Desert Island Dicks - ZING TSJENG

Episode Date: July 7, 2020

Editor of Vice UK, Zing Tsjeng joins us to let us know the worst people and things to be stuck with on a desert island. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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prices, which might lead to another discovery. Your headphones haven't been connected this whole time. Awkward. Discover top brands at unexpectedly low prices. Sierra, let's get moving. Hi, I'm Dan from Desert Island Dicks. This episode features writer, journalist, and podcaster Zing Zing. And we discuss all manner of awful things, from terrible characters on light entertainment shows to strange marine life. If you enjoy this podcast, then why don't you subscribe to it? Then you'll never miss an episode, and we'll be happy, and you'll be happy,

and it's just a nice thing to happen to it. Then you'll never miss an episode and we'll be happy and you'll be happy and it's just a nice thing to happen to everyone. And if you really like it then please give us a rating or a review too and then we'll be even happier. And now that's out the way, on with the show. Here's 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 executive editor of Vice UK, writer of the Forgotten Women book series and podcaster Zing Sing. Hi. Hi, how are you doing? Very well, thank you. How are you? I'm good. I'm just about clinging on in lockdown, you know, several months in, haven't lost it quite yet. It's funny, isn't it? Because there's sometimes I speak to people on this and I sort of go, oh, you know,

I wouldn't mind lockdown to carry on a bit longer. feel fine and then the next day I'm like god I just want to go to the pub and see my friends and it can sort of change hourly can't it oh yeah I mean like what wouldn't I give to be able to walk into a cafe stare at all the patisserie on display and just walk out without buying anything it's all it's the simple pleasures of pre-lockdown life that I miss yeah yeah definitely and and I feel like now that as we're recording this people are sort of counting down to the pubs reopening but I don't want that kind of pub I want normal pubs I don't want to sort of like to be seated at a table in a pub and have table service I just want normal pubs again I know I

want the kind of pubs where people insist on standing up even though they're seating yeah exactly that to me is the vibe of a pub you know where people insist on standing rather than sitting and table service I mean you might as well just go to a nice restaurant yeah exactly yeah it's not going to cut it not going to cut it okay and so um you seem a bit fed up with lockdown so has that sort of helped you kind of choose a load of hateful people and things for this island yes it has well one of them directly has to do with lockdown and then um the other few are just random things that i thought i have i actually in the process of choosing these people realized that i actually do hate quite a few things but the difficulty was

picking uh ones that i felt like people would be amused by or would resonate with people. So I kind of feel like, you know, hopefully I picked like a good list. I didn't want to go for the standard kind of Piers Morgan, Katie Hopkins. So, you know, I feel like lots of people pick those guys, right? I mean, I've never made a league table, but they'd be right up there if we had. Oh, that's what you need to do. You need to do like a league table, one of those like ultimate crossover kind of rat tournaments where at the end you come up with the ultimate desert island dick yeah exactly i mean well i think it's generally piers morgan katie hopkins

and the children's tv character bing are very popular so um i don't know what that children what is what is bing bing is a hateful cartoon i think is he a rabbit i think anyway just don't know what that children... What is Bing? Bing is a hateful cartoon. I think, is he a rabbit? I think... Anyway, just don't worry. If you don't know about him, then that's good. And you should keep it that way, frankly. I will look Bing up now after we finish talking on YouTube immediately. So you've cursed me, essentially.

I'm now cursed to find out who Bing is. I'm sorry. Well, let me distract you and hopefully you'll forget. Zing, who's going to be your first choice for the island so my first choice for the island is none other than matt hancock good choice directly related to the lockdown and coronavirus and the current situation we're in and you know i picked him because i mean to be frank i probably could have picked all politicians for this episode but i thought that would get quite boring for some people but I feel like Matt Hancock to me really you know personifies this kind of tragic figure in politics that you don't really get very much like you get you know you get full-on dicks and assholes and

pricks and self-serving obsessed narcissists and you know you could just look at the current cabinet for that but Matt Hancock to me like his entire demeanor his face his facial expressions even the way he walks up to the podium to do the daily briefings that are now no longer everything about him was like so browbeaten and so downbeat and just a real kind of tragicomic figure and you know i think to some extent you know you can't help the face you're born right you know he just has one of those faces that you know if you were at school with him he probably you know incited quite a lot of bullying but having said that I'm also not a fan of bullying but you know in Matt Hancock's case you know maybe I'd let that pass if I was a teacher in a classroom

um but with Matt Hancock it's like the full package of the demeanor his like appearance you know what he's doing which is a very bad job of handling the coronavirus pandemic it all combines into a really hateable figure yeah absolutely and the thing is you know so i've tried to kind of make sure that this list is stuff that would genuinely be useless or aggravating on an island and i honestly think out of everyone in politics right now he would be the most uselessating on an island and i honestly think out of everyone in politics right now he would be the most useless person on an island and i think this kind of came to me when i realized what he'd done with ppe so you know famously we didn't have enough ppe and people were protesting doctors and nurses on the front lines were saying well you're sending us out to

die um and then you know the government said oh we've got millions of people we've got so many and then it emerged that actually they'd been counting it twice and that to me just sums up Matt Hancock so Matt Hancock is the kind of guy who you know you'd say Matt we're stranded on an island you know bring me a canoe and two oars and we're gonna paddle our way out of here and then he'd go he would turn up with half a boat and one oar and say I did it yeah exactly yeah when you sort of look at things like that where you know the PPE being counted twice I mean you understand when people like Armando Iannucci say that there's no point doing the thick of it that you know because satire is dead now because you can't they're just doing the job for them it's sort of preemptively satirizing

themselves isn't it exactly but it's so bad because there's no like release that comes from laughing at them because even if you do laugh at them you never get the kind of catharsis of well this could never happen in real life yeah it's difficult if you're sort of you know not liking the current government it's really difficult because you generally want them to mess up so that people see that they're bad at the job and we get a new lot in but the problem is when they do mess up then people die so you kind of want them to succeed it's like it's a weird thing because you don't want them to mess up and do a bad job because everyone's lives are on the line

I know and it's almost like I don't even want them to not mess up I just want them to be competent at their jobs and I think that's what really kind of annoys me and frustrates me is that there's such a base level of competency that you should be able to operate at if you're in government and these guys have not even cleared that no it's it's weird I might have I can't remember if I said this on here or to someone else, but he sort of has this appearance of like a regional manager of a small chain of supermarkets in the north, you know, or like a sort of a chain of WH Smiths, but not like the main ones, the ones that you only get at train stations, you know, and takes it very seriously.

He's got that sort of, but he just has this sort of look of surprise all the time, right? And I think one of the weird things about politics is that you're in charge of a whole the chancellor of the exchequer for example you're in charge of all the money you're in charge of all the health care or in charge of like all the transport but you can do all of these jobs without being an expert in anything which is the really weird thing about government you kind of go all right boys sitting around to say well what do you want trains you like trains go on then you have the trains you do health and

it's like what in what world is does that make sense i know exactly and i feel like oh i mean you know you've got boris johnson and michael go for both former journalists it would be like if you got me in to be prime minister and you're like okay well can zing add you know five plus nine great put her in charge of the treasury yeah and and no one can just go well i don't know but i'm crap at maths i can't do that it's like yeah no piece of piss mate we'll get you advisors like even if i had all the advisors i'd still go well i don't know if you're talking sense or not because i have no idea about the workings of the NHS you know like it just seems so mad and in cases like this you really see that happening.

Yeah 100% and it's so funny what you said about he's got the look of a regional manager of a branch department store because that's that's exactly my test for whether a politician has legs or has longevity and can appeal to people it's like if you look at them do they look a little bit like they might be the department head for a regional walworths that's about to shut down and if they do then you know i'm sorry you know they might have the best intentions and the greatest policies but people will just not warm to them yeah yeah although i mean we're living in a time where our prime minister looks like a scarecrow who's being kicked down the stairs so i mean i don't know maybe he looks more professional than the person he's serving under which is the insane thing but i agree i think as well on as you say on

the island you know he's just going to constantly be saying he can do stuff and you come back you know a day later and you're like where are the coconuts you've thrown them in the sea what are you talking about this is insane yeah exactly i told you to make a fire, but you've actually put out the fire. Yeah. But we've actually had some quite interesting discussions around the concept of fire. And, you know, yeah, dreadful, man. Good choice. Good choice. And who is going to be joining you as your second choice? My second choice to join me on to not join me on the island is mr blobby right okay so okay so to caveat this i literally had no idea who mr blobby was uh until

maybe a few years back because i didn't grow up in this country so i came here when i was about 16 and therefore i missed out on this whole kind of generation of children's tv you know like bing or mr blobby so the first time i saw mr blobby in the flesh as it were was at a music festival called bestival which is on the isle of wight and these guys had dressed up as mr blobby for the entire weekend and just went around terrorizing people you know literally they would just go up to people and push them over or like kick over a bin or dressed as mr blobby the entire time i actually have a picture of them they look absolutely terrifying and you know at the time i was like oh my god these guys are just pricks you know they've

just come dressed to some random thing and now they're just behaving like monsters and then i realized that mr blobby is an actual tv character and this was just mr blobby's persona you know he just goes in and like he messes stuff up yeah so he'll walk into a room and he'll go through a table or tear down a door or push someone over while saying Blobby in this really horrible, high-pitched mechanical robot voice. Yeah, it's a really eerie voice. It's truly hideous.

And I don't actually understand how Mr. Blobby came about or why they thought this was a good cartoon mascot to have on tv do you know more about mr blobby well i mean he was i guess he was he was on the show with noel edmonds uh noel's house party and and noel edmonds is i mean i'm surprised he hasn't been on here more because he's quite a divisive figure so if it was you know his brainchild then i kind of understand how he got quite so annoying because uh i think he used they used to do quite a lot of setting up celebrities so they kind of go oh we've tricked this sort of b-list celebrity not b more like z-list celebrity to pretend she's got a job doing

this advert for a new mobile phone company with the mascot mr blobby and then he'd come and trash everything and that sort of thing or or sometimes he'd just run onto the set and trash things but he got really big I think at one point he had a Christmas number one there was he did a pop song and yeah and it actually made it to number one and although he can't sing I think there was kids singing in the background so I think they sang the actual bits and he just said blobby blobby blobby a lot so he's not like a children's tv show character right is he for adults well it was a sort of six o'clock or five o'clock on a saturday sunday afternoon sort of early evening kind of program so it was a bit of light entertainment so they'd have like maybe some games for kids where like the kids could do a quiz against their parents and win a new computer game or something and then there'd be maybe some guests and then there'd be so it's kind of very light all family

entertainment you know it's still when you had like four channels so you couldn't really switch off so you'd always have huge audiences and they have to appeal to as many people as possible although i don't know how you appeal to as many people as possible with mr blobby because that seems insane i mean he just seems like a complete chaos merchant right yeah so he just goes in and destroys stuff but also I mean I just find him quite a frightening character like don't you think he's very frightening yeah he's truly terrifying yeah I mean I think he was I'm sure he would have scared a lot of kids I was of the age where I could probably still kind of enjoy some of the slapstick elements of him so I kind of see both sides but yeah he is terrifying and I imagine that because he sort of

is a a weird kind of cartoon character albeit in real life I imagine cartoon rules would apply to him like you wouldn't be able to kill him very easily you know like you just keep popping back up again every time you try to drown him and also probably too buoyant to drown and also you know like he'd just keep popping back up again every time you try to drown him and also probably too buoyant to drown and also you know how old is blobby because what no edmunds is now in his like 50s 60s oh i think older probably yeah so blobby must be like i don't know like in his 50s which is a weird age to be you know yeah a giant whatever he is a giant pink plastic blob and then you're like it's mr blobby naked the entire time except for the bow tie yeah yeah yeah exactly that's one of those weird things yeah no clothes except for a tie i wonder also if maybe one day the mask would slip and you just someone would pull his head off and underneath there's just this like really sad divorcee who's kind of all rithered and prune like

from being sweat sweating in that suit for 30 odd years and was just incredibly bitter about some dispute it had with noel edmonds over the rights to the the voice or something like that exactly because who was in the suit you know we kind of know what happened to the guy who did barney you know we know who's in the elmo sesame street suit and telly tubbies but i don't think we've ever found out who's in the blobby suit no because i think sometimes we thought it was noel edmunds himself but then noel would pop up with him as well so it can't have been but yeah and just yeah you're right an absolute chaos merchant and i mean i suppose he's like the sort of matt hancock on lots of caffeine you know it's like because he's doing slow chaos and then you've got the fast chaos of mr blobby and yeah and at some point he'd try and get you to sing the song yeah no i'm not singing

the song and you know it's weird how many people love putting on the blobby suit i had a friend who was in the blobby suit for his stag do and something about that suit like wearing that costume just turns people into absolute animals so there's all these kind of footage from his stag do of him behaving like an absolute monster and you know pouring wine on himself and like public and like mooning people just something just something truly evil about mr blobby i think that not enough people have explored i wonder if it's something that like because we're so used to seeing him get away with being an awful character that even though we know it's just some stag do guy drunk in a suit we still part of our brain just goes no this is this is right I have to let him behave like this and then when you're in the suit you're like I've got carte fucking blanche here I can do whatever I want because you know people will sort of acquiesce to my crazy wishes I think so yeah and it's such a British thing as well you know this idea that you need to put on a suit and a

mask to get away with doing mild chaos like you know with Americans like you just you don't need the mask you don't need a suit they can just be like Americans just look at the number of news stories coming out about America you know Florida guy wrestles gator and bites someone's convertible rooftop you know they don't need any masks or suits or anything but british people we have to put ourselves in this pink plastic suit to feel like we're free enough to express ourselves the worst element of ourselves yeah like the british national superhero would just be a normal person free of inhibitions yeah exactly it would just be a normal person free of inhibitions yeah exactly it would just be a normal person who isn't tormented by their inability to express their emotions yeah it's

very true i've never thought of that before but i think you make a very very good point um zing then who will be joining the three of you on the island so joining me on the island uh is a collective of people i hope that's allowed. They're the statue defenders from the protest to protect the statues. Yeah, okay. The many statues. I mean, they've been protecting statues up and down the UK, some very strange statues indeed.

I think someone was protecting the statue of the guy who founded the Scouts. Another one was protecting the statue of george elliott who's a victorian author and then obviously all the guys who came out to protect the statue of winston churchill yeah i mean i honestly don't really i mean with the statue guys uh who were in london for that right wing march to quote unquote protect the statues i mean i have a lot of sympathy for football fans who were not able to practice their national religion during the lockdown and wanted to piss up but why why statues you know it just seems like quite a weird thing to suddenly glom onto like

of all the things that britain has built as monuments to some pretty you know some very nasty people in its time why statues yeah yeah it's weird it's almost just because they just see what they perceive as kind of left-wing anti-fascists being happy about the tearing down of monuments they're like well they want that so i want the opposite of that and for once instead of having ideologies they've just got an actual concrete thing they go yeah symbol actually concrete yeah this is symbol i protect symbol that's okay you know it's like you don't you can't get into a debate it's just symbol should stand you know it's like nice and simple yeah it's like the yin yang kind of bad activism i mean it's kind of weird because at the same time um on the protest that day they were

supposed to be protecting these statues from black lives matter protesters whom they thought were going to go around vandalizing them which they which didn't happen anyway and then at the same time they were attacking police who were deployed to protect the statues too so in a way it's a bit like they were trying to shoot themselves in the foot yeah yeah i mean like there was this sort of the guy who was there to defend a statue but was also pissing on a monument at the same time and that sort of yeah it gives you an idea of the mindset doesn't it's like yeah i'm broadly in favor of this thing i don't really understand but i just need to have a piss over here on this thing that i'm protecting yeah and so fighting with the police i mean like everyone who would who's defending a statue would probably you know talk about our brave boys fighting for our neck

you know and it's you will stop fighting them then i know and then at the end of the day it all climaxed with you know an actual black lives matter protester having to rescue someone yeah so i mean statue defenders they you know if they were on the island you know they they can't even do the thing that they were meant to be doing they had to be rescued from the people that they were supposed to be counter protesting so you know for that reason would be very very useless on an island um and you know i just kind of feel like with the whole kind of we're protecting a statue but we're also going to get pissed around it because it's how we show our respect and love to the statue it all got a little bit kind of

weirdly um weirdly like lord of the flies-esque like did you see those pictures of people uh well they weren't pictures of the people who'd done it but it was a picture of people of what people had left at the winston churchill monument that had been boarded up and it was like snickers bars a pack of chocolate digestives a twix i mean if winston churchill was here he doesn't want chocolate he wants neat liquor from what i've read you know i mean you can't that's not a good a good offering and also it's like i mean the statue's not alive you guys i mean yeah yeah i mean it's such a good sort of metaphor just sort of like fighting over like a dead ideology you know i know i mean i

you know i wrote this piece about glastonbury festival being off this year and missing music festivals in general and what going to festivals like glastonbury taught me about what it means to be british and essentially i genuinely think the british kind of mindset can be summed up in three things which is number one uh having something to complain about number two quote unquote having a laugh and number three getting wrecked and if you have those three things in a venn diagram of an activity british people will come to it like they will just come to it and that's like what happened with you know that so what happens with music

festivals that's what happens with raves but that's also what happens on things like the statue defenders protest yeah yeah it's so mad isn't it and it's like we need such a flimsy excuse to drink it's like i'm on a train i will i can drink. How does that work? I mean, I do it sometimes. And you just think, why am I doing this? It's like, you know, it hasn't been that hard a day, you know, for, oh, train, drinks. Yeah, great. Oh, I'm walking from this point to this point. Drink. It's like some weird Monopoly game, like pass this point, pick up drink. Yeah, I know. And I have to say, you know, when I came to the UK, one of the things that really perplexed me was the drinking culture. And I think when I grew up in Singapore, the drinking culture was much more, I guess you'd say European in that, you know, we'd always have food with drinking, people wouldn't go out and go on the lash and get like hammered unless you were, you know, a uni student or something. But here it's like, going on the lash, like you're're born onto the lash and then you die in the lash you know you die with like pins in your hands in a retirement home somewhere yeah yeah he died

doing what he loved contributing to his own heart disease exactly i like the idea that maybe um the island you're on could be easter island by some quirk of fate and there's just all these statues for the statue defenders to to guard so that you could get rid of them quite easily like oh there's a seagull on the statue get them and they'll just sort of run off or like if you need to distract them you just build a crude sort of idol out of coconut shells and be like oh um i've just got to go and do this thing can you mind the statue oh i will mind the statue with my art my life and you know and so maybe maybe you could sort of there'd be quite a good way of occupying them somehow yeah yeah i feel like their attention span is probably quite quite easily diverted

yeah it's funny because they're sort of they're protecting these supposedly great britains but nothing makes me more ashamed to be british than seeing these sort of people in action. So I think it's a very good choice there, Zing. 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 Lipson ads. Go to lipsonads.com now. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N ads.com. Now, mercifully, amongst the wreckage of the plane, there was some food and drink left over. Unfortunately for you, it's your least favorite food and drink in the world.

What are they and why are they so bad? So my food is licorice. It is unfortunately licorice I found in the wreckage of the plane. The least good sweet ever. Yeah. Again, who came up with it? What is it made of? Trico?

Sugar? It feels like it's sort of shoe leather or something, isn't it? Sometimes, you know, it's like you tap it and it's rock hard. It tastes like tar. And, you know, there's a lot. I eat pretty much everything, you know there's a lot i eat pretty much everything you know like i eat loads of fermented stuff really like durian you know all the things that a lot of people think are just not very nice to eat but i have to say i don't understand why people eat licorice and sometimes in like parts of scandinavia they have that salty

licorice as well and you know all the things to i mean salted caramel is one thing but like of all the things you could add to it to like why so i mean it's like get a crap idea put a crap idea on top of it that's salted licorice i yeah i have eaten the salted licorice a colleague of mine once brought it back from i think sweden um and it was disgusting i'm really sorry if she's listening to this right now but it just tasted like someone had taken had stripped a car wheel of all the tire and had sprinkled salt on it and then given it to you in a in a sweet wrapping and said enjoy compliments from sweden yeah it's one of those things like it's i get it before there were real sweets.

Like, you know, back in the sort of 19, 1800s or whatever, you know, and it was everything was aniseed and licorice. And that's what you got. And but now, like, why? Why is there any need for it? It's like rich tea biscuits and people still buy them. You can get biscuits with chocolate on now. Like who is like you're not on like some ship in the arctic and this is all you've got what the fuck are you playing at i know it's like a weird kind of punishment to yourself right it's like oh i fancy a sweet but i can't have a nice sweet i need to have a bad one yeah yeah um i mean potentially it could be useful on the island

maybe you could sort of sharpen it into i don't know like use it in the same way you'd use flint and make an axe out of it or something like that yeah or maybe you could kind of leave it to dry and harden in the sun and then you could use it as rope yeah it's very suspicious i mean sometimes i remember being young and you know you might sort of go to your grandma's house or something and she had you know grandma's taste in sweets and you might have licorice all sorts and you know when you have like the sort of colored ones and you're desperately trying to kind of think oh well maybe this bit's all right but there's still that weird underlying licorice taste still awful yeah i mean in the grand pantheon of grandma sweets like worth his originals comes

out tops yeah and then licorice also at spot him definitely we used to have these uh are you familiar with oh what are they called sherbet fountain so it's like a little it looked like a firework and it's full of sherbet and you dip the licorice stick into it to lick the sherbet but then after a while you were like okay at first i couldn't taste the licorice but now like it's wet enough i can actually taste the the horrible tar like nature you might as well just you might as well just dip your own finger into the sherbet yeah which is i think what you ended up doing most of the time yeah it's a really weird sweet and it tastes like boots and it's and also it's not a sweet it's not sweet it's like it's like aniseed yeah and i don't mind aniseed as a taste but this is like a shit version of that it's not even like a proper version of it

my wife is similarly like the least fussy person food wise i've ever met right but licorice is her downfall as well she can't stand that and so i think that speaks volumes i wonder if it's kind of you know one of those things where you need to grow up eating it and then the taste is kind of familiar to you because i definitely did not have it growing up and you know sweets were sweets and they were sweet. They weren't like this bizarre middle ground of the devil's leather. So I don't really know where, I mean, ban licorice. Yeah. That's the first thing I would do if I was prime minister.

Yeah. And frustrating because even if you had to survive, I mean, it'd just be so tiring to eat as well if you had to consume enough to stay alive on the island. So, yes, licorice is a very good choice. And what would you wash it down with so uh controversially beer okay beer it is quite a controversial one but i mean is that all beers or a specific beer i mean i genuinely have not enjoyed a beer in years a beer in years um mainly because okay this is the other thing that i put down to not having grown up in this country and not having spent most of my like younger years here like i just don't understand how british people can down pint after pint after pint because how much how

much is in a pint like 450 milliliters of liquid is that about right i don't know i only think of it in pints yeah okay so let's say like 400 and then you go to the pub you have a round of drinks you have another round of drinks you have you know by about the fourth pint you know you're feeling pretty good but that's what literally over almost two liters of liquid sloshing about in your body and i really struggle to think of any other liquid that someone would willingly down pint serve one after the other round after round like nobody drinks that much liquid normally I've always found that really weird because I couldn't drink the same amount of water in that amount of time right and I don't know how it works and also

water doesn't have bubbles in it so it should be easier to drink four pints of water than four but you know over two hours that seems like a lot but with pints you can quite easily and i don't it's really weird i don't know what it does so maybe it's it's just in our dna now as british people yeah yeah maybe it's because you know somewhere in the distant past people's ancestors grew up drinking it instead of water because the water supply was you know contaminated with things worse than beer yeah but i genuinely don't i don't get it because it's like would you drink pint after pint of wine and it's like a hard no would you drink pint after pint of you know cocktails assuming you're not like an 18 year old in the student club probably not and yet you know you'll have people of all ages just downing 400 to 450 milliliters of straight beer repeatedly on a night out and then being like oh i've had to throw up

and i've had to piss like 20 times in the course of three hours but i'm having a great time guys yeah god it is insane isn't it i yeah mean, I've got no comeback for this. I mean, you make total sense and I can't explain it. I mean, I think more and more as I spend less time out and about with my compatriots, I mean, everything is starting to, everything that's not my flat and my wife and my son is just seeming increasingly alien and strange you know so if you've been away from home for a long time and you come back and you're like has this always been like that that's you know or someone comes to your house when you're young

and they go why do you do it like that or like why do you keep bread in the fridge you're like I don't know my mum just does it I've never thought about that yeah why do you live like this yeah yeah why do we live like this um I mean I kind of like to think on an island, a nice beer could be quite refreshing. But I mean, it's going to be warm and that's that's never good. Exactly. You know, and it's not like I've not enjoyed, you know, tiny size, tiny pints of half pints, quarter pints, whatever. What are the small pints that you get in Europe?

Yeah, I don't know what they're called. Just a European beer. european pint yeah like you know i've you know i've had those those are fine but it's just something about having a full tankard i don't know why i pronounce tankard so weirdly but let's just go with it you know having a full tankard of just like frothy beer of a liquid of any liquid i would just say you know no I just say no the the pint as well like as a measurement is such a I mean because a lot of the time it's just a bit too much like sometimes in normal normal life when I'd be I'd leave work and I'd go to pick my son up from nursery and if I had like a spare 15-20 minutes I could be like oh a little bit of me time I'm

just going to pop in for a pint on the way to pick him up and half a pint wouldn't quite satisfy you but a pint was just always a bit too much but if you suggest to anyone that maybe we should introduce sort of three quarters or like two thirds pints right like that would be seen as sort of sacrilegious you're like no no no you can't do that you're like really because it would be satisfying and it'd be about the right amount and you know you wouldn't get the dregs at the bottom but it's like this the things that we pick to be our institutions are really weird yeah you know I mean it's a really weird attachment because it's just a measurement and I think you know especially in lockdown there's so many people saying oh I really miss having pints with my friends and I was like can you not just be with your friends do other pints necessary can you can you enjoy friendship without having like trying to down like 450 mils of straight liquid repeatedly I mean I think since lockdown some of

us are wondering if we can spend that much time with ourselves without that much liquid yeah it can be it can be a tricky thing for for british people yeah licorice and pints i mean that's a a terrible combination should we say then when you say beer we're gonna have to be you can only drink it from a pint yeah a pint of beer okay fair enough fair enough uh now fortunately you won't be without entertainment on the island. The plane's entertainment system continues to work, but just your luck, it only has two working settings. One's your least favourite film of all time and the other is your least favourite song. What are they and why? So, least favourite film, definitely the most recent film I've enjoyed the least is Cats.

Because, have you seen Cats? I've seen the musical when I was very young but I haven't seen the film but I mean I saw the trailer I mean I couldn't even hate watch it it's it's honestly again in that Mr Blobby zone of being simultaneously strange and terrifying so I've never seen the stage musical Cats so when the trailer came out I was like oh my god what is this nonsense and my friend explained to me the synopsis of the musical cats which is that a bunch of cats can sing and dance in london and they must sing and dance in order to ascend to heaven uh to get reincarnated as

a new cat and i was like what just just it sounds like absolutely deranged nonsense and she was like oh no t.s elliott wrote it and i was like what it was bizarre yeah and um so obviously after seeing the trailer and watching how terrible it was i had to watch the film and the cinematic experience of watching cats in an actual cinema and it was mainly empty except for a group of other people who had come to jeer at the film same as my friends and i and it was just truly very strange and i don't know what it is about that film but maybe it's the bad cgi maybe it's the very haunting kind of setting of london that is almost just too big for the cats so the cats sort of operate in a world that's five times larger than it should be

so they're human-sized cats but at the same time everything in the cat world is much much bigger so it creates this really uncanny effect and then there are all these really random things like dancing cockroaches with human faces and mice with the faces of small children. And it's all just very, very odd and disturbing. And from what I've seen in the trailer, they all sort of look like everything's a bit sexual with them. And I know cats kind of can have that sort of, what's the word? I mean, there's a reason, I think,

where cats are always voiced by people. I mean, dogs are always voiced by Ray Winston types and cats are always kind of Joanna Lumley because there's this sort of inherent eroticism around them for some reason but like it's weird they would it just seems to sort of very fetishy yeah it's very it's very weirdly sexual in a way that it shouldn't be because it's meant to be furry animals yeah I don't know call me a purist but I feel like animals shouldn't be sexy no no i mean well to each other that's fine i've got no problems with cats having sex with

cats but yeah let's draw the line there yeah um i think there's something weird about a lot of musicals and i wonder if it's because some of them were sort of made in a time when there was just less entertainment around so like things like cats sort of worked in the 80s when we didn't question everything as much. Or like one of Andrew Lloyd Webber's other things is Starlight Express. Oh my God, I was going to mention that. The one where it's just talking trains and people on roller skates. Yeah, and it's supposed to be a boy playing with trains and they're played by people on roller skates. So they're trains. They don't even look like trains and they're whizzing around and that's quite fun

if you're little because there's people on roller skates on stage which is more interesting than some of the other ones but like now that we're in the year 2020 what the fuck is going on it just doesn't make these things kind of work for a time when you needed more imagination because there wasn't that much to do like mr blobby you know we had four channels it worked then whereas now like we can see the horrific character for what he is and and we realize that that was bleak and and weird and I think there's also that sense of the strings all kind of showing in entertainment from that era so it's very much like you know mr blobby's not cgi you can see there's a person in that horrible suit and you know it almost makes it worse because it has this real kind of panto kind of effect that you know now to people who have now you know seen i don't

know transformers or whatever and cgi is so advanced it all kind of comes off as a little bit weird yeah yeah i mean to be honest i suppose now we've gone so far the other way in entertainment where like you don't need any imagination and it's just a group of people with not many clothes on being filmed and they're pretending to have real conversations that they've had before and you know and you can think okay maybe a bit more fantasy maybe we could pull it back a little bit from this of just watching idiots talk to each other but I mean something in we need a middle ground but yeah I agree cats just looked very very strange indeed I mean I don't even know which version I watched so famously there are two versions and

the first version came out and that was the one that loads of critics reviewed where the cgi wasn't even finished so you could see the end like people wearing leggings and you know the hems of people's leggings and their you know skirts or whatever and um it was all just very unfinished and i think the one i saw was the one that they then rushed back into production to fix all those mistakes but it was still horrible yeah and i think something awful about like rebel wilson and james corden kind of then taking the piss out but going oh shit people don't like it uh let's make fun of it and say that try and distance ourself from it by saying it's shit it's like no no no come on you went through you signed the contract you got paid like don't you

oh yeah but it was ironic i'm too cool for that now you're like no no no you were in a shitty movie you've got to own that come on at least jason derulo completely owned it you know he just went and did interviews and was like yeah i'm like i was a cat it was great you know i respect i respect that commitment to the bit i don't respect people who kind of like do it by half measures but if nothing else you know cats really kind of like do it by half measures. But if nothing else, you know, Cats really kind of proved to me that actors have literally no control over the final product of a film. And it's weird because, and I'm sure you found this as well,

when you interview actors or as a journalist or something, you kind of put them in the place of being the figurehead of the film. You know, you ask them like, oh, why your character do this? What about this decision in the film etc etc and cats kind of showed me that actors have literally no control over the way a film is going to turn out all these people including ian mckellen and judy dench turned up to put on a cat seat and act in front of a green screen with no idea that this would be the result yeah yeah i guess it's like watching a load of models and you go oh you look ridiculous in the outfit that someone else designed and made you wear.

Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. It does look like a real stinker. And I think it's it's one that looks so bad, but it's never going to be so bad. It's good. You know, it's always going to be on that precipice. So you're never going to ever enjoy it. It's never like one of those films that you can actually enjoy laughing at. It's just going to be shit. It's not a show girls. No. Right. And what would be your least favorite song?

I don't know if you remember the song Jet. Are you going to be my girl? I work at a commercial radio station, so I very much know that song. I mean, I, you know, at the time the the song came out I think I was at uni maybe or at school and um I loved the song and you know watched the iPod advert and was like oh my god what a cool funky sexy song called are you gonna be my girl I downloaded it onto my iPod you know loved it listened to it all the time and then as the years have gone on and you know ipods became iphones and then iphones became kind of sweatshop labor products and apple became like this like huge dominant corporation

and the kind of bloom came off the whole like tech industry thing and that you know that optimism and that like freshness of that advert combined with that song i watched it again before i came on this podcast and i was like oh my god i feel like i'm watching a time capsule from the past and it's made me feel so sad it's like you know we started out the millennium with you know jet soundtracking this ipod that would free people to listen to whatever kind of music they wanted and dance around and be free and now we've ended up with you know 4chan and russian interference yeah yeah exactly yeah and it's a very sort of i mean it almost feels like it was built by an algorithm it's like siri make me a rock song and you know and that's sure here you go and then you got that and because it also sounds a bit like

it's it's an older song you know there's like a bit of a pastiche of an old-fashioned sort of rock song but it's not it doesn't quite have any grunt it's a bit paint by numbers isn't it yeah and it's you know even the lyrics just don't really make any sense it's just like if you asked a toddler to come up with a rock song you said well rock songs have a lot to do with looking at girls and counting that's a song that you come up with yeah it's um and it just feels it's one of those songs that's been around so much it's it's strange that it was ever actually just a song you know that it wasn't just a song off an advert right you know like there was one of the take that songs i i didn't know was take that before because it was it was just on a supermarket advert and every time i hear it i'm like you made that as a real song before the supermarket used it

and it feels like that with jet it's like that wasn't just a theme tune that was you having a career i know and you know it's very hard to now think back in those songs and go oh someone actually sat down and wrote this and thought this will contribute to someone's overall understanding and listening pleasure of our album the sum total of our musical aspirations as an artist you know it no it's just the ipod adverts are now and your band is named after a song by wings and paul mccartney I mean that's the sort of level that you're going for I mean maybe they weren't named after that but I mean it's that it's that sort of era isn't it it's not that ballpark I mean I find looking back on the

whole kind of uh 2000s era of indie rock and it's just you know it comes off as so sad and hackneyed now yeah it was sort of felt like it was that period where like you know there's a lot of people who weren't into metal so you had this kind of like laddy male energy but it was being channeled through music that wasn't quite hard enough for it so you'd kind of get like really like aggressive laddy indie boys who were kind of also a bit pretty but also like tough and it didn't quite make sense you know like the you know like the automatic uh it's like you want to have fights but you also want to have nice hair and you know it's that sort of there's that disconnect yeah i mean it's the whole kind of you know i think probably people

have written books about it but that whole like 2000s boom of, you know, indie scenesters as the Cribs, you know, titled their song that I now look back on. And I was like, God, that was a real cultural blip, wasn't it? Like at the time, if you're living through it, you're like, oh, my God, this is the second coming of the Rolling Stones or whatever. You know, it's rock and roll is back. And now you look at the charts and rock doesn't account for very much of it. No, no. I saw the Cribs warming up for someone once and I think it might be something really odd

like the Sex Pistols and I had tickets to go and see the Sex Pistols and yeah, the Cribs warming up and they smashed up their equipment at the end and it just felt so kind of cliched and awful especially like before the sex pistols you're like oh don't lads come on come on now let's not do that it's silly yeah i think a lot of the time on the island stuck with that song it's just going to feel like you're in some bad advert so i think that's a good good good suggestion okay well i mean it's the one two three that would

absolutely drive me insane after a while and you'd start probably in your head to start kind of filling it in with other things like you'd be walking around the island and like annoying things about the other islanders would be popping into your head with that rhythm yeah or it could soundtrack a montage like every single clip is you know soundtracked by one two three just going again and again and again and again until eventually you just go mad on the island yeah absolutely uh now finally the island is overrun by the biggest dick of all the animals which animal is it and why oh i didn't think that the island would be overrun because i picked jellyfish so maybe the island could be surrounded by jellyfish no that's

fine right okay jellyfish the absolute worst animal just again a blob with a barely sentient brain in many respects very similar to mr blobby yeah yeah yeah they're they're weird aren't they i've i sort of feel like they're having sort of a resurgence like i see more pictures of them and like you know like one of my when my tv goes into sleep mode there's a screensaver of jellyfish and I feel like everyone used to hate them and now they're considered a bit more beautiful but what are they exactly well this is the thing that really concerns me what actually are they made of you know why are they transparent why did you just move through water why do they sting you so badly I've been stung by jellyfish and it really hurt you know i've eaten jellyfish as well yes they're not very nice either yeah i

when i first ate jellyfish i thought it was one of those things that it was actually a type of noodle but like you know sometimes things are given different names like you get dragon's beard noodles and obviously it's not a dragon's beard so i thought it was just like a type of glass noodle and they're like oh yeah we call it jellyfish or something yeah and so i was eating it going well it has got an unusual texture and they were like no no it is jellyfish i was like fucking hell but then it doesn't taste of an awful lot but it is that texture that you don't find anywhere else that kind of stays with you it's almost it's not jellyish it's like hard set jelly yeah yeah it's got chewy it's like it got a bite to it hasn't it it's like a's not jellyish it's like hard set jelly yeah yeah more chewy it's like it got a bite

to it hasn't it's like a very rubber band kind of thing yeah i mean i imagine if mr blobby went into the ocean and evolved over thousands of years he would become a jellyfish yes and that is exactly what mr blobby would taste like yeah well in a way they're just you know like mr blobby is chaotic and fucks up his environment a jellyfish does as well don't they because they just fill the water i mean i remember being in a beautiful part of sicily and we're on this really pristine lovely picturesque beach and the water was just teeming with them and you're like i can't and it's sort of they're not aggressive because they're just floating by.

But but they're just everywhere. And when you see a video of like, you know, like on the screensaver, I've got that is silly to mention because it's a visual thing. But, you know, it's a sea that's full of jellyfish. And at one point it's kind of, oh, this is quite fascinating. And then I think someone was in the water taking that picture. And that's horrendous. No, get me out. I would rather be in the water with a shark because at least with a shark you can kind of tell where they are yeah and they're baffling as well because like what are they thinking do they have a brain what do they know is there a consciousness because they're heading somewhere it's not is it just the current i mean they're sort of pulsating so something's going on i know i just

don't trust it i mean you know give me an octopus at least octopus octopi are smart but jellyfish you know what are they even thinking yeah fuck knows what's going on with them i wouldn't be surprised if one day we realize they're they are they have been aliens just the whole time yeah just sitting there watching because you're not gonna like you're just gonna let them get on with it because you think they sting and yeah they're just floating so it's not like a shark that's like purposeful and then they were just observing the whole time yeah maybe this maybe we're their version of netflix and they're like oh god look at these morons going about their daily life this fucking idiot's got me as their screensaver now well I think you have done a great job picking a very inhospitable island

to be stuck on. So thank you very much for that. And now where can people, I mean, you're a very busy woman. Where can people sort of hear or read or see more of you? So I write for Vice UK and other places like Vogue.

I host a podcast. I host the Obsessed With Killing Eve podcast for BBC Sounds and another podcast for Sounds called United Zingdom, which is about my journey to understanding what it means to be British. And you can also check out my book series called Forgotten Women, which is about the forgotten histories of very interesting women. Brilliant. Well, thank you very much, Zing. We'll be checking out all of those things. And thank you once more for coming on Desert Island Dicks. Thank you for having me