TRASHFUTURE - Britainology 38: Jeremy Vine (feat. Jeremy Vine)

Episode Date: June 11, 2022

In this special edition of Britainology, Nate and Milo traveled to BBC2 Studios to interview the man himself, Jeremy Vine, in order to discuss how he keeps a straight face when asked to arbitrate questions such as 'should a panel of mums decide all criminal punishment in the UK' and 'is your tea kettle as loud as your lawn mower (please bring the lawn mower into your kitchen for a comparison).' Hope you enjoy! If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, and welcome to yet another edition of Britonology. I am Milo Edwards. I'm joined by our co-host, Nate Pathay. Hello, lovely day. Warm day, one of maybe 30 we're going to get this year, so I'm very excited to enjoy, appreciate it all. It is a very warm day and we're unusually for us outside of the basement. We are, in fact. Because we've journeyed to the BBC, to the heart of the beast, because we're recording a very special guest, Jeremy Vine. How are you doing?

Hi. Yeah, the belly of the beast. That makes us sound much more sinister than we are. Come on, this room is sunlit. We've got windows. We've got sun outside. We're feeling good. Or are we feeling good? I'm not feeling great. I mean, this is definitely less... We record downstairs. Our office is upstairs. We get sunlight, but downstairs, no sunlight to be found. So this is quite nice. Exactly. This is actually, just to tell you, this is an executive's office. They're not into

the day. I don't know where they are. But the executive put, in a very BBC way, put pictures of her idols on the wall here. So you can see Johnny Ma, Stevie Wonder, Muhammad Ali, Dylan, et cetera. And there was then a bizarrely, a blank frame. No, it's just really faded. I think it's... Oh, right. It looks like... Oh, God, it was Nina Simone.

Yeah, I was going to say. Oh, right. That's... Yeah. That's so strange. It's the ghost of Nina Simone. Hero is Elvis Costello. So I did the Elvis Costello one. Oh, right.

As you can see, so it's a black-and-white picture of Elvis Costello. And I've then taken a picture of Elvis Presley, shrunk it, and placed it in his hands outside the frame. And no one's ever noticed that. He's the bigger Elvis. Yeah. No one has ever said, Jeremy, that's brilliant. Sort of like something Banksy would do. It's the problem with this place is that those little touches are not appreciated. Well, Nate's actually quite a big Elvis Costello fan.

He could just completely sidewine the podcast and talk about Elvis Costello instead if we felt like it. I'm up for that. Yeah, we do. That's been another. And Nate likes to periodically buy me CDs that he likes and I play them in the car because I sort of also lived like it's 30 years ago and listened to CDs in my car, which I don't think anyone else does. I'm sort of old before my time, but so one of them was an Elvis Costello CD. Oh, which one?

I made him actually... I think I got you both armed forces and this year's model. This year's model that I've got in the car, I preferred that to it. This year's model is, I think, the greatest rock album of all time. Very good choice. It's very... Especially that there's that expanded edition of it that has the live tracks as well, like them demoing chemistry class, like, yeah, incredible stuff. Wow. But this was out before you were born. What does that happen? There's a song called Night Rally and I was thinking that was a little bit Trumpian.

Yeah, it's funny too because I remember reading that, apparently, when they released that album in America, they cut Night Rally because they're like, it's too English, no one's gonna understand it, which in retrospect, if you're like, no, I think we could get it. But while we're on our detour, there's a song on that album called Little Triggers. It's Little Triggers that you pull with your tongue, Little Triggers. I don't want to get hung up, strung up, when you don't call up. And I was reading Middlemarch, the classic, you know, 1800s book and then... Yeah, it's a nice short read.

To be honest, I was reading it on Audible, so I had it in my ears while I was cycling. But one of the characters said, Little Triggers, that you pull with your tongue. And I thought, oh my goodness, Elvis has lifted a line from Middlemarch and we thought he was a punk. I like the idea of getting pulled over by the cops and having to turn down the Middlemarch audiobook. I'm blasting. Excuse me, officer. Sorry, I'm not trying to be cross with you, I'm just furious at Elvis Costello right now. Please don't make me explain. Yeah, plagiarizing. George Elliott, is it Middlemarch, I think?

Yeah, it is, isn't it? No, or was she Middle on the Floss? I'm just trying to... George Elliott wrote quite a few... I had to do a George Elliott book when I was at school. I can't recall. I remember having to read Middlemarch and I think it's George Elliott, but I do not recall. I'm pretty sure it is. Yeah, I had to read Silas Mahner at school, which might be one of the most boring books ever written. Some of them were dull, weren't they? The Mayor of Castorbridge, oh my god. Well, I mean, starting a tradition, a long-held tradition of British mayors being extremely boring. Oh, have we got a tradition of that? I suppose we have compared to American ones.

Yeah, we've got this... There's a guy who was elected in the local elections recently. Look, Ferraman, he's not boring. Ken Livingston wasn't boring, but most of them are. Ken Livingston, for all the criticisms you might level at him, was certainly not boring. I know we're sort of about US-British here. We had the British equivalent of that was when the guy who ran the Co-operative Bank, and I think his name was the Reverend Paul Flowers. Yeah, name alert. That's my new indie band. Well, it all started when he was at a select committee in the MP.

One of the MPs said, how much is your bank worth? And he said nine million. And I think the number was just pulled off the top of his head, because it turned out to be 90 billion. Right, okay. But then a whole load of other stuff emerged around drugs and whatever, but basically drug dealing. And you'll have to look it up, make sure it's all legal, this bit of the podcast, but essentially major name alert and libel alert. So Paul Flowers was our equivalent of Rob Ford. So you notice the guy's a vicar, and he runs a bank, but he did all the same stuff.

Well, I notice this is quite topical and also sort of circles back to the Jeremy Vines show, because I caught a bit of your show in the lobby and noticed you were talking about Keir Starmer's beer and curry gates. And so as a result, we were just kind of checking in on where that was at. And on the subject of extremely boring British political scandals, I note that now one of the big controversies is whether or not Keir Starmer returned to work after having his curry in a beer. Dreadful, isn't it? I mean, this has got to be one of the dullest scandals ever. But then we do have good ones. You think about the guy last week who was googling tractors, which is now a phrase for looking at porn. He was doing it inside the House of Commons

Chamber and he had to resign. So that was at a higher level. But no, this thing about the beer is, I know that in 100 years, we're not even going to understand why we were debating whether it was wrong to have a curry. It won't make any sense at all. But it does have a lot of traction with the audience because a lot of them A, obeyed the rules and B, then they lost relatives and they couldn't go to funerals. And that's why they're really, really cross about it. Yeah, I mean, I think that the porn thing also was very interesting. And we had a like because I think the guys, the exact line that he had was that the first time he'd gotten onto the porn site by accident while looking for a tractor. And the second time he just revisited it deliberately,

which implies that it has excellent marketing. Like it's got good use of retention. He's on there even accidentally. He's back. He's like, when he said I was looking at a tractor and so I said, what was the tractor called? And he said, the dominator. I was sure that was a made up name, but there is actually a tractor called it's a combine harvest. They're called the dominator. Yeah, that's what completely show that we twos boss probe like editors note. But Riley, when we edited that episode, talking about the story made me put the whorzals. I've got a brand new combine harvester at the end of the episode as the outro music. I didn't understand why and now I get it. Yeah, that's what Britonology is for, you know, to explain things like the whorzals.

That is a absolutely classic song, but they only really had one hit, I think. But what's it I'm a cider drinker. I think that will say I drink it most every day. Yeah, I drink cider. The song, the whorzals song was based on a different song, which was a classic pop hit, but I can't remember what it was. I don't know what it is either brand new key or something. Oh, okay. Right. Oh, I didn't know that. And I think there was also like a like a Sam missile style IRA song that was also based on this one because we're talking about like, yeah, hearing the outro music, they're like, I was expecting the lyrics to be very different. I was like, oh, okay. Once again, I'm learning that stuff's got layers and layers to it. I mean,

the provisional whorzals, the real whorzals. The whole provisional thing I don't get. I'd never understood as a teenager growing up, I knew the provisional IRA were very, very dangerous and very, very bad. But I never understood why that was provisional, like what was the and of course, to understand that you have to go right back into the Mr. Time to find a group called Easter Rising, right? I think even I think it's probably later than that. But it's the official IRA who are a bit better behaved. And then the provisionals were off the side of them. Gotcha. So, but you know, that was never explained. So to me, if I heard the word provisional immediately, my I was on alert that something very bad was happening. Yeah, you get your first

alert as permit driving license. It's got a little balaclava on. Exactly. My provisional license meant I could drive my car at people. Yeah. Well, so I was thinking about it too. I mean, that's with local elections in Northern Ireland. Now they're being a significant presence for Sinn Féin. It seems like that'll also be a topic that might come up on the radio. It did. You know what it did today? And thank you for listening. Yeah, the first item on the show was, are we heading for a United Island? So we're thinking that obviously one of the key, just thinking for you as an American, try to explain this is a nightmare. But when my kids were young and they said, you know, what country are we from for almost any other country in the

world? It's easy to answer. You're a Canadian. You're from Canada. You're an Indonesian. You're from Indonesia. Here it's like, I don't even know. I think it's Great Britain. But I also think it's the UK. And I think you're English. But then I don't want to say you're not Scottish because you can go up there without a passport. And then Northern Ireland is on your passport as well. So it's Great Britain of the, hang on. I don't even know. It's the, my passport says the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. That's a hell of a stretch. You know, and I'm trying to tell a four year old this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think I did actually learn this at one point where the British Isles is everything. Great Britain is the big island. So Scotland, Wales and England.

People take a little bit of umbers to the British Isles now, though, because that sort of lumps the Republic of Ireland in. They're like, yeah, it's not British anymore. And the United Kingdom includes Northern Ireland, but not Southern Ireland. Right. But also, they take umbridge at the idea of the mainland, as in Great Britain being the biggest island, because then the island of Ireland says, well, hang on a minute, why aren't we the mainland? So very difficult to get it right. But the upshot of the local election thing is Sinn Féin did very well. They're obviously the nationalist party in the sense of being an all Ireland party. And maybe in the next 100 years, we speculate it will see, no, maybe the next 30 years, United Ireland. It could just be England

at the end of all this on its own. That's been an ongoing joke for us. The possibility that, um, yeah, we'll wind up in just the United Kingdom of England. And that maybe England and Wales, I mean, possibly, I know a lot of listeners would lose their minds me saying that. They would lose. I think the the interesting thing would be that obviously the Scottish Go independent and so the Northern Ireland joins Ireland, the Wales should gotta follow. Surely they're gonna say that we're not having this anymore. And you do end up and then maybe London goes independent as well becomes like Monaco. We could all get a Gucci belt. I was gonna say, it would be very funny to have the Republic of London on your passport. You feel

like you're in like a, you know, 16th century city state like across the board. But when, when the Royals were touring, now you see, you can explain this to me, they were in the Caribbean and suddenly, although there've been royal tours all my life and there hadn't been a problem, a whole load of stuff came up that made things very difficult. And they hadn't foreseen any of it, which is quite interesting to me. And it wasn't the Queen. It was, it obviously wasn't Andrew who's locked in a laundry basket somewhere. So it was, I think he's into that actually self locking. So it was him and Boris Becker are stuck in there. It was William and Kate. And then it was Edward and Sophie. And they were doing this tour and it kept going wrong.

And it was Belize and was it Antigua and Barbuda? And then Jamaica, I think. Yeah. And, you know, all, all British people struggle with, are they still ours? We, you know, which one are they independent or Belize is a, because we have got overseas territories, territories. And I think we only have 14 of them. And the Falkland Islands will be one. Yeah. Yeah. Can Island. Tristan to Kunya. Yeah. Gibraltar. Something like Antar, Great Antarctica or some. Yeah. A lot of them are.

Territory. Yes. Yes. God, you're good at this. Oh yeah. Well, 14. No, I think we're going to see if I win a mug or something. We're going to, we're going to stumble on like St. Helena and all of our listeners. Yeah. Ascension Island. Yeah. Because Pertale wanted to build a sort of concentration camp there.

That's true. Yeah. Right. Because once I was outside the house of parliament and there were 14 flags and they were the flags of the territories and it was the most obscure quiz question ever is which of the 14. Yeah. I mean, I presented a quiz show called Decades and this came up once of how many territories are there and the options were 14, 44 or 400 and someone went 400. So they're living it 200 years ago, you know. That reminds me of the theory test for getting your driver's license here where you think it's going to be something to stress about, but some of the multiple choice questions are like,

you recently had an argument with your spouse and you were about to drive, but you're in a bad mood. Should you drink alcohol to calm down, drive as fast as possible, you know, park on the center island and sleep or slow down. So like if you can't, if you can't figure out that question, like you probably don't have any business doing it. Yeah. No, I think so. And I think that this is kind of a good bridge into like, because we were talking about this before we started recording, but I've listened to the Jeremy Vines show a lot because my mom listens to it. Oh, thank you. So my mom just has kind of radio to on all day, sort of in the background. And I sometimes find that I listen to it more than she does,

because she sort of just kind of is there. She kind of dips in and out and I'll be like doing emails at the kitchen table or something. And I just suddenly become aware of what's being discussed. And I think what really fascinates me about your show, that's why I post about it, is the kind of the transitions that it makes from one topic into another. I mean, the one, the one that I always come back to is discussing how evil are ISIS and sort of carrying people calling in suggesting, are they as evil as the Khmer Rouge? Are they as evil as the Nazis? And then you just smoothly go next up bricklaying. Yeah, undoubtedly, I'm just trying to think of an absolute classic. It was next chick sexing, but first James Blunt. That was one of

And he's all to do, I think in a funny way, that journalism is all about range now. So it's about being able to do very silly and very serious or almost in the same breath. But the joy of this this wonderful station that we're sitting in is I can play records so I can put the eagles between ISIS and bricklaying. Well, that's the sort of thing I was going to say. My own big Eagles fan, he'll definitely he'll definitely be a loyal listener for that. Yeah, yeah. So we've hit we've got the Elvish and the funny thing is too, is that as part of our show, we have started doing doing extended like comedy skit bits that then wind up requiring us to write songs where the skit takes 15 minutes and the song takes like 10, 15 hours for us to work on. And invariably,

Milo's like, I want to play an Eagle song. And I'm like, I want to play a, I don't know, a Duran Duran song or level 42 song or something like that. I'm not that into early 80s British music, but there are some things that I point to for him. And so we wind up with this sort of mishmash where it's like he wants to play something off of like, I don't know, what's a what is it the fast lane? Yeah, we yeah, if we've had a discussion about that. And I'm like, I haven't asked to play little triggers, but I have been like, Oh, no, we should play Crawling to the USA or something like that. That's a great song. And Milo's like, what, what am I listening to? What's what's that organ doing? So yeah, it's been, it's been interesting

for us, but we don't do call in. So we don't have the public, we get comments, we get emails, we get DMs on Twitter, but we don't have people calling in to voice their opinions. And if they did, it'd be a very different show. There was a Russian general, I can't, what was his name? Maybe it was Van Malka, who said no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, which is a brain life. And a radius shows like that. You know, once, once you open the line, once you open the lines here, the whole thing is blown to smithereens, you know, and and that's the joy of it. So we don't really know what the news is until they tell us. And the the size, as it happens, radio two is a very big radio station. So we do get it's quite a big drag net

when we say, you know, have you got blonde hair and you fell down a manhole? We'll get somebody who has, you know, have you ever accidentally sprayed superglue in your eyes instead of eye drops in the middle of a night because you put the wrong thing on the bedside table? Yep, two people ring up and they've done that. So yeah, it's an amazing research tool, but it means that we don't really know what's in the show until the show's finished. Yeah, because I think it's something that I think that's very interesting to us is because we are sort of also broadcasters in a sense, but we work with what is like an extremely cult audience, whereas you're at the complete opposite end of the spectrum of working with the

broadest possible audience. And it's not I think that probably I can't be very arch and I, you know, things need to be quite clear. Why are we doing this story? And the question is usually a story is all questions, not statements. That's the other change from my news background, because it used to be about telling people things. Now it's about asking them. So it's, you know, would you go sunbathing in your front garden? Question mark. Yeah. Is it acceptable? And you will get a range of opinions. You will get a lot of views on that a lot. There's a big debate on that at the moment. Another one that I vividly remember, and it's one that my mum and I discuss a lot and recall is how loud is your loudest household appliance? Because I believe the

news headline that had sparked off was something along the lines of some household appliances are as loud as a petrol lawn mower. Yeah. Kettle. One kettle had been rated by which as being as loud as a lawn mower. Right. And actually, I've lost faith in which as a result of this story, because I thought I quite fancy having a kettle that says loud as a lawn mower. I mean, they scored it down, obviously. Right. I think if you're brewing a cup of tea, you want to hear it, you know? Yeah. So I've got, I've got the very kettle is in my kitchen. And I put it on every day and it's not as loud as a lawn mower. Fake news. Yeah. You only ask them loud in kettle. I want a proper river. Well, what I loved about this though is you had one guy call in,

I think it was in the West country somewhere who was like, right, this is how loud my kettle is. And he puts it on. And then he said, I've also brought in my lawn mower for comparison. It starts up. So it's obviously completely deafening. You're trying to ask him to turn the lawn mower off. He's just yelling what into the phone. Yeah. That kind of chaos is just not something that you get. That's great. I love that you listen. Yeah. Because funnily enough, we've had a real technical issues recently with the fact that this will sound minor, but it's not the fact that iPhones have some sort of noise cancelling. So unbelievably now, someone will say, have a listen to my lawn mower and the blooming iPhone will cancel the noise. And you say, can you hear that? It's deafening.

No, we can't hear anything. So we're going to, we're thinking of appealing to Apple saying, take all the tech off. Have a Jeremy Vine mode, a little slider in the menu. Yeah. You've got airplane mode. Then you've got, then you've got Jeremy Vine mode. Because I think there's a sort of interesting thing about, like, I think your show provides insights into stuff that it never occurs to me that people are bothered about. And then I get this sort of fascinating cornucopia of like bugbears that people have. I've just, I went back through times I've tweeted about the show just to find interesting ones. From the 30th of March, 2020, I wrote, Jeremy Vine is currently on Radio 2, hosting a heated debate between a jogger and

a dog walker about who is more entitled to their space on the pavement. Oh yeah, big one. Yeah. People get very angry about joggers barging past them. So if a jogger feeling that, that he, she can actually just run straight through a group of people, that's a big issue. I mean, another big one actually is, well, yeah, I was going to say cycling, but that's, that goes without saying anything to do with parking. So we want one of the biggest items we ever did was, do you own the space outside your house? Now in the States, it's not a problem. Because you've got, you know. Typically either driveways or it's completely on, it's metered regulated by the city.

Yeah. Or there's no pavement or whatever, you know. But people here believe that the space in the road outside their house is their parking place. And when we did this item, we got people who take incredible measures to make sure they kept it. One guy bought another, another car, religious, the lump of metal really. And he was, he was parking it while he went to work. He would reverse it into his space in Verde commas. He'd take his actual car to work. And then when he got back home, he would park his actual car and then remove the other car. I don't know where he put it though. That's strange. Yeah. Well, go to nearby playing field or something. Carjenga in your, just to preserve one spot. And thereby he still has to walk back from the nearby

playing field. But he's kept his space. That's the key thing. One of the things that's interesting though about the US that you'll see in places like Chicago or Philadelphia, which are cities where typically in the urban center or like, you know, in the near urban center, you don't have a lot of driveways. You don't have a lot of parking is people will do the exact same thing, except they'll put lawn chairs or garbage cans out to block their spot. I've seen it with Wheely bins. If you, if you, if you move someone's bins, like they'll come and dump snow on your car, be like, no, that's my spot. So we have this phenomenon too. It's just, it's invariably, it's like someone puts a lawn chair and you're supposed to know the score that like,

you're not allowed to park there because I'm saving my spot. But in Britain, of course, the bins are sacred. So you never move someone's right. I have it on my street. I live in Peckham. And there's a guy with his blue recycle bin. He has hand painted in a very kind of angry block script. If you touch my bins, I will kill you. And I took a picture of this and tweeted it. And I was like, people were like, Oh, there's so many, you know, interness sign complicated things about British politics. And I'm like, no, it's just this, this is it. If you understand this, you understand it here. We had, yeah, bins are big, aren't they? We had a similar

split on our road about this issue of the, I think the bin operatives decided that they weren't going to use, they weren't going to use some sort of lifting equipment because it wasn't strong enough for them. And half the residents were saying, how disgracefully lazy. And the other half was saying, well, if you're a bin person, you've got to protect your back. So it was a really interesting split on whether you, whether bin people, and a lot of it comes down to this actually, is should we be living like we were 30 years ago? Fundamentally, when bin people had a metal bin that they hoisted on their back. We wrote a song about this, talking about this phenomenon about, I remember when the bin man was hard because it has such traction. I've only lived here

for years and even I observed this and hear the metal bin's quandary from my neighbors. So another example would be the constant calls on my show for the return of what's called life on Mars style policing, which is when people were scared of the police, you got this guy, Gene Hunt, the fictional figure, who would drive around. It was an Audi, he was driving a Quattro. And you'd be thrown across the bonnet. And so listeners would say, why can't we get back to life on Mars style policing? And then we had a bit of it at Charing Cross police station, where it was revealed about six months ago that officers at Charing Cross have been swapping the most disgusting sort of texts about women and everything else. I thought, well, that's the

downside of it, that you end up with very, very backward facing policing. If you really want to go that way. So it's not quite clear that we'd be better off if you were inverted commas scared of the police. But that's what, why can't they just bust them first and ask questions later? Well, I find this, this is a big thing I think that we talk about on this show a lot is that a lot of, I think, I mean, it's the case everywhere, but I think it's like a particular vagance in British politics of people are very engaged with kind of fantasies that aren't, it's not really about the police. It's about some other perception of like personal identity or whatever. But it's kind of like, yeah, a policeman used to hit me over the head, he's truncheon, never did me any harm.

Absolutely, never did me any harm should be the title of my show. Bullying at school. I mean, you know, so bullying at school never did me any harm. Let's run that as a story. And then you just end up with people saying, no, my life was destroyed by it. So you, in the end, it doesn't quite match the reality. Yeah, well, bullying at school is such an interesting one, because I definitely encounter a lot of people in my life who are bullied too much at school and also people who weren't bullied enough. And that Goldilocks zone, I think, is hard to determine. We've tried occasionally to run counter to the listeners. So we've tried with bullying to say,

is it possible to argue that some bullying is good for you because it sort of knocks you into shape, makes you tougher, whatever, goes nowhere. All that happens is people ring up and they just tell these awful stories about being bullied. We tried it as well with animal cruelty. We realized that the number of stories that suggested that maybe we were taking cruelty to animals more seriously than when we were taking cruelty to humans. And it was triggered by a guy who'd come home drunk from the pub and strangled his pet parrot. And he got a... It sounds like the start of a joke. Anyway, so having killed his parrot, he's then given a suspended prison sentence, which is quite a serious thing. And I then noticed the same week, some police officers

given a press conference about a dog had been thrown off a bridge by some teenage yobbs. And the police... A, they'd had a press conference. And B, the senior police officers said, we need to find the people who did this because they are beyond evil. Well, beyond evil, where are we on pole part or Hitler? I'm not sure people... You know, anyway... And then you've got to tie that back to bricklaying. So that's when your challenge really comes in. Exactly. Then it gets tricky. But so we do that story. The same thing happens. All that people do is, if the penalty now for... You shouldn't be a suspended sentence for killing a parrot. It should be life. They should make them suffer.

So I realized that you can't... There's no way you can do anything arch or clever with certain subjects bullying or cruelty to animals being two of them. Well, I don't understand is that that parrot was a grass and it was going to dob him in. Yeah, I kind of saw this one up close because I have a weird trajectory to becoming a podcaster. But a long, long time ago, I was an army officer in the US and I spent time in Afghanistan. And this last year was involved significantly with trying to help people as much as possible to get out. But there wasn't really any good stories to tell. Basically, people who got to the airfield got out if they got past the perimeter in the first day. Otherwise, basically no one got past

the perimeter and they didn't get out. And so you had all these horror stories and people being like, you know, I know someone who's got charter flight seats. Can you help someone? Here's a number on Signal or on WhatsApp for someone. They might be able to help you. And it was this disaster. And in the background of this, we were watching this stuff about the Penfarthing saga. And it did seem like there were a number of people who were just like, well, no, I think who's show was it on LBC where someone basically said, if the people are being evacuated or human beings, but they didn't help the British military, then it's more important to bring dogs back. And I was like, I'm not trying to say this is indicative of everyone in Britain or even a

majority people in Britain, but it does feel like that opinion will come out. And it's like, we would stay away from, we don't really do the sort of call in topics in a lot of ways or we'll make kind of make fun of it. But we would stay away from that topic because you'll get responses like that. Yeah, I mean, there will be an argument that dogs have priorities, priority over humans. I mean, there will definitely be listeners who call in to say that. And I wouldn't want to knock them for, you know, if they want to say that, they can say it. But the argument is normally dogs didn't start this war. Yes, that's the argument. And and therefore, you know, how do you know that? I'll see some dogs. I remember it wasn't in Fallujah. Was it

Syria where there was a big campaign to get the dogs out as well, when that city was flattened by the Russians? I think it probably would have been in Syria. But yeah, and I would be like Homs or Aleppo or something like that. I just remember it was always, it always took me back. For one, there's a different culture around adoption in a country like Afghanistan. So like, there isn't really a formal process. People have huge families. And typically, if a child is orphan, then they are brought into their their parents or relatives families. And if you wanted to adopt a child from Afghanistan, for example, you know, it would have to be an Afghan American family, like it would be, they probably have to be if they're Shia or Sunni, they'd have to be probably

the same ethnicity, but you could do it is very hard. But they're basically, if you're American, you can't, if you're Western, you can't, but you can spend about $5,000 to adopt a dog from Afghanistan. And it has to go through quarantine in Pakistan, it has to be given in doculations, then you fly at home. And it's like, part of me is like, I understand what people would want to do this, like they've, but at the other time, I'm just like, the irony of this does not escape me that like, you know, I encounter a lot of stray dogs. And I also encounter a lot of children who are in very, very dire circumstances. And I know there are people in the US who would want to take care of like help these kids out, but you can't really. And so seeing that stuff put

forward of sort of like, here's an opportunity for people to get out. And you hear that argument being made like, obviously, I'm not your average listener on this topic. But there were times when I was just like, man, this is I want to make a joke out of it. But also like, I can't pretend you wouldn't hear that argument voiced in America too, unfortunately, it just seems like, I mean, this goes back a long way in Britain. I remember being about 13 and being somewhere in like a waiting room, so I had a copy of the sun and the sun on the same page was running two different campaigns, one of which was to bring back hanging to punish some youths who murdered a dog. And the other of which was that Katie Price or Jordan was planning on having a breast

reduction and the sun was mounting a keep them campaign. I thought really addressed the two ends of the psyche that we're dealing with the duality of the British man basically. Yeah. I don't know why I don't know whether we're the most animal loving country in the world. I don't know, but we must be near the top. It's just the way people don't on their dogs and cats and pets and so on. And also there's a big conservation thing as well. I think, you know, I think that's all it's all pretty healthy in a way. It's just obviously it goes to extremes when we see cruelty. That's of course a particular thing. And the idea, I think, one of our co-hosts is his family, his parents moved to the United Kingdom from Uganda there,

Gujarati, but he grew up in Kent and is lived here his entire life. And he has reported on extremism and on far right stuff in the UK a lot. And one of the points he made was that a lot of these pages would start out with animal lover stuff to build an audience. Like they knew they could get people to sign on Facebook like, aren't these puppies adorable? And then it's like, and now we're going to talk about Sharia law and Halal slaughter. And like it's almost seamless after having built an audience of like 300,000 people share this if Halal slaughter should be illegal. And that we're running joke about like a Facebook group that has like a 500,000 members that's called I remember the milkman. And then the top post in it is like the Muslims are taking

over. There's a particular kind of Facebook group that yeah. So I'm wondering you see this from the other side, these people call it and you get you get some real interesting opinions. So like does this enter into your conception of like when you think of the average person, the average British person, do you filter in the fact that you are in contact with people who have for better or worse the time to call in on a radio show and voice their opinion? Well, yeah, that's a great question because I don't have a particular picture in my mind of the average listener. If I did, it would be a I guess a mom in her fifties with with teenage kids who are probably about to head off to college or jobs or whatever. So that that's definitely the actual fact of who the average

listener is. But I don't also I don't all I would say is that the listener is outside London. That's the key thing. One of the weird things about this city that we're in is it is so atypical of the UK and I was brought up just south of here in Surrey. And I was shocked the first time I was on a plane and I saw that there were so many fields and farmlands because I just assumed everything was roads and houses. So I think that, you know, the country is very, very different from London. So my my my thought is it's a regional person, probably a mum in middle age, you know, no more than that. And I don't also the other thing is who calls in, you know, because actually you're going to call if you're furious. And the this is the classic statistical quirk, isn't it that all

the callers are furious and they end up thinking the whole country is furious. But maybe it's just the people who call who are furious. I mean, people what the thing that amazes me always is when you put two callers on together, they've never met each other before, and they will start arguing with each other as a reflex, just as a reflex on Keir Starmer should be like, no, he shouldn't. You're doing the Alice the Campbell putting two phones together and just letting them go. It's probably the best way. Yeah, exactly. Well, I figure with with everything that's happened in the last six years in this country, it sort of feels like you've basically your job is sometimes to put two B's in a jar and shake it because with Brexit, with the Brexit agreement, with the 2019

election, with with COVID lockdown policies, all the stuff. I mean, I've seen everything from, I mean, getting handbills in the post about 5G, you know, causing coronavirus and things along those lines to to stuff where I say it was advocating for a level of lockdown that I feel like unless the government was going to give people money, they probably wouldn't be able to get anyone to support it. But it's been very strange to watch because I'm just reminded that that like, even if I turn it off, even if I'm not on social media, if I'm not listening to the radio, like this debate is raging and it's happening outside. And oftentimes the flashpoint is like a headline about dinghies arriving off the coast, you know, I don't understand why it's got so black and white,

because I don't feel 20 years ago, I was a political correspondent, and it wasn't so polar or bipolar. Whereas now, I call this the era of TBCLC, which is Trump, Brexit, COVID, and Leicester City winning the Premiership. So all the things you don't expect happening at once. And the very first referendum was the Scottish... Jamie Vardy at the centre of the huge spider diagram. Massive! Red tape everywhere. The, yeah, I mean, the Scottish independence referendum went in a way, it went, it was the one that was out of character, it went with the status quo, everything else went the wrong, went the way you didn't expect. And particularly all the elections, I do the graphics for the general elections, we have really failed to predict them since 2010. So 2010, 2015, 2017,

2019. All of them were... Prediction rises. Trump was predicted wrong. Brexit was predicted wrong. So what's going on? And it's just, we've lost control of it. You know, it's a joy, isn't it, that I'm sitting here in the BBC and previously I would have known stuff and now I don't know anything at all. I mean, we have a similar phenomenon in the sense that the Cubs won the World Series in 2016. And we're like, oh, is this opening a portal to a dark dimension? Because this hasn't happened since like the 20s. And then Trump won. Is that like the city, the Cubs? Well, I was gonna say the Cubs, the Cubs were like one of the famous losing franchises in Major League Baseball. Like even when they make... I know they made it to the World Series in 2003,

but they didn't win. They're mythologised to have been cursed. Yeah, they were cursed by a base. So something to the effect of like a farmer was outside, that can't remember the name of the venue. And he was like trying to sell a goat. Did it Wrigley Field, is that right? Wrigley Field, thank you. And they made it. You know it and I don't. Well done. I know... Is that just Chicago, right? Yeah, yeah. I just, I don't know. My brain is just a repository of... I don't know what this reference was. I mean, this is another reason why I love your show, which we can get onto there. Yeah, I only know Comiskey Park, which is the White Sox. And if I said that one for the Cubs and like some random Chicago fan would find the show, would have found

a way to call in the show. It's fully, fully called in to trash shoot you. Yeah. But yeah, they'd always choked in the last minute and then they won. I think it was the first time they'd won the World Series since 1929. And then it was like, all right, chaos to mention. So you had the same thing as the tectonic plates, is an unusual sporting event, is what starts it? I mean, you could also say that same time the primary had been going on, nobody expected Bernie Sanders to do as well as he did. Nobody expected Trump to get... Once the access Hollywood tape came out, people thought he was done and it was sort of like his voters were like, no, we talk like that too. So like, you know what, we're good with it.

But I do think the Trump thing is one where we have total connection because we... I think the Brits understand that whole thing. Sure. And in the same way that you watched it, like a show, and part of you enjoyed it and part of it, you were horrified by it. We had the same. I think in this country, the Trump... I mean, the disinfectant moment obviously was brilliant, but there were a lot of standout. Like when they had that COVID ceremony, that ceremony during COVID to appoint that new Supreme Court judge, and it was like the super spreader event, there were more cases reported there than there were in the whole of China that week. Yeah. Well, I think about like, similarly Boris Johnson driving a JCB through a big block of

a wall of foam bricks that says Brexit. He's like, well, we're going to get Brexit done by the most heavy-handed metaphor you can think of. That is not that far off from some of the stuff Trump would do, like dancing to the village people basically throughout his entire re-election campaign. He's just so cool. I don't know what... Is he coming back, Trump? Is he coming back? He's old, but he might try. I mean, he definitely... I think he would definitely win the primary. They call it the gay national anthem. Did you know that? They love it when I do the whims. We're like Trump tweeting about how he has some grudge against the Vanity Fair editor, talking about sissy grade and Carter's bad food. Restaurants are no longer scare quotes hot.

Like, he has a style about him and you're just like, they're inimitable. I think because we're sort of journalists, we feast off it and that probably is an unhealthy thing to want. I mean, you want, in a sense, bad things to happen, I suppose, as a journalist and it's terrible to say it. But I remember when Trump arrived in the UK, he was on the plane, didn't get off the plane for about 10 minutes, but everyone knew what he was doing because during that 10 minutes, a tweet was uploaded and it was the one that said, Maryland city can is a stone cold loser. When the plane landed, he thought, okay, let's just tweet about city now get off the plane. City con very weak, very short. Don't

like him. No longer sad. Actually, a lot of people live up for city kind, but they shouldn't. I'm actually much better. The president of France said so. Oh, my goodness. Well, I think that's one of the bringing it back to your show. I think the way in which you just let people talk is quite unusual because if you compare it to like other, I mean, you've got kind of like, I took two LBC shows as an example, like Mike Graham, who's obviously like an extreme right-wing headbanger. And then you've got like James O'Brien, who's kind of like a liberal, but they're both basically like yelling at their listeners and kind of either in agreement or in disagreement or whatever it might be. Like Mike Graham,

basically interviewing the insulate Britain activist. And he was like, yeah. And Mike, this is yeah, brilliant. It's about growing concrete. Yeah, tree. You can't grow concrete. You can trees. Or he says trees aren't renewable. He's saying, well, what kind of environmentalist are you if you're a carpenter? And this guy's desperately trying to explain that carpentry is actually sort of sustainable. But he's just very, he's just very cool. He's like, well, I work with lumber, which is the sustainable resource. And he's like, no, it's not. He's like, well, it's more sustainable than concrete. No, it's not. He's like, you can't grow concrete. He's like,

yes, you can. That to me was another one. I was like, share it. It was, it was a beautiful moment. I think Mike probably enjoyed the fact that it went, you know, trended around the world. I don't see it necessarily. It's the funniest, probably a BBC thing. I sort of think I'm just opening a slot for the listener. And, you know, if they do something utterly wrong on the facts, I should correct them. But I don't really want to sort of argue them down. I think they've been, they spend so long watching TV programs and listening to radio programs with the only people who are ever allowed to speak got titles. You know, the cabinet minister, the MP for whatever. So Roger Buffton Tufton,

who is the chairman of the something. Next week's guest. At the end of it, you're asleep. So you just think, oh my goodness, suddenly we've got this beautiful moment where the listeners allowed on. But funnily enough, the person who sat in my chair, let's just think, 20 years ago, a guy called Jimmy Young, you won't know him. No. Okay. I don't think I know him, either. Well, so Jimmy was, let's just put it, he reluctantly decided to leave in 2002 at the age of 83, which is quite something. He'd done 50 years on the air, I think, amazing. He was Britain's Elvis, basically. And then Elvis came and just destroyed his singing career. So he then started broadcasting. And he was broadcasting as a DJ, so Jimmy. And then in the

70s, he wanted to do something more. And he said, will you let me have some politicians on? And they had let him have, I think it was then probably an opposition politician, Jeffrey Howe. And this was about 1971. They would have been junior government minister. And somebody rang the production office here and said, this guy's an idiot. And then it was written down on a piece of paper and it was taken through to Jimmy. And Jimmy said, well, we've just had someone call in saying, you're an idiot. And that was the birth of the show. And it was almost an accident. He had to go out to the phone box to do it. He's like, I'm leaving the pub. So someone actually rang in and got through. And then they thought, well, maybe we should

just say what the number is and we'll get someone, a couple of extra people in to take the calls. And we're pretty much still there in 2022. Because, you know, the comments I'm given still come through on pieces of paper. We had a guy say during the Brexit negotiations, I served in the Second World War. It's a Cyril from Somerset. The Brexit negotiations are not going well. It is time to bring in the SAS. For their negotiating skills, if they can deal with a hostage situation. That would be funny to have like, you know, Michel Barnier sat there with three guys who have like black tape across their eyes, who are just, you know, discussing in quite earnest the details of the fisheries agreement. It's almost coming to that. What was that? We had, well,

what was one you'd be really, that you'd love this? It was a production idea of, let's, instead of judges deciding sentences, because they always get it wrong, let's get mums to sentence serious criminals. So we bring in a panel of mums and then we run certain cases. We run certain cases past them and what would you have given them? And they basically, they're really inventive. They keep saying, when the worst scenarios come up, that the criminal should be, and I quote, forced to wipe the bums of old people in care homes. And this, we're thinking this is a bit, making us a bit queasy. And then we get a complaint from a care home saying it is extremely offensive to ask any of my residents to come into that close

contact with criminals. And no part of their body should be used to punish crime. So the panel of mums to punish criminals, and they believe me, the criminals would not offend again. I think that's the thing. I think it's the stuff on the show that isn't political that I find the most fascinating. I mean, there's certain stuff, I think, and for this reason, the Dr. Sarah segment, is that on a Monday? It's on Medical Monday. It sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, because we try and do, we're struck between doing very common illnesses, like have you ever had the flu? And really uncommon ones, like have you got Capgras syndrome, which is the syndrome where you think all your friends have been replaced by imposters?

So we go from the very common to the very rare. But anyway, sorry, I interrupted. But yeah, and so I think you often get listeners phoning in with stuff where I was sort of like, oh, the KGB couldn't have got that one out of me. I've got one here where it's just, you're taking a call, and the exact line was thinly and glossy, you're ashamed of your ingrown toenail, is that correct? And then he's sort of going on quite a long rant about this ingrown toenail. And then you follow up with, so maybe toenails are like wisdom teeth, Sarah, we don't really need them. And then I've just got Sarah is making a sort of noise. We had a guy who had an infection in his penis. And he said it was caused, it had been traced back

to his goldfish. And you know, the, yeah, fine closed doors. Well, exactly. I just thought, thank you for your call. Next caller is, you know, I know quite where that came from. So yeah, the goldfish is an idea. I mean, the medical ones can sometimes make you a little bit queasy. But, but we all, but we do think it's a great connector medical stuff, you know, everyone's got something. But yeah, I think, I think that that way in which you just kind of sail through this kind of in a very like, I think that there's a like, I definitely, I think you and Richard Maitley are both people who sometimes get the Allen Partridge comparison. But it almost seems like a like a function of broadcasting. I think what I want to ask you is sort of is the Jeremy

Vine on air kind of a constructed character. Oh, clever question. I, well, of course I am on air now. So I would have to respond now. No, I don't, I mean, I would say that, you know, if I'm a home watching TV, I'm sort of slumped over my eyes a glaze when you're on the air, your jazz hands, like, so it's like, this is the most exciting story we're ever going to have to this week. Just listen and call us, you know, so obviously it's a bit of that with all broadcasters. You can't, the only person who ever pioneered anything that was not that in this country was a guy called Jeremy Paxman, right? And he was, well, good evening. There's no news tonight. I don't know why you're here really. He was, but that, that only certain people would call a caller

an idiot. Yeah, he would if he had any cause. I think I do think that the somebody said to me once your show is basically a comedy show, isn't it? And I thought, God, that's interesting. I hadn't thought of it like that. But I know this, I have to take everything seriously. And sometimes there are very silly calls that I have to take seriously. So somebody says, the way to cure hay fever is by leaning back in a wooden chair and putting flowers in your mouth. I say, yes. And how do you make sure the chair doesn't fall over? You know, and I realized this is a crazy conversation where if your ability to ask an indulgent question of someone who's completely mad is something I'm fascinated. Well, that's important. I think that indulging, no,

not indulging the listener, but hearing them is important. Yeah, I suppose. I don't, I mean, in the end, it's just best if we only remember the listener, not me. So I'm interested. I see this argument kickback and forth. And I do think that sometimes it can be very obvious. It's a bad idea to air someone's opinions. And other times, like, there's genuinely no way of knowing. But like, for example, LBC had a guest on, which I believe had been screened deliberately, who basically went on this tirade about, you know, Indigenous Britons and how we need to kick all the non-white people out, you know, to basically like otherwise will be a cultural replacement, demographic suicide. It was full on like white nationalist stuff. And she was a

just the same person who said that David Lamy could be British, but not English. No, I think it was someone else. And just just absolutely like perfect scenario alert. She was a vegan hot yoga instructor in Ibiza. She's English. And she's on the Bums panel. That's one of the more extreme examples. But I'm just wondering what your take is, because on one hand it's like some people call in deliberately to say things as inflammatory as possible. Some people, that is their honest opinion, there's an argument to be made, I think that you could say, well, this is at least an opinion that someone has in good faith, even if we strongly disagree with it. But I'm also a little bit wary sometimes, because I feel like that can be kind of

gamed. And you know, it seems to me in America, we're constantly having to hear outright wing opinions. And like, there's this, what's happened with Trump about sort of like, why, why, why we need to listen to the people of West racism, Pennsylvania or whatever. It's like, I'm from Indiana, like, I know you go into a bar where my parents hometown and like, it's your, if you ask a question about say, for example, Obama or Black Lives Matter, like, you will hear the N word, like that's going to happen, because that's how Southern Indiana is. And so there's a part of me that's sort of like, I don't want to like, just say, oh, surely it's all good faith, everyone needs to be heard. But I don't do this for a

living and you do. And that's what I'm wondering, like, is a is that a moral kind of quandary you struggle with and be what is your what are your thoughts on it? Yeah, I'm my default setting is that everyone should be allowed to express their view. So fundamentally, I'm really reluctant to get in and say, you can't say that. But we do work under a broadcasting code and we can't we can't allow, you know, racist hate speech and all of that. And there isn't really even an issue with balance with that, we just can't do it. I think, I just think, though, that all of that said, we don't mind crazy. And we did something on notice that yeah, we did something on conspiracy theories, we had a guy ring up who said the whole world was run by an underground network of lizards.

And I thought, yeah, well, that's that's a view, you know, why not? I know that that leads us into difficulty. I mean, with COVID, we ended up with you know, it was quite strict advice really from the sort of the regulators about not indulging the views of people who say it's all made up, it's not a real illness, nobody's dying from it, you can die from the vaccine, whatever, whatever. And I think that that gave us a bit of a problem because you ended up with this subterranean group of people who were really angry about the MSM, the mainstream media. And he was on a call round at my house at some point, and they were just furious, like the truckers in Canada, furious about any any idea of public sector forced vaccinations,

anything. And I think the reason for that was that they weren't, they, we didn't really tolerate the views of people who wanted to say it's all out of bollocks. So we, you know, going with the science is all very well, but you probably need to hear the unscientific view too. Yeah, I was taken aback by this because I noticed when COVID first hit in my neighborhood, a lot of people signed up for group chats for mutual aid, help old people with their groceries, help bring food, things like that. Very quickly started getting spammed with lizard people, 5G stuff, and porn adverts. I want to meet the guy who's like, the 5G is giving you crown advice, but in fairness, it has really improved the reception.

I never got the 5G connection at all. I mean, I don't understand it, but I got a hand, I got a hand bill, but we would see these text messages. I remember seeing one where a lot of its Chinese made infrastructure was that was that was the argument. Yeah, because of the virus originated in Wuhan, but also like, I saw things along the lines of them basically saying that the COVID vaccine will kill you. Anyone who's got the COVID vaccine is going to have a chip in their body activated by the US military, which is flying a Comanche helicopter around London right this minute, which is very funny because the Comanche was never put in production, so there's one of them in a museum somewhere and that's it.

Your Manchurian candidate suddenly gets a powerful desire to buy a Dodge Charger. Yeah, so it's just one of these things where I saw this happening and I could tell that the BBC wasn't going to go that route of indulging COVID denialists like Crankstuff, but I also, in the US, I was always very wary of it because it felt as though there were people who understood how they could game the system in terms of getting views out there and that's how you wind up with like Proud Boys, alt-right stuff in America, you know, being in newspapers, being taken seriously, people talking about like great replacement theory and things along those lines and it's just like if you're an average person, you might be like, I don't know what he's talking about,

but if you know what's being said or you know what to look for, like it's obviously a very troubling thing. Yeah, so interesting and I don't, you know, in the end, we sort of got through the pandemic. We had the vaccine, the vaccine sort of worked and we're here and we're all sitting in a room together without much space between us and that's all working well. But I, yeah, I'm left wondering whether we should have aired more of the doubters. I suppose the doubters were not so much doubt in the science, they were more doubting, do we really need to lock down for this bloody thing? I mean, if you can't die from it under the age of 80, what are we doing here? And that will be a genuine debate for the rest of time. Yeah, and it was different in the US

because they did give people money, not everyone, but a lot of people got money either from the federal government in the state or as I understand it, besides like a slight increase in universal credit, there wasn't anything comparable here. So I understood why there was probably more opposition to lockdown measures here because of just people's financial situation. But it was very, it was interesting to watch this and now, like you said, we're kind of coming to the tail end of it. There's a part of me that wonders, because for us, if somebody views those kinds of things on an episode, we'll probably just can the entire interview. Like we record an episode, we put it out for the delay, we don't do live stuff. We try to be cautious about it. But I'm interested because everything

about your show involves sort of giving the mic to the public. So you mean if somebody on this, on your podcast was to say? Yeah, I mean, if somebody on my podcast was trying to say that, like, I'm Jewish, if someone was like, oh, yeah, the Jews are controlling us with 5G to do COVID, I would be like, yeah, how did you find that? Exactly. Like, please, please, yeah, stop, stop airing my secrets on Mike. No, I would, I would cut that kind of a thing, you know what I mean? Like that sort of stuff happening. But obviously, there's been some disagreements we've had people who've had pretty sharp disagreements about stuff like the war in Ukraine or vaccine passports or things along those lines. And like, we doesn't always line up. But that's fine. All I

think is whether if people say, I don't know, the vaccines killed millions of people when clearly it hasn't, or the vaccine, as you say, is a way of implanting a chip, you know, remember that first woman to get, can't remember her name, was it Margaret something? Was it the Margaret Hill? Who was it the first woman to get the vaccine? You'll know this Milo, because you're so good. The second person was called William Shakespeare, bizarrely. They were at the PR fail there. When your surname is Shakespeare and you're having a son, you know what you have to do. He was very excited. Why did they make him the second they should have made him the first? Anyway, someone tweeted, you know, Margaret has given us a view of what it's like her first day

with Bill Gates chip insider, you know, her first day controlled by Bill Gates. Yeah, Bill Gates very excited to get control of Maureen. I'm just with teenage daughters, the thing that it's quite educational for them, I think this whole COVID thing, because it shows them the power of the state, you know, the state could actually force us to lock down. It's incredible. We didn't think they were involved in our lives that much at all. So that's, that's the big thing from it. And it did make going back to radio shows and all that, I think it made the connection with the audience much closer, actually, because they were a lot of them were not speaking to anyone. They weren't hearing any voices during the day.

I certainly listened to the show a lot more, being at home all the time. And I was thinking about this too, because yeah, like the extent to which, especially friends of mine who live in the North, who were talking about like people who were living on really reduced incomes, like they wanted to work and the lockdown was sort of preventing that. And like that, I understood why there was much more opposition to it as opposed to in America, where unless you live in like Florida, where they just canned it entirely, you got some of the states refused the expanded unemployment. That's that's an extremely American move. I kept seeing shots on the seaside in Florida and everyone was behaving as normal when the rest of America was locked out.

I couldn't work it out. And then Florida had the worst death rate overall for a while. But like, obviously, it's different in the pre vaccine era than it versus now. But like, it is interesting to watch this because I realized that most of my feed, most of I get a still from people in America, and there was just a very different response in this country. And so like, obviously, we, we appreciate your willingness to interface with everybody and everyone because like, yeah, this is for us, it's doing a call in show, we would probably, well, we probably get offcom complaints. Based on the COVID and all that, is that a lot of this comes down to intergenerational warfare. And and so in COVID, what you see is there's a split all

the time between, you probably say pensioners and the rest or 19 year olds and 90 year olds, let's say. So the older generation during COVID was saying the younger generation had ruined the country because they couldn't obey the rules. The younger generation was saying, we've thrown away our best years, love life, university, we can't go clubbing to save older people. And you're still blaming us. And then this comes in a bigger way comes back at us with just the whole thing that younger people say that older people have taken the free houses, the free education, the free holidays, the final salary pensions, everything, and they destroyed the planet and the health service on the way out. And they've got to pick up the bill, which in this

country is 2.3 trillion and counting. Older people say, no, no, no, the reason you can't afford a house is because you spend all your, this is one of my listeners. The reason they can't buy houses is because they spend all their time in Paris. So one of my listeners said, How are you going to get a day's work done in France? It's too busy having sex with your mistress. So their view is that young people are feckless, that they, as soon as they got any money, they buy a flat screen TV, they never save up for a house, they just go around taking pictures of themselves. Young people say the reason we do those things, like go to Paris and take photos of ourselves is because we only have experiences, we don't have any long term planning, because we're

never going to have a house because you took them all. And then the key phrase is rattling around when old people are described as rattling around in houses, they go mad about it. Young people say, no, you've got four bedrooms free. Why can't we have them? So the whole show comes down to that and COVID did a bit as well. Yeah. I mean, I think that one thing I've noted before is that actually, I think as a mainstream radio show goes, you give more or I hear more airtime given to like an alternative, more left-wing viewpoint. I remember you doing a call in about in the current, has the current crisis elucidated that a hospital cleaner is actually of more societal use than a CEO? And I think this was the first time we interacted on Twitter,

because I tweeted something about Jeremy Vine's going to turn suburban mums into mouths. I saw that. That was you, of course. Yeah. And then you responded with something like, yes. Yeah. So it was, do we now know that a cleaner in a hospital is more important than the CEO? And of course, we always knew that whether they're more important than a consultant is a different matter we'd have to think about. But yeah, but I don't know whether we're left-wing because I always think that if you listen to Radio 4, Brexit was a total surprise. If you listen to Radio 2, you knew it was coming. We had a listener on and this was just before the vote. The Queen, there was a report in the sun saying the Queen probably backed Brexit.

And Phyllis Kapstik from Sheffield said, the royal expert had come on and basically said it's not true. Phyllis Kapstik said, I don't know who the royal expert is. I'm sure it is true. And I said, but the royal expert says it's not true. I don't care about experts. She said, experts built the Titanic. And I thought those five words summed up how it happened. And it's also such a great metaphor of how the whole thing works, because of course, there was nothing wrong with how the Titanic was built. It was more the people who were sailing it. A lot of highly intelligent people made that point after that went out on social media. But of course, it's such a brilliant soundbite. By that stage, the argument's gone. You're

actually right. The captain was at fault, not the engineers. When I think this is going back to the Kirstarmer thing, I think this is a thing we say a lot where it's kind of like, I mean, we are no fans of Kirstarmer, but like oftentimes we'll say he's more or less on the right side of the argument, even if he doesn't go as far as we would go, maybe, but he's so bad at making the argument. Because he's so pathologically boring and he's so bad at coming up with like a catchy way of putting it. Or if you compare him to someone like Bernie Sanders, who's good at going out there and hammering tongs, yelling at people, making a point. I mean, Americans like that. They gravitate towards Bernie Sanders. He's

very popular in terms of polling because they like a politician who's just like, there's no good sons of bitches. Like, they appreciate that. It's something. But isn't it amazing how our countries are so in track? If you go back even to the 70s, we had Jim Callaghan, you had Jimmy Carter, we had Thatcher, you had Reagan, so in sync. We then followed them with George, well, John Major in our side of the Atlantic, and you had George Bush senior, again, very similar. Then you had Clinton and we had Blair, who were virtually brothers. And then after that, it went a bit wrong, didn't it? Because you had Obama and we had Brown. Or we had Bush though. I mean, we had Bush during the whole stretch of

the layer because Blair was Prime Minister during Clinton's, the beginning of Clinton's second term and then was still, Blair was still Prime Minister when, oh, no, Brown had taken over. But basically, when Obama was starting the primary campaign for 2008, Blair was still the Prime Minister. That's it. And yeah, so my thing that no longer works when Obama becomes president, they don't quite match up. But then I'm thinking that maybe Keir Starmer and Joe Biden are similar, I don't know. Maybe the thing I would say is that having the black president in America created a societal freakout on the part of a certain subset of Americans in the same way that the Brexit debate did here, I think that you could say that that's going to ripple for forever. And I personally

think that Obama winning and winning twice, there was an Onion article that was the joke post him winning in 2012 reelection that basically said like, after Obama victory, white hot ball of pure rage, leading GOP polls for primary, because it was just such a meltdown. And I was living. I didn't think he would have, I mean, I watched it carefully because I thought that can't be the case if he's won. But maybe it was the case. I mean, I think the thing about it was is that, you know, in the very, very beginning with Republicans, they were like the Eric Cantor sort of led Republican Party in the house, were willing to work with the Democrats. And they, many of them got primary because their

voters were like, no, he's literally the devil. He's trying to change America's flag to the Obama logo. He was born in Kenya. Like he's, he's a Bolshevik. He's a Marxist. He's a Muslim, all this stuff. And the Republicans were really out of step with their base. He's a bitch. He's a lover. And then, and effectively the Democrats can never get that right. They can never, the Democrats hate their base. The Republicans fear their base. And Republicans were just like, oh, we can be racist. We can get on board with that. And that was, that's my take, obviously. On our thing of shadowing presidents and prime ministers, of course, I didn't even mention

Trump Johnson, where there's a slightly uncanny, almost look and the populist thing and the blonde hair. There we are. And the sort of stage managed buffoon thing that's obviously like meant to land with an audience, I think. I think with Trump, it's more natural. Derek Craig, I mean, yeah, Boris Johnson can quote reams of classical poetry in Latin. I think maybe that is a difference. That's one of the things that really irritates me when he does that. I did a classics degree. And I knew he'll just like trot out some like bit of great pressure. Oh, man, come on.

Meanwhile, famously, when Trump was getting his order of the deal book ghost written, he took the guy through his house and he was just sort of like, this is my favorite painting. And I was like, why is like, because it's of me and it's my most expensive painting. And that was his reason. And it was that guy became really interesting, the guy who wrote the art of the deal. Yeah. Giving interviews, say it was hell. And yeah. Well, I mean, because Trump, I don't know, Trump, he made a very bad deal.

When I was a kid, Trump was really this like business success story. People look up to him like, so it's just bizarre that this happened. Yeah. So I think sort of Alan Sugar is a bit like that in the same way where he was kind of thought of as a credible businessman and that he's been given too much TV exposure. And you're like, oh, no, this man is insane. He's out of his mind. I thought by way of by way of wrapping up, I've just got a couple of other highlights from my time listening to the show. I thought this one went back excellently to what we were talking about earlier, which was you were reading out people's home injury stories

and the quote I wrote down was then he fell from the ladder and the shears went through his eye. He is Roxy Music. Oh, thank you for reminding me of that. Well, we have had a series of things where the record has been the wrong record. I mean, playing the on Bromfield outs that hurt after an item about torture. And we did us, I think we had, we had to look at constantly look at the records to make sure they weren't causing a problem. And we had, there was a shark attack in Australia and we followed it with, I think it was a cannonball by Damien Rice, but it starts, there's still a little taste of you

in my mouth. So that was, that was a mistake as well. Very funny get offended by Damien Rice, like to construct that very particular paradigm. We do complain. I mean, we had, again, we had a story about someone being electrocuted. And, you know, the producers know you've got to look through the lyrics of a song carefully. And it was this town in big enough for the both of us. So we think that's fine. Forgetting it's by Sparks. Great song, though. Oh, wow. Actually, it's the motto of people getting electrocuted. They adopted that as their anthem. Well, yeah, well, I feel like that's kind of, and this is sort of a joke that we make on the show.

We have a sort of periodically, sometimes we do these intro skits, the name was mentioned earlier, and we sometimes have a character, Keith James, the talk radio host, who is kind of like an amalgam of different. But like the thing we do is we'll always have like there'll be like a raging debate or something, which is like the subject of the skit. And then he will say something like his Phil Collins, Susudio, which I feel like is sort of the soul of it in a way. Yeah, absolutely. I think it goes back to what you're saying about someone accusing you of running a comedy show, which it kind of is, but it's completely deadpan. Yeah, but of course, the audience are very serious about what they think. So I must always never take away from that. But

I do, there are moments where just the whole madness of it, just how angry people can get about very small things. That's that's it. You know, the woman who's standing every day in her road with a hairdryer, because she's angry about speeding drivers, and they think the hairdryer is a speed gun. And so she's standing there for eight hours at a time, you know, it's just incredible and people are very, very, they just cross about a lot of stuff. They're kind as well, lots of good qualities too. Furious about minutiae, I think is something we know. It's like the people who are painting their own speed signs and hanging them up on their trees. Or the story about the little boy who stood outside with a slow sign and just glowered at everybody that was going over

the speed limit. And he was like seven. Like, yeah, that is a very much like regional British news story. The moment for me where I genuinely don't know how you kept a straight face with this one was you had a woman call in about she has 10 siblings who are all in their 70s, 80s and 90s who are all still alive. And then you said, and you're all still alive, crikey. If any of you had any brushes with death. I don't know what you said to that. I can't remember. That's a real, yeah, I'll credit Richard Maitley with that one. I think you were possessed by the spirit of Richard Maitley momentarily. It is the classic where you say, and how is your husband? Well, I'm afraid he's dead. That's the classic one which interviewers always, always fall into. We did one today about

snoring and living in, you know, being in separate beds. And we just put basically got 20 calls for people whose husbands were loud snorers. It's not the way I expected it to go, because it was just about, does your husband sleep in a different room? I just think, actually, if mums have made their verdict, that's it, that's it. And that's what it's all about. I think that's a great place to leave it to be honest with you. Yeah, thank you very much. Is there anything you'd like to plug to our loyal listeners? I mean, it seems fairly redundant. No, obviously, I'm just delighted to meet you. It's fantastic. I should have brought some clips in and stuff, but I mean, whether there'd be problems playing them, I don't know, for

copyright and everything. Is it always fine? Yeah, well, we might, we might insert a couple of clips maybe into the, into the release. We can report the audio off YouTube. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, yeah, thanks again very much. Thank you guys.