions for future episodes: email written words or voice recordings to [e-mail]. Tweet us Facebook Our new album Home Entertainment is available now for £paywhatyouwant at , where you can also obtain our other special albums, AMT episodes 1-200, and our Best Of compilations. Hear our other work: Helen Zaltzman's podcasts The Allusionist at and Veronica Mars Investigations at ; Olly Mann's five podcasts including , The Week Unwrapped, and The Media Podcast at ; and Martin Austwick's music at and his Tom Waits podcast Song By Song at . This episode is sponsored by: The Great Courses Plus, the streaming library of courses on topics from yoga to mystery fiction to formal logic to dog training. AMT listeners get a free month at . Squarespace. Want to build a website? Go to , and get a 10% discount on your first purchase of a website or domain with the code 'ANSWER'. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Was the milk tray man ever arrested for trespass? Can I feed Ben and Jerry's fish food to my pet sea bass? Since our last episode, Helen, I have done something I only do very rarely. I've taken your advice. The hell mouth truly has opened. As I sit here recording this now helen guess what i'm looking at guess what i'm looking at my very own lava lamp what changed because you were like i can't i already have one novelty lamp and that is the

maximum novelty lamps i just i thought about what you said which was give my tetris lamp to harvey thus freeing up the one permissible novelty lamp space in my office. Yeah, but you said, what if Harvey strangles himself on the lamp cord? Am I now going to be culpable if that happens? What I thought was, I'm probably being overcautious with that, take the cable out, Ollyman. So that's what I did. So he now has some novelty Tetris blocks on his shelf, as far as he's concerned, which he's thrilled with. Great for him. I now have a beautiful lava lamp that i ordered for myself for my birthday yes and in two years time it's the gift that keeps on giving because then i'll show him that he can plug the tetris blocks in and it's a novelty lamp so it's like this will never end so anyway whilst we're talking

you know my chat's going to be illuminated at this end with the beautiful red i can just picture it just soothingly blobbing up and down. So great. Jose in Mexico has been in touch as well because he's previously owned a lava lamp. But, he says, he tripped on the cord and broke the bottle. Oh, no. That is not a mistake that I would make because mine's at the back of my desk against a wall.

But I sympathise, Jose. He says, I managed to separate the wax from the broken glass. That's a good first step, isn't it? God, well done. And I managed to find a bottle that fit in the lamp perfectly. If you want to try and build your own lava lamp, the one he used was

Carib, a Mexican alcoholic fruit soda drink. That bottle fit, apparently. Right. Well, apparently the original lava lamp was a squash bottle, so it's in keeping with the history of the lamp. But, he says, when I tried filling my bottle of carob with water, the wax never circled in the lamp like it's supposed to. Instead, it floated. Yep. Bit grim, isn't it? Right, because, oh, my wax blob is dead. I suppose, yeah, it's like a sort of living creature, isn't it? It's not just, sorry, I'm getting slightly transfixed looking at it whilst I'm describing it. It's not just that it's

moving. It's that the blobs are constantly reinventing themselves and joining harmoniously with other blobs and making beautiful blobs. If it's just like a floating lump of wax, it's a bit like someone's just spunked in a bottle, isn't it? Oh, great. Don't do that. Don't make your own lava lamp out of your bodily emissions. He saysen answer me this what is the liquid inside lava lamps made from we can't tell you because it's a trade secret is it yes except it obviously isn't because as we talked about last time you've got math moss in pool making the original lava lamps but also loads of rip-offs on amazon doing it for a tenner well here's the thing it's fairly simple you've got two mutually insoluble liquids so that you don't have the wax dissolving into

the water right but you need them to be a similar density to each other very slightly dissimilar but otherwise you've got a situation if if the density is very different where you've got the wax on top and the liquid at the bottom okay but what liquid has the density of wax? I mean, like sun cream? So you have to add to water some salt or Epsom salts. I've never been sure what Epsom salts are. And you add more salt very gradually and then heating up the lamp, seeing if the wax behaves properly or not. And then if it doesn't, you add more salt. You also need to add a surfactant. So the two

things you need in the water are density and surfactant. Surfactant's like a detergent, isn't it? You can do it with washing up liquid. What does it do in the context of a lava lamp, though? It breaks the surface tension of the wax, which allows it to form all the different little blobs. Oh, wow. So quite an important job. Do you know this because there is a DIY lava lamp movement online then? Yeah, I read up on how to fix your lava lamp and they first go through the stages that Jose has already experienced where you manage to rescue the wax from broken glass. I also learned a bit about what happens when your lava lamp curdles.

You know, if you move it when it's hot and then it just goes into little granules of wax and it's quite hard to get them to return to blob form. But if you manage to extract them and then melt them, then it'll come back to blobfulness. Or like the T-1000 in Terminator 2. The Robert Patrick lava lamp method. Here's a very sweet blast from the past from Andy in Lee.

Nay, Andy in Stafford. Oh, he's moved. It's good to keep up to date with everyone's geographical location at all times. Thanks. I will update the chart accordingly andy says i'm a huge fan of your podcast and have been listening since 2009 i am the proud owner of two copies of the answer me this book one of which you signed in birmingham waterstones we didn't go to birmingham waterstones did we ollie oh did you go without me uh it's possible that some signed copies of our book ended up in

birmingham waterstones but you and i have never been there that's a good theory because yeah i was about to say maybe he came to oxford or manchester and forgot but actually no um you're right we we used to have to sign like surplus copies and then they'd get distributed around the country and he didn't say he met us did he said he's got a signed copy so yeah but why have two copies i've only got one was it an unwanted gift or a wanted gift like was it for best what what was going on one to keep pristine for posterity and one to read andy says he has also listened to every episode at least once including the classics ollie answer me this how do i fill the huge helen and ollie void in my life

between new episodes well funny you should mention it andy but we do have the the huge Helen and Ollie void in my life between new episodes? Well, funny you should mention it, Andy, but we do have the perfect void-filling audio content for you. We've recorded a one-hour album. It is called Answer Me This Home Entertainment, and it's out now. So go and get that, Andy. Yes, it's pay what you want, which means you can get it for nothing. You've already done your bit by buying the book twice.

Yeah, I don't know if you've never listened to one of our albums, by the way, by the way before and you think oh that is just for the kind of like hardcore fans like andy you know i like the podcast but maybe i don't know if i'd like the albums seriously the albums are just basically hour-long episodes of the show they're just with questions grouped around a particular theme if you enjoy this show you will enjoy our albums and yeah we've done a brand new one which is all about stuff you can do at home luckily we recorded it before ollie got his lava lamp because now for just the whole hour of talking about what you can do at home he'll be like just stare at the lava lamp wouldn't be able to concentrate at the lamp up it blobs down it blobs blobs up blobs down but there's uh yeah quite a lot of deep dives i think they'd call it on the internet in there. For example, we audio describe and analyse the 1972 educational film Why Doesn't Kathy Eat Breakfast?

One of the great unanswered questions of living memory. We answer questions about the Simpsons blood groups and whether those are plausible, because cartoons must be very plausible. And Helen takes us behind the scenes of her TED Talk. So if you've ever seen Helen's TED Talk and thought, oh, but what was it like behind the furniture? Helen gives you an insight into that world, a glimpse under the magician's cloth.

Yeah, I mean, there's more stuff that I could tell you. Like we're all kicked out the green room for Elon Musk, which now I'm kind of relieved about. At the time, were you like, oh, I would have liked to have met elon musk and if so what would you have said no at the time i just wanted to be able to sit in the green room yeah where speakers were hitherto allowed to be anyway the album will be available in the future on platforms like apple and amazon and the price will be three pounds 49 but not now but we know that times are tight for

many of you at the moment we know that a lot of you are looking for some free entertainment we know that you know an equal number of you would like to give us some money in return for a piece of content that you enjoy and decide to set the price yourself so that is what we've given you the opportunity to do you can buy it twice for nought pounds andy yeah there's no signed option though is there for andy it's hard to sign an mp3 anyway uh you can give us a pound five pounds ten pounds whatever you think it is worth a million pounds to get an hour of brand new content from us answer me this store.com is where you have to go and if you're listening in the future by the way and it's not any more available on pay what you like nonetheless head to answer me this store.com and that's where

you'll find the links where you can buy it the payment pages are completely secure you can pay via credit card or paypal and if you want to know how you're going you can buy it. The payment pages are completely secure. You can pay via credit card or PayPal. And if you want to know how you're going to get it, it's an MP3 that gets emailed to you, which is unencrypted. You can download it up to five times and you can keep it forever. That's Answer Me This Home Entertainment, available from the price of £0 to £0.50 from AnswerMeThisStore.com. Hi, it's Ben from Manchester.

I live in a flat and the flat directly opposite me has a disgusting doormat that's not been cleaned in the two years I've lived here. It looks like it would be suitable to go in the washing machine. So Helen, Ollie and Martin answer me this. Is it acceptable to take my neighbour's doormat, put it in my washing machine, dry it, and then put it back outside his door? This is such a great question. It really is. And I was thinking, well, that would sort of be a very kind and generous thing to do. But then I was remembering a question we had a few years ago from someone sort of on the other end of this conundrum. Her neighbour had washed her car without permission. And I thought, yeah, that is kind of a violation, even though I think

probably people care more about their cars than they do their doormats yeah we sided with her don't let this weird guy come and wash your car it's really odd like you've said no and he came around and did it anyway i mean i suppose ben's situation is he hasn't approached the neighbor at all to ask about the doormat but you could knock on their door put a note through the door saying oh i'm gonna do a doormat wash of my doormat Do you want me to put pure doormat through at the same time? It's no trouble. We, the Block of Flats, are doing a friendly neighbourhood doormat wash at the moment.

Would you like to participate? Although then you would have to get everyone in the Block of Flats to clean their doormat as the cover story. Worth it to save your English embarrassment, Ben, isn't it? That's a lot of effort. Start a new doormat WhatsApp group. Can you just wait till the neighbors like definitely away for at least the weekend so there's a good chance that if

anything goes wrong it's time for a it to dry and b to buy a replacement doormat if things go really badly okay so i think there are a number of options all of which are pretty bad so one of them would be either steal or damage the doormat, and then you can generously offer to buy them a replacement. So it's not great, but you could be like, oh no, I dropped some tar or some fire on your doormat. I'll get you a new one. Or you could say it was really embarrassing. I got some dog poo on my shoe and I tracked it through the corridor and I think it got on your mat. I was peeping through your letterbox and i got poo all over your doormat i was swatting a mosquito on your door when i besmirched your mat with the dog poo it's not a perfect solution but i mean some

kind of lie like that to justify the cleaning where it seems like it was your fault and you're doing something nice rather than just stealing it which seems seems like a bit of a pass-ag move. I quite like Martin's suggestion of just doing it when they're out because it could have not been you that did it. So, for example, like most flats have a service charge and they'll have a cleaner that cleans the communal areas once a month, wait until the day they're coming and then do it then and they'll just assume the cleaner did it, right?

I guess, but again, it would rely on everyone's doormat being as clean. Yeah, clean everyone's doormat being as clean yeah clean everyone's door that's the only way you're coming up with some really high effort solutions ollie if these people haven't washed the doormat in such a long time do you think they'll notice if their doormat is washed this is not for ben's neighbors it's for ben so you just have to look at this disgusting doormat i think there's a pretty reasonable chance that they might just walk over and not even register that he's washed it but he will know and he will feel happy about it so maybe you could put it through the wash but then trample a little bit of dirt in it just to take the clean edge off so they don't notice wash it

and take a shit on it right wash it and take a shit on it thanks martin least you'll know it's yours you don't know why it is that they haven't cleaned it there might be some sentimental reason perhaps it was last walked on by a precious pet who has since passed away or the dalai lama yeah exactly and also you don't know how they'll react to a joke that's then another element i don't know how well he knows his neighbors like not everyone has sense of humor especially with essentially that joke is you have bad personal cleanliness like however you dress it up they might take it as bullying yeah what i would actually suggest which is contrary to what i always default to i'm usually the person

who's like take a common sense approach talk about your feelings you know in this case I actually think don't do that because you'll be seen as passive-aggressive as well like why do you care so much about my doormat stop being an interfering busybody that's what they'll be thinking I think just write an actually blatantly aggressive note and leave it on their doormat anonymously no so it's not from you. Just leave a thing on it that says, dirty mat. Because I often find if someone does that kind of thing with me,

I do feel shamed and I instantly deal with the situation. Yeah, but then you're making them feel uncomfortable in their own home. They're just feeling judged by their neighbours. So they should. Like they've got a dirty mat. I don't care about people's mats. So I wouldn't care about my own mat, but I would care if I felt like my neighbours

had this vendetta against me about something as small as the mat. Yeah, but you wouldn't know which neighbour it was, would you? Well, that's worse, isn't it? I wouldn't even know which enemy, so I'd suspect them all. Do my first one where you offer to wash it for them because you're doing your own.

I'm only talking about it from the experience of being the recipient of such a note, which is when in non-corona times, I take my son to the trampoline park down the road. The car park is often full and there is a block of flats next door with its own private car park. And I had been known in the past to park in that car park because there were lots of empty bays. It's the middle of the afternoon. I figure we can still walk into the trampoline park. I know I'm not supposed to park here, but who cares? There's empty bays. It's the middle of the afternoon. I figured we can still walk into the trampoline park. I know I'm not supposed to park here, but who cares?

There's empty bays. And last time I did it, someone had written one of those notes on my door. You can't park here. It didn't say like, I live at number 29 and would you terribly mind? And it didn't say, fuck you. It just said, you can't park here.

And I felt so shamed. Not only have I not been back to the car park, I haven't been back to the trampoline park since. I think it's a bit different with parking spaces because you're effectively trespassing on their space. But this mat is effectively trespassing in Ben's nostrils. But it's nice in the hallway. And also just remember, doormats don't stay clean. It's going to get dirty again. So whatever plan you have, it has to be repeatable. That's true. It has to be an annual plan. Therefore, I think if you're offering to clean it with yours, that's something you can then just go and do every few months, as long as you do your doormat as well as an alibi.

Here's a question from Anna from Bristol, who says, I had a breakup a few months before the lockdown started. Sorry to hear that. It was sort of amicable. And we both expressed that we wanted to be friends. But we agreed we needed to have some time with no contact with each other to heal. That sounds sensible. And then the government said they couldn't have any contact with each other anyway. What I did not realise, she says, was that I had left my bag of sex toys at his house. Nearly two months later, after lockdown hit, I dropped him a text to see how he was and to ask if he wanted to resume contact. He said he needed more time and we haven't talked since. I didn't bring up the sex toys at the time as that seemed churlish. When is the right time? Well, this is very much the nature of the question, Helen. She says, I did ask a mutual

friend to ask him about the sex toys. It seems clever. That's something we might have suggested ourselves, isn't it? Get a third party. That's impressive, i know and apparently he made a joke but there has been no movement towards returning them so helen answer me this when is it acceptable to make contact again to ask for the sex toys back what is a good way to ask for them and how can we do a socially distanced drop of sex toys in an easy way as he drives and i don't so is it okay to ask him to drive them down to me as i'd have to walk for over an hour to get to his? I'm a bit worried he's just chucked them away. If that is the case, do I ask for compensation?

Amazing. Or just accept the loss and move on? And then she does say as a postscript, he listens to this podcast, so it's possible by answering my question, you'll be facilitating their return to their rightful owner anyway. Okay, well, job done. done terrific anna has been very proactive about trying to deal with her

own problem and i admire that so anna's ex-boyfriend if you recognize yourself in this question pop them over if you're in bristol with a sack full of sex toys that used to belong to your partner you're the person we're talking about if you are him drive them in your car and just drop them off on her doorstep. That would be nice of you. Well, I think it's probably worth dropping her a text to say you've done so, though, rather than just leaving them there for the postman to discover. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know if he has other stuff of yours and you have of his,

because you could both arrange the return of the other person's stuff. Say, you might have a t-shirt that he wants to see again. Yeah, I'm going to guess that they don't. I feel like she would have mentioned it. She's done a very good job of describing the predicament. Exactly. That would be the natural way

to mention it, wouldn't it? Let's swap some of our stuff. I've got your things, you've got mine. And then you mention it as part of the things he's got. That obviously isn't the case. She left the house. She took her stuff.

She forgot her sex toys. Yeah. And now she's in the position of having to get them back without getting access to the property. Yeah. And before she mentioned the thing about how he drives and she doesn't i thought well just text him before and say tomorrow i'm going to be passing by your house could you have

them in a box on your doorstep at 2 p.m but bristol is somewhat hard to navigate by public transport even at the best of times whereas at the moment i would imagine there is a limited service and maybe anna doesn't want to go on it yeah but the weather's great at the best of times. Whereas at the moment, I would imagine there is a limited service and maybe Anna doesn't want to go on it. Yeah, but the weather's great at the moment. Yeah, but it's a two hour plus walk. Okay, but I mean, how much does she want the sex toys? How heavy are they? Like, how many is she talking about?

Has she got like marble dildos that are heavy? Yeah. I mean, I don't know, but I am now thinking about that. I think the compensation issue is fascinating. I can't imagine it having much traction in the small claims court, but it would make a fascinating episode of Judge Rinder. There are certain items where you just have to accept the loss, and maybe clothing's like that, but if it was like your television,

then you might expect to be given half the value of a television back, say. But then I'm sure that a collection of sex toys could easily cost as much as a television yeah sex toys quite expensive if you get good ones but also the gray area is that um you know they could some of them be couple toys what if he thinks that they're their sex toys you know it's like a joint thing like a netflix account does your mutual friend drive you're you're comfortable enough to talk to your mutual friend about this problem, which means I think you could say if the mutual friend is going to visit your ex anyway, you could text your ex saying, Alan is coming by. Could you hand them over on Tuesday? I mean, some of the more advanced ones,

you know, have Bluetooth technology and stuff. Maybe you could somehow communicate with them and see if they could find a way to get back to you by themselves. Oh, like flying. Yeah, or just slowly vibrating down the stairs. Yeah. I'm sort of imagining this as an Aardman cartoon now. I think focus on practicality. Give him something to respond to

so he doesn't have to have any input to the plan at all except for putting them in a box and having them in a particular place. But I think you need not to ask him for things. You're right, because the problem for him is he's not ready to be friends yet. So he doesn't want to have to have a conversation. I'm sure he doesn't want to necessarily

keep your sex toys from you. Yeah, but he maybe doesn't want to have to do favours for you either. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So make it as easy as possible, as frictionless for him. Right, exactly. So in an ideal world, it would be he leaves it on his doorstep your mutual friend picks it up in their car yeah or you get a taxi there or you walk there and get a taxi back i think you think of the value of the sex toys and think okay it's probably worth 10 quid on a taxi back yeah i've 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 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. Ten minutes each weekday, wherever you get your podcasts. Here's a question from Steph, who says, a lot of multi-camera sitcoms brag that they are filmed in front of a live studio audience. Brag. Since most sitcoms involve at least four to five sets. Ollie asked me this. How do the audience see them all?

Are the sets on a turnstile? That would be amazing. Or are some scenes just pre-recorded and played so the audience can follow the plot? Is that technically in front of an audience? I'm confused. I've seen them do that where they've like gone and filmed on location for a bit. They play that to the audience on screen.

Yeah, of course. Yes, if there's a scene in the Eiffel Tower that is hard to replicate at the Riverside Studios. I can actually answer this question from experience having spent at least five nights a year from the age of about 12 watching sitcoms being recorded till I was about 21.

It's so tedious, isn't it? Well, I used to love it because I was interested in sort of, I thought I was interested in comedy and telly and I wanted to work in TV. So I was just fascinated by the process. I loved watching my favourite comedians in things, even though it was a torturous night out. It was also free. So when I was 16, 17, that was good. And I lived in London. It seemed like a fun thing to do. The one that was absolutely the best one to watch by the way you would never guess was um Grace and Favour which was the spin-off of Are You Being Served in about 1991 bloody hell what was so good about that one then just the performers I mean John Inman Molly Sugden you know they knew how to work the audience and the comedy because

it's so broad it was like prop based just nonsense and it so it was just a joyous room to be in it was like an end of the pier show that's the thing it was it was a proper live show i suppose that's kind of like why people who like mrs brown's boys like mrs brown's boys now is why i thought grace and favor was a fun thing to watch when i was 11 years old it was just a laugh basically whereas it's often not a laugh as you're suggesting like it can go on all night and that is because uh steph they do film everything in front of the audience including moving the cameras around to get to each set and they do tend to film them in order so that you can follow the plot so it does go on a long time and so to answer her question directly the set so if you like the sort of central perk or del boy's living

room or whatever the one where most of the action happens, that tends to be configured so that it's in the middle of the live stage when you're watching, so that most of the action is directly in front of the audience eyeline. But the minor sets, the other ones, you know, Ross's apartment, that tends to be off, around the corners,

sometimes even backstage, you know, in nooks and crannies of the setup, because they only got a couple of shots there. And the truth is, you can't see it. They don't care whether the live audience can see it or not all they're saying is that it's recorded in front of a live studio audience the purpose of that is that the actors are responding to the laughter and it feels like a live show a communal thing they don't care whether the people who have paid nothing and are sitting there for five hours actually see what's happening or not does that explain why the scenes set at ross's apartment seem less funny yeah possibly because the audience are just watching a load of cranes and crews

standing in the way they're not actually seeing what's happening apart from on the overhead monitors but you still do have a lot of sets in a row when you're there so central perk would be next to one of the apartments wouldn't it yeah yeah of course your friends recording so yeah so the reason you have the set is because there is a limit to how many you can have and it is four or five in each episode um but it's just those minor ones that you know feature infrequently the bus stop you know which just simply just might not be in front of the audience and the one that really disregarded the audience was i'm alan partridge um because to create the documentary single camera feel of that i think people forget

that it was recorded in front of a live audience, but when you watch it, you can see it definitely was. They had four walls. So Armando and Uchi put a fourth wall between the audience and the stage so they couldn't see it at all. So it looked like the internal view of the travel tavern, but that's because the audience were behind the wall. Totally works for the audience at home,

but it probably wasn't that much fun to watch when you were there. It does sort of make sense to have them on a revolve like some theaters have but presumably they can't do that because of like the electrical rig or something but again it's just not benefiting the production like every minute that you are keeping those 50 people there filming it costs loads of money all the equipment's really expensive the director doesn't have to care about what the live audience are seeing they're caring about what the finished product is that's why they keep you there all night watching it endlessly so they just don't care what the audience see the live audience are usually just happy if molly sungdon comes out

at the end and says pussy like that's fine like you know come say hello to the audience give them a t-shirt that's they're happy so why bother catering to them the super boring bit of information that i've filed away in my brain ever since a mid-1990s school trip to see the live filming of the BBC sitcom Keeping Mum. Not a classic. No. I saw Holding the Baby, also not a classic. Is that they would take this elaborate set down of several rooms of someone's house

and then rebuild it the next week and repaint the floors and all of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they need the studio for something else. Yeah, which is why famously like Fawlty Towers Between Seasons has a slightly different internal configuration. If you're following the architecture, it doesn't make any sense.

But that's because they've written episodes around new things that need to be there that they didn't think about in series one. I think watching any sitcom is fun if you find the sitcom funny. But I must say, once I cottoned on to how laborious it is, I started applying for tickets for chat shows, quiz shows, stand-up shows,

because at least then you're not watching the same material endlessly. Like the recording might go on for two and a half hours, but it isn't. At least it's one stream of conversation you can follow. And there's usually in-jokes for the audience when they fuck something up, you know. It is harder to laugh at the same jokes on the third take. Exactly.

And in fact, oh God, I know that this is now a derided show but i still hold it up as a very good sketch show but season one of little britain i went to see because i was a big fan of lucas and walliams and when they record a sketch show they just record one whole season of a character it's the same fucking thing over and over again isn't it yeah so the one i saw was the sketch where i don't think matt lucas was even there it was the one where david walliams had married his ex-student do you remember he was the teacher and he'd married his ex-pupil it wasn't one of the classic sketches in that in that season but the the joke was essentially you know his wife fancied him because he used to be her teacher he was still treating her like she

was a pupil patting her on the head marking her for sex etc that was the joke so you saw the first sketch and you thought oh yeah that's quite funny then they do it two or three times like three takes of the same sketch with the cameras in different positions then they do the whole series worth each three times you're effectively seeing the same joke 18 times in a row it's like you're living groundhog day it was it was just it was interminable but the thing that made it watchable was to entertain the audience they showed them all of the stuff that had already been filmed on the screen so you you know by the end entertain the audience, they showed them all of the stuff that had already been filmed on screen. So by the end of it, I had seen three hours worth of the first series of Little Britain,

months before my friends did. But fuck me, watching sketch shows, not fun. Imagine if you were in the first character to be recorded for the season, there wasn't anything recorded. So you just had to watch Bitty for three fucking hours. Well, maybe they did the outside broadcast first, so that you could get lou and andy like jumping into a lake or whatever that's right some of the sketches were filmed entirely on location like fat fighters isn't it is in a town hall so they had that all done so at least

you got that but um yeah don't go and watch the sketch show be recorded is my advice well go once well go for the first five minutes yeah if to the great courses plus for supporting answer Me This and giving me a lot of interesting and fun educational matter to occupy myself with. I very much appreciate that. What have you been watching? I've been watching the course Myths, Lies and Half-Truths of Language Usage. Okay, that sounds pretty much perfectly designed for you.

Well, exactly. And the lecturer is John McWhirter, who's a very renowned linguist, but also a very entertaining one. Some of you probably listen to the podcast Lexicon Valley, which he hosts. And he's a very compelling speaker because I've been to linguistics lectures when I was at university. It was sort of like, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho. Very soporific.

Not John McWhirter at all. He's pretty funny, but also very, very informative. So I was just watching a very interesting lesson about black English. What does that mean? Well, it's just the idea that black English is, quote, wrong English, but it isn't. It's just a different strain and it's a privilege that makes one form of English seem like a better form of English. It's not wrong, it's different. Fascinating. Yeah, it's really, really interesting.

Good series altogether. And that is the good thing about The Great Courses Plus is it's essentially essentially it's a video streaming service so you can sit on your ass and watch streaming videos but you feel like you're learning something love things where i can sit on my ass and feel like i'm learning something so uh the one that i've been uh engaging with in the last month is uh make stress work for you which i downloaded because i thought it was like a kind of um self-help thing because of the title. Yeah. And I thought, actually, I am someone who walks around feeling quite rushy a lot of the time.

Right. I'd quite like to try a kind of mindfulness type thing because I've never done that before. There is that kind of self-help, here are some exercises for you type stuff. But actually, it's an academic psychologist giving the lecture. So there's some real brain food in there as well, like scientific studies that tell you about the psychology of why certain things work in terms of how we process trauma and stuff like that. The bits that I felt might help me relax, genuinely, I found practically useful. But actually, the bits that weren't kind of relevant to me, like there

was a whole chapter about how to kind of filter out unhappiness, and I'm quite a happy person, generally, I didn't really need that. I still found the science really interesting about the various kind of research that had happened behind the practical concepts to mitigate unhappiness. So yeah, actually, I'm really, really enjoying it. And you can check it out, listeners, because we can offer you an entire month of unlimited access to The Great Courses Plus for free,

just because you are a listener to Answer Me This. It's great to be you. Sign up today using our special URL. It is a limited time deal uh you can start your free month at thegreatcoursesplus.com answer that's thegreatcoursesplus.com answer i'm chris i'm calling from sunny bryton and i was having an ice cream with my friend the other day. Why is a Solero a Solero? It's made by Unilever.

Why is it not a fruit Magnum? It was made after the Magnum. It seems to make no sense. When they were pitching the Solero, did the guy describe it and then someone go what you mean like a magnum but with fruit cordial around it what is he talking about it makes perfect sense in the brand pyramid of magnum i would say it's about size first then chocolate nothing to do with ice cream covered in another thing exactly a fruit magnum to me would suggest a fruity ice cream inside so you'd get like magnum chocolate the magnum size but inside strawberry ice cream yeah which they have done

i think also it is that they are marketed in different ways so the magnum was launched in 1989 in the uk and according to the unilever website this made it the first widely available handheld indulgence ice cream in the uk that's handheld indulgence ice cream that's a category is it yeah that's surely just the expensive ice cream from mr whippy as a handheld indulgent i see the distinction with indulgence because it's a luxury product apparently there's a myth that margaret thatcher was involved in the invention of mr whippy but it predates margaret thatcher's uh dairy career she was a chemist but she didn't in fact mr whippier good to answer our letters of the future before they've even been written magnum is really

marketed as indulgent it's rich it's bad for you but you're gonna do it anyway yes and indeed a classic magnum is 244 calories for the full size and 19 fat whereas solero is marketed as kind of oh go on then it's not not bad for you because it's under 100 calories and it's only 3% fat. You're a cool about town lady who's just finished your tennis match. Just give yourself a little treat on the way home. So I think that's why. I think the intent of the ice creams, or at least the advertising intent, is different. You'd never see a chocolate Solero. No. And not just because that would suggest a fruity exterior with a chocolate ice cream filling, but because of that brand target you mentioned.

Like a Solero eater does not want a chocolate Solero. Exactly. I noticed on the Wikipedia entry for Solero, which is not super informative, there's a footnote to an article that is no longer available that mentions that the Solero was invented in 1993, it was launched in 1994, by a magnum engineer called Gerry Campbell working in Noosa in Australia. He dipped a magnum extruded product, so presumably that's the ice cream interior, into mango juice and then dipped it into liquid nitrogen.

So he was experimenting and I think they were looking for a product to compete with one of Australia's favourite ice creams, the Weiss Bar bar i think their most popular flavor is mango and cream so it's like a block of mango with a strip of vanilla ice cream down the side and that was launched in 1959 the ice cream market in australia is very competitive and so they invented the solero to try and get in on that uh tropical fruit plus ice cream tip. And then Unilever ended up buying Weiss in 2017. It doesn't surprise me, actually, that the origins are Australian, even though it's a tropical taste. And therefore, like, if you're going to pick a country,

you'd say the Caribbean or whatever. Well, it's also called a splice in Australia. It's not even called a Solero there. That sounds like some kind of like science fiction movie about genetics gone wrong. Oh no, we put mango in the fly at the other end and they got spliced. But surely putting ice cream in a sort of fruit lolly isn't new with the solero because that's like strawberry movies and stuff in my childhood no no it was the world's first handheld indulgent mango dip treat martin everyone knows that but sure the reason doesn't surprise me that it's australian is because of their relatively benign climate. Because in this country, England,

I only eat a Solero in basically August when the ice cream van has none of the decent ice creams left. Desperate times. Because it's a summer flavour. Whereas their Magnum is something that I'm happy to indulge in all year round. Even on a cold winter's day, a chocolate ice cream is a treat i'm not sure australia would characterize its climate as benign ollie if by mean like fucking hot for most of the year then yes it is more benign towards ice cream but not to human beings i was talking in ice cream

terms roger moore according to some invented the magnum he told the journalist chrissy illy in the 60s i was doing an interview for some magazine or other, and I was asked, if you could have one wish to meet one person and ask them a question, what would it be? I said, I would like to meet Mr. Wall and ask why they don't have a choc-ice with vanilla inside that I had as a child and put it on a stick. And I guess it took them until 1989 to make Roger Moore's idea a reality. That is not inventing the Magnum.

That's so stupid. That's when someone goes, wouldn't it be amazing if if we could like have flying cars and then be like yeah i invented flying cars like how difficult would it be for mr ford to invite to invent a teletransportation device that takes me from my desk to work i'm going to teleport us wouldn't it be amazing to have a widely available handheld indulgence ice cream but you know technically choc ice is also handheld. It's just you're holding it by the food, not by a stick. Or by the paper.

Right. A fucking ice cream cone is held. You know, the true genius would put an ice cream cone on a stick and pretend they'd invented the fucking moon. Ha ha ha ha ha. I sing like an angel, that's what everyone tells me. But for some reason record labels won't sell me They say my songs are so crap they can virtually smell me

What on earth do they mean? Instead you square space to build a musical empire You can stream and sell your songs and merch through which to inspire Other people to dry their hands singing as you are so dire What do you mean mate I'm the new Jessie J? Thank you very much to our sponsors, Squarespace. Bless you, dear squares and spaces. We love your squares. We love your spaces. Actually, one thing I didn't love about Squarespace's base template

for AnswerMeThisStore.com is all the buttons that I designed come out and they're fine, but they come out as black rectangles. How dare they? For a long time, I've just accepted it because it was so easy to design a website using the template. But recently I was like, no, I want this to look more like our kind of house style. And this is the great thing about Squarespace, folks.

It took me about max eight minutes to Google, how do you change the buttons? There was a support forum i i clicked the thing once and now all the buttons on our website are round and big and yellow and i was like that's so easy it was one change and it changed all the buttons on our website that's really inspired me not to think that things can't be changed to know that they can and sometimes all it takes is eight minutes and some googling that's right yeah what an incredible relief for these times anyway if you'd like to have the incredible relief of playing around with squarespace you can without putting any money down oh yes because

there is a two-week free trial if you mosey on over to squarespace.com answer you can try all of the features you can give the templates ago you can put some fucking buttons in something just like ollie man you can finally have the life of ollie man that you've always wanted and then if you think yes i want to continue with this life because obviously everything about ollie man's life is uh it's lovely it's yeah it's a great time then if you want to live as ollie man full-time or at least sign up to squarespace to keep your website and maintain it over a long period, then you can get a 10% discount off your first purchase of a website or domain if you use our code ANSWER.

Here's a question from Laura from Brentwood in Essex who says, I noticed that traditional butcher's shops often have a statue of a mustachioed man in an apron, an archetypal butcher outside the shops. I also noticed that no matter where you are in the UK, they all look the same. Slightly plump, jocular, with a red and white striped apron, a straw boater, and a fulsome moustache. They're good looking man sculptures. Sort of middle-aged Caucasian glazed butchers. So, Ollie, answer me this. Why do all the butchers shop have this chap outside? and who was the original model for these statues how did they become so ubiquitous okay well on the question why do they all have it

outside actually that's fairly straightforward councils make a fuss often if you put a sandwich board outside or if you have your stock outside on the street you don't want to put raw meat out on the street lots of problems there great for dogs but because this statue has as laura rightly says become such a symbol of the fact that you are approaching a butcher shop um it is an elegant thing to put out on the street that no one's going to prosecute you to tell you to move it's not going to blow down like an a board yeah it signifies to everyone much like the kind of curly barber shop uh thing that we've talked about before it signifies everyone you're coming towards a butcher shop so i mean that's why they became popular. But on the question of like,

what it is, who posed for it, what the history of it is, I genuinely have been struggling to find some concrete answers. Or should I say resin answers? Because that's what they tend to be made from these days. There's so little written about them. Here's what I have been able to deduce. The official name, I think, is a butcher's dummy. Because I am seeing some Google juice for that. And also, despite me having said that councils don't ask you to move them out of the way, there was a case in Scotland a few years ago that got reported on by the Scotsman and Mail Online where a bloke was protesting because the council did ask him to move his jolly butcher out of the way.

And that got reported on and it was called a butcher's dummy in those articles. Is the butcher's dummy holding a knife? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But here's the thing that I think links it to history. They are always smiling. Now, I know that you wouldn't have a scowling butcher, but I think what it is actually a reference to, and again, I think this is echoed in the fact

that the company that makes these these days is called the Jolly Roger. What I think it links toed in the fact that the company that makes these these days is called the Jolly Roger. What I think it links to is the kind of old saying, the old cliche of the Jolly Butcher. Is that a cliche? The Jolly Butcher? I've heard of the Jolly Postman and Santa being jolly, but I don't really think of butchers being jolly. I've never heard of the Jolly Postman. The Jolly Postman is an Alan Alberg book. The Jolly Butcher is actually a traditional english folk song okay it's not an alan alberg book with like slices of meat

tucked between the pages that's right open onto the flap and see which animal has been stuffed into a sausage the actual folk song uh from 300 years ago or so is actually called something like the three butchers although of course it's a folk song so different people call it different things but i think it was colloquially referred to as The Jolly Butchers because the first line of the song is, it's of three jolly butchers, as I've heard many say.

So this is what I think, because there's also a lot of jolly butchers pubs around. It's like if you type jolly butchers into TripAdvisor, you'll see hundreds of pubs across Britain called The Jolly Butcher. So I think putting all these pieces together,

although no one has i mean i find it astonishing there isn't a wikipedia page on this but there isn't so get on it now if you want something to do during lockdown what i reckon has happened is there was an english folk song also an irish folk song either called or colloquially called the jolly butcher pubs then were called the jolly butcher when people opened butcher, they wanted to embrace this idea of being a jolly butcher. And someone somewhere modelled for this statue, put it outside, and it caught on because it signifies a butcher shop. What I cannot find anywhere is who that man was. So if you know, please get in touch. I'd love to know. Do you think there's also a kind of aspiration to be

jolly? I'm going to be a happy person, and my radiance is going to inspire others to buy meat. Looking at the song The Jolly Butchers and the lyrics of What Happens, I wouldn't necessarily suggest that those butchers are particularly aspirational figures because they get robbed by highwaymen. Oh shit. What happens is, it's like three jolly butchers going through the wood, they see a naked woman on the floor. She says she's been robbed. One of the butchers says, oh fuck, i'm not going to stop here and look after her another butcher says no i'm getting off my horse and the third one says we should help they get off they talk to the woman and then it turns out the naked

woman is bait for the jolly butchers and they get robbed by high women oh fuck so the moral is i don't know don't help women i'm not really sure they could have been any profession then yeah i wonder whether the fact their butchers gave them like a full sense of security that they'd be all right in the woods or maybe they're out looking for meat and i wonder if it's like a sort of slightly naive jollity oh so do you think it's just to kind of counteract the death inherent in the bushery i think it's just a joke like it's an old joke like the jolly butchers walking through the woods that then get robbed you know ha ha they have a great life because they've got an industry that everyone wants to buy into but ha ha fuck them because they weren't looking what

they were doing is it the same company then that makes all the statues are they basically all the same mold nowadays if you want to get one online then yes there's only one company that's advertising it and i did call the voicemail of the bloke who's selling them and i haven't been called back yet i guess they have other things on their minds but i'll let you know if i get an update because there's what one or two companies that do most of the chicken shop signs in london but they do them in different styles yeah i'm old and cynical now but when i was like 17 and i found out that all of the americana that you see in branches of tgi fridays is all mass produced in a factory in china i found that a bit mind-blowing just because it's cheaper to make new reproduction 1950 stuff than

it is to just buy the stuff people are chucking out. It's weird, isn't it? Well, it was weirder to me that the sewing machines in All Saints are actual old sewing machines and not just mass produced fake ones. Yeah, that was, oh, those were fun times, that episode. I remember that. Innocent. Not a care in the world. Laughing butchers, we. Just caring whether the All Saints windows were going to collapse under the weight of real sewing machines. I thought that I would never love again. Oh no! I went on to the internet and then... What then?

I found a place where all true love lasts. Hooray! At www.answermethispodcast.com Here's a question from Clara in Bosque Farms, New Mexico. She says, I hope you can help me with this family puzzle oh i'll try when my husband and i got married in 2018 the guests included my cousin marianne and her boyfriend who flew in from out of state right they were wonderful to have at the wedding that's a nice accolade yeah Yeah, I'm not sure, like thinking

back on my wedding guests, if I ever internally ranked them like that. They were the five star guests. Marianne jumped in to help us with some elements of the reception. Okay, fair enough, she was hands on. And at the end of the night, she even caught my bouquet of handmade crochet flowers. This is important. Sure enough, a few weeks later, Marianne's boyfriend proposed. The bouquet tossed a credit. When their wedding was announced, my parents, Marianne's aunt and uncle, received an invitation. But my husband and I did not. Oh, awkward. We just figured that perhaps they were having a smaller event and they didn't have room to invite the cousins. The timing wasn't convenient for us anyway, so we didn't press to find out if we could come and we also didn't send them a wedding

gift or even a card yeah so she says that the important fact is that marianne caught the crochet flowers and she'll return to that i would like to park this point that they didn't even send a card for the wedding of their cousins yes i would have sent a card and some money i think so i mean now that I can afford to. At times in my life, I've not been able to afford to when I didn't. Yeah. I should have sent a fucking card.

Yeah. I regret it. Send a fucking card. I agree. Anyway, Clara continues. My parents went to the wedding and they arrived home with their report. Because we are all scoring weddings, aren't we?

That's right, yeah. First, it wasn't a small event at all. Ouch. Second, at the reception was a prominently featured table displaying my handmade bouquet along with the story of Marianne catching it at my wedding and how that event had inspired her to make hand folded paper flowers for her own wedding decor. Okay but that's kind of great you're getting attribution that it was at your wedding and you inspired her to do a thing. Like, that would make me feel kind of proud.

You're getting the glory of being name-checked at a wedding that was inconvenient for you to attend in the first place. Yeah, and you don't even have to sit through a wedding, a lot of which are very tedious. Given this information, she says, I feel there are two possibilities. Either Marianne committed a fairly large slight by publicly celebrating my handiwork

at a wedding to which I was intentionally not invited, or my invitation got lost in the mail. If the second version is correct, then I'm the one in the wrong, she finally says graciously, for not sending her a gift. Well, it's kind of more appropriate to send a gift if you don't have to go to the wedding because it costs so much to go to some weddings. If you have to fly, if you have to get a hotel or a new outfit or something, or go to a dinner. Pricey. Their anniversary is in a few months, says Clara, and I could perhaps get them an anniversary gift to make up for not sending a wedding gift. But, she says, first I need to know which of us was in the wrong. So Helen, answer me this. How do I tactfully find out whether or not my cousin intended to invite me to her wedding? Oh, Detective Clara.

Yeah. You could ask your parents for a start because I wonder whether they would have at least noticed remarks if you were invited but hadn't acknowledged the invitation. No, null and void, Helen. Null and void. They've given the report. They've given the full report and they didn't mention that. They mentioned the table with the bouquet and the invitation. No, null and void, Helen. Null and void. They've given the report. They've given the full report and they didn't mention that. They mentioned the table

with the bouquet and the story. They would have mentioned any signifying indication about whether she'd been invited. Well, okay. So one of you is going to be slighted in the scenarios you've outlined. In either one, one of you is.

It just depends whether it's you or her. Now, I think if you had not answered she might have chased you up if you were a cousin that she was expecting to come she probably would have nudged you going oh we need your rsvps in by next sunday yeah or could you let me know if you have food allergies yeah and also i think if she was pissed off at you for not acknowledging her wedding invitation, maybe she wouldn't have been so glowing about displaying your crocheted bouquet or anything. True.

Or she would have drunkenly made this light to your parents inadvisably at the end of the evening so you knew where she stood. But she didn't because they gave a full report. So I think things point to her intentionally not inviting you. Now, this may have been due to circumstances that you don't know about rather than her not liking you enough to have you there even though it does look bad but even though you say it's a big wedding i don't know the size of your extended family but is it possible that even if it's a big wedding the groom had loads of relatives that he had to invite and therefore she could invite fewer people or they both had a cap fairly early on so they could have more yeah non-relations come something

like that you know she hasn't mentioned how many cousins were there like if there were no cousins there then that's consistent isn't it and that is the thing people often have to deal with is well we really want your aunt so and so but if we do that we have to invite aunt so and so from the other side exactly so we won't have aunts even though i like one aunt don't like the other or whatever the thing is yeah or we only have aunts but none of the aunts children because then you get a lot more people coming exactly yeah yeah i can understand that you would not feel happy about this and i don't know what a tactful way is to discuss this with her because she is also not obligated to invite you to her wedding like no one is obliged to invite you to

their wedding that's right but we are agreed aren't we that she should have sent a fucking card at least a card if not at least a gift yeah so given that she's acknowledged that herself even if she feels slighted she might as well just take the upper hand like at the moment she's in the inferior position isn't she because she feels slighted and she's been a bit spiteful and she knows a way to remedy it which she might choose not to do i think choose to do it choose to send something on their first anniversary it doesn't have to be a gift what about a plant or something given that you've got this sort of floral theme going anyway but maybe a real plant that could die yeah so it doesn't feel as permanent but feel like you're on the front foot

then then then you wouldn't, in the retelling of this story, have this nagging thing of, oh, but we didn't send a card. Be the better cousin. Well, that brings us to the end of this episode of Answer Me This. But we thrive on your questions

sent via email and voice. Yeah, not in the mail that can be lost that we then have some vague nagging doubt. Don't trust it. Did it ever reach us? Have you snubbed us? It's a very romeo and juliet situation all our digital contact details are available to see upon our website

answer me this podcast.com and also on the website there are links to follow us on facebook and twitter and there is a link to our new album home entertainment that we mentioned earlier yes it can be yours now for free if you want or you can chuck us some money it's your choice it is a really good funny album yeah whether you pay for it or not it is a very amusing hour full of facts and fun and we can always use facts and fun right you'll enjoy it yeah answer me this store.com if you know that you want to get that right now. And why not? Obliterate another hour of being awake. But once you've listened to Answer Me This,

Home Entertainment, and our other five albums, what else do we have for people on the internet, Helen? Oh, well, I've got The Illusionist and I just did an episode about the etymology of the word pornography, which is quite interesting. Yes, that does sound interesting.

And I also have my podcast, Veronica Mars Investigations, which you can find at vmipod.com. And I do five podcasts. You can discover them all at ollyman.com. But this month, I feel I should point you in the direction of a show that I guested on rather than hosted. And that is My Teenage Diary on BBC Radio 4. Your dream come true.

It was a show that i was trying to get on and i think publicly discussed in this show in an attempt to get on about seven years ago you really campaigned hard for this a long time um so it was really fun to do uh luckily it was recorded pre-pandemic so in front of a live studio audience to refer back to our content from earlier. And it was me reading out from my 1994 diaries when I was 13 years old. So the ratio of content is roughly one third about the soap opera Neighbours, one third bar mitzvah preparation,

and one third wanking. I enjoyed it. I have linked to my episode of my teenage diary on my website, ollyman.com. If you click on the news pages, you will find it there. Martin. I do a podcast called Song by Song about the music of Tom Waits.

And we've recently completed our film season with some fantastic guests, including film critic Amy Nicholson. We talk about Robert Altman's shortcuts. She's from the podcast Unspooled, which is very good. Unspooled and Zoom, which I make the music for. And also KB Abunaka and Helen Sadler from Flixwatcher and the 90 Minutes or Less Film Festival people

and Helen Zaltzman and Jenny Owen-Youngs from VMI Pod. And as for more Answer Me This, there will be a retro episode taken from The Vaults that lands in your feed halfway through the month,

but you have to subscribe to get it. And then we'll be back on the first Thursday of next month with a brand new episode of Answer Me This. So join us for that. Bye! And then we'll be back on the first Thursday of next month with a brand new episode of Bonsbyness. So join us for that.

Bye!