TRASHFUTURE - *UNLOCKED* I Want to Get Rid of My Arms and Legs: TF Reviews 'Years & Years' (Parts 1-2)

Episode Date: August 31, 2021

What if Black Mirror did This Is Us? What if your kid wanted to upload themselves to their dang phone? What if a Lib Dem wrote one of the worst TV dramas to ever exist? All of this, and more, in the TF review of Years and Years (episodes 1 and 2). We hope it doesn't count as a spoiler alert to say it is bad. We've reviewed episodes 1-5 on the Patreon, and they are available here if you want more of this series. Episodes 3-4: https://www.patreon.com/posts/52033425 Episode 5: https://www.patreon.com/posts/55067991 If you’re in the UK and want to help Afghan refugees and internally displaced people, consider donating to Afghanaid: https://www.afghanaid.org.uk/ *TF LIVE SHOW ALERT* We have a live show in London on September 1! Patrons have a discount so check the posts if you are a subscriber! https://www.trashfuture.co.uk/event-details/trashfuture-live-at-vauxhall-comedy-club-1-9-21 *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 future listeners. Due to the bank holiday here in the United Kingdom, the regular episode will be coming out on Wednesday morning. In the meantime, I've unlocked the first of our reviews of the Russell T. Davies television program years and years. If you want to hear the additional episodes that we've reviewed, that is two through five, those are linked in the show notes and they're all available at the $5 tier on Patreon. Also, just a heads up, we have a live show in London on Wednesday night. That is September 1st at Voxel Comedy Club. There's a link in the show notes to get tickets. Hope to see you there and please enjoy. Welcome to this TF. The free one. No, no. You thought it was the free one, but it's the

bonus. Why would they think it was the free one? It's on the bonus feed. Well, how the fuck would we know that? You said welcome to the and then you just pointed across the table at Milo. Yeah, that point that translates well into this audio medium that we've been doing for years. Yeah, because I do the voice on both of them. So I don't know. Stop doing the bonus voice in the premium ones on the free ones. No, you know what I mean. Shut up. It's the bonus. Welcome to the bonus. Welcome to Riley and the bonus. Trash YouTube Morning Zoo. Yeah, that's right. I'm so hungover. So basically, we have discussed discussing this for a while. It's the show that has been

received rave reviews as confusing and not very good. It's the best piece of TV, the evening standard op-ed page. We'll tell you about. It has like 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, and I do not understand. So does Bon Cop, Bad Cop. So what you're telling me is we watched something that was significantly worse than Paddington 2. Yes, at least 9% worse, if not more. That's right. It is years and years. We watched years and years. And here to talk about it, it's Riley Milo and Alice. What's up, everyone? This was a painful watch. I hated it so much. And we're only,

we're only, what, 30% through this? So how we're going to be doing this is we watched two episodes. We're going to talk about those two episodes. And then as time goes on, we'll watch sort of, we'll do two more episodes. Yes, that's the years later. We'll do the next two episodes. Yeah, go by. Yeah, go by. Dramatic montages with unsuitably dramatic music. Terrible soundtrack on this dog shit. So bad.

So we watched years and years. We'll be continuing to do that for a few more episodes. The first two episodes, 33% of years and years. That's right. And it was two, it was two episodes too many in my view. The whole thing gave me a horrible tummy ache. Yeah. However, I'm, I'm that kind of hungover where I'm in the perfect position to critique years and years with the correct amount of vigor. I went to McDonald's on my way to the studio, and I thought I'd parked my car in a space and got out of the car and just go,

and I just like abandoned it across two spaces. And I was like, close enough. Nuggets. Just parked like 28 days later, like slew across the road. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then you went up to the McDonald's and the dramatic sort of like choral music from years and years started playing. They do. And everyone's going like, uh, they're like banging on the windows. I hate the fucking music so much. There's genuinely like every time there's a big emotive liberal moment, they'll do like a big crescendo of choral music. And it gave me a

fucking headache every time they do it so much. A big emotive liberal moment, like when you sell your London townhouse for 1.2 million pounds, but then a bank run causes people to literally run at the bank. It's like, it's like 28 days later, but like live them like sentries 28 days later, like, what about the regulatory protections? So we're going to get through this basically. The structure of the store, one more thing before we go in, I was like, because I'd watched the first two episodes of this before because I was like read about it and it seemed like an

interesting concept. So I watched the first classic British prestige TV. It's like our friends in the North or whatever way you say, you make something that says a lot about our society and the way that you say a lot about our society is every episode you jump forward five or 10 years. Yeah. And you also have the characters do like big long sort of speeches at like the camera. And crucially, you have a bunch of actors who are that kind of shit British actor that they're only ever in like low rent British TV dramas and they've never been in Russell Tovey to Russell Tovey and then randomly Emma Thompson, who is like in a different league to every other actor in

this show. She's having fun at least. How much money did they offer her for this? I like every other actor in the show is like a guy that an American podcaster would invent as a bit when imagining what British TV is like. So you're telling me there's just a guy with big ears and his name is Russell Tovey. Oh, it's Gareth Thompson, known for his part in North Street. Russell Tovey is an interesting one because he's basically like actor. This is the worst part. He's a fine actor, big ears, one percent body fat, crazily ripped. Yeah. And this one is a big guy. Yeah. Insanely ripped. So congratulations, Russell Tovey. You are the gym rat of the week at TF. Yeah. At Patrick Wyman to collect your prize.

I'm afraid the prize of the TF Clown of the Week goes to Russell T Davies, the writer of Years and Years. Of course it was. I didn't even notice that. I didn't know that. But now that you said that, I'm like, who else could it have been? Who else could have done this? If you want to just encapsulate everything that's wrong with modern Britain, I think Russell T, the fact that Russell T Davies is like a respected and revered like national treasure screenwriter is like a great place to start because like everything he writes is just like the most insipid like algorithm bullshit. Yeah. It is amazing to me. Because I think that like it's this weird thing where like Britain for some reason cannot do prestige TV.

We're so bad at it. Every time we try and do it, it sucks. There are a bunch of Bluetooth journalists trying to insist that it's good. And yeah, America, which makes so many terrible bad cultural products find prestige TV very easy. Americans made Deadwood. Also like the other thing is we keep trying because we have this like inferiority complex about it. So we keep trying to make prestige TV and nobody gives a shit because nobody watches it. People watch fucking line of juicy instead, right? Counterpoint. There was one amazing British, well sort of semi British prestige TV show. Wow. Semi British. Okay.

Mainly British cast, which was of course, Rome on HBO. Yeah, that was true. That was great. That was because they had HBO money, right? This was on HBO, but HBO didn't put shit into this. All the American prestige TV is full of all the good British actors. And then all the shit British actors are in all the fucking, all the ones that are called like Dave Nonts or whatever are in the fucking British prestige TV. You know, fucking Damien Lewis is on the HBO shit. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, that's it. So basically, right, we follow the Lions family who are basically

a whole bunch of, you know, British TV character actors. Lions. Do you think that says something about England, maybe? This is the level that we're pitched at here. Yeah, they're supposed to be rich. They're actually rich because they're the Lions bakery family. So they're not actually supposed to be rich. They're sort of like sort of a, they're basically a family of like PMC stereotypes, all of whom are like, I would say a middle class. They're Pessie Bourgeois, but like written by such Pessie Bourgeois people that they think

that they're just normal, right? That these people do not think that they have a class if they exist in real life. Yeah, also they have a big townhouse in London, which is supposed to be worth £1.2 million. You cannot buy a big townhouse in London for £1.2 million. Unless it's in like, I don't know, Walthamstow. Yeah, but they obviously, it's implied they live in like Islington or something like when you look out on the street that they're on, it's like big, big fuck off tool. They're saying we ain't in Walthamstow.

Yeah, they're not, no, they're not in Clapham. No. Anyway, so, but there's, there are several like strands of this family. I'll just sort of set the scene here. They're from Manchester and their grandma Muriel, an old, classic old lady name lives up in Manchester where her job is puttering around making tea and saying stuff like stuff like, oh, wasn't that my time? But then also being like, but like being sort of woke basically. Being like woke, but like, oh, we didn't used to have all these types.

But sort of blitz spirit. Like, she will say a slur, but then be like, oh, it's good that we have all of these slurs here because of diversity, I guess. Yeah, it's good. I love, I'm glad that they're here actually. Yeah, then all the characters who still live in Manchester are all like, oh, you've gone down south and you've gotten soft. And it's like, what? Yeah, that's right. So they basically, she lives in this old house, an old big detached house

that's like, oh, I can't afford to keep it anymore. Classic, just the whole thing, middle class family does another middle class. This old detached house and like, I don't know, hail or sail or what are the, one of these places where like footballers live outside of Manchester. And Cheshire, something. Yeah, I think it's supposed to be like Manchester-y. Anyway, Medlock, it's somewhere in Medlock. So the, what happened is that the story of the show, years and years,

is told on successive birthdays of this grandmother when all the family, the ones that live in Manchester, the ones that live in London, and the one who's a sort of a crusading activist saving the world, all return for the grandmother's birthday. And sometimes there will be like several birthdays in an episode, right? I love how every, every character in this show is incredibly annoying and every way, and all the things that the other characters dislike about the other characters are somehow annoying things to dislike about them. Oh yeah.

Yeah, it's amazing that they're all so dislikable and they all dislike each other for the wrong reasons, incredible. So, well, that's the framing device, right? So there's Muriel, and then there is Steven and Celeste who live down in London and work in various professional jobs, and they have several kids. And then there is Daniel, who works as a, it was like a housing officer in Manchester, and he as his partner Ralph. Go license for this house.

Essentially, yes. And his partner Ralph are sort of together, not married at the beginning. And then there is Rosie, whose whole thing is she's in a wheelchair and the Russell T. Davies hates her. Yeah, she is, she is red wall voter turned Tory. And yeah, that the, oh God, we'll get into it. So, yeah, they really, they really is, is like, you can really see like the cogs turning and like making sure they've got the correct like diversity of cast here.

Like they've really like gone out of their way to make sure that like every, every section of the family is like a little bit unconventional in some way. Yeah, which again, fine. Which is like fine, but like, it's also, it's also like contrives. It feels so forced. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, anyway, it's like Russell T. Davies is waggling his eyebrows that you like, oh, not Northern Vosa, who's a little bit racist, but she's disabled. Yeah. And so, yeah, but you can tell which ones of the characters that Russell T. Davies likes and which ones the characters Russell T. Davies does not like. Because all of the characters who are mouthpieces for him will tell you. At excruciating length. Usually, like directly speaking to camera.

Which is such good writing, I think. It's great. You know what they always say? They say, tell, don't show. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Russell T. Davies could have just, he could have written a little pamphlet maybe.

Yeah, anyway, I'm fine. So, um, this is the premise of years and years. We follow this family through the near future of what happens hell world, if you like. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Geohel, where politics is happening to them under process. Yeah. This show is like fucking, you took like, uh, the sort of like the Lib Dem party conference

and like mashed it up with the fucking episode of Doctor Who. But like, it's just, it's so bizarre. What it is, it's more centrist black mirror. And if you didn't think that was possible, you sweet summer child, we have such sites to show you. What if your, what if your kids was a phone? Well, years and years, years and years does indeed ask the question. What if your daughter was a phone? Yeah.

His black mirror is like, well, if your mom was the phone, which is interesting, but what if your kids were the phone? Now that we're making more things into, oh, your kids are on they damn phone and you wish they weren't monkeys. Poor Carl's. There are so many like lingering shots of the kids being on they dang phones. I love it so much. It's so good.

So I'm going to go through the plots of the episodes, right? So we start in 2019 and everyone in the country is watching question time as they do. Yeah, of course. And texting each other on the family group chat. About what they're seeing on question time. Who doesn't do that? That's what people do. Yeah, Britain is a country hooked on the news.

We love it. We love the news in Britain. No one, every, the most popular program, question time. We all watch question time. It's like, it's become Game of Thrones now. It's 2019, but Theresa May is still Prime Minister in this universe. Maybe it was written, it could have been written in 2017. I'm not going to sort of try to judge Russell T. Davies for like

not correctly predicting the shape of particular events in politics to get. Yeah, you didn't call COVID. What the hell? It could have been the most significant thing. I think the one thing that he doesn't call correctly that's important to talk about is he doesn't call the most recent US presidential election. Correct. So we'll get to that.

We'll get to that. Okay. That's so every, every time you mentioned American politics, it is hilarious. This is the thing. This show is so much the fucking ideology factory that there's so much to talk about that you can't like dig into it. You want to like talk about 50 things at once. So I'm going to go through it, start to finish.

Russell T. Davies is doing muscle conversion. Yeah. On my fucking brain. So basically Vivian Rook played by Emma Thompson. I'm massively just actually having a good time massively outclassing it for an observation. She's sharing that scenery. Doing what is essentially like addressed that version of the resistible rise of invertebrate, right?

Yeah, and Vivian Vivian Rook is also just like, I've got to think of a name. She started with like Viv Stanton and then thought, what sounds evil? Rook. Yeah, Vivian Rook. That's pretty evil. The most evil police in chess. Yeah, that's right. They can swap with the king.

It's tricky. All right. So she's asked by a question on question time by a lady who's like, what would you say to a Palestinian family on the Gaza Strip when Israel reduces their electricity to two hours a day? And then she takes over the ask. It's Jeremy Corbin. Anyway, Vivian Rook says, I don't give a fuck.

And then everyone's like, whoa, she said a swear. The most outrageous thing a Lib Dem can think of. Love censoring swears in their tweets. And that comes across in this fucking story. Is she allowed? Most of all people say unironically, can she say that or she can't say that? Yeah, everyone goes crazy. And then she's like, well, we're not allowed to say anything true anymore.

All I want is for bins to be collected and could people stop parking on the pavement? Okay, he did observe that part correctly. British people do only care about the bins. But he's allowed one thing. Yeah, we got that from us. Yeah, that's right. So basically, yeah, everyone watching question time is again, just like seeing this like human Facebook post like do the first swear on British TV ever.

And every family group chat is come alive. And it's again, this is like, it's so poorly read. It's like, it's people wouldn't get excited. People, Americans would be shocked by someone's a politician swearing. And maybe British people, British people wouldn't be shocked by this. Would they? In Britain, people swear all the fucking time. Yeah.

And only awful nerds are watching question time. I'm saying, okay, it would be more believable in America because America is so much more puritanical and like you cannot swear on TV in America basically ever. So like, I could kind of get it in an American like a British context. Like, just swearing on TV in Britain all the time. But like, just swearing on this TV show. Yeah, it's a TV show. Why would people be like, whoa, can she say that?

When Nazis are supposed to be polite. Question times after the watershed, right? Yeah, I guess so. It's like fucking 10. Anyway, so this is the mad fantasy of British liberalism that a human Facebook post sort of takes over politics by being like populism. Yeah, populism. That's right.

So there's also just like, again, little bits of like, it's just very annoying of, I think, again, the family group chat group phone call is sort of always happening. Oh yeah, it's like they like make up like futuristic technology that's completely unimpressive, but doesn't exist. Oh yeah, there's like an Alexa thing that's called Senor. And then there's like a whole running bit of how like the grandmother can't say, she's like, senior. Yeah, this is the black mirror bit is they'll slip little bits of like

ripped from the headlines near future technology past you. Yeah. But the family phone calls were like all of their phones ring at once. It's like, that's not, that's not a thing. It's just a WhatsApp group call. Yeah. Anyway, so it's like family link. There's one conversation where the daughter Rosie, the one that Russell C.

Davies hates is giving birth to yet another child where the father is nowhere to be found. Can't stop squeezing them out. Yeah. And when Daniel, the gay brother is off to go take her into the hospital, one of the dads is just like, oh, don't watch her pushing it out or I'll make you more gay. And then one of like hectoring kids that's always on their phone looks up and is like, that's kind of phobic. No, it's Celeste who says that.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's the wife who is like a woke and also the only black member of the family. It's like, yeah. No, you can't say that that's kind of phobic. I'm canceling you.

She's woke, but also like a huge lip. Yeah, because that's the wokest you can be is being a lip. Exactly. Yeah. I also like, what the fuck does gynophobic mean? Well, when you're afraid of the pussy, that's literally it. That is literally what they're going for. Don't try to think of the actual semantic content of the words that are being used here.

Think instead of the fact that Russell T. Davies is like, what are the trends now? Let's extrapolate that. Yeah. It's Russell T. Davies being furious at having been accused of being a misogynist, half remembering it and being like, oh, what are people getting cancelled for? Gynophobia. It sounds like a word that TERFs would invent,

because they've realized that misogynists make it seem like you're including trans women. So we've got to come up with a new word that makes it explicit that trans women aren't included. Yes. Yes. Anyway, that was why it raised my eyebrows. So she said, anyway, I noted that because it's just like, ah, yes, because this is just a peek into the mad mind of a Lib Dem black mirror. So that old woman hates pussy and she should be called out on it.

So essentially, right? Number one, we have a car driving in London listening to the news. I think Rory Kinnear, just brilliant actor listening to the news. Yeah. He's got some great reacting to stuff shots and this. Yeah. He's just getting shocked at different things. He's a fine actor, but like, god, the script.

So President Trump has called on his opponents to bridge divisions as he plans to build a Walling Mexico, yet another British centrist who has not understood Donald Trump a lot about our society. Oh, they get Trump's so wrong throughout this. Repeatedly. Yeah. They don't even quote Trump and they get him wrong. Yeah.

It's so bad. We'll get into that. Yeah, we'll get into that. So anyway, we go to deliver the baby and the family's all there and then the main, oh, I think is the main Russell T. Davies mouthpiece, which is Daniel, who is played by Russell Tovey. That's same first name. Exactly.

I like you and it make you my mouthpiece. Says begins to like go on a bit of a tangent, which is like, oh, but is it even okay to bring children into the world? Because it's getting so bad. Yeah, we get the fucking simple English Wikipedia version of first reformed. So things were okay in the days before 2008. It's the companies, the brands, the corporations that frighten me. Don't even start the analysis.

Have you heard of ad busters? Don't even stop me. Don't even stop me. ISIS. Don't even get me. Dude, don't even get me. Don't even get me. Don't even start the analysis.

Those guys are on fucking notice. This is ISIS. Yeah. Also like, but like, No, I'm there's more. Yeah, I know. I never thought I'd be scared of America in a million years. We've got fake news and false facts.

No, no, not false facts. Fake news and false facts. It's me, Professor Brian Cox. I've just seen a woman give birth and I'm so disgusted. I'm never going to have children. We've got fake news and false facts. If it's this bad now, and then we state the like topic sentence for the show,

what's it going to be like in five years or 10 years? What's it going to be like? I guess we won't find out. Title card years and years. I love it when they say the fucking the name of the show. Don't even say the name of the show. He said the premise. Yeah, he explained the log line of the show.

The show to us. Yeah. The elevator pitch. Man, there's the fucking soliloquy. I got so mad. Oh, there's so many of these two. You think you're going to get away with just one? Oh, no, there's multiple per episode.

In some some days, I really hate this like podcast fucking red pill that I've had to take where now when I see anything on TV, I just see all of the joins and I'm like, you just you don't understand anything. Why would you say no one's ever said that? What the fuck? I'm sorry, Boston.

Awesome. Yeah, sorry. I was supposed to sell Hondas. It was okay before 2008 before buying Hondas. So anyway, the title card of like a date counting clock flips over and flips over 2021. We did. We missed out an important part of the first episode though,

which is the the additional gender that we get. No, no, this is not the end of the first episode. This is the end of the first. This is the fucking beginning of the first episode. Sorry. I thought that was at the end of the first episode. Oh, no, we'll get in. I have some fucking thoughts about the gender.

I was hoping you would, Alice. We'll get there. We'll get there. So 2021 invented a new gender 2021. The world awakens to a second Trump term. Oh, no. Guess that one correctly, boss, man. But like you can't you can't fault him for that.

Yes, I can. Because the reason the reason I can fault him for this, right, is it's the exact same stupid fucking ignorant liberal assumption on the back end of there was no politics before 2008, because I didn't have to think about it versus like if Joe Biden is elected and Trump is over, I will go back to not having to think about it. Well, he was elected and the bad shit is still happening. And also the fact that like the worst thing he can conceptualize

is Trump getting elected again. When Trump's president was basically quite uneventful. He was actually like less bad than some of his colleagues would have been in the same position because he was fucking incompetent and didn't really do much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, a president after my own heart.

Yeah, the idea that like a second Trump term would have ushered in like some kind of like fascist dictatorship but kind of misunderstands Trump, which they all did. Yeah, it's going to be the guys after Biden who does that. So I think what you're saying Alice, if I get this right, is that it's not so much about getting the fact, about the prediction wrong, because it's a work of fiction. Fine, who cares?

It's what rather what that prediction necessarily says about this lib dem, this lib dem version of children. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. The reason why politics is happening and is being imposed upon me is because orange man bad. Let me just shock you. What if it was children of gay men? So basically, the army has taken over Ukraine

and now Ukraine is a client state of Russia. They call it the Ukraine a lot, which I do like. I do approve of that. And newsreader says, and I don't know if this was intended to be like a point of divergence. Oh, yeah, I caught this too. I caught this too, Alice. Or if Russell T. Davis is just that stupid,

but the script is the Soviet army occupies Ukraine. I fucking said that as well. I was like, what? Yes, that is what we wanted you to think. So, yeah, it's like, yeah, they've invited the Soviet army into Kiev to maintain stability. So again, like, we're just, I guess this is a world where like... We need you to come out of retirement for one last job.

Yeah. I swore I would never wear that to Shanka again. Fully the Simpsons bit where the Berlin Wall springs back up from underground. Yeah, so this is, this is, this is very, very funny. But also it's like, yeah, this is also a world in which like, the Canadian Liberal Party, or if like all parties in the Canadian government haven't just been like supplying rocket

launchers to like the Azov Batali for the last several years as well, like none of that exists. Just none of this is understood. Oh, none of it exists. Well, they get Russia so wrong as well, because they're trying to do a whole thing about like Russia, like the, like the politics of homophobia in Russia, which like no one in the West, they just refuse to learn

anything about it. They don't like, they just, they just refuse to understand what the laws about like homosexuality actually are in Russia. And then they're just like, well, I guess being gay is illegal and I put you in jail for being gay. And it's like, look, Russia's a very homophobic country, but they do not put you in jail for being gay. And they certainly do not invade other countries

with the specific aim of putting their gay people in jail. They just let the Chechens do it. Well, that's what it is though, is it's half remembering a bunch of different news stories. So being like, oh, the Chechen fucking purges. Oh, I'm just going to apply that to Russia, I guess. Yeah, it's always like, I guess what if like Ramzan Kadyrov and like Vladimir Putin stepped into the teleporter from the fly?

Yeah, he's a Russian client state leader. Now that would be a jack dude. The fucking, I guess, new Ukrainian governments were a Russian client state. Therefore, same thing, I guess. Yeah. And the whole thing right also is like, Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, they're the same.

The world is being ruled by these old men and there's nothing we can do about it. Yeah, that's right, Russell T. Davies. Anyway, Angela Merkel dies, then Vivian Rook goes- It doesn't say how. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe she's- She died in being too cool.

Yeah, falls off a podium or something. Yeah. Yeah. Died in Berghain. She fell off the Reichstag. Fell out of a front-ex guard tower. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right.

I don't think it's very funny. Yeah, Angela Merkel falls off of a- She falls out of a front-ex like on-board technical that they used to just murder people. Anyway. She's buried in Greece. But Vivian Rook goes on, have I got news for you? And like Paul Merton is like, oh, you card.

Again, Russell T. Davies being like, ah, we did this with Boris Johnson. That's why he's popular. It's like, this is, I think you got this. I can't remember which one of you mentioned this, where it's like just a bunch of like half-remembered news articles. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

100%. But he's like, oh yeah, Russia's homophobic. And have I got news for you? Kept putting Boris Johnson on. And that's probably why they're there. And their main thing is about being in play. They've got cool misogynist ones. Gynephobia.

Yeah. Yeah. Single ones. I mean, actually, I think that they misread the Boris Johnson thing. Because I think, really, we should have gone further with Boris Johnson. We should have actually just made Boris Johnson.

You're Starmer. You'd like Boris Johnson to go further. I'd like him to go further. I think we should have just made Boris Johnson more of a celebrity, so that he wouldn't have needed to be a politician. Because that's actually all he wants to be. He hates being Prime Minister.

He fucking hates it. He just wants to be like a cool guy that people like. He should have been like Jonathan Ross. Like in a just universe, that's who he would be. Can we make him into Ross Kemp? Ross Kemp. Just shave his head. Are you just thinking that because they both

have the name Ross? Yes. I'm Boris Johnson, Ross Kemp. It's an ultimate force. Hello, I'm Jonathan Ross Kemp, and I'm here with some of the most dangerous gangs in the world. So basically, it is 2024 now, and a lot of Ukrainian refugees are fleeing Ukraine for the UK.

And like the line here is like, they elected a pro-Putin leader with 97% of the vote, and then the other 3% of the vote is being persecuted. Half remembered the thing about Crimea. Yeah, and also, that's not how a rigged election works. You don't rig the election and then punish the people who you forgot to rig. This is the thing.

You just trace it back to the news article that Russell Davis is half remembered, which in this case was that Crimea voted to join the Russian Federation, like 97% to 3%. And therefore, it is like that, but like more persecution, I guess. Yeah. Anyway, so that's the situation there.

Now, we meet Steven and Celeste's daughter, Bethany. Now, Bethany basically, and again, this is just the most middle-aged shit. Can we talk about the fucking face thing? Oh, she wears a Snapchat filter on her face. And never wants to take it off. She never wants to take it off. And she's always sad and brooding.

Yeah, almost as though she has a deep secret, something that is fundamentally doesn't fit about her life that she needs to come out to about her parents. Yeah, and so her parents hack into her search history, which could have been interesting, wasn't. She's not experiencing you for it. It's presented as like this dilemma for half a second. All good dilemmas, it never comes back.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, her mom Celeste is like, tell me her search history. And they're like, are you sure you want to do that? She's like, yes, and it does. And so she's been googling. Isis, don't get me started on that. Yeah, she's been googling how to join Isis, but also she's been googling trans and how to be trans

and like a trans life and stuff. And so she's just following Alice Aversandum. International space. What is this deep fried screenshot? She sits both of her parents down like I've got a mom, dad, I've got a big announcement for you and they're all hyped up and they are cartoonishly, liberally supportive of the idea that she is going to transgen, right?

They're like, we will love you so much, no matter what you do. We'll love you more, actually. You kind of suck that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is based, our family's gonna- We hate your body. Much more inclusive. And then she says, no, I don't want to change my gender.

I'm transhuman. I want to upload my consciousness into the cloud. She also says the line, I want to get rid of my arms and legs. My pronouns are Amazon slash web services. Yeah. I like the line, the line that someone wrote down, reviewed, published, acted, edited, and then released onto a TV program was, I want to get rid of my arms and legs.

So good. We also get this little comedy of errors, right, where she's trying to tell them, no, I'm not transsexual. And they're like, oh no, we say gender now, right? And it's like, fuck sake. Boo. Anyway, yeah, in 2024, this is totally a settled issue and everybody's fine with it.

And it's not anything that would give anyone a moment's pause. And now we have had to make up an edgier, more futuristic way of being transgender. I'm tired of all these bloody, cute, cloud humans going in the women's toilet. Coming into the women's toilet in Habbo Hotel. No, I mean, I don't need to tell you, and I suspect many of the listeners this,

but it is not a settled issue in 2021 in Britain. And yet we've decided, oh, that's, you know, that's yesterday's news. That's yesterday's social issue. The news show is gonna be uploading yourself to Habbo Hotel. Yeah, she's gonna go live in Habbo Hotel forever. She's gonna get a neopet, but like for real. You don't understand, mom and dad, I wanna be in Club Penguin.

And her mom is like a Habbo turf, I guess. No, I forbid you from like, yeah, from like disposing of your human body and embracing the new flesh. And Rory Kinnear gets to sit there in the middle like, well, I mean, I think whatever makes her happy if she wants to live in Habbo Hotel, then. She's mad, is mad, hand cocking it.

And also they say, they're like, and she's like, what happens to your body? And she goes like, it gets recycled. It's like, what do you, what does that mean? You can't recycle a body. You wanna give it to someone else? Like what? What do you mean? It falls into a kind of slurry.

It's someone who no longer wants to be in Habbo Hotel. They download into that body. It's like a switch thing. Okay, yeah. Anyway. And that's how you transgender. Yeah, that's right. So, well, that's a hack.

You can get around some of the rules. It's also this whole thing where it's like, it's just kind of like, oh, well, we need some like hookey social issue of like the future to win. And it's like, no, but that's obviously just dumb. Like if her parents are gonna stand there and say, that's dumb, I'm just gonna be like, yeah, that's right.

That's dumb. I'm uploading your consciousness to the cloud because you don't like, I don't wanna get rid of your arms and legs. Yeah, that's stupid. That's not like being trans at all. Being trans is a real thing and this is stupid. They're a clinic student switcher.

She says that they're gonna do this in the very near future. They built a real Habbo hotel in Switzerland. I wanna go live there. Yeah, which is also a little bit of like a dignitas thing, I guess. Yeah. Fuck, I don't know. Here's a few more little peeks in the future.

I'm so mad at the fucking transhuman thing. Daniel back in Manchester, like picks up his new neighbor on the street to like give her a ride into town and ask why she gave up on London. And she's like, oh, you know, the fenced off areas, you know, you can only enter Kensington if you're means tested.

And it's like, what the fuck does that mean? That's fucking stupid. Again, just have heard the word means tested deployed at me at some point and it's like, yeah, means testing. Means testing is for making sure you're poor enough to receive a benefit. Yeah. I'm actually too rich to Kensington.

How does the Lib Dem show get means testing wrong? The most Lib Dem thing. Yeah. Well, no, it's now because now the popular position is like universalism, but the Lib Dem approach to universalism is still very stupid. Like for example, the Lib Dem candidate for London Mayor wants to solve the housing crisis, not with like more means tested benefits,

but with like Lib Dem universalism, which is Yimbyism more or less. Yeah. So it's just like, no, we're going to increase the supply of houses like I don't know where. What is this character in the show for? Oh, this is another Russell T. Davies bit of self-congratulation because she's a storyteller.

And she says, oh, I lived in London. I gave Ted talks, but I gave up on it. I teach people about stories. I'm glad this woman has failed. Because of media reaction. Because stories can help us make sense of the world. She says, not fucking this one. Highly didactic story about what will happen

if we allow ourselves to descend into the anti-intellectualism populism of Brexit. Yeah. Again, this is actually, this is not really a story about Britain's future. This is a story about how, like so often, like most people when try, like how apocalypse fantasies tend to be power fantasies,

like at the core. People imagining a world where their skills become uniquely necessary and not bound by rules. But you know how we always joke about how the ultimate Lib Dem Wank fantasy is like coming third and like being part of a coalition. Like even in their fondest dreams, they don't win. Same thing, right?

The power fantasy here is not that you exercise power. It's that you are powerless, but you get to say, I told you so. Yeah, precisely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we do that. That's our thing. Yeah, that belongs to the left.

We have fucking empirical data to support us. That's right. Anyway, so yeah, just Russell T. Davies cannot stop congratulating himself throughout, just relentlessly sucking himself off throughout this entire show. So we also now set up the fourth lion's child, right? Four lions on the shirt.

Yeah. Edith, who is this? Yeah, crusading famous lefty activist. Guy in Russell T. Davies, just some annoying shit with this character. This man, this is a man who fucking understands the left. I can tell you. Yeah.

Yeah, so basically she travels around the world doing, doing lefty stuff, protesting things, you know. It never really explains what she's doing in any of the places where she is. Yeah, that's because all of the, all of the background elements of this world are so poorly realized because the entire world is created of half remembered fragments

of guardian articles. And like an active resentment of having to remember them. That's what the populism has played off of is like, oh, well, why should I have to give a fuck about Israel and Palestine? And it's like the same thing. It's like, I resent that there's news happening because I miss when I could just switch off.

Yeah. There's too much news. Yeah, that's right. Anyway, what's the deal? So Daniel goes into this refugee camp for Ukrainians where he meets a rock and twink. But before that. Getting, getting sucked off by a Ukrainian twink.

I've come here to this refugee camp. You're enough to die. You can live. So there, there's like a lady that comes in from Blackpool, which is not like liberal Manchester. And it's just like, I'm learning. I want to learn. No, I want to learn how to make it less nice.

Great if she doesn't understand why she's allowed to park. Yeah. Which is a really, it's an uncouth thing to do. Yeah. Yeah. She parks in the wrong place. Then it is like. She's got like a bad dye job.

She's like bottle blonde. She's a little bit on the chunkier side, which is always interesting. And she's like, yeah, no, I'm fucking, I had a more fucking shot. And it's like, what? So she says, I voted, I voted to leave the EU. It's one thing taking in starving kids,

but in Ukraine, they have shops over there, don't they? I love that. No, she's got a man. That is true. They've got big bags of sugar. So much of this show is just partridge. I was saying this to Riley and he like, so many of the characters are just saying things like,

there's that being partridge where he was like, the potato famine. I'm sorry. If you can afford to emigrate, you can afford to eat in a modest restaurant. Like that's basically what this woman is saying. Yeah. I thought it was weird when she said the salve 900 wasn't overraced.

Basically, then this is another bit of Russell T Davies, letting Daniel be his mouthpiece. Doing an epic clapback speech where he's like, we're still part of the United Nations, whether you like her or not, which is nothing to do with Europe. Oh yeah. She says, and the lady says some stupid folksy phrases

that don't exist. Like, oh, they're apples in the custard. Oh yeah. And then they're like, that's a weird thing to say. And it's like, you just made this up. You can't be like, but he says, we're part of the United Nations, whether you like her or not,

which means we need to take in asylum seekers. It's nothing to do with Europe. Now, who said that thing about the apple in the custard? My mother said it. Well, she's a bloody idiot and then he walks off and you're supposed to stand up and clap at this point. Yeah. Well, I did.

Yeah. But I was absolutely off my face on Edibles. So like nothing I did during this can really be. And it made this show like a borderline bearable. God knows how I would have felt if I hadn't been on Edibles. Yeah. I took psychic damage from watching this, both sober and fasting.

I will be billing the podcast for my therapy. I watched it with her. I watched the first episode. Fine. I watched the second episode with a tummy ache. Oh, yeah. I'm sorry to hear that. Poor Riley.

Sorry about that, Riley. I watched the second episode with a really bad tummy ache. Yeah. And I like fell asleep on the toilet. I hate it. I'm the most persecuted man in the world. That is probably true. Anyway, it's an apple in your custard.

All right. Whatever it says. So I hate that shit, though, where they're just like, I've made up a dumb phrase for this woman. And then I have the other characters go like, that's a weird phrase. And it's like, but you know what?

I'm going to look up if it's a real phrase. It doesn't matter. It truly doesn't. Yeah. I don't care. She shows up to like be annoying and then get instantly owned and then never show up again. Well, goodbye.

You've been owned. Or if she does show up again, it's going to be in like two episodes. Time is the stormbound furor of one of the fucking camps. Yeah. All the characters in this show, you're supposed to dislike are Alan Partridge. All the shows in this character,

you're supposed to like are like Trump, Blutick, Replyers. Yeah, exactly. That's the whole world. Yeah. So anyway, here's another person that's just put in this show for Daniel to own, which is Daniel's boyfriend Ralph who he marries,

husband now, I guess, is yeah, this picture of this gormless conspiracy addled idiot who just believes the earth is flat and germs don't exist because he reads stuff on Facebook. And he's like, well, I'm just asking questions about the flat earth. And it's like, we've been to India. You could see the curvature of the earth.

You've got a GPS in your car. You can't see the curvature. Ralph says, it's got a flat screen, done it? Got him there. Oh, yeah. This is to be fair. Plastic. Roasted.

Plastic flat earth guy. Like the point is, it's not even that guys this stupid don't exist, right? It's that it's such a fucking caricature. And the fact that there is no other depth to them other than, oh, this is the next guy that I have to own. Just it's Daniel is basically a wandering Ronin of like having right on liberal opinions, wandering into town

and dispatching the local crime boss. After he does this, after he slices him in half with his katana of reason, he goes into the toilet and he calls Rory Keneer. The most ideological conversation in a show full of that shit. He just fully goes, yeah, is everybody getting dumber? Yeah. It's not just Ralph.

It's everywhere. Whoa, is it idiocracy? And then Steve and then Rory Keneer replies, it's like we went too far. Whatever we had, we punctured it. It's all collapsing, which basically is like too many phones. We did too many phones. There are too many phones.

Somebody has broken our fucking moral arc of progress. Hey, is this freaking simulation on? Am I right? Did someone turn up the stupid in the simulation? What are all these oafs doing in Britain? It would be really funny if someone had done that. I would love that. There was just like a guy on the simulation desk

who just leaned on the stupid lever. He was like, yeah. So are we going to get to the nukes? Yeah, yeah. So basically, there's like Rosie goes on a date with a guy who fucks his house cleaning robot, which is funny. Yeah, this is a fun punchline.

Yeah, he fucks the robot. Why doesn't the robot looks like something Peter Griffin built in his garage? Yeah, the robot is just clearly a guy in a suit. It's Boston Arsenal. Yeah, I was supposed to sell our handers, but now I have to suck this guy's dick. What the fuck?

I suppose it is quite funny that given a robot, the most interesting thing an English man could think to do is it would be to fuck it in the mouth. And that's right. To be fair, that is the most interesting thing. Robots are dumb. They suck, but fucking one is at least funny. Yeah.

Anyway, that's all horrifying. And morally neutral. So Viv Rook has now formed a party called the four-star movement. That's pretty fun. Yo, is this a reference to the five-star movement? My hair is being blown back like the fucking THQ guy. We are all at this at fucking here. Oh, my God.

Oh, my God. I hate this fucking show so much. We are all waggling our eyebrows theatrically. Yeah. So we're calling it the four-star party, she says, in honor of what I said fuck on TV. It's so cool. Another line that got written and got put into this show.

It's simply epic. And the censorship I have faced ever since on the fake news media. How could these people who understand populism, if that's even a thing you can talk about, so poorly, have been owned so badly by it? So we represent the coalition of the ordinary man and woman who've been abandoned by all the traditional parties. The two people, the ordinary man and woman.

The Tories are dead. Labor is dead. The Lib Dems are dead. Oh, no. Oh, no. Huge change. No, the size makes change. The guy who was sat there going,

okay, the Tories and Labor are dead, but they're still hope. Oh, no. No, the Lib Dems too. Fuck. Oh, who am I going to have a phone for now? Respect. Well, time to vote for Brian Rose, I guess. It's the like time enough fucking guy from the fucking,

oh God, the Twilight Zone. Just going, oh, well, at least they can still vote for Change UK, the independent group. And then they disband too. And he's like, no. There was time now. Viv Rook is the most partridge character in the cast of characters you're supposed to dislike,

because this is just like broadcast television. It's a dead duck. So basically, the other thing is we're back at this party, the birthday party, and they're like the girl, and one of the girls who were doing her GCSEs is like, yeah, I learned about it in my sexual awareness image in control class. And they're like, can you believe they're getting taught

pornography mentorily from the age of 11? This show keeps hammering on, like we're over sexualizing the children in a really weird way. I'm sorry, was this made in 1986? Yeah. Kind of what? Yeah, I mean.

Tip or go, script consultant. There's a couple of times when it'll come up, where they'll just be like, kids are watching too much pornography. And it's like, well, sure, but you're putting that on like an equal footing with, simultaneously, Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, kids watching pornography, guy fucking a robot.

It's like, it's a totally flat landscape. There's no topography there in terms of like, which is worse. Speaking of Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, the end of the first episode comes when there's an emergency broadcast in a siren. The US has launched a nuke at the Chinese island of Hongshadao. This is what Trump did in his final three days of office, but he did it.

He fucking did it. Donald Trump did it. He did it. He did it in his final days of office. He did the thing because the Libs were right, and they warned us, and now we're owned, because they told us. And again, it's such a misunderstanding of Trump.

It's such a misunderstanding. He was like the least militarily hawkish, like American president in like the last 30 years. Yeah, he killed Kasim Salamani, basically, because he was bored. And then he just kind of, I think the thing, right, maybe it's the thing that makes me, the best exemplifies Trump's foreign policy to me

was the time when he inadvertently almost got to like a peace agreement with North Korea by negging Kim Jong-un. And then after creating a historic summit with him, the first of its kind, he then immediately collapsed it because he got mad at Robert De Niro on Twitter. Very funny. Awesome. All of that stuff, none of the liberals thought that like,

and this is included in this show, I think as well, right? But it is representative of this specifically like liberal brain disease that all of these norms collapsing and people getting dumber are just these things that are happening because of phones or TV or other weird cultural class that's mandatory every day at school. And it's making them dumber. And that all of these things are just flattened out as,

everything's getting beyond our control. Anyway, at the end of this, after the nuke goes off, Edith calls him from Vietnam, like just basically in like a radiation sunbed. Yo, I decided to like stand in the path of this nuclear weapon because I'm too woke to leave the path of nuclear weapon. And then this episode ends with a Daniel leaving his idiot husband Ralph to go meet up with Victor,

the Ukrainian twink. And all of the Ukrainian refugees are dancing around a bonfire with effigies of both Xi Jinping and Donald Trump for some reason, which is interesting. This says a lot about our society and it's doing the fucking choral music. Oh yeah, the epic music. Yeah, epic music.

It's like, it's a lot like the Brexit film that we watched. The bit where Benedict Cumberbatch's Dominic Cummings fucked a manhole in the street and heard the sound of Brexit. It's exactly like that. It's like, oh, we could hear chaos. And what chaos sounds like is spooky choral music and like hard bass. And Zimmer's fucking lobotomized brother doing the music for this. But also it's just like, it doesn't really...

They had a centrist ward in. Yeah, it doesn't explain at all why the Ukrainians are even energized about this event as it has nothing to do with their situation. How did they get the materials for the bonfire? They're under guard. Like who was letting them do this? Where do they get the materials for the effigies?

They just had those ready to go. Why are they dancing? They get two suits at short notice. Why does he immediately drive down there? Like as though there's like... He drives down there like he's fucking Jason Statham about to stop a terror attack. Well, because he realizes that his life could be over

at any moment and needs to seize love. Yeah, he needs to fuck a twink. Yeah, he's like in love with the Ukraine. Oh my God, we could be about to die. I've got to go bust in a twink. Yeah, which he does. But like fully missionaries though. Oh yeah, the missionary gay sex was quite something.

I mean, I'm sure Alice, this struck you, but... There are multiple instances of entirely missionary lying flat as a board and getting fucked in the ass. And this is a show-in by gay man? Is that possible? Russell T. Davis is gay, right? I didn't imagine that. Yeah, he is, but I don't think he did the blocking.

No, but I mean, did he not... Did he not at any point go, yo? You can have a human sex face to face, but your legs are going to be up in the frame is the thing. Yeah. And they're not. He's just lying there. They're thrashing against each other kind of like two fish in a net.

It's like that kind of a... Both of them are very muscular. Also point out Russell Tovey, also gay. So that's a gay guy doing a gay sex scene written by a gay writer and somehow managing to make it look incredibly unconvincing. Yeah, that's right. How do you do that? I mean, how do you fuck up?

I mean, it's the lived-damn children of men, Alice. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I guess so. So the episode two begins with Edith going on, like getting interviewed on Indian television. And then like the Indian news anchor is like, well, according to our calculations,

you were heavily, you were heavily radiation poisoned, which I don't think you usually do. Like that's not how an ambush interview works. You're not going to be like, oh yeah, well, you've got cancer. Sticking a microphone in your face. Like she's fucking Dr. Manhattan, right? Like are you aware that you're fucking radioactive? I'm also not sure that's how nuclear explosions work.

I don't know that. Whatever. I mean, this is right. Fuck's sake, the United States of America nuked a part of China, killed 60,000 Chinese people, and the Chinese response was question mark sanctions. So basically everyone is sanctioned. Xi Jinping is the most fucking calm man on earth.

I take back everything bad I've ever said. Ukrainian Twinks. And he was like, well, my hands are tied. Just in mid, I want you to just imagine the idea of a nuclear weapon designating on Chinese soil and their response being, well, better do nothing. So they say the world that, so basically Edith turns to the camera again. So and says, the world just keeps getting hotter and faster and matter. We never learn.

We just keep racing towards the next disaster. Choral music. Love choral music. And she's like, what's going to happen next? Looking straight down the camera. What's going to happen next? And then I almost imagine that the lady who's like, I tell people about stories, stories have the power to explain the world,

comes on just waggling her eyebrows. That woman was such an instant hate for me. Like if I had a big hate button and she was like, I'm a storyteller. I was like, oh, yeah. Anyway, also this is 2024. Oh, Mike Pence is the charismatic powerhouse. Mike Pence. Yeah, that's right.

He's in charge of America. Trump is like the power behind the throne. It's like a Medvedev thing. So funny. Mike Pence, just to pop it. Trump, we all know Trump is still in charge. Yeah. Albino, Playmobil, man.

Mike Pence. Yeah. Oh my God. The idea that Trump is the power behind the throne that he had. There's such a Trump. Trump lost the election and went back to like posting press releases about the Oscars. It's not going to take any end. Yeah.

So, but like the idea this that like he was this like, you know, scheming old man with like designs on things and so on. It's like, no, no, he's not. Like, yeah, this is once again. The least Sven Gali figure in human history. The power behind the throne, just like stumbling ass first into the throne room, being like the jester, the jester is a disgrace. Yeah.

He has never wanted anything that has taken more than two steps to achieve. Yeah. Like if Trump launched a nuclear warhead, it would be because he was like trying to like dunk his big mac in some ketchup and like mist and hit the button. Like he would be he would be launching it like at the New Yorkers head office because they were unkind to him. We're how close to Trump? Terry is the New Yorkers head office.

Let me just come and get a Jared. Can we get it? Can we get a calculation on that? How big a warhead do we need here? So anyway, the UK sanctions America and there's a by-election in the Lions, grandma's hometown because the MP, the local MP is decapitated by a drone, which I think is actually quite funny. Yeah.

He's decapitated by a drone. Like an episode of mad man. But it's like a tiny little delivery drone. It's like a fucking fully decaffeinated decaffeinated. This guy is he's so sleepy after that. My favorite detail about the sanctions thing is Rory Keneer, whose character name I'm not going to bother to learn is like, but we can't sanction America.

That would be incredibly stupid. And it's like, yeah, you've just identified a problem with your plot there. Yep. He's going to notice it. Yeah, we're going to hang a lantern on it. So also like the grandmother now also is like woke old lady and talks about like how the victor's parents turned him into the Russian authorities for being gay. And she was like, I'm not without prejudice myself.

I don't like Londoners or people who wear sunglasses indoors. The shades the blind. That's her thing. Dogs. Well, they're leaning on dogs for they don't even pay them. Disgrace. So it's basically again like the old lady. Russell D. Davies writing an old lady version of I don't care if you're black, white or purple.

Anyway, so that's annoying. Like everything else in these in these episodes. So this is the first one. This is where Bethany takes gets the first of her like trans human surgeries where she gets to remove her legs. She gets what if your kid was a father? She says, and again, this is the word for word line. That I've can't scribe after she gets a phone implanted in her hand.

Subdermally, I am the phone. This is what phones are going to be from now on. Just a fucking humdinger of a line. Yo, that's fucking yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. What if the kids were the damn phones? And that's a good question.

Yeah. It's a good question to ask. I hope someone tells a story. It doesn't really explain how you would like use the phone other than to answer a call. Yeah. She like clicks her fingers, which is like, what if you ever need to click your fingers in any non phone or laser phone? What if you're trying to applaud at a slam poetry reading and then you just make a bunch of calls?

Yeah. Also, it fails to take account for the fact that to do any kind of phone calls, she has to be constantly doing the shaka. Yeah. Making it the most like Hawaiian dude, bro. It's not. It's the opposite of hands free. You have to use your literal entire hand.

It's so easy to be on the phone, but you're having to do the hand gesture. It's actually more annoying than holding a phone. Like why not just have like a little like a codec like in Metal Gear Solid? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it's yours. Do you have Prince Albert in a can?

Anyway, so that's like, and the mom is just continually horrified. Oh, sorry. Let me put you onto my mom and just like fucking giving her your hand. Oh, and the whole time Viv Beppe Grillo, four star movement is like gaining power. She's gaining popularity. She's won a by-election at the end of the episode. She wins the by-election.

She's getting popular. She has a battle bus and the party with one MP. That's going to make them as powerful as you, Kip. The woman that Russell T. Davis hates in the wheelchair is like, yeah, I love her, but I hate her, but I love her really. Which is like the stupid working class idiot being seduced to the dark side in this. It's fantastic because it's like, oh, she loves them, but she doesn't know why and neither do I.

And I'm not going to make any attempt. I guess it's the swearing. Is it the swearing? We do swearing. They just do horseshoe theory, don't they? Like, oh, the left and the right. Yeah, we will absolutely do some of that later on in this episode. Anyway, so Victor is discovered by Daniel's ex-husband,

who like drops a dime to the home office on him because Victor is working in like a gas station illegally, just so he has something to do. Would you believe that in 2024, the British immigration system might be bad? I can't believe that it took developments in the future to make it bad. Crazy. Remember before 2008 when politics was boring

and also the immigration system wasn't bad? So it's like, the whole thing is, okay, so they set up a, so basically they also set up the sanctions against America thing being like, oh, we'll make all our banks fail. Anyway, so they... That's not what would make banks fail. Yeah, I guess they're all owned by American banks,

but most of the British banks are based in Britain. Yeah, and they're also mostly not owned by American banks. Anyway. Well, just to... Well, the world's wealthiest banks are just British banks. We're known for banking. It's like our thing. It's like our only thing.

That and shit fucking screenwriting, apparently. I mean, I'm sure there are more elements to it, but like, I'm gonna say, I don't think... There are, there are not. I don't think Russell T. Davies has thought this through. Anyway. No. So, consequently, there is a run on the bank,

which takes the form of... Yo, running on a bank, that's like what happens when a bunch of people get together and they run towards the bank and they bounce off of the windows, like fucking dawn of the dead. I can't believe... Like, you got my money in there, man.

Yeah, they literally do a run at the bank, where a lot of people run onto the different bank branches to try to get their money out. Anyway, this is important because the middle class... We'll get to that when it comes up. It comes a little later in the episode. But, so, Edith comes back and has some kind of realization, which is like, maybe it's time to do something useful

rather than just shouting. So, she has the realization that lefty activists have in the fantasies of centrists. Anyway, they get crossfaded off some synthetic Japanese alcohol that doesn't give you a hangover. Then Rory Kinnear gets his dick out and dances around a ball of fun.

Yeah, I heard this Rory Kinnear ass. If you're into Rory Kinnear ass, there was jiggling Rory Kinnear ass in episode 2. If you want to see... Of years and years. I'm going to go check on misterskin.com for Rory Kinnear. No, I mean, the one joke that came off in this whole series so far is just the synthetic alcohol

is supposed to not give you a hangover. And then they wake up the next morning and they're all comically hungover. And they're like, well, guess that doesn't work. And it's like, he is able to carry off one joke in two hours of this show. Right, yeah. Anyway, so Victor gets a text from the home office

at midnight saying he's no longer got leave to remain. And... Sorry, one second. Can I... I was getting the food, but can I quickly go back to the bit about the run on the bank? No, we're going to get to it.

Oh, sorry, have we not got to it yet? Yeah. Okay, great. Yeah, I preempt to drive over. But so Muriel thinks it's a prank. He's like, oh, you shouldn't get your friends to prank text you. This is very serious. But they get into the car like, oh, yeah, it's real.

You get the text at midnight. And this is because immigration removals was flipped over to that privatized service. Yeah, when you got deported by a public utility, it was way better. They'd send you the text at like 9am. I love how much of this is like, whoa, it's this dystopian future where it's now.

Yeah. Like, oh, I hate the dystopian future where Pretty Patel is home secretary. Good job that, isn't it? Yeah. The fucking like home office immigration wasting room is less grim than a real one is. Absolutely.

So he got to interview the home office, but then he gets like detained directly from the interview suite taken away from Daniel. And he gets removed back to Ukraine from the Three Bridges Removal Center. And there's the whole thing. Sorry, you're too much of a hot twink to remain in the United Kingdom.

And the whole thing, right, is that his phone is taken off and he's told he's going to be deported in 12 hours. It takes 24 hours to lodge an appeal. There's a bit like of the British immigration system has become so Kafka-esque and brutal. And it's like, yo, that's crazy. Yeah, what if that happened? Remember 2008 when politics were boring?

And then I actually wrote down that I needed to give Russell T. Davies some credit here because this storyline between Victor and Daniel was well-paced and moving. And I felt a palpable sense of relief when Victor was removed from the plane. But at this point, I remembered that I wasn't thinking about years and years.

I was half remembering the 2019 film Official Secrets. So, whoops, sorry, I almost gave Russell T. Davies an undeserved compliment there. So yeah, Victor is now in Ukraine and there ended his story for episode two. Edith and Rosie see Vibb's Battle Bus drive by and they're like, ah, I read she acts all normal, but she's really a millionaire.

It's like, oh, is this Nigel Farage calling? She's a British politician. Of course she's a millionaire. So they go to the by-election and they're like, oh, we're all so mad about everything right now. And then yeah, Vivian Rook is like, oh, they're imposing export tariffs on us in the EU. Labour candidate is like,

you don't even know what an export tariff is. And then Vivian Rook just does some like showmanship on stage. She does like pro-mind magic. She says, we've been asked about strategies and policies and I've been accused of sounding vague, but I'm terrified. Given the size of the task in front of me, have you seen one of these?

It's an highly illegal device called a blink. It's made by cyber terrorists. This is the... Yeah, cyber terrorists incorporated the factory. Just the like sentence to sentence writing and this is a fucking work of art. This weapon takes out all the phones and internet connected devices in a given radius,

but I would go further. I would give the blink to every teacher, every parent, everywhere. I looked at my goddaughter's phone and I found this, then she plays a porn video, non-stop porn for kids. Yeah. Oh, now this is very partridge because like some guy in the crowd laughs.

She goes, oh, are you proud of this? Are you non-stop porn for kids? Wanking in front of a child. Do you think that's good to you? And nice. Have a bloody good thinker. Look at yourself in the mirror. All right.

The Labour candidate then says, this is cheating. You're not supposed to use visual aids. Sucking off a kid. Do you think that's all right? And then she's like, I will jail Jack Dorsey. And it's like, okay, fine. I support her on that one and everyone claps.

Because that's what populism is, is when you say that you're going to jail Jack Dorsey. And if that's populism, sign me up because he's very annoying. Anyway, Steven Celeste get 1.2 million pounds in their bank account from the sale of their house when then they experience the upper middle class nightmare. The quickening.

Yeah. It fully is like this is the upper middle class horror movie. It's very like the one thing we didn't want to have. So what happens is, they leave the money in the bank account overnight and then there's that run on the bank that they set up earlier.

Chekhov's bank run. And so... I hate it so many bits about this. Yeah, Milo, take it away. Right. So basically what happens is he tries to call... I mean, he just like, despite being like a rich guy, doesn't understand how banks work.

And so he's going like, trying to phone me like, I know Bruce, who's like a middle manager at like his bank. Because they're like, he's going to be able to do something. Like if you just know the guy and he's like talking to a policeman. Please undo the financial crisis. He's like outside. He's like shaking a policeman guy. But I know Bruce and it's like the policeman

doesn't even know who Bruce is. He's a policeman. He doesn't work for the bank. So the other thing though is things really funny is they were like, what about temporary high balance protection? An actual thing where like, you're insured for much more than that amount of money. So long as the...

So that this nightmare does not happen. Yeah, you're insured for... You're insured up to a million pounds if the money is in your account for like less than 12 months, I think is the current rule. But then they were like, what about the temporary high balance protection? Oh, they took that out. Yeah, the populace they got rid of that.

So I suspect what actually happened here is that they wrote this in and then they were about to go film it. And then someone said to Russell... Yeah, their accountant. Someone said to Russell H. Davies, but wait a minute. There's such a thing as the temporary high balance protection. This kind of thing is quite literally impossible.

And so they had to be like, oh, what about the temporary high balance protection? Oh, the populace did away with it. Yeah, the populace who do not even have one MP yet. Don't worry about this. And so they lose everything that they're not insured for, which we are told is statutorily 85 grand. So they have lost their house and now they have a mere 85,000 pounds in the bank.

And on the family group chat that everyone is always in. Completely misunderstands how people relate to their families in Britain. Yeah, we see Edith and her sister whose name I also refuse to learn because this show is absolute fucking dog shit, like laughing it up. And they're meant to be the bad guys. And I cannot get over this. Like Rory Keneer gets very mad at them.

He's like, oh, you've had your fun, have you? Now that we've been left with merely 85 grand. So if anyone wants to give me merely 85 grand, you know, please get at me. Anyway, so the bank run happens. Sorry, my favorite part about the bank run, though, is that they're all like queuing up. And then like the police there and they're like,

please, please remain calm. And then the bank manager is like, we can't let anyone in. And then immediately everyone turns into like hooting siamangs. And they play the court. They play the fucking, the choral music again. And then everyone starts like banging on the windows of the bank going like, let me in or open.

And it's like, and it's like this, we literally had a run on the bank and this did not happen again. But no, because this isn't how people behave. Because Russell T. Davies also, also one of the cops like joins in with them banging on the doors and shit. And he's like, wait, my money's also in a bank.

And then he runs to like a different bank and starts banging on the door. What do you mean the bank's out of money? Insolvent. That's what happens when you do a bank run. Is everyone runs to the bank? Solvent and insolvent are different things. What a language.

You're observation that this is just half remembered news articles is perfect. Yeah. It's like half remembering a queue of people outside a branch of Northern Rock, looking a bit sad and going. They're banging on the glass. I imagine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What if that, but like also 28 days later. I'm not going to stand here and tell you that most people are smart, but they're smart enough to know that like banging on the window of the bank isn't going to get your money back. Yeah.

So the, and then like again, the more just like relitigating Brexit basically, where the fucking, the daughters that Russell T. Davies doesn't like are like the bankers and experts knackered the country a second time. People like Steven, they did this. And it's like, oh, the bank. Yeah, fucking get us.

Steven's a fucking financial advisor. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Oh yeah. Guys, guys who like tell you how to get a mortgage, they did it. Those guys. So, but that's, that's the thing, right?

It's just like, again, just hating this character is like a fucking idiot. And the, anyway, the episode ends with Viv Rook elected to one seat in Parliament. Yeah. Anyway, it just, it just refuses to understand how British politics work. And like, I'm sure the arc of this show is going to be

like Viv Rook becomes like dictator of Britain. But that's not what would happen. Like the Tories would just like adopt enough of her policies to like kill her off. And then it would just still be the Tories like, which, and again, this is stuff that has already happened in Britain. Like, how are you getting the prediction wrong when you're literally just modeling stuff

that already happened, but getting a different outcome? Well, yeah, because this isn't a show action. It's really, this isn't a show about predictions. This is a show about working out Russell T Davies and generally liberal anxieties about Britain now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also getting to have the fulfillment of like, I told you so. Again, that's our thing.

Yeah, it is. And like, there is a bit, right? There is a valid sort of criticism of the left in here. Not from Russell T Davies, at least not consciously. But there is a bit where Edith is like, oh, well, I think like stupid guy voice. Oh, well, I think we should actually just give up because everything's terrible.

And it's like, well, okay, that is a thing that some of us, including me, have been prone to, where we're just like, oh, now we're just, we've just fucked it lads. Join me, Mr. Chuck. Just give up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And like, it is not a smart thing to do.

It's not been smart when I've done it. It's also not a criticism that I'm going to take from Russell T Davies. No, the last person I'll take a criticism from. A man who wrote, I want to get rid of my arms and legs. All right. I think, I think that's about enough years and years for this month. We have two more fucking episodes of this shit to do. That's right.

I hate you so much. Aren't I a stinker? I feel like, I feel, I feel like Nishikuma here. That's right. Just I feel like I'm being tortured by my friends on trash. That's right. All right. I think that's about it though.

Thank you very much for listening to the bonus episode of TF, where we watch two episodes of years and years. It's the bonus. Now I think it is time for dinner. It's the free one. No, it's not the free one. It's the bonus. It wasn't the free one.

I just wanted to do the sexy voice. Now it's time for dinner. So we will see all of you on the free one next week. Bye. I'll take your note.