Three Bean Salad - Posters

Episode Date: April 27, 2021

A man called Gareth suggests that we discuss the topic of posters and see where it takes us. A counterfeit Santana. Prince Charles's toilet seat. Large and terrifying flightless birds.Get in touch:[e-mail]@beansaladpod

Hello, and welcome to the first ever episode of Three Beans Salad. I am Mike also in Three Beans Salad. The other beans are going to introduce yourself. Benjamin Bartridge, yeah. And Henry Packer, Bean. Henry Packer, and we will be discussing a thing. I actually, this is just completely coincidental this, but I did actually soak a packet of mixed beans last night. And that's exactly the sort of thing we won't be talking about on this show. Because it's not a bean themed show in any way, but I say, well, we might. I bought a packet. I can't promise anything. I tell you what, I bought a packet of beans in a supermarket,

dry beans, right? It was a bean mix. So lots of different colors of beans. They look quite gorgeous at that point, quite attractive. They look a bit like jelly beans, but then that nature's beans, right? I soaked them overnight because there's so much work you have to put into beans. But anyway, I did it. I soaked them overnight. This morning, I then had to, I then had to boil them for an hour and a quarter. And at the end of all that, all you end up with is just like a bunch of beans. It's such a high maintenance product for what it is, which is a load of beans. And also, and that anecdote. Well, then quite innately illustrates the nature of this podcast is that

there's going to be, we're going to be discussing all sorts of things, you know, a topic. Sorry, I didn't realize that I knew it was called free beans salad. I didn't realize that we were talking principally about beans. No, no, this is where the introduction has already gone very wrong, although it did illustrate the point that there won't necessarily be any big payoffs, just as has been illustrated by Henry's bean anecdote. Although having said that, you may have judged me a bit too soon in terms of payoffs because I haven't actually finished my bean anecdote. One, because actually the anecdote itself is still happening in the sense that I've still got

most of those beans in my fridge. This is very much a hot anecdote. We're made an anecdote in a way. I don't know how it's going to end yet. And that's life, isn't it? So there'll be truth in the podcast as well like that. But one thing, they've lost all their lustrous color through boiling. They've become gray, just a kind of uniform, gray, sludgy mush. They filled the house with a really horrible bean smell. So then the opposite of lobsters. The opposite of lobsters is what we've discovered about beans. Lobster starts gross. You boil it, it becomes a lovely orange lustrous snack food. Whereas when it starts out, it's a disgusting kind of Satan sort of like a hellish demon,

slimy creature of the hellish deeps, isn't it? Gross. That stinks of beans. Tentacles. It's got slime. It's got eyes that go in different directions. It's a fucking absolute freak, isn't it? It's just like a cooked bean. What you're saying is... It's very much the cooked bean of the sea. It's often referred as the cooked bean of the sea. Also, it does say likes to soak. It'll soak for even longer than beans. It'll soak for almost all of its childhood and adult life. Anyway, all I'm saying is beans, they're a lot of work yet to really feel that they're worth it. Okay. A cautionary tale there from Henry Packer.

Mike, I think in a way that Henry's little ongoing hot anecdote there is a nice explainer really to the audience as to what the podcast is. I think we should tell them what the format is. They probably are none the wiser at this stage. No, fair play. So the idea is that we will in each episode discuss a different topic. This episode, we aren't discussing beans, but were we discussing beans? The sort of thing Henry just did would have been sort of in the wheelhouse. But potentially would have been cut out.

Yeah, very much the same... Might have been cut out. But yeah, very much the same level of preparation. I mean, nothing. We are ambushed with a topic. We embrace that topic for one episode and then we are done. But also, you decide, don't you, the listener? The listener tells us what to talk about. They will, although not for this episode, because this is our first... And not for the first six, actually, because we've already recorded some. And instead of getting prompts from you, the public, we've got prompts from a man called Gareth. Yeah. So essentially, the audience gets to decide in the same way that Russia is a democracy.

Yeah. What? Getting pretty heavyweight early doors there, Henry. Yeah, I thought there was actually a fair comparison. And that, you know, it has the structures of a democracy, doesn't it? Nominate, is it? Russia? Yeah. Okay. So again, but again, Henry, you are doing a great job actually of illustrating,

because again, the levels of research, we might not necessarily know what we're talking about when we start talking about something. Yeah. Well, welcome. Welcome. And if we do have any listeners in Russia, get in touch. Absolutely. Do you know what I mean? Listeners should feel free not only to bamboozle us with new topics, but also, you know, have you had a different experience of boiling beans? This is your platform. Finally, at last, it's here. Okay. Well, let's try this. This is three bean salads with Henry Packer, Benjamin Partridge,

and Mike Wozniak. Every episode, we're going to talk about a thing. That's right. And that thing will be picked at random from a hat full of suggestions from the audience, but we don't yet have an audience. So it's currently just picked out of a hat of suggestions from a man called Gareth, late 30s from Neath South Wales, lovely guy. Here we go. So today's theme is posters. Posters? Who are your, who or what were your posters?

Teenaged posters. So I had, I got into comics at a point, and I had loads. The idea of it now is so embarrassing to me, but I had loads and loads of Batman posters that I thought were incredibly cool. And you know, when you're a teenager, it's all about like, I'm into this thing. And other people who are into it might realise I'm into it too and think I'm good. So that's why you get into t-shirts so much, t-shirts with the band that I'm into on. And you really hope that one day somehow you'll connect with someone, essentially, you'll be on a train or

You'll signal them to the right try. It may even be a band you don't particularly ever listen to or like. Yeah, it may very well be that. And what you're hoping will happen is across a crowded train, the most beautiful woman in the history of the earth will see the t-shirt band that you're into. And she will waft across the crowded commuter train and sweep you up in her arms and carry you away and live with you, even though you are 14 years old and she works in the city. It's quite a maternal element to that fantasy. It's very revealing.

Basically, you want connection, right? You want to signal what you're into. It's part of your identity, isn't it? And posters are really important when you're a teenager, is like, I'm into this. And also, I'm going to publicly say that I'm into it so that hopefully other people who are into it will make love to me. Oh, there's both curation going on. Yeah, because you're imagining someone is going to come around at some point. Yeah. But the thing that was so pathetic about it was that for someone to notice my Batman posters, they'd have to befriend me and come into my room. Do you know what I mean? It's the long game, isn't it? It's such a long game, especially with a city professional.

And likely you're going to be in a groom someone two or three times your own age. Exactly. A Deutsche Bank executive. A Deutsche Bank executive, a multilingual French economist. Yeah. And I'm doing my... Oh, my God. You are so, you are so like Batman. You know, Henry, you're only 17 years old and I am an incredibly successful, physically extraordinary specimen of a German banking woman. I live my life every day. Meetings, meetings. Oh, no. Every day, another man with a big heavy watch and multiple cars. Oh, I'm bored of them, Henry. What's it you that I like? You with your

folders, your A-levels hanging over you and... Your new pubes. Your freshly minted pubes. You know, I like that you respect your family. You still go on holiday with them. I like that. Yeah. I like that you still have small pets in the cage in your room. I like this. A lot of the men I'm meeting, Henry, in Dusseldorf, downtown in New York, I do a lot of international meetings. They're not like you, Henry. They don't have a gerbil that they've named after their favorite wizard. You know what, Henry? A lot of them don't even have a favorite wizard. Oh, no. That's what I did on some level. I did think that was going to happen if I got enough of the right Batman posters up. If you're chance to... Well, you've got to be in it to win

it, right? That was the one time I really got into something enough to go, I want to live in a kind of igloo made of this stuff. I think you're the only person I know whose teenage fantasy involves being on a commuter train as well. You know, it's just a grind, isn't it, Henry? Every day I'm here on my way to an expensive meeting, you know, and every day I've got so much perfume on me, and I've got so many little clinky clink metal things on my handbags. I've got so many handbags, the little clinky metal things that keep it together, you know, Henry? And I get so tired. Teenage levels of research as well, you know, expensive meeting because that's what they have expensive meetings. And Henry, your hand gets so bored and hot and on the way into work, you know,

and I see you, Henry, there, sitting there, and I know that you've got like detective comics, which is the best when Norm Brayfogel was illustrating Batman. So this is issues 375 to around early 400s. Frank Miller did some of the writing. Oh, and I see you've doodled your own version of the Joker in your little notebook. Is that your own doodle? Do you illustrate so beautifully, Henry? I love the way you draw the Batman and all the villains, you know them all, Henry. Oh, and look here, you've invented your own little car, or it's your own special superhero car you've invented. It's called Henry's special mega car. Oh, it can fly and go underwater and go invisible. It can go to so many places, Henry. I'm feeling

very, very, very hot now. You know, that kind of thing. Is that, yeah. As a teenager, I largely lusted after other teenagers, I think, rather than professional women. I think the truth is I went to mainly boys' schools until girls didn't come in until quite late on in my schools. And I just developed an entirely bizarre fantasy woman in my head who I was in love with, who was some sort of German banking commuter. So it's lack of exposure rather than an old knob on young shoulders situation. Totally. It would have been an amalgam creation from various romantic comedies and things I'd seen on TV, I suppose. Were there female teachers in your school? Yes. Yeah, I was brutally in love with my

math teacher, brutally. The level of unlikeliness to the fantasy I had, which is I just thought that one day after a class, she would simply ask me to stay behind as everyone else left and just tell me that she loves me and, you know, we'd start kissing and stuff. I genuinely, I wanted it to happen so much that I would be quite slow at putting my stuff back into my pencil case at the end of the lesson. I would quite, I mean, I'm not going to lie. I'd give it the opportunity. Yeah, I would be really, I would, I would like, oh, in goes this pencil. I guess that panel after going at some point. Here he goes. It just really didn't occur to you at the time that she might be in a relationship and it might be with someone who doesn't even own a pencil case at

all. Yeah, almost. It never occurred to me that that was almost certainly the case. What about you, Mike? What were your walls adorned with? Can I imagine what you've got in your walls, please say? Yeah, go on. Okay, I'm going for a big poster of an F-15 fighter jet. Okay, yeah. Can I guess something? I think one of those Andy Warhol prints where it's like six faces, but it's an Enoch Powell. It's something you had to order especially. From Andy Warhol himself. From Andy Warhol himself. He did it as a private commission. Yeah, my parents had to remortgage the house for that one, but yeah. I don't know why we're

absolutely, no reason at all to be painting you as some sort of racist. I don't know why we're doing this. A tattered Union Jack from the Boer War. This is uncanny, lads. Maybe a sort of guitar hero on the wall. I know you're a kind of, you're a Clapton guy. Yeah, you're on it now. Yeah, I can see a kind of silhouette of Clapton. It's all that kind of stuff. Sort of back arched in that kind of ecstatic guitaring way that really, really turns on very, very middle-of-the-road people. Isn't it? That sense that the man and the guitar have become one. Yeah, we level that stuff. That really gets your dull bastards going.

That's middle-of-the-road provincial dull arts. If there's anything you enjoy more than pouring diesel into your lawnmower. Oh, yeah. And then put on, go back into the house at the end of the day, back in the bungalow, put on a bit of Gary Moore's Parisian walkways and do a bit of arched back. I didn't even know what that is. It's the ultimate of what you're talking about, basically. It was heavily guitar-based, I would say. The other thing I can imagine is framed, a handkerchief, which you think the sort of 30%

chance was one of Santana's headdress sort of things. That you found it, you found it in Paris and you knew there was a Santana gig that night. Santana would have been absolutely banging on. Was it you, Henry, who saw a Santana tribute band? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought it was Santana, but to this day, I couldn't tell you for sure whether or not it was actually Santana or a Santana tribute band. I went to, I did a gig somewhere in some town not far from London.

I can't remember where it was now. Some sort of market town with a corn exchange sort of gig. The kind of place where Santana regularly walks up. Well, that's the thing. And I was in a small room. I did my show. And then I was talking to one of the tech people and he was like, oh, it's quite exciting Santana's here tonight.

Santana's performing in the main room. And I was like, oh, brilliant. I might go and check out Santana. So I went, I went and the room that Santana was in wasn't huge. It wasn't as big as I was. I can only really, I imagine Santana playing a stadium-sized sort of room. Yeah, he can fill a space, can't he? He's bombs on seats.

I would say it's like a 200-seater. Right. Safe. It's a very safe booking. Safe for Santana. It's a 200-seater. Everyone, I just gradually know, I thought, you know, Santana, he's one of those sort of slightly world music stars who whether

there's like about like 70 people on stage during the Santana gig. A lot of pipes. There's lots of pipes. Little drums. Load various drum kits, like, yeah, multiple drum kits, lots of backing singers. Four generations of a single family in the percussion section. At least.

Exactly. It's that world music vibe. So for a start, it takes quite a long time to locate Santana. Anyway, by adventure, by adventure, I thought, oh, that's Santana. He was sort of moving up and down the stage. He had the shades and the headdress. I thought, yeah, that checks out. That seems to be Santana.

But then I noticed how old the audience were. Ancient. Like everyone was 70s or more. Like most of the audience, a lot, a lot of the audience were, in my mind, I'm thinking on drips. They probably wasn't. I think they were 80s. It was like one person.

Was it just one massive drip on the ceiling? A series of tubes passing into them. So everyone was very, very old. Hunched, crooked, lots of carers, wheelchairs. I was like, okay, fine. There's just an old. But like, and then I looked to the stage. I thought, Santana, this is quite weird.

Santana's playing. There's 200 seats or pensioners. It's where he workshops his stuff, his new stuff. Maybe. Maybe so. Maybe he was preparing for a big gig. But then also I realized that you look at Santana himself. It's very hard to tell if Santana is essentially in disguise as his look,

because he's got shades and the headdress on. It's a bit like the headdress. He's got this sort of hanky on his head. Slash and Guns N' Roses. I always feel like Slash may have franchised himself out in the past and basically now just sits at home. Saddam Hussein did the same thing. It's a good move.

If you think you're going to become a big rock star or a major dictator, get shades and some facial hair into your look, early doors or hanky on your head. Something like that. And eventually you can retire and simply franchise it out. You're earning money for free. And anyway. You could be playing corn exchanges in small towns in England while you're sitting at home in Mexico, five at the same time.

But anyway, so then I was like, oh, maybe this must be a Santana tribute band. And I think I Googled it, but it said like Santana and the something's playing. I don't know. Just to this day, I'm not entirely sure whether it was Santana or not. I think it probably wasn't. But no one there seemed to know. I mean, the audience would for a number of reasons. So they had a perfectly nice time thinking it was Santana.

And what do you think? Do you think that was Santana or not? 100% it wasn't Santana. Oh, was it definitely not Santana? No, he was playing a 300,000 seater Coliseum in Greece. Okay. I think it was. And you've stumbled across the greatest live music conspiracy of all time.

And no one will ever give you a straight answer now. I think in a more broad way, doesn't it make us ask the question, who is Santana? Because if a load of people, if 200 pensioners watch a Santana gig and go home telling their grandchildren this or a Santana gig, does it matter? I mean, maybe it was a Santana gig. I mean, the other option is that Santana himself,

like a sort of king that likes to one day a year go amongst his people in disguise. Maybe once a year, he likes to actually take part in a Santana tribute act. He flies across the entire round to Gosha and likes to be among, not his people, but some very old people in Aylesbury. Yeah, in disguises himself. Now, if that doesn't make you think, I give up. Ben, what posters did you have on your walls? The two that I can remember are pretty embarrassing in the way that all

tinnish posters are. I had, for some reason, a huge poster of Paul Whitehouse from The Fast Show. Did you know that? That's weird. As himself, like actor headshot or in character? He was in character as the guy who used to go, brilliant. Do you remember that? I can't really remember how the sketch went,

but the guy who sort of said everything was brilliant. It was a big picture of him dressed as him doing thumbs up, and it had the word brilliant underneath. That's firmly lame. That is lame, isn't it, that poster? Yeah, I mean, that's lame-er than Batman, I would say. That is even lame-er than Batman. You have a poster of Paul Whitehouse.

We love The Fast Show. And Deutsche Bank, we love it. The other one I remember is I was heavily into Liv Tyler in The Lord of the Rings films. Oh, really? You had elf fantasies. She was some sort of queen elf, wasn't she? And she talked in an incredibly sort of voluptuous, slow way. Oh, because she was as old as the hills.

Yeah, as young as... But she had a complexion of someone in their mid to late 20s, even though she's 4,000 years old. That was the unrealistic beauty standard that I was holding all women to. She would move a lot, and she'd just be very sagacious. Yeah, she had a noble stillness to her. That's what I was into, yeah. She was of the forests.

You had that interesting combination. And I think I got it for free. I think when I went to see one of The Lord of the Rings films, I think the second one, I think they were just giving them out in the cinema. So I got one of those. You couldn't believe your bloody luck. I feel like you had a pretty lackluster attitude to your own posters there.

You were just like, yeah, you just got to give them on your own. I'll stick this up, yeah. Whatever. No, it was luck. It was... I happened to be given the perfect poster for my burgeoning sexuality. And so did you use the White House to sort of temper that? Was it a Yang Yang thing?

Yeah, were they next to each other or opposites of the room? They were on walls that were next to each other. In a corner. Okay. So they were sort of looking at each other in a way, gazing at each other. Two different universes, isn't it? The universe of Tolkien and the universe of The Fast Show, sort of. The two different fictive universes.

So what we're seeing, like posters of this kind of phase you go through, aren't they? Like between childhood and adulthood, there's basically, there's posters. And then you could sort of do... I don't know if you think you could sort of do, couldn't you? A sort of toy story version of posters where you've got these posters. So when you leave the room, in your case, Ben, Liv Tyler and... And Paul White House of The Fast Show. Come to life and start kissing.

It's literally just the two of them every time. No one else to mix it up. No one else to mix it up. It's just so sad. They chat and they, I mean, presumably just repeatedly realize they have nothing. Very, very little in common. So, Mike, in your case, all these posters would have come to life and... It'd be a sweet jam going on.

They'd have been lovely, like Hendricks jamming with Clapton. Oh yeah, it'd be busy. It would sound busy, I think. It'd be like the ultimate, the absolute ultimate mega jam. Right, guys? Yeah? Oh, keep talking. Cool, now let's get a Barbie on.

And I'm going to talk to you about different kinds of diesel I've been using for my lawnmower. Oh, keep talking. Oh, this is the business Henry. By the way, have you got fibre optic yet? Because it's absolutely brilliant. Well, let's just get this mega jam going and let's discuss fibre optic, broad... Sorry. What am I talking about?

Oh, yeah. And then, in my case, it'd be Batman. You'd have had Batman and Batman. Mike brings me loads of Batman's, you know, maybe chatting about teaming up and becoming the Batman. I don't know. And then what happens is you become a proper adult and you take your posters down, like in the end of Toy Story, and you roll them up,

and you discard them, and it's quite touching. And what happens is at the end, you know, you've thrown away, Liv Tyler's gone through the shredder, horrible scene, really, really hard to watch. Paul Whitehouse's character is still saying, brilliant, because that's what he can say, but he's saying it in an ever more sad way. Yeah. In the script, his last line is brilliant, but this time he's got a question mark at the end. Yeah.

Brilliant. Brilliant. Do you think he's going to die? You think you're going to stick with the recycling, but actually, you save him. And it's like, oh, you've kept one, and you take it to a new home. And he's like, brilliant. And then the last scene is him being sort of trapped under glass because you're framing him. And he's like, oh, no.

And he's kind of squished up in the glass because you frame him. That's what you do, isn't it? You frame some of them as you get older. Well, I think the thing is, when you get older, then, I think the kind of, the framed print scene, which is basically the world we're in now, right? As adults, is the same as teenage posters in terms of its intent. Which is signaling. It's still about sort of demonstrating your, yeah.

Taste. Exactly. But it has to be a bit more carefully considered at this point, right? Yeah. You've got to curate this stuff properly. The big one that I feel like I've, I see a lot, but I don't feel like I'd ever pull off personally is the framed print of a poster of a Tate Modern exhibition that happened in the 90s. Yes.

Walter Sickert, 23rd of August to the 11th of November. Yeah. Tate Modern, yeah. Who do you think you are? I sometimes want to get something on holiday because it feels like, oh, this would be like authentic to me. And, you know, because I went to this place, so I can bring back something, but then you go to the shops and they're just full of absolute tat.

And it's like, am I going to get another, you know, no offense Mike, a lot of this stuff is produced in the West country. Another absolute dog shit, like literally the artist made no effort, picture of a little boat on the sea, like no effort, no love's gone into it, just churned, lovelessly churned out. Absolute crap, this stuff, isn't it? Piles of it being sold in shops in the West country. You've got to be careful because, you know, I mean, some events taken,

some of those West country artists will spend a full morning trying to find a half rotten piece of driftwood, you know, to nail the shell to decorate it. It's a lot of time, exactly. It takes a lot of time to find the right piece of driftwood, to find the right shells to glue to it, you know, and then put that on a plinth and then someone can put that on their wall. Yes, yeah. The maritime tat industry, I dread to think how much money it's worth, but I imagine it's billions.

It will be in the billions per annum. And a large portion of that market is the nautically-seemed bathroom scene, which for some reason is popular. There's nothing inherently nautical about a bathroom, but you'll often see a shell in there. Someone's put a little shell. My parents have shells in their bathroom. It's almost impossible to resist the urge to give a very slight maritime twist to a bathroom.

It's very hard for it. It's almost impossible for a human being not to make a small nod to the world of seafaring. But why? Well, it's the freshness, isn't it? The freshness, you give the sense of the freshness of the seer, I think that's what it is. Are you also sort of prefiguring where your thesis is going to end up? It's a little attribute to the ultimate result. It's like a sort of travel agency for your turd, isn't it? You go into a little office room where there's like objects and pictures representing.

It's almost like you're just trying to gently get them into the idea of it, because they're about to go through the... Your turd is about to go through something very traumatic. It's been shot out of an anus, drowned, and then transported through miles upon miles of dark, wet tunnels into a vast endless ocean. It's very traumatic. So I think, yeah...

Or it's like a sniffer dog and you're giving it the scent. You're giving it the... This is where you go end up, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a one-way street. You go there, you don't come back. Exactly. And either way, it would be wrong to expect it to go there with no warning and no sort of preparation. The very first thought that came into my mind was of a friend I had as a kid,

who lived quite near me, who his mother was understandably and not unreasonably concerned about his access to pornographic material as a teenage boy. He knew that if he was ever caught with a dirty rag under his bedclothes, or what have you, he'd be in a heap of trouble. But what was allowed was he was allowed to cut out the underwear adverts from his mother's fashion magazines. So his wall absolutely covered from top to toe in cutouts of ladies in bras and gift-worthy underwear.

So it feels to me that he was following the very much the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law, wasn't it? He found a loophole. And she couldn't do anything about it because, yeah, he'd heard what she had to say. He'd looked at the fine print, essentially. You know, we've all been in the rooms where there's a lot of posters, but I mean, this was the covering was intense. It was intense.

I don't remember the way I remember it. There was not an inch of wall spare. Quite the opposite to that. I once met someone where his mum had every day bought the son and had cut out the photograph of the topless woman from page three and put it in a ring binder, which was his. And because she sort of felt it was healthy for a young man. Yeah, pretty weird. Wow.

But for me, it's the introduction of the ring binder that I find interesting. There's one thing if we can combine this objectification of the female form with stationary, with healthy stationary. Can we fetishize stationary? Can we move it onto a fetishization of hole punchers? Frame onto hole punchers. It's an easier to treat. By the time he's 21, hopefully he'll be fucking a laminator.

But that, yeah, that being them in the ring binder, that's an extraordinary idea. And I suppose you could then bring in dividers, couldn't you? And you could then start categorizing them. I tell you one thing that ring binder would have blown out of the water was the fallacy that the sun tried to make the nation believe, which is that these were all different women that had different hobbies and interests. Right. Whereas the truth is, if you followed it for about a year, there was a rotation.

He would easily be able to audit the alleged pastimes of the models. Yeah, he'd be able to go, you're Samantha, who's allegedly interested in Greyhound racing, or are you Bernice, who's interested in long walks? Yeah. He could have blown the whole thing wide open. Hang on, literally one in three of these models is taking saxophones, as this can't be right. Do you remember Page Seven Fella? No, what's that?

No. It's such an 80s. I think it was 80s. They tried to, the sun thought, well, you know what, people are complaining about these lovely ladies we got on page three, tell you what, we'll even up the playing field a bit. And they had to introduce a thing called Page Seven Fella, which was basically a bloke, just sort of like a muscly bloke. Yeah.

Holding a couple of tyres. Just holding a couple of tyres or like a big drill or something. It was just like, just some more sort of 80s gender stereotyping. But a model again, not like smash hits or just 17s torso of the week, or whichever one it was, I can't remember. Oh, it might have been something similar, but it's... Because I'll be a celeb. I remember Tony Blair being torso of the week.

Is this when he was a prime minister? This is at his peak. Yeah, he was snapped on a... I think on a... It was kind of one of those prime ministerial holiday snaps. Yeah, but he popped out on a balcony, lording it, naked from the waist up, not unreasonably on a holiday, but he'd been snapped and so on and said, hello, our Tony's a bit tasty.

The bar for being good looking in the world of politics is so low. It's very low, the bar for being good looking. Because like Tony Blair, I do remember now was sort of considered vaguely hot in some way. I think so, yeah. The person who wasn't considered at all hot, despite being a similar age as Blair was when he was prime minister, was David Cameron, who you never heard anyone... And he's a normal looking guy, but there's something uniquely unsexy about David Cameron.

He looks like an androgynous sort of cartoon character or something, doesn't he? He's got very big round eyes, very big white round eyes and sort of like a little... First draft cartoon character. Yeah, he's like a very... He's too smooth. He actually looks a bit like very early Mickey Mouse. You know there's like 1920s black and white cartoons with the big round eyes and big like a foot that's always tapped him because they're always like jiggling.

He's got that sort of thing. Steamboat Willie era. Cameron. Yeah, exactly. It's totally Steamboat Willie. Just always like smile on his face, tapping his foot, everything's going to be fine. Very, very smooth face there, like a cartoon face where you haven't drawn any stubble on. Yes.

He... I saw a photo of him last week because he had the vaccine and there was a photo of him getting it put in his arm. And he has got really buff since leaving the high sobs in the land. He's got these huge arms, like sort of Popeye style. That's gross. Why? That's disgusting. Yeah, because these days it doesn't seem that old.

But if John Major had done that in 1997, if he'd got ripped, yeah, it would have been so weird. If John Major had buffed up. I'd love to have seen a shredded John Major at the Chilcot Inquiry. Just slipping his shirt up a little bit to show us his sweet abs. John Major, the idea of John Major with like panning down to see him having that incredibly sexy muscley buff under that face. What that reminds me of is, do you watch He-Man, the cartoon, Skeletal? Yeah.

It was the same kind of cognitive dissonance of like, because Skeletal had the face of a skull, but an incredibly muscly hot bod, fleshy muscles. And it just didn't, they'd two jar, didn't make sense. It'd be the same machine John Major with that muscly bod. You don't get posters of prime ministers, do you? On the whole? Well, didn't David Cameron, famous David poster of Margaret Thatcher in his bedroom when he was at university?

Did he really? I thought, I'm sure I read that. I mean, how does he, how's he got his hands on that? Is my, is my question because I've never seen that. You can get, you can get pop stars and popes. No problem. I have, in my life, I have flipped through literally, I would say hundreds of miles of those heavy laminated poster books that used to flip through.

And I've never, I don't know. The Athena Perusa. Yeah, the Athena Perusa. I've come across both of the Belushi brothers. I've come across Stormtroopers and Popes, as I might say. I've never, I've come across Marilyn with the dress up. I've come across Roger Rabbit, never, never Maggie. Where the hell did he get that?

That's a really good question. Is that an Eaton thing? You don't even generally see them that much in, even when they're doing sort of political advertising, certainly in this country. I mean, if you, if you're in a country with a despot, absolutely, the image will be everywhere, posters and billboards, mega posters. Yes. And I guess our beloved despots, the Royal Family, they sort of realized they can't

get away with that level of idolatry. You know, as compared to your Maus, for example, they try to keep it on the down low. They do, and they tend to appear on ceramics rather than posters. And that's right. Billboards are the like, they prefer, it's a more, it's a more discreet. It's optional ceramics. Yeah.

Well, it's stamp, stamps and money, isn't it? That's it. That's all we have. Yeah, maybe that's enough. For the Royals is stamps and money. The Royals famously don't carry money, which I've never understood really. Just toilets. They carry toilets?

Well, that's another Royal rumour, isn't it? The Queen notoriously wherever she goes, there's a regal loo in the boot of the car. Well, Prince Charles is not a sort of shiny white leather toilet seat that he takes with him wherever he goes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And the Queen has similar rumours. Yeah.

And he lays it down on top of the, I think they unscrew whatever toilet seat's already there and then screw on his white patent leather one. They're all footmen. The Royal Assman steps in with a screwdriver. So he must have an excellent tool kit, that guy, because you get a retina tool. He can fit it to any toilet. There's a wide range of different toilet sizes and shapes. So he's got a kind of universal adapter kit, has he?

Yeah, he'll have a full case of Allen keys and he won't have lost any of them and he'll know exactly where they are as well. But how do you? That's what sets him apart from a general member of the public. I'm thinking it must have some sort of hard rubberised lip. The toilet servant? Explained. This toilet seat, which allegedly he can fit onto any other toilet, it must have,

I'm trying to think, in terms of the actual how you get the things to attach, it's got to have to have something like a hard rubberised lip, which can adhere, sort of suck onto things of different sizes. What about a series of tightly little suckers, like a tentacle? Yeah, you've got, yes. Would that work on any surface? Using octopus technology. Yeah, I think so.

I think something like that. It's got to involve creating a vacuum to create suction, isn't it? Because otherwise, what you're drilling into the previous toilet seat, if you're attaching screws and things and you're damaging the previous toilet seat. It is possible to replace a toilet seat, Henry. You don't just get one for your whole life. You don't just move house. That's my idea.

Cos, so when the royal sweep into town? I imagine they go ahead. This footman goes ahead and lays the ground incognito. So if they're like the prince is likely to go to a Starbucks, whatever, they'll go into that Starbucks toilet, take the seat off. Yeah, he'll have to buy a coffee himself because he'll need the code on the receipt, obviously. Yeah.

Yeah, and then he'll get the job done. And then he'll fit the toilet seat on. And then he'll do that thing where people kind of stick to the ceiling by holding on to the walls with his arms and legs and just stay there. In case he's needed. So if anyone else comes in and tip before the prince, he can just with a silenced pistol shoot them. You open the door to that toilet and you see the leatherette toilet seat

and the penny starts to drop. You look up, you see the man stuck to the ceiling. It is full royal livery. Yeah. And you just have in that fraction of a second, you work out exactly what's happened. You're like, I remember seeing that the Rawls are visiting town today. Someone mentioned that work. Oh, the leatherette toilet seat.

That'll be Prince Charles's special toilet seat that I've heard. You look up, you see the shadow of a man attached to the ceiling with suckers. And you're like, of course, I cannot have seen the royal toilet seat and live, of course not. And you bow your head willingly and he shoots your brain off. And you die happy. And I assume the bodies just stay there then until Charles arrives? There was a rumor in the late 80s when he was at his most arrogant.

He would say he wouldn't actually, he would refuse to use a toilet unless you could climb a staircase of corpses to get to it. So there we go. That was Posters. Truly rinsed as a topic, I think. It was the definitive discussion. And thank you for listening. Yeah, thank you for listening. If you have any ideas for future topics you'd like us to cover, do send us an email at

3beansaladpod at gmail.com or you can contact us at our Twitter account, which is at beansaladpod. And the gmail, the three bean, it's the word three, not the number three. It's as unwieldy as it could possibly be. So if you do manage to punch through all that and contact us, we'll be absolutely thrilled. 3beansaladpod at gmail.com or Twitter, beansaladpod. And remember, double check that spelling because when an email address involves two or more words that are conflated together into one without the spaces, into one jumbo word, it can be quite sickening to look at, quite sickening to do,

but take the time to recheck that word, recheck that spelling. Also, do get in contact if you have just anything to say about the topic of Posters, anything we've said. Were you disgusted by it? Were you enlightened by it? Were you deeply moved? Yeah, and if you've got any of your own thoughts about Posters, please share those with us and we might read them out on the next one. But only if they're interesting. But only if they're interesting and good. Good thoughts, really.

Please don't make, please don't make them too long. Well, like this outro. Do you, okay, I think any email that's like long is from someone mad. It has to be. Do you ever get an email and you go, look at the length of that? Jesus fucking Christ, this person has fucking lost it before we've even started reading it. But often it'll just be from a building society or something, wouldn't that kind of length of email? Yeah. Or a HMRC.

A great HMRC. And if HMRC or a building society was a person, they would be fucking mad. Satire as well. That's the thing with the show. Just be careful, Henry. You're going to ruffle some very dangerous feathers. Well, that kind of sort. That kind of fresh unrestrained tool. Probably will never be able to go to chelting them nor Gloucester ever again. People say, oh, don't ruffle any feathers if it's a big deal. But since when has anything scary got feathers?

I'll ruffle them what I fucking like. They only belong to a fucking bird. What, like an eagle owl? Ripped your bloody head off, mate. Yeah, I'll ruffle them with a few exceptions. That'll be a mistake to ruffle the feathers off. What's that bird that's like an emi, but it's got like a sort of dinosaur style claw that it can like rip your face off with? Is it a rea?

Yeah, it's got a special beak that can remove your liver in one single movement. Is that a rea, as in Chris Rea? Yeah. That says his ancestors back in the day, we can assume, would have been land-based, very fast moving. Oh, no, I've got mixed up with someone else. I was going to say it's the song Free Falling about a bird that's injured itself in flight, but that's not that's not my Chris Rea, is it? No, but it is. You're right, they're on both anyway, yeah.

But it's another happy coincidence. But also reas are flightless, so I guess they would Free Fall if you knocked it off a cliff or out of a plane or something. And I suppose if you were driving home for Christmas as a rea, that would suggest that you've had an injury, well, if you're not choosing to fly. They don't fly, they can't fly. Well, hence so hence driving home for Christmas makes full sense. They would probably sprint home for Christmas, I imagine, across the savannah.

I've never heard of a rea. It's very much, yeah, it's the lesser talked about, yeah, of the ostrich emu gang. It's very much comes in in bronze. I think it's the kind of bird where if it gets out, you know, in a zoo, they've got like, there's like, there's certain animals, if they get out, you have to call the army. I think, I think it's one of those. Which branch of the army are we talking about?

So heavy artillery? Are we talking about sort of light inventory? I think it's tanks. It's straight. I'm looking at an aggressive looking rea. They look fucking terrifying because you can't reason with them at all that you can with a bear or even a crocodile compared to a rea. Yeah, a bear, you, you can't bear you can reason with them.

You can't zigzag them. Yeah. You can't, you can try climbing up a tree, I suppose. Come on. Henry, are you reviewing your, your policy then that it's, there's nothing scary that you can ruffle feathers-wise? Well, yeah. Okay, there's, there's some exceptions.

I think I still think broadly, if you're ruffling feathers, the worst that's going to happen to you is you're going to get a little peck of something quite cute. You're going to get eviscerated by a gigantic sprinting beast. In the case of a rea, I would, I would not want to ruffle the feathers of a rea. Jesus. But the thing with the rea is, and all of those, all of the tall, flightless birds with sort of weirdly human and slightly sexy looking legs.

So we're talking the rea, the emi and the ostrich. You don't mind a flamingo either, do you? It's a bit skinny for me. Backwards knees. And the backwards knees thing is not, not far enough. You just wouldn't know what would ruffle their feathers. That's the thing that frightens me with them, because they're these, because they're so inhuman birds.

They're so unknowable. So unknowable, but not in an enticing, sexy way. You know, like, I don't know. Like Nigella Lawson. Like Nigella Lawson, exactly. But in a kind of that, that tiny little peanut-sized brain is just full of primal hate. That I can't understand, and nothing I can say is going to make, is going to calm that rea down.

Whereas a bear is mammalian, you know, at least, you know, that essentially understands things like the idea of a hug, or a nice, nice getting your feet up, or chilling. Of the family unit. It's got a family unit. Whereas a rea, what, what the fuck is that thing doing with that? And those weird sexy human legs. Yeah.

You proffer a jar of honey at a rea. It's just going to pick it up, smash it to pieces, and use the shards to dice you into a thousand tiny pieces. And they've got kind of sexy eyelashes as well. They've got some very stereotypical, like 1950s classic, sexy woman eyelashes to dye for. We all love those eyelashes. They have the fluttering eyelashes.

Don't they have a sort of golden age of Hollywood? Sort of 50s movie style. Yeah. But they're coming at you, and they're pecking you, and you use blood on your hands, and they're just pecking and pecking and pecking, and the eyes are just looking flirty, and the legs are just so smooth, and so sort of well toned.

The talons are gripped into your bonnet, and its head has punched its way straight through your front windshield, in a perfect hole, and it's just through your neck and out the other side, and your wife's screaming. And you're still part of, you just want to sort of clutch that leg, because it's that leg that's now sort of wrapped itself around your neck, and it's starting to gradually crush your spine. Feathers flying everywhere.

And all you can do is just wait. Or you can just wait for the tank's first salvo of shells to just obliterate all of you. You're trying to punch it, you're trying to grab it, but all you're doing is sort of harmlessly plucking feathers out of it, which are then filling up the car. You're continuing to ruffle the feathers even further. You're actually ruffling and making it worse. Yeah, so it's like that, or whatever it was.

Yeah, I can't remember how we got onto Rear's, but if you have any thoughts, if you've ever seen or been attacked by a Rear, please get in contact at bean salad pod or through bean salad pod at gmail.com. Or actually, if you've ever met or seen in real life Chris Rear, Oh, God, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Or, and certainly particularly, if you have been alerted to the fact that a Rear is on the loose, please get in touch urgently and let us know where.

Have you been attacked by Chris Rear? Chris Rear has an anecdote he tells about the making of the song, Coming Home for Christmas, Driving Home for Christmas. And in the anecdote, he actually was driving home for Christmas. This anecdote is dangerously boring at this stage, Henry, so. But he actually was. Tell you what, Henry, shall we take this bit off there? No, but he actually was.

Was it a great experience driving home for Christmas? He's been so well to our listening. No, no, but here's the thing, Henry, he was driving home for Christmas. And then when he got home, he told his wife about the idea he'd had, where he was driving home for Christmas, and then it becomes this kind of infinite loop. And then he got home and told his wife about the song, where he was driving home for Christmas. And then he got home, told his wife.

Do you see what I mean? And now you're trapped in that loop as well. They're all trapped as well. All the listeners are trapped in that loop. It's frightening, though. I don't understand the anecdote. No, it's quite hard to follow. Do you mean mine?

Or Chris Rear's anecdote. I think it's Chris Rear's anecdote. Two sides of the same coin. It's through the prism of your telling of it, made it incredibly hard to work out what was going on. Well, it's a kaleidoscope, isn't it? It's enticing and dangerous at the same time. Like a Rear?

Like a Rear. Oh, God. Is it true that Rear view mirrors? Well, initially, the reason they called that they were designed for people driving around Longleaf Safari Park. No, they didn't attack. Stop it. Stop him.

Ben, don't stop him. Right, so that was the first episode. Thanks a lot. And do send us some ideas for a future conversation. Have we done that? Yeah, that's important. But yeah, if you, yeah. I mean, here, you've already heard posters

and basically a sort of section about Rear's as well. Yeah. So anything like that. Okay. Bye. Bye. Ta-da.