TRASHFUTURE - *UNLOCKED* Britainology 5: The Cult of the Legend

Episode Date: July 3, 2021

We brought on Riley to discuss a phenomenon as eternally British as bad weather itself: the legend. Who are British legends? What makes them act this way? How do you create a taxonomy of figures to distinguish between the Essex Geezer, the Entrepreneurial Legend, the High Street Hard Man, and Tim Westwood? Well, we gave it our best go. This episode is from October 2020 so if anything is out of date, that is why! For more Britainology episodes, sign up on our Patreon -- and if you desperately need more Britainology in your life, you can get a second episode (and a Q&A) each month at the $10 tier: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture Please consider donating to charities helping Palestinian people here: https://www.islamic-relief.org.uk/palestine-emergency-appeal/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI3oja5NbR8AIVSOmyCh2LdQ9rEAAYAiAAEgKM9PD_BwE and here: https://www.grassrootsalquds.net/ *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, Trash Shooter fans. Please enjoy this Unlocked Britannology episode from last year. And just bear in mind that for $5 a month, you get all Trash Shooter bonus content and one Britannology a month. However, at the $10 tier, you get a Q&A and a second Britannology each month. Hope you enjoy and thank you for listening. Welcome, everyone, to what I believe is the fifth episode of Britannology. Yeah, that's the one. The offshoot of Trash Shooter where we talk about the neuroses of the Great Island of Britain. So great. They literally put it in the name. I've got a fucking terrible morning.

Hi. But wait, this comes out like wildly asynchronously. So by the time anyone actually listens to this, you'll have had probably dozens of other mornings, terrible and great. Many of which may have been worse, if anything, the way things are going. In this economy. Yeah, exactly. That's fucking right. I just wanted the listeners to know the state of mind that I'm recording this in. I've hurt my knee, my ex-girlfriend is texting me, my running headphones are broken. It's a bad morning, but we're here and we're going to

talk about Britain as a very appropriate energy. What better mindset could you be in than just kind of hurting full of some nonspecific sort of resentments that, again, you don't really feel like you ought to have, but you do anyway and so on and so on. What better mindset than that than to talk about Britain? Exactly. It's the sort of mindset in which you might erect a giant flagpole in your back garden to make a point to your neighbors who you suspect might read The Guardian. There was something going on not that long ago. I bought a garden shed. I'm still waiting on it to get delivered. Somebody was on Twitter, we're talking about the various psychoses

you encounter on British Twitter from Boomer Dads and such and Gen X dads. Somebody was doing some transphobic freak out and I quote, tweeted them and somebody responded to me like, Jesus, this guy should just get a normal hobby like having a shed. I felt this utter just stab of fear and pain in my heart because I am becoming a British shed guy, even though I'm not from this country. Are you going to go like based Anglo-Vibes and build a huge train set in your shed? The shed is not that big, sadly. It's more like a big wall locker for the army heads out there, but that being said, I am going to have a shed before too long in my yard

and I'm excited because next thing I know, I'm just going to buy a Voxel or something like that and just trick it out insanely. I'm going to code it in terrible off-brand anime graphics. It's going to be amazing. One of my favorite parts of this show is Nate sort of groping around in the dark for a British stereotype. Guess I'll buy a Voxel. I mean, guess I'll buy a Voxel Zephira and then drive around my home in Chipping Norton. To be fair, Voxel Zephira is such a powerful British dad energy. Like you have kids who you hate that are between the ages of five and 12.

The show Outnumbered is the official show of the Voxel Zephira. I was thinking actually in the grand scheme of things, the Ford Escort Cosworth is a badass car and I would actually be okay with buying one, except it's so ridiculous to buy a car that old and shitty at this point. But also to me, when I think of Voxel as dad mobile versus Skoda, which is lad mobile in its own right. Oh, damn. Well, it depends what model of Skoda you're talking here. I've seen some barely street legal Skodas here in White Castle with a CCTV everywhere. Actually, White Castle is a very British vibe in America.

It's a harshly lit restaurant with CCTV everywhere that feeds you slop and people claim to love it for some reason. Yeah, it's called the Trash Future podcast. That is fucking right. But this is not the Trash Future podcast, is it? No, this is, well, I mean, is it or isn't it? That's an interesting question of ontology. One of the things, right, is that Riley, you could be introduced as a guest on this show. I am a guest.

And you've got a little bit weird about it. I'm technically a guest and you failed to control me. Take the small prince on your contract. There it is. Shades of a Britonology episode to come. Yeah. Well, anyway, this is Britonology. I am, as always, joined by my co-host, Nate Pathay. Hello, it's me, experiencing Britain through fresh and new eyes and just excited for the

Jellied Eels and Slop. Awful. Awful. Awful. Awful. I love Eels. A real bad food. I love Eels. I hate Jellied Eels.

I've never had... You've never had... I've never had Jellied Eels. But I... Well, I was just like, that's not true. Japanese food. They do a great job with Eels. Eels are great. Eels sashimi, awesome. I'm down for Eel, whatever. Why make it in Jell-O?

But when I saw Jellied Eels, when I actually saw what a bowl of Jellied Eels looked like, I was just like, this makes the slop from the breakfast scene on the spaceship and the matrix look normal. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's not a food you would eat. I think the only people who eat Jellied Eels are doing it to make some sort of point. I mean, so people were complaining about that Canadian sandwich, about the chicken sandwich with gravy and peas on top.

That's a good sandwich. And I was like... It's got to be from Quebec, surely. No, no, it's from everywhere. Really? I used to have those all the time. It's a good sandwich. But anyway, I was like, okay.

The Prince Edward Island classic. You want to be snotty and uptight about that sandwich. I guarantee you, if I just go into the Google listings and Google Maps for restaurants within a mile radius of where I live and look in some of the food and drink photos that people have published of the food served in this restaurant, I can find something 10 times more disgusting than any joke you might make about a Canadian sloppy sandwich. Yeah. And you also found some pictures of Dave Courtney having a sword fight, which was...

Or Dave Courtney hiding in his front garden, aiming a gun at the Google Maps car, which is absolutely a thing he did. A gun which has a big speech bubble pointing to it saying, this is illegal. I do not have a permit for this weapon. I had a permit for this weapon, but I've allowed it to last. Legitimately, if you go on Google Street View and you look up Dave Courtney's house, which is Camelot Castle in Plumstead, which I think is technically in Kent, but I don't know, maybe it's in Lewisham, either he or someone in his employ is standing near the front

garden gate wearing what I can only describe as like a large Wild West hat and pointing a gun at the Google Maps car. Kind of in like a bit of an Al Capone costume. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it could be like a big photo, but it's like a strikingly large fedora, almost a highwayman hat. But long story short, I found some disgusting slop food within a one mile radius of my home.

I found a really burned omelet served with french fries and baked beans for some reason. I found pie mash and eels at man's pie and eel house or whatever, which is right down the street from me. And the pie looked good. The gravy looked okay. The mash looked fine. The eels looked like the best way to describe it was as if they gave you the novelty option of having a 1900s Victorian era military ration that that guy on YouTube eats thrown

in with your normal meal. And yet that apparently is a cockney delicacy that people care a lot about. The jelly deals just ain't been the same since they all started doing cocaine. He sported a flavor. It tastes all Peruvian now. So anyway, we're going to talk about some British stuff. Yeah. And the real the real heads might have noticed.

I mean, I hesitate to say real heads heads of this podcast of any kind might have noticed that we're joined by Riley Quinn. Hi. What's up? Yeah. Yes, it's me. I'm happy to be here on Britonology. Having to be a guest on your own show.

Yeah. How the tables have turned. Now Milo has a script he's trying to stick to and you can just fucking distract the shit out of them. It's a very it's a very skeleton script. I will I will be doing my best not not to stick to it. So this week we are talking about the the greatest British archetype of all the legend. It's a very of a time archetype as well.

Right. This is I think it's what it shifts through the decades. What you're saying is like the British legend is kind of like it's it's like a like a young Ian archetype that it exists deep in the psyche of every British person is is a legend who's just waiting to absolutely go mental. When I was a kid there was a British family that moved to my hometown. They were from Coventry and the dad wore a platinum chain and was a Taibo instructor and kind of looked like Tim Westwood.

And in the grand scheme of things I now understand who that guy was and who he was trying to be just because of the stuff Milo's made me watch for this episode. I didn't get it at the time but I understand now why I think the kid's name was Oliver. I can't remember why he was affecting this sort of like hard man in track pants approach to life. And now I get it. I didn't get it before but I get it. The legend is perennial being being any kind of niche martial arts instructor is such

a powerful energy. I feel like it's not just martial arts Billy blanks Taibo. If you know what that is it's so fucking bad. This dude taught Taibo classes. Yeah. I mean it's the other thing about the British legend is that the way the legend is portrayed in media is that they would get their ass kicked by someone doing Taibo. Yeah.

Well, unless they knew a different direct to VHS martial art. The legend as he is portrayed in British media always is portrayed as an Amazon. He's always made to look foolish because the way that it works is that someone like, especially for example, in the show like Phone Shop for example, they're presented to look ridiculous. They're not actually enviable characters or like... Well, it depends on the show, right? Because I think Phone Shop is like a satire show which we'll get to in a minute. But yeah, if you look at something...

I guess I'm familiar with the legend as a satirical category of kind of like a street Alan Partridge. Ah, no, it's all too real. For them, it's an entirely serious matter. I was going to say Milo, having grown up in Essex, I imagine can speak to the aspirational quality of being a legend because I do think that in some ways, Riley, you are reflecting on it as someone who doesn't live in legend country. Yeah, I wrote a short text for the top of this episode, which I feel kind of sums it up,

which is that if we're talking about like defining cultural archetypes, America has the suburban dad, Russia has the staircase alcoholic, and Britain has the legend. And the men of Great Britain are so shaped by their relationship with being a legend that the concept is quite hard to define. It comprises something more than just a spectrum of behavior. It is, in essence, a lifestyle. Much like the American dream, the legend lifestyle has its own kind of like cultural accoutrements, like it's about owning the newest phone, a number of Ralph Lauren Polo shirts,

an ice white BMW M3, and dating a girl who is considered a proper stunner on the social scene of a suburban town. And the other way to be a legend is through actions so outlandish that they sort of take on a life of their own in the kind of oral tradition of an exceptionally boring group of people who all work in IT in a place like Kettering. Like, remember the time Davey jumped through a bus stop window? Like that kind of, that guy is a legend. Weirdly, when you were explaining like the epistemology of being a legend,

your voice kind of trailed towards partridge territory. It did go hard partridge. Was that intentional? I was talking about bringing a legend. Okay. And now a proper legend. It's Dave Clifton. Yeah.

Who invented the skip? My dream is basically just to have Alan Partridge's radio show. Like what? Which is basically to be Jeremy Vine now that I think about it. Like, what could be better than just having a radio show where you come up with absurd phone in topics and then people phone in and take them completely seriously. Like, what is the loudest appliance in your house? And then you've got two people arguing whether someone's Hoover or someone's Lawnmower is

louder and you just sit back and watch the clock tick down. I was just thinking about this. This is completely non sequitur. But years ago, I remember seeing someone linked to this. The NH, maybe it was the NHS, maybe it was some sexual health charity, I don't know, had put together a video series about sexual health topics. And one of them was whether or not squirting was a thing. Like whether squirting was real.

Oh, wow. They were doing Voxpop interviews with people on the street about squirting. Which is- If you have a squirt. And legitimately like that. Oh, you're a cheeky count for a survey interviewer. And they were talking about it. And there was this guy who just to me struck me as sort of like,

you know, a former legend now just kind of like the, you know how in basically anywhere in let's say zone two London, you can encounter the guy who's just sort of like London grizzled, probably partied and took E way too much in his 20s. And now it's just sort of like, not quite a track suit dad, but getting there. You know what I'm talking about? Like he, you know, he- Like if you're going to talk about Tom Usher on the show, just-

No, it's not, it's not, imagine Tom Usher when he's like a dad and has a steady job, but is also just like, he's still got that past legendary status. And they got to play for. And the guy, the guy, someone asked at the end, the final question of this guy was like, do you think if squirting is healthy, do you think it's a good thing? He's like, yeah, don't see why not. I'll just say, carry on squirting ladies. That's burned into my fucking brain.

And that's 10 years on. And that's a legend thing. And exactly, that's a thing a legend or a post legend guy would say. Post legend, we start getting into like kind of a Foucault level examination of like the sociology of the legend. So I've kind of, I mean, as ever, because this is an episode being curated by me, the format of the show is quite loose, but I've collated some, what I consider to be key legend archetypes with appropriate supporting evidence, which I've had Riley and Nate watch.

I thought we could start with the kind of an obvious one. Someone I'd like to call the smooth operator geezer. It's a guy who is kind of, he is like, what if Dave Courtney sort of had money and like used masculine grooming products? It's this kind of thing where like, he's like a big watch guy. He has big watches and a big car. And he says like, all right, darling to women he meets in Starbucks, like that, this guy. I feel like the best example of him is Mark Wright from the only way is Essex.

Oh yeah. I have a lot of, I have a lot of things to think about, specifically about Mark and Ard. Yes. So I'll start by just setting up who Mark Wright is for the uninitiated. So this is from his Wikipedia. Mark Wright is best known for appearing as a cast member on the first three series of the only way is Essex. Wright gained further popularity after appearing on the 11th series of I'm A

Celebrity Get Me Out Here where he finished his runner up and the 12th series of Strictly Come Dancing where he finished in fourth place. Before his appearances on the only way is Essex, Wright was a semi-professional footballer with a youth career at West Ham, Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur. He started his senior career with South End United, but moved into nightclub promoting and played only semi-professionally. In January 2012, it was reported that he rekindled his semi-professional football in Clearby, Korea by signing for St. Neat's Town.

But this was denied by Wright on his Twitter account. I would never play for them fucking slags in St. Neat's. Get it straight. Like there's something, his entire biography is so perfect, like legend material because he's like, like good enough at football to be like better at football than everyone he knows, but not good enough at football to have made a career out of it. Because basically legend is it speaks to a kind of the British grappling with neoliberal localism. It's grappling with what does it mean to be a guy who's grown up and

lives his entire life in Milton Keynes. Riley, I do not invite you on this podcast for you to come in and smart this shit up, okay? But you know what I'm talking about because there is an extraordinary sense and a lot of British art has been trying to deal with this, whether it's sort of the random spasms of culture that happened in like Taui and so on. Or even like writing like Millennium People, like by J.G. Ballard, we've been trying to deal with this sense of dislocation. Now Ballard was writing about London, but a lot of these shows deal with what does it mean to be from the fringes of somewhere, whether that's Croydon, for example, Peepshow as well.

Jez is kind of a failed legend in Peepshow, I think. Because he's someone who's at least in the early episodes, because he wants to be a slacker, he wants to be a DJ, he tries to take advantage of the people around him. He tries to be this big, brash, larger-than-life personality, but because it's Peepshow, of course, he always fails and he's always shown to be pathetic. But it's also a show about working in these... It's a show about lower-middle-class drudgery, about the boredom of living in a suburban commuter town where you're sort of just trapped in your flat. It's all about limited expectations, shabbiness, and I feel like a kind of pale photocopy of all of the trappings of American

suburban life without any of the plenty that comes with living in the country that is like the global consumer of last resort for everything. It is essentially a kind of tribute act. I mean, I will say that circumscribed and very shabby is definitely the way that I look at some of this stuff. But at the same time, also, I think that there are... The best example I can give is we had this discussion recently about the sort of... There's some Essex influencer lady who got her living room redone, and literally the whole thing is gray. Everything is gray, like gray and shiny. Gray and silver, kind of. Gray and silver with bright gray.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like a gray sofa, gray wood parquet flooring that looks like wood, a grayer accent wall, some live laugh, love, shit, some picture frames that are really shiny. Imagine a really Rococo-style fucking picture frame, but instead of it being gold, it's just all silver. And that is an aspirational style in Britain, whereas you show that to Americans, you're like, what the fuck is going on? Do these people get discolored or not exist? Is color banned by the government? I guarantee if you stand on the front doorstep of that house, you can see at least 15 Ford Focus STs. And so in a way, the point I make is not necessarily to just punch down at Essex,

or maybe that's punching up, I don't know. Can you punch up at a burrow? All I can tell you is that Essex should be punched occasionally. That's the only thing I can remember. The point I'm making here is that whether or not that corresponds to a Jungian archetype, the point here is more that there is a particular kind of... Essex doesn't have Jungian archetypes, it just has Jungian. God damn it. There is just... There's a certain aspirational quality of being a legend or being a sort of Taoist-style influencer kind of person, but the aspiration is aspiring to be a thing that

when you take it out of the context of just being normal here, it kind of looks like shit. Yeah. Well, I think that there's a part of the legend's personality that they kind of aspire to be something that doesn't exist. They aspire to be the PDD of fucking brain tree, but the thing is that they can't be a PDD of brain tree. Those two things are sort of inherently opposed to one another. And then so the different kinds of legend, I think, have different ideas that they aspire to. I think you're kind of your smooth operator geezer, Mark Wright. Mark Wright aspires to be James Bond. In his head, he is like, a gentleman, the ladies love me, but I'm a bit fleshed because I'm a geezer. He's that kind of

like, it's the fancy car, the fancy watch. He thinks of himself as kind of cultured in a sort of folksy way. Should we talk about the video of Mark Wright that I sent you? We shall talk about the video of Mark Wright buying the damn watch, making a watch... Also, very carefully looking at all of the watches that are 15,000 to 20,000 pounds and picking one that's 3,700 pounds. I've bought a watch for 3,7,000 pounds. That's how we'd fucking say it. Yeah, I got this one for 3.7, but then the other thing to think... I think the thing to remember, I think, with legends, specifically the Taoie legends, specifically these two, is the extent to which they've staked the rest of their career on essentially trying to continue to recapture that

feeling of specialness and of specialness in places that are relentlessly unspecial. Country is relentlessly unspecial. That's kind of like baked into the culture. You can see Mark and Arge. The two of them together. They're kind of just raging against the monotony of this place, but in the most consumer and flash way possible. That's why their job now is to go and as 45-year-old, 50-year-old men make special appearances at Bounce by the Ounce in Sheffield. The thing is, they're not even that old. They're both in their late 30s. They just seem that old

because of the impossibly bizarre way in which they lead their life. This is another thing about the legend. It's like the legend wants to be cool and wants to be seen as cool, but the thing is that for that, they don't actually have to be cool. The legend only has to be the coolest guy their friends know. Mark Wright only has to be cooler than Arge, which is easy. How could anyone manage that? Because Arge is a simpleton. I remember there was, there's like a plot line from, I watched that first series of The Only Ways Essex when it came out when I was like 17, and there's a plot line in that show where Arge buys his incredibly annoying girlfriend,

a micro pig, because she wants one, except that Arge has been hoodwinked by the pig salesman, and he has, in fact, just bought a piglet. So quickly, they just have a full-sized, fucking pig in the garden of their house. Extremely, extremely normal. But yeah, so there's this video of Mark Wright and his simpleton friend Arge in a watch shop, which is also run by an Essex geezer who is just like Mark Wright, but like 20 years older, who's just going like, oh yeah, that's a nice one. That's a nice one, Mark. And he's like, that's $3,900. And he's like, can you do me a deal? And he's like, oh, I think we kid there. We could do $3,700.

I remember, this just came flowing back to me like a Proustian reverie. I, you smell the watch and then it all comes back. I remember, I once briefly worked as a pub bartender before getting fired for being very bad at it. Okay, classic. And you already kept having Proustian reveries from the various beers. Yeah, I smelled, I smelled the skunked ale and was transported back to numerous house parties in rural St. Catherine's, Ontario. What happened was, I remember there was a guy who came in and I'll remember this man for the rest of my life until the day I die.

Okay. And he said, and in the same accent that the guys in phone shop use, which we'll get to. Oh, we will. He said, hello. I would like a Kovacier and apple juice and ginger. And I said, I don't think we have Kovacier and he said, ah, it's a great cocktail. It's called a deals named after me because my name is also deals. Well, he actually said because my name is also done. He said, he said it in a much more sort of street way.

Oh, okay. He said it in a month, you know, so this was in like 2012 where like people like still remit like Nathan Barley was also much closer to the cultural imagination than he is now. But there was also a sense, I think, of there was also a sense of a lot of people were still talking like Ali G, but without a hint of irony. Oh, yeah. Did you push this guy on why he was called deals?

Yes, I did. So he said, I want this cocktail. It's got Kovacier. It's called deals. It's named after me. My name's deals. Yeah. Okay, implied. Okay. My name is Kovacier. My name is, of course, ginger ale. Yeah.

Please, Mr. Kovacier was my father. Call me ginger and apple. So, um, so deals then says, well, all I can get you a deal on is toilets. Do you like to shit, mate? And I will remember that exchange until the memories of my family, my wife, possible children, who knows, these will be my second to third last memories. I mean, I'm a similar with huge swaths of my life. I've forgotten because apparently they're insignificant, but you mentioned Kovacier

has reminded me of the fact that for some reason, the, might have been Diageo or whatever fucking global brand distributes Kovacier around the world, or at least in America, decided to like try to explain Cognac and specifically Kovacier's appeal to French Cognac grape growers by getting a projector in real to show them the video for Buster Rhymes is past the Kovacier. Now imagine this happening in like a rural French fucking countryside town. And apparently like it went down so poorly that literally one of the growers said, this makes me want to stop doing this and I've been doing it my entire life.

Needless to say, we all have those Proustian reveries that just come back. And I can only imagine Riley getting fired because he was insisting on serving Madeline's to the fucking barb, the pub patrons. No, I was bad. I was bad at the job. Riley just carrying a huge tray of drinks at a tea drink going like, whoa, kind of. I had sort of have, I'm not very sort of coordinated. I dropped the payment taker thing. I said, I had, I just, I wanted to, because this was when I was working as a full-time writer and that was like paying

all my bills. Like it was going very well, but I was also working completely by myself. And so I was like, damn, I've spent like, I'm in this country and I'm in this country that I've moved to. I have a group of friends, but I don't really know anyone outside like that group of friends. Cause I've lived here for some couple years. I need to meet some deals guys. I need to meet a guy who can get me a cheap toilet and bulk. You know, we should, we should fucking buy a toilet off that guy just to see if he's still operating. Do you think deals still has all the toilets eight years later?

I don't know that kind of that. I believe that guy that you can get you a deal on a toilet. You know, like I, I can, I can see that as a thing. I don't know why he thought I would buy a toilet. What do you thought I would do with a toilet? Maybe he thought you owned the pub and you needed a new toilet. Maybe he went in, destroyed your toilet metaphorically and physically and then was going to offer like, oh, so you got a problem with your toilet, right? A classic confidence trick. He finds people like, oh, it's your toilet running.

I like, well, actually that, that does, that kind of fits in with a perfect like archetype of a sort of Essex guy who has like a baffling array of business interests. Like recently my mom had the windows on her house cleaned and we've used this one window cleaner for like years because we like knew his parents and he came around. And so my mom like chats to the guy and he's, I was just going out as he came in. So I said, hello to him was reminded of like one absolutely gigantic geezer. This guy is like, like imagine, imagine the most stereotypical geezer you can think of and then double it. And that's kind of this guy.

And he told my mom that he had started this like side hustle apart from being a window cleaner for extra money where he gets rid of people's wasps nests. He has no qualifications for getting rid of wasps, which I feel like you have to know something about. It settles up to them and it's like, I'll, I'll pay you 15 pound to fuck off. They're paying me 30 quid to get rid of you. I'll give you 15 to fuck off. I'll get you a deal on the toilet. Oh, you move, you move to the other yard. I'll go back there.

They'll pay me for it. I'll give you another. Or give you toilet. You build your nest in a fucking toilet. I would love all of the different just completely birdbrained business ventures that different British legends have like created over the last sort of what 30 years to just all come together in one stupid conglomerate. But so then he's telling my mom, right? That recently he went and got rid of a wasp nest for someone and he got stung like 50 times.

And he went out to his car and he just passed out from like anaphylactic shock. And they had to call the paramedics and they had to like restart his heart, right? Because he'd had such a bad reaction to these fucking wasps things. And then my mom goes, oh, I guess you're not doing the wasp nest anymore. He's like, no, I'm still doing him. I'm fighting each one. Yeah. And he's like, you could get a wasp. You could get a wasp sting any time, I figure.

And it's like, but you're much more likely to receive a wasp sting. As a wasp nest remover. Hey, yeah. Well, just as a sort of fly by night. Oh, see what I can do. Wasp nest remover. Yeah. Just an Essex guy will remove your wasp nest at a great personal risk. Yeah. Because that's legendary behavior.

Yeah. This is a deep cut on me, but I'm actually terrified of bees. I managed to control it, but the reason I'm terrified of bees is two reasons. Number one, because when I was three, I was told, Stan, still you've got a bee on you. And I stood perfectly still and the mother fucker still stung me. Fuck you bee. But it was a bumble bee, so it died immediately, but still no solace. Secondly, because when I was a little kid, I was visiting my grandparents, my brother,

I was probably at four, my brother had a cap gun and was sitting on my grandparents' front porch swing. And underneath the porch swing, unbeknownst to my brother, was a comically perfect wasp nest hanging from the perfect oval, suspended by a little stem. And what does my six-year-old brother do? He points the cap gun inadvertently down and fires it next to the wasp nest. And then he, as I remember this happening, disappears in a cloud of wasps. That's why I could describe it. So yes, he survived, he got stung like 70 times.

Had to give him 15 quits to fuck off. And if they had just gotten an Essex guy to convince those wasps to build their nest in a toilet somewhere, it's never going to happen. It is a culture of kind of, because I'm really interested in the evolution of the culture of British wheeler dealing, and that you can, sort of the spiv concept, isn't it? Like the same guy who can open up his coat and sell you a stolen watch or whatever. It's different. I don't know.

I think, I don't know, Miles, do you think there's a crossover with spiv and this sort of like? It's a crossover, but it's a different thing. There is a bit of a crossover, but yeah, I do see what Riley means is there's kind of like, there is sort of like the honest tradesman wheeler dealer, but like their business isn't in any way illegal. It's just bizarre. But also, I think, again, to think, thinking specifically about what a, what a, what, especially like, this is the business of a legend, of course,

but the idea of this sort of mass of this bravado and suburban bravado and machismo that is connected to success often in sales is something that comes, it's been coming to us from the 80s, right? And it's an attitude that you, that starts in like the gentlemen's clubs in Mayfair, arranging or like Mark Thatcher, you know, just getting in the middle of deals and arranging things and so on and so on and taking cuts and feeling like this wheeler dealer, these early hedge fund spivs, if you want to call them that, and that filters down through... I'm putting up my co-oy, mate.

Do you want an East India company? That filters down, right? That filters down through, through the sort of more like standard, petit bourgeois middle classes. And you can think of, if you want to think about that, the Fri and Laurie sketch, where they're two like office managers, two businessmen, and you never know what they do, but they're always talking about Marjorie and saying, damn, oh, it might, you want to mortgage back derivatives.

Marjorie took the client book with her when she left, damn, Steve, that kind of thing. And it's, again, it's this taking, taking these sales businesses and the Wolfer Wall Street lifestyle incredibly seriously. And it's been something that has just seeped through this country's class system until we end on phone shop where it's the same attitude, it's the same affect, it's behaving like you think the hedge fund guy behaved in the 1980s, but applying that to the selling of a mobile phone. Well, that's the whole thing about the Essex man, isn't it?

The guy who coined the phrase was like on the DLR, and there was some guy doing some high stakes deal on a mobile phone back when that was like not a common thing. Mobile phone with like a comically large aerial. Looks like a World War II field. Yeah, and it turns out as he listened, he eavesdropped in this guy's conversation. He deduced that it wasn't actually some high flying business deal. It was him making bets on horse trading or horse racing. So like, yeah, like the guy who's wearing a suit on the DLR,

yelling into a mobile phone to place bets on a horse. But take that through multiple, you know, boom and bust cycles of the British economy becoming more moribund. And that's where you get to this. Yeah. Is that moribund? And so this is, I mean, you know, because, you know, it's like, strike me down, I'm a materialist.

I look, I look at the, I, when I ask myself a question about culture, I tend to look for the answer somewhere in these tectonic shifts that define how we produce things. Yeah. No, I think that's, I think that's right. I mean, maybe this is a good point to start talking about phone shop. And I think, yeah, the culture of like sales bravado, I think is like one of the key things that show satirizes in the wider setting of like just the sheer, like what, what people do to make suburban life in Britain interesting, like this kind of like mad, like these guys

who are stuck in Sutton, which is like near Croydon and the desperate way in which they try and create drama in their daily life, which is incredibly undramatic. Like they, all the guys who work in the phone shop talk at great length about the high street and like the people, the different kinds of people who work in the different high street shops, like whether a certain kind of pickup line would work on a waterstones girl or a habitat girl. Well, it's the, it's again, it's the, it is the idea of, if you want to look at a basic mindset, right? It is the acceptance that the world is, it's an acceptance that the petty jungle that you live in is a jungle and that it is a place of no rules of, you know, the big cats, etc, etc.

It is not a, it is not a, a nice place. It's a place where you have to either dazzle or dominate others. And then the thing about Britain is that it always is that Britain is a country that's incredible at taking these lofty, even if it's, you know, quite rotten, but very big ambitions and then setting them in a pathetic way, you know, trying to be the big man of the Sutton High Street. You know, it's, but trying to be the big man of the Sutton High Street is an inherently tragic situation. It's a tragic situation because these things are incompatible because your dream of being a big man is doomed from the beginning because of what you want to be the big man of. It is, it inherently, it is, that's why in comedy, the legend is always,

you know, the, the object of mock, the legend is frequently the object of mockery, right? Like, again, how jazz is handled in peep show. I don't know. I have, my confession is that I watched the episode that Milo told me to watch, but I struggled really hard because I had a violent physical and emotional reaction to too much legend. I just, to me, because this is not, you know, I've only lived here two years and this is not something I'm familiar with. I know the, like, the sort of stereotypes that it's portraying. And I understand, like, you know, the way it's written and the way that it's paced and everything about it being a comedy show and it being a satire, but like, gotta cringe does, there's no word in English to describe the inability of the word

cringe to describe what I was feeling watching this, just like every fucking subatomic particle in my body was like, reject this, run from this, flee this. Like, I could not fucking tolerate it. Like, it was just, it was just too much. Yeah. No, I can see that. And yet, and yet it's so perfectly encapsulates what we're talking about. Like the petty rivalries between the guys who work in the phone shop over whether they work on contract or pay as you go. And like the worst thing you can do is be demoted to selling pay as you go phone contracts. They're like, no, no, no, don't do pay as you go. What is the deal with everyone trying to affect a yardie voice? That was kind of weird. And that's the thing that's of its time. Yeah. Yeah. Because that just,

from an outsider perspective, that did not age well. Yeah. But also it's just South London, like white guys from South London talk very similar to how black people from South London don't fucking talk like that. I mean, I live in South London, but they don't talk like that. I mean, a lot, it's a lot, a lot of them do. And also like the other thing, right, is a lot of them did then. Yeah. Very much was, because if you think about it, right, that's also, that was just before, this was, this was just before the time where like a garage, like Grime had made its heyday, garage was also big sort of throughout the entirety of the 2000. I just, maybe a lack of experience on my part. But if I feel as though, if I were to encounter a white guy from South

London who called people blood, like he would be laughed out of the room. Oh, no, no, it was totally a thing. Well, no one says blood anymore at all. Like I don't know, I don't know non white people who say it now either. But at the time that was very much a like, yeah, everyone said that. Yeah. That's wild to me. I mean, yeah, I've, I've, I've, I've, if I've heard it, I've only heard it in passing on the street. And it's definitely not white people saying, I think if you want to think about, if you want to think about or at least the way I have experienced Britain coming to know it as an outsider. So having to experience it sort of, having to experience and understand it sort of piece by piece, not having it sort of just grow up around me and having it feel natural.

Right. I've understood the way, the way that the use of language breaks down here is much, much, much more regional. Whereas in the States, there are obviously regional differences, but they're quite macro regional differences. In, in the UK, you're looking at micro regional differences. Yeah. I mean, you get more of that on the east coast in the US, which makes sense, because it was settled earlier and the shit, but like, yeah, the further west you go, the, the bigger the chunks are, if you know, so if, so what you're looking at. So in the UK, you're looking what, what is a South London accent to you sounds like a white guy doing a bot, like British, literally, I was like, this, this feels like I'm watching somebody like one step removed

from blackface. Yeah. In my experience of the country, I'm pleased to be told that I'm wrong, is that it's more, it's, that's partly it, but it's crosses over heavily with regional, with regionality as well. Like there's a much more regionalism to it. Yeah. Because what you might call in scare quotes, like a black way of South London speaking or something like that is kind of, it's influenced a bit by like, kind of, I guess, like the West Indies and like the accents that came from Jamaica and stuff like that. But it's also heavily influenced by Cockney, which is also like how white people, so they, all those things have a lot of interplay. And so a lot of the accents that grew up are kind of similar to

one another, if not completely the same. Yeah, it's much, there is much more, that's why it's defined more by region than anything else. And so it's, but to an American watching that, you're like, what the hell is, why is everyone putting on this voice? This is the first time I've ever seen this show. And yeah, that was my initial reaction was just sort of like, yeah, what the fuck is happening? No, it's much more, it's much more like the, I think the humor in there is, is much more, it's like, these are people from Sutton, which is like a suburban, you know, relatively like, you know, relatively compared to some others, relatively prosperous suburb, just like how Ali G's from Stains. Yeah, like it's not, it's not the hood. It's like, it's just

a boring place to be from. So they're talking, it's more like they're talking like they're from somewhere much more interesting. Yeah. Like they're talking like they're, to be honest, they're talking like they're from, they're talking like they're like from Brixton and they like go, they have in it the kind of, a kind of interesting life that they would think is interesting that they would want, but they're doing it from the suburbs. It would be kind of like, it'd be kind of like someone from New Jersey. It's like kind of almost like when someone from New Jersey would put on a heavy New York accent. I don't know. I mean, the thing about it is, is it like the, I get where you're coming from. I think a better example would probably be like

if somebody from a relatively prosperous suburb was trying to talk like they were way more street than they actually are. And obviously there's a certain degree of affectation because like some of that's way more racialized in America than it is here. I think they're really kind of blurs more here, but I get where you're coming from. Yeah. Whereas, I mean, somebody from New Jersey, somebody from New York, like probably just going to sound like a fucking Guido. Yeah, that only got popular in the last couple of years. This guy doesn't do fucking pay as you go over. So like, for example, it's the same. So like the way to understand that as well, it's like Tim Westwood, for example, we're also going to talk about one of these problematic men.

Oh my God, what is the fucking deal with Tim Westwood? Like to me, like all of it, the thing about it is, is that I can't recognize the truth being portrayed in this. I can't recognize the real life example being portrayed in this. All I see is a bunch of people talking in a really annoying way. I mean, let's round off on Tim Westwood in a bit because Tim Westwood is my third and final archetype. I want to do a quick hit on like what is kind of almost like a kind of an offshoot of the Essex legend, Giza archetype, which is what I like to call the Instagram comedian. Like, there's this guy who's like, he kind of wants to be Mark Wright, but he doesn't have the pretensions to being like a classy jint that Mark Wright has. And he worships not at the throne of

like Rolexes or of like the BMW M3. He worships at the throne of banter. So this is dapper laughs. Yeah, this is dapper laughs. That's fucking right. He's in a turtleneck. He's apologizing to Emily Maitlis. That's who this guy is. He was too much of he got too much legend and then had to apologize. That's what happens if you become too much of a legend. You have to ring up and apologize to Emily Maitlis. Hey, Stice, you saw your legends. This is the guy that you basically made your TikTok joke about Milo, right? The one where like this is the British Instagram comedian that calls up his girlfriend and he's just like, you're a slag. Yeah. And then post, I think that's like nine million likes. Yeah, like the legend's put in a lot of effort

into wooing the fittest girl in, you know, Sutton Coldfield. But then end up just hating her. I was just thinking, is this Sutton Coldfield like a barracks town? It's outside of Birmingham, no? Yeah, I think it is a barracks town. I feel like it is. Anyway, this is like really topical this week because the right, sometimes this thing happens where things which I'm familiar with due to where I'm from like make their way into left Twitter. And this one of these was recently my fault, which is Dave Courtney, which I've just like made the bridge so that now people know about Dave Courtney. But there was the video doing the rounds of the guy who put dye in his girlfriend's bath. Oh yeah, legendary behavior. Yeah. Because

legends do pranks. Exactly. Because part of being a legend is imagining yourself to be like an Odissian figure. Yeah, exactly. And so this is like quite, he put like industrial dye stuff in there. But basically, it's not really like a thing you should do as a prank because it can, you know, it can be caused quite serious reactions and some of it's like, you know, legend only went in poison dismisses. Yeah. He's made her infertile by pouring blue dye in her bath. Ilarious. Yeah, no, it's pretty, I don't know if it can make you infertile. That just seems like the kind of, do you know what? Neither does he. That's the important thing to bear in mind. And it's really, I was doing the rounds on kind of like a Twitter of people who aren't insane,

who were like, what's funny about this? And the answer is nothing. But like, it's like that kind of like, you constantly have to be engaged in larger than life behavior in order to be like, you have to be engaged in some kind of banter of some sort, which could result in someone describing you as quote unquote, a fucking mentalist. Like that is the most important thing to do that whenever people talk about you, they're like, fucking hell, this guy's a fucking head case. Because you're trying to be larger than your own life. Yeah, exactly. And so everything, they have to make everything into a kind of drama. Because like the other thing with the Instagram comedian, right? They're either like doing a prank on their girlfriend,

or they're doing a parody of what their girlfriend would do. So they put a tea towel on their head, because that's how you know they're being a girlfriend. Do that. Yeah. Are you either being a woman or Muhammad bin Salman? It's not entirely clear. One of the two. So you're wearing this, you're wearing this tea towel, and you're going around going like a little button that says Yemen. Oh, are you watching football again? Oh, you know, when your girl says that, and it's like, what? Yeah, what? I mean, that's that's a standard comedian trope. It plays out differently based on the psychosis of where you're from. In America, it's like, I hate my wife. She never lets me do anything. Yeah, you hate how you're because because American because American guys,

we talked, we talked about this with Felix Biedermann years ago of different types of guy. I remember this conversation. We talked about how in America, pissed guys are always being held back from fighting by their friends. And they're always being told that they can't do by their like wives and girlfriends. And they're just sort of sitting and seething internally, until eventually they get a camera and start ranting in their car. Oh, classic. Whereas British doing the same Kizvani British legends are constantly just are constantly acting out in every direction. They're pulling pranks on their wives and girlfriends. No one has ever held them back. No one has ever held them back. If anything, the world would be better if someone would

hold them back. No one holds these guys back. And again, it's the same reason why they're why they'll try any scam. They'll try any sales technique. They'll do any pickup line because they know that it's all just banter. And nothing's that serious. And oh, just have enough, right? And that's why that's what folds itself in on this of constant live this constant striving for something larger. It's just that that's something larger outside themselves that they're striving for is fucking stupid. Yeah, you can't get canceled from being like the British legend. It's not possible. You have to you have to go too far as Dapper laughs did. Yeah, but it Dapper laughs is still popular. He still has like a big fan base. He's like huge online still.

He makes like how old is he? Loads of money. The legends are ageless as well. I think Dapper laughs is in like his early 40s. Dapper laughs at 60 is something I'm interested to see. Oh, yeah. Dapper laughs is like an elder statesman like Grandi of the British media class, you know, Dapper laughs gets a chat show akin to Parkinson. I think the other thing right is, you know, you is you can't that the thing is right. If it's Britain, you can never escape a class discussion. Yeah, you can never escape that. And you know, I sort of I think I mentioned it mentioned it earlier that this behavior is interpreted differently based on who's doing it and what they're doing with it, right? Like you could say that the the empire was just a bunch

of legends who went on the piss and took their ship the wrong way. But anyway, so they so a lot of a lot of the portrayal of the of the legend and in Britain tends to be one of a sad middle class person who's in denial about the monotony of their own life or again because I take in this. I take this as archetype in through comedy mainly, right? I take it and I take it in through the kind of comedy that I enjoy it. That's you know Dapper or Chris Morris or Dapper laughs into Grandi. And so I tend to only see comedy where they're portrayed as pathetic delusional characters. But that's but that's and that's usually used to describe the pathetic delusion of like specifically middle class people who are terminally bored. And I don't feel

like I guess to me in a sense like the I wasn't necessarily associating a middle class vibe with being a legend. So maybe I've got that wrong. Because to me it seems the extent to which like the juvenile shit that gets done just doesn't straight. I don't know. It's hard for me to associate that and be like, oh, this is this person is explicitly middle class as opposed to just like almost classless and just being a British dumbass. They are middle class, but the aesthetics of it are kind of working class because it's like it goes back to a thing we've talked about on a previous on the Suburbia episode with Hussain about like the the British guy who owns four white Range Rovers and the number plates when you park them next to each other to say

working class. Like that is like it's like that kind of guy like that guy's kid. Yeah, exactly. They're like their middle class, but it's like they aspire to this kind of like hard man working class aesthetic because like their grandparents were like the young Tory personal trainer guy. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the young Tory personal trainer is a legend is frequently the kid of the guy with four Range Rovers with the lumber plates is spelled out working class and then grows up if he is successful and enough legendary shit to then have four of his own Range Rovers that say working class and give birth to a legend of his own. It is because it is because legendary legendariness in this case it's all about it is all about moving beyond

something and moving outside of something and it's a rejection of what is imagined to be a quite stuffy prim middle class existence. Okay, you're listening to Radio 4. But how does this explain Tim Westwood then because I am struggling to fucking grasp that guy. Tim Westwood's new fucking guy, new archetype. Let's do it. The final of my like canonical legend archetypes, the wannabe gangster. So we're taking we're taking Tim Westwood for this one, but this is not a wannabe gangster in the Dave Courtney sense. The Ali G sense. This is wannabe gangster in the Ali G sense. Exactly. Ali G is portrayed, Ali G is additionally don't forget is portrayed as coming from Staines, which is a very like nice like suburban neighborhood. Next to Slough. Next to Slough.

And like he's got he lives in a nice home with his grandmother and so on and so on. He's not middle class in the sense of like owning property or anything. He's like, you know, probably his like grandmother owns her house or what have you. But he is still like has a pretty comfortable life and he's just sort of throwing it. He's trying to throw it away to experience to impress people and experience rawness. But he's too much of a coward ultimately to do so. Yeah, the wannabe gangster. Right. This we're talking here white boy from the home counties who has decided to attempt to become a road man. Their voxel course has a bathtub tape to the front and it's so low it's scraping over a speed bump. Right. This is this is the look that we're going

for here. Their dad may or may not own four Range Rovers that say working class on the back. It's not necessary, but it really can go either way. There's sort of there's kind of like there's two tiers I think of the wannabe gang. So there's the ones who go out full hardcore and are driving some kind of like modded out Japanese car. And then there's the ones who are like, they're driving like a Ford Focus ST, which they have got like a private number plate on, which they which probably cost them £25,000. But they talk in like a fake like London Patois and they wear like full track suits with a cap and a little man bag. You see, but the thing is right, what puts me, what this puts me in mind of

is that, you know, you could you could talk about Simon Mann in much the same way. You know, he's not imitating the same, the same signifiers. He's not taking on the same sort of frequently working class and frequently black signifiers. He's taking on the signifiers of like a para army man and so on. And again, trying to live this very exciting life and also don't forget unable to stop bragging about how exciting his life is in ways that fuck him up. But he is the same. He's the same thing. It Tony and old money leaves his life for a great adventure. And because he has those resources behind him, he is able to have he's able to have his great adventure. He doesn't have to be

the biggest man on the on the Sutton High Street. However, because of his own inherent stupidity, the legend can never succeed no matter how many resources he has at his disposal. Hmm. Yeah, no, I think I think that I think that is a fair characterization of this is like a personality type. Right. But I have to say, though, if before anything else, you must understand this listener, if you're not familiar yet with this archetype. Tim Westwood is old as fuck. He is 62 years old. That's our example of an old legend. Yeah. He doesn't necessarily look that young. He has most of his hair. But you can tell this is not a young guy. And to me, watching Pimp My Ride UK, I think the thing that weirded me out so much is that I was

an unironic fan of Pimp My Ride in America when it was a new show, when I was like 16, 17 years old. And I know the show's tropes pretty well. I liked the exhibit's music before he even became the host of that show. But fundamentally, although exhibit is putting on a stage persona, it is still pretty close to who he is in real life. I cannot decipher the complete insanity of a guy who literally looks like, you know, if you took off the enormously baggy letterman's jacket that he's wearing for some reason and instead put him in like a flat cap and a vest and a sweater would not look out of place. I mean, just like John Rental. He's wearing like Jinko's. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense to me. Nothing in the show makes any sense to me because

all of it seems like multiple different refractions in a simulacrum of the American show. And none of it, it looks like the American show is over the top, but it's more or less meant to be taken at face value as like dumb entertainment. This show, if you told me this was an elaborate prank to make fun of like, Americans are like, ha, what if we made a British version of Pimp My Ride as a sketch for Saturday Night Live? It would look like this on a British paper like Tuesday. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, I mean, something I will say about Westwood, right, is that the image that he's portraying is at this point, absolutely the person he really is. He has forgotten how to be a normal person. Like just a bit of background of Westwood,

again, Wikipedia. Timothy William Westwood, born on the 3rd of October, 1957, is a British DJ and presenter of radio and television. He is often referred to by other DJs and artists appearing on his show simply as Westwood. He presented the MTV UK show Pimp My Ride UK. He is the son of Bill Westwood, former Anglican Bishop of Peterborough. Westwood grew up around East Anglia attending the independent Norwich School before attending a local comprehensive. He is a private schoolboy who is the son of a bishop, but he has become the big dog. Yo, dog, your car, it's messed up dog. We've got to pimp that ride, my brother. Your Westwood is so good. Thank you. I've been doing it, but that is genuinely an impression I've been doing since school. You have two genuinely

perfect impressions, and it's Westwood and Partridge. The two wolves that dwell in all of us, to some extent. Now, can we hear what would happen if Westwood called into Partridge's show? Cherm, who invented the skip? Listen, dog, I don't know who invented the skip. Here's what I'll tell you, brother. I invented the big dog. Who invented the skip? That's good. That's good impressions. Yeah. Westwood lives his life in this very… Because he used to present the show on Radio One Extra that Charlie Sloth now presents, and Charlie Sloth is again just exactly like Westwood, a big white guy who has this absurd kind of street persona. And I think it was Westwood who invented the idea of just constantly playing explosion and

breaking glass sound effects and alarms. Oh, so Alice. I mean, the best comparison I can make to this is maybe a slightly old reference, but watching Tim Westwood on this show and you telling me this is just how he is makes me feel like the whole setup for the movie office space in which the main character was hypnotized, but the hypnotist dies in the middle of the session and he never gets brought out of hypnosis. So he just basically has an unfiltered view of life, and it just says what he's thinking to people. It's like that concept of Tim Westwood was doing a skit as midlife crisis dad who decides to become a street man, but then something snapped in his brain and he can't come out of that impression. And that's who he is now. If you told me that was

his origin story… He ended up presenting a show on MTV. If you told me that was his origin story, I would believe it more than I can watch him and be like, this guy is not taking the piss. I would imagine, like in my mind, I think of Tim Westwood as like he does this and then he literally talks like Neville Chamberlain. So the fact that this is how he fucking talks like this is who he is, he's really blowing my mind right now. Wait, fuck, there's a story about Westwood. I can't remember where I heard this, but it was, I'm almost 100% certain this was Westwood, that there was a show somewhere like a music festival and Westwood was doing a DJ set and then he just shouted out in the middle of his set. Yo, I want you to put your hands up if you

got a dirty pussy. Just a man who must have been in his 50s at this point, just being normal. But yes, this episode of Pimp My Ride UK that we watched, there's a guy who I think is a failing actor. He said he was on EastEnders. He was on EastEnders at the time. He's playing like a minor role. Yeah, he had a walk-on role on EastEnders. That's basically, you know, that might as well be Matthew McConaughey at that point. A walk-on role in EastEnders in 2004 is probably the equivalent to like a secondary character on The Crown now, of course. But the thing about this guy who owns this shitty Suzuki is the most unproblematic British guy you've ever met in your life. He's a Suzuki-loving Brighton Himbo and there's nothing wrong with him.

There's nothing wrong with him. He's the most unproblematic British person I've ever met in my life and yet he gets a car from Tim Westwood that it looks like if we put a template on our Discord and told our fans to design an anime car. Which is weird because at no point does the guy say anything about liking anime or Japanese culture. He does say he loves Japanese culture. He gets a little bit of Japanese writing on one of the panels that falls off that Tim Westwood then just basically exaggerates across the entire car. But it has the worst cherry blossom on it. It's that level of extreme. It has the look of a hand-drawn Newgrounds dating simulator but on a car. Oh yeah. Remember those. Yeah. It basically was like

they couldn't get the rights to any legitimate manga images to put on the car so they just went on DeviantArt. That's what it winds up looking like. Why does this woman have four huge jizzing dicks? Yeah. Well, there's so many just like bizarre. I mean, I think some of these are just like straight lifted from the American version of the show. But the fact that they put a video camera in the dashboard with a screen so that he can practice his lines. Yeah. He was the archetype for the car YouTube guy. I want to know. So basically what happens with this car is it's a terrible car and they keep talking about you're never going to get an acting gig if you show up and look into a rehearsal in this car. Yeah. This is like Yerk van der Klerk acting agent.

Hey, you're never going to get an acting gig in this piece of shit. You got to buy yourself a Toyota Hilux. Try this Antonov. Yeah. Just be careful for birds. Yeah. So it's basically you're never going to get an acting gig in this table. This car is doing nothing for your acting career. You should do the accent from before rather. You were drifting into like Forrest Whitaker in the last game of Scotland. I was loving it. I will not drift. Unlike this guy with this Japanese car. So what we get is yeah, he he he says this car is doing no favors for your acting career and on the whose car has ever done them faith like to unless you're talking about the cars from the movie cars. No one's gone

in acting career on the base of being a car. I'm pretty sure those are animated. They should have given him the car from the movie cars. They should have given him the bones from the show bones. That's right. So that would be awesome. If my ride UK was still going, we could apply with my car and say that we just laughed at the show bones and just see what they did. He would like get the guy who plays like Hodgins or whatever one of the secondary characters and bones to do because what he does the military guy. So he gets basically has this car and he says it's doing nothing for your acting. And we know you love Japanese culture.

And so they basically just hit those two things in mind then spin it off into a wild automotive phantasmagoria the likes of which Marinetti could only have dreamed. I mean, yeah, if the car had just been solid gloss black and they'd done the interior stuff, it actually would have been kind of cool. It's a shitty Suzuki, Suzuki hatchback, but whatever. It's not that bad. You know, the interior bright red, kind of weird. Yeah, so they do nothing to the engine. Yeah, they are leaving that fucking one leader in place. That's my ride classic. Yeah, the car is still a piece of shit, but it looks nice. But they slap on a bunch of vinyl graphics on it to basically make the car anime. And

as Milo said previously, alluded to previously, it resembles Tim Westwood's jeans in the sense that this is basically the car vinyl decal version of the embroidered art on a pair of Jinkos, like it's garbage. And they mount a projector in the car so he can watch movies by pressing a button that flips the hood of his car up to be a projector screen. So basically, he can watch movies in his car. He's like, Mal, now I don't have any reason to ever leave my car. Dream in a different light. I can film myself in my car. I can watch my movie of myself in my car. I have another legend, Danny Dyer's handprint in the back of my car. But yeah, they wrote in Danny Dyer's to give a fucking hand

for it. It doesn't get to meet Danny Dyer, but it does drive around with Danny Dyer's handprint in like plaster. Mounted in the back of his fucking car. Danny Dyer tells him, you know, keep it up, draw him a school, it's a mugs game. Yeah. Nice one, brother. I can't believe you haven't watched human traffic for this yet. The bit that, well, the bit that still gets me right about the fucking, the camera that they mount in the dashboard for him to practice his lines, which has a screen right next to it for him to watch as he's, because the idea is that like, oh, now you can like see yourself in your car while you're practicing your lines. It's like, you realize that like a car has like multiple

mirrors in it, right? Like that is like a, that's like a famous basic feature of every vehicle. But weirdly that, that was the part of the car that actually made the most sense to me. I was like, as I was watching, I was like, okay, that's a sensible thing to throw in there. You know, just I'm going at it full on dad vibes. I was like, yeah, practical, makes sense. He's an actor, the grooming kit. Okay, maybe a little bit janky, but whatever. But look, you're making your tapes ranting about the grooming gang. But the, what's it called the, the projector to watch movies in your car. Like you've just installed a really nice stereo unit that has a big screen on it. Surely wouldn't you just watch a movie on that versus watching a movie?

Because you could, that way a passenger could watch a movie, but none of that's legendary. Yeah. I'm just, I'm grappling with the idea that rather than watch it on your screen while you're going places or go to a movie theater or watch it at home, you're going to park your car flip the hood up, watch a movie and also watching in the car that is made out of anime. You haven't, you haven't understood the British legend yet in that case, because that's the point. The point is, oh, he's got a movie theater in his car. That's mental. Yeah. He's not. Yeah. The guys from Indiana who love the British legend. I can't do accents. This guy's got a movie theater in his car. Oh, that's so mental. I've never seen anything like it

here in the home counties. This geezer is off the hook. What? That must be the only one in all of Sussex. Yo, I was set up not to like this guy because we're from East Sussex and he's from West Sussex, but you know what? After I saw that car movie theater, he's an all right bloke. Well, you know what? Yeah. Honestly, man, if you can impress Andrew Tate with your car, you can impress anyone. Sorry. Listen, I don't want to hear about your dodgy Suzuki with your car movie theater. If you can take me on a good night out in Brighton, I will pay for it. If not, I will punch you, dog. No, clearly, the logical continuation of the Andrew Tate story with that is that if he doesn't have a good night out in Brighton,

Andrew Tate gets to fucking do Street Fighter II style beat up his car just like a brownhouse kicking the shit out of a Suzuki. One thing I think it's important to mention before we stop is that like Tim Westwood is has some pretty serious allegations against him as well. Oh, really? Yeah. He's been he's been accused of things of a he's been accused. He's been accused of sexual impropriety. I think surely no British radio DJ has ever had a problem with that before. Yeah. No, so I think it also you should. We should also mention this. This is probably not a nicer benign person. Well, that's what I mean. That's important to point out, though, is that like a lot of this stuff is sort of predicated on kind of being a dick to people.

And it's like, well, if you your attitude is just kind of being a dick to people, it doesn't surprise me that then your approach to like, you know, sex and sexuality would also be being kind of a dick to people. Well, it's the thing to under I think the the real thing here right also is the is the is the is the relationship between portrayals of certain archetypes, especially like archetypes of archetypes of, you know, dudes who play by their own rules or whatever tends to be one that's in dialogue with how people really are. And so you can, so the the let the legend archetype as it has existed in British fiction and especially television and reality TV and there's more reality TV, but the talk about by the way,

including like weird shows that capitalize on this like Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents. But these these archetypes then get into dialogue with the real world and all of all of these things there's outrageous mental behavior or whatever on when it's in the when it's written and on TV is, you know, funny. But then as as these but these things, they're not saying that people watch it and then start doing crimes, but rather that these things reflect a tendency. Not Wayne Crimes. No, not Wayne Crimes. This is how you wind up then using industrial dye in your girlfriend's bath and making her infertile by mistake. Yeah. And it's and so it's that this we do not know that that yeah, but right, but that this that this tendency is something that is inescapable in

this country at least, and that the way it's portrayed tends to elide how quite pernicious and cruel it actually is when it's executed in real life. Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's a fair summary. And I mean, I definitely think that the fundamental premise to me is that I would never want to be around a legend in real life, you know, just as I would never fucking late sunshine. Let's get some fucking points in. Do we have a tweet go for a few more minutes? I want to ask a couple more things about legend. Nate, Nate gets into his bath after this episode thinking, thinking, oh, well, I'm glad all that legend stuff is over. Oh, oh, no. Oh, no. I've been fucking turned blue by those goddamn legends. Oh, no, the puckish Milo has turned me blue.

I hate to see that. Yeah. But like, if you if you ever go to Amsterdam, you'll always see legend. Yeah, you'll see a lot. I once saw a guy look at this guy's got a tea towel on his head impersonating his girlfriend, hilarious. I've got polish on my face. I should make friends with him. I'm also impersonating my girlfriend. Girlfriend who loves doing black. She loves doing blackfish. That's right. She loves honkball. Hey, you guys, you're from England. I bet you've never seen a honkball game before. You just heard the song. Listen, there's four honks. Okay. And you've got a bad that you used to honk the ball. I'm just imagining the Essex legends hearing this guy. He's just talking about sex things. Is he talking about a famous British

show? No, but I want to remember what's seeing in Amsterdam. I was like, going to dinner. And I look at I saw a guy with another group of guys, they were all British. They were all in their forties and they were all being dudes. Bald as shit. Just incredibly bald, clearly having the stag party for someone's third marriage. Yeah, one one of Dave Courtney's geese was having a stag party. He was there with his 499 friends. And I remember seeing like there was like all but one of the party were sort of looking in bafflement at a barge that was in the middle of a large canal. And the police were there also looking in bafflement at this large barge. And one of the guys was on it, having clearly like jumped from a large bridge onto the barge.

And he seemed like he was hurt, but he was like fine, like he was alive and he wasn't like paralyzed. And it was just everyone was just trying to figure out what to do with this monumentally stupid guy whose decision to try to impress his friends for basically no reason has suddenly ruined everything for everyone, including himself. Yeah, but they'll remember that so fondly. It was legendary, mate. Do you remember when he jumped onto that barge and hurt his leg? Classic fucking nutter. I mean, this I think for me that kind of thing is like perfectly summed up by there used to be an amazing Twitter account. I don't know if it still exists called year nine banter, which just reposted like the kind of like legend shit that you thought was

really cool when you were 14. And there's that infamous meme, which I'm sure you've all seen, where it's like these two British teenagers who are incredibly thin just standing in the kitchen of like a shitty looking house pointing at their friend who is lying on the floor and is doing like finger guns. And then they did the caption that they've posted it with is we dared Dean to lie on the floor and he just did it fucking mentalist. There it is. There it is. Thank you. Thank you for tuning in to this fifth edition of Britannology. If you're listening to this, you're already on the Patreon. So I don't know, buy a shirt or something. Thank you so much for listening. Once again, we really appreciate your patronage.

We will continue to do these episodes. So long as this bizarre island continues to fascinate and horrify us. Thank you, Riley sinks into the sea and only Birmingham exists. Exactly. That's a horrible future. Ozzy Osbourne's water world. Can I actually happen? Can I plug my podcast? Yeah, please, Riley, plug your podcast. So I also host a show. It's on this same Patreon. It's called the Boney Island Whitefish. Myself and Buntavista's Andrew Law Breakdown. Why do we do talking about the show? Bones, is it? Talking about Bines. I've got plenty of bones. Oh, a lot of Bines. I've got a lot more bones than I have appendixes.

Everyone does. But I at a slightly higher ratio than most. I did it. Listen to the Boney Island Whitefish. It's a clean sheet. You can find it. You can find it on this Patreon. And if you're listening to this, you've probably listened to it. Yeah, there you go. Listen to it again. Just see if you miss it often. Yeah. Listen to it again. Give another listen. Maybe listen to it on half speed. Yeah. Maybe print out a transcript of the Boney Island Whitefish and read it to yourself in this voice. What do you need to? What have you had for breakfast this morning? All right. Good morning. All right. Well, thank you very much for listening,

and we will join you both with our next Britannology whenever that happens, as well as both of our listeners. And on the next trashy to bonus episode as well. So until then, bye. Later.