TRASHFUTURE - Let The Games Begin feat. Ash Sarkar

Episode Date: June 25, 2019

Every outbreak has its patient zero. New York's Typhoid outbreak had Typhoid Mary. Springfeield's Infectious Diptheria problem had Jebediah Springfield. Britain's most tedious faux-progressive centrists have the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony. Novara Media's Ash Sarkar joins the lads to discuss a skydiving monarch, fifty dancing industrialists, and a salute to the Windrush Generation that actually involved dozens of British citizens at risk of deportation because of the race. It is the future-past Chuka Umunna surely dreams of for all of Britain and eventually the world. If you like this show, sign up to the Patreon and get a second episode each week! You’ll also get access to our Discord server, where good opinions abound. https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *WATCH THIS SPACE* We’ll be performing at the Birmingham Transformed festival on 8th August. Details to come in the next few weeks. If you’re in the West Midlands, come down to Brum for a night of delightful soup jokes. *LIVE SHOW ALERT* Come see Trashfuture live at the Edinburgh Fringe! We’ll perform on August 10th at 21.30. The venue is Venue 277, PQA Venues @Riddle's Court, Edinburgh EH1 2PG. Tickets are £11.50 and there are a ton of discounts available. Get them here: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/trashfuture-live-at-the-fringe If you want to buy one of our recent special-edition phone-cops shirt, shoot us an email at trashfuturepodcast[at]gmail[dot]com and we can post it to you. (£20 for non-patrons, £15 for patrons) Do you want a mug to hold your soup? Perhaps you want one with the Trashfuture logo, which is available here: https://teespring.com/what-if-phone-cops#pid=659&cid=102968&sid=front

Welcome to the desert of the real. We have only bits and pieces of information, but what we know for certain is that at some point in the early 21st century, all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to him. The games of 2012, 2012, 2012. Hello and welcome back to TF for the week. I'm Riley, you may remember me from every other episode of this podcast. Once again, we are joined by Milo.

Hello, it's me, your boy. I've not choked anyone yet, it's going well. Yeah, he is having a comparatively better 24 hours than certain members of the of the Conservative Party who remind us that when we say blue lives matter, we're not just talking about the cops. The thing is, if you could get thrown out of the Conservative Party for choking a woman, it'd be a very small party. And we're also joined by Hussain Kassavani. Hey, I'm back in the studio. I feel like I haven't been here for a long time.

Yeah, you know, it's changed quite a bit. The lights are more hospital-like. Elon Musk has a couple more stickers and a Pekol. But the towel is still there. Yes, fortunately. And we have Nate on the damn boards. Hello, you're editing, not choking people for the time being. Yeah, we are.

We are all doing better than Mark Field. I don't think that sounds as reassuring as you thought that it did. Nate only chokes people in the edit. He only chokes me because I'm not close enough to the microphone. He's just had enough. It'll be one of those movies where he finally has enough of his really annoying colleague. He's doing it Darth Vader style from across the room. No, it's like the movie falling down.

But it's because Hussain never fucking talks into the microphone. I just get intimidated sometimes. He's falling down at a jaunty French retitling of the film Downfall. And of course, we are joined by returning champion Ash Sarkar. Ash, how are you doing today? Oh, man, I feel like I'm dying. I've not been choked recently. I just have a cold. So I'm going to try and cough away from the microphone.

OK, excellent. Excellent. Just slam in the corner. This is, yeah, of course. That's fine. So if Ash stops talking a while at some point through this, she has succumbed to her Victorian wasting disease. And we will be, of course, giving her a dignified send off. However, we are actually talking today about a subject that is very, very close to my heart.

And it is, in fact, the dignified send off that was given to Britain in 2012, because folks, it's time to talk about the moment that broke the brains of liberal Britain, the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. Yeah, pop air horns, please. Now, put in the real ones in the edit. Is that probably just sounded weird? Yeah, of course. Nate, I know you were in America for this,

but where were you guys all during the London Olympics opening ceremony? I was at home. A bunch of my friends got arrested that night. This was like when the left was split between still being part of sort of weird Trotsky sect, and then everyone else was an anarchist. I was an anarchist. I was just lazy and also I couldn't ride a bike, but the ones that could ride a bike and he wasn't lazy,

which is most of them decided to do like a critical mass take back the streets kind of thing, where it was like cycling en masse to sort of disrupt the area around the Olympic stadium. And absolutely everyone got arrested. Everyone got nicked. I was like keeping up with it on Twitter and I was like, oh, I guess there's nothing to do, but watch David Beckham with the Olympic torch now, or my friends are in jail.

Yeah, that's, I mean, if there was ever going to be a, not necessarily a metaphor, but like an event that was so synecdoche for that, for the entire story that that thing was telling, it was a group of people who were trying to draw attention to and change a wider social thing were arrested so that people could watch David Beckham deliver the Olympic torch. But it was also kind of like, it was kind of that moment for the left where everyone had read David Harvey

and stuff about the right to the city. And at the same time could see the way in which the city as a commons was just being enclosed at every angle was like a year after the riots. There was the big blue wall, which like had gone up around like Hackney and Walthamstow and Tower Hamlets for the Olympics. And everyone was like really, really pissed off. And so all those things were really good. And then because there wasn't a sense of scale and actions at scale

outside of like somewhat spontaneous ones, it was like, oh, what do we do about this? I guess we're going to have to do some disruptive cycling. So there was nothing else for it. Milo, where was I? I think I was at my parents' house because it would have been university holidays. And I seem to remember I actually avoided watching it because like I would periodically, I think my parents are watching it and I'd periodically come in and I'd be like,

yep, this is awful. Because it's just like, at that point, not for political reasons, just because it's so like more kishly shite. It's just like, oh, like a really twi envisioning. Oh, isn't everything, isn't everything lovely? Like it's like, oh, fuck off. I don't know. I've always been contrarian, horrible.

So, you know, I may not have been, I may not have been so woke back in those days, but I certainly did hate more kish sentimentality. So my views on the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony haven't changed. I was living in Hong Kong at the time. Okay. Very cool way. Nothing happened there. You know, you know, in Hong Kong, there were like the pro,

there were like the kind of the hangover of the Occupy protests still happening. So, you know, they, you could see like some of them watch, you could see some of them watching it on their, on their phones, which was very weird. And it was kind of, it was a bit weird being far away and people kind of asking you about, oh, you must be so excited about the Olympics coming to London and not really having an answer for it. So I kind of only, I experienced it through like headlines,

and I experienced it through Facebook posts that were like the London 2012 opening ceremony was just amazing. And look, even the Queen was there. Damn. I mean, it was, it was a really weird, like everyone had been like super critical. And I had been like super critical and I was like ready to hear everything. And then I was like, quite cool that Usain Bolt is going to be in London. That's quite cool.

Quite excited about that. Like, I know it's a surname. It's quite excited about being in the vicinity of Usain Bolt. Like I could breathe a molecule of air that had been in Usain Bolt's lungs. Which, and really, that's love. Yeah. That's how you get pregnant, Mads. So be careful.

However, of course, everyone knows the real left, Chuck Romana, had this to say, looking back on the 2012 Olympics opening ceremonies. And this is kind of why we're talking about this. In something he wrote like two or three political parties ago, he said, he wrote, what are progressives for? Remember the opening of the London 2012 Olympics? We had a unique chance to tell the world who we were and what mattered to us. And we absolutely nailed it.

We've never had a chance to do that before. I've chosen to display it through concentration camps. There was a lyrical opening scene inspired by Shakespeare. The Queen parachuted in with James Bond. Mr. Bean made it appearance. Wait, do you think that was actually the Queen? Don't tell him. This is Chuck Romana's Santa Claus.

We celebrated that NHS Tim Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the World Wide Web, sent a tweet live from the stage. Cool. Thanks, Tim. A tweet saying, did you call my wife a prostitute? Dizzy Rascal provided the soundtrack to a house party there in an actual house erected in the middle of the stadium with the world watching. Whoa, not a real house.

Wow, nothing says Britain like a house. That was the only place in London where Grime wasn't illegal at the time, right? It was the only house actually being built by the government. Got him. Got him, chief. It takes quite a wonderful, remarkable country to pull off such a show. You know, sending a tweet, building a single house. I know, man.

Does this man like, has he never been to like Las Vegas where they do these types of shows like all the time? Or I don't know, just like any... I'm pretty sure there are countries who do like very elaborate shows and they're very kind of specific reasons why they do elaborate national shows. Yeah. Well, now no one's surprised about the Olympic ceremony anymore because now we realize that all these people were on cocaine.

But like at the time, no one knew that. They were just like, whoa, they've really thought outside the box here. They were just really into all the lights and stuff. I mean, I kind of feel, I mean, this, this nurtures one of my like weird grudges and well, not grudge really, but like theories about Dizzy Rascal, which is he was just like, actually, I fucking hate East London. I hate Hackney and I hate where I'm from. I'm just going to like go hang out with Calvin Harris on like a June buggy.

He's in Chiselhurst now. He's in Chem, right? He's moved back, but this is supposed to be like the sort of like, you know, return of like a Hackney boy done good, come home. And he's like doing like the worst Dizzy track ever in front of like a kind of like barely aware crowd of extras. I think he did bonkers. Oh, okay.

Cause I feel, I feel kind of sorry for him just in the sense that obviously we were all around, but I, you know, when Dizzy Rascal was like a thing among kind of white indie kids who had just transitioned from their emo phase and Dizzy Rascal was being booked on like every kind of white boy festival that you could think of. And I was at the Reading Festival, I think in 2008 or nine when he was there and like he just had to play these songs that white kids really liked because he played, I don't know, he played some track, which was like one of his old like mixtape ones and like no one heard it, right?

Right. And it was just, it was just really, really weird to kind of be in the same world. But then he did kiss me by six minutes and it went off. Then it transitions to like, then it transitions to one of his tracks with Calvin Harris and then suddenly like all these white kids are just going like wild for it. I just, I just don't understand how anyone can actually enjoy Calvin Harris because I don't think Calvin Harris actively enjoys making the music that he makes for people. Like every song is the same.

Every music video is exactly the same. And I think that can only come from a place of like deep hatred for your audience. Well, No, no. The richest musician in the world or something. Calvin Harris. Which is amazing because he's so irrelevant to music. He's like somehow the richest and most successful and yet also the most pointless.

So, so Chaka continues, the vision we sought to present to the world, a country not only proud of our history, but proud of what we have become open humorous, decent, confident and modern. What a people. This is the Britain I love. I feel and see it in Stratum, southwest London where I grew up and where I now have the privilege of representing in Parliament for whatever party I currently belong to today. It is my theory that the Olympic 2012 opening ceremony was to London, the UK, what the entire

Obama presidency was the United States in terms of liberal nostalgia post 2016. When we, when centrist columnists and Chakramana and all these people say, I want to go back to normal, what they really mean is I want to feel the way I felt about Britain when I was watching the opening ceremony. In this essay, I will. Yes. All and as we, what I have done is I have actually found the media guide where the opening ceremony is described for the media by the people who put it on under its own terms.

And my goodness, does it contain some gems? So, for our American listeners, you're about to really dive into British psychology. For our British listeners, get ready to hear about what some of the most mawkish idiots in our country think about it. So, for a little bit of background, as Ash mentioned earlier, this did take place in East London where I currently live. And a big, big part of it was we are going to bring the Olympics to our country. We are going to regenerate it.

So, here's what Boris Johnson had to say. This evening's opening ceremony celebrates the best of London past, present and future. But the games are not just about, are not just celebrating what London has to offer. They're also helping to shape it. The stadium in which you sit is at the centre of a transformational renaissance for East London with investment providing much needed homes, jobs and green space for Londoners and infrastructure that is already attracting investment from around the world. The Olympic Park is the most cursed part of London and the idea that this was ever going

to be part of any kind of regeneration for East London. So, the only person I know who's lived in the Olympic Park is a mate of mine who at the time worked for Deloitte. And Deloitte were putting all of their graduate scheme people from Oxbridge into the Olympic Park. They changed a new working class. Yeah, where they'd rented them these ridiculously overpriced flats, which were horrible and made out of papier-mache.

Everything there was like, you know how most of East London now is annoyingly overpriced like, hips to cafes that are shit and will sell you like a vegan milkshake for like eight pounds. Whoa, whoa, Brendan O'Neill. I didn't know you were here. Why don't you try it because it's vegan? I hate it because it's overpriced. The Turning Point UK just jumped.

Let's see who Milo really is. My love tax Chloe. Brendan O'Neill and I have now swapped. He writes the parody, Brendan O'Neill and I write the real Brendan O'Neill. But the Olympic Park is like a fake version of that. Deloitte have come in and been like, okay, we're going to now build like 400 fake vegan hipster cafes. So it's like that, but they're all like run by like the same interchangeable.

They're all run by Circo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like another layer of like ridiculous. A really good example of this is just like the buildings that the kind of homes that they've made around West Stratford, Westfield. So I had to go do a podcast the other week and to get to this person's house to record it, I had to go through Stratford, Westfield, like as in through the shopping centre to get to these podcasts.

There's no way around it. Unless you have like a car, there's no way that you can actually like physically go around it. You have to go through the shopping centre. You actually have to get there by swag way. Well, what they've done is they've kind of integrated it. So it almost like if you look at it from like an aerial view of the outside view, like these flats, look as if they're part of the shopping centre.

It's just like this really weird, like almost like fantasy world where it reminds me a lot of Hong Kong where like so much of so many of the train stations were just kind of extensions to like big malls and everywhere you went, everything was just like a shopping mall. That is like the Essex Dream. It's like, oh my God, imagine if you could like live in Lakeside. Lakeside is good. I'm sorry. It used to be good.

It used to be good. It used to be good. No, I grew up in Essex. I can talk shit about Essex as much as I want. No Essex girl would be seen dead in a lakeside. That is so untrue. It really isn't that bad compared to like the other shopping centres in that area. Anyway, I mean also you could say that justice for Lakeside.

Yeah. You could say it's the dream of this dream of whatever this Lakeside thing is or you could say it's or you could say it's basically like someone read, you know, like those, those quite sort of corny ad busters magazines from the 2000s where they'll be like more kids know the Ford logo then a maple leaf or whatever. It's as though someone read an ad busters and was like, yep, we're just going to do this. We're going to turn, we're just going to add, we're going to turn this into the villain from ad busters.

It is that on the nose. Well, I mean, but it does, it does feel quite like there is like the entire legacy of the, of the Olympics on East London has been one of privatising a bunch of stuff that we and redeveloping that we didn't have the will, the political will to do for ourselves instead just allowing a bunch of private contractors to come in and turn it into like an axe throwing bar that's above a video game shop in effect. I mean, it also does go hand in hand with what followed the riots and no one could predict the riots happening or spreading in the way that they did.

What I felt was most striking about it is just the speed with which people were displaced after that. So like number one, you've got like 24 hour magistrates court. So you just have this churn of people being banged up and serving custodial sentences for the most absurd offences for like what happened during the riots to you've got like a bunch of funding coming in, which is basically trying to target and fragment and disperse working class communities of colour around North and East London in particular. So like Tottenham and Hackney and luckily that's going hand in hand with the sort of

project of social cleansing, which they wanted to achieve the Olympics anyway. Now, in fact, this leads quite well into another person writing on the Olympics, not included in the media guide. This is actually a section of Mark Fisher's blog from an entry he did in 2008. This is from K-Punk and it's Mark describing walking through the pre-Olympics Lee Valley. Are you ready for the zone? From here on in it's Piratarkovsky and so it was light industrial spaces, car records, yards, square windowed studios, haulage depots and a mile further on we hit the fence.

The perimeter of the Olympic site is now secured by a plywood fence that is 10 feet high around four miles long, bright blue in colour and chinkless in places it is double banked and others taught by razor wire. The fence is a barrier designed not only to exclude access but vision. To see inside the zone you must ascend to Stratford Tower Block, hire a helicopter or visit the website which provides stills of the construction process and mocked up future dramas of the park. Light glinted buildings, sparkling water features, happy munchkin people.

The mocked up park surrenders east London to the eventless horizon of the end of history in which nothing happens forever. In between are many visits to the Lee Valley in 2003 and Ian Sinclair and Robert McFarlane's expedition in 2007 was the awarding of the Olympic Games to London which now was consumed by the CGI shadow of 2012. The first signs of a coming non-event is always the CGI. Damn, choke me Mark Fisher. You know how I got these CGI mock-ups.

So, I think there is a sense and I think as we get into the ceremony itself that this was kind of portrayed as the end of history, right? When we talk about the end of history we talk about the fantasy that the conflicts are smoothed over, that everything is basically done and worked out and the project is now just turning the world into a larger and larger shopping mall where people's desires can be catered for more and more efficiently. But there are the desires that we have as imagined by capital in effect. I mean, what's interesting is that the project of regenerating Stratford was always coming

up against the last utopian residential vision which was sort of from the 60s and the 70s and that kind of like legacy of like residential modernism. And so, there was an estate called the Carpenters Estate which after the Olympics, UCL which was the university that I went to tried to buy up that land, demolish it and they wanted another campus just like randomly in Stratford and it ended up not happening because no one wanted to be responsible for demolishing it. And when you walked around the Carpenters Estate, it was really striking to see the sort of vestiges of a dream that was and now is no longer because you don't just have

these huge tower blocks where lots of people live but NHS walk-in centre, the idea was that you would have lots of little shops and cafes and like little pub and things like that and the idea was that you would have a sense of community and it was all right there and most of those shops, most of those cafes, a little pub was still there by like 2012, 2013, closed down, they were like completely dilapidated but there were still hundreds of residents who refused to be displaced in there so it was always that thing of the new residential dream coming up against the old one and this sort of friction or antagonism that occurred when that happened.

Well, because that's who we were living in a pre-Math Hancock era when those businesses would have gone unencouraged. I mean, at the core of it isn't, you know, the Olympic, you know, just thinking about what like Rayleigh was saying about like what the notion of the Olympics is. It's kind of, it's a post, it's marketed as this kind of environment where everyone sort of like, let's go of international conflict and they all come together for a common cause which is like, you know, to do some running. You know.

Achievement sucks. Putting more chalk on a human body than I've ever seen before. So when that, so what they've basically, what like Chuck O'Muna and like everyone who kind of like valorizes the 2012 ceremony is doing is basically taking that ethos of like what the Olympics is projected to be or like this is, you know, supposed to represent and basically making a political model out of it. It's also interesting to me because London is cited so often as the thing to not do by part of people like the no Boston Olympics campaign, which I was just a friend of mine

was very involved in that because of the extent to which once planning permission is granted, it's just, it's things get steam ruled that would otherwise have required a lot more work on the part of developers and it just becomes this free for all. And I think people in Los Angeles, people in Boston saw already that, you know, communities that were gentrified that were being squeezed out by capital and realize that London, London was the example of what you absolutely did not want to have happen. It's weird because of watch people who you see this, this vision of the Olympics being cited so favorably, whereas like it's actually kind of become at least in the U.S.

this sort of buzzword for like the worst case scenario as the Olympics comes to your city. I'm just imagining a Boston Olympic Stadium. That's a huge pyramid, which would of course be built by the Irish. So without further ado, let's get into the ceremony itself. It was called Isles of Wonder and it was it was directed by Marcus Jackass, Danny Boyle. Hey, welcome to Marcus Jackass. I'm Danny Boyle and this is me and Johnny Knoxville crying over a video about the NHS. It was called Isles of Wonder.

Some countries, he begins, have revolutions that change their whole nation. I had a revolution that changed the whole world. It was called colonialism. Thank you very much. The Industrial Revolution rebooted human existence. Nothing would ever be the same again. That is correct. It's not correct in the way that he thinks.

It's correct. It's just if you want to draw a straight line from the domination of capital ownership, you get like devoting an enormous amount of water and security manpower to keeping like golf course conditions in the Stratford Park. I think we're being uncharitable to Danny Boyle and I think that actually what we think of as the limitations of his Morkish vision are in fact the limitations of the form because I remember that bit in the opening ceremony where they did like the Industrial Revolution is here and they actually made it look like as crap as you can in a big extravaganza

Olympic opening ceremony. It was very much that reference of sort of like dark satanic mills, that kind of shit. I think that in his head, that's him doing a like, I'm doing a Watson or look at British history. And of course he's not because it's the limitations of the form itself. I'm saying that maybe the Morkishness isn't entirely his own. I think we need to draw a distinction to here because there are two separate ways in which the Olympics opening ceremony is bad.

There's sense one, which is like more like just a comment on British society, which is how this is not a reflection of what Britain is like. And then there's sense two, which is in that like, it's just like sentimental and wanky, which is what Danny Boyd is guilty of. But he's not guilty of I think like trying to like whitewash things. I think he's just like, it's just boring. I think the, and I think the all sort of prefigure of something that comes later, which I think the issue isn't that he's, yeah, he's correct.

The Industrial Revolution was terrible. But I think the my main problem about it is the way that it's used politically now as the sunlit uplands for the FBPE types. But I think... Opening ceremony or the Industrial Revolution? Opening ceremony. That's going to be like Jolly and Maugham being like, you know what? If we stay in the EU and bring back child labor.

I mean, we already know he has an affinity for mills. We just didn't know what kind of... But if there's a no deal Brexit, what will happen to the steam looms? So, but I think that one of the, what this is guilty of isn't of not, of not portraying it accurately. It's of saying, yep, and all those problems are solved. Because it says, yep, it's all in the past. That's, yeah.

Yeah. In fact, we'll get to this now as I go through this. Ahem. This is for everyone is the theme of the opening ceremony. A celebration of the creativity, exuberance and overall the generosity of the British people. The ceremony will take us to the great revolutions in British society. The Industrial Revolution, the revolution of social attitudes that began in the 1960s

and the digital revolution we're living through now. Wow. Woven through it all. A lot of food from your phone. Yeah. Good thing we had all those mills. Very nearly the book structure for like fully automated luxury communism. A little to Danny Boyle.

No. After the 2012 opening ceremony, something greater would happen and that would be the Bluetooth-enabled Chastity Cage. Now, if we could redo it now. Instead of all of the performers coming together with the NHS, they all come together in the shape of the Bluetooth-enabled Chastity Cage. It would be the same opening ceremony, but everyone would have to wear a Chastity Cage. Yeah, exactly.

And they're all like unlocked by Tim Berners-Lee with the press. And he goes, that's the power of the internet, baby. Oh shit, the Wi-Fi's gone down. I might have an unpopular opinion. Go for it. Is the vision of history that's presented in Danny Boyle's 2012 Olympic opening ceremony that different from the understanding of history, which is generally perpetuated within Corbynist narratives? No.

No, and yes. No, in that I think he does, he has portrayed history as a struggle. I'm not talking about Corbyn the individual. I'm talking about the sort of, you know, the intellectual work done around it. So you sort of, you know, you think about the imagery of like the party political broadcasts. You think about the centrality of protect R&H chess. You think about the way in which there is a sometimes superficial multiculturalism, maybe. Do you feel like the sort of utopianism of the 70s that people were like,

if we could just recapture the 70s, then it would be better than what we live in now? Because we talked about that with, I remember James Medway bringing that up about this weird, like he felt like it was sort of a trap falling into this idea that like, make things back the way they were before that or everything would be great now. And it's like, but there were huge problems back then too. I think there are elements of it. And I think that there's, there are aspects in which Corbynism struggles to free itself from a very, very liberal understanding of history in which there is a sense of,

oh, because we're doing history from below, we can do a history in which white and class people have suffered, strived better themselves and then suffered again. And it's got very little interaction with colonialism, with the creation of what you might call like a labor aristocracy, with some of the more exclusionary practices of trade union movements, hasn't really plumbed what living in a multiracial society today means. I'm just saying, unpopular opinion. Weirdly enough, I think you may have exactly prefigured just now

what Danny Boyle actually concludes on for the ultimate purpose of what his opening ceremony is about. Check this out. Woven through it all is a golden thread of purpose. The idea of Jerusalem, of a world that can be built through the prosperity of industry, the caring nation built on the welfare state, and the joyous energy of popular culture through the dream of universal communication. Yes, I actually think you basically more or less nailed it. I mean, there's a lot of plundering that went on during the process of actually finding Jerusalem.

We'll just brush over that for a little bit. There were a few like partitions. Danny Boyle just loves the British Palestinian territory. There were just like a few like partitions, you know, some kind of, you know, some warlords paid off. But you know, we brought people together. We technically could call it that. There were locked doors though. The Olympic opening ceremony starts at the Crusades.

So dancing around holding the head of a Saracen. Look, some people might have engaged in some light slaving. I'm just saying that like it's not when you think about Danny Boyle's vision and the politics running through it, it is that particular kind of English socialism, which isn't very Marxist at all. And I think there is a strong sense of that within Corbinism today. That's my argument. That's my unpopular opinion. That's not unpopular with me, but I don't know how in touch I am with everyone else.

We don't know how popular you are. No, that's right. I know I'm not popular. We don't know when the Brendan symbiote is going to come out. Yeah. Like as I previously mentioned, I just like hate Morkish sentimentality in all its form. So I do hate all of the Labour Party political broadcasts because they're all just like, Oh, isn't it great?

The NHS. Oh, God, blimey governor like that kind of. It's just like, come on, like the NHS is a good service, but it's not like, I don't like sit at home like looking at the NHS logo going, I don't want them to get rid of it. I mean, genuinely, my partner cried at that our town PPP because he was like, so like the idea of like the town was like, Oh, you found the opposite person of me.

This is amazing. And I'm really glad about that. To be fair. So glad. But like, like the idea of like the town had like such emotional resonance for him, like growing up in one. And I was just like, yeah, but like, you're not from like the seaside. He was like, I know, but still a little fishing birds.

I like the accent. I'm not even sure if that is his accent. That was a little vision is about the little fishing boats, bring back the little fishing boats and the jam. So any case, this, this is, I think you can, I think if we talk like, if that, that vision of history is essentially Wiggish, that there is, we started here and everything has been building to this particular moment in the Lee Valley, which has been militarized, cleared out.

And will now contain quite a bit of dancing. And at one point dropping 7 billion small pieces of confetti from a plane to represent every person in the world. Wow. Yeah. And how they will be discarded like chaff from the spaceship that Elon Musk takes to Mars. So sort of confetti by the gradable or is it like all going to be like in the bellies of little fishes now? Oh, I mean, oh no, not the little fishes.

This was 2012 before anyone knew about, you know, like climate change or anything. Yeah. This is before Blue Planet 2. So almost certainly it is made of some discount plastics. So the, so basically we carry on up the Thames. We, the camera goes at the Thames. We go past the Oxford Cambridge boat race, Eaton College, the University of Oxford itself. All of the things, of course, that have made Britain great.

All of the little symbols that definitely, you know, are providing us with the wonderful leadership we've come to expect. And then we go into England's green and pleasant land. As we said, there is one is unbarred Kingdom Brunel comes out of Swindon. Smash is a drum really hard, says some shit from Shakespeare. And then the Industrial Revolution happens. And this is the scene. That was how it started. It's an unknown bit of history.

The weirdest name ever comes out and just hit a drum and then suddenly you get coal. And this scene is called Pandemonium. Celebrating Britain's birthplace of the Industrial... Britain as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, the workshop of the world. And yes, he does invoke the Satanic Mills thing to be fair to him. Pandemonium was Milton's word for hell. So that's what I mean by it's like very much sort of English social history. Indeed.

So the Industrial Revolution was a time of tremendous excitement, but also fear and hardships. These standards of ordinary people rose for the first time in history, but their lives are radically disrupted. Families are split as the young went in search of work in cities that were overcrowded and overrun with disease. To represent this, of course, a bunch of smokestacks come out of the ground. I don't think the living standards of working people rose for the first time in history. I think the working standards of living standards of people had risen since like the year 600. I think that's kind of a ridiculous thing to say. It may have been the most dramatic, but like people weren't living in like mud huts in 1750.

No, remember, we're doing wig history. So yes, actually it was necessary. It did raise everyone's working standards for the first time and only here, of course. There was no other way to do it. People were all like naked and painted blue and like warring over like, you know, for fucking pagan stones in the ground. Indeed. Now, suddenly everything stops and this is where they stop doing history in a linear sense and start saying, pandemonium, here are the disruptions.

A hush falls and all eyes turn to a poppy field where a group of soldiers stand in silence. And through trade unionism and protest, working people were able to solve all these problems. Political upheavals are represented in a parade of pearly kings and queens, Chelsea pensioners, immigrants of the, quote, windrush generation, and representatives of the Beatles and suffragettes who also fought for women's rights. So all of the Beatles, the Beatles, the Beatles. And this is sort of where it gets into. I think one of the, one of the things, I don't quite know what this means,

but it's something that it keeps, I keep thinking about is they keep saying, and we got the real people to, to join in. So for example, the suffragettes are joined by the grandchildren of the Pankhurst sisters. The windrush, the windrush generation is represented by the children of the actual windrush arrivals. The pearly kings and queens, I'm not super familiar with them. I think they're like an East London thing. I don't really know what they are. It's like one of those phrases that like, I'm told all the time is meant to represent London.

And I'm like, yeah. It's like a really outdated cockney thing. It's like a working class thing. Yeah, yeah. It's like a real like cockney thing. Like people used to dress up in these like pearly suits, like with loads of pearls sewn onto them. And that's how you, that's how you get rights for workers is you put on a pearly suit.

But like no one's like, it's, I think even in the 20th century, it's outdated. So you're like, it's like very like, I don't know. Yeah. And so all of the, all of these things, you know, like the beetles and the windrush generation and so on, they're all, they're all here. And, and of course the windrush generation, the windrush generation played by their own children are the people who are being systematically deported. It would be unsurprising to me if some of the people who were literally in the opening ceremony.

It was going away party. It would be unsurprising to me if some of the people then who were literally in the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony were at some point between then and now deported by the British state because of the hostile environment. Or at least targeted to an extent that made their lives, you know, measurably worse. Yes. They all looked at the camera and said, our work is done. And then it was like the windrush generation had to go back to their home planet. Oh my God.

Like teleported out of the stadium. And I think that's this, this goes back to something I was saying earlier where it, it feels like what wig history wants to do when you look at his, when you, when you look at history in the way that the London 2012 Olympics does, and therefore in the way that people now look at the London 2012 Olympics, you see these problems is basically solved. It's the industry revolution was bad. It's a good thing we had trade unionism.

Remember when women didn't have equal rights? No one's choking female protesters now, of course. The windrush generation, I'm glad we're so welcoming of immigrants. However, we're going to deport most of the people actually in this stadium right now. And I'd also say that it just, it glosses things over to the point where like, you fall in love with a symbol of something versus talking about the reality of it. And you, you talked about this Riley about them, the American version of the 2012 Olympic ceremony is the Obama presidency.

But all the things that are happening with, you know, with separation of children at the border and with detainee camps in America, that was started under Obama, but people look back at Obama as this symbol. And in the same way, it's like, you can look at the problems that are affecting Britain now, and we're already manifest at the time, but for somehow things were all better back then because we didn't have Brexit or whatever. And it's just, it's weird to me because it seems like it's, it's not universal and it's not the same, but it's similar and it seems like the same people who are in love with that symbol in the US

are the same kinds of people who are in love with it in the UK. I mean, I agree with you that it's a, it's a wiggish vision of history. And I think what makes it wiggish rather than the sort of like, straight up similarity with the sort of traditions of English socialism as identifying was the abstraction from the material conditions in which the staging takes place. And that's what makes it wiggish. And I think that when you're trying to make the same judgment of is that how people perceive and remember Obama,

is that some people do have a lingering attachment to some of the more violent processes of the Obama administration, in particular, drone warfare, in particular the sort of like hawkishness, which dominates some aspects of foreign policy. And for them, that's an integral part of why they think he's a sensible president. And so I think that's the sort of hard one to like match up entirely. But I do, I do buy your wiggish idea of history argument. Finally, I buy it.

I was, I was like the whole way, I was like skeptical and I was like, reluctantly, I might come to an agreement. You like a drone warfare? You can give it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so it's, it's why I think this is, but this is the essence of that scene. And then with, fortunately, with all of those problems solved, done and dusted, we can move on to celebrating our, our wonderful achievements. I'm looking forward to the 2040 Olympics everywhere.

We have a tribute to all the soldiers that died in Iran. Fuck me. Show me the lie. Yeah, yeah. So they're not going to be British soldiers. No, it's what, yeah, we're going to have a tribute to what all of the, all of the drone pilots that got carpal tunnel syndrome. They went down the rankings on Call of G.D.

They're distracted by the wall. We move on to the next scene entitled second to the right and straight on till morning, perhaps the most, most mockishly sentimental. This segment honors two of Britain's greatest achievements. Again, now the struggles are all behind us and we're done with those. On to Never Neverland. Yes. Oh God.

Damn. Danny Boyle is, He built the like satire, the satire of his own work into his thing. Absolutely. He is his, he is, he is his own critic and he's too dumb to realize it. Maybe he knew, maybe he knew we would have this conversation. Maybe as we start wrapping up the podcast, Danny Boyle enters and he's like, He was a visionary.

He's actually an extension of the 2012 opening ceremony. You know what it is? Just like when we read Rory Stewart's national service, no, the article written in The Times about how good an idea national service would be, and we suspected that The Times is just playing a prank on us in the most recent premium. Maybe it's the same thing. Maybe all of this, all of this completely,

the hands-on head liberal stuff that we make fun of, maybe they're doing it as a prank on us. Maybe you'd like to keep scrolling through your document of like, you know, the guide to the ceremony. And then it's like, And then a few years later, a basement in Whitechapel, an ethnically diverse group of ragtag media content creators. Interior day, a fetid basement.

It is not fetid anymore. We moved to the nighter office. Everyone's nude. We're all sharing one towel. Exactly. There is directly in my line of vision a damp looking towel. Yeah. It's Milo's.

It's bone dry. I can confirm, but it is there. It's covering a page of a whiteboard of secret plans of sketches to do. Secret plans for our own Olympics opening ceremony. Privatize Olga? We'll explain that later. I would love to say it doesn't say that, but it genuinely does. We'll explain that later off the air.

So, no one could know. This segment honors two of Britain's greatest achievements. It's amazing body of children's literature and it's national health service. Oh my God. I was about to say, but there's amazing body of children. Like a hologram of like fucking Dolphin Square, like showing up. Jesus. Peter Pan and Captain Hook, Mary Poppins, Winnie the Pooh, Cruella Deville,

the Queen of Hearts and Harry Potter were all created by British writers. Awesome. Who could forget Britain's long tradition of really hot children? Jesus. Fuck off. Fuck off. Look, it's kept the British upper classes and their haircuts busy for years. If Gido Fox is listening to this and clipping it,

I in no way condone the comments made by my fellow podcaster. You know that Gido doesn't even care about that, right? He doesn't give a shit. Yeah. You can post full bits of contact. You can post loads of contacts and you won't give a shit. You can go off and kill people with the contrasts and that's fine. Yeah, they love it.

So, almost don't love drink driving laws. What we have in this segment is a bunch of nurses push some lit up beds onto the, onto the stadium with a bunch of children on them. They all actually work for the NHS. Yet more of that thing where they're like, we're not just representing the thing. We're doing the real thing. We got the real Windrush kids, the real descendants of the Pankers, real nurses. This is not a simulacrum.

And those are the real nurses who at that time are getting fucked by Andrew Landry's top down reorganization of the NHS. Yes, correct. They literally at the same time. Oh, Andrew Lansley, I forgot about it. They're pouring one out for our boy. Yeah. We also, we watch this before the recording.

They also made them swing dance for some reason. Don't know why. They know, of course, Danny Boyle would of course love the swing hop revival as related as 2012, the lamest music trend since guitars. It is such a strange thing when you think about the working conditions that those real nurses would have had to be a part of. And then suddenly it's like, okay, now dance in front of the Queen. They're being paid eight pounds an hour to do that dance.

No, their volunteers are getting paid nothing. Oh, wow. They, they essentially dance and then they come together. The beds form the pixels NHS. Interestingly, Jeremy Hunt was trying to get this section axed because he didn't want to celebrate the NHS, which he thought was Stalinism. I didn't, he didn't use the word Stalinism. I, I estimate he's probably done that in private, but he was, he was culture secretary

at the time, but he was very against the continued existence of the NHS as he continues to be as health secretary or foreign secretary now. That's all the same thing. He continues to be against the existence of foreign. So he really continues like, you know, the same. As culture secretary against the existence of culture. Yeah, exactly. This is why Matt Hancock has to be every minister because he just unironically loves everything.

I mean, to be fit, again, I always cite, he, the one good thing any Tory ever did was Matt Hancock accidentally decriminalized grime music effectively. So thankful, we all, all are to him. Also, he is, as we said, Labrador, it's not his fault. He just fell in with a bad crowd. Did I ever tell you about the time I saw like Stella Creasy and Matt Hancock absolutely like getting lit and turning the fuck up together. I think it was like the enemy awards or something.

And I was just like, and I was with my friend and I was like, that's Stella Creasy. And she was like, you're hallucinating. And I was like, it's fucking Stella Creasy. And then she turned around. I was like, that's Matt Hancock. Imagine, imagine what kind of drug you'd have to be on to hallucinate Stella Creasy and Matt Hancock. That would be a somehow very extreme and also very mundane drug.

A 2C compound for sure. I would find my own experience. I took shrooms once and I just kept thinking I saw like Alicia Silverstone. I was like, oh, that's Alicia Silverstone over there. And everyone was like, no. And I was like, it's Alicia Silverstone over there. I love doing 2CB in the car park at Oxford Parkway and hallucinating the Elizabeth Hook shot is hanging out.

So the NHS is the institution which more than any other unites our nation. It was founded just after World War Two on Nye Bevan's famous principle, no society can legitimately call itself civilized if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means. No, they should only be denied it as a foreign. Yeah, if they're a medical tourist, we don't want them. Damn, I hate medical tourists. But again, this is one of these things where again,

it's almost as though it is in fact two on the nose that we are celebrating all the imagery and the symbols of this thing that we think unites our nation in a useful way while systematically demolishing it. It's almost like there was an audience of people who watched the ceremony and they're like, destroy all of this. Everything in the ceremony has got to go. The NHS, people whose parents were immigrants,

it's just you look at it now and it almost seems deliberate. And obviously it's not, but just it seems it couldn't be more perfect that these are all the things we've been watching happen. You joke, but I remember the next day after the Olympics opening ceremony because the scene in the house was a mixed race family and it was a black man and a white woman and their mixed race kids. And it was either the Daily Mail or the Sun, which literally did a good God,

grabbing this multi-culturalism in our face. And also it's so unrealistic. Are there mixed race families where the man still around here would have left him because it was so ugly. It was just like they literally had an aneurysm at seeing a depiction of a mixed race family. So unrealistic, a family in London being able to afford a house. Yikes.

But it's true. I never cease to be surprised by this country. I have to admit the only thing we liked about the opening ceremony was all the coal that can stay. Burn more coal. More fossil fuels. The opening ceremony was when the kind of hologram baby came out during the NHS bit.

Oh, they were celebrating the Tabby Tabbies. Homage to the boss baby. So what? Same baby actually, same actor. It was a hologram baby. It was a hologram baby celebrating the invention by Scottish inventors of... Baby?

Of the obstetric... He must have had to be hatched fully formed. There was actually only one baby and everyone was like... Alexander Graham Bam. We were all born Athena-style, popping out of forehead. Would any two people British enough to get that check? Oh, wait, I think I got it. Anyway, so this continues.

A bunch of children's literature villains then sort of spring up. A bunch of Mary Poppins has come in and then defeat them with umbrellas, which actually is the most realistic way you're going to get treatment now as a child for any kind of like rare or mental illness because the NHS has now been so defunded.

Nothing I care enough to hit you. Yeah, they don't. Yeah, you basically... You can no longer get treatment or rather the official treatment is now. Imagine Mary Poppins is fighting your illness. If you want to get hit, what you got to do is build dinner parties.

Jesus Christ. And so, yes, then it continues on to some sort of tributes to, again, the music of the British 1990s and early 2000s back again when everything was good and all of the people who are putting this on were young and their dicks worked and stuff.

Exactly. We all remember Chico time. Yeah. His dick works during like the ecstasy heyday. OK, never mind. All the stories. We're all loved up in fields and they're looking back to that, but now we look back to them, of course.

And then there is this final thing which, again, I tried to find video of but it's just very sort of hard to follow which is Frankie and June say thanks Tim where Tim Berners-Lee sends a tweet celebrating the internet which he invented which was free and open and definitely hasn't been privatized since then.

Did that tweet say hello, Twitter? Hope this works, lol. Yeah. I think it was RIP Whitney Houston who really can't believe this. Actually, Tim Berners-Lee sent a tweet saying I invented the web which was free and open for all promoted by skincare.

What Tim Berners-Lee just retweeted Ben Bradley. Yes. Of course. And then we get to the one of the first lesbian kisses broadcast before the watershed especially in Saudi Arabia.

Brookie? Was it the Brookie kiss? Oh no, sorry. It was in Saudi Arabia. This was broadcast before the watershed. But then it was, yes, this love story between two people who like leave a phone somewhere. I don't know. It's like kind of like a happy black mirror. Yeah. They got Princess Anne and the Queen to do it live.

But and then... It's her daughter. Fucking reprobate. I never just... the way you said it made it sound like it was a live kiss rather than like a recording. Yeah.

Was it something to do with the kiss of Brookside? Was it a different lesbian kiss? No, no, this is... I've been reading so much about this the last few days that all of the various takes have run together. It was that the broadcast meant that was the first lesbian kiss broadcast in Saudi Arabia because...

But who was doing the lesbian kissing? It was the two... The actress is playing Frankie in June. Oh, sorry. No, there's only one lesbian kiss that I recognize as a red kiss because all of us remember that. I just love the idea of them being like what should go into the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony?

Well, definitely the serial Brookside. I mean, like... There's nothing that says Britain more than Brookside. Hollyoaks, gow here. Biker Grove don't even think about it. Even though I feel like Biker Grove is the like... There would have been any excuse to get Anton deck in it. Any case.

Love Biker Grove. It was so good. Any case, that all happens. We all are. Then some like weird cycling... A non-cycling protest, which is they all dress up as doves and bike around the stadium because they didn't want to harm any normal doves.

Who among us? Who among us hasn't dressed up as a dove and cycled around East London? For peace. And then they drop 7 billion pieces of paper to represent the entire world. And now every single... Every single person who voted for Change UK has something they...

Has a political aim they definitely want, this forever. Oh no, I've just realized that they should have had it sponsored by dove and had a bunch of real women cycled around the stadium. Have you met thin women? They're not real. Don't trust them. Women don't exist.

Only talk to men. So, that is... And that is essentially the Olympics. That is the Britain as it was presented to us by Danny Boyle as it is fondly remembered by most of the Liberal Commentariat.

It is the thing that we want to go back to. But before we... Before we transition on to sort of some final thoughts I want to go back to Fisher. This is from a different K-Punk article. London 2012 preceded in a company preceded in a company as it was

by the authoritarian lockdown and militarization of the city is being held up as the antidote to all this content. The feel-good Olympics we are being assured will do everything good the damage done by last year's riots to seeing off the threat of Scottish independence. Any disquiet about London 2012

is being repositioned as griping or cynicism. Such whinging it is claimed assumed its proper place of marginality as the vast majority just enjoy the games and opening ceremony and all is vindicated. We was going to get independence but that was a crack in lesbian kiss.

Let's call the whole thing off. The Olympic Semiosphere is one from which all negativity must be banished. They acknowledged that we invented the baby. We thought they'd forgotten. Now you've got my lucky. It's no good.

I quite like sort of Mark Fisher's writing on this which is that there is this large performance of a rump steak that we're stretching over all of the fat and bones that actually is

an ancient Greek sacrifice reference. I guess we can ask what is this British sorry, let me take that again. It's like that stormy bit on like Capitol Radio where it's like and the thing is like even

let me start that again. The sunlit uplands of liberal Britain before all of the problems started as far as they're concerned the imagination that we were at the culmination with all of history's problems solved and then people just sort of started creating new ones afterward

is I think a very... People went retro. It's one that I think is still with us today. I don't think we've gotten over the legacy. I actually think it's more intense today than it was at the time. So you take someone like Chika Ramuna

who really interestingly when he first became the candidate for stratum. He was running as the left-wing candidate in stratum. He was running as a compass candidate and he was the guy saying like you know I'm going to take on these Blair rights like I've got no idea what he was saying about

the Olympics opening ceremony at the time but now what's interesting is he's sort of rewriting what his politics were in that early like 2010s period in order to like fit it within an ideology in a social base which doesn't really exist anymore.

It's the... I mean like you can talk all about the fantasy you want then. You're basically just being... That's one level of media criticism. If you want to get on a second level of media criticism it's of course what is the ideological function in 2019 of the continued

remembrance of this thing. And I think it is to tell a story for a politics that has no popular base. To tell this story of wanting to go back to the contest between Blairism and Cameronism where things were more or less settled

and we didn't have and the problems were in the past. It is the last... It is the end of the end of history. It is the last gasp. It's the best that political ideology can really do I think. I mean I think it sort of

hints at people's unwillingness to live in the present that we've got in which people feel about the Olympic opening ceremony which happened is an interesting obverse to how people feel about the Brexit celebrations, Festival of Britain blah blah blah which hasn't happened. And I think both of those things

indicate people's unwillingness to deal with politics as it is and who we've got around us. Trying to live in two impossible places. One is the future which is based on a misremembering of the past and the other is misremembering a past which is also a misremembering of the past. Damn, every day is a gift.

That's why we call it the present. Fuck off! Modern Britain is just an Instagram caption, isn't it? But I'm like a very depressing and badly taken picture. Modern Britain is like... It's one of those pictures, you know that people you hate from university upload

of them and their really boring boyfriend and they're like sat in front of the TV they're watching like ITV3 or whatever and then there's like two plates of dinner which are like... It's like a plain chicken breast with no seasoning just a cooked Tesco owned brand garlic bread and then like

a sort of like a pile of non-descript vegetable and then it's like... I can't believe he cooked me dinner cracking night in with this one and there's like a bottle of Blossom Hill in the corner of the shot. That is modern Britain. It's like pretending everything's fine in what is obviously a terrible situation.

I was just kind of thinking about what Ash was saying about positive... Or maybe what Mark Fisher was saying but I'm guessing the same thing about like positivity and the idea about like these types of ceremonies almost they almost kind of

restrict, not even restrict but kind of they they really don't kind of take to criticism that well and the whole like you know so I remember when even you know Londoners was saying that all the Olympics have kind of you know they've really kind of messed up how people kind of get into work in the mornings because like they've changed

all the bus routes and it's really weird you know one of the big things that you know we've forgotten about now is the fact that there were like armed police officers on roofs of like buildings and stuff because anti-aircraft guns on the top of the tower because they were really

they were kind of saying that oh we don't want another because you know it was in the aftermath of the riots right so they're like we don't want like other riots so Boris Johnson put a bunch you know really said well he said that he increased didn't you buy all those water cannons that then turned out to be illegal? I think that was later

I think that was later but he was definitely like yeah we've got like armed police officers like on rooftops and stuff and we'll like take out anyone who don't even think about coming around our roofs right because you know because of the tourists like oh we don't know if London is safe and stuff like that so basically they created like this

they create like on top of a security state that already existed to begin with they created like an enhanced security state in London and like even kind of saying that like you know for the sake of the Olympic Games that last for like two weeks they've basically like changed the city

in ways that disproportionately like hurt the poor and restrict the poor and like prevent people in poverty actually just being able to kind of get on with their lives and saying that was like oh well you know you're just you know the Olympics are here why are you complaining it's a great time the Olympics are here you know see

it's kind of you know whenever you have these big sporting events it's sort of like oh we can just like forget to talk about politics for a bit because we should just enjoy like the event same with like the World Cup and stuff as well right and that's what trucker wants to go back to he wants to go back to a time where people weren't talking about austerity where people where we could just

feel good about this stuff you know politics wasn't making its way into his political career right why are we talking about gentrification and deportation why can't we talk about cool things like um d.rem also like I actually think in Chukka's head it's not that deep

in Chukka's head he's like these are nice things wouldn't it be nice to go back to a time where things were nice it's an M&S advert I can see it now don't you like for lights and the giant baby yeah exactly remember when Britain had a giant baby this is your this is

I'll tell you exactly what it put me in mind of it is um the that Mitchell and Webb look sketch where they're talking about the ultimate British relaxation DVD that includes settling into a pillow stifling a Yorkshire putting a burp and watching a beef eater being

hosed down with heavy cream um um so to um to conclude to conclude our our discussion I also have found the legacy of the artistic censor centerpiece of the games the Arcelor metal orbit a

tower that sort of goes up and then twist around a little bit and then goes down um it was a gigantic sculpture that was intended 911 well well Milo you sort of not know you're almost there I hate it when this happened were you right by accident

no he wasn't right by accident but he was sort of in the same ballpark adjacent yeah it was a gigantic sculpture that was intended in the official design brief handed to celebrity artist Anish Kapoor to quote make an iconic statement about towerness in general

what yes it was a tower that was designed to make a statement about towerness um and it was I mean if we it looks nothing like a tower and that's why it's such an interesting statement on the nature of towerness

it looks yeah it looks a lot like a roller coaster that's been like put through one of those like car crusher things yeah so much that's and I mean look I I love to draw things together actually that this is when you know that like anything you do is going to be shit as soon as you start being described as a

celebrity artist that's that's like Damien Hurst reached that point and then it was like what if you put a shark in formaldehyde and it's like okay yeah he's lost it now what if we made a tower that didn't really do anything it said really makes you think about towers in general huh yeah it really does everything started

with the Tower of Babel all the way through to the Twin Towers exactly live in a society I was gonna say I mean this seems like the Jared Leto Joker kind of moment but yeah it's a tower that's been twisted so I think that we can comfortably say that Britain as the concept

introduced in this opening ceremony only makes sense if the entire country just like cut to black like in the end of the Sopranos however I also have to say Princess Anne start snogging and it just cuts to black the credits come down

awful David Chase yeah so it falls to me only to thank Ash for coming out to the studio today thank you very much Ash thank you for having me in this beautiful basement so thank you all for listening to remind you that we have a patreon you can subscribe to it

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