The Bugle - Have influencers gone too far? Trump's ex-presidential mash-up and Gnome News!

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

On this issue 4371 of The Bugle, Andy is joined by Alice Fraser and Tiff Stevenson as they breakdown another turbulent week's news from across the globe, with the aftermath of the attacks across the Middle East, and the appointment of the new supreme leader of Iran. The trio also discuss Timothée Chalamet recent controversy, and the growing concern that the human race are too easily influenced! 🇮🇷 Iran Update: Andy, Alice and Tiff unpack another turbulent week in the Middle East 🩰 Timothée Chalamet put's his foot in it: The trio discuss the Marty Supreme actor following his controversial comments on Opera and Ballet! 📱 Influencers going too far: Andy, Alice and Tiff try to get their heads around the latest influencer hack and has influencing gone too far...Andy's Links: andyzaltzman.co.uk Tiff Stevenson's Links: https://www.instagram.com/tiffstevensoncomic/?hl=en Alice Fraser's Links: https://www.patreon.com/AliceFraser + The Gargle is BACK go Watch/Listen now on the Bugle Network! 🎧 Support The Bugle! Become a Team Bugle subscriber for bonus episodes, exclusive video editions, and the righteous satisfaction of funding satire:http://thebuglepodcast.com📺 Watch Realms Unknown on YouTubeProduced by Chris Skinner, Laura Turner and Harry Gordon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, I am Andy Zaltzman, as you may know. The Bugle, as well as being the world's only ever, longest-running and arguably best audio newspaper for a visual world, is one of the very few fully independent media empires remaining in this thus far very silly millennium. Our voluntary subscribing listeners have made this possible, and you, if you are not already one, can join them to keep our shows free, flourishing,

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To become a true hero, or just to join the voluntary subscription scheme, go to the buglepodcast.com and click the donate button. The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world. Hello, buglers, and welcome to issue 4,371 of the world's leading and only audio newspaper for a visual world. I'm Andy Zaltzman, coming to you in up to five dimensions from the shed of truthful dialogue or STD. must work on a paragraph. The place where sentences come to fritter away into... Amongst the people who have never set foot in this building,

Sylvester Stallone, Martina Navratilova, Ludwig van Beethoven, Frieda Carlo and Abraham Lincoln. Quite the illustrious list. And what a dinner party, that would be. But quite awkward with three of them being dead. But I think Stallone and Martine would have quite an interesting chat about the difference between being a real sport star and a pretend one. Anyway, I'm joined by two people who I'm delighted to say

have never launched a preemptive, preemptive military strike on an enemy state, which is a decreasing proportion of the human species at the moment. Welcome to Alice Fraser and Tiffany Stevenson. Hello. Oh, you don't know that for sure, Andy. Teenage girls can be hardcore. Yeah, I am affronted on this, a year that contains a week that contains International Women's Day. I feel offended that you are downgrading my achievements in preemptive striking. How's March treating you so far in Australia, Alice?

Pretty good, although I'm in Sydney at the moment and I got slightly sunburned, which, you know, you think I would be mature and controlled and then, you know, equipped enough to avoid. It was quite a grey day. I was wearing sun cream, but clearly did not reapply at the sufficient... Like, I always feel ashamed when I get sunburned mainly because when my dad, when I was young, my dad used to do this like protocol of us getting sunburned where he would cover us from top to toe in sorbeline cream after we got out of a bath.

He wouldn't let us dry off and he would make us cover ourselves in sorbeline cream to, I don't know, soothe the burn and you'd just be lying on your sheets like sticking to everything. And then he would sit next to you and explain. how important and vital your skin was and like you own like how your precious your precious tiny body must I remember just being so embarrassed even then and now just when I have this

slight like tinge of pink in my cheeks I'm like oh the shame the stickiness I can smell soylene cream in my aura how are you Tiff well I'm not sunburned so we can start there

it is grey here in London but it's the other day the sun came out and it felt like hope which is nice to have. It felt like possibility and there's some daffodils. So that's always a good feeling

in spite of everything that's happening everywhere. Yeah. I mean hope I think has been officially banned. It's been put on some sort of international blacklist. I got sunburned once when I did an unusually long set at a gig and the stage lights

just too much for me. We are recording on the 10th of March and 20206 a special anniversary and section in the bin on the 9th of March 1776 Adam Smith the celebrity Scottish economist published the wealth of nations, his platinum selling smash hit economic tract 1776 of course the year that sent America spiraling off on a disastrous path to where it is today.

But on the 9th of March that year, Smith published, well, the full title, an inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, which controversially did not describe nation's wealth to the traditional cause of them being blessed by God. So that was a huge step for humanity at the time. It was a two-volume magnum opus, so-called, because it came with a free magnum of champagne for the first hundred readers, I think. But if he was around today,

I reckon Adam Smith, rather than publishing a two-volume book, would just knock out a couple of one-minute TikToks. But, you know, we live in different times. He was a so-called father of capitalism. Not sure what he'd think of what his kid has turned into today, but that's often the way with parenting. The wealth of nations... Or are we sure what he f***ed to get that?

I think it was the Industrial Revolution, wasn't it? Anyway, but the wealth of nations' 250th anniversary is being marked with a series of special events, including a game of invisible handball, of course, and a couple of kids' kids' shows. Freddy the Free Market Ferret does whatever he wants. Can get a bit rogue at the live show. And Susie's supply and Debbie Demand get the munchies.

Anyway, that section is in the bin. Top story this week. Operation Epic Fury continues. We had world-exclusive coverage on the early stages of what is also known in some quarters as Operation Epstein-Schmebstein and Operation All the Failures of the 21st Century Politics and Economics Concentrated into one uneasily digestible ratatouille of bullshit. But it's been a strange old time to be a residence and customer of planet Earth

over the last week and a half as the rationale, objectives, excuses, timelines, and made-up narratives in this war fluctuate wildly. it's uh how have you you two enjoyed the uh the early stages of uh you know what what may well turn out to be um i don't know could it be another hundred years war uh i mean because you know trump's basically said it's it's over and that it's going and it's going to continue and i mean it's really hard to what's trying to work out exactly what what he means um the hundred years war of course actually was uh 116 years in the end i think due to uh interest payments because ailing king Edward III at the start of it was living on borrowed time.

Anyway, what's your analysis of the opening phases of this chapter in the history of our species? Warmongering. It's my least favourite type of munger after fish and iron. Right. And rumor? It's a worrying time for people like us, isn't it? Alice is like for content creators and influencers, we need to know what wine pairs best with apocalypse,

what moisturiser is best in the event of a nuclear winter, because your skin's going to be dry. Is that going to be slip-slap, slop in the event of a nuclear winter? I'm thinking of ideas of what kind of stuff I can come up with, like maybe a fit check in the bunker, interior designs for fallout shelters, or a tinned goods cooking channel. I think these are all possibilities.

But yeah, yeah, it's not looking good for people who are in the business of creativity. I don't think we have the attention span for 100 years war anymore, Andy, unless it can go into a series of, as you say, one minute viral video clips. I don't think we can digest and comprehend the processes of reading comprehension is not good enough for a long, drawn-out conflict. it does need to get done by Christmas, I think, for people's understanding of the narrative arc. Otherwise, they'll have to do that thing where they break the season in two and give it like six years for everyone to go off and do their own movies and then come back. Oh, my God, I think that is what they're doing in the Middle East.

Fuck. What about the war to end or wars? Maybe it shouldn't be the 100 year war. It could be the war to end or wars. Or was it how that was the marketing for the last one, wasn't it? Well, I think that was the marketing for the First World War, and I think history has proved that it didn't really live up to that. So it's all over the way with slogans.

People don't really follow through on it. As we mentioned last week, Truth did not fulfill its traditional role of being the first casualty of war, having been unceremoniously bumped off way before the conflict began. But they've certainly dug up Truth's body, Oliver Cromwell style and posthumously executed and stuck its head on a spike, trying to work out exactly who's doing what, why, and for how long in this devastating crap.

storm when two of the world's top-ranked liars are running the gig against the regime that has invested as much in telling the unvarnished objective truth to its people as Nepal has in becoming a flatter and lower-lying nation than the Netherlands. Well, it's tricky. It's tricky trying to work out the truth. It's like trying to follow the plot of a Christopher Nolan's sci-fi film whilst in a cinema full of wasps, whilst the Swedish punk band Sleazy Joe attempt to break their own world record for loudest concert ever with a bucket on your head. So even if you do get it right, it'll be more by luck than judgment. So it's sort of impossible to, I don't know,

it's sort of quite hard. It's hard to talk about, generate the best of times, but it's so hard to know exactly what's going on. In terms of Trump's mixed messages, the world's leading chicken Caesar has been barking at various real, perceived, imaginary and fully fictional cats. I mean, basically his messaging,

it's not so much mixed as kind of liquidized into a strange gloop and then force-fed down the world's gull it like a foie gras of goose. I've sort of given up trying to even work out what's actually happening. Yeah, I don't think you need to figure out what's actually happening because there are so many people who are 100% certain about what is actually happening and they are willing to tell you it at like an extreme volume. And again, within 55 seconds and no longer in comprehensive detail exactly what is happening.

I think the closest thing we have to an objective fact is the. Oil prices. The economy is going to be like boobs in the 90s, inflation on top of inflation. We're entering a very tricky time, aren't we? Apparently the crude benchmark is up 25%, which, to be fair, is me every time I'm on this podcast. In fact, the combination of me and Alice means the crude benchmark is probably about 50, 60% to be fair. Yeah, I was just trying to formulate. to necrotizing nipples falling off

Kappa to your boobin patient, yeah. Family shop. But apparently, so here's the nuts and bolts. You want the oil to live above 60 but below 90. And don't get me wrong, we're still printing money at 90. But gas gets up to over

350 a gallon, it starts to pinch. Hits 100. Every product in America has to readjust its price. $78 a barrel, that's the sweet spot. That's perfect. You know, brings it enough profit. it to keep exploring, but it don't sting as much at the pump. Sorry, I know everything about oil from Billy Bob Thornton in Landman.

That's a direct quote of one of his speeches. Well, you know, that's, to be honest, much more cogent and coherent than a lot of the analysis that has been passed around. Yeah, so the oil has passed, well, quite comfortably passed $100 a barrel for the first time since the early stages of the Ukraine conflict. And I mean, it's disappointing because I was going to buy a few bags. barrels of oil for my wife as a belated Valentine's Day present in March, February. What does it matter when love is eternal?

But the price has got up now. And, of course, I like to pick the barrels out at the oil well to make sure I get the really nice ones for it rather than just order a random one online. So no, it's looking a bit tricky for me right now. The G7 is sort of flapping their hands. I had an emergency meeting about these oil prices as they tipped over this, the invisible line of $100 a barrel. They say that they're standing by to take necessary.

measures, including to support the global supply by releasing the stockpile, but they're not ready to release the stockpile just yet. The finance minister in France, Roland Lesgur, said that we are, quote, not there yet when it comes to release. It is, it's funny when the international community has a solution. They say they have a solution to the problem. They acknowledge it's bad enough to have an emergency meeting about it, but they don't want to help just yet. It's like how if your children go under in the swimming pool, you're recommended to give them a second underwater just to really learn the lesson and get less, you know, panicked about the feeling of being submerged. You know, part of swimming is being underwater a bit and part

of living in a global swing back towards populist pharaohs and pig ignorant peasantry is that sometimes they could release the oil reserves, but they don't. So we need to get to use to the feeling of being culturally underwater. So we learn when it's appropriate to hold our breaths for a decade or and when it's okay to try to breathe again. We're not there yet. It's like a marriage is failing and you know it, but you don't want to deploy couples therapy just yet because what if Bevan naturally becomes better at communication?

Oh, this poor Bevan. What did the Welsh have to do with this, Alice? Why have you brought the Welsh in? The head of the AA came out to advise, This was my favourite bit. Motorists against making non-essential journeys. Oh, thanks, because I'm often out in the car driving for pleasure when I live in London. What are you, phoned from Toad Hall?

Oh, I'm just out to do a lovely bit of stress-relieving, non-essential driving. Yes, please. Can these people hear themselves? I just, there's no self-awareness. Pete Hegseth, the, I'm not sure what his official time. title is now warmonger in chief, I think. Warlock, official state warlock for the USA. He's, for those who are unfamiliar with him,

a crusade fetishist and cosplay hard man. And he's been saying some really weird and disturbing things. His message, reading between the lines and indeed reading the lines themselves, is there ain't no party like an escalot. No, it's not that, is it? So it's, I want to kill people. It makes me feel alive. And he's just giving off the vibes that he's,

is really curious to see what would happen if a nuclear bomb went off and I'm not entirely comfortable with that. Kirstama has been heavily criticized by Donald Trump which suggests that he's got his strategy entirely right for the nation and indeed humanity. He described,

Trump described Kirstama as no Churchill to, well A, an audible sigh of relief from the people of Bengal but also to people then responding, well Trump is about as far from Roosevelt as it's possible to be, apart from the bit about not 100%

nailing your wedding vows. Now, obviously, on this Augustine dignified news organ, we won't mention the historical irony of an American president bleating on about Britain not joining the early stages of a conflict. We will not stoop that low. We will rise above it. However, we will express our profound disappointment that Kirstarmer spurned

the opportunity to respond to Trump saying he was no Churchill by saying, sorry, Donnie, the old bone spurs are flaring up something rotten right now. And for me, that was a poor leader. ship from Starma. And in terms of, you know, what presidents Donald Trump reminds me of. I've been thinking about a lot after he, you know, unflatteringly set Starma alongside Churchill. So for me, Trump, yeah, there's a little bit of lots of different presidents, maybe a little bit of

Ulysses S. Grant, a little bit of Gerald Ford, maybe a touch of William McKinley, maybe James Madison a bit as well, one of the early presidents, and a little bit of Harry S. Truman from the post, well, end of the Second World War and late 19. So if you take a little bit of all of those and put them together, you get, you fucking madman. And that, to me, I think, encapsulates what Trump is bringing to the White House. Now, of course, look, it's early days. We're 10 days in. It might all work out.

I mean, just because Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya haven't all panned out flawlessly after initial kaboomings, it doesn't necessarily mean that Iran will not turn into a peaceful, it'll for the rest of all eternity. I mean, history is full of things happening differently to how things happened before. For example, Hannibal, the Carthaginian leader, was eventually defeated by the might of Rome at the Battle of Zama in 202 BC.

But in 1983, Steve Davis beat Canada's Cliff Thorburn to win the World Snooker Championships. So different circumstances can produce different results. That's my point. So I'm clinging to that as a little beacon of hope. Well, I have friends in Iran who are, extremely hopeful and happy and excited about the possibility of this turning out well. And I just, I hope, I hope for their sake that this is just the one time when it absolutely

is going to work and that we can all bomb our way to peace. In terms of the, you know, the oil price surge, I guess no one could have possibly foreseen that happening. And, you know, war always has unforeseeable consequences. You know, you couldn't have predicted a rapid spike in global oil prices caused by a sudden war instigated by the USA on a major oil-producing nation. Certainly no one would have done that, say, before the year 1400. They'd have probably responded to say, what is this America of which you speak and please explain the term Tomahawk missile.

So, look, I mean, it's just, you know, it's hard, it's so hard to know exactly what's going to happen. In terms of the succession in Iran after the death of Ayatollah Khamene, whom we phuked eulogized last week, well, I've kept it in the family. appointed his son as the new supreme leader. I mean, there are times when taken over the family business must seem like an attractive proposition. Other times, not so much.

I mean, yet personally, I don't think I'd be that keen to become supreme leader. I mean, the life insurance premiums must be off the fucking scale. But it's quite an interesting response from Iran. It's almost like they did it just to piss Donald Trump off and trust that his The shortness of his attention span is something that they can weaponise to their own benefit. Sick of these Nepomullers, Andy. I'm sick of these Nepot-Mull-like, we talk about nepotism everywhere else. Why are we not talking about it when it comes to Supreme Leaders?

You know, think of all the other Iitolers who are like, I've been suppressing and beating dissidents for years and no one is noticed. And this guy is his son. So he just gets a shot. It's the first primogeniture inheritance since the revolution overthrew the last monarchy in 1979. This, on the other hand, maybe they are playing into Donald Trump's back pocket here. This is the ultimate anti-D-EI initiative. It is the least diverse hire you could possibly imagine the right person for the job,

not worrying about placating the woke left once they'd excluded anyone who might be qualified, but it was also someone other than the son of the people. previous Ayatollah and also not dead. This guy was the only real choice. That's a good, interesting angle on that. So basically trying to almost a point of unity, the sort of anti-wokeness of the Iranian regime could be, you know, a meeting point with Netanyahu and Trump.

Yep, it's horseshoe theory if the horse is crying. One positive to emerge from the events is final and conclusion. proof of the non-existence of God, which ought, you know, ideally to solve a lot of the problems, or at least God's status as being on an extended and seemingly permanent sabbatical. And this came in the Oval Office of all places when Christian leaders from around the USA prayed with Donald Trump. They laid their hands on their president and prayed for God to give him guidance and wisdom. Now, exactly where you saw this moment on the genuineness spectrum,

from touchingly spiritual to nauseatingly hypocritical, we'll leave that up to you. But surely, if there was a god, at that moment, even the most patient of deities, would have appeared from the heavens and said, guys, guys, guys, he clearly hasn't even skim-read my fucking book. So we know for sure there is no God. I mean, personally, I've long thought actually that all religion should be banned in public but compulsory in private.

I think that would do the world a fuck of a lot of good. But I think this is something that we can cling to now, that God, by not responding instantly to that meeting in absolute disgust of the fact that Donald Trump, who is in content? for the least Christian man in history award. I can't recall Jesus telling the parable of the sex offending plutocrat. He didn't come out. We now know for sure that all those old arguments that have shaped that whole region can be laid to one side. On the bright side, Andy, Donald Trump is well known for being big on handing

merch and McDonald's to anyone who visits him in the White House. And so all of those faith leaders got to walk away with a T-shirt that said, hands on the president, all I got was this lousy exorcism. Moving away from the Iran War now, other land grab news. Well, it's not the Middle East, which has a monopoly on disputed territory. Here in the UK, there has been a Titanic illegal battle over a small strip of grass outside a couple of homes in Surrey. The land, 8 foot by 3 foot, has been disputed after

new neighbours moved in next to the couple who had looked after this strip of grass outside their house for several years and essentially tried to claim it through the use of a garden gnome. They put a garden gnome on it. Now, look, the garden gnomes for those unfamiliar ones generally sort of bearded white men.

Now, of course, there is an age-old tradition of claiming that bearded white men get to mark out who owns what land. and that dates back to early biblical times and it can cause quite a lot of problems, as we all know. Anyway, this led to a court case and the court have sided with the couple who had looked after the land for a long time under a legal principle known as adverse possession,

which allows people to claim land if they've used it as their own for enough time. This was a principle that Britain and other European powers didn't always scrupulously apply around the world back in their imperial heyday. Tiff, I mean, the position of the garden gnome in British society is, I mean, it's one of the few things that marks us out from the other nations, I would say. Yeah, the gnominess. Whether or not the gnom is fishing. That's an important factor as well.

Because if it was a gnome with a fishing rod, that means whoever's claiming adverse possession is going to. plan or putting a little pond in. I think everyone else is going to pick this up and run with it. You know, I expect Donald to be down the garden centre picking out his favorite ornaments. You know, like, oh, look at that ceramic frog. That could go in the lithium mines in Bolivia. I like those Wellington boot planters. Maybe good for an oil reserve in Venezuela.

Ooh, and that nymph water feature, perfect for my hotels on the Gaza Strip. It's just smaller scale, isn't it? It's just that's what we're all doing around the world. makes you realize that the micro and the macro is the same. Everyone's just battling over a strip of land. Oh, it's very philosophical there. Alice, what did you make of it? I applaud them for their restraint in choosing a gnome that was sort of a trad gnome.

I'm glad that they didn't choose one of those, you know, ducks with their legs spread, wearing a polka dot bikini, drinking a bottle of upside down wine with a sign around its buttocks saying, is one o'clock somewhere. You know, it could have been a lot worse. They could have added insult to injury. And instead, they just did a mild colonial incursion. I think we can all feel okay about that.

It's done with class, discretion and taste. Oh, yeah, we must be close to live, laugh, love in a garden setting. I think actually that the UN have just passed that as the, as the, latest resolution on the Iran crisis. Live, laugh, love. It's as effective as all their other ones. A few gnome facts now, for those unfamiliar with garden gnomes. Like some other...

A little known facts? Sorry, there we go. Okay, here we go. Some little gnome facts. Thank you, Alice. That was remissively not to have seen. Not to have gone with that initially. Here are the bugle, little gnome facts.

Like some other British prominent institutions and traditions, garden gnomes came to Britain from Germany and remain inexplicably popular to this day, even though they look ridiculous and have no practical purpose. I don't know what other British institution we could like that to. Anyway, no one knows what Jesus Christ would have thought of garden gnomes, which are not thought to have been available for purchasing garden centres in the Roman province of Judea in Jesus' time. Some archaeologists believe Stonehenge was meant as a gnome-fighting arena in the days when gnomes, like dinosaurs, were real flesh-and-blood creatures rather than made of stone.

Gnomes are renowned for their amply bearded look, which has inspired, amongst others, Leonardo da Vinci and Osama bin Laden. Read into that what you will. Evolutionary biologists believe that gnomes are the missing link between ancient Greek warriors and hipsters. And finally, in a world, well-to-weight boxing match in New Orleans in 1980, Roberto Juran, the Mexican legend fighting Sugar Ray Leonard, quit at the end of the eighth round in order to focus on his hobby of collecting garden gnomes. He turned to the referee and said, more gnomes. in Spanish. No mass. That is one for the boxing fans.

Other senseless disputes news now. Well, it's not just the Iran situation in the Middle East that has a global dominance of pointless disputes. The celebrity actor Timite Shalame, the Timmy Mallet of the 20th century in many ways, has prompted a furious backlash from the performing arts world, having slagged off ballet and opera, as art forms that he said audiences don't care about.

He said, I don't want to be working in ballet or opera or things where it's like, hey, keep this thing alive, even though like no one cares about this anymore. Now, look, there's a lot of things where you could apply that to, other than ballet and opera. For example, test cricket, polar bears, properly functioning democracy, hope, any kind of behavioral decency in politics, and the concept of objectivity. And I'm a fan of pretty much all of those things, not necessarily all at once.

I mean, test cricket, polar bears, democracy, for example, tricky combination, even though the polar bears obviously fit test cricket better than one day or T20, but it's hard enough to make the bears stand still on each other's backs long enough to function as a workable sight screen behind the bowler's arm at one end before you even get to voting on who should open the bowling. So he followed it up by saying, so he said this,

I don't want to be working ballet and opera, blah, blah, blah, blah, all respect to the ballet and opera people out there, by which, of course, he meant no respect. any sentence in which people say they are paying respects. I don't know if he took his cap off or not before giving all of his respect to the ballet and opera people out there. I mean, this is dangerous territory for anyone to go into these days to talk about the popularity of ballet and opera.

What did you guys make of it? Well, I thought it was, it's caused an uproar in the arts. Canadian Metso Soprano Depot Johnny described Shalame's comments as a, quote, disappointing take, but did it in a well-supported high sea above the normal range of man to hear. And Jamie Lee Curtis, Hollywood star, said in an Instagram story, why are any artists taking shots at any other artists, which makes me ask, Jamie Lee Curtis, have you ever met artists? That is their main source of fun and entertainment is taking shots at other artists, art forms, are the person just before them and after them in the show that they just did,

and I for one will never back down on close-up magicians. Though I know some who are nice, I just feel as a class, it's men who, when confronted as teenagers with the problem that they felt weird about talking to women, decided that the solution was to learn how to trick them better. It's a shame, isn't it? I don't know why you had to diss the ballet. it's not on point.

Well, okay. I mean, look, Tiff, I mean, this is just, we don't need to ever state it. It's just one actor needlessly slagging off opera and ballet. I don't think we should make a song and dance of it. Or actually, maybe that's exactly what we should do. It's one step or two too far, really. There we go, right. Are we done?

We'll move on. You're all right. Now I'm just getting started. Well, he's ruined his Oscar chances, apparently. So I will be playing the world's smaller. violin for him, which he will also dismiss as an old-fashioned art form. He's ruined his Tosker chances as well. I mean, look, it is just an actor being stupid.

There are many such cases. I'm on this podcast, like I'm an actor being stupid a lot of the time. What I'm interested in is the fact that since he said it, he's been offered a ton of tickets to shows so they can prove him wrong. So he's getting offered free tickets. Is that how it works? If I say Brad Pitt is ugly, will he try and prove me wrong by having sex with me? I think the Bahamas looks like a shit holiday destination.

Where's my free stay? Caviar, outdated food concept. Who wants to keep that alive? Get it in my belly. I mean, cynics might suggest this highlights the dangers of actors saying things without someone else writing their words down for them first and without someone in a special chair telling them exactly how to say it. But I'm not one of those cynics.

I wouldn't say that. Look, full disclosure. Opera, not my thing. I prefer my conversations spoken, not sung. Ballet, I prefer the version on ice with sticks and a puck and goals at either end. And like Timothy

Chalemay, I would not like to work in ballet or opera because they look fucking difficult and hard work. They take years and years of dedication to become a professional at any level. And lovely cheekbones, Timote, are not enough in those art forms.

So, but I acknowledge, you know, lots of people do like ballet and opera. Like I say, not my personal thing, but lots of people do like them, even if they're not currently as popular as TikTok, groundless pseudo-justifications for war or Zumba. I mean, I feel like we're missing a little bit of context here, which is that Timotay was saying this in the context of saying,

is cinema a dying art and saying, if it is, he doesn't want to have anything to do with it. I feel like we are inches away from him launching an online TikTok microdrama, 147, 30-second installments, each one which ends with the possibility of him being sucked off by a werewolf. So, you know, that's all taken with a pinch of salt. I mean, obviously the way to make him care more about ballet and opera would be to offer him shit millions of dollars to play the part of a ballet star

or an opera star. You know, he's already done Bob Dylan. You know, if he got off at the part of Rudolf Nureev or Quiet Sunday. Sorry, Placido Domingo. I must stop putting my script through an online translator before recording. Maybe he'd be more positively inclined towards them. Other people having trouble with travel news now, and it's not just the Middle East where travel has encountered some difficulties.

It's true around the world due to TikTok, a so-called travel hack shared by a so-called influencer who suggested washing your underwear in hotel coffee makers has led to humanity staring itself in the mirror and asking what have we become and has the time finally arrived

where we should just resign as a species I mean obviously the global influencer epidemic we've covered quite extensively on the bugle over the years I've I've I've I don't think this would work for me this hack So the idea is you put your underwear in the top of the coffee machine and then the steam cleans your underwear

and then you dry it with the hair dryer. I mean, it wouldn't work for me this because I like quite a strong coffee and I don't think there'd be enough caffeine coming out from underpants. I tried it the other day and I fell straight back to sleep. So, I mean, there are other options at what you can wash your underwear in. in a hotel room, the fucking basin, you fucking idiots, or just wear your clothes in the shower like a real person. Have either you ever tried this,

or do you have any other suggested a hacks, so-called for people to improve their lives? I've tried like melting my eyeliner on the iron in the hotel room. Right. To get a really smoky eye. Oh, right, not to get really flat. Flat eyeliner. Look, I have suggestions for anyone who is travelling and wants to make use of the hotel amenities.

You can make free tiny cheeses from their little free tiny UHT milks plus some vinegar from whatever's making the hotel reception clerk's face look like that. You can use your own buttocks as a panini press on a long haul flight by putting three ham and cheese sandwiches beneath you, one in each back pocket and one in the crease. You can use the hotel bath to make some top dollar moonshine from whatever's in the mini bar. And of course, classic tip, you can iron your shirts by leaving them in the bathroom next to the toilet so they get the steam from a massive poo. There's that. There it is. There's the crude benchmark.

The crude benchmark just went up. Someday I'll get you two on one team and Tom Ballot and Nish Kumar on the other. team. We'll have a crude off. Really aren't all, isn't that what all oil wars are? I mean, I think fundamentally the problem is, as a species, we're too easily influenced, hence the rise of influences. Now, obviously, that's an evolutionary tool that initially

enabled us to survive and other animals have this, you know, the sort of influencee tendency, oh, I'm a zebra, that other zebra appears to be running away quickly. from something, maybe I'll give that a go too. That's basic self-preservation. But now humanity has evolved to become simultaneously, stupendously intelligent and catastrophically stupid as a

species. This Darwinian proclivity to be influenced has become an Achilles heel, I think, and that Achilles heel has spread all the way up the leg, past the waist, up the torso via the heart, into the brain. So I do have concerns about another suggestion, and I don't know if there are any influences

out there bold enough to take this on and make a video about it, just take the right number of fucking underpants with you in the first place, you're fucking idiots. That's another suggestion, I guess. And also, if you find yourself being influenced by someone telling you to wash your underwear in a coffee machine, put your phone or whatever else you're looking at down, swear never to go online again, remove yourself in the electoral roll in case you end up voting, and buy a pair of glasses, which instead of lenses,

have a little bit of wood on with the words, I need to live my own life, daubed on them in fluorescent paint. Surely, surely the motive for wearing clean underpants is everybody's grandma. mother saying, what if you got hit by a bus? Wouldn't you be embarrassed for people to see a dirty underpants? And I don't know that anyone would be less embarrassed to see them stricken by a bus with their underpants all the flap covered in coffee ground. Decaf.

What if it was decaf? Can you absorb it as well? Can you absorb it vaginally? Why do my balls feel so awake? One of Willie Nelson's less well-known songs. My flaps have started twitching. I think I've had too much. I think we need to move on.

Well, let's move on from that to other deranged leader news. And it's not just the Middle East. There's a monopoly on deranged leaders. Vladimir Putin has received quite a lot of international attention for a coughing fit and in a video for international women's day

now look I do think we need to cut Vladdy Poots a bit of slack here the Gremlin has done so much for women over the years from his ceasers efforts to increase the bereaved mother community to his determination to make sure there are a significant significantly more women left in Russia than men through the traditional Russian strategy of disastrously strategised wars alongstanding national tradition.

So, I mean, this, surely we should be praising him for once again showing his incredible support for women. I like that they accidentally released a blooper reel of an international Women's Day speech. I like to imagine it was like, I hope bitches be having a great day. Happy International Women's Day. All the local women could go fuck themselves. We're just international only. I mean, we should feel grateful guess that it was the blooper reel where we broke off in a fit of coughing and not the blooper reel where he burst into a fit of uncontrollable laughter at the prospect that anyone would think he cared about women's feelings on any given day of the year.

Look, it was a pretty platitudinous sort of toothlessly retrograde peon to sort of trad wives and generic women's ability. to be both real sexy and real strong at the same time in ways that are supportive and not threatening to men. Look, I would have applauded some graphic descriptions of Baba Yaga's rack. That feels like something Russian fairy tales are quite full of, surprisingly quite full of descriptions of sort of sag in boobs. Look, it was a few minutes of him being relatively harmless.

I think we should all applaud. International Women's Day for just having him spend a couple of minutes not doing anything truly dreadful to anyone as far as we know. We don't know what he was looking at off camera is what I'm saying. Well, that's the blooper that they accidentally shared. Yeah, I mean, I think I didn't know that the holiday, the International Women's Day, the holiday is wildly celebrated in Russia, apparently. and it centres on expressions of appreciation for women and men mark the day by giving flowers, chocolates

to wives, girlfriends, female relatives and colleagues. I think it's very impressive because a couple of years ago someone asked what I got for International Women's Day and I replied, shouted out on the internet, which seems to be pretty much. Like, I even forgot this year that it was yesterday. I just forgot about it. It seemed to be there was an International Women's Week

and then I forgot about the actual day on Sunday. And I've ignored it the last few years because mainly International Women's Day as a female comedian has been filled with requests to do shit for free, which I think is pretty much the opposite of what the point of International Women's Day is. Well, that's why you're both on the show this week

and not getting paid for it. And of course we should also recognise that it is international millennium of the man this millennium. again. It's about 20 in a row now. Apparently a lot of those Viking kings. Some of them were women.

And they found that out in like the 70s. And I was like, yeah, let's not include that in our understanding. Well, that brings us to the end of this week's, this week's Beagle. Thank you very much for listening. Don't forget that I am currently on tour. dates and tickets via andesaltzman.co.uk. Thanks to everyone who's been so far.

Alice, anything to plug? Yes, indeed. I am also on tour. I will be at the Newcastle Fringe Festival in Australia, not being Newcastle in the UK. We do name everything after places over the UK. But Newcastle Fringe Festival this Saturday and then I will be at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

I'll be at the Manly Writers Festival a number of other places. Go check over at patreon.com slash Alice Fraser. You can subscribe there for free. It's just where I put everything now because I don't trust the algorithms anymore. Also, we have two, a twin sister podcasts to the bugle, which is to say The Gargle,

which is Science and Technology News, and Realms Unknown, which is science fiction and fantasy news, which go one week on, one week off, alternating weeks. So I never know what I'm doing. A boom, boom, boom, you can subscribe to both of them in the bugle family of shows. shows. Tiff?

I, three, I'm on tour. So I have shows, my show, post-coital, a very sexy poster. Is it a sexy show? Hmm, debatable. I will be doing that in Edinburgh at the Monkey Barrel on the bit of it. It's Easter Sunday. I've made the smart move of booking a show on Easter Sunday. So come in your Easter bonnet.

I mean, even if your Easter bonnet is just the fact that you've hit a rabbit with your car. So I will be doing the show there and I will be at Soho Theatre on the 10th and 11th of April. So I'd like people to buy tickets to that. Let's get that sold out. That would be nice. And I'm also in Belfast on the 6th of May doing the show.

Yeah, you want to really want to, when you're doing a gig on Easter Sunday, you sort of have to get an encore. Do I have to wait three days? Thank you very much. For listening, Buglers, we will be back next week with all the latest from this ludicrous planet. Until then, goodbye.