Desert Island Dicks - AHIR SHAH

Episode Date: November 8, 2021

Dan is joined by Ahir Shah to discuss the worst people and things to be stuck on an island with, and he picks a diverse and interesting selection, so why not stop reading this bit and have a listen. Oh, before you do, remember to buy a ticket to one (or both) or our live shows at 21 Soho on the 1st and 2nd December with Fern Brady and Stephen K Amos! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Or run a reproduced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Lips and Ads. Go to Lipsandads.com now. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N-Ads.com. Hi, I'm Dan from Desert Island Dicks. This episode features comedian Ahir Shah. And from his job title, you'll be able to guess correctly that he's a funny man so I hope you will enjoy this episode but I'm pretty sure you will. Just to remind you we've got two live shows coming up in December. On the 1st of December we've got

Fern Brady which is going to be great. On the 2nd of December We've got Stephen K Amos, which is also going to be great. You can find out more and get tickets from the link in the description of this podcast. And you can also find the link on our socials on Instagram and Twitter at Dick's Pod. So go ahead and get them. It's going to be Christmas soon. So why not go to a live podcast recording? Those things have always gone hand in hand. As soon as it's Christmas, you know, my mother used to bundle us up, take us out in the cold air and we'd go off to a podcast recording and get festive. That bit's not true. But why not make it a new festive tradition?

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please like and subscribe and give us a rating and review all these things help if you've already done all those things hey why not tell a friend all about us that would be very lovely so thank you for that as a reward i'll stop talking and here's desert Island Dicks with our here-sha. Hi, I'm Dan Benedictus and welcome to Desert Island Dicks, the show that sees you marooned on a desert island after a plane crash with the worst people and worst things imaginable. Who they are and why they're a dick is up to our guest and here to share their Desert Island Dicks with us today is comedian Ahir Shah. How are you? Hello. Hello, Dan. I'm very well, thank you. How's it going? Yeah, not bad. Thank you for joining us today.

Pleasure. Are you feeling kind of ready to sort of tear into some dicks? I mean, is it an easy process for you? Well, I find myself, even the idea of being on a plane full stop, let alone one that crashes, seems so remote to me. And the closest thing to being on a desert island I've had in a very long time is having gone to the Isle of Wight in July. So this is uh this is uh if anything a nice exercise in escapism yeah yeah good and and do you find normally like

you're the sort of person that finds it easy to come up with your choices for this sort of thing or is it is it hard whittling them down or have you just straight away just gone bam bam bam I know what I hate no I think it is difficult because even with things that you dislike if it's your only option you're gonna end up finding something to enjoy about the situation you know so for example like when we're talking about uh having people uh on the island and what have you and instinctively my brain immediately went well faraj or whatever. And it's like, well, probably we'd end up through necessity having to bond. And then I would realise that, oh, actually, like I've got, and if I weren't strong enough of will, I might end up convincing myself that actually he has a

point about me and my family. So I too worried about that yeah it is a risky business and i think you know you don't want to pick someone that you would hate forever and have nothing in common with because that would be awful but then if you sort of found yourself getting along with a character like farage it's every day like maybe now i should say something oh fuck it tomorrow i can't be bothered yeah one day there'll be like one night he took the last coconut or something and it something or you just kill each other now yeah and also like i mean he's he's a heavy smoker and i'm assuming that there won't be any cigarettes on the island so he's going to be very prickly yeah uh even more than

more than usual uh so that's something that one must uh be conscious of that there were a lot more uh you know second order effects in this than i was expecting yeah plus i just thought he's already had a plane crash hasn't he famously so i mean yes the first bit he'd be banging on being like oh well the last time this happened you shut up nigel it's not the same okay well let's uh let's get cracking in and um who's going to be your first choice for the island uh my my first choice is uh ethan rom ethan rom ethan rom from series one of lost okay okay so i mean immediately we've got a sort of a similar environment that he's used to yeah talk us through your thinking here well and look there are going to be spoilers for season one of Lost for anyone who hasn't seen it yet.

But given how long it's been, I mean, like, I think that we're talking there hadn't been a financial crisis at that point. You know, like none of us had none of us had heard of coronaviruses or pandemics or witnessed the London Olympics opening ceremony. So it's a it's another world. But Ethan Rom is the character who they realise in the first... And this is when you are like, ah, Lost is great. Like, this is a really... They realise that he wasn't in the passenger manifest

and that he's actually been on the island before. So there were people on this island before and he, like, steals a baby and and everything and it's all very spooky and i'm just thinking the one thing that you don't want if you end up in this sort of situation is finding yourself in the midst of there being a pre-existing sinister cabal yeah i think that that would be very awkward and also i mainly i just dislike lost uh that's what that's what that's what this entire thing is about but also having having followed lost uh for a very long time and thought about if there's one thing that i hate more than being suddenly confronted by the existence of a pre-existing child-snatching island dweller.

It's an unsatisfactory conclusion to a narrative. And I think that that's the real risk that having Ethan Rowe poses. Perhaps I should just have, was it J.J. Abrams who did Lost? Maybe I'll just have him. Yeah, that's the thing. It's like, it happened increasingly with series these days when you're kind of getting through the first series

and you kind of think, oh, this is brilliant. And then it must have been around sort of episode five. They went, do you want a second series if you want? And then they go, oh, shit, I better rewrite the last episode. You can tell sometimes. Like I watched one on Netflix recently and I was like, that would have been such a good one series thing. But of course there has

to be more and the guy has to change his mind like let things just end and we get that so rarely these days like for example uh fantastic film Knives Out right really fantastic and it's just like a very successful film that's not superhero not part of a franchise not a sequel or anything like that people just like it because it's a good film and it's there. And then what do you know, down the line, well, Netflix have put X million dollars on the table. And so we have to have Knives Out 2 and 3 and nothing can just be standalone anymore. Yeah, definitely. And you said he stole a baby as well. And I just think apart from the sort of character that does something like that, I mean, that's an awful kind of person who would do that. But also on a desert island, like babies are really tiring to look after.

If you're someone who like you're clearly there's something wrong with you where in a survival situation, you think, I know what I need, a baby. So it's like you're an awful person because you can steal a baby and you just you're unhinged because you think somehow that's a good idea. That is spoken with the real understanding of a man who has a nine-month-old right now there was there was a palpable weariness i mean even older kids are tired i mean basically you want to be stuck with grown-ups you know like at least if they're annoying you can kill them or walk away but with a kid like even if you hate them you're gonna have to stay with them and if you just deliberately go

out of your way to get them then i just i don't know what you're doing yeah so i'd start with yes start with ethan rom or failing that because i know that we've uh we've we've gone immediately i may not be fulfilling the rules of the game uh in choosing someone fictional uh so in that case i will choose uh jj abrams for having done lost okay and because i would just inevitably end up grilling him about the series and nothing he said would be satisfactory to me well maybe we can have a sort of an amalgam like there's either one of these people there each each day so you've got another two people but it sort of flips between these two people sometimes he kind of appears as the character ethan and sometimes he's jj

you know he might manifest himself as that you know when people kind of go oh look podcasts they can be about anything or they don't have to be 45 minutes long. You know, people start realising it's like, oh, huge, long, drawn out series. Don't have to have a satisfactory conclusion. It's fine. Yeah, I think, though, you've you've really you've found what I think the best solution to this is, which is that the person on the island that I would choose will be William Maposa, who played Ethan Rowe in Lost, but on the island he is playing J.J. Abrams defending Lost.

Okay. Okay. Nice. And he's a good actor as well. He'd be able to do it very convincingly, I think. It's also getting quite meta then as well. So that's, you know, like an extra layer of complexity while you're already sort of tired and starving and bored nice okay well this new creature joins you

on the island and uh who's going to be your second choice uh the second choice is we just are going for someone who does straight up exist and is already on an island with me uh though would that that weren't the case and we are going with dominic cummings okay great i'm sure a lot of people can imagine why you picked him but like fill us in show us your workings i don't right on a desert island there are very few means to blog so starved of the ability to blog i would just become the person he verbally blogs at. Yeah. And that, I feel, would be among the most frustrating. And he'd always have like wacky

harebrained schemes for how we could get off the island and everything. But all of them, like he wouldn't have fully thought through the consequences of any of them. And they would always sort of end with vastly more problems being created than the ones that were purported to being solved in the first place. And yeah, I just think that he would cause a lot of problems on that sort of setting. Yeah, definitely. I mean, in one sense, you'd rather be stuck with clever people than stupid people. And you know, he does seem to be a clever chap, but he's only going to channel all his intelligence into just being like as abrasive and difficult as possible, I think.

Well, this is the thing. And I think that he's, he is an intelligent man, but he's a very specific kind of intelligent man, which is one who thinks he's considerably more intelligent than he is. And even if you are intelligent, thinking that you're considerably more intelligent than you are is always going to create problems. And that's the sort of thing that you don't need in what I imagine will already be a pretty fractious environment. Yeah. Even if he turns out to go, oh, I hit my head in the crash. I've come to my senses. I was wrong. I want to start over again. You'd never believe him ever. He genuinely had turned a new leaf. You're like no no no no no no like i'm watching you and it would just be exhausting wouldn't it it would be extraordinarily exhausting and uh there's a chance that he might

somehow get someone extraordinarily inappropriate to end up leading the island. And then once that all goes tits up, act as though he always knew that that was what was going to happen, but that it wasn't actually his fault for having done that. And I think that I would find that very difficult to get on with. I mean, I don't think that he particularly enjoyed

being on a desert island with me either. So I think that I've done us both a favor in um preventing this from happening yeah he just seems like someone who has the highest opinion of himself and that will never stop and he seems sort of like the chief mansplainer even if no one's asked him anything like that's what a blog is isn't it just sort of going yeah well since you asked but you haven't but i'm gonna tell you anyway yes and it's it's very easy to do that when one can retrospectively edit one's blog in order to make it seem as though one had thought of the problem all along. I thought it was really funny when he resigned, because when he left Downing Street,

he was walking along and he had like an archive box with some stuff in it and a plant sticking out. And I was like, that's just how people resign on telly. There's always a plant in it. I was like, is this, you've just gone, I need to have a public walking out of Downing Street. This is what it looks like if you're a normal person. I'm like, even in carrying a fucking box out of your old job, you have to sort of be calculated about it.

Because I've seen people leave the job I've worked in. None of them had a box with a plant in it like that's just what you see in a series you dick yeah but i think it's it's sort of uh life imitating art thing you know it's like uh how it was reported that after the release of the godfather uh mobsters in the united states started talking like that uh in order to mimic the way that it was in the film because they loved the film so much and then that again got turned on its head when the Sopranos came out and those mobsters were parodying the fact that real mobsters talked about the fake mobsters and they were like you know

so yes I think that that's where that's where the resigning archive box and plant comes from yeah definitely I don't feel like he'd pull his weight i think he'd blame you for lack of whatever you needed you know he'd find a scapegoat it wouldn't be a chance of going look the best chance of survival here is we all chip in get those coconuts build a fire we're all going to do this they'd always be like well actually you know if you'd actually read my last post which i scratched into the sand over there you'd know that this isn't an effective way of blah, blah, blah. The post blew away, Dom. And, you know, what I will say on the scapegoating thing

is a very good point as well, because obviously, you know, in order to do what he did to the island that we actually live on, there were very sort of of quote-unquote effective uh groups in order to scapegoat uh and demonize and what have you which that campaign did extraordinarily and tragically successfully from my perspective anyway and obviously on this desert island there's just this poor actor who i forced uh to pretend to be jj abrams the creator of lost uh and me uh and then who's gonna get it's a dangerous time there are very few options of who to scapegoat yeah yeah definitely you know when like when you're a grown-up and there's glimpses of just how fucked everything are sometimes you

know like the whole press conference in the garden of downing street and everyone's being like you fucked it mate come on and he's going no no no and everyone's like so you're not going to resign or be fired no and everyone's going right and that's just going to happen then is it that's uh that's just fucking life is it now you know like you know when you just go everything is fucked and i've got to look my children in the eye and pretend that they can be anything they want to be and it's all gonna be fine okay well um who's going to be the third person joining you well the third person so as you asked at the beginning do I find it easy to come up with these sorts of things that I hate and uh no and particularly not with people, because I do like to believe that people would have redeeming qualities and whatnot and everything. And I didn't want to choose like the actual worst people in the world, you know, because I could be like, I choose Bashar al-Assad to be on this island, but let's be perfectly honest, there is very limited comic potential

with choosing Bashar al-Assad to be on your island. So one person that I've chosen is already someone who I very obviously don't hate. And Dominic Cummings I do greatly dislike, and so I dislike him to an extent that I was able to park my usual reservations about engaging in such topics. Um, but I think that the twist in the tail of this sort of thing is that there are, there is a type of person who you wouldn't want to be on a desert island with you. And that is, that is the person you hate most in the

world. But there is another type of desert person that you wouldn't want to be on a desert island with you, which is the person you love most in the world, right? Because that would be ruinous to their life. Of course. And so for my third person, I have chosen my sister because she is a wonderful person and she has a husband and a dog and a baby on the way and being stuck on an island with me an actor and Dominic Cummings would really get in the way of a lot of the things that she's got planned oh man yeah okay all right so your sister on there yeah because you'd always feel responsible as well you'd kind of want to team up and against the others but then it's putting so much pressure on the two of you yeah exactly and like we've also like in our lives you know we've had arguments in the way that siblings will have arguments and that sort of thing but we've never had like a proper falling out like i'm not

speaking to you i mean we've always been like my closest friend uh in many ways so uh and you wouldn't want that like you wouldn't your closest friend in that sort of environment where inevitably things would go so awry and it would ruin a wonderful relationship yeah um that'd be terrible yeah because you hear like when people are doing those kind of arctic exploration things you know you traverse the south pole or whatever whoever you go with you end up just hating and you'll just be walking behind someone for 16 hours just going i'm gonna kill you in your sleep tonight or whatever you know just because of like the pressures of the environment and then you're gonna set up camp and have some food and calm down a bit and also you've got these awful people with you so you get

on with your sister but there'll be times and it's like why didn't you say that to dominant cummings earlier you know that that's wrong you know that's wrong we've talked about this like you know that effect that that's had on us why did you say that yes exactly having someone that you actually hate ultimately fine uh because you know either the two of you will just properly have it out or you're like right we've been put into this pressure situation together, we've got to set aside our differences. And maybe as you say, this could create the possibility for some unlikely buddy situation where we end up saving one another and growing as a result of it. Whereas having someone you very much love, I think can only cause problems. You mentioned she's pregnant. So I don't know whether she's just going to stay pregnant forever, you very much love, I think can only cause problems.

You mentioned she's pregnant. So I don't know whether she's just going to stay pregnant forever or whether she's going to have her baby and then you're going to have a baby on the island, which we've discussed is going to be difficult. Exactly. We've got an actor whose probably most famous role is a guy who stole a baby. So this would be the greatest problem ever

uh and maybe you know we don't know whether we've gone to a time standing still island or like the m night shamalan beach that makes you old situation yeah so i think yeah rock in a hard place basically i think either way it's going it's going to be difficult okay so your sister joins you on the island. Fair enough. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad. Reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lipson Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a reproduced ad like this one across thousands of shows

to reach your target audience with Lipson Ads. Go to lipsonads.com now. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N ads.com. Now, I hear mercifully amongst the wreckage of the plane, there was some food and drink left over. Unfortunately for you, it's your least favourite food and drink in the world. What are they and why are they so bad?

Right, now that we're moving on to not people, I feel much more comfortable on this entire thing fuck portobello mushroom burgers fuck absolutely cannot stand it it's always like a gastropub situation and you've gone with fret and if they meet and it's always like oh there's a this cow was sung to each day by wood nymphs for six hours uh before sort of retiring to the meadow to compose verse uh and then uh died we just went like oh look over there and uh died it killed it as it was eating like ambrosia. And you could have that, or you can just have a massive mushroom in between two bits of bread.

And that's what you're having out here. And it costs the same, by the way. That's, you're not escaping on that front. So yes, I really cannot stand a portobello mushroom burger. And if it were the only thing, you know, if it were the only thing keeping me from death sure but as it stands generally speaking that's i'll avoid an establishment to avoid a portobello mushroom burger they've just gone what's a bit hard and chewy like meat and it's like you know you've got you've got this classic like a mushroom halloumi these things and

now you've got obviously different options that are sort of better but you know a lot of the time it'd be better to just have saying that is it that's its own thing than a pretend version of the good thing but also i don't even think that they've gone what's also chewy and slightly i think that it's just what's that size and shape yeah but it's one thing and they would just get a job lot of those in and put those and it's not like a cow isn't that size or shape stuff's been done to the cows so do some stuff to whatever ingredients you're using in order to tiny round cows and then in the field like waiting to get into the bund like i like mushrooms but it does feel like that's not enough you need other things as well i think nowadays

there's people take more care and kind of trying to come up with things that are interesting yeah and this is the thing like as so i've been vegetarian since i was a child and i'm 30 now so over the course of my life i've seen vegetarianism and veganism become far more pronounced in the uk uh and consequently seeing far more places go to more effort to make actually interesting things for people with such dietary requirements. And it feels like the Portobello mushroom burger is the last holdout of an era when people are just like, fuck it, all of their friends eat meat, they're going to come. So what are they really gonna do i had

a friend who was um like just couldn't eat goat's cheese because she was a vegetarian she said so often the the alternative was some kind of goat's cheese tart that was like the only vegetarian thing on a menu and it's like i've run out of portobello mushrooms let's do the goat's cheese i've run out of goat's cheese get back to the mushrooms again yeah actually thinking about it perhaps a better scenario or a better choice would have been one of those actual you know burgers that a cow's been sung to and whatnot because that would also make me test my principles of like to what extent am i willing to go to avoid like if it's the only thing there obviously i'm going to eat it but then i'll feel terrible although i do like a beyond burger yeah okay if it's anything like that i probably would like it yeah um what would you attempt to wash it down with then what would

your drink choice be so originally i was thinking of just tonic water okay because having just tonic water as a drink is a very uncanny valley experience to me. Because it's just like there isn't gin, but it feels like there's gin, but there isn't gin. And it's a very confusing situation to find oneself in, I believe. But then I realized that tonic water has quinine in it, famously. And so on a desert island, that's an anti-malarial. You probably would want that. Yeah. So that's the possibility.

It's something that I dislike having in and of itself, but would in this case also be medicine. So it might be quite valuable. Yeah. But my other option is there's a particular sparkling water from Georgia, Georgia in Europe, not Georgia in the United States, Borgiomi or Boyomi if it's a soft drink or what have you. And the thing about it is, it is nice, right, for the first bit. And what it is, it's a naturally sparkling water that comes from the surface just entirely naturally,

very cool thing. It's got a very high sodium content, so it tastes sort of gently salty. And for the first few sips you're like this is so good and then after a while you're like this is a lot of effort like i'm actually not feeling hydrated by this because it's also got the thing that dehydrates you in it and apparently this was the only water that stalin would drink And it was like his favorite water. And I was like, I understand why he was so upset and angry all the time.

Because I would be too if I was just constantly quite parched. And I also think that on a desert island, it's a particularly dangerous choice. Because a water with a sodium content like that will make seawater seem dangerously palatable yeah you know like let's imagine that you get on a raft after that and you're like wow i've been i've been drinking all this borgermian that's that's quite salty so how how bad could this really be for me yeah probably it'd probably be fun and then you die yeah yeah and also i'm just suspicious something that comes out of the ground fizzy. I don't know why. It just seems like it doesn't seem natural somehow.

Yeah, no, that's very true. Although when having it, I was like, if there was a hot spring of this, it would be so nice. Yeah. Yeah. Fizziness is such a weird thing in drinks because sometimes it's really refreshing and sometimes it makes everything really bad like my oldest son is kind of a bit weird like when he has fizzy drinks you can just see his face going what the hell is this this isn't normal juice which is quite good as a parent because it keeps him away from like the really bad

drinks but i went to like our local bar recently we're just in the sort of phase of reintroducing ourselves into society now that our youngest is sleeping a bit more and near where we've moved there's like a nice little like restaurant wine bar and you can take away bottles and stuff but it's all natural wine which i'm unfamiliar with and i don't really understand it because like i just want a bottle of wine that tastes like wine in my head. And you go, oh, try this one. You're like, why is this red wine fizzy? This is so wrong. But oh, the white wine's fizzy.

Delicious. It's a celebration. And my head can't get around it. And I feel like a real child. It's like, no, this can't be fizzy. This thing that's similar, but not the same can. I mean, I was told about natural wine a little while ago, quite extensively, to try and have it explained to me. And I'm still at the conclusion that natural in the context of wine is just one of those words that means we can charge white people more for this. Yeah.

And by God, it works. So more power to the elbow of those business people. I just feel like I'm so in there, you know, they've got me in their crosshairs, you know, like I'm absolutely the demographic, but I just wish that the really nice place at the end of my road that looks otherwise perfect just had normal booze in it. And it's hard to explain that to them without sounding like a prick, but you're like, where's the one that tastes like the normal stuff? I think that you can say that because in that, like,

that's one of those statements that's either like really low status or really high status. And it was like, no, if anything, I've had too much sparkling red wine before. My palate has become so refined that i can handle only jacobs creek i will give that a go next time i'm in there okay so we're going with a georgian sparkling fizzy water or sparkling water for your drink choice okay well that seems seems like a good one to wash down the burger with um Okay, now, fortunately, you won't be without entertainment on the island.

The plane's entertainment system continues to work, but just your luck, it only has two working settings. One is your least favourite film of all time, and the other is your least favourite song. What are they and why? My least favourite song of all time is the hold music at hmrc if that was your only option you would from time to time be like oh yeah i could i could listen to it but it just it's never on that um on the island there's never going to be the situation where even after 40

minutes the music does finally end and someone from Cumbernail helps you with your problems. That won't occur. I'll never get the really... And like HMRC Hold Music also has that thing of like, it constantly makes you feel as though it's about to finish because you so desperately want it to. And so that would be the worst situation, just being on this island, getting constantly edged by HMRC

and having to listen to their whole tunes. Definitely. My least favourite song is More Than Words by Xtreme, for that reason, because it sounds like it's about to end lots of times and then just carries on again. And you're like, oh, I forgot. And it's something about hold music, it's about to end lots of times and then just carries on again and you're like oh and it's yeah something about hold music is it's purgatory even if it's a song you like it so quickly becomes torture yeah they also i've noticed um quite often when you're on hold it's never like a good signal

like the music never sounds very clear it often kind of has interference. Do you notice that? It's like there'll be the tune and it's kind of going... Yeah. On top of it. But I wonder whether that's one of those sort of artificial digital things to make you feel as though something's happening. Like, you know, the way that, like, cash machines actually don't do...

Do they not? They play that sound to make you feel as though something's happening. Apparently, that's the case. Wow. Cash machines just to make you feel as though there's some elaborate clockwork mechanism within it uh will sound like that but there actually isn't um so maybe it's like that that they don't want it to sound too perfect or you'll feel as though nothing active is occurring has it got a title the hmrc hold music is it a real song or is it just It's called Fuck You by

HMRC. I mean, something good might be at the end if you're managing to somehow claw some money back, but it's unlikely and it's very boring. So they should reward you for holding by giving you some content. Don't they put Netflix on? Just leave

something running. Just have comedy specials from netflix just on a loop in the background i mean as a comedian that's probably not great for you but um but uh this is it i i haven't been able to find the uh the name of the hold music but i have uh found that the national audit office estimates people in the uk spent 4.7 million hours in 2015 listening to HMRC hold music while waiting for someone to pick up, costing the country around 97 million pounds in wasted time. And in 2015, the biggest, the most streamed song was Cheerleader. You know, I think that I found. And that was 71.7 million plays. And that works out to 3.6 million hours of streams.

So it's a third more for HMRC or a quarter less for Omi's Cheerleader. Wow. I wonder if they can get PRS details because the person who wrote that song must be making a killing if so. Yeah. The most listened to sound in the UK is that, which is terrifying. the person who wrote that song must be you know making a killing if so yeah the most the most

listened to sound in the uk is that which is terrifying actually i've got a lot of sympathy because i've spent a lot of this year for various you know like i moved house and my mum's been quite ill and between the two things there's been a lot of being on hold to different like either hospitals or doctors or estate agents or solicitors or like utilities providers so it felt like most of my day for like a good few months was basically going to be on hold something it was it was kind of like you know when like you see people who like have to go dive into sewage for a job and there's like a very sort of like okay here we go again then you know yeah once more under the breach yeah like all right here we go

but some songs absolutely add to the madness of a situation and that would absolutely drive you insane actually perhaps i have retrospectively chosen badly on the people front because i think an even better person than any of the people who i've chosen uh would be um an employee of hmrc this is not to say that the employees of hmrc uh dicks they're like many of them have been very very helpful to me and i'm not uh not having a go at them but i want someone who who's just there by the hold music whenever i listen to it but and always feels like they're about to speak to me but never does so that that that like a like an hmrc torturer and i'm just there on my knees just go please say something please very good okay what would your film choice be there are obviously like ones that you very much wouldn't like to what like if your only

visual option was the triumph of the will or something you're just like after a while you're like oh yeah i mean i guess the cinematography is quite good, but that's like at what cost? This is not acceptable. I think that the worst film to have with you in that scenario is a film that I neither hate nor love, but is just cast away. Because I think having that at first, like you could watch it quite a few times and be like, all right, no,

but that speaks to my current situation. So that's quite good. And I identify with that. But then he gets so good at like, you know, just spear the fish with his little thing and everything after three years. And I know myself well enough to know that i would never get that competent so with each passing month and year it would feel like

more and more of an admonition of my own lack of prowess in dealing with the consequences of being on this island and like he's, and I'd be like, oh, I haven't even got a volleyball. That's rubbish. Like, I don't know how to make a raft and what have you. And he does get out at the end, right? And he gets back to his life and obviously things have changed and things are very difficult for him.

But you get a sense at the end of the film that he is going to be able to move on and everything whereas i think that i'd just die there and so i think that it would fill me with false hope that it was possible for me to escape i would attempt to craft a raft and i would die on that raft after having drank large quantities of seawater because I think it's OK because of the georgian water I've been guzzling up to that point. It's a very good argument for the case. Yeah. I don't know if you ever kind of catastrophize and you kind of think, what would I do if I was in this situation? And that bit of the film is quite exciting because you're like, yeah, he's got the right idea.

Yeah. Use that and turn that into an axe. And then, yeah, I guess I would get pretty good at spearing fish but the bit where that stops for me is when he what he manages to work out how long he's been there and the tides and where he is like yeah from the stars and stuff and i'm like what i have no idea what that is and i couldn't i don't even understand you know i know that we go around the sun and that's about it. I've lost that. I've got no idea. And I'm rubbish at swimming.

I wouldn't get on the raft. And I don't even have a fucking Oscar. Okay, so Cast Away is your film. Now, finally, the island is overrun by the biggest dick of all the animals. Which animal is it and why? I mean, I feel as though this is going to have been a very popular choice as well but it's going to be snakes snakes okay good yeah i mean it's sort of obvious why you would pick that but um like what are you particularly scared of snakes or yeah like it's but like i don't i don't consider it to be a phobia because

it makes sense. Yeah, exactly. It's like, I'm scared of sharks because they can eat and kill me. Yeah. I suppose a phobia would be being scared of sharks when you're on land, right? Yeah. That's irrational. And similarly, I'm not in this flat thinking to myself,

oh, God, what if there was a snake here uh and everything that's that's not what i mean but you know you ever find yourself in the like reptile room at a zoo or something i'm just like no not having it there's a reason that from the like bible times people were like these guys are bad news yeah when. When I was young, I used to really be fascinated by snakes. I always wanted one as a pet and I was never allowed. And so fascinating. But when I've seen them in the wild a couple of times, they're terrifying because you don't know where they're going. You don't know if it's like, you know, it doesn't want to bite me. But it's so hard to tell which direction they want to go in because they're like.

Yeah. You don't know what their agenda is, but you're sure it's not good yeah you know at least with a lion you're like there's a big lion that's dangerous with it's like you know snakes you're like ah the small ones are the deadliest or something you know like with like a lot of venomous animals you're like it doesn't matter the size is irrelevant so you have to be scared of all of them just in case and you know sometimes the really bright ones are dangerous sometimes the one with no color you know sometimes the brown ones are dangerous it's like let's just be scared of all of them yeah absolutely uh and you know we we know from filmic history quite how much trouble they can cause when they're on a plane yeah yeah so that's

that's that's clearly happened uh so it could you, I could find myself in the Samuel L. Jackson position of just being on the island with all of those little crawlies and I wouldn't be into it at all. Yeah. I suppose the ultimate nightmare scenario was if you were in a snakes on the plane scenario, then the plane crashed and the snakes got to the island so they were the same fucking snakes yeah like i've seen you before you fuck yeah and we and we've not developed a positive rapport yeah like we're not gonna you know with with cummings i guess there's

a thing that we we end up on the island and we're like look let's set our differences aside and work together and i don't think that that sort of that argument doesn't wash with a snake. Yeah, I think as well, you do end up finding scenarios where you're like, oh, fuck off, you bloody snake. No, I'm talking to Cummings. Okay, well, I think you've made a really good selection of people and things that would just be a crap environment to spend the rest of your life. So well done. You have nailed the format. Now, where can people see more of you at the minute? You've got a big tour coming up. Yes. So a new tour starts on the 1st of November at the Soho Theatre and then around the country until March 2022.

And the show is called Dress. And you've got a special that was recently recorded or recorded a little while ago. Yeah, it was. It was recorded on June the 6th. It was supposed to be recorded on March 31st, 2020 and was not owing to events you may recall from all of our lives. And that is currently streaming on HBO Max in the United States. So if you're in the United States, please watch it on that. And if you're not in the United States, like torrent it. I don't fucking know. Hey, you know, this podcast gets around,

so there will be people in America who can watch it. And it'll pop up here at some point, won't it? I'm sure. One hopes. Okay, well, thank you again for your time it's been brilliant and thank you for being on desert island dicks pleasure that was desert Island Dicks, and Desert Island Dicks is a Sync Clap production created by James Deacon,

produced and presented by Dan Benedictus. Our editor is Chris Attaway. Social media support comes from Jason Leitch and Chinsey Clinton, and a special mention to Grand Mamster Flash, our statistician, and John Deacon, the official Desert Island Dicks historian. Thank you for listening. And if you have listened to these episodes and you think, oh, I want to get stuck in with who I think is a dick

or what I think is a dick, then you can, because every week we also publish Compact Dicks. And that's our little sister podcast where you have your say. If you want to tell us who and what you hate it can be anything you want just tell us at dixpod.com contact or get in touch with us on instagram and twitter at dixpod that's all for now so thank you once again for listening remember to like and subscribe and leave us a review and we'll be back very very soon cheers