The Gargle - Zoomer accents | Catfishing | Diaper houses

Episode Date: May 25, 2023

John Robertson and Cerys Bradley join host Alice Fraser for episode 113 of The Gargle - the glossy magazine to The Bugle's audio newspaper for a visual world.🗣 Zoomer accents❤️ Catfishing for love🪨 Magic rock dust🧷 Diaper houses📝 ReviewsProduced 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.

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It's the blunderer from Down Underer, John Robertson. Welcome back to The Most Dangerous Game. Whoa, it's great to be with you, Alice. How are you? I'm well. Sorry, I should have mentioned The Most Dangerous Game part of this. All gargle guests are paid only in prawn cocktails, and after the recording, your premium level Alice Fraser Patreon subscribers are allowed to hunt you for sport oh that's okay the anaphylactic shock from the prawn cocktails will kill me first and welcome back back back the triple threat if you're easily threatened by someone who can do rugby and talk about it on stage returning to the illustrious audio pages

of this pretend magazine it's keris bradley Hello. What's the third thing? If my threats are rugby and talking about rugby, what's the third threat? That's an unspecified threat, the most threatening threat of all. Just a general aura. Just a menace. The front cover of the magazine this week is the kangaroo who was tied down by Rolf Harris, telling us all about its new life, fresh start and happy family. A quote on the front cover of the magazine this week is the kangaroo who was tied down by Rolf Harris, telling us all about its new life, fresh start and happy family. A quote on the front cover? Every leap for a kangaroo is a redemption arc.

It's a joke about how kangaroos go boing, boing, boing. The satirical cartoon this week is the grittier reboot of the gritty Disney reboot of The Little Mermaid. This time, Ariel is still half fish, half woman, but bisected vertically instead of horizontally. She must woo her prince in profile, and the sea witch Ursula is still half woman, half octopus. But this time, the octopus bit is the top half

and the person bit is on the bottom, but it still squirts ink. Don't ask me how. And our top story this week is sociolinguistics news. And this is the news that American Zoomers, which is the youth, not the people on Zoom, which is who we are now, the youth of America are now faking British accents as a coping mechanism. Keris, you've coped with a lot. Can you unpack this story for us? Yeah, so Americans are using bad British accents to say the things that they like, just to express the negative parts of themselves. So people who've been watching your classic, like, posh dramas with posh accents, but then also loads of reality TV, like Love Island type shows, they're now doing terrible impressions of the people on those shows every time they have to be passive aggressive or ask someone to do something that they kind of feel

bad that they have to ask them to do that thing or have to say something uncomfortable to their boss they'll be like oh i'll just i'll just use an accent uh and then it won't be like i'm saying it will be like the character that i'm performing is saying it and then some socio-linguistics now have decided that that's like a real phenomenon that we should study is if we didn't all spend the whole of the pandemic pissing about in our like apartments doing loads of different accents this is just something everybody does it's not a story just because Americans are doing it well certainly every that every comedian has done forever just to create a character in order to distance yourself from your own awful opinions.

John Robertson, you sit there with your dyed-white hair in front of your palace of dreams. Yeah, it's horrifying how wet these dreams are. Yeah, it's an absolute non-story. It's astonishing. My favourite part is, one, they go, Zoomers are doing this, and the first person they interview is 32 years old. So that's a

millennial, I believe, is what that's called. And the part where they went, fake British accent on TikTok has 188,000 searches. Well, that's nothing. That's exactly nothing in the world of TikTok. Man farts. Call me when the

kids are putting cinnamon in their mouths again. That was pretty good the first time. Have you ever done an accent to distance yourself from something that you've had to say? Yeah, I do an Australian accent to distance myself from having to say something. I didn't have a really broad Australian accent until I moved here because like a German comic said that to me and I'm going to do his. He just, he went, you know, I noticed when we are back at your home, you are a nice middle-class boy. And then you come out here just like you are Crocodile Dundee. And it's like, yeah, g'day. Oh, you know, it's an odd thing.

That's not an accent. This is an accent. Yes. And that's exactly right. And I do it. I do it over here because people go, oh, look at that deranged man. And then they go, and he's making an amusing noise as just as distinct from look at that deranged man. Oh, I see. He was pampered by his mother. And I'm all right.

OK, this is what happens when you're just told yes all your life, you know, which is a bit less sympathetic, perhaps, you know, then he ripped the lungs out of a lizard or something. My partner and I got very into doing accents in lockdown. So we had Jeff and Jeff, who are two divorced commentators who then just narrate our lives. So whenever we see someone doing something that we don't like in the street, we'll just be like, oh, Jeff, kids these days, what's happening with that Jeff and then we'll we'll Jeff and Jeff for a bit and I know that everybody else can hear us but they can't

hear us they can hear Jeff and Jeff so it's totally fine uh and I also had Hans the little German boy who my partner will not let me do in the house anymore because she finds him terrifying but that that was I think that was like third lockdown so we were quite deep in oh do it do the little german boy he just uh yeah he just uh he wanders around and he sneaks up on her and he says oh hello it is hans will you play with hans and she says no get off me and that's that's hans little german boy he's uh it's quite bad at the moment because he's not been allowed out for a very long time so i'm quite quite rusty. I feel like in every long-term relationship there is implied consent to Hans the Little German Boy. To a roving Hans here and there.

If you're marrying me, you're marrying Hans the Little German Boy. This is in the vows. I'm starting to worry this is everything the American right fears is happening. Wait, isn't everything that the American right fears happening everything? Yeah, they're doing it. It's amazing. Politics bell page. Yeah, usually.

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And you've heard of Friedrich Nietzsche, Immanuel Kant, Bertrand Russell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Soren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, Karl Marx. Now meet the guy they're all named after. It's Phil, the man who invented philosophy. Yes, that Phil. He's of an indeterminate age, but he's definitely got either a hat or a hairstyle he thinks means something,

and he'll tell you all about what he's thinking about stuff. 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'd like to forget. Acast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com Phil. Dating news now. Dating news now, and this is the news, that there is now a new job in this terrifying economy of rising living costs and horrible job-going-awayness. There is now a new job, if you want to be a freelancer,

to lure lonely people through the network of dating apps that exist in the world. John Robertson, you've guided people down some dark paths in the past. Can you unpack this story for us? You don't have to bring up how many times I've sold heroin. Yes, yeah, this is an appalling story. People going on various apps, whether they are looking for love or looking for a casual fling, are being charged, well,

money to speak to what is essentially an actor. It's somebody sitting there with a profile. They can see all of the person's profile information. They can see whether they have kids, where they live, whether they've been to therapy. All of their chat stuff is saved. And then rather like talking to a telemarketer who then says, oh, I just happen to be a rich divorcee from this area near you,

and at $2 a message, i will let you form a relationship with me a non-existent person uh yeah they speak it's amazing they'll speak to these people for two minutes at a time and they might uh perform up to 30 different people over the course of a shift feels ethical to me caris well i'm i'm just waiting for the netflix rom-com where a person who's pretending to be 30 other people meets a person who's pretending to be 30 other people meets another person who's pretending to be 30 other people and then they just keep accidentally meeting with all of their different personalities

and always hitting it off until they eventually find out that they are, you know, living in the same city and they've been in love with each other the whole time. Until at last Hans, the little German boy, finds his true match. I am also waiting for 60 weddings and a funeral. I think that would be great. I just, I don't think that this is such a,

like so everything on the internet is a lie. When I was at university, I used to make extra cash by writing fake Yelp reviews where you would get sent a list of restaurants and then you'd like Google the restaurants. Imagine having a meal there and then write positive Yelp reviews for the restaurant. So this this is just the whole of the Internet. This this happens like all the time. And what I really love about the story is that when so a lot of these people

that they interviewed said that they didn't know what they were signing up for they thought they were getting like a more kind of the jobs were all advertised as like translators or content moderators or things like that so they thought they were getting that kind of job and then they found out that actually their job was to lie to loads of people and so those people who were then employed by these companies started subcontracting their work to people in other countries so they are scamming the companies who are scamming the buyers by saying that they would do the work but actually they've got someone who lives in a country with much lower like living costs to do the like 42 hours or whatever it was of grunt work and then send them and then they put it through so it's it's an elaborate web of

lies which I think should be respected as well as feared. Now it's time for your reviews as you know each week our guest editor is bringing something to review out of five stars what have you brought in for us this week, Keris? I've brought in my notebook. As soon as there's now a video being made of this, this is my notebook. I will describe it for the podcast listeners. It is a very cute blue notebook, which has a fluffy daisy with googly eyes on the front. And I thought it was very cute and I was very sad. So I bought for myself and it's an absolute f***ing nightmare to write anything on the left hand pages

because it's got a massive bobbly daisy on the back so I can't use half the notebook but it does get you a lot of compliments so I give it three and a half stars three and a half stars the unusable review as we comedians like to call it

which is apt for an unusable review as we comedians like to call it uh which is apt for a an unusable notebook so i appreciate that very much uh john robertson what have you brought in for us this week i'd like to review the experience of uh walking a park with the very jet-lagged alice fraser uh on the afternoon of the death of disgraced australian uh entertainer rolf harris where you turn to alice go, yeah, I read about that on the train. I sent out a really dumb tweet about it. And Alice talking to you like like maybe she would like while humoring a child or a

lunatic goes, well, John, if that gets more than 15 likes, you can read it out on the show tomorrow. And 875 likes later, if the headlines don't use die me pedophile down sport i'll be very surprised the worst joke i have ever written and thanks to elon throttling my twitter account the most successful tweet i've had in three months five stars five stars five stars five stars i'll be in one of those The Shovel roundups or something. Climate emergency news now. And this is the news that enhanced rock weathering might be able to help climate change.

Keris, you've seen a rock. Can you unpack this story for us? Yeah, so humans have found another way to stop feeling guilty about climate change is the headline on this story because obviously we've we've it and we've so badly and we haven't brought the co2 levels down or we haven't and we haven't like done enough to stop them from rising so now people are looking at ways that you can absorb the co2 that we've already put in the atmosphere and all the the trees are like, hey, that's our job. We're really good at it. And then we have polluted so much that even the trees can't handle it.

And so they've worked out that there are particular kind of rocks that react with rainwater. And then that takes the CO2 out of the air because of science and all we have to do is blow up a bunch of those rocks and then spread them around the earth presumably using things like tractors and helicopters and planes and that's gonna solve all of our problems so there you go buy the second range rover there's no no consequences anymore that's what I got from the story I mean except that Range Rovers are the most stolen car in the UK according to recent data good I once saw a Range Rover tried to come off a roundabout which had a cycle lane on it and because there was a barrier between the the car bit and the cycle bit the Range Rover no longer

fit in the gap that they had made for cars and so it was just stuck on a roundabout forever. I think it's the only good bit of cycle infrastructure that I've seen in this city. My only contribution to this story at all is that the lead scientist that they've spoken to is Jim Mann, which sounds suspiciously like one of the made-up names I've been dating lately.

Good old Jim Mann. And Tom Person, who hangs out next to him. Yeah, Jim Mann, short for gymnasium hemisphere. Oh, yeah, he's toxic. It's great. It's really fun. Look at my abs. Ignore my personality, he's toxic. It's great. It's really fun. Look at my abs. Ignore my personality, he says.

And this is genuinely exciting environment news. Our next story is that up to 8% of housing material can be replaced with dirty nappies in order to make building houses more sustainable. John Robertson, you've changed a dirty nappy in your time. Can you unpack this story? Yeah, I certainly... When? When did I do this?

I'm not yes-ending this. This never happened. This has come out of Japan and seems like just a fantastic thing to do. The sand is the problem, apparently. But, yeah, there's huge amounts of piles of wasteful you know waste filled nappies around the world and i'll tell you something if these houses were being built in london they'd be more expensive than the normal ones this is uh yeah huge amounts of money for shit and that should be familiar to anyone uh trying to buy a house in any city in the western

world caris would you buy a house made out of eight percent dirty nappies i mean i would i would buy any house that i could afford give me a house um but i yeah what i really like about this i've put this in my list of like worst phd research projects because what the project was was to find how much nappy can you put in concrete before the house falls down? That was the research question. And so they cleaned all of these nappies, like scraped all of the poo out of them, like chemically treated them, broke them down, and then took the leftover material

and took some of the sand out of the concrete, which was very resource intensive to get, and filled it with nappies instead. And they said, well, let's put this much nappy in, let's put this much nappy in. Oh no, that house has fallen down. That house is still standing. And they found their nappy threshold.

And that's your whole, so that would be like your whole three year research project because they had to clean all of the nappies by hand. And that's all one research student did i know i found my nappy threshold he said this is why you do a performance studies degree we never had to do that crap study performance i'm just naturally this bad i think this is up there with the research student in America who had to wank off dolphins for her doctorate. Had to. You apply for your own doctorate.

Thank you very much. Is this the one that the dolphin fell in love with? Yeah. Oh, that's a sad story. But it was a house made completely out of concrete, no nappies involved, so unfortunately no crossover of the two stories. Keris, Keris, tell Alice, tell Alice.

There was a research project to see if you could have a dolphin as a pet like a cat or a dog, and obviously you can't. The house is very wet, which all of our houses will be soon, so carry on that's okay the nappies will absorb the water so uh they built this house that was kind of half submerged in water and the the human lived in the human bit and the dolphin lived in the dolphin bit and then they would kind of interact like you would play with a cat or a dog and they got this research student to live with the dolphin for a certain amount of

time but dolphins are very horny and i think the the thing that a lot of people don't understand about dolphins because they have very good pr is that they do want to have sex with humans and so this dolphin they picked the wrong dolphin it was a very very horny dolphin and it wouldn't do anything because it just wanted to hump the research student and so then she in order to do any research had to wank the dolphin off with her foot before it would comply with any of the tests and that in the in the name of science was decided to be like a good enough trade-off um i think they put it maybe in the limitations of the paper. I don't think it was like actually intended step three of the methodology and now.

Which is why you should never read science journalism headlines without checking the limitations in the abstract of the paper as it's published because you don't know whatever it is. Three tomatoes a day are healthy for you if you've wanked off a dolphin first. You know, you have to be careful. Three tomatoes a day are healthy for you if you've wanked off a dolphin first. You know, you have to be careful.

So how many sustainable homes are we making from dolphin semen? Oh, I'm sorry. I lost the thread of what we were talking about. We have to find the threshold first. You're going to have to masturbate a lot of dolphins to find out. How much cum stops the building falling down? To be honest, with the state of academia at the moment, there is definitely someone out there that would take that fellowship.

If it was guaranteed three years of funding, yes. There's a social media influencer. I can just see some brawny bald bloke with a beard being like, dolphin semen. I mean, this is what we need eccentric billionaires for, to go down this alley. See, this is what we need eccentric billionaires for, to go down this alley. See, this is an interesting question, Ped, as an editor of this illustrious paper.

How much beeping do you think you can put in here? Because it's not as though we're being explicit. I've only f***ed with bleeping this f***ing bit. And with that, we come to the end of this week's edition of the magazine. We're flipping through the ad section at the back. Keris, have you got anything to plug? Yes. Two things.

I'm doing lots of work in progress with my new show, Not Overthinking Things 2019, which is coming to Edinburgh Fringe this summer. So you can go see it in Cardiff. You can see it in Croydon. You can see it in Colchester. I'm not going to any cities that don't begin with the letter C. So that's unfortunate for anybody who lives anywhere else. And then Boys Night is back.

It will be in Oxford at the Old Fire Station on the 24th of June. So if you want to come see a whole bunch of boys and make a lot of noise, then you should get tickets for that. You absolutely should get tickets for that. It's a great night. John Robertson, have you got anything to plug? Yeah, I am on tour with my live-action video game show, The Dark Room. That's going all around the UK until the end of the year.

We've got Oxford, the Edinburgh Fringe, London, Manchester, just everywhere you care to name, unless it's one of those towns I'm not going to, in which case I'm sure that I'll get some nice emails from people going but why not my shithole town? It's like, well, because I don't have any money. But yeah, if you go to thejohnrobertson.com

you can see me there and there's all my social media and my Twitch channel. And thank you to our roving reporters, James of ET who sent in the Zuma Accents story, Sea Lips, who sent in the freelance catfishing story, Martin John Green, who sent in the magic dust story, and PK, who sent in the nappy house story.

If you would like to be a roving reporter for The Gargle, tweet us at HelloGogglers. We have two live gargle shows on the 15th and the 22nd in Edinburgh at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. If you would like to see the first ever and second ever live gargles come to Edinburgh and watch them on either the 15th

or the 22nd of August and I will be all around London and the UK you can find my gigs on alicefraser.com or patreon.com

slash alicefraser it's a one stop shop for all of my stand up specials podcasts, blogs my weekly tea with Alice salons and my weekly writers meetings

if you would like to write with me go and sign up there, it's pretty good value, 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.