Desert Island Dicks - STUART HERITAGE

Episode Date: May 11, 2020

Guardian journalist and author Stuart Heritage 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 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

At Sierra, discover joyous deals on great gifts for everyone on your list. Like cozy slippers, ski gear, fishing poles, bikes, large kayaks, even larger canoes. Which might lead to another discovery. Robbing gifts is the only sport you need to stay fit this season. Tis the season to discover great gifts at unexpectedly low prices. Sierra, let's get moving. 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. Hi, I'm Dan from Desert Island Dicks. Our guest this episode is journalist and writer Stuart Heritage, and it was recorded about seven or eight weeks ago at the very start of lockdown. I have no idea why we waited that long to get it out and I only mention it because you can tell we're still talking about the whole thing like it's a fairly recent occurrence, which it was at the time. Anyway, Stuart is great so I hope you enjoy this and please do like and subscribe or leave us a review if you can because it really

helps us out. And now here's Desert Island Dicks with Stuart Heritage. 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 you. And here to share their desert island dicks with us today is writer and journalist Stuart Heritage. Hello. Hello. Hello. How are you?

I'm very well. How are you doing? I'm good. We're doing this over Zoom because of the way things are now. Yeah, it's... It's weird. It is strange, isn't it? I've been doing a few of these and i feel like there's just sort of strangers across the world now just seeing into my bedroom isn't it it feels really i feel very vulnerable having people know what's behind me for some reason

i don't like it yeah i like meeting in neutral places yeah and i find that um there'll be times i'm on a sort of a work meeting or something like that and uh it just i feel like my safety catches off a little bit because i'm in my own house and i end up saying things that i really shouldn't be saying at work because i'm in my own environment it gives me that sort of freedom i think the thing i can't get my head around at the moment is when you see like the news and the news readers are at their own home just telling the news from like their living room it's i don't like that very much there's no authority i know it would be weird if you're a newsreader and

suddenly you're like oh god i have to tidy up and how do i make my house look newsworthy yeah if you've got like shit books behind you or something yeah or you could be quite a conservative newsreader but have quite outlandish taste in interior design or something we're all going to learn a lot about each other over the next few weeks i'm sure absolutely stewart how did you find the process of uh picking your your dicks for the island today very easy like too easy probably it was it was more of a case of whittling down right than than having to think good there was every every slot had maybe four or five choices battling it out so hopefully this is like the the creme de la dick and um i feel that well we're all sort of in confinement and we're

sort of testing each other's patience i mean this is probably quite a cathartic exercise for some people to sort of just have a rant for a little while and as well there's kind of there's a safety to it as well because no one's i'm not going to bump into any oh actually no all right i might bump into some of them but like for the most part no there's always a chance i'm terrified anytime i go anywhere because i'm kind of my job is i'm nasty about people on television and i'm terrified anytime i go out i'm going to bump into one of them and they're going to have something memorized i've written i suppose it depends on the shows doesn't it i think with like with I mean if it's sort of Love Island you can guarantee they're probably not reading The Guardian or something so that's probably a bit

of a safety valve yeah no I don't think anyone's been quoted me anyone that it's something I've written about them yet I hope it never happens it's it's I can't I wouldn't be able to cope with it at all okay well Stuart who's going to be your first choice for the island? My first choice? I think this is a very solid choice. It's Alan Sugar. Nice. Yes.

Okay. Is he Lord now? Yeah. I refuse to call him Lord Sugar. Lord Sugar is a status. I don't think anyone, if you are a Lord, a very telling thing that you can do is just say no you can call me alan that's fine if you go around making people call you lord yeah like

you're fucking darth vader or something don't that's horrible he's even changed his twitter name to it it's lord underscore sugar for fuck's sake lord shouldn't be on twitter it should be a level playing field if you're on twitter you don't get to use lord no you should be you should literally have a live in a castle everything by candlelight move around on a horse if you're gonna if you want to call yourself a lord you have to like be an old school feudal lord yeah i agree i think and also something about his surname being sugar is lord sugar sounds a bit like it's almost like the chief sugar daddy or something isn't it yeah it's it's like he's the lord of a thing

yeah yeah like Lord Business in the Lego movies he's lord of all like everything that's bad for your teeth he's the lord of that yeah Lord Sweetie and what is it in particular then uh that really grinds your gears about well i mean primarily it's his participation in the apprentice which is the the very very worst television program of all time yeah i hate the apprentice

i hate the apprentice so much i've written it was pointed out to me uh uh recently that uh for the last five or six years i've write exactly the same piece which is why is the apprentice still on it should just die and it's exactly pretty much i'm sure lots of it's word for word i just hate the hate the apprentice um and you know it's uh he's by far not the worst person it has produced because of donald trump and katie hopkins and people like that but he is nevertheless just to just to continue being a part of a program that promotes the worst excesses of sort of humanity it drove me mad yeah because there's very much that sort of underlying thing of to to be good at business you have to have no morals and be a real dick like that's yeah that's what it is in business you've to have no morals and be a real dick like that's

yeah that's what it is in business you've got to do this or you know my way or the highway there's no there's never a sense of like negotiation or compromise which i'm sure is quite a big part of business at times yeah and just being no i'm sure if you're that much of a dick the whole time they're just people around you won't want to work with you yeah but he's that i remember watching one early on uh and it was someone had messed up and they're in the boardroom and it was basically it was the guy who was chucked out was who whoever like shat on the other person the least yeah and it was it was like you can't you can't ever ever ever admit to a fault that you've done because that's that's suicide on the apprentice you can't say no all right hands up i that was a mistake but you know we've learned from it and yeah as soon as

you say i accidentally charged three pence more for this whatever upcycle bullshit they've made me sell at shoreditch yeah oh there was none of none of the sorry i'm sorry none of the tasks have anything to do with anything like you can't go and sell sweets at a market and then become you know steve jobs or something and you towards the end of a day if you if you haven't sold enough sweets you don't go around running to all the shops near you trying to sell as many sweets as you can for 5p just to get them off your that isn't how business works and as soon as you start doing the maths on the apprentice like you've got a team of at the beginning eight people all i'm gonna stick with this selling sweets thing selling sweets at a market to just dumb tourists and they might say you know you've made 300 pounds

over the course of a day split that between eight people that's incredibly shit that's just such shit business i did worse than that i did work experience i was more successful than that when i was at school i get the feeling though that all these kind of trivial things are just so that alan gets a chance to sort of say, well, that's how I started, selling sweets on the street, because I'm Lord Sweetie Pie. And, you know, just you have... Like a wheelbarrow full of tat that I just sold to idiots.

Yeah, you just have to, like, shoehorn in something demeaning for the contestants to do so Alan can give a point about how he's a self-made man. Yeah. And the beginning of The App the apprentice i hate as well when like they his assistant phones him off four o'clock in the morning and they've said like you've got four seconds to get to the outer hebrides and they get there and they say he like he turns up on a video he doesn't even get there himself and he says oh today's challenge you're in the outer hebrides which is near some sea today you've

got to sell a cat because that begins with a letter C. It's like 3-2-1. Do you remember 3-2-1? Yeah. It was just a very cryptic game. It reminds me of that. So I don't like that. And also, like you said, his Twitter feed has just destroyed

any sort of credibility that he's got as a human being. He's just an angry man who tells like he's stupid actually there was he tweeted like three days ago someone uh did a video of lions in the street and and said look they're in this city they're putting lions in the street to keep people indoors and he tweeted is this a wind a wind-up? Like, how did you sell things, you hedgehog-looking idiot? Yeah, it's one of those things like Donald Trump as well, isn't it? Like, you don't seem that bright, and you haven't made that much money

versus, you know, how much you potentially could have. But maybe it's just the personality around you is such that people are willing to go along with you for a while or something like that like you've been allowed to become this awful person just because you're a name now and that's it yeah yeah there was a great story um i read before the very first series of the apprentice which was that he on his wedding anniversary he wrote a card to his wife and on it he'd write like best regards alan sugar i can absolutely believe that yeah it's a mark of his closeness that he actually dropped the lord for his wife but still regards alan sugar only five people get to call me alan these days

one of them's pierce morgan yeah he does seem awful and and to be on a desert island with him as well I mean he wouldn't get stuck in but he'd just he'd just rate all your efforts throughout the day he'd just see it as a new level of the apprentice he'd only be able to see you in terms of the apprentice game show yeah which I'm fine with because I mean I could I could whatever collect coconuts and sell them to crabs i don't really is that is that how it would work you're you're the owner of this island is that yeah i mean i think you've got to make it your own really i mean uh i just think you know you're all scrabbling to survive and he's just going to be sitting there you know he's too old to actually

contribute but that's not going to stop him from judging your efforts is it i think he'd be sitting in his i believe he wears a lot of lycra in his downtime i think he's a keen cyclist who just lives in florida and wears lycra yeah yeah i always remember at the beginning of the apprentice he used to say something like i don't want any steady eddies or cautious carols or something like that like cautious cautious carols isn't isn't a phrase you know you can't just like alliterate and hope that like everyone you fool the british public into thinking that's a real sentence yeah i used to really enjoy the beginning there was that i think it might be the first one which like i don't like bullshitters i don't like and he's just listed like traits of of himself i think. I think that if he was confronted with himself

in the boardroom of The Apprentice, his brain would explode and he'd die. Yeah, he wouldn't do well, would he? He's very much, he has to be the only one of him in a room and then it's okay. But I mean, yeah, it's just sort of awful alpha male kind of syndrome, isn't it? Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's what it is. It's just that whole kind of kill isn't it yeah yeah i think that's that's what it is it's it's just it's that whole kind of uh kill or be killed ethos yeah which is like no everyone could just be nice and have a bit of everything and be very happy you don't have to so oh and do you remember that thing that he he fucking sold on the advent of emails the emailerer phone. Oh, that sort of Amstrad. Was it Amstrad or a thing with a screen on it, a phone with a screen? Yeah, it was a tiny, tiny screen, smaller than a phone, and it had a little tiny keyboard.

And his whole business model was you can send emails for 20p a go. He really, yeah, I think that's one of the stupidest machines ever made but that's that's the thing about alan sugar when you list his successes it's things like amstrad which doesn't exist anymore as far as i know something to do with spurs football club like i don't know how he got so rich i bet he wasn't that rich but he was the only person who agreed to to go on the apprentice yeah and now he's made a lot more money to to go on the apprentice yeah and now he's made a lot more money from just being on the apprentice yeah there is no way on earth he was the first person on the list i bet they tried branson first yeah i bet they tried lots and lots of people and

they in the end they were like oh the spurs guy yeah he's a nasty curmudgeonly arsehole he'll be good on this and then because he's associated with business then the government gives him a peerage yeah that's when it all went wrong i think well i think was he alan sugar at the beginning and then he got knighted and he made everyone call him sir alan and now it's lord sugar possibly i wonder what's next what's higher than lord king i don't know can they make king sugar is that how we're going to... King Alan. It will lock down forever and monarchy and reality TV just merges until we just sit in our houses forever bowing down to King Alan.

One of the good things about the lockdown is they cannot make The Apprentice. Unless they're like, he's doing like we are now on Zoom and he's like, go on, make an origami thing out of some toilet roll, do it. And then he... Yeah, there's no way of doing it yeah it becomes very craft based that's nice i think the bbc thinks that the apprentice is a liability as well because um they keep sort of shoving it

around the schedules anytime there's an election they can't because he's a peer that's technically that counts as sort of political um uh um i can't think of the word but it's it's it's there's a sort of a slight bias to it right so they can't they have to shove it around and i don't and i don't think anyone's excited about it and no one would miss him if he was gone okay well i think you made a very good case for uh alan sugar going on the island stewart who's going to be your second choice? My second choice isn't a person, but nevertheless should be brought into the world of the tangible and then destroyed. It's Bing.

Bing Bunny. Oh, I'm so glad you picked this guy. I hate Bing so much. So for listeners who don't have young... You have a three-year-old, right? I've got a three-year-old, yeah. Try and not let him watch Bing as much as possible. Stuart, for those listeners who don't have toddlers in the house,

explain Bing. Bing is a CBeebies show about a rabbit. And he's just a bad, bad person. He breaks things, he steals things, he kills things. He actually murdered a butterfly in one of the episodes and then he kind of he gets this weird victim complex about it and his helper who's this sort of stuffed possibly alien i'm not sure has to sort of talk him down from the ledge every single episode it's such a weird i don't i don't know what the point of it is but it's very successful and nobody i know enjoys it no it's it's the scourge of parents everywhere isn't it

because i i suppose what they set out to do is try and kind of have everyday emotional situations for toddlers where you know you accidentally break something or you're worried about getting into trouble or you yeah poo in your pants or something and then the adult kind of says don't worry we'll fix it it's okay but he doesn't really learn for sometimes he will just break something and they go well that's all right and sometimes it's not all right yeah yeah i think children and i don't want to sound like a very terrible parent but children should be aware of the consequences of their actions they can't just have a like a parental figure come in and be like oh it's fine yeah mistakes happen sometimes you can be like no you killed a butterfly yeah look at it that will never come back to life that will never come back to life that butterfly has a family and that family will go on struggle through

the rest of its life miserable and they won't even know what happened to it. They're butterflies, for God's sake. It'll just be like a weird absence that they'll never be able to reconcile. And you did that, Bing. You did that. Yeah, I would love to see Bing get a proper dressing down and really be faced with the mortality of a crushed butterfly. He has a very sort of whiny voice as well doesn't

he even when he sounds happy it sounds like he's complaining he's like i went to the park today and i got a balloon what's wrong with you well i hate him so much i hate him so much it's a there's a colleague of mine um and we were talking about kids' shows that we like, and he was like, oh, yeah, Bing, love it. And I've never been able to let that go in my head. I have judged him silently for the last couple of years. Ever since he said Bing, I was just like, are you high? What the hell is wrong with you?

That's someone who doesn't spend time with their children and will suddenly drift through a room while Bing's on and and be like that looks like a colorful television program i'll just say bing that's an easy word that i can remember yeah your your friend is not a participant in his children's life i guarantee it there are so many better shows to watch and it's uh i think i think i think because i i know people who have tried, they don't like it, but they've tried to defend it to me. And they say that, is it Flop? Yeah. Yeah, that's like the weird sack thing that looks after him.

Yeah, Flop is the parental sack. He's just a sack. Voiced by Mark Rylance, the greatest actor. It's like having Daniel Day-Lewis play Bing's friend. It doesn't make any sense. And he'll just come in and be like, oh, it's okay. And the people who've defended it to me have said that he is like the gold standard of gentle parenting. Right.

There's a parental technique called gentle parenting where nothing's ever a problem and everything, you know, it's fine. Things happen. We can get over it um but no he i would like one episode for when bing does something when he breaks something or kills something or hurts one of his friends or whatever he does this fucking monster just for the camera to zoom inside of flop's eye and just to see the life he had before he had to look after bing where he was happy he had friends and he could do things because he it's it's a bit like he has ptsd he just he he shows no emotion he's just shut down yeah and he's just like oh another thing another

thing i have to deal with thanks bit or an episode where bing goes to bed and flop goes and just shoots up a load of heroin or something because there must be there must be something that keeps him he's he's dead inside i like to think he didn't used to be an old sack he did actually used to just be a normal human being but sort of looking after being for so long he's becomes of desiccated and just now looks like a bag with a belt around it yeah it's just one day he woke up and looked at his hand and it was a bit textured and he thought oh that's weird and then just gradually all his human functions were replaced which is a bit like being a parent anyway yeah at first i was concerned and i thought oh just go with it i don't want to be a sort of uh you know sound like

a kind of grammar nazi but he doesn't even speak properly so he's supposed to be an educational program but he's always his past tenses are all over the place he's always like yeah i broke it and all that sort of thing you think well if you're gonna try and teach kids at least have the language you know uniform so that they can actually learn rather than going i broke it and i did a cry and i don't know he just it's all wrong yeah i broke the butterfly or i deaded it or something he doesn't say killed because that would be two on the nose yeah and then at the end he has to he has to perform a summary of like everything he did wrong and why it's better and then flop bottles on and he always says it's a bing thing like yeah it's shoplifting it's a bing thing yeah and and it's always a very

uh universal human trait isn't it yeah washing your hands during lockdown it's always a very universal human trait, isn't it? Yeah. Washing your hands during lockdown. It's a Bing thing. It's like, no, we're kind of all in the same boat here. No. Yeah, the hubris. Yeah. Claiming just feelings of sadness as your own.

It's not a Bing thing. It's an everyone thing, you monster. And yeah, on the island, him and Alan Sugar. i mean you couldn't get sort of bigger extremes i nearly shot drink out of my nose sorry i would actually that's that's a hell that deserves to be a if flop was replaced by alan sugar and alan sugar had to look after just a sort of a slightly errant child yeah i would like to see that yeah okay well bingo's on the island i'm very happy to see him on there i mean i'm sorry that you have to deal with him there but uh it's fine who's

going to be your third choice today uh my third well i feel slightly bad about this now it seemed like a really good idea at the time um um it's my family it's my immediate family okay it's very very context dependent i've just come out of a 14 day full-on don't leave the house locked down don't go shopping don't do anything wow so it's been it's been the four of us on top of each other and um uh yeah wow it's been it's been a lot it's you learn a lot about people by never leaving their side for 14 days non-stop 14 day and you've got two children as well two children yeah and i love them i should point out i do love them i love them more than anything they're my three favorite people in in the whole wide world that's i think more a statement about the lockdown

that they that it's made me feel like this about the people I love most in the world. But, oh my God, a five-year-old who, and it feels like I've just hit it at the wrong stage, because the five-year-old is questions, constant questions, and a Sonic the Hedgehog obsession. And the two-year-old has just hit the stage where he likes to say that everything is his. So they are just destined to clash constantly. And the way we're working at the moment is because my wife has pretty much the same job as me.

So I work from six o'clock in the morning until midday. She works from midday until six o'clock. So we have six hours of just firefighting constantly just being like don't touch that don't climb up that please don't do that stop interrupting me don't we and yeah trying to put a sort of a school schedule into that into that it's oh it's blowing it's i love them i love them so much but i i want this outbreak to be over as soon as possible so I can make other people look after them again. No, I think that's very fair.

I mean, I've said this before on this podcast that I think for a lot of parents, the idea of being shipped off to a desert island doesn't sound that bad at first. You know, you could last maybe a week and just go, well, it's like a nice holiday. This is all right. A bit rough around the edges, but you know, it's last maybe a week and just go, well, it's like a nice holiday. It's all right. A bit rough around the edges, but, you know, it's OK.

Yeah. Yeah. And I completely misread the whole premise of this because I've only just discovered that now I have to go onto this desert island with the very people that I want to banish. So I've accomplished nothing here. Well, I mean, you know, it's the worst people you could be stuck with so and you know after this much lockdown then having to sort of do basically the same lockdown but with also with bing and alan sugar yeah i mean that's only going to make it worse isn't it really you're right you're right but yeah that's fine i yeah i feel like it's probably me this is probably a reflection of me that i i want my family to to be banished to the island um it would

my wife has responded very weirdly to the outbreak she's she's suddenly wants to uh completely reorganize our house right so nothing is where it is and that in itself is driving me bonkers like multiple times a day i'll have to go upstairs to where she's working be like where where are the bananas where where the onions were here yesterday where are they and oh oh god i work from home that's the thing i work from home as as as a as a like a matter of course this is really lockdown just means i don't have to do the school run everything else is completely identical um but still it's getting to me i don't oh yeah i wonder with the your wife reorganizing the house maybe it's one of those things she's read online where it's kind of how to keep your your family's

brains ticking during the lockdown sort of hide normal things around in different places like you know like you'd keep a cat occupied by sort of moving toys around so they they continue to learn and develop maybe she's doing that for you we had a very old dog once yeah and we used to do that and yes they they learn quickly maybe that's it maybe maybe she's just enforcing like uh brain training on me yeah that's fine my cognitive yeah maybe maybe yeah okay fine i'll cut her a break just the children or it's a very mild sort of version of a saw style thriller or something but instead of sort of like games of life and death you're just sort of version of a Saw-style thriller or something, but instead of sort of, like, games of life and death, you're just sort of confusing your husband.

Yeah, your shoes were here yesterday, but now, because you did something bad three years in the past, they're at the top of the stairs. Well, I think I feel your pain. I think it's something that, you know, in normal times, you might be judged more strongly on, but I think during these strange times we're living through, I mean, I think everyone's struggling a bit.

I notice on WhatsApp groups I'm on with my friends, everyone's just drinking earlier and earlier in the day. Oh, really? I used to have a rule about trying not to drink from Monday to Friday. I mean, that's gone so far out the window. I saw on Instagram someone put up like a bingo card from a lockdown bingo card. And it was just like you had to tick off all the things you'd done. And one of them was like, drink a nice cocktail.

And one of them was, read that book you've never read. And one of them was, you know, just learn a language. I was just like, fuck you. How dare you have more free time than me yeah exactly i i see some people complaining and they don't have kids and i just think i wouldn't if it was just me in a flatmate lockdown i reckon that could be all right you know that would be quite a nice right it'd be great yeah i would i would eat badly and i would i'm eating badly anyway but i would eat badly and just watch television my dad is a fairly recent widower and he's all by himself in this uh in this house that was built to be a family i'm quite jealous of him and his

his loneliness i phone him up every couple of days and i'm like oh what did you do today it's like nothing really sort of went out in the garden for a bit and I was like, oh, did you? Nice. Well done. Do you know what I've done? I had to build a tent while writing an article on my phone while someone, oh, were watching a Sonic the Hedgehog fan-made video on YouTube. And sometimes you kind of, you have to sort of get inventive as a parent

and I'm trying to be a better dad and you know because i can't just make him watch telly all the time so the other day i'm like right i'm gonna make you the biggest den we've ever done i'm gonna turn the whole living room into a den spent ages setting up so you couldn't actually step anywhere and then i looked i was in the kitchen just making him some food and i looked over and he was not sat anywhere it just he was sat basically right in front of the telly because that was the only place he could sit that wasn't covered by den and so i'd driven him further into the telly i just just made a rod for my own back now i've just got to do loads of clearing up for no reason yeah it's the same we we have like a pop-up tent that we all have in the lawn in the

afternoons and gradually it's getting more and more full and the moment they kind of just reach the point where it would be a genuine pain in the arse to put it all away, they've changed their mind and they want to go and just do something else. Yeah. Oh, it's... No, absolutely.

The children are great, aren't they? Children are lovely. They are, but I mean, they're like... I often think they're sort of like the embodiment of the god chaos. You know, they're just these insane little tornadoes of energy and questions. And that's great, but they shouldn't... Like a tornado is not meant to be contained for long periods.

Yeah. You know, so I think that's the problem. Yeah, and just with... The problem I'm having with mine is that they are their only companions now, my two boys. They're the only is that they are their only companions now, my two boys. They're the only people that they have to play with. And increasingly, it's becoming apparent that they are not compatible in that at all. It's just one of them wants to...

Even screen time, which is the laziest, most minimal parenting that you can do. They will fight because one of them wants to watch something and one of them wants to watch something else yeah and it's oh it's exhausting yeah no i agree i agree well stewart i think that's a good choice and uh yeah i mean that and your family and alan sugar and bing i mean it's it's quite the melting pot it's good i think it's fine i think b, we've got two kids. Bing's a bit like a kid. Alan Sugar's a bit like a dad. I can cordon off part of the island.

They can all help each other. I'll go and lay in a hammock. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad. Reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lips and 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 Lips and Ads. Go to lipsandads.com now.

That's L-I-B-S-Y-N ads.com. Now, Stuart, 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 um uh the food is italian food really uh specifically specific i like because i like pasta but it's specifically the very sort of stringently adhered to italian food where everything has to be the exact same thing from the exact part of the region of italy okay drives me bonkers there is a weird thing with italy where they're incredibly passionate about food but it only if it's exactly the way their grandmother used to make it it has to be

yeah it has to be like i'm completely not i can't have moved at all within sort of generations and generations and generations i remember nigella lawson put cream in a spaghetti bolognese or something recently and she was just crucified for it by people going no this is not how we do things in it that's not an italian but people saying this is not how we do things in italy oh yeah it's funny so a friend of mine lived in italy for a few years and he loves Italian food. But he said that after sort of three years of every time you went to a restaurant having a sort of tomato based pasta to start, he was going a bit. Because I think I think in this country we're not as passionate about food, but we maybe have a broader spectrum of cuisines. You know, so you might have curry one night or lasagna the other night and then you might have a stew or something and you know that that doesn't happen he said once he made a thai curry for his

workmates and they were just like they were like what the fuck is this that and he's like what we you know this is nice we eat this all the time and he's like i can't eat it it's too spicy this is crazy so it's a weird weird food culture it's yeah it's i mean it's good and there's the the plus side of it is that you you're preserving a tradition that's good yeah but at the same time don't it's fucking pasta just eat pasta with whatever you've got eat it like the whole rest of the world does and it's pasta and just whatever you've got in a cupboard mixed up together. That's fine. That's fine. I've got the kids feeding kids. They like pasta.

But I so I can hide. I can hide anything in pasta now. I've got so good at it. I can throw vegetables in there and I'll never know. Both of my children swear blind that they hate mushrooms. And they've eaten mushrooms every day of their life because i am so good at hiding in pasta i could put i think i could pour like a bottle of cow poll into a spaghetti bolognese just to make them sleep and that they wouldn't know that's that's the true test of a home chef i think not

not being like making sure that your lardons are from a special village and whatever yeah it's uh it's weird isn't it because it's such a sort of everyday easy food. So it's hard for us to imagine it being elevated to that level, isn't it? Yeah. And even in the lockdown, I saw Jamie Oliver, his new How to Cook with No Food programme. And it was just, he made pasta. And it was just, you get some flour, you get some water,

you roll it into a ball, you cut it up. There you go, that's pasta. It's the easiest food in the world to make stop making a big deal of it yeah yeah we don't do it we don't if like someone gave you some mashed potato and some sausages and the mashed potato was arranged in a different shape on the plate you would you'd be all right with that wouldn't you you'd yeah you're a rational person yeah i went to went to a part of Italy where I think traditionally it was a bit poorer. It was in the south. And so all their pasta, they say they often make it without eggs in because back in the day, hundreds of years ago,

it was considered an extravagance. So all their pasta is like kind of a bit dry and sort of sticks to your teeth quite a lot. And you think, well, eggs aren't really an extravagance in the year 2020 for now like maybe because it's quite nice when it's not really like sort of glue do you want to give it a go no this is how no this is how you do it yeah no i get it that's that's that's fine but yeah you do wonder like maybe it's time to yeah just just learn to evolve slightly i used to live in south korea and there is a uh special delicacy type of pork and it's called dongdweji and it's made with pigs that sit underneath

toilets and basically eat shit like that doesn't need to be a thing anymore that doesn't like you go just just have a normal farm it's fine that works now yeah yeah exactly yeah it's it's um it's a weird thing because i do love italian food but i i sort of i'm scared of talking about it with any italians you know it's like i think it's one of those things there's italian food that the rest of the world enjoys and then there's italian food that italians like and it is quite different yeah and they get they get so angry about it. My wife used to work for BuzzFeed and she did a listicle about her favourite type of cheeses. And someone, as a response, read it out on video to their Italian boyfriend

who was just going, ah, no, this is the wrong type of cheese. Again, that's not an Italian accent. But he was just losing his mind because of... Because he just... They have such a... Why what all i'm saying now is words block on my brain it makes me so angry okay well italian food goes on the island and um what would your drink choice be uh coffee easily okay do not like coffee um well i'm i am more of a tea drinker i like yes i do like tea but i think

i like the idea of coffee more than i like the act i think yeah me too i like the idea of coffee i quite like the smell of coffee i cannot stand the taste of coffee and it is it is so awful i refuse to believe that anybody likes the taste of coffee. I think the thing that annoys me about coffee is that it's sort of like cocktails. You pay a bit more for it, and so you kind of want it to always be perfect. But it's like if you're really hungover and get a Bloody Mary, and it's just not very nice, but you've spent nine quid on it. It's really annoying. And it's the same with coffee sometimes.

You go in a shop, the guy's got a long beard, there's a bicycle on the wall. You think, this is going to be nice.'ve spent three pounds 50 on it and you get it and it's like oh this is a bit bitter and horrible why is you know and then i can't get another one now and now i've just got to i'm gonna have to go drink this bitter thing where's tea even if it's not that great it's still kind of warm and comforting yeah i i've tried every type of like every option of coffee that they have in coffee shops they all taste bad i don't i think again this is a thing i argue with my wife about a lot because she claims to like coffee and i'm convinced it's just an affectation someone years ago said coffee's a nice thing and everyone bought

into it no one enjoys it but they're stuck in this trap of they said they liked it once because it was cool and now they're they can't back up they can't back down from it yeah and i i don't there's too much culture around it it's like the sort of like it's you know this the hipster scene about you know it's just it's just a drink lads come on can we just have a hot beverage it feels like there's a whole rigmarole to it like you've got to know what you want you've got to know if it's good or bad you've got to know the type of beans and i just sort of you know sometimes you just want to ask for a coffee and just say can i have a coffee and they go what kind you know i don't know just what's the normal you know like with

tea you can say i want a tea yeah sometimes they'll ask you about varieties but essentially you go normal tea you know tea and they go oh yeah okay with coffee you can't just say coffee i think the thing about coffee is as well uh you need stuff for it and i think that's what people like they like having stuff they like having an expensive machine but there's none of that with tea you just need a kettle and a mug and a bag and that's it and sugar and milk if you're a bit of a you know if you want to be ostentatious yeah I feel like tea is a very it's a sort of it's a leveler it's an everyman whereas whereas coffee feels the opposite it's more of an elitist thing where you know knowledge is required and you have to kind of know your stuff a lot more and prove your worth.

Yeah, which is normally, weirdly, that's the sort of thing I love. I love flaunting superiority over other people. I love it. But I can't, for some reason, coffee leaves me cold. I just can't understand. I can't understand the appeal of something. And another thing I hate is that it's so prevalent that people will just make you a cup of coffee sometimes. And sometimes I get embarrassed to say, no, I don't like coffee. So I'll just have to sit there with a cold cup of coffee. Once, quite recently, someone did it at the office where I work.

And I even pretended to drink it. I clamped my lips shut and I put it to my mouth. And I just let it sort of splash against the front of my face. And I went, good coffee, and put it back down again. I just let it sort of splash against the front of my face and I went good coffee and put it back down again that I shouldn't have to behave like that it's one of those things isn't it that can really make you feel like a child when you're a grown-up you kind of think when I'm a grown-up I like coffee I'll understand all the small print at the end of insurance adverts things like that but you get to this point and you've got children you think no no it's not

happening oh well am i a child what's going on yeah it does you do feel like no i don't like that that isn't i yeah that's not what adults should do adults should be able to just eat and drink everything yeah and put up with it because that's what it is to be an adult but for some reason it's my one it's my one holdout but the biggest problem i have with my kids is when you make them dinner and they go, no, I don't like rice. And you're like, well, just fucking eat it or you'll die. And I feel like that's how I am a bit with coffee.

I should just be able to put up with it and drink it and, you know, get on with it, but I can't, I can't. It tastes so horrible. I don't know what it is with coffee as well, where you have to sort of, people need it so much that they have to carry it with them on public transport and things like that yeah you know whereas other drinks you're okay with but but coffee has to be in a cup on the move and i don't know how people have done it because i've tried to do that once or twice when i was sort of trying to get into coffee and it's just

i could never not make a mess i was spilling it on my bag and other people and and then you try and drink it and it's hot forever forever yeah you know and you burn your lips but you can't show anyone because you're on a commuting train it's just a minefield it's it's all part of it's the lie the lie of coffee someone's someone wrote once on a mug you know i can't live without my coffee and people believed it and now we're all stuck in this thing where people have to have this horrible, too hot, impractical, expensive drink for just no purpose whatsoever. I agree completely. And also, if that's your only drink on the island as well,

I mean, that's going to be awful. It'd be a nightmare as well, yeah. I'd dehydrate very quickly. Yeah. I would still take my chances with the seawater though probably yeah i mean it would at least be a counterpoint to the bitterness of the coffee yeah maybe they work really well together maybe that's why i don't like coffee because i don't drink salt water yeah i mean well we have salted caramel so maybe salted coffee is the next thing i wouldn't be surprised i mean they're due

a next a next gimmick aren't they because there's a cold brew coffee which is as far as i can tell cold coffee but it's special because it comes in a medicine bottle um so they're due another remix i think at some point yeah salty coffee yeah uh now stewart fortunately you won't be without entertainment on the island the planes 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 i'll start with the film it's bambi okay which i hated as a kid and now we've got disney plus i watched it this weekend turns out i still hate it it

doesn't have a story to it whatsoever the first 15 minutes of it are just a deer just being a deer just walking around being a deer in throughout the seasons let's get like there's a deer he's born and then it's autumn and the deer is just slightly older and then it's summer and then it's winter and he skids about on some ice but nothing happens in Bambi and isn't it I mean I don't I think I might have seen it but when I was very young and haven't re-watched it because everyone just tells me how sad it is isn't isn't there quite a sad bit as well there is well that's this is what I thought when I revisited it because his mum gets shot Bambi's mum gets shot by a hunter and I was really bracing myself and the kids,

being like, OK, now this is going to be a sad bit, but it's all right because it's just a cartoon. And Bambi's mum gets shot off screen. Bambi is sad for 45 seconds, tops, and then he goes away. And the next thing we see him, he's a grown-up, and he's fine. Right, yeah.

I mean, it's weird that they even considered putting that in because what are they i mean they come from america which has a very big hunting culture so is the message don't hunt deer or or maybe spare a thought for 30 seconds about the child of the deer that you killed but it's not really a big deal so actually carry on hunting yeah you know what are they trying to say it's i think i think it's anti-hunting because the deers say men men are bad but of course they would because they kill all the deers it's it's really odd and this is i remember saying going to it with as with my mum when i was a kid and there's a bit where suddenly it leaps ahead a few years or one year or something but he's got he comes back and he's got antlers and he's a he's a grown-up deer and i remember as soon as that happened being a kid being like oh

this is a different oh this is an entirely different cast of characters i don't care about them anymore and exactly the same thing happened um watching it with my kids as soon as he turned up with antlers the kids just walked away yeah it's weird that isn't it because i spoke you know kids always relate to the sort of younger characters and things so yeah why would you make it a grown-up yeah if you applied that to other characters like bing i mean god knows what bing's going to be like when he grows up they should do with bing they should do the thing did you ever watch adventure time the cartoon adventure time uh it rings a bell i'm not sure if i have it's really it's really good it's an american series but the brilliant they did, it lasted a bunch of years.

But as opposed to every other cartoon, every year they kept the same voice artist. So the character got slightly older. Okay. So year by year, his limbs got longer and his voice got deeper. They should do that with Bing. Completely. I want to watch puberty Bing. When he's suddenly rebelling against flop for being so easy on him

and now he's kind of an anarchist and has no no morals yeah yeah sorry we're back on being sorry that's my fault i shouldn't do that i hate being so but yeah bambi feels it's i think it feels like maybe cartoons have moved on a bit since then yeah completely it feels like it's a bit like the lion king but the lion king they tried to make the story so there's a there's a royal baby born and then something happens to one of its parents and then like that's the point where the films diverge with bambi the deer just gets over it very quickly but with the the lion he has to go back and fight the person who killed his dad and it's a just a much better film bambi is just feels like they kind of they wanted something to break up

just footage of the birds flying around and the leaves falling off the trees so they killed his mum i wonder if that's uh just because they picked a grazing animal and that's just part of a grazing animal's life is that you know your relatives are going to get killed whereas the lion it's like your relatives are going to get killed in some kind of quite deep power struggle and you're going to have to fight to regain the crown or the throne you know so that's that's where they diverge because you know you're like well mum's dead but you know it goes with the territory. I'm a deer. It doesn't matter that much. Yeah, it's not part of a wider narrative about familial power struggles. Yeah, it's just... Oh, God.

And it's not even a long film. I think it's maybe one hour and ten minutes long. It barely even counts as a film, but it's tedious. It does sound it. The opening shot is just a tracking shot through the forest and i swear to god it lasts for five minutes of just trees there is a different pace to these older films isn't it i mean it's it's kind of it's strange when you kind of i don't know like kids brains surely aren't that different today but they definitely get fed different images don't

they yeah and i think people back then it was made in the 40s people were just still amazed by animation as a as a concept like moving pictures this is amazing i will literally watch any old boring shit that you can give me yeah of course now you've got to have kind of subplots and different different themes and i mean i tried to watch inside out with my son the other day and i thought this is this is aimed for much older children than you and he's like what's going on? I'm like well these are the feelings of the child. What's feelings?

I'm like do you want to watch Hey Dougie instead? Yeah, there's that Pixar film Coco that is about how like the spirits of the dead will always walk with you and i'd like you're two my youngest is two there is not a chance maybe when you're 15 yeah i'll sit down and watch that cartoon with you so maybe maybe bambi isn't that bad maybe that's just what kids want to watch is just woodland animals doing nothing but unfortunately it's what you have to watch on the island for for as long as you survive so but unfortunately it's what you have to watch on the island for for as long as you survive so i think it's probably quite a good choice in terms of

being with something unbearable on this island thanks very much and what would be your song um it's imagined by john lennon by gal gadot and her hollywood Oh, good choice and very timely as well. Yeah, it's just everything. I've never liked the song. I've always disliked Imagine, just for sort of the schmaltzy sort of insincerity of it. But performed by bored film actors who don't have anything to do and just want to make some sort of...

Gal Gadot started the video by saying, I've been in my house for a while now and I'm feeling very philosophical. That's no... Don't inflict that shit on me just because you're feeling philosophical. Yeah, and also if you sort of say, oh, I'm feeling really philosophical so I've been singing Imagine by John Lennon, that's that that's someone who wants to be philosophical it's someone who doesn't really understand the nature of thought

and philosophy isn't it exactly exactly read a book wonder woman yeah it's like someone going oh yeah you know i like to think really deeply sometimes i just think about like trees and what they are like no you just you just want me to think that you're a deep thinker don't you that's that's yeah that's what this is so i watched so for anyone who isn't familiar with this she's on lockdown and she was bored so she started a sort of a she started singing imagine in her kitchen or whatever and then it's interspersed with other very famous people all singing Imagine. Yeah, at different paces, in different keys, wildly different musical ability. Yeah, but they all, I mean, the self-belief level in this video is very high, isn't it? Oh, God. Oh, God.

It's, yeah, this is like the worst thing that could ever happen to a celebrity is for their charisma to be over, sort of destroyed by a worldwide virus. And now all of a sudden people are slightly less interested in them. So they're just doing whatever they can to stay sort of in the public mind, even though none of them can sing. Not even the professional singer sia is in it she sings for a living and it sounds like she's drowning a cat in a bath when in her line and you're right it's something as well about about that song it had to be that song which is so

sort of uh schmaltzy and kind of i don't know it's that go-to kind of emotional song isn't it where like oh no something bad's happened on tv and they need to do a montage oh let's put it to imagine yeah because we can't think of anything else it's it's it's a lazy choice yeah because it's it's yeah i can't i mean just lyrically it's it's very insipid it's just wouldn't it be nice if things are nice is basically the the point of it yeah i'm not going to do anything about it i'm just going to say wouldn't it be nice by the way i'm a lot richer than you yeah we are we're as we're locked up in this gigantic house with our infinite funds let's try and imagine people being nice to each other yeah it's that sort of thing isn't it of like yeah celebrities going oh isn't it difficult it's six

days come on it's not that bad it's all right i mean you've you know if nothing else like they've got a huge house compared to me so however well-meaning they are they've still got a lot more space to be bored in and that makes a lot of difference huge yeah i even like the backstreet boys did a similar thing they all sang i want it that way during like with video conferencing technology and but they've got gigantic swimming pools they've got more rooms one of them seemed to be in a different room every time the camera cut back to him and meanwhile i mean i'm quite lucky because i've got a garden at least i can sort of go outside yeah but lots of people don't and they're just literally trapped in a flat yeah it's and and

i think the fact that it's all these different celebrities as well it feels like a kind of what i imagine an end of year party at a drama school would be like you know like all these people who aren't singers but of course they can sing i mean you know i love i love to sing and then yeah it's just it's so awkward yeah yeah they're they're putting they they they have to mean something and so they're putting it into this song it reminds me a bit of the uh do you remember in 1997 the bbc perfect day advert i was just about to say that exact thing it's the modern day version isn't't it? Because that has ruined, that ruined Perfect Day for me because now I hear like the woman from MP.

It's always Heather Smalls. Yeah, and Tom Jones. And just all singing different versions of the same song smashed up together in a horrible way. And it's like that, but less because they're not singers. They're just mark ruffalo and will ferrell yeah it's oh it's it's terrible isn't it and i think particularly as for a british audience where we're not we're not always great with that sort of level of sincerity

it's uh it's particularly cloying and difficult to stomach isn't it i can't imagine if they did if they did a british version of that and they had like dame judy dench singing it to kira knightley imagine oh man that would be so bad so bad i mean it's pretty bad already i think but i think i think i don't think this is an exaggeration i think it's the worst thing about the coronavirus that video i think you're i think you're yeah you're not far off though i would go with that yeah i mean good okay i yeah. Good, okay. I couldn't make it all the way through. Maybe I'm going to give it another go and just check, but I don't think I can bring myself to it. I did, and it starts to be people like Will Ferrell.

You would have thought that Will Ferrell would have politely declined, but when he turns up, you're like, oh, not you too. And it's made me sort of question myself. If Gal Gadot sent me an email and said, hi, it's me, Gal Gadot, would you sing one line of a song into your phone for me? I don't know if I have the sort of the moral fortitude to say no to that. I wouldn't want to upset her. But it's not even for charity or anything, is it?

Like, at least, wasn't that BBC thing, wasn't it? It wasn't the perfect day thing for comic relief or something. I think so, yeah. I mean, this isn't for anything. I mean, at least if you're, like, at the end, you go, you know, buy the single and feed some children somewhere. But it's not that. It's just people showing off.

Yeah. Yeah. It's the fake profundity of it that really grates. Yeah, absolutely. I'm with you on this. Dicks. Now, Stuart, finally, the island is overrun by the biggest dick of all the animals. Which animal is it and why?

Hippopotamus. Hippopotamus. Hippopotamus. Okay. Because it is legitimately a dick of an animal. It's much angrier. So, like, you think of a hippopotamus, you think maybe a cute thing, maybe a heffalump, maybe a moomin or something.

But they are responsible for more deaths worldwide than tigers and lions. Yeah, I've heard this. They're incredibly dangerous, aren't they? Yeah, they're angry. They're short-sighted. They've got giant mouths. Just fuck them.

They don't even eat meat they just they kill for fun they're herbivores they're like the predator yeah they're very weird because they don't look like i mean they're basically like pigs but with the jaws of a lion or something they're very i don't know how they got put together they're just yeah there's well they are the most closely the animal they're most closely related to are whales. They shouldn't even be alive. Really? I mean, how did that happen?

Because you don't get, I can't even begin to do the maths on that one. Maybe that's why they're so furious. It explains why they've got bad eyesight, because they must be just clumping around trying to rely on sonar. Searching desperately for krill in a swamp. Yeah, it doesn't work it doesn't work and they just murder people by in in floods yeah terrible i've heard as well that apparently because they they spend their life in water yeah apparently they can't even swim what they do when they're underwater they're just walking around under there fucking idiots what an idiot animal yeah badly designed in the wrong place kills for

fun silly name yes stupid name that's the only reason people like hippopotamuses is because hippopotamus is fun to say if they were called what they should be called which is dry land death whale then no one would no one would enjoy it whatsoever they've um i think they've they've been given a very cuddly image, haven't they, over the years in cartoons and things like that. Yeah. It annoys me. I mean, they did the same thing with bears.

Bears are fucking cunts. Bears just go around killing people. Bears are the worst. But because Theodore Roosevelt chose not to kill one once, they turned them into toys, and that's how we've got teddy bears yeah we shouldn't have teddy bear toys we should have toys of nice animals like um i can't think of any nice animals dogs well that's the thing isn't it when you delve down into it you know we're all just bastards i think all of nature you know what are you going to be left with

like a chicken or something and then you're going to find out that they they do something horrendous and and that's it i'm sure they do i'm sure they do i like i remember reading uh about dolphins and how prevalent rape is for dolphins that's i mean that's ruined dolphins we need we need attenborough to start doing a proper expose on these things. Like the cook report. You just go up to the linesman. Why did you do that?

Why do you eat so many people? You like to be seen as a fluffy, cuddly animal. But that's not what I've heard. What have you got to say about it? Don't walk away from me! Don't walk away from me! Yeah, I think, and hippos as well they were weren't even if they weren't violent they're still going to take up a lot of space on the island so yeah you know that's going to be

annoying now completely annoying he might eat bing though he i've already assigned it agenda the hippopotamus oh yeah well that would be fun that would be fun okay well maybe i think it's a very good choice anyway thank you very much okay, Stuart, thank you so much for joining me on Desert Island Dicks today. And obviously, you know, it's strange times at the minute, but where can people hear or see or read more from you? I'm The Guardian. I write for The Guardian. I'm on Twitter, at StuHeritage.

That's about it. You can walk past my house and leave me some flour. That would be nice brilliant well stewart thank you very much again for coming in and i hope the rest of your lockdown is as bearable as possible thank you so much for having me it's been really nice thanks a lot cheers bye Bye.