Comedy of the Week - Why in the Name of Pierre Novellie

Episode Date: January 19, 2026

Unarguably tall comedian Pierre Novellie uses his unique style of erudite bafflement to focus on the deep and the shallow in a comedic answer to In Our Time. In this episode, all about why we can’t stop eating, Pierre discusses the misuse of soap, weaponised crisps, Saint Aetholwold, and George Orwell vs the pizza.As Pierre says, “I’m delighted to be given the chance to perform my own comedy on the BBC, the original source of my obsession with comedy as a child. It’s a chance to bring my stand up to a hypothetically grateful nation.”Written and performed by Pierre Novellie and produced & directed by David Tyler (Cabin Pressure, One Person Found This Helpful, Armando Iannucci’s Charm Offensive)A Pozzitive production for BBC Radio 4

Why in the name of Pierre Novelli? A show where I ask why and then I tell you why. This episode, Why in the name of Pierre Navelli, can't we stop eating? By the 14th century, many of the monasteries in England had become decadent. The monks were eating so much meat and drinking so much booze and becoming so overweight that they had become constipated. The situation was serious enough that they wrote down medical advice for their bound brethren, which we still have. It was, in my best middle English pronunciation, take a piece of soap, make it small, and put it in your fundament.

Aside from being probably quite effective, this is also a very satisfying thing to say when they try to upsell you in lush. Take a piece of soap, make it small, and put it in your fundament. Sorry, I should have said, Hello, I'm Pianoveli, welcome to the show. And today I'll be talking about eating and overeating. Apologies for the rapid start. I've always loved in our time, and it's insanely sudden introduction.

Hello, Nizami Ganjavi, 1141 to 1209, is considered to be one of the greatest romantic poets in Persian literature. It's like Melvin Bragg is leaping out of an alleyway to mug you. Mug you with knowledge. I wonder if he does a very accessible two or three hour introduction, and then they just switch his microphone on at 9 a.m. regardless. I should address him leaving the show. I do wonder if his successor has been advised to have more of a nursery slope.

Maybe force the guests to try and make the Schleswig Holstein question relatable to Gen Z. So, on to eating and overeating. And the full quote from those monks, by the way, is take a piece of soap, make it small, and put it in your fundament, and rest upon your bed. How soothing. If you use the foaming bath bomb, you could pull your legs back in simulate a volcano. And in monasteries and abbees across the land, these monks really were overeating.

In the 14th century in Westminster Abbey, monks were given 6,000 calories a day, which included five eggs. Five. Who wouldn't be sculpting a soap suppository after a five egg sitting? I once bought one of those little cardboard trays of 30 eggs that you can get from shops in London sometimes. If you're wondering if you can get through 30 eggs, on your own, before any of them go off, you can.

It won't be pretty, but you can. Has anyone ever tried to make an eight-egg omelet? Turning it over in the frying pan is like trying to flip a burning mattress. In order to eat all of this food, said monks of Westminster Abbey had constructed a special room they called a misery cord, where the rules on eating and fasting didn't apply. The monk's logic was that because the rules expressly forbade

eating decadent things in the refectory, or the dining hall, the rules didn't apply in a room with a different name. This may be the true motive behind Trump constructing the White House's new porn star shagging wing. Inspired by the monk's renaming trick, I no longer snack. I merely have seven to eight meals a day. You see, the problem with setting up rules that forbid delicious things is that it does tend to make the forbidden thing more delicious. If you tell a small child that the worst swear word in the world is cirrhosis, and there must never, ever say it. It will be a matter of minutes

before that child has shouted the word cirrhosis at the health visitor. People say, shall we be naughty as a way of announcing their intention to order dessert? Very few people say, shall we be naughty immediately before robbing a bank. That monastic medical advice

is silly, but it is historically important. It's one of the earliest examples of someone in the UK dealing with the health effects of eating too much. Though these days we have moved on from putting soap in our bums, at least medically. And now we have these special injections. These injections are the latest tool

to stop us from overeating. When I heard there was an injection that stopped you from overeating, I assumed it was a tranquilizer. I would pay good money to be blow-darted by an unseen Amazonian assailant. Every time I walk past a chippy

and considered going in. Oh, wow, they've just poured the chips out the friar. They're going to, they're going to be nice and fresh. That's not where these injections are, by the way, or fat jabs, as they have been nicknamed. As a very wide man, fat jabs is what I get from elbows on planes. These are injections that simulate the hormones

released by your lower intestine when you've eaten. They slow down your stomach emptying, so you feel fuller for longer, and they tell your brain that you're satisfied. There are quite a few potential side effects. Some people report nausea, bad gas, and a total lack of interest in food generally. In other words, the injections work by providing a perfect simulation of boxing day. It's one of the few days a year where I look at a pile of roasted meats,

the same way I look at a blocked shower drain. I hope it'll go away on its own, but I know in my heart I'm going to have to get my hands dirty. It's worth mentioning that this stuff was originally invented to help with diabetes and other illnesses, not as a diet thing. But there is a long tradition of medicine being invented for one thing and used for another, like amphetamines being used in the war by the Germans,

becoming diet pills. If this little pill can keep a Nazi pilot awake for two days, then by God, they can help your mother look her best. And then it became ADHD medication. Don't thank me for these great exam results. Thank the Luftwold. Maybe NHS methamphetamine is the answer to Britain's declining productivity. We'd get a lot of things done, just not necessarily the right things.

Then again, you should always be careful trying to find alternate uses for medicine without enough evidence. Otherwise, you end up taking horse-de-worming tablets for COVID. Although, in fairness, horses never got COVID. And thank God, as it's very hard to race the Grand National over Zoom. I've never seen a horse cough come to think of it. Maybe they're too nervous. They've seen what happens when they break a leg. But do we really need advanced medicine to stop us eating food?

Why can't we just control ourselves? Why do I need all this tech in medicine? What about self-control? I do my best to track what I eat because I can't be trusted. I am very food-motivated. Imagine me as the thickest Labrador you know. The one you had to take to the vet because it ate so quickly, it got food in its lung. That's me.

I track my food on a little app. And it's embarrassing. As a grown man, to stand alone in my kitchen thinking, well, what would I consider to be a medium banana? Resist the overwhelming urge to Google average UK banana buy weight. No, thank you, Google. I literally meant banana. I said, wait, not girth. And much like a dog, food is my only reward and my only incentive.

If I didn't tempt myself to be productive with little treats, I'd lie down all day. Give me a cheer if you use food as a reward? Yes, and it has to be loads, doesn't it? It has to be loads. A friend of mine is also very food motivated, but he rewards himself with very small amounts of food that are extremely high quality. And that's of no interest to me. I would rather eat an entire...

boiled cabbage than a single Belgian chocolate. Because if it's not loads, it's not a party. And it has to be loads because I also eat to feel full, and that takes some doing. I would happily eat a cheese toasty every 15 minutes. I'm never full until I'm suddenly so full. I feel like I'm in danger. And that's when it's a reward.

That feeling is how I know I'm being rewarded. Because, and this is my point, things have to be rewarding and nice, or people won't do them. Even if healthy food did cost the same as unhealthy food, it's just not as nice. It's not clever to quote George Orwell anymore, especially not in 1984 or animal farm. We get it, George. You shouldn't let pigs run a farm. It can't be trusted. But it is clever to quote, Road to Wiggin Pier, where, thank you. where Orwell pointed out,

the ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and rivita biscuits, an unemployed man doesn't. When you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull, wholesome food. You want something tasty that can tempt you. Orwell wrote that about chips.

He thought it was almost pointless trying to get people to eat healthily because of how nice chips were. If he saw a stuffed crust barbecue sauce meat feast pizza, he'd probably think maybe Big Brother should step in and control some things. Part of the problem is that the food situation in the UK isn't how it used to be. Modern life is making us unhealthy. Well, you may ask if modern living is the problem,

why was there no obesity crisis in the 70s? Well, the food was awful and everyone smoked. Very simple. Now, I'm not one of those people who imagined some version of the past where we were healthier. If we were going back, where exactly are we going to go back to? Before antibiotics? Before we realized you shouldn't cook everything in beef dripping? Back when the smog was so thick, you could hide Jack the Ripper in it.

Nostalgia is delusional, and whenever people imagine living in the distant past, they imagine being a king or a well-off person. They never imagined themselves dressed in stinking wool, clawing turnips from. the frozen earth. No, the problem with modernity is that the food situation in the UK is upside down for the first time in human history. For all of human history, getting enough calories

has been a struggle. Poor people were thin and only the richest were fat. It used to be that only the elite could afford something as luxurious as a loaf of soft white bread, wine from Spain, and an entire chicken. But I've checked online, and you can get all that from a supermarket

for about 10 quid. And that's an incredible achievement for humanity. Well done us. But also, it's made us go insane. We've made everything so nice that it's made us go mad. There are now twice as many obese people in the world than underweight people. That's why the earth rotates at a slight angle. Humanity's own success, our triumph over nature, is now our main problem. And the people in charge know it's bad. Elite CEOs do things like ban their kids from having smartphones or only eat things they imagine cavemen would have eaten, which is just a childish way of eating healthily for men who feel insecure about salad.

It's not gay to eat these little berries? Cavemen ate berries. Like how you tell your kids that broccoli is Batman's favorite food. So now that the elite are thin and austere, is it just elitist to try and stop people from enjoying themselves? The people in charge of a long history of trying to stop ordinary folk from enjoying nice things even hundreds of years ago. After the black death, wages increased for the average laborer. Ordinary people were making lots of money from trade and administration, brainwork. This meant that they could suddenly buy things that used to just be for aristocrats like velvet hats and exotic spices and swan meat. The sorts of luxury goods promoted to this day by

influencers on Instagram and TikTok. I follow several swan meat influences or swan fluences on Instagram. But the aristocrats weren't having this. Food and clothing were their only ways to signal their blue blood. If some horse trader could eat and look like a duke, what was the point in being a duke? The whole system could crumble. Like when there are more priority boarding passengers

than normal passengers. At that point, they're the normal passengers. And people like me who don't pay for priority are just airborne scum. So the government introduced these things called sumptuary laws, which stopped people from buying certain clothing or meat or jewelry if it was too fancy for their social rank.

In 16th century England, sumptuary laws limited the amount of dishes you could serve at dinner by rank. Cardinals could serve nine, dukes, earls and bishops seven, and so on, all the way down society until you hit peasant, where presumably they could only order one side dish like coleslaw. It's like if today an intern could only eat a bowl of gruel while gazing jealously at the CEO, as he enjoyed an entire roasted cow tongue suspended in pigfoot jolt. jelly and a peacock made from marzipan. It's incredible, isn't it, that they ate like that before René's.

No wonder Henry the 8th was in such a bad mood all the time. One bottle of Gaviscon and we'd all be Catholic. Before 1604, only the royal family and their relatives could wear golden cloth or sable fur or purple silk. Essentially, only the royal family could dress like Elton John or Prince. Maybe that's why he was called Prince. Only the wives of knights could wear taffeta. Imagine being denied the pleasure of taffeta.

These days, anyone can wear taffeta, which is why no one does. Wives of Knights was the very first dirty magazine, of course. They even regulated how long swords could be for men of different ranks. Now, between arguing over who has the longest sword, the cod pieces, and half of Shakespeare's jokes, I would like to nominate the Elizabethan era as when England was at its most penacy. Were they right to stop us, though? Were the sumptuary laws saving us from ourselves?

Sometimes I wish someone else would come along and make me change, make it impossible to be like this. I think that's part of the national obsession with rationing and the blitz. It's not that we're horrified by our greatest generation suffering, it's that we're envious.

We want the rationing back. At some level, we want the gasioning back. government to come and take the biscuits away. If you want butter, you have to queue. And if you want slightly more butter, you have to commit fraud. And the fraud would only have made the butter ten times as delicious. Things only have value to us if they're rare. That's why people get angry when they put Easter eggs on sale in January,

or mince pies in September, or roast goose months before Martinmus. Just me? By making these foods easily available, shops are making them boring and less special. They're destroying seasonal eating, which is always our deepest link to the passing of time, the changing of the year. It's amazing to eat lamb when it's only available a few months of the year. But when you could theoretically eat lamb three times a day, who cares? Apart from the lamb.

In the 10th century, is it going to be monks again, Pierre? Yes. Bear with me, the world. So, in the 10th century under King Edgar, who you don't know, because he's not in the song, St. Dunstan and St. Ethelwald went around all the English monasteries, kicking out the decadent monks and restoring discipline, out with all the big fat fakers with their sexy wives, in with the studious virgins with the odd haircuts.

A big moralistic clear-out. So why don't we do something like that today? A big moral crusade. We did. We did try. Our modern-day St. Dunstan was Jamie Oliver. Sorry to repeat a cliche. But it is worth remembering how that turned out. For anyone who needs a reminder, they filmed Jamie Oliver, the celebrity chef,

desperately going around schools, trying to convince children to eat boring, healthy things, instead of delightful treats, while the parents of the kids pushed hamburgers through the school gates, like people handing their children to American soldiers fleeing Saigon. The trouble is kids have no concept of health or death,

so trying to scare them with health or death doesn't really work. We filmed Jamie Oliver, trying to explain mortality and decay to primary school children. We forced a celebrity chef to become a character from a Samuel Beckett play.

I think the mistake was to treat the children like at any point we value their input. Why are we trying to convince children using nutritional rhetoric, their children? We don't send Mary Beard and Richard Dawkins around schools to desperately persuade the children that it's good to do homework.

They have to do it. They get in trouble. I'm not saying don't bother trying to convince them, but you need carrot and stick, or rather, chicken nugget and carrot. It's like with crime, we try to educate people that it's wrong to commit crimes, but for the few that don't get the message,

a man in a wig locks them in a boring room for ages. It's not like we didn't try every other method of persuasion with the kids. Jamie Oliver even made them watch him put a turkey's bum and face and eyes into a big mincer to turn it into the pink foam, they use for turkey twislers, the children were delighted. They thought they were in a rolled doll book. A marvelous machine that turns this boring stuff into nuggets. And then he said, who still wants to eat nuggets?

They all put their hands up. And they made him cry. Not pucker children. Not pucker at all. I have sympathy for that view. I have always thought of nuggets is a very efficient way of using more the chicken's carcass. Surely it's less wasteful. Isn't it better we're using more of the chicken? People always say, oh, they're made of bum and eyes and face, but they've just minced the

bum and eyes and face so thoroughly that you can't tell. Good. Why would I want to be able to tell? Thank you. Thank you for mincing the bum and eyes and face so thoroughly. How modern? A beak too? Why not? Throw it in. I suppose one answer to it all is physical exercise. or PE. PE's job is to improve your health and give you a love of exercise that lasts the rest of your life. But it's not quite what I got from it.

Aside from learning to fear the sight of tabards and cones. No one spotted I was hypermobile, so I mainly received injuries. I also developed a lifelong skepticism of stretching and warming up. Why am I doing exercise to get ready to do exercise?

Shouldn't I do some exercise to get ready to do the exercise before the exercise? Should I have started warming up yesterday? Also, you're supposed to stretch afterwards to warm down, but also before the next exercise. So ideally, you should never not be stretching. Always be stretching. Stretch your hamstrings until they're so loose you can pull your bum over your head.

Maybe I'm just bitter. But there's all this talk of suppressing hunger. What about all the people like me who eat for other reasons? I'm a terrible one for comfort eating or binge eating. There is a difference between love of food and love of eating. Unfortunately, I love both. The Japanese have a word that roughly translates to lonely mouth, which is when you eat because you're bored or because your mouth feels lonely.

I'd be fascinated to know of telling someone that your mouth feels lonely works as a pickup line. I think I also eat out of guilt. Give me a cheer if you were also raised not to waste food and finish all the food on your plate. Oh, yes. Now, my wife has a superpower. she can scrape leftovers into the bin. First of all, it's incredible to me. First of all, that she has leftovers at all.

Secondly, that she can bin them. The other day, I saw her scrape into the bin a piece of cooked bacon. I know. And it was a good piece. The fat had fully rendered. It had visible crunch. Edges of deepest ruby.

It didn't have that elastic band fat rind that stretches away and twangs you in the face as you bite the sandwich and pull. The bacon wasn't grey and wet with smeg on. It was a good piece. And she scraped it into the bin. Right in front of me, the bin she loves. But that's the right attitude. I wish I was like that.

Here's a more extreme example. The other day, I bought a kilogram bag of generic supermarket Penae pasta. Don't tell me how to have fun. But here's the point. The pastor's not fancy. It's not going to go off before the apocalypse. There's no rush to eat it or use it up. I put the pastor by my hob, but I kept forgetting it was there.

So every time I went to the hob, I was already making something else. And I'd see it, and I'd think, oh, for God's sake, I mean to use the pastor. God. And every time I used the hob, that would happen. And the pastor would stare up at me mournfully as if to say, but you promised Pierre. When you took us home from the shop, you promised you'd cook us. It's so cold. here in the bag.

Why don't you run us a nice hot bar? Every day for weeks this happened. Until one day I snapped and I ate it all at once. It weighed a kilogram dry. I didn't enjoy myself. But once I'd eaten it, the pasta was over. It no longer existed as a problem. And the packet could go in the bin.

And I could lie on the couch in agony. Like a snake in a documentary, when the narrator says, he won't feed again for two weeks. So much of eating is psychological. And the thing is, it's not a fair fight. Food companies spend millions on research and development. Every crisp is as engineered as a drone.

There are food scientists working with food tasting experts for years just to develop exactly the right level of crunch, exactly the right level of salt or sweet, the maximally addictive amount of flavor powder left on your fingertips. It's like the Manhattan Project. Teams of scientists working day and night to make sure you can't fit into your trousers. I am become crisps, destroyer of waste lines.

And there was always unhealthy food available. You could always fry eggs and bacon and lard if you wanted, but it wasn't weaponized like this until modern times. It's like playing card games at Christmas, as opposed to in a mob casino. You could always play rummy with your family, but at no point did your family insist you played poker in a room with no windows or clocks, so you couldn't tell what time it was or how long you'd been there. Although, thinking about it, that is exactly like Christmas lunch at Grandmas. Though mob casinos have thick wall-to-wall carpet and needlessly ornate furnishings.

Although thinking about it, that is exactly like Christmas lunch at Grandmas. Although mob casinos have a back room full of cigarette smoke and a threatening atmosphere, and loose cash that really should be. in a bank account, although thinking about it. Now to be clear, I blame the junk food or the ready meals or the ultra-processed food, or whatever you want to call it. I blame it for being too delicious, not for being too specifically unhealthy in itself. There is a fashionable new superstition that if food was made in a factory, or designed not to rot the second you got at home, then it must instantly give you cancer and diabetes.

It's the same people who think everything is better if it's natural, but by natural they never mean crawling into a hollow log to dive an infected tooth. They mean that when you buy it, the shop assistant puts it in a brown paper bag. Now, if you want to know if a food is ultra-processed or not, just try to imagine it being fed to a child who plays with tasteful wooden toys. If you can't, it's bad for you. It doesn't matter if the ten pints of melted butter you drink per day is organic or not. You are still turning your blood into patte.

Well, it would matter if the butter was organic, to be fair, but only because you'd run out of money long before the butter killed. There are a lot of food chemicals where we simply don't have any evidence that they do harm, but we do have evidence that they make food so delicious you eat ten times as much. And we have plenty of evidence that that does harm. It's too much stuff. That's too delicious. That's the problem.

Not that your chicken didn't go to uni. And I think it's our own version of something. sumptuary laws. Delicious, decadent food no longer indicates status, so the status indicators have to change. The foods that do indicate status are still expensive, but now it's because they are organic, or from a farm that's pointlessly close to the restaurant. Or they take a lot of time to prepare. Rich people are time-rich too. They don't have to have two or three jobs. They can wait for the Arga to warm up. The rest of us will just have to have nuggets or take our nugget vaccinations. Maybe the injections and pills are the answer. But if we

If we take a pill to stop us wanting too much to remove temptation or greed from ourselves, will we still develop self-control? It's not self-control for most people not to drink vodka for breakfast, for example. Most people don't want to, but it is self-control if you're an alcoholic. I find the people with the best self-control are the ones who've had to develop it in opposition to a challenge, as opposed to people who've simply gone through life completely unchallenged. Most people don't want to eat a whole tub of ice cream or a sack of crisp flavoring or a kilogram of pasta, it turns out.

The problem is that everything is too delicious and life is too short. That's why when you make everything less delicious, your life gets longer. And if everyone is on this stuff for a generation or two, what will happen if it ever runs out? Will Britain suddenly be defenseless to treats? Will southern fried chicken rip through the population like measles through Aztecs? What if I have just enough self-control to resist the injections, but not enough to resist the food? So, what's the answer? Injection in the arm, beaks and the mincer, soap up the bum.

That's my weekend sorted. Good back. That was Y in the name of Pierre Nivelli, written by and starring Pierre Nivelli. The producer was David Tyler, and it was a positive production for BBC Radio 4. If you enjoyed that episode of Why in the Name of Piavelli, you can hear more on BBC sounds. Just search Stand Up specials. Attention, animal lovers, haters and undecideds. A little birdie, a tit, told me that your love.

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