Desert Island Dicks - CAIMH MCDONNELL

Episode Date: January 17, 2023

Irish novelist and podcaster, Caimh McDonnell joins Dan to share who and what he'd hate to be stuck with on a desert island. Be sure to follow the podcast @dickspod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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. Hi, I'm Dan from Desert Island Dicks. This episode features Irish novelist C.K. Macdonald, also known as Queeve Macdonald, and his new book, Love Will Tear Us Apart, is out in a few weeks, around the start of February, I think around the 9th of February. It's called Love Will Tear Us Apart, and it's well worth checking out. We had a really nice chat, it was a pleasure to record with, and so I hope you enjoy his books as well. Now, long-term and regular listeners will notice

that last week we brought back our Compact Dicks, which is where me and James Deacon, who is the original host and the founder of Compact Dicks, go through your submissions about who and what you think would be awful to be stuck on an island with. So if you would like to submit your choices, it can be people, things, food, drink, any of the categories from the podcast, just go to dixpod.com slash contact. You can fill out the form there and we might be reading yours out in the next episode of Compact Dix.

You can be a part of it. You have your say. So if you've ever sat here listening going, God, I wish I could just pick this person. Well, now you can and you can be a part of it so that's dixpod.com slash contact or the other way to get in touch is of course on social media everyone's at it these days aren't they the kids on social media well we're at it too sometimes intermittently but you can find us at dixpod on instagram and twitter so you can also give us your suggestions there any submissions

will be very welcome as always if you want to leave us a review and a rating that's very much appreciated thank you to those of you who have done that really helps us out a lot and also it's just nice to read it's always nice to hear from you guys uh especially if you're enjoying it um i think that's it i'm just gonna stop now and let's get on with the show, shall we? This is Queeve Macdonald on Desert Island Dicks. 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 and writer of the Dublin trilogy Stranger Times and new book Love Will Tear Us Apart, it's Queeve Macdonald also known as CK Macdonald. How are you doing? Oh very well sir it's delightful to be here. Thank you very much for having me. Oh thank you for joining us yeah it's good to meet you. Now I was just thinking before we started recording obviously you know you're a writer you're fairly prolific you've got a lot of novels. We were about to talk about all the people and things that you hate. Do you ever write a character that you really hate or is people and things that you hate do you do you ever write a character that you really hate or is it you know being a writer do you always have a little

bit of affection from them somewhere somewhere um sort of the main characters you generally end up liking even guys like the people that you probably weren't going to start to want to like you end up liking in a lot of instances like weirdly the character i'm most kind of known for from my my dublin books is a guy called buddy mcgarry and i've done it before but it's he was in the first book he was supposed to be i wasn't even sure when i started writing him was he going to be like sort of goody baddy kind of what thing he was and um he literally just sort of came in and took over and he's now the main character. He just didn't leave. And he's, you know, I have a lot of affection for him when he was initially supposed to be a bit of an annoyance.

But yeah, I've had characters where I wrote a guy who's a tabloid journalist in the Stranger Times books that was supposed to be redeemable, irredeemable, awful characterization of a tabloid journalist. And then weirdly, I kind of got fascinated with him his life going wrong and then him trying to redeem himself which is one of the sort of subplots of the things so I end up probably liking him I mean I have there's a couple of times in my books I don't you very rarely do it I have done the odd character that's based on somebody I really dislike um and there was one guy in particular I remember I put a name in I won't say who it is but i put a name of a guy who was he was uh yeah he was arrested for interfering with mannequins i remember that being the thing he was interfering with mannequins and his name was based on somebody

who i really disliked it's close it's not close enough to people be able to get say exactly it's not it's not actionable by law but it was it was i was surprised nobody actually even guessed who it was but it was someone who had annoyed me in an area of my life shall we say quite uh quite publicly and i uh i used it as a way of getting back at him without anyone but me knowing fair enough okay good well let's see who does make it to the island today. Who's going to be the first person joining you? The first person, I think, is going to be a weirdly competitive person. And I say person, it's always a bloke. Because I don't mean like competitive, like when you're playing Monopoly or any sports things.

People who get competitive, there's like two kind of variations on it. One is if people know you're a comedian. You always sort of meet somebody he's always like the husband of a friend of the wife's or something like loads of comics have this thing where you can see them come in and they're trying to out funny you but like it's like you're trying to be funny in the situation you're just being an ordinary person but you can see them trying to commit it almost prove i'm funny i'm always funny in the office the guys think i'm hilarious and they're just working so hard to try and sort of get into the space.

And you're like, just relax. Just have a conversation. But yeah, that drives me mad. And then the other weirder form of competition is when somebody tries to out-Irish me. And it's always, it's generally like, you get a lot of expackings. So I did like the sort of

thailand and dubai and all these different things when you went as a stand-up and you meet these people they're always like giving you like their family history because like i wasn't born in ireland but i've got this this this this this and they literally go into ridiculous detail like oh i've i've followed i've seen the dubliners play 50 000 gigs or something like that and they're like and they'll give you this big cv and just sort of go right Well, I'm just Irish It's like trying to it's like somebody trying to prove they're taller than you by getting a box and standing and go look see I'm higher than just like just Nope I wasn't I wasn't questioning it

Somebody just goes into this big thing and you go I I wasn't doubting you. Okay, if you say you irish i believe you yeah and and i guess what's their end game like you get pull out a big rubber stamp and from the irish certification board and there you go there you go yeah it's official you just need the granny and you get the passport everybody gets one it just takes a while to process we're not going around and checking um although i do there's a great story about colin murphy the brilliant northern irish comedian and uh he was talking about when brexit happened and he was in the post office it was a big queue and he got to the end of it and the woman just handed him an irish passport for him and he was like well why are you giving said oh sorry it's just everybody's wanted one so we've just this is all we've been doing now for two weeks it's just

giving people irish passport applications um so yeah yeah i think i know i know these type of people like even if you're you know you're not a comedian you get people who sort of just trying out funny you know if you're being funny or whatever it's like a competent after a while you just think i'm happy to just walk off and let you be the funny one today you know it's like yeah it's just yeah it's just it's it's the trying to prove something thing that really sort of like they feel threatened like this is my thing and you're going okay it's like i'm not i don't work in your office you can still be the funny one there it's like relax it's yeah weird i suppose it as well because i think with comedy particularly you

know obviously it's it is a job that you go you know you prepare for and you go off and then you do it. But it's obviously you don't have to be switched on all the time. It's not like you're paying bills with your partner and kind of going, oh, here's some material in this. Look what I'm going to do with this. It's like sometimes you just have to be a normal person on hold to like the tax office or something. You know, it would be insane if you weren't. We do get that. I remember that was always the thing with comedians that when you're sitting in a dressing room and somebody starts telling you something

and there is that sort of moment where someone goes, are you trying out material on me? And it's like, yeah, it's like, don't. Because I think it's really sort of like it's bad etiquette. It's like, if you're going to ask somebody if they think there's something funny, then say it before. But don't start going into a bit

that you've been working on in the car and go, yeah, just don't do that just have a conversation i think you're right it is a fairly male trait i think i mean you know i'm happy to be proved wrong but just being with someone like this on a desert island would be absolutely exhausting you know you're just trying to get on with the job of surviving and someone's kind of like yeah just oh did you see what i did here Like doing a funny gag about a palm tree or something, and you just think, I don't need this right now. I mean, if you've literally done that thing where you've had the plane crash,

you know, one of the most hacked things you can talk about as a stand-up is the, why is there a whistle on the, it's like on the life jacket, why have they given us a light and a whistle? It's like something that was done in the 80s, and weirdly sort of bad comics keep doing stuff about it now where it's the most obvious thing but yeah they'd be doing that bit you'd be going yeah we've discussed this the whistle wasn't useful stop bringing it up i feel like this sort of trait in people is so ingrained that it's not going to switch off that quickly you know it's like any kind of competitive

uh nature you know whether it's sport or, it's so ingrained in a person that, yeah, even if it's just conversational competition, even if you've been there for a year, it's still going to just be this person niggling away at you. Yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong, competitive people can be great in a certain sense. Like, for example, if you can go, ooh, I bet the people in that other desert island

are going to get off before we are, and then they're up on, like, building rafts. You go, great, that's useful. With someone trying to prove that they, you know, just trying to cram in a sort of gag they've thought of is like, oh God, this isn't helping. Yeah, definitely. I can see that person winding you up very quickly indeed.

So it's a very strong first choice. Who's going to be joining them? Who's the next person? Now, this next thing, to be clear, is more a reflection on me than other people i say this because if you cut this up wrongly i could sound really really bad like literally just just i feel like i'm gonna have to repeat this every 15 seconds i'm talking about myself basically people with very strong accents now let me be very clear on this. I myself have a strong accent. But there's a weird thing that we've noticed.

Like, you know, I'm terrible at understanding certain accents. Like, really bad. And I'm not talking about people from just certain countries and stuff. There are people from Ireland I cannot understand. I am related to at least one of them. Where I genuinely can't understand what they're saying a lot of the time. I don't know what it is, how my ears work,

my brain doesn't process things well, but I've had like really embarrassing, like I used to live in Birmingham and I had a guy with a really strong black country accent and I couldn't understand a word. He'd come around to my house to fix something. And you know that way where you can only say sorry,

like you go, sorry, and then you can maybe go for sorry a second time. But after that, you just have to go at whatever you think they said. You can't keep querying it. And it's genuinely my nightmare just being trapped with somebody who I can't understand very well,

where they'd probably be talking about very important stuff, and I'm probably just going to have to guess. Because I'd hope I would get better at understanding somebody's accent the more I'm around them, but I can't guarantee that. I could literally spend a year in this horribly awkward situation going, oh, God, I'd rather just die than sit there for a whole year not understanding somebody because it's just so horribly awkward. Yeah, I'm thinking of someone, I can picture them very clearly, who I have this problem with, is a family friend and they speak, they don't have a

particularly strong accent, but they speak in such a fast, they speak really quickly, very garbled as well. I'll ask him three or four times and after a while you just go really quickly, very garbled as well. I'll ask him three or four times and after a while you just go, yeah, yeah, I guess so. And then you realise you've said yes to something just ridiculous, you know, that you'd never agree to ever. I remember my first ever job interview was for a local garage in Dublin. And the manager was from just Cork, which is just, you know, 100 miles down the road. And I could not understand him. And you know that way

where you can see on somebody's face that you've just, when they're asking, that's the worst thing. If somebody's asking you a question, that's the worst thing because you have to give an answer. So I just had to guess

what he might be. And I'd not been in many job interviews, so I didn't know what the questions were normally. So I could, you know that way where you can go, oh, I've've got nowhere close you can see by his facial expression he thinks i'm a moron because i've literally he's asked me about can i work weekends and i've said about how i'm dedicated to you know uh exclusivity or inclusivity in the workplace or

something bizarre and it's yeah it's that that horrible situation we're just going oh just please let this be over i know i've not got the job, but please let the interview end. Yeah, I mean, that sort of thing, being stuck with it. Because mercifully, these interactions are usually fairly brief. But when you're with someone for an extended period of time, it's just awful. And plus, if you're on an island, you've barely got any company. If one of those people, you just can't understand. It's really tricky. I mean, I even have it when i walk my son to school and i think there's something about him

being half the size of me and being on a busy road like i just i find it really hard to filter out his voice amongst the traffic and sometimes a lot of the time you know because he's five he's just telling me something that i just have to agree with something that he's watched on telly i'm like oh yeah do that okay right and then he's like no dad I've just said this I'm like oh sorry he's like well why did you say that and I can't just go I haven't been listening to you I never listened to you that I can't hear you properly but I mean if it's just someone who I mean at least the rest of the time I can understand him perfectly well so yeah you know being stuck with someone like that would be yeah it would just be awful

and it's just a waste of another human body there really yeah i just imagine every morning waking up going oh god he's gonna have another conversation with me um and then you just sort of go uh-huh yeah and like i mean you're on a desert island as well because there's only so many things you can talk about you would think but you go yeah you'd hope you'd eventually pick up the clues but there's no guarantee i mean at some point i think i just have to go look i understand none of what you're saying so um it's like it actually would be a lot easier if somebody was genuinely didn't speak the same language as you because then you would have to make an effort to understand each other but when they do you've got no excuse yeah you can't just sort of like develop

your own little pigeon english because doing sign language to someone who's also speaking english is like i think there's a bit of a faux par isn't it i would much prefer to be stuck on the desert ireland with the volleyball that tom hanks had that some bloke from the black country who came around to fix my washing machine back in 2006 who i cannot understand i just like picture an image of you know the person that you can't really understand sort of he's been off for a trek to the other side of the island he comes back excitedly like waving his arms telling you all about the big discovery and you think i don't know if it's a food source fresh water other people but i can't get into this i'm just going for a swim fuck it good luck to you he's going wave at. And you're going, you want to have chips? How are we going to have chips?

It's a fine choice, definitely. Very good. Okay. Who's going to be the final person then joining the three of you? What? The final person is someone who doesn't understand lying. Okay. Because lying, we have this thing where lying is bad

and in certain circumstances it is like telling some you know like telling your partner lies and stuff is bad but there is a gray area with the truth it's not all the truth or lies there's a gray area where you can improve on reality basically if you know how to tell a story well because like for example there's basically there are standard comedians i know who are quite famous even among other standard comedians for being ridiculous just telling you ludicrous stories now here's the thing i don't mind somebody telling me a ludicrous story as long as the story was enjoyable i have the problem with the people who just sort of kind

of like the competitive person you kind of get back to it where they just tell you a story where you go right well this is just long and boring and none of it's true i don't care if it's not true but just for the love of god make it interesting story do you know i just can't people and then people who sort of the other side of this people go is that really true is that exactly what happened and you go it doesn't matter if it's exactly what happened. I've given you the broad details of it, and you've got the overall truth of it. Like, I remember, frankly, I even say this. I had to give the eulogy at my own father's funeral,

and I told a very funny story about my father. And most people, yeah, I wouldn't appreciate it. It was a good story. It told you a fundamental truth about my father. Did all those things happen in exactly that order? And did he say things in exactly the way i said them possibly not but did it tell you who my father was absolutely and that is the bigger truth and people who can't understand that really annoy me because it's like and look people always say it's like oh do you do you sort of because like i remember my wife does sort of joke me when when i'm telling a story and like you're driving home after and you go where oh that story i like i like i like the new version i like you you've you've edited

and people sort of go is that because you're a stand-up comedian you go or a writer and you go no no i i am a stand-up comedian slash writer because that's what i do because that's the way my brain works. Where when I was six, when I was telling my dad a story, when I was like you walking the kid to school, I was telling him and then I'd tell my mother a version later on where I'd figured out how to improve it slightly. Because that's what you do.

Yeah, definitely. It's weird. There's sort of different ways of getting lying wrong. I mean, like you say, when someone's telling a boring story that isn't true you're like well i mean there is no excuse for this being boring because i mean you could add in literally anything you know within certain boundaries i find another thing that's weird is when people sort of think that being honest is is sort of the opposite people think being honest is is telling everyone everything you know like there was i think there was a Ricky Gervais film called The Invention of Lying, and I watched a bit of it on a plane, and I just sort of had to switch off

because I was like, this isn't just... I think it was set in a world where no one could lie, but what they hadn't realised is that not being able to lie doesn't mean you have to be brutally honest about everything, you know? Like, sort of just insulting everyone you see and things like that. So I think it's a weird... I think lying is such a useful human trait. everything you know like sort of just insulting everyone you see and things like that so i think it's a weird i think lying is such a useful human trait i mean if we couldn't lie we'd be awful parents a lot of the time you're like look at my picture it's shit again you know like why do you

bring this crap home to me you know so i think people who don't get it or like who strive to be absolutely truthful all the time, it's like you're missing the bigger picture. There's kindness in lying sometimes, you know? Yeah. People say that we evolved and monkeys didn't because of the old opposable thumbs and stuff. That may be a slight, again, wrong interpretation of evolution. I think the most important thing that it aided the evolution of mankind was undoubtedly lying

because otherwise we'd all be dead by now imagine if you develop speech and didn't understand lying you wouldn't get very far as a species because you'd end up killing each other pretty bloody quick um so i think lying is probably the most fundamentally important human skill definitely yeah i think i think it really helps us care i mean yeah it saves so much arguing. And it doesn't always mean, you know, and often it's to protect someone's feelings or make someone feel better. And lies can be truthful in a weird way.

Like they get like that story about my dad. It gave you the broad truth of my father in the best way possible. But did I change things around? Yeah. And technically, was there lying involved? Yeah. Good lying. But it's the same, you know, if you were sort of,

yeah, if you're doing a eulogy, there might be a funny story that if you told the absolute truth could have quite a nasty sting in the tail. And, you know, that's not a problem. Let's just leave it at the fun bit. It's like, well, actually, what happened afterwards is, yeah, I mean, it was awful, really. And like everything came crashing down. I cut my hand and like, you know, he went off, like hit that child.

And so, yeah, so I think, yeah, I think that's a very, very good observation, really. So, yeah. Now, 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 oh i mean the food there's two there's two in the running here uh but i think the one i'm gonna have to go for is the motorway services sandwich um and because the reason like again when i was a standard comedian um you'd be traveling back really late i've never been to a motorway service at 3 o'clock in the morning where you can often be literally

there's one sandwich there it costs a ludicrous amount of money and it is the most offensive piece of food you've ever seen in your life where you're looking at it it's just the despair of

standing there and you know you're looking at it going, oh, I don't even like cheese, but it's the only thing that's left. And it's either this or get back in the car and starve or go 40 miles up the road to see another cheese sandwich at the next service station. Because I've done that and you go, oh, this is just... But it is, it's that point that makes you think,

oh, it's what it represents, which which is have i made bad life choices because no one who's done well in life is spending three o'clock in the morning in a services station in oxford looking at one cheese sandwich it's going to cost them four pounds fifty to eight yeah it's true is there's such a sort of sad desperation in those sandwiches aren't they i mean and like and when it's sort of cold and wet as well and and i think maybe one of the things that's the most annoying is it's like it's such a basic food it's it should be so hard to to get it wrong you know like how how can you make something so simple and bland so offensive you know it's like i get it if you were sort of trying to make something really elaborate

and then package it so that I could eat it in my car. Like, yeah, okay, you're not going to get that right every time, but it's bread and filling, you know? It's literally the most basic thing in the world. It doesn't involve cooking. It just involves putting things on top of other things and then putting them together and it's amazing how dull they can make it and like m&s obviously we all know there's

a lovely sandwich but you do look at it you feel like just sort of buying some and then bringing it in next door and going look this isn't hard it's just bread and some stuff but look they've just put it they put a bit of tomato in let's have a go at that next time yeah I think sometimes because you hear people come over from other countries like America and they've got such a food culture there's so much choice or like Italy where you just go to a tiny little cafe

but they have the best pasta you've ever had and that sort of thing and people slag off in the UK all the food and stuff and you think I live in London and I walk around. I'm like, God, there's loads of great food everywhere. We've got this awful reputation.

And you go, that's why. Because I'm at a service station and that's what they think we eat. In France, there's a nice baguette with really nice ham in it and good cheese. And they're looking at it and being like, oh, fuck, there's only this left. Yeah, their bad is our best in that situation yeah yeah it's like i remember really when i used to work in london when i used to work in the city i was working with an australian guy and he called pret a manger and for literally months me and two other people every day our whole thing was who could get him to say

Pret-a-Main first in the day without him catching on. And you're like, where are you going for lunch? He's like, oh, I might go down to the pub. Oh, okay. I mean, there's other options. Where else would you, where were you yesterday? Like, you're just trying to get him to say it. Because we just, we didn't,

we had a whole thing where no one could tell him, but we really wanted, every time he said it, it was like, that was a good day. I actually worked with an Aussie once who was really impressed by our range of sandwiches as a British thing. I was like, yeah, but in Australia you can get like pies everywhere. And that's much better to have like a nice hot pie, even if it's one of the shit ones. He was like, oh, I don't know, man, these packet sandwiches you've got over here. I was like, God, I wish I was that easily impressed.

There are tribes in the Amazon who've never met other people who, like, if literally a sort of mo-o sandwich appeared, they'd be standing there looking at it going, ooh, that's terrible looking, what's that? Yeah, it's bizarre. Yeah, I think one of those things, they're so sad and lonely. And, I mean, to be honest, you know, you've been in a plane crash, so the sort of things they serve on sad and lonely and i mean to be honest you know you've been in a plane crash so the sort of things they serve on a plane often it's very much the same ballpark like very cold

wet sandwiches with this sort of you know the blandest tomato in the world so yeah well it's going to be a tough one to live off um or i mean maybe maybe you can use it to build build uh shelter with or something like that but i don't know either way i think it's going to be pretty damp and miserable what are you going to try and wash it down with what's your awful drink choice well this is going to be controversial uh but my awful drink choice is all coffee okay i i um but like literally i've never drank coffee because i find the smell so bad that um it just literally i know everyone else goes mad it was got their favorite coffee orders and this whole obviously you know shops are full of this stuff in every

corner i just can't stand the smell um like my wife occasionally drinks coffee sort of thing and it's literally um it's like you know i've got to give her a kiss and go oh did you pull away because oh geez coffee breath no no it's like when i use smoke because she was the same like i'm not kissing you if you want a cigarette i just i don't know what it is but the smell i'm the only person who seemingly cannot stand coffee but i really it drives me mental yeah i think i i mean i i'm sort of fairly on the fence about coffee i sometimes have it purely as a functional thing when i'm very tired and it's like tea isn't going to cut it today I don't have the time to drink 18 cups of tea so I'll have two coffees instead but even you know when I've had it like I can drink it but then afterwards I'm like oh this is why is it still

here like it's too much and you always have that memory I mean I just have that memory of like being in school and a teacher maybe like looking over your work or something and just having that or having to go up to their desk and just that coffee. Or you go past the staff room and just that the door would open. This sort of coffee fog would spill out into the corridor. So I think I can understand that there's some unpleasant memories there. I mean, it's not all freshly ground beans and stuff like that. I mean, do you do you find certain coffee smells less less offensive than others or is it just the whole the whole ballpark i think it's the whole i mean

to be honest i've never been sort of gone through them all exactly because it's like uh i've not it's like there's lots of different ways to be electrocuted but once i've been electrocuted once i was like i don't think i like electrocution um and i'm very much the same with coffee where the smell just instantly um turns me. I've nothing against caffeine. I just, you know, I love diet Pepsi all day long. But, yeah, for some reason, just the smell of coffee, that annoys me. And then also the sort of fetishization of it, where it's, you know, all these different variations of it and stuff. And people spending ludicrous amounts of money to get like a 12 pound

coffee and certainly i find that really sort of bizarre and confusing but it's i'll be honest it's mainly the smell you're right about the fetishization of it and like it's i think that sometimes it's especially galling when you're you might go into town you think i'll treat myself i'm tired i'll get a nice coffee from that posh looking place with a typewriter stuck on the wall so they must know what they're doing they've got leather aprons you know big mustaches and and then like you've paid three pounds something for a coffee and it's still shit and you just think you there should be like a sort of a thing where like if if you're gonna set up your shop like that you have to make there has to be someone tasting every single one before it goes out because like you know if it's a roadside cafe or whatever like fair enough i'll you know i'll run the gauntlet

but you pricks with the all the bicycles parked outside you know you're selling a dream here it's not and it's not accurate yeah very true but yeah i think a bad coffee and a bad sandwich is just oh it's i mean it works well as a meal together. And, you know, they're both awful things that sort of go together, but they're just horrendous and could be so much better as well. Yeah, fair enough. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad.

Reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lipsyn 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. Okay, Kwee, fortunately you won't be without entertainment on the island. The entertainment system continues to work but just your luck it only has two working settings one is your least favorite film of all time and the other

is your least favorite song what are they and why uh the song i'm sure it has a name but i don't know what it is what it is is it's the weight music at my gp's office uh when you're ringing because you don't nowadays you've got to ring up and like sort of pile through the queue and he just goes and it's one of these things where I think it's technically you could possibly call it jazz and it's kind of sort of initially it's quite peppy but when you've just it sort of loops and then it just sort of comes in every 30 seconds you are position 12 in the queue and then you're sitting there and then and especially when uh for a couple of weeks their phone system went haywire

so you literally went you are 12 in the queue you are three in the queue you are six in the queue and you go what what i was three how did how did you where did those three people and it's one of these things like because i was i played in bands i was a drummer and stuff and you're gonna think nobody would ever write that song because when you're trying to write a song most time you're trying to write something great or this is going to be a brilliant and you think that's something that somebody wrote went yeah that'll work for home music like that was its whole that's that's inoffensive enough that it'll just yeah but it's just the nightmare is that song just looping over and over again because it just emphasizes that you're going nowhere yeah yeah and i find with hold music even if it's even if it starts off inoffensive it just it just burrows into you

so even like the sometimes it's awful and crackly and like loads of interference and it's a bad song or it's too loud you know and you can't hold the phone to your ear but you can't put it too far away because you're gonna miss it because you've been there for an hour even if it's nice and sort of relaxing and gentle you're gonna hate it by the end you know and then it's usually a company that you'll have you know like the doctors you will have to call them again one day and then and then it hits you and you're like oh god i forgot about this like the fucking purgatory of it yeah as soon as you hear the opening chord you go oh lord here we are again

um i suppose the thing is with home music though you don't want to use songs you like either because you end up hating them so it all means is you end up like i remember virgin had like was it virgin it sounds like it'd be virgin where they had like a choice where you could put in two for this type of music or three for this type of music and you think initially it's a great idea but then you realize you just end up hating the songs that you liked by the end of it because they're still answering the phone after 45 minutes yeah yeah because it's i mean because i was thinking oh wouldn't it be great to put on like stand-up comedy but then you couldn't because it's too broad an audience you know it's like everybody in your neighborhood who's calling that doctor isn't gonna like the same stuff and then you know you're only gonna hear a limited bit then you're hearing the same joke delivered

over and over again and it might be someone you hate and so there's there's really no way of winning is there I mean it's just you're doomed I spent last year I moved house and so obviously that comes with a lot of calling up utilities companies and being on hold and all that and simultaneously my mum was in and out of hospital a lot and so I was always calling her doctors and the hospital and I just had weeks of my life on hold and then you forget who you were calling you're like oh it's this one again oh yeah okay and for maybe 30 seconds it's okay again and like i didn't have to call anyone for ages and i sort of spoke to her doctor again and just hearing that whole music i like i started

like having palpitations because it took me back to like that period of my life and i was like oh my god it's uh you can see how like music is used for torture quite effectively oh yeah yeah yeah i mean metallic is always a popular choice when they're doing it on various things i know they're always blasting that through when they have people like guantanamo bay and stuff i maintain the jazzy weight music for my doctors would get them to crack way quicker than yeah definitely definitely okay and what would your uh what would your film choice be uh my film choice would be sucker punch uh which which is, is it Zack Snyder? Isn't that his name? The guy who did the, yeah, the Snyder cut and all that sort of stuff.

Because the reason I hate it so much is, I remember it was lovely sunny weather. Myself and the wife were having a great day out. And I said, oh, let's go to the cinema. We'd been out and we'd had a lovely meal and stuff. And we ended up going to the IMAX. And it was described, you looked it up and it said, oh, visually stunning and all this sort of thing. Imagine a 14-year-old boy was giving a limitless budget

and wrote the film that he wanted to see. It is literally scantily clad women firing machine guns for two hours and 17 minutes or something like that. It was that, weirdly, it has a brilliant opening scene. Superb piece of cinema. for literally the first five minutes going oh this is going to be good after about 25 minutes where we're supposed to be in these women's imagination where inexplicably these young women were imagining themselves dressed as school girls like sexy school girl outfits what you go made no sense but it was that bad i always

remember turned my wife who i'd picked it and after half an hour ago do you want to go and she went no we're gonna stay here and watch the whole thing and it was basically as a punishment for me making her go to it in the imax as well it's like massive it's like watching it too big it's just so big watching something so awful um and it was just i remember somebody left after 10 minutes later and i've never been more jealous of any human being in my life than the person just went i'm not wasting the rest of my life on this thing i'm walking out and i was going oh i'd love to be able to do that i had to sit through the whole thing oh no i mean it's very liberating walking out of a cinema even though it's i mean it's obviously really annoying because you've paid however much you've had to pay to get

in and you wanted to watch a film but that feeling of like wait a moment i can just do anything i like you know that i mean i wish we could sort of employ that mindset more in life you know it's just yeah oh wait this is shit i don't enjoy this i'm leaving you know but well well that's the danger of i've been like self-employed now for god uh yeah 20 years and to the point where my wife now works for our publishing company she just works for us basically so we're both self-employed but back when she was in a proper job she'd come home and tell me stuff about oh yeah this was crap and I was like you should just leave and eventually she went

stop telling me to leave okay just shut up and listen to the story and say that's terrible but actually to go back to the cinema thing you know about getting them to leave

I always remember myself and my friend comedian Gary Delaney who I lived with for years we went to our local cinema in Coventry years ago do you remember The Village the M. Night Shyamalan film yeah it's a good film I like but there's a weird thing who I lived with for years. We went to our local cinema in Coventry years ago. Do you remember The Village,

the M. Night Shyamalan film? Yeah. It's a good film. I like, but there's a weird thing. We had to see it in the cinema and this blind character comes on. There's the girl that is blind and the screen went all blurry and we were like,

literally because the timing, you went, oh, this is how she sees the world. And we're literally there for 10 minutes watching it. But the whole thing is blurry and you're kind of going, in your head you're going, this doesn't watching it. But the whole thing is blurry. And you're kind of going, in your head you're going,

this doesn't seem right. And eventually, there's like literally, there's only about 10 people in the whole cinema. And it's like usually like twos and twos and twos. And at one point, literally after about 10 minutes, a guy near the front just stood up and went, yeah, this thing's fucked. And the whole room went, yes.

The weirdest reaction where nobody wanted to be the one. But as soon as he said it, we went, he's right's not it's not of course it's not supposed to be blurry you can't make an entire film that's blurry and then we all we all left and they're like yeah they gave us like a thing to go but it was that weird thing where you're kind of going i'm 95 sure this is wrong but i don't want to look like an idiot and then that guy did it we're all going he's a hero we should all be more like that man yeah it's weird isn't it because you think if i stand up and and say it and i've called it wrong and i'll look like an idiot but i'm gonna look like an idiot for sitting through the blurry film for a long time yeah yeah i mean having to sit through a film that you hated i mean obviously you know that's the premise of the island you're gonna sit there and watch a film but i mean one

that's so bad and devoid of any anything at all is going to be particularly painful particularly if it's quite long as you said as well yeah that's the thing when you go you've nothing happens in this except the same stuff over and over again in that film where it's just scantily clad women firing machine guns and you think at least make it an hour and a half if you realize because at some point most people you'd hope would realize they're making a bad film at least have the decency to go right we'll make this 90 95 minutes knock it on the head it's it's a film then but let's not make drag this out for anybody but zach snyder's like no this is my vision and i think he just had a success with superman or something so

they obviously just gave him as much money as he wanted to do whatever he wanted and that was the dangerous result it's funny isn't it because films seem to go through so many levels of testing and rewrites and stuff you know before they're released into the world and it's like it's weird that such bad films can still even happen given like the amount of investment and people that have to sign it off you know yeah it's i mean i can only assume the test groups were all 14 year old boys because that was that was all all it was

basically was like because you think you're literally watching the film going like you know they have that what's the rule about two women having a conversation

where they can't be discussing a man all that kind of thing you know that rule which is a good test of how they but you look at this and go have you met a woman

I mean you've clearly seen them in certain videos but have you actually this and go have you met a woman I mean you've clearly seen them in certain videos but have you actually met and had a conversation with a female human up until this point in your life that you wrote women like this and nobody went ah hang on let's

you know try and there was a little bit of nuance here I mean God love the actresses some good actresses in it you think they must have realised at some point when they started turning up the costume and stuff going why are we all dressed like strippers this doesn't make any sense but yeah oh dreadful oh fair enough so you've got sucker punch and the hold music from your local doctor's surgery to to keep you entertained on the island okay all right now finally the island is overrun by the biggest dick of all the animals which animal is it and why the worrying thing with this is this is probably

the truth in anti-desert ireland but uh mine is by a very long distance rats um because i am i mean i would say phobia because it's actually doesn't even clarify as a phobia really because you're supposed to be scared of rats i mean they carry disease they're they're they're biting little stuff but i remember describing to somebody how much i've basically when i grew up i grew up beside a canal and my mother um to keep me away from the canal because obviously young kids who's worried about going up falling in the canals or something on the news or something probably um so she emphasized that there was rats near the canal um and she may have over egged it slightly because literally now as a grown man i have this thing where i remember explaining to somebody when i was about when they were talking about someone said to me once oh yeah well everyone no one likes rats i was like yeah yeah

but when i'm on stage and a member of the audience moves their foot there's like 10 percent of my brain that's even when i'm in the middle of a stand-up thing going, rat. Like any little movement, I think rat. And it literally sort of like, it just sort of jumps out everywhere and you go, rat, rat. I think little movements are rats. My brain is always processing because I'm absolutely terrified of them.

And the weirdest thing that ever had happened to me on stage was I was doing an Edinburgh show where this was a part of it I was talking about my fear of rats it was the end of the show it was somewhere down in the west country and I kid you not

I had a newspaper headline from a tabloid about giant rats invading because I saw this in a thing and I took it and bizarrely

it was giant rats from Scotland invading England and I got the it invading England and I got the you it was the star and I got the our England English version of it which was that and I thought what about this and we were on our way to Scotland myself and Delaney were doing a tour show and I got the other version and it's amazing to see they did two different verses of the story because

because the Scottish audience it was all you know not mentioning this thing but it was literally the English version was giant rats Scottish rats invading England but I was doing this with two big was giant rats, Scottish rats invading England. But I was doing this with two big A2 poster size cutouts showing the two things and a giant rat ran into the room and literally ran by me and started running through the audience.

And these are a lot of people from Southern countries, so some of them are freaked out, most weren't that bothered. But to this day, I think most of that room are convinced that i had a rat that i released for the finale of my edinburgh show i released the rat into the

audience because it was such inexplicably weird timing and i just basically throw it's a weird thing where normally i'd freeze near a rat but because i was on stage my instincts were still there so i sort of kept going and then i finished the show and then i went outside and sort of freaked out right oh man that's bizarre because yeah that's the thing like they get far bigger than they're supposed to i mean i've i've got no problem with like rats if i see someone has a pet rat or something no problem with that but like we are like you said sort of programmed to be sort of flinch a little bit you know if you see him on the street or something sometimes you know you're on the underground you see a little mouse or a rat or something and i can sort of deal with that but

sometimes you're like well that can't be a rat but it can't be a rabbit but it's the size of a rabbit but it doesn't look like one but that means there's a rat the size of a oh my god it's a rat the size of a rabbit it's like it's a weird thing as soon as you tell people that you're terrified of rats they all go i have a good story for you it's like no don't want to hear a story about your rat so we can have nightmares like i can always remember a guy i knew in dublin when i was working in dublin and i told i remember telling him about yeah my fear of rats and he went oh yeah there's the uh the dump near where i used to live uh went on on fire and they had the guys send it into the big suits to to to to you know get rid of the fire and the rats were freaking out and leaping up at their throats and

I was like what why would you tell me that story I've explained I'm terrified of a rat it's just running away from me why would you tell me about these rats leaping at people's throats um that's another career i have to tick off the list now like dump fire fire service yeah it's like to be honest yeah well i should in hindsight i should probably put in the people i should put people who want to tell me their rat stories i should have put that in as a thing but yeah it's and it's um and you know i think as you do come across I lived in an apartment building where

bizarrely when it got cold there was a very nice apartment building they managed to come up and there was like it was where the skybox had been put in or something

so there was a hole in the wall that the last people that left where it was just cable coming through and this giant rat literally I was sitting there my own one night just popped in

and I went and I actually told like the building concierge and he was like yeah that's bullshit And this giant rat, literally, I was sitting there on my own one night, just popped in. And I went, and I actually told the building concierge. And he was like, yeah, that's bullshit. That can't be true. Clearly, he didn't believe me. And then I was freaking out because my wife was away. And I literally was like, couldn't sleep for two days because the giant rat had been in the apartment. And then we got all these traps and stuff.

And we got loads of them and put them around. And we were going to gonna try you know you can get these sort of non-fatal traps and then someone actually told me from the rspc or some what did said but those things end up being in a lot of ways worse because they end up the the animal could be there for things and horrible stuff so we end up we had this thing where god love one of these traps caught this thing and i was too terrified to go look and my wife was like, she went and dealt with it. God love her. She put it in a bag

and like brought it downstairs. And only years later, I went, well, I said it was a massive rat. And she went, no, it wasn't too bad.

It wasn't. And then we moved house literally the week after I went. Do you remember that rat? She said, yeah, it was actually enormous. It was literally bigger.

I couldn't believe the size of the thing i literally went down and showed it to the concierge and he freaked out and they called in and exterminated to figure out what because it was a nice building how it had happened it was because a building worked somewhere but yeah it was like she didn't want to freak me out but you went yeah it was a monster it was literally a monster unsympathetic concierge just thinks you're lying you're like what would be weirder a rat coming to this building or me making up this story using my own time to come downstairs and tell you about it i know i'm a writer but i've got other outlet i don't need to do this with you i do genuinely think that is a thing though especially like a standard comedian even more so than a writer

people going oh here we go he's working on some kind of routine okay there's a giant rat yeah go on all right let's see where this goes and it's like no there was there was a giant rat in my house and uh and it freaks me out whereas now i've got two dogs and one of the big things with the dogs i'm like going uh because you still we live near a stream um the back of the thing so you will get occasionally rats running down there and the two dogs go mental if they hear these and i'm like i'm genuinely so reassured because like you know these two do nothing for me in any other part of my life i spend a fortune on feeding them and and spoil them rotten but when they do freak out when i rat i'm like good this is what you're here for at least do this one thing for me you do nothing else to help me but at least this

you will do for me yeah yeah fair enough yeah i think i think an island overrun by rats you know phobia or not would be horrendous so uh i think it's a fitting end to this island of doom that you have so ably created today so uh thank you very much um now queef as i've alluded to at the beginning you know you're very prolific you've got lots of books coming out um or you've written lots of books rather you've got another one coming out quite soon as well yes uh love will tear us apart is out on february the 9th which is the third book in the strange time series um which is my sort of it's a paranormal one set in manchester in a newspaper um that sort of reports the weird and wonderful and the whole

life it's like the 40 in times if you know that uh you strike me as the kind of man who might read the 14 times there's a certain look but uh yeah there's um so i've always been obsessed with those weird news stories um which is why i know quite so many weird rat stories because there's always one in every couple of episodes um So yeah, I was always fascinated with that and then I decided to write something based in a newspaper and that's The Stranger Times which it's kind of paranormal

but it's a lot of fun. I'm really, I love writing it. Nice one. Brilliant. Well, we'll check that out and yeah,

thank you so much for coming on Desert Island Dix today. It's been a pleasure. It's been, I would say it's a pleasure but let's be honest, it's been a series of terrible things

but in a nice way well i hope the rest of your day is free of all these things and you know we'll finish recording and that'll be the end of it i hope but if not do get in touch and um i'll just apologize more formally excellent you'll be hearing from my therapist so there you go that was queef mcdonald there on desert island dicks i hope you enjoyed it now um what am i what am i going to say here well Well, I've mentioned Compact Dicks at the start. I've mentioned leaving us a rating and a review. I think that's pretty much it. I mean, as always, DicksPod has been a SinkClap production.

It was produced and dreamt up in the first place by James Deacon. It was also produced and presented by me, Dan Benedictus. A special shout-out, as always, to our historian, our sommelier, our archivist, John Deacon. He probably knows our back catalogue better than the rest of us. And he always gives us recommendations when he pops up on Compact Dicks as well. But yeah, he's well worth listening to

because, as I say, he knows the subject inside out. So if you're a recent listener or you've just discovered the podcast, then yeah yeah go through all the episodes they're everywhere uh they're all on spotify and everywhere else you'd imagine that you can find podcasts lots of comedians we've got a couple of chefs on there we've got critics we've got writers there's even a couple of politicians in there so you know just go and have a little delve and pull out a dick and i'm sure you will enjoy it okay that's it for now uh

we'll be back soon with a compact dicks and then next week with a full desert island dicks as well thank you so much for listening bye