The Luke and Pete Show - Happy Birthday Pete!

Episode Date: April 30, 2020

Pete turns 39 today! As a birthday treat, this show features an email about a red fireman’s thong, a story about a man experiencing a particularly bad midlife crisis and tales from Pete’s days working at the zoo.Also on today’s episode, we’re talking about iPods, mountains and a man whose given himself a new tattoo every single day of the lockdown.All that is soundtracked by D:Ream’s 90s track ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, which has apparently been blasting out all over Nottingham.Happy Birthday Donny!If you’ve spent your birthday in lockdown, or you just have an excellent story, tell us about it: [e-mail]!***Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or your preferred podcast provider. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks!*** Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

it's the little peach show it's a thursday it's actually my birthday so happy birthday me oh stop it luke do you know what i'm gonna do for my birthday uh eat some beef from the Japanese supermarket. And pour my delicious aggressive lemon yuzu sauce all over it. It's going to be big, baby. I'm going to be so powered by citrus by the end of this lockdown. You are not going to be able to see me for citrus. Joking aside, a very, very happy birthday. Many happy returns. I hope under the circumstances you can still have an enjoyable day, mate.

39 years young. Can't believe it. Birthdays are just silly, aren't they? I don't know why people get so wound up about them. Did you ever think you'd get to 39, Pete? What did you think as a 16-year-old you'd have been doing when you're 39? Well, I was hoping I wouldn't have my head in a fucking box in my front room. Speaking to a hairy boy.

Yeah, I am hairy at the moment. Although not bodily, unlike some of our colleagues. Not bodily, no. One of our colleagues has got his wife to do a haircut and she's done a better haircut than he's ever had, he said. Based on the photos we've seen, though. Oh, what? The back would be an absolute...

I don't know. We haven't seen a comprehensive view of it, have we? Good point. Good point, yeah. Good point. It's all about body. It's all about body. Well, I've not gone mad yet and shaved my head,

but maybe that's coming just around the corner. A little birthday treat, maybe? A little birthday treat. Whatever you do. The thing is, what I like about the lockdown is there are excuses to do the midlife crisis stuff you wanted to do just to get it out of the way. You know, like shave your head or grow a beard and stuff like that.

Leather trousers. Try things out with your body. Leather trousers. It's too warm for leather trousers. That's a January thing. That's a lockdown in Wuhan province. That's, youuary thing that's a lockdown in in in wuhan province that's you know that's called it's called there could i ever tell you about the guy used to share the same office building as me a number of years ago probably about 10 years ago now and uh he didn't

work for my company but he worked in the same building and i used to see him in the gym i used to go on the treadmill quite a lot because it's quite near my desk it's quite easy to um just to get involved so um and i would see him in the changing room and uh he went from i mean to be fair to him he did amazing he was like this married guy father of two he'd probably be about probably about 50 now i reckon he's probably about the age we are kind of then right and um he broke up with his wife like very sad divorce and all the rest of it and um and he was quite an overweight dude he was he was you know he was he was quite rotund and at the end it started to go to the gym and he completely transformed his body like he got properly into it and he became quite ripped and he looked good to be fair and then um but i

overheard him in the um in the changing changing rooms quite a lot talking to guys who were younger than me, and I was only late 20s at the time, talking about chicks and literally saying the word chicks. He had a motorbike in the car park with one of those open-faced helmets, and he wore quite weird clothes, and he started to wear a bandana and stuff. And I thought to myself, look, you're having a lovely time. Surely you're not hurting anyone. But that is the clearest, most obvious example of an MLC I've ever seen.

Well, and also just, you know, disposable income, not having to manage a household maybe or just looking after yourself. Your needs are a little cheaper. And I imagine he's probably not drinking much or eating much food. So he can put more diesel in that motorbike. And impress those chicks. And impress those chicks. That's the thing, though.

Because motorbikes are quite American. I think you can get away with having really flashy motorbikes in America, but you don't notice a midlife crisis in America quite so much because all of the things that we think of Americana, big muscle cars and big motorbikes, that's just stuff that people can be into. Over here, if you buy yourself a Cadillac, A, you can't go down most B roads,

and B, or A, it's just seen as a bit sad. Yeah, that's a fair point. I don't mean to be mean to him. I mean, you know, we've all done embarrassing things over the years, but like I say, he's not hurting anyone. I just found it to be mean to him. I mean, you know, we've all done embarrassing things over the years. But like I say, he's not hurting anyone. I just found it quite interesting since you brought it up. But Peter.

Hey, look. Sorry, go on. No, I was just going to say, I did trail on Monday a story I wanted to bring to your table today because I think it might, I said at the time that you would like it, but I think what I secretly mean by that is it's going to get you angry. Well, you know for a fact in my house I don't actually have a table, so good luck finding a place for it. You've got a computer table? It's more of a desk, isn't it?

Have you got a coffee table? No, not really. You haven't got a coffee table in your house? I've got coffee, all right, so fuck you. Okay. There's a guy um who has uh decided to this is not a story i'll talk about but i just want to run this past you as well because there's a guy who has decided to give himself a new tattoo on his own body every day of lockdown oh wow he's taking it quite badly. Yeah. Has he ever tattooed before?

I think he might be a tattoo artist, actually, to be fair to you. Oh, okay, that's fine, that's fine. And the one thing he has done is that he's done these tattoos on his body. Now, I can only assume that some of the tattoos he's done existed before the lockdown. He didn't tattoo them himself because he's got a really well rendered blue whale on his stomach but it's the right way up as you're looking at it so he would have had to draw that and tattoo that on himself upside down no because um you've had a tattoo was your tattoo

did they use flash for it like did they did like because you draw it on that you draw it on something or print it onto something and then it gets put onto that inky transfer kind of paper yeah and then that gets

and then that gets layered on your thing so you could so you could have drawn it the right way up I mean I would say he's got

I mean he's got a Joe Exotic tattoo so I mean that's how he's getting on has he oh okay right okay that's how he's getting on

with kids yeah on the Monday show i try i um i um i basically trailered uh a a story that i said i'll do today that i thought you'd be you'd find uh you'd you'd love pete um i was being a bit mischievous there because i actually think you might well hate it and to me it's a classic example of someone just getting like way too into it and possibly ruining it for for many people right so you know every thursday people go out and clap frontline nhs staff to show a bit of appreciation and it's and the first time it ever happened um i completely forgot it was happening or i hadn't read about it or something and i didn't

know what it was and i heard it quite organically and i looked it up and i was like that's actually a really lovely thing um and i found it quite touching so yeah as whatever happens with with and i don't know if this is a uk thing i suspect it might not just be a uk thing but it certainly is the case in the uk that once something is and you've said this before pete in a slightly different context that once something good happens it kind of almost instantly gets automatically ruined right so usually people who do parody songs i always find well having said that people have access to instruments you say that well this is exactly right because in nottingham every thursday they go out and do their clap and um all of a sudden a dj in nottingham has decided to get his

dj gear obviously that's not getting much use at the moment he's big speakers sticking on his balcony and play at maximum volume d reams things can only get better Right, okay. Yeah, I was half aware of it. Why that song, though? I find Things Can Only get better is inherently a slightly depressing song anyway however poppy it might be or it just reminds me of the labour government of 1997 yeah well listen dj um i think his name is chris hales yeah dj chris house i'll hand the quotes over to him pete to answer your questions it's just an absolute anthem he said

everybody knows it young and old it lifts spirits it's a feel-good song things can only get better as long as we stay at home and only go out for essential things which i think is which i believe is the full title of the song by the way wow i mean yeah um how long's the song for four minutes it would just go on for too long for me i think it's a minute isn't it it's like a it's like a minute's applause banging your pans and How long's the song? Four minutes? It would just go on for too long for me, I think. It's a minute, isn't it? It's like a minute's applause, banging your pans and stuff. I agree.

Four minutes is way too long. I can concede that the very first time you heard the opening bars, you would think, oh, that's quite good. And then, do I want to hear that every Thursday at 8 o'clock exactly? Just imagine it. If this goes on for three months, imagine it. Every Thursday where you live at eight o'clock exactly just imagine it if this goes on for three months imagine it every thursday where you live at eight o'clock you're going to start hearing you can walk my path it would be like it would induce psychosis you you start to do that thing where you know the idea of this of the sunday blues where you know you've got to get up early the next day it would be like that i just don't think he's thinking it through.

It was like going to New Orleans at any point in the last five years where every single band and every single bar on Bourbon Street was doing an admittedly excellent rendition of the Bruno Mars track, Uptown Funk, endless Uptown Funk. You could not go anywhere. And then I guess that probably would have been replaced by Despacito. You know, because I've got a guy who walks on Soho with a massive boombox and he plays out

My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion, et cetera. And he does that every night. Obviously not now because the people aren't outside pubs drinking, so they can't tip him. So, yeah, I'm broadly against people who will take it upon themselves to abuse people's ears with music that they like. To me, it's like the lockdown equivalent of taking your acoustic guitar to a barbecue.

Yeah. Has anyone actually done that? Barbecues are for eating and socializing all right taking it to a camp camp yeah yeah house party house party because i've got i know someone and i'm not going to name them but i know someone who tried to sell their ipod right and rather they tried to sell it on ebay and what would you do if you're trying to sell an iPod on eBay, right? You would completely wipe it, restore it to factory settings, and put it on eBay, right? He not only kept all his music on it and listed the music on the listing, but he also tried to charge the prospective buyer more by saying,

well, it's got loads of amazing music on it. So you probably want to you probably want to buy that one more you want to pay more for it and we and we said to him well do you not think that the person buying it would have their own music taste yeah but this is quality yeah i mean you are getting those songs for free that is that is good value but i don't know how you'd get them i don't know how they would survive the wiping that you would need to do to get your songs on it if you know i also just don't i just also don't think that if you're going to purchase something that's specifically for storing music the tune of perhaps 100 pounds or whatever you necessarily

want to have to have it dictated to you what music you can have on it right okay yeah um what if you're really into scooter everyone likes scooter so everyone likes D-Rim, mate. So that's an absolute anthem. And the other story that caught my eye, Pete, this week on your birthday episode was to celebrate your birthday, I noticed that we can add Mount Everest to the list of places that can get

a better Wi-Fi broadband connection than you. Oh, right. Have they installed some kind of Wi-Fi broadband connection than you. All right. Have they installed some kind of Wi-Fi connection? Get your tinfoil hat on because a Chinese communications company has installed a mast on the mountain, meaning you can send selfies from directly on the summit of Mount Everest. Now, is it for selfies or just genuine rescue requests? I know people have systems that allow them to get rescued on the side of mountains,

but I mean, presumably it's not just for Instagram and stuff like that, expressly. I don't know, and I suspect you're probably true. You're probably correct on that. But one thing I do know, having read this article, is that one of the photos attached to it was very indicative of the sheer number of people who climb or attempt to climb Everest. I had no idea. I knew it got more popular and people were trying to do it

and people were dying and there was a problem with littering and stuff like that. But this photo attached to this article I read, there was literally, if you can imagine a snake of people a proper full-on queue shoulder to shoulder probably across about 100 odd people all waiting to get up to the top because everyone's really fit now everyone like no well if you ever sort of see mount fuji you sort of think of uh you know it's one of the things to do in japan it's probably one of the easier uh mountains to climb uh you climb during the day stay over and

then you you um you know experience an amazing sunrise the next day and um you're in a situation where you are just walking like bum to bum with old ladies with their sticks and you know they're making short work because it's not a hard climb but um yeah it's it's during on during on peak season it's actually a bit shit yeah i found that i had that experience with um i mean it's difficult situation isn't it because you obviously in that situation you were there as well so i mean you're part of it and and it's the same when i went to the isle of sky my wife and i go to the isle of Skye quite a lot, as you know. And the most recent time we went there, it was very weird as far as we got engaged upon the old man of Storr, which is not really a very high mountain or anything. It's just like a nice peak to climb up and it's very picturesque.

And when I proposed to Mimi, there was no one there, like no one there. And then a year or two ago when we went there for the most recent time, pretty busy to the point of where there were quite a lot of Chinese tourists trying to climb it in like heels and nice clothes. It was quite weird how many people there, and I saw an article actually subsequently saying that whoever's in charge of all that stuff on The Isle of Skye is actually quite worried at the sheer volume of people going there now.

Yeah. But look, you cannot halt international tourism except during the pandemic. Pandemic, yeah. They'll be gagging for them. They'll be gagging for them next year, I tell you what. So maybe the big licks now. Maybe nature will have time to heal, Pete.

Yeah. I did like that trope online did you see the one with the crabs at the airport the crabs what they've taken the crabs have uh so basically so basically there's this trope on the internet for those who haven't seen it where they'll someone will post a picture of a load of wild pigs in some spanish city and it will say oh pigs are returned to this area nature is healing and there's loads of different examples and then someone there was some kind of uh transport of uh crabs to as in like sea crabs or whatever they are i don't know what they look like crustaceans um through some airport for commercial purposes and the box broke or something like that obviously

they must have to carry livestock somehow and the crabs were just all over the luggage belt of the airport and then someone put crabs are returning to the airport nature is healing the idea of them having that many that that amount of crabs in one bag though i just why have you got so many crabs yeah i've done i've spoken about before that um that program about an Australian airport security section where people are just returning from Iran with just bags and bags of spices. Just like they have spices. Everyone's got spices. Don't worry about it.

It's fine. Thinking of crabs, though, they're kind of underrated when it comes to good quality internet content for animals. Because you can put a cigarette in a crab's claw. You can put a little knife in there. You can just pick one up and throw one at a wall, film it. Tennis racket, I was going to say. Yeah, whack it over a wall. That's outrageous by you.

Nip your toe at the beach. Should we have a little break and come back, Pete, and after which we can do some birthday emails. I mean, I say birthday emails, I just say those emails as normal, but it's your birthday. All right, then. And we are back with the Luke Pitcher, and it's time for some emails.

Luke, would you like to kick us off? Because I know you are chomping at my bit. Why not? I think the phrase is champing at the bit not chomping and I think people are going to get confused. It is champing in it, yeah. I always get hunkering and bunkering mixed up when hunkering down. That's easily done.

Yeah, bunkering, hunkering. I think it's bunking down and hunkering down, isn't it? Yeah, that's the one. That's the one. Doesn't matter, it's easily done down and hunkering down isn't it yeah that's the one that's the one doesn't matter it's easily done um alex alex has been in touch saying uh hi luke and pete long time listener first time emailer i wanted to get in touch to tell you a story that doesn't belong to a particular thread but it's the tale of how i managed to get 700 people evacuated from my uni halls my best male friend from university is gay and was given a rather salacious fireman's costume from Anne Summers for his birthday by his then boyfriend.

This costume consisted of a yellow fireman Sam style hat and a bright red thong. He wasn't particularly... That's it. Do you like that? I mean, is that it? It's not much of a costume. It probably costs about 50 quid.

It's not going to protect you from a back draft. No, definitely not. Apparently, he wasn't particularly into dressing up, but our group and the boyfriend had a good laugh about it anyway. Fast forward a few weeks, and the group of us are relaxing in my study room one Saturday afternoon, enjoying the pale Manchester summer sun streaming through our windows. Outside was so tempting that we decided to go out and enjoy it in our courtyard

and kick a ball around. After 10 minutes or so, I dart back inside to get a glass of water and open my bedroom door to find a roughly one-meter-square patch of carpet on fire. Ironic. The opening of the door must have caused more oxygen to hit the flames. Again, ironic. A backdraft, and they seemed to double in size before my eyes thankfully this caused the fire alarm to go off and it jerked me back to reality so i leapt forward to stamp the flames out goodbye my favorite pair of nike air

maxes i was able to get the fire out but not before two campus guards came into my room to see me standing sheepishly next to a burnt out patch of carpet as the evacuating students filed past my open door one of the guards bent down and picked up a singed red fireman's thong using a big biro this was back in the day where people could smoke indoors and the red fireman's thong must have been the perfect catalyst for a still lit cigarette no idea how the thong got in my room, but it did cost me 400 quid to get the carpet fixed. Keep up the good work, Alex.

Jesus Christ. I mean, I like the idea that he calls it a fireman's thong. At this point, it's just a thong. And I like the fact that the security, I mean, what is it, like a campus security kind of guy, probably not that much formal training, probably picks up with a biro like he's the firing investigative officer. Like he's a browbeat detective. Yeah, exactly. Looks like we've got the thong in question, sir.

Fireman's thong, right? At no point have a couple of firemen jumped into a fire truck with the siren going and one of them goes to the other, Oh, God, what's up? I forgot to put my thong on it's never happened exactly i mean because to be honest you want to be wearing um trousers at the very least because sliding down a fireman's pole just wearing a thong you're gonna get burned you're just gonna get burned and you're gonna damage your testicles and speaking of which uh ewan gruel which is a great name uh check my balls is the option as thealls is the subject.

Hey, guys. A few months ago, you were encouraging guys to check their plums to spread awareness of testicular cancer. And coincidentally, a few weeks after that, I did develop a pain in one of mine. I rang the doctors, fearing the worst, and they were insistent. I had to have an emergency appointment as soon as possible. I went to the doctors that afternoon.

Unfortunately, it was nothing sinister. However, I was diagnosed with possibly my weirdest injury to date. I experienced the pain, but mostly just after exiting the shower, but also when I was getting out of the car. Essentially, moving from one microclimate to a colder one, one warm microclimate to a colder one. I had pulled my cremaster muscle. The cremaster muscle is the muscle responsible for lowering

and raising the testicle during changes of temperature. And having pulled this, every time the old boys got a bit cold, the muscle would contract to raise the testicle, causing me some discomfort. Isn't that incredible? I've heard about this before, but I thought that was, you could somehow like turn your testicle in such a way, but it was due to the cremaster muscle getting involved and essentially tying off the bloodstream to your testicle in such a way, but it was due to the chromastomuscle getting involved

and sort of essentially tying off the bloodstream to your testicles or the tubes that are within. I initially felt bad that I had been rushed to the front of the queue for what was essentially a pulled muscle, but I was quickly reassured by my doctor who said that it is important that anyone with testicular pain gets it checked out immediately. He would prefer to have 10 false alarms and emergency appointments than one case of cancer in a patient

who had waited weeks for a general appointment. Moral of the story, don't be afraid to get even the smallest pain checked out. It could even turn out to be something humorous like mine or it could save your life. Keep talking bollocks, Ewan. Girl, thank you very much for that one, mate. And I'm glad your ball muscle is back intact. So I've heard of a twisted testicle,

but I've never heard of that particular... I didn't know that was what it was called. No, very, very weird. A friend of mine who played football at university had a similar thing, and he said it was unbelievably painful. So do stay on top of that. Pete, I've got an email here from fee and dan and i it's just

one for you basically i'll just it's your birthday i'll treat you with this because um you might find it very very exciting so they say hi luke and pete second time emailers here we've been using lockdown time to weed our entire garden and listening to you guys as we go we decided to start right from the beginning as we ran out of current episodes pretty quickly anyway we heard your men carter sections for the first time and wondered if you also used to have this cd wrong when you were younger dorking kinder's leaves the way things work it rings a bell i may have had it in my possession or certainly it may have been at my school at the time well fee and danee and Dan say, in their opinion,

it's vastly superior to N-Carter for so many reasons. You get woolly mammoths guiding you around some sections. There's a whole big section about moving parts. You might already have talked about this back in the day. It's not. I just wanted to throw it in there. So I haven't, I think I may have vaguely heard of it, but I couldn't tell you anything about it. Is it something you could get hold of and run the rule over?

I don't think anyone, the only way I would be able to get a hold of it would be eBay. And even then it would probably run on a Windows 3.1 device. Some of these Windows 95, it would be actually quite hard to run in the first place unless it was in DOS. And then also you've maybe somebody put it up on a torrent. I mean, you could probably host the whole thing on a website these days yeah could you not get it can you sort of manufacture

something to do with some of your cables and get it onto your onto your macbook I mean to be fair like my uh spent at a zoo was meant to be creating a cd-rom uh using old macromedia director but uh I obviously failed in doing that um how did you feel a little bit wary just laziness and just i just feel like uh cd-roms give me the chills a little bit and they you know i i don't like thinking about them i don't like thinking about mind maze and in car 95 it's it makes me it makes me it reminds me that i didn't do a job that I was paid, well, to be honest, a very small amount of money to do for a year in the education department of Twycross Zoo. So Twycross Zoo hired you for a year and said,

make us an educational CD-ROM about the zoo. Yeah. And so what did you envisage that would have taken, what would you envisage that job to have entailed? It would have taken two months really really hard graft um i would like to point out that while everybody else in my class got a reasonable amount of money minimum wage at least to do the job that they were doing i spent a year at the zoo getting paid 50 pounds a week now that was um that was 50 pounds a week and i had to make my own way to twycross from uh leicester which was incredibly expensive

how far away was that i mean it's in warwickshire so it's like leicestershire to warwickshire and you got you know see i'd have to get a train to nanitaton every day. So I managed to sort of talk my way down to three days a week. It was prohibitively expensive. It was costing me way more money than it was, you know. But it was an educational establishment. Zoos generally don't pay very well. It's a vocational thing, and the people who own zoos generally make a bit of cash out of the whole endeavour

to be quite frank Right, so you were supposed to basically put together an encyclopedia, how far down the line did you get with it? I filmed a lot of chimpanzees I knew you were going to say that I just spent a lot of time with a digital camera filming

and filming and filming because I just got to watch the chimps and the bonobos do what they do best, which is fuck about. And chuck shit at each other. Nice. Well, listen, that's the end of the show today, I think. That's the end of your birthday episode, Peter. But we end by metaphorically throwing shit at each other.

And we'll be back on Monday, I suppose. What are you going to do for the rest of your special day? My special day? It'll probably involve Yuzu aggressive lemon sauce. I don't know, man. It's having birthdays under lockdown. I know a lot of you guys have experienced that as well recently. Maybe...

A little Zoom call with your parents? Yeah. I mean, they barely call me on my birthday at the best of times, to be fair. So I doubt they'll be into all of that. But, yeah, it's probably going to be a very ordinary day. But hopefully I'll get through it. Hopefully I'll get through to 39 proper.

39, that's a number, isn't it? Wow. Yeah. Hopefully your dad will get you a big sort of industrial-sized box of crisps. They're probably still piling through those as we speak. All right. Listen, that's about all we've got time for on the Luka Pete Show for this Thursday. Thank you very much for joining us.

Join me as well in wishing Mr. Pete Donaldson a very happy birthday. We'll be back on Monday. We'd love to hear from you. Hello at lukapeteshow.com. We've got lots of emails to pour through, but we always want more. So do indulge us on that front too. Say goodbye, Pete Donaldson, the birthday boy.

Goodbye, Pete Donaldson, the birthday boy. Remind me to talk about Floating Hotel next week because I won't. Okay, yeah. Floating Hotel on Monday. It has been promised and we'll do our best to deliver. It's goodbye from me as well.

See you next time this was a staccato production