Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4 - Too Long; Didn't Read: Ep 4. We've got our work cut out

Episode Date: August 22, 2025

With unemployment on the rise, Catherine and friends want to know why Britain isn't working. Is it AI? Is it older workers taking early retirement? Or is there something bigger going on?To find out wh...y, Catherine is joined by Hugo Rifkind, Isabel Berwick, and roving correspondent Sunil Patel - and they've got their work cut out...Written by Catherine Bohart, with Madeleine Brettingham, Georgie Flinn and Christina Riggs.Producer: Alison Vernon Smith Executive Producers: Lyndsay Fenner & Victoria Lloyd Sound Design: David Thomas Production Co-ordinator: Katie SayerA Mighty Bunny production for BBC Radio 4

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Starting point is 00:00:00 This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously. Each week I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past. In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed, from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg Brothers.
Starting point is 00:00:26 Listen to Your Dead to Me now, wherever you get your podcasts. BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. Hello, lovely Friday Night Comedy people, I'm Catherine Bowhart and I'm here to tell you that if you're in the UK, you can now listen to brand new episodes of my series, Too Long Didn't Read, and all the other Friday Night comedy shows, first on BBC Sounds, seven days earlier than anywhere else. Just go to BBC Sounds, subscribe to Friday Night Comedy,
Starting point is 00:00:56 and I can't stress this enough. Make sure that you have pushed no. notifications turned on. That way you'll get alerted as soon as new episodes become available. Although, here's a big clue. It's always on Friday. Listen to Friday night comedy first on BBC Sounds. Hello and welcome to Too Long Didn't Read, the show that like Trump and his Alaska meeting with Putin just about manages to sound informed while furiously Googling stuff during the lunch break.
Starting point is 00:01:24 I'm Catherine Bohart and this is a show with so many angles on the news that's like Nicholas Sturgeon's haircut. sharp, impulsive, and timeless, yet confusingly sexy. Here on Too Long Didn't Read, we take a deep dive into one big news story with the help of comedians and an expert, but before that, what else has caught my eye this week? In big news for me and all the other messy bitches
Starting point is 00:01:49 who live for drama, so that's me and the entire cast of The Archers, Taylor Swift is releasing a new album. Taylor announced she's releasing her 12th album at 1212 on the 12th of August after posting a carousel of 12 photos on Instagram. Presumably, this is a play on the end of World War I which happened on November 11th at 11 a.m. And if in case you're wondering,
Starting point is 00:02:12 yes, the album is the bigger story here. Former Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has released her autobiography just in time for me to ignore it on my holiday in favour of a romanticcy about a horny wizard. During her time as First Minister Nicola oversaw the fallout from a fractious independence referendum, the aftermath of Brexit and the coronavirus pandemic. So naturally, what the
Starting point is 00:02:34 pre-release interviews have focused on is a single sentence where she says she never considered sexuality, my own included, to be binary. In several interviews, Sturgeon has been forced to confront the rumours that she's had, as the press put it, a Torrid lesbian affair with a French diplomat. Now, the dictionary definition of Torrid is both hot and dry. So not only was in... Was the wording salacious, it was also, you'd hope, at least 50% inaccurate. US Vice President J.D. Vance is on holiday in the Cotswalls, immediately raising the twat level from severe to critical. Trump and Putin met this week to discuss the situation in Ukraine. Trump has already called
Starting point is 00:03:18 for Putin to agree to a ceasefire or face more US sanctions, but knowing these two, he was probably just flirting. The two leaders will be trying to repair what used to be a very close relationship, which recently soured when Trump discovered Putin had been seeing other world leaders behind his back. Mentioning no names, but Kim Jong-un is a slag, so... Their chosen meeting location, Alaska, is a state famous for a dessert, which, like Donald Trump himself, is icy cold on the inside and horribly scorched on the outside. In fact, Trump actually won't have any Russia experts in the room with him because he's fired
Starting point is 00:03:53 them all in a drive to promote loyalty over experience, which, to be fair, sounds pretty Soviet to me. Doctors have said that blowing a conch could help sleep apnea. Could it? Or is this doctor's getting annoyed that everyone else gets more sleep than them? Doctors said, and I'm pretty sure this is a quote, if we have to spend our nights
Starting point is 00:04:12 hearing about how he just fell on it, you should have to listen to him play it. Can you imagine going back to a guy's house for a one night stand and he gets his conch out? Unconscionable. The liberal Democrats, finger on the pulse of the nation as ever, have noticed it's rather hot this week and have launched a campaign for the government to heat-proof the NHS by legislating to install
Starting point is 00:04:37 aircon in hospitals and care homes. I mean, call me old-fashioned, but I wonder if we should just start by legislating to install hospital beds and doctors and then work on keeping it a breezy 21 Celsius. I'm also pretty sure five minutes ago the elderly were complaining about having their winter fuel allowance taken away, so are these guys too hot or too cold? Make up your mind. I get where they want to talk about cooling den. If we know anything about Ed Davies, that this is a guy who loves an excuse to be on water. When the Lib Dems are in charge?
Starting point is 00:05:04 When. Sorry. When the Lib Dems are in charge, your GP will be fully empowered to prescribe you a combo of beta blockers and 20 minutes on a banana boat. And their suggestions are, to be fair, more reasonable than that of the government,
Starting point is 00:05:19 whose guidelines in response to the current heat wave include advice like, sleep on the ground floor, avoid fizzy drinks, and I kid you not, delete old emails because data centers use up a lot of water. So, Britain, I want you to know that I too will be wiping my browser history for the planet.
Starting point is 00:05:37 But this week's big discovery is that Britain isn't working and, I mean, we have been saying the same thing across the Irish Sea for a while now. Figures from the Office for National Statistics released this week show that unemployment has now reached a four-year high and that the number of job vacancies
Starting point is 00:05:52 has fallen by 44,000 over the last three months. The news comes at a particularly bad time for 18-year-olds across England, Wales and Northern Ireland who received their A-level results this week. Subjects like business studies and economics saw a huge rise in popularity, so at least the kids will know all the technical terms they need to explain why they're still living with their parents. It's supply and demand, moms. Please stay out of my room slash office slash breakout space. Economic uncertainty. AI and higher interest rates are all contributing to an environment which some people have argued makes it the hardest time ever to be a young woman. person, people who have forgotten the jeans underdresses trend in the mid-naughties, I imagine. Belieger Gen Zs are turning to alternative career paths with 24 Love Island star Patsy Field going so far as to say it's an embarrassment to work nine to five in this day and age. Instead, Patsy
Starting point is 00:06:42 is planning to relocate to Australia, where the UK has always sent its best and brightest. With me to try to figure out what's going on is a man whose job it is to write an imaginary diary every week, so presumably he's given some thought to unemployment. It's the Times broadcaster and journalist, Hugo Rifkind, everybody. Hi, Hugo. Oh, hello. Hi, how are you? I'm good.
Starting point is 00:07:06 Hugo. I'm trying to figure out what the situation is with unemployment. When my dad tells me I should try to get a proper job, how legitimately can I currently respond with that's actually really hard right now? Hmm, well, look, so employment is, it is a four-year high, but sort of historically speaking, it's quite low. It was like a lot. In 1984, it was 12%, for example. It's now about four-ish, 4.7%. Even when I was last job hunting in about early 2000s, it was about 6%. Still bad if it happens to you. It's like if you get hit by a bus, it's not much consolation if someone says, this hardly happens to anyone. You know what I mean? But unemployment, it's not the same thing as joblessness, right? What's the distinction? So joblessness is just people who aren't in work. And about a fifth of adults aren't in work.
Starting point is 00:07:52 A fifth? A fifth of adults aren't in work. They're not class as unemployed because they're not looking for work. They might be on benefits. They might just not want to work. It's the inactivity rate, we call it. But even the inactivity rate, at about a fifth, it's been sort of historically 20, 25%, same sort of region since about 1971.
Starting point is 00:08:11 If you've not worked consistently since 1971, well done. And are you Prince Andrew? Some of them will be working, though, because they'll be working in the kind of grey economy, the illicit economy, cash in hand. Okay. And also presumably some of those people are doing, like, work that we don't value,
Starting point is 00:08:31 but nonetheless is real work, like domestic labour and parenting. Call that work. Sorry. Hugo, you're speaking to a front row of women. I mean, absolutely, and it is historically been difficult. They shouldn't be considered unemployed because they're not, but they're also not paid. What's changed, though, is,
Starting point is 00:08:51 although that big kind of chunk of economically inactive people has always been more or less the same size, or at least for a long time it's been about the same size, the people who are in it are different now. Say more? Right. So it used to be fairly universally spread, or indeed it was more likely to be women than men
Starting point is 00:09:09 because men were more likely to work than women. These days men are only very slightly more likely to work than women. Okay. But you're quite likely, much more likely, increasingly likely, to be workless for whatever reason if you're over 50. post-pandemic has been a huge rise in people over 50 who are worthless. Because everyone was like I actually love pottering in my garden
Starting point is 00:09:28 or because and we're like just took early retirement or because it's actually a totally different environment in which to get a job? All of those things. Also a lot more of them are ill and on benefits of some sort which means they're classed as worthless as well. Also though there's been a really, really marked rise in young people outside employment. Neats.
Starting point is 00:09:46 It's not in education, employment or training. Again, historically it's not that high, NEETs at the moment. They were higher in 2012. There were more NEETs. But it's gone up like a ski jump since the pandemic. Why is that? Who knows, really? I mean, I guess it's because the number of jobs that there are around for these people have sort of been in decline. They've been harder to get. It was about 600,000 people were classed as NEETs in about in 2020, 20, 20, 21. It's now, I think it's a bit over a million. Wow, that's a huge jump. It's a big jump. And is that because graduate levels specifically, those jobs are difficult to get?
Starting point is 00:10:20 Graduate recruitment, like really, really plunging down 33% in a year, the number of jobs available for graduates. But it's also much harder to get other jobs now if you're not a graduate. So there's this big trend in like hospitality jobs, things like. Things that traditionally wouldn't necessarily be a graduate job demanding like a 2-2, for example. But the big, I mean the big traditional graduate jobs, the milk ground jobs, KPMG, PWC, Deloitte, EY, they hired a, I think a thousand fewer people last year than the year before. Oh, my goodness. Wow, so I assume Gilles sales are also down.
Starting point is 00:10:58 Wait, so you can't, it's not like you can just say who your dad is and that you went to Cambridge anymore. Alas, not, not anymore. Devastating. Which jobs, are the particular jobs other than graduate jobs that are hard to get, any that are easier? Who are the winners and losers? There are a lot of jobs that are in sort of sharpish decline.
Starting point is 00:11:12 Jobs that being impacted by AI are in sharpish decline. What are those jobs? Because it feels like they change every time I read an article about AI. Any job that requires amassing information and using it, which has always been the bedrock of the middle classes, things that are protected and regulated like doctors and lawyers, you're going to be okay. Things like accountants, you're probably in quite a lot of trouble.
Starting point is 00:11:31 There were stories in the paper this week about the jobs that they reckon are going to be most resistant to AI. Being a vet, apparently. Okay. Because your dog doesn't want a robot's finger up its bottom. You said that like the rest of us too, but okay. Sorry, but my dog. Oh, pecky.
Starting point is 00:11:52 It's also worse for men. Is it? Yes. What a shame your smile won't come across on radio. There is a he session. What does that mean? A lot of the better paid professions,
Starting point is 00:12:03 the junior ranks are increasingly dominated by women. Men are finding it harder and harder to get those jobs, which means it's going to be really, really hard for white men to keep rid of the world. But you know what? I reckon we'll find a way. I reckon you'll find a way too. But then once you get a job...
Starting point is 00:12:17 Right. Plain sailing? No. There's this weird double thing going on, which is employers want more and more and more and more. What is this notion of, like, 9 to 9 to 9 that I'm hearing of? 9 to, was it 9.96, is this idea that what your employer wants is for you to work from 9 to 9 6 days a week. Okay, Dolly Parton's going to have to write a new song. Yes.
Starting point is 00:12:40 That's a shame. So Angela Rainer, before the election, started talking about the right to switch off, right? Yeah. Which was going to make it illegal. for employers to contact people by phone or by email outside of working hours. She said that was going to be in the manifesto. It wasn't in the manifesto, perhaps because she thought about it and then wanted to email somebody about it to put it in the manifesto.
Starting point is 00:13:03 But it was outside working hours, and then she forgot. But so it's not there, not happening. Isn't there something that they have this policy in France, right? They absolutely have this policy in France. And in fact, before coming on today, I called somebody in France to find out more about it. But they were at lunch. Okay, amazing. Thank you so much, Hugo Ruffian. Thank you.
Starting point is 00:13:25 Thank you. Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of Your Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously. Each week I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past. In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed, from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg Brothers.
Starting point is 00:13:51 Listen to your dead to me now, wherever you get your podcasts. Well, we've heard all about the job market from a journalist, but what about a man who's never worked a day in his life? It's Saneal Patel, everyone. Thank you. I mean, that's not fair. Oh? I'm a very hardworking guy.
Starting point is 00:14:15 Okay. All right. Yeah? No, okay, this sounds like a joke But before I became a stand-up comedian My last job was managing a Christmas grotto Does that make you Santa or is there someone above him? I was actually Santa's boss
Starting point is 00:14:31 Santa's grotto is actually surprisingly top-heavy Bit like the NHS Okay, well it just goes to show It's a cut-throat job market out there Isn't it, Seneal? What's your take on all this? It is, Catherine, and that's why I've got some rather bad news, I'm afraid? Oh. The BBC want you to rule.
Starting point is 00:14:46 reapply for your job. Sorry, just to check in, they want me to reapply to be Catherine Beohard on Too Long, didn't read with Catherine Beoward. That's right. They've been running the numbers and they think it'd be cheaper to have this whole thing written by chat GPT and presented by a hologram of Silla Black.
Starting point is 00:15:01 Who's doing the interview? Me. You? Why are you? Because I'm a man. All right? That's how the system works. Me and the head of comedy agreed it last night when we were out at the strip club. Lads, lads, lads.
Starting point is 00:15:14 That's pros. Look, in a... competitive job market, you've got to take advantage of the old boys network, okay? Anyway, look, I'd love to chat, but I'm extremely hung over from all the shots. Now, first question, what are your relevant skills for the job? I love current affairs. I have some
Starting point is 00:15:28 broadcast experience. Most important, I mean, I'm already hosting the show. Arrogant. That's the first note. All right, next question. What are your feelings on Jason Statham? Is that relevant? Well, I need to know if you're a good workplace fit.
Starting point is 00:15:44 Are you going to come and watch Crank, too, with the boys, a load of tango in or are you going to be all like I want to watch Bridget Jones what is wrong with Bridget Jones there she goes that's exactly what I'm talking about also
Starting point is 00:15:56 don't you think your voice is too high pitch for Radio 4 what is this a show for dogs I knew this would happen I knew it would happen I wrote it.
Starting point is 00:16:19 Don't worry. I wasn't just scribbling away on the bus here. I wasn't... What is this? A show for dogs? That is so offensive, Seneal. Wow. Potential loose cannon. Okay, it's time for the team-building section.
Starting point is 00:16:37 On the count of three, I want you to leap into the audience and crowd-serve to the back of the room. I'm obviously not going to do that. We have not done a risk assessment. Someone could die. Not a team player. I should tell you that as well as a holographic cilla black,
Starting point is 00:16:50 there is another candidate in the running for this job. It's you, isn't it? Well, I'm not at liberty to say. All I can say is it's a suave wild man of the UK comedy scene known for his intense sensual allure. Joel Domit? That's rude. Now, have you brought any references?
Starting point is 00:17:07 No, I didn't know the interview was happening. Can I ask someone in the audience to be my referee? Can you vouch that Catherine isn't a criminal, a troublemaker, or someone who labels her milk in the workplace? kitchen. All right, whatever. Now, for the final section of the interview, I would like you to give a three-second presentation
Starting point is 00:17:24 about why you, Catherine Bohart, are the best woman for the job. Okay, I'm hardworking, and I'm passionate, and I'm curious. All right, I don't need to know about your personal life. Let's your time up. Now, okay, Catherine, thanks for your interest in the role of being Catherine Bohart,
Starting point is 00:17:38 on Too Long Didn't Read, with Catherine Bohart. We'll be in touch. But did I get it? Well, let's call the rest of this episode a trial shift. Thank you. My colleague and arch-nemesis, Soneil Patel, everyone. I honestly didn't even know I worked for him, but okay, good to know. They say, be the change you want to see in the world.
Starting point is 00:17:57 So we've given a third person a job to talk to us tonight. Please welcome this evening's expert, the wonderful, Isabel Berwick. Isabel leaves the Financial Times working a brand covering the workplace management and the future of work. And her book, The Future Proof Career, comes out in paperback. next week. Hello. Hi. Welcome. I'm glad you're here. Hugo got us worried, I would say. Hope you're here with more happy news. More upbeat news. Yeah. I'm really sorry to talk about unemployment figures behind their back, but they seem all over the place. They are all over the place and actually the real numbers are quite low. About 7% of the population, working age
Starting point is 00:18:38 populations, on long-term sick. And I think that's a huge issue. It's about 3.8 million on long-term sick. Are they trying to figure out? at why people are on long-term sick. Yeah, and actually, if we're talking about being out of work for younger people, it's increasingly mental health conditions, and that has gone, it's huge since the pandemic. Is there any connection between young people having to live with their parents longer and being depressed? I think the pandemic had a lot to do with that. As we all know, a lot of people spent a lot of time in their bedrooms. What degree of joblessness or the lack of job vacancies is down to AI occupying jobs? And is that threat?
Starting point is 00:19:16 for the future, or is it happening already? It's happening already, but probably we don't know the full extent. So there's a lot of other stuff. So it's what we would call a perfect storm of stuff happening in the world at the moment. Like, you know, geopolitics, economic uncertainty, obviously the AI, stuff like society's polarising. So if you're a human who's uncertain, as we all are, think about how you behave when you're uncertain. Like, you may not embark on that bathroom renovation or house purchase. you hold off, you're uncertain.
Starting point is 00:19:47 It's the same with graduate recruitment. The leaders are uncertain. They don't know what's going to happen, so they're cutting the graduate recruitment. Yeah, we're behaving like humans do, but actually it's going to have a massive knock-on effect in about, say, five years' time. When you're not building the workforce,
Starting point is 00:20:03 you're going to have a massive gap, basically. Okay, so on the expectation that AI might take jobs, we're creating less jobs for fear that those jobs won't be as necessary anymore. I mean, AI will take jobs, but we really don't know. actually. I cannot tell you how much hype there is about AI. I get hundreds of emails a week about AI. And the reality of the billions and billions and billions that's going into AI is not
Starting point is 00:20:26 matched by the reality and workplaces. Okay, so the people who aren't working, not people who are in Longsick, but people who are not working, who are they? How are they managing? So there's a lot more what we might call entrepreneurial activity. And a lot of Gen Z want to work for themselves. So they don't want to work for the man, as my son would say. They want to sort out their own lives. And I think the lack of trust that people are having governments, it's mirrored in the workplace. So people don't trust institutions.
Starting point is 00:20:55 Many fewer Gen Zs want corporate jobs. There are fewer corporate jobs to have, so that's just as well. But actually, generationally, they're not as interested. You know, I was desperate to get a job and a pension because I'm quite boring. So it's actually good that they've got more imagination, so they might be side hustling on Etsy. They might be running one or two. I'm sorry, just think it's skills
Starting point is 00:21:16 that should have been bullied out of you as a child. Do you know, I mean like I'm sorry? So, okay, so they're all trying to side hustle, which isn't a dance move. I mean, there are people who are doing more than one job. So, you know, one of the aspects of this we haven't talked about is the polygamous people. So they've got...
Starting point is 00:21:31 I honestly don't see it coming up, Isabel, but let's get into it. There are people who've got literally two or three full-time jobs. Okay, we're using that word differently. multiple jobs like it's just stitching together of a career rather than getting someone to offer it to you on a plate does seem mad that post-pandemic when it turned out we could all just work from home
Starting point is 00:21:50 that we have all just been like well back to the way things were and they didn't expect us to have any feelings about that so something like 85% of managers think that their staff are not working hard when they're at home and 85% of staff think they work incredibly hard when they're at home so that's a really big gap
Starting point is 00:22:06 so if you talk about the four-day week to a manager who is measuring productivity in bums on seats that's a massive drop but actually you should be measuring output and you can do the same output in four days that you can do in five if you're efficient and actually that has lots of people do
Starting point is 00:22:22 presumably we're talking about Gen Z hopping from job to job. The shift purely generational and if it's generational is a permanent? Yeah I think it's permanent. Actually we can learn a lot I think those of us who are older in workplaces learn a lot from Gen Z's coming up
Starting point is 00:22:36 because, you know, we sat there and took terrible treatment from awful. This is not you, Catherine, if you've never had an office job. But, you know, we had terrible treatment. Oh, no, my boss is a nightmare. It's just that she's me. Hell, hell. So we can learn for, you know, they don't take it. Does that mean, so essentially they're more empowered to advocate for themselves?
Starting point is 00:22:55 Yes, they are empowered. How do words like boundary play in a corporate environment? Well, they used to mean offense, but now it doesn't. Now it means I work the hours that I'm contracted to work and no more. And actually it's quite a divisive word in workplaces. The use of the word boundary is, I hesitate to say, triggering for some older managers. Fascinating. Okay, amazing. I love the idea that Gen Z have taken one look at the concept of a job and labeled it gaslighting. It's now your turn. If you have questions for me or for Isabel, more importantly, the expert, then we'd love to hear them.
Starting point is 00:23:35 Does anyone have a question? Hello, what's your name? Hi, I'm Michaela. I'm 23 years old, so I've just completed an acting program. My question is, do you think you even need a degree or university in this day and age to be successful? Do you need a degree to be successful? No, absolutely not. And in fact, one of the things that we need more of in this country is apprenticeships and degree apprenticeships. They're incredibly hard to get. It's actually probably harder than to get into Oxford or a top university to get an apprenticeship or a degree apprenticeship. So you know when he went to Oxford's going to want to hear you say that. It's just because that's the future. We need more people who have got those skills. And if you've done drama, you've got amazing people skills.
Starting point is 00:24:18 I don't know. I know a lot of actors with horrible people skills. Oh, that's interesting. Hello. What's your name? Catherine. Hi, Catherine. It's a solid name, Catherine.
Starting point is 00:24:27 Off to go. What's your question? So, like, unemployment statistics have been brought up a lot. Is there any real geographical bearing on those? Because just from young people that I know, So people who live in more rural areas are struggling to find jobs because there's no viable opportunities near them they can't get to anywhere. But then people in cities are struggling to find jobs
Starting point is 00:24:43 because they're competing with so many more people for them. That's a very neat summation of the problem indeed. Yes. And in fact, there have been some big studies done about long-term unemployment, even in cities. And actually, a lot of it is to do with the fact people can't get to jobs. So the buses may run at not the time when you need to get to your job if you live in a rural area.
Starting point is 00:25:03 So we need a lot more joined up thinking about public transport, for example. That's one thing. But a lot of money is going to the rural economy. For example, the government is trying to set up AI clusters. The first one's going to be around Oxford, I think, and there's one in Scotland. So maybe at some point really great tech jobs will roll out in other parts of the country that are not London, Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin, where the tech clusters are currently. There's a tech cluster in Dublin.
Starting point is 00:25:34 It's normal cluster. It's like a techopolis. Hello, what's your name? Hi, I'm Daisy. Hi, Daisy. What's your question? So I kind of wondered what the incentive is for the workplace population that you're talking about, particularly like if people are out of work because of their mental health and also because they don't think it's worth it.
Starting point is 00:25:55 So what's the point of them working now? At its best work does give you a sense of purpose. It helps you to discover parts of your identity. perhaps didn't know. Leading people can be a really interesting thing to do and very rewarding to help other people in their careers. But you're right. For a lot of people, there are big questions about do I want to work. But I think people underplay how good work can be in our lives. Where else did you have your affairs? Do you know? Okay, thank you so much to Isabel Eric, everyone. And let's welcome back Hugo Riskin, everyone. Hugo. Hello. What have you learned? What have
Starting point is 00:26:32 We learned. What do you think? You know what? I think we've learned it's not awful on paper, only in reality. And that's not even a joke because that makes it really, really hard to identify what the problem is to tell government, you know, what they ought to do. I think we've also learned it's a really good idea to have not been born any later than 1987. Do you have a hero of the week? Have you heard of the Pretend to Work Company in China? No, but it sounds up my street, go on. The pretend-to-work company in China is this relatively new organization that's set up.
Starting point is 00:27:05 And what it is, it's an office, a beautiful, lovely office where anyone would love to work. No one works there. People pay to go there and pretend they work there, right? It's kind of like we work, but we don't work. They do this for a feeling of self-worth and also to stay in touch with what it is like to work in an office. It's all the fun of a grinding office job, but without the money. Well, before the show, we asked our audience What Dream Benefit from an employer
Starting point is 00:27:35 Would mean that they give total employee loyalty My favorite one is a psychiatrist couch With a psychiatrist. Enforced spa days And a four-day week Somebody else has written drugs, yo Honestly, I didn't expect from this crowd But shout out to that person
Starting point is 00:27:53 Bottomless ice cream, have you ever had that out of a job? I don't know what that means. Right. I just remember that you probably never had a period. Okay? I was like, why don't you... Okay, yeah. Unlimited free Harrybo, that feels like a cheap hire. Yep, sure. Or, other end of the extreme, free use of a private jet.
Starting point is 00:28:13 Yeah, see, I'm not an employer, but if I was, I'd employ the Haribow guy. Yeah, I get that. I really get that. And then, oh, this one's sad. More than 20 minute lunch break in a 10-hour day and nothing thrown at my head. Brackets. From a row. recent ex-teacher.
Starting point is 00:28:33 Well, on that note, whose Instagram should we be lurking? Nobody's Instagram, you fool. Get on LinkedIn. Well, this has been Too Long Didn't Read, the show that's fun but newsy, like the back of a toilet stall in your local spoons. And thank you at home for listening.
Starting point is 00:28:47 See you next week. Goodbye. Too Long Didn't Read was written and hosted by Catherine Bowhart with Hugo Rifkin, Sunil Patel and Isabel Barron. It was also written by Georgie Flynn, Madeline Brettingham and Christina Riggs. The producer was like, Alison Vernon Smith. It was a Mighty Bunny production for BBC Radio 4.
Starting point is 00:29:08 Hi, I'm Phil Wang, and this is a podcast to podcast trailer for a different podcast than this podcast that you've listened to or are going to listen to. But nonetheless, I'm talking about another podcast that you should also definitely listen to. The podcast I'm talking about is Comedy of the Week, which takes choice episodes from BBC sitcoms, sketch shows, podcasts, and panel shows, including my own. show, unspeakable, and puts them all into one podcast. Maybe I'll trail this podcast on that podcast. Who's to say? I'll do what I like. Listen to Comedy of the Week now on BBC Sounds. Podcast.
Starting point is 00:29:48 Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously. Each week I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past. In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed, from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg Brothers. Listen to You're Dead to Me now, wherever you get your podcasts.

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