The Gargle - Croc virgin | Car seat | Masturbation

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

Buy tickets to The Gargle Live at the Edinburgh Fringe FestivalTue 15 and 22 AugustGo to https://www.thebuglepodcast.com/live 🐊 Croc virgin birth💺 Car seat disguise🐒 Origins of wanking��� Streaming broken🚴‍♂️ ReviewsJay Foreman and Cerys Bradley join host Alice Fraser for episode 116 of The Gargle - the glossy magazine to The Bugle's audio newspaper for a visual world.Produced by Ped Hunter and Chris Skinner. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, it's producer Chris from The Bugle here. Did you know that I have a new series of my podcast, Richie Firth Travel Hacker, out now? It's the show where Richie Firth and I talk about how to make travel better in our very special way. In this series, we discuss line bikes, Teslas, the London overground, and a whole bunch of other random stuff that possibly involves wheels

or tracks or engines of some variety. God, what a hot sell this is. I mean, you must be so excited. Listen now. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Every sport has their big, juicy controversy. Boxing has the Mike Tyson ear bite.

Cycling has Lance Armstrong. Baseball has its steroid era. Curling has... Broomgate. It's a story of broken relationships, houses divided, corporate rivalry, and a performance-enhancing broom. It was a year I'd like to forget. Broomgate, available now. Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere.

Acast.com. This is a podcast from The Bugle. Money can buy you almost anything. It can't buy you immortality. That you have to earn. You're going to be remembered forever because some things are eternal. And a shoe is just a shoe until someone steps in it. Then it's still a shoe. But the thing to remember about immortality is that it is the gargle. Hello, welcome to the gargle. This is the sonic glossy magazine to the Bugle's audio newspaper for Visual World.

I am your host, Alice Fraser, and your guest editors for this week's edition of the magazine are Jay Foreman. Hello. And Keris Bradley. Hello. Jay, how are you? I'm good, thank you.

The last time you had me on this podcast, I don't know if this is a massive coincidence, but that was when it was the coldest day we'd had in London for ages and we had snow. And here we are again. This time, it's the hottest week London's had in ages. It's like you only have me on when there's extremes in the weather. Yes, yeah, yeah. I only like you at the ends of the bell curve. That's a special occasion. I've got my shorts on today. Keris, how are you? Yeah, yeah, I only like you at the ends of the bell curve.

It's a special occasion, I've got my shorts on today. Keris, how are you? I have too much hair for this heat and it's very stressful, but I am not getting my hair cut until the 30th of June. And so there's nothing that I can do about it. And the desire to shave all of my hair off is very very strong and so 90% of me right now is just resisting shaving my head and the other 10% is sweat. So you're sweating, Jay's got his knees out. What scandalous times we live in. It's a party. It is a party. Before we step onto the canoe and launch out into the river of this week's top stories, let's have a look at the front cover.

The front cover this week of the magazine is Geraldo Flange, who plays new crypto-based superhero Cryptbro on the new Disney++ binge service. Flange is posing provocatively in Cryptbro's controversial costume, which to stupid people with no appetite for risk looks like no costume at all, balls flapping in the wind, but for crypto visionaries, looks like an excellent superhero costume. The satirical cartoon this week is Silvio Berlusconi looking benevolently down through the clouds like Mufasa at all other weirdly haircutted wannabe authoritarian political leaders. Now we'll get into our top stories.

Top story this week is Virgin Mary crocodile news. And this is the news that a crocodile on her own, in isolation for 16 years, has laid an egg that it contained a fully formed baby crocodile. Keris, you've occasionally been called a fully formed baby crocodile. Can you unpack this story for us? Yes. So this crocodile, who has been denied love its entire life, has somehow managed to reproduce in what scientists are calling a virgin birth,

even though that crocodile has explicitly stated in several interviews that it doesn't buy into the social context of virgins. Thank you very much. And it's exciting scientific news because this is the first observed instance that we have seen of parthenogenesis in a crocodile. And there's lots and lots and lots of other examples

of parthenogenesis in other animals, there's lots and lots and lots of other examples of pathogenesis in other animals so like in snakes and lizards one documented case in humans that we mustn't forget have been both excited that this is the first time we've seen a crocodile do it but also quite quick to say uh like this does actually happen all the time probably crocodiles have been doing this a whole load they just haven't been showing us and so what's interesting it's the first time that we've we've seen it and it's triggered by dwindling populations so it's thought to be like an evolutionary trait if you've got a dwindling population then this triggers the ability to to have a baby without having a mate um so that's

one theory for where it comes from the other is just that when you're caught pregnant before you're married and you you haven't been cheating those are the two two evolutionary uh traits that scientists have or explanations that scientists have for how this happens. See, I read this story and I thought there was just a misunderstanding where the crocodile was regretting her life choices, saying, oh, I can't believe I went and got myself pregnant, but you did what? Wow, let's write this down. I feel like scientists are missing the obvious explanation here,

which is invisible crocodile. Is that not the obvious explanation, that there is currently a very horny and invisible crocodile. Is that not the obvious explanation that there is currently a very horny and invisible crocodile going around impregnating all these allegedly isolated female virgins? You get all those stories about octopuses in captivity who can like squeeze themselves through holes

the size of a 50 pence piece and they spend their whole time escaping. Maybe she is so horny that she's worked out how to get out of her cage, set up a Tinder date, go get some, and then get back in before anyone's even noticed. I mean, you cannot underestimate the motivating power of the horn. I feel like every invention in human history was to impress someone of your target gender. is each of these virgin born crocodiles going to be taken just as seriously as the one in the human race

are we going to have crocodile messiahs all over the swamp their arms aren't long enough so it's just not going to be the same same story arc unfortunately no yeah you can't crucify a crocodile that There's a song about that, isn't there? The thing that the biologist said is that this is actually, it's a bad sign. In their experience of this sort of thing happening before, it's a sign of a species that's on the way out, like having a last gasp attempt at speeding up procreation. As if to say, well, you know what, there's not much point planning for the next million years, so let's just churn out a few deformed inbred monstrosities and just see how they get on it's like the equivalent of sending out some very ill-thought-out emails on a friday

afternoon like ah it's the end of the week just who cares of the consequences the scientists can't can't claim that this one is the side of the the dwindling like they have kept her in isolation this is an entirely artificial scenario that they have created. What they have done is stressed a crocodile enough that she has cloned herself. That's not, we can't learn anything from this other than the fact that scientists are monsters. That is what I do when I'm stressed out, is clone myself. Also, what did she do that was so evil that she needed to be in solitary confinement for this long? She wouldn't stop having sex with other crocodiles that's why she got put by herself your ad section now because you can't be what you can't buy it's a hot day you're at the park someone's brought fruit you go to eat the fruit but then someone says should we wash this fruit

we should probably wash this fruit but We should probably wash this fruit. But you don't care about washing the fruit. At home, you'd just eat it after maybe a desultory rub at the crotch of your jeans like a bowler trying to shine a cricket ball. But now you've been shamed. You've been exposed. You must show willing lest you be thought a filth guzzler. But how to wash the fruit? How to fully cleanse it of its wax and detritus, the grime of a fruity life well lived? How to denude this delicate snack of environmental pollutants try tokenistically running it under about half a glass of water fruit washing it's the thought that counts and this section of the show is brought to you by that thing where your toddler throws up and you strip them off and wash them and bundle all the sheets and clothes into the washing machine

and then turn on the washing machine on a long hot wash and dry cycle and then wash yourself and then put her back into clothes and then realise that her nappy was in the washing machine. That's what's bringing you this section of the show, sorry. And do you want a one-stop shop to sort of optimise your mid-grade performance? Of course you do, bringing you athletic browns, a balanced concoction of vitamins, minerals and adaptogens sieved through a mushroom that may or may not be good for you. Find out with Athletic Browns.

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Acast.com Now it's time for your next top story, a not driving news now. And this is the news that a man has disguised himself as a car seat in a study. This is, I mean, it wasn't just to study how freaked out people are by sitting on a man who's pretending to be a car seat. It is a study to test people's reactions to driverless cars for which they did not use a driverless car. They instead used a man dressed as a car seat.

Jay Foreman, you've often dressed as a car seat. Can you unpack this story for us? I love the fact that the scientists justified it by saying that the point of the exercise was to see how people would react. the scientists justified it by saying that the point of the exercise was to see how people would react. I mean, you can turn anything into science by just doing something silly and then announcing, let's just see what happens and write it down. So ostensibly, it was to see how pedestrians react to driverless cars. And the question being, why not simply use a driverless car? Because they've existed for a very long time now. The effort to result ratio in getting this really quite impressive disguise

where this guy leans back in his car and wears this sort of upholstered seat-like item of clothing, it's really impressive, but it's a bit like trying to fake the moon landings. The amount of effort required to keep the secret hushed up for decades and so on, it's more effort than just going to the moon. I love the way this looked. I genuinely, I did once see something like this. I was on the motorway and there was a van driver to the left of me who was leaning luxuriously back in his seat

with his hands at the bottom of the wheel and from exactly my angle it looked like he was like not there and the van was driving itself and I spent the rest of the journey I got my wife to take a photo

of the driverless car moving along I then spent the rest of the journey trying to think right what's the right caption for this video of a driverless car never came up with one and it's still on my phone.

Well, I mean, if you see the photo that they're using in the news story, it's not a very convincing seat. It's convincing if it whizzes past you at 10 miles an hour. You know, you're looking at, what was that? But yeah, I guess if you are staring at it for the purposes of of look at this photo of a man who looks exactly like a car seat well then you can spot his eyes popping out the side and his hands holding on to the bottom of the wheel and his jeans i just he's very clearly going through something and so when he proposed this to his research group they were like sure mate whatever you need right now if you need to get up like a car seat and drive around terrorizing pedestrians we we know you've had a rough couple of months

so people people process in different ways and that's why nobody has been like do you want a driverless car because clearly he needs to be a driverless car right now. And I think it's actually very sweet of his research group for enabling this ludicrousness as opposed to taking him to the side and sort of having a word. It feels like society has done a 180 because you might remember about 30 years ago when they introduced carpool lanes. So like cameras that give fines for people driving a car without a passenger people used to do exactly the opposite there were people in america using blow-up sex dolls to make it look like there was a passenger in the car with them at least that was the explanation given by most men who

were asked why do you have a blow-up sex doll in the front of your car i looked into this experiment they said that one of the interesting findings was that pedestrians still interact with these driverless cars. They make eye contact with it and they thank it when the car lets them pass, which raises the question, which bit of the car is the eyes? Do most people go down the Pixar route where it's the windscreen or do they go down the correct route where it's the headlamps? It's the headlamps because that's where you put the eyelashes. Exactly. That's been solved by people who have pink cars. The real question is if you put trousers on a car, is it horizontally along the car or is it vertically down the middle of the car between the front doors and the back doors?

These are the real questions that we should be asking ourselves. And we should ask this man who's pretending to be a seat how he how he feels potentially the only person in the world who could answer that question to be fair but i think there's so the the yeah the purpose of the research was to work out what pedestrians do that i think it is a valid research question because i know that i would behave differently if there was someone driving the car it was a driverless car or if it was a lunatic dressed as a seat driving the car because if it's a pedestrian crossing I will cross the road if it's a car with a driver unless it's a Tesla in which case obviously they get to go first I'm not gonna mess with them so don't stop for anybody can't get in the way of

progress caris exactly and also they beep really loudly at you if it's a driverless car then i'm running like hell in the opposite direction because they keep hitting people and if it's some scientist prick with a epsrc grant that allows him to dress up as a seat because he's been going through a bad breakup then I'm just staying very still and hoping that he can't see me I think that's your only kind of option in that scenario hide behind a tree and hope for the best because you can't really my problem is you can't really trust drivers like I always think that they're slowing down I cycle in London and I always think that drivers are slowing down for me but they're not they're just on their phones and they wanted to read that text message in more detail so you can't you can't make any

more like a good assessment of whether or not people have seen you and if they want to if they're going to kill you because they haven't seen you or if they've seen you and want to kill you this is not even the most dangerous thing that I've seen on the road but if someone pretending to be a seat drives past me, then I'm not going anywhere near it. I would definitely behave differently if I got in a car and then I sat on what I thought was a seat, but instead I go, oh, hey.

I do feel terribly la-di-da saying this, but I did buy a new car recently. And before you start judging me, I should stress that buying a new car is a once-in-a-decade this new car I accept it is better than my old car but I hate it because it's so judgy so if I veer slightly into the wrong lane the steering wheel vibrates at me if I reverse slightly too close to an object then it beeps at me if I so much as go one mile an hour over the speed limit then it flashes red I think this is how self-driving cars will eventually become accepted by car owners, because the frustration just boils over into, well, you do it then.

Fine, car. You're better than me. You're safer than me. You drive the car. Just stick to what we're best at. You drive. Let me navigate. But they train the self-driving cars.

They train them on drivers. They are the worst of us. It's the same with all AI. They are the worst of the algorithm, and that's why they keep hitting pedestrians, because they have learned from the humans who hit pedestrians. Surely the only reason that the AI cars have to drive the way they do is because there are other human drivers still on the road,

and the way they drive is going to be completely different when only robots are allowed to drive you wouldn't need traffic lights anymore they could sort of weave hypnotically in and out of each other on junctions but you know until the last remaining driver which might make a nice documentary about 60 years down the line but until we get rid of him we will still need traffic lights and we will still need to stop at junctions for pedestrians and computers are still going to have to ask us incessantly what counts as a traffic light what counts as a boat i was i was promised that the dystopian future where we were all controlled by robots was one in which there were lots of like sinister looking androids clunking around and and arnold schwarzenegger's popping out of the bushes and instead it's just incredibly annoying beeping

noises from every direction. I feel gypped. Your Reviews section now. As you know, each week we ask our guest editors to bring in something to review out of five stars. Keris, what have you brought in for us this week? I've brought diarrhoea. Difficult to carry. Yes. brought diarrhea difficult to carry yes i diarrhea is one of those things where you always think that you've had it and then you actually have it and you realize that all those other instances that

you thought were diarrhea were just like slightly uncomfortable poos and it's also very difficult to spell, so it has no redeeming features. And it ruined my Thursday last week, so I would like to give it zero stars, but only because I know that you don't like it when I give things negative stars. No, because negative stars are dangerous. If we know anything about black holes, it's that they suck really badly. Jay, what have you brought in for us this week? So the last time you had me on the show, it's when London was really cold and we had snow and I reviewed my first ever snowman.

So this time it feels only right that I review something hot. So by the way, they said that recently we had the hottest day of the year so far. If you give it a bit of thought, that's not very impressive because for the first half of the year, aren't lots of days the hottest day of the year so far if you give it a bit of thought that's not very impressive because for the first half of the year aren't lots of days the hottest day of the year so far like january the first for example is always the hottest day of the year so far anyway um the hot thing i want to review i would like to review a method for cooling down that i discovered a couple of years ago it's a sustainable environmentally friendly cool down method which i swear by to this day um so basically some time

ago i had somewhere to be and i needed to be wearing a smart shirt but it was on the hottest day of that year so far and i happened to be cycling there so i stumbled on this method for keeping cool that works so well i want to sing from the rooftops about it basically all you need is a small bag and a metric ton of factor 50 cream. Basic idea is you put your smart shirt in your bag, and then you cycle topless through central London with your nip-nips out. And when you arrive at your destination, the wind has kept your bare skin cool, the sun cream has prevented you from crisping, and the bag has kept your shirt shielded away from any sweat that would otherwise have arisen

if the two had been inadvisably in contact. Your sweaty dinner guests will wonder how you managed to turn up looking so cool as such a cucumber. The obvious catch for this method is, if you're cycling around central London with your nip-nips out, you're at the mercy of the Google Street View car drifting past and snapping you, which is exactly what happened to me at the corner of Long Lane and Borough High Street southbound. And the other catch is, whilst all your other dinner guests are covered in sweat, you're covered in creases which look worse in the photos and don't evaporate

so overall i give the nip nip wind cooling sun cream crease method four stars one star if it's a cold day one star if it's a cold day or two stars that represent your very pointy nipples if it's a cold day evolution news now and this is the news uh that they have traced back through history to find the origin of masturbation uh we were sent this story a lot by people who seem to think they know what this show is about and i can't say they're wrong uh j Jay, you've seen a monkey doing something unmentionable before. Can you unpack this story for us? So what I loved about this story is they said that, so from an evolutionary perspective,

masturbation appears costly, distracting, wasteful, even risky. I love the way that's phrased. It sounds like one of those black and white ads from the 50s. Do you realize that for every minute young Jimmy spends in his bed wanking, he could instead be reciting the National Anthem or building a nuclear shelter? Remember, the road to success, please wank a bit less. Well, also, costly. How much lube are you using? They don't seem to be doing any research into the cost saving that you can do.

Apparently, you can get a lot more work done in the office if you have wank breaks. But no one wants to introduce it. No, you don't want to be the first to introduce it they also noticed that a lot of research has been done into males but surprise surprise no one has looked into female masturbation for monkeys that's going to come next week one of the things that i've realized about having a toddler and taking her to various zoos and animal experiences in the world is that most of the job of rangers and guides in such places is making euphemisms about f***ing. So much of what animals do is just in pursuit of banging. And so they have to figure out ways to say that that won't traumatise the three-year-old. I was always told growing up

that the only other animal apart from humans that have sex seemingly for no reason, just for fun, is the dolphin. And does this research now mean that that's no longer true? We now know that monkeys have sex with themselves, you know, seemingly for no reason, given that it's costly, distracting, wasteful and risky. We've known this for ages and we know that like pigs have the longest orgasm and we know that bats do oral sex

this the person who wrote this article has never read anything about animals in their life i just this this is not this is not new news once again scientists think they've come up with a reason for why animals masturbate and the only reason why they're with a reason for why animals masturbate and the only reason why they're looking for a reason why animals masturbate because they've got all of these outdated views on masturbation being like risky and uh wasteful which is bollocks but they're like they're now finally satisfied that they've got the reason for why animals masturbate because there must be a reason for why animals masturbate it can't just be that it feels nice because they can't write an article and get it published in a science journal which is just them saying we think that

animals masturbate because it's quite fun and it feels good but this is the the problem that i have with basically all of evolutionary biology and this particular type of evolutionary biology where they're trying to look for an evolutionary explanation but evolution isn't someone has carefully thought about what would be the best possible thing not everything in evolution has a reason that is the other theory for how we all got here that's that's the opposite of what evolution is is saying evolution is just like throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks and some things are sticky not for a good reason some things are sticky just because they're covered in jeers exactly and there were loads of examples of like evolution doing ridiculous things like some deers grow antlers so big that they get stuck in trees and then they die but that is an evolutionary trait because some deers really like

other deers that have got big antlers and so now they're stuck with these incredibly cumbersome terrible antlers that they've got to deal with. Evolution is the dick and it doesn't make any sense. Absolutely. Nature is absolutely stocked full of not only dead ends and pointless things, but also like massive inefficiencies. A few years ago, they cracked the human genome and they looked into it thinking, wow, let's find out the elegant, beautiful, efficient code that is responsible for all of us. And it turns out something like 5% of it was actually being used and the rest of it was just waste that you know we haven't bothered to get rid of it's the equivalent of male nipples what are they for they're for feeling the cool breeze when you're cycling with a shirt in your rucksack now for our culture news section. This is the news that it turns out that the new streaming service binge model may have broken television entirely.

We've been moving for years and years and years away from free to air television and towards this like streaming and on demand service. And apparently it is not economically viable. Keris, you're wearing glasses. Can you unpack this story for us? It turns out that running TV platforms like venture capitalists' money schemes doesn't work because there's no money in Netflix, which is what all the people who copied Netflix

have just found out. So that really sucks for them. So I also think that what we found out from this collapse of all of these streaming sites is that TV gets really bad when you make stuff based on what a generation that refuses to be alone with their thoughts wants just in the background all the time. That's what is, that is really what has brought us the end of the TV age. Again, not the fact that people who have money and really want lots of money should not be trusted with art and money making

schemes. Well, so much of this is the same model that has inshutified everything else in society, which is the tech model of growth, which is not monetary growth for your business, which you get from providing a service to customers, but shareholder growth, which is that you grow hype and you grow word of mouth and you grow brand recognition. And that, in people's minds, translates to this must be worth something. And that, in people's minds, translates to this must be worth something. And it turns out that it's not. And also people who are thinking short term, like, because if you grow the business really, really quickly and then sell it, you personally make loads of money.

And then everybody else, like, you have deliberately destroyed a thing so that you can profit off it they were like the when i was a kid the song like how many bicycles are there in beijing was like cute and quirky and now china is filled with bike graveyards from all of the e-bikes um and like boris bike schemes that didn't work because people bought thousands and thousands and thousands of bikes and now there's nowhere for them to go because all of those companies have have collapsed and so there's just all of the bikes everywhere um just not being used because what you want to do is grow the business really really quickly and then pass it on to some patsy who's going to pay you billions for it well there's pros and cons. On the one hand, it's an environmental disaster

with a huge amount of litter that we don't know what to do with. But on the other hand, it's a catchy song. I think the most concerning thing about this new trend where streaming is taking over traditional TV is that it's now the algorithm that's entirely responsible for promoting new shows, which means that we won't need trailers anymore. So Netflix, it flashes up these tempting thumbnails

of shows that you may like with what looks like a glossy poster and no more than three very specific keywords underneath along the lines of gritty, witty, historical, swoon-worthy. It can be a fun game to get your partner to close their eyes and then read the keywords and see if they can guess what the show is. If you had to describe yourself for the purposes of a job interview just three keywords like what would

you choose witty gritty and historical yeah so netflix is trying to claw some money back by saying that you now can't give your password out to people and you can't share accounts across different households and i would just want to take just two minutes of the gargles time to rant about this because I'm so mad about it. Like, so my mum, my brother and I have been sharing a Netflix account for 10 years and now Netflix wants us to not share that one account

because I don't live with them. But I have spent 10 years training that piece of shit algorithm to only give me good stuff. I have been on other people's Netflix accounts. I know what it looks like if you haven't told it to only give you nice things. I don't know if you've ever been onto YouTube when you've not logged into your account.

You've just gone onto what YouTube is meant to look like. It is just Jordan Peterson and Elder Fraud. It is a horrible, horrible place. I have spent so many hours, I've wasted so many hours of my life creating this Netflix that only gives me nice, queer, coming-of-age comedy dramas. That is all I want to watch.

I'm not going to start a new Netflix account and then have to wade through all of the shite to try and find those things. It can claw that password out of my cold, dead hands. I'm so angry that now that there's no, they haven't even thought about a way that if I could transfer my data, fine, I will give you money. But I just, that is my thing. I made it. Netflix is terrible without my input. They can't take my input away from me. I'm so cross that I now have to text my brother to get a pin code every time I want to watch something on Netflix. Well, you know, it could be worse because of course, when Netflix first started in 1978, it came with this very thick catalogue with all the shows listed

alphabetically. And the best marketing technique in those days was to call your show something like AAA comedy or Aardvark time or real monsters or Alice Fraser. Occasionally I will spend like half an afternoon clicking on things that I think I should like on YouTube to retrain my algorithm because occasionally it goes downhill and reflects back to me a self that I don't enjoy and it reflects back my viewing habits and and then I think well this is not the person that I want to be so I have to spend the afternoon looking up extremely worthy YouTube videos this is the reason why I haven't managed to get on board with TikTok because just because I watch a thing doesn't mean that I like the thing and so I have that like the first things that TikTok showed me were like spots popping and ear cleaning videos and they are

to look away from and so if you show me one I will watch it but I do not want to watch it and so that's now all of my TikTok likeok like every time i open the app i have to scream and throw it away otherwise i have to watch all of that i once i once went on youtube to watch a video about how to um break apart and reassemble and clean a very specific brand of vacuum cleaner and then at the end at the end of the video it says don't forget to subscribe for more no and then youtube started offering me more videos about how to service vacuum cleaners. I obviously only want to watch it once. And I made it to the end of the video.

So it was a success. Leave me alone. I'm not a fan of streaming because the only time streaming is a good thing is on the exceptionally rare occasion when you've already decided you know what you want to watch and it's there for you. If, however, you and your partner decide, should we cuddle up on the sofa, see what's on? and it's there for you. If, however, you and your partner decide, should we cuddle up on the sofa, see what's on? What ensues is a nightmare of endless scrolling,

which takes longer than watching whatever programme you choose itself. I'm very old-fashioned in the sense that I would rather watch 45 minutes of a ready meal spinning slowly than having to spend even 30 seconds trying to choose the apparently perfect film to watch. Can I give you a tip for how to choose to watch stuff because this was a big problem that my partner and i had um like how do you pick something and then on reddit we found the 5-3-1 system which is that one person picks out five things

uh and so you're going for like a scattergun approach, five things that you personally wouldn't mind watching, no judgment. Then the next person chooses three from those five that they would be happy to watch. And then the first person then picks one thing from those three things. So you've both got an input. You both know that you are happy watching the thing, but really no one has to take responsibility and say we're gonna watch this

thing and it it works every single time that's a good system that's a very good system but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem where you end up only watching between you stuff that you think is going to be quite good because programs for example like crime watch you would only watch it if you're eating your dinner and it happens to be on and fair enough i might as well watch it i don't mind but no one in the age of streaming is going to choose to watch a program like that you know there could be a show that is everyone in the world's second favorite program and no one's going to watch it anymore i miss i miss the days of dvds by which i specifically mean i miss the days of judging other people by the dvd cases that they keep on their shelves in the digital streaming era we've seen a resurgence in the days of judging other people by the DVD cases that they keep on their shelves.

In the digital streaming era, we've seen a resurgence in the popularity of vinyl. Do you reckon we're going to soon start seeing a revival of Betamax? Well, there's already been a revival of VHS tapes. That's already happened. A lot of the films I grew up with, in my brain, they're the versions that were taped off ITV, with all the ad breaks still there, and the end missing, and the tape worn away from every failed attempt at pausing that exact bit of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Every generation loves to claim that the golden era of whatever it is was about 10 years earlier

and it's all gone to shit now. So no doubt there are Zoomers who are going to complain in the 2030s that, oh, the golden era of Love Island was 10 years ago and it's all shit now. Well, I mean, they talk about netflix and chill but they don't talk about the real relationship bending question your account or mine of course in the age of ai your set-top box will know exactly the sort of show that you want to watch and it will generate it for you in real time and you're gonna watch it and hate yourself this is what i deserve oh god and that brings us to the end of the show i'm flipping through the ads at the back

keris have you got anything to plug yes uh on the 24th of june um at the old fire station in oxford we are bringing a boys night it's going to be amazing um and then i'm also doing some it's going to be amazing and then I'm also doing some work in progresses of Not Overthinking Things 2019 which is my new show for Edinburgh Fringe so if you're in Cardiff

on the 22nd of June I will be doing it there and if you're in Croydon on the 29th of June I will be in Croydon Excellent and Jay what have you got to plug?

I've got a new series of map names starting on youtube in july so uh stay tuned to my youtube channel which is youtube.com slash jay foreman and keep an eye out for that and a big thank you to our roving reporters who have sent in stories charlie miss otis jedi ghost and lockie who all sent in the virgin crocodile story valentian miss otis who both sent in the car seats disguise story and peter and steis who both sent in the car seat disguise story and Peter and Steve who both sent in the wanking monkeys story. If you would like to be a roving reporter for the gargle, tweet us at

HelloGogglers on Twitter while that lasts. We are also doing some live gargles in Edinburgh. Two live gargles. That's on the 15th and 22nd of August. Find tickets online at thebuglepodcast.com slash live. And you can find melepodcast.com slash live. And you can find me online at patreon.com

slash alicefraser, where I do my weekly writers' meetings and workshops. If you want to write with me, you can do that at the moment. It's still only a dollar a month, so you can get four writers' meetings for a dollar, which, to be frank, I should change. This is a Bugle Podcast and Alice Fraser production. Your editor is Ped Hunter. Your

executive producer is Chris Skinner. I'll talk to you again next week. You can listen to other programs from the Bugle, including the Bugle, Catharsis, Tiny Revolutions, Top Stories, and The Gargle, wherever you find your podcasts.