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Here Comes the Guillotine contains offensive language, mature content and adult themes.

It is not suitable for a younger audience.

This is a Global Player Original podcast.

Hello and welcome to Here Comes the Guillotine.

I'm Frankie Boyle and I'm going to be talking to Christopher MacArthur Boyd.

As I was saying there

to the fantastic Bruce Randy,

it's not just the Empire Biscuit and Freedom Fries, there was also what is known as liberty cabbage.

Schutzauerkraut was kind of considered a way to win this associated with German people.

We Americans had to change a lot of things because

two wars with Germany and they're essentially a German society.

So Frankfurt has become hot dogs and so on.

You know?

They're essentially

an outgrowth of

European Protestantism and

the Germanic

the Prodi work ethic thing taking to its natural conclusion.

The work ethic, the marching bands that they constantly have, the

town festivals.

I know I said this many times, but Sandra Bullock.

Yes.

German.

Bruce Willis?

He looks German as well.

Exactly.

Yeah.

That's a good German guy who's lost his money.

If you're interested in this, theory is a whole scur back to the episodes where we detail how

diehard is essentially

a discussion of the different types of German-ness that modernity offers.

And it's Hans Gruber's archaic German Germanness

saying let's get some money, whereas Bruce Willis, John Maclean's modern American German-ness is saying no,

there is the spectacle, there is thrills beyond money, there are fireballs to outrun.

We can enter the virtual realm with our Germanness.

There's a divorced partner who's about to be

shtapped

by her boss.

And if you are willing to enter out of the spectacle, you can be killed by your shadow.

Your German self.

There's a world of sensation that's available to you once you abandon the old rewards of things like money, that Hans Gruber is interested in, money and revenge, and enter the new hyper-real that's available to the American German.

So it's a Christmas.

Yeah, as you've seen

Christmas.

When you were looking at those

little buttons here in the Global Studio, there's three buttons.

What did they say?

Capital, heart and smooth.

The three options you can take in life.

So you saw this as you could have money, you could have love, or you could have an easy road.

Yeah.

The smooth life.

What is becoming a monk if not smooth?

Your head becomes smooth, your life becomes smooth, featureless.

I'm not saying smooth necessarily.

Great.

Your genitals essentially become smooth though.

They may as well.

Would you hear about that Italian monk who never ever met a woman?

No.

He lived till he was 52 and he died and he'd never seen a woman or spoke to a woman.

How do we know this?

He said that, and then he died.

Maybe it was talk shit.

It seemed to me like he'd committed a variety of Master Chef-style crimes.

But Master Chef had gone on in his past.

I've never even seen a woman.

I've never seen a woman.

I love God.

Shut up, you fucking pedo.

Dead Peter.

Anyway, we're here for another episode of the meal.

Okay, okay, okay, okay.

Hello, here comes the guillotine.

That's us.

Love this show.

Sometimes you talk the Scottish creative culture on the podcast and how some of the talent hasn't been supported or given the breaks available to those down south or around London.

I read an article recently about how Sean Connery was offered the part of Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings film, but turned it down.

What do you you think about a Scottish Gandalf?

And would that have helped shine the eye of Sauron on Scottish creative or performance talent?

Thanks and keep doing what you do.

Mike from South of the Misty Mountains, also known as Winchester.

P.S.

I sometimes write jokes for Des Clark on breaking the news.

Any advice on what he likes in his current form?

A lot to unpack.

There.

Wow, that really took a turn.

Yeah.

I think Sean Corner would have been a bad Gandalf.

His voice was too distinct, but also...

Washard is never late.

Always on time.

You shall not pass.

Shall not pass, Balrog.

I discipline my Balrog with an open-time slap.

Sometimes if Shoran

is being hysterical or being a bitch.

I found him open-handed slap.

I've always considered the eye of Shoudon to be a bitch.

You can give the Witch King of Angmar the last word.

And often he's not happy with the last word.

In which case, I found him open-handed slab.

I raise my staff above my head and shoot a white beam.

And that seems to do the trick.

What?

Your modern social motors prevent you.

I think

Gandalf is located as a spirit who is sent to Middle-earth

to help deal with Sauron and to help deal with the politics of Middle Earth.

So he comes from the West, he comes from

the land of the Valar.

Who's that?

Is that like the heaven they go to then?

It's sort of like a bunch of Teutonic gods.

Yes, it is kind of like heaven, but it's kind of like

also physically there in the West.

So it's a land

where the gods live.

And

Gandalf comes through there.

He's a minor spirit of the type that Saurin is.

So, Sauron's like a kind of

championship-level

devil, whereas the original devil,

Morgoth,

he's kind of locked up by this stage.

Salron's taken over, assistant manager job.

And at one point, I think he just gets killed by a big dog in the Silverland.

Do you know what I mean?

He's not all all that.

But then he makes the one ring, and that

second phrases him.

Right.

For a bit.

He's nerfed.

But I don't think Sean Cornery is much.

But then again, that is prejudice.

We expect these people that sound English because they're from heaven.

How fucking cucked are we?

Do you know what I mean?

It's not possible.

He could have been an angel if he's from.

But I guess they're Teutonic.

I wouldn't have minded seeing a German Gandalf.

i wouldn't have minded seeing

werner herzog's gandalf

you know what would that sound like

i think people have to do it themselves that's where they're incapable of um

what's that werner

yeah the

the penguins

they

go towards the mountains even though it's a certain death much like hobby does when he does that thing about i love i spoke about this before in a podcast but that thing about the the penguins the suicidal penguins, and who

there's one penguin.

What is madness?

Is a penguin capable of experiencing madness?

Not that he thinks that he is Napoleon, but perhaps, you know, some aberration of the social penguin contract.

Well, um, sometimes penguins walk towards mountains.

I looked at the video of the penguin walking towards the mountains for hours.

I felt a need to intervene.

We turned him around.

He turned back himself.

Some penguins must go to the mountains.

I think I can do it okay there, right?

Well, um, the best bit in that interview is when he just suddenly goes to the guy out of nowhere.

Can penguins be gay?

Guy goes slide, I don't know.

And they can, I guess they can.

I guess anyone can, but everyone.

If a penguin wants to be, a penguin can be.

If a penguin's born that way,

that's the lady, I guess.

So I have seen

And then they show him listening to it, and he's gone.

Oh no, no,

ah,

he's mispronounced ministers.

Minister.

What's wrong with that?

I'm not fucking pronouncing it.

He has.

Shelmeralion.

I'd love to see Sean Connery struggle to pronounce.

I don't know how to say myself.

The Silmarillion.

Well, Arwin, I've given you the last word.

In this council of Elrond.

You don't seem to be happy with the last word.

Women are very good at that.

The fellowship.

That's a perfect word for me to say, fellowship.

Because he's saying it right.

It's the one word you can say.

Fellowship.

What fellowship?

No, no.

You would assume

you would over counterconnect your way of hearing it.

Stop over-connecting for Max Beauchamp.

Your fucking fellowship.

It's a fellowship.

I love that.

Yeah.

What do you, you were kind of having a...

I think that the thing you said at that blind boy interview.

Early on where you were like Scotland doesn't really have a culture.

I think a lot of people in the room were upset by that.

They seemed kind of, ah, we've got culture, we've got tote bags,

we can go to the mono and see a band on tour.

What do you mean we do have a culture?

I don't think it has a significant culture, put it that way.

Um,

and it's kind of hobbled and hamstrung over the years by various factors: cultural cringe,

its

um subservience to England, its classism,

its um

Philistinism of its bourgeoisie, which we've gone on about here various times.

But you know, compare it to modern Irish culture.

I remember being a teenager and being in bands and stuff.

Everybody wanted to learn how to play the guitar.

I think, based on the popularity of Guitar Hero and School of Rock and stuff like that, everybody bought an SG and a Fender Stratocaster and learned how to play the guitar.

But we never

people didn't learn how to play music.

They learned how to play the guitar.

Like, nobody learned how to make stuff, we just learned how to do it.

And if you brought the idea, like, let's do an original song, people would be kind of like, nah, it's cringe.

Let's just

play CDC or let's out play on Metallica or the Artic Monkeys or Kings of Leon or Vampire Weekend.

Like, let's just copy people.

I remember writing with and for people early on, right?

I guess mainly for.

And

there'd just been a huge kind of mental roadblock to doing anything good to the point that people would often kind of almost violently resist it.

Remember I mean when this guy going oh we could do this or we could change our line that way and he's going that's a bit like a thing in Monty Python isn't it or something like that.

He'd always have some thing of what was wrong with this lane and I would go what bit what you know let's let's get it out.

What's the thing that you think that's like and he would talk about something so it might be a line about say Wimbledon or something go there's sort of a Monty Python sketch about tennis, and you're kind of like,

this is completely unconnected.

And what you're doing is you're hearing something that has some quality to it or some novelty to it, and going, oh, I could do that.

And then going, oh, God, no, I couldn't be good.

You know?

And you kind of got to fight your way through that in the sense of Scottishness.

But like, because I did it with quite a few people, I experienced quite a bit of that of going, oh, yeah, there's kind of actual mental roadblocks to creatively achieving things here.

Do you know what I mean?

And maybe it's easier if you're a novelist or something, you just sat on your own typing up your own kind of vision or whatever.

But certainly in collaborative things, there was always a lot of

cringe.

Yeah, I find maybe you look at the kind of great

Scottish creative people and you go, there is a kind of trend of

neurodivergence and autism.

It's almost as if you need to not be willing to

be part of the culture yeah the so-called culture yeah and you need to that's the people I admire you know James Kilman or

Carly Meester or Rachel Maclean to an extent as well I guess you've got to be fucking collaborative if you want to get shows and galleries and all that kind of stuff but um they are very much doing their own thing do you know what I mean so she's filming all her own videos doing all the her own costumes doing um her own edits and she's the only actor in it and all that kind of stuff.

Look at Lemmy, you you know, and Lemmy.

He was just every thing he did, he was just shaving off more and more people who were involved in it from Lemmy's show.

But maybe you just need to abstract yourself from the general

anchor that is the rest of the culture.

Do you know what I mean?

I think there's always contained within any complaint about culture, it's contained within, so let's try and be better.

It's kind of part of the message.

So, I think when I was younger, and I would go, oh, you know, it's a bit shit that we only get these fucking two sitcoms a year, and you know this sort of base very base level offer that we get from Scottish culture well now you get one sitcom and one yearly schedule

if you're lucky and now I just kind of accept that doesn't change and well I guess basically I don't next year I'm just planning on just writing and not doing any other kind of work at all

and

just seeing if I can kind of isolate myself and do something that interests me and like entirely so that I'm entirely happy with the thing rather than

you know at any point you know most art is create uh collaborative um and if you went to something like a theater you don't get intensely collaborative but in Scotland that comes with a lot of um

minuses of um

you know

uh attitudes that are you know aren't they very helpful and you know I have been fostered over the years because they're unhelpful.

Do you know what I mean?

That idea you used to get when you'd work in tele up here and they go, I don't think we could do that.

And then you'd see the same joke on

something.

You know what I mean?

It's definitely a fostered subservience.

Yeah.

The time you get to be,

I mean, it's dead obvious, but the time you get to be appreciated in Scotland is when you're dead.

So when Alistair Grey was alive, it was always a bit of a, oh God, he said this thing about there being too many English people working in the arts here or something.

Oh, he was embarrassing.

But now he's dead.

He's like a fucking saint.

Because he kind of say any of the stuff that he would have said, which was you know, he was like socialist and

you know a loose cannon.

I brought that up at the thing I was doing to kind of celebrate him and respond to his work.

And the reception from the audience was frosty.

Where I was like, it's only really now that he's, you know, he's not a...

Because he's quite a radical figure in terms of like

he wrote a whole novel that was about how Scotland is like a

place where they keep all Scotland's bombs, all America's bombs and stuff.

Like Atlantic ends in nuclear apocalypse.

And like

you can really be embraced by the BBC and the British culture at large when you're like talking about stuff like that because

he was saying this is fucked up and things have to change and the empire, like the union has to end and stuff.

And yeah, once you're dead,

you're softened by death, aren't you?

You can say in very literal sense and stuff like that, right?

Say the BBC did a two-part documentary about him while he was alive, right?

He in the promo for the, you know, people that interview him and the rap thing might go, it's terrible that we're fucking a millionaire and all the stuff he kept saying.

Yeah.

So they go, oh, fuck, don't do that.

Yeah.

But now he's dead and he can't say it.

Oh, great.

Isn't it wonderful?

Yeah.

Yeah,

he was unique.

He was a unique figure, but

part of the...

I can't wait to be dead.

Hopefully somebody will find something

worth enjoying

about me.

You'll be dead at some point, and I'll get a lot of money from talking heads.

Well, you know, Frankie,

we've heard the podcast, you know.

You'll be three years into a re-education program in fucking a Chinese moon calling, I think.

You hope.

At best.

What a cool question.

What does Des Clark want for his?

What does any advice on what he likes in his current form?

Des likes wrestling.

He likes darts.

He likes.

He's a big sport guy.

He loves sports.

And like, it's a real.

Burden me.

This is a post-lunch episode.

And

we both had three different little curries.

We had a tray of curries.

We had the tally tray, which is not tally as an anti-Italian slur from the early part of the 1900s.

Nobody loves Italy more than me, Christy.

Nobody loves Italy more than me and you.

Yeah.

But we both had three little curries and rice and bread and dessert.

and coffees.

So, but please bear with us if you hear any collective digestion.

plumming

if you hear what sounds like a witch's cauldron as people

we have we have on the show unusually this week a boar constrictor yeah that is digesting a small deer

it's part of the the global we're just doing well you know it's susie's not huge

get the animal man brought us a boar constrictor and we fed a deer in parking state and you might hear a little bit of that yeah but

I think they're adding a lot.

Yeah.

It's just nice to have somebody to turn to and see them.

Well, they digest a full elk.

You ever seen one of the videos where a snake swallows something and it just bursts?

Those are the only videos I do, see?

You're ugly.

I'm sick.

Imagine every time something comes out your phone, you're just like, no, no, no, no, no, no, for like a year until it shows you the snake bursting as it ate a crocodile, which is usually the thing they're eating.

I used to watch a lot and post a lot footage of a fox being decomposed, which I think lost me quite a lot of followers.

Yeah.

But it had this really inappropriate, like, BBC science sort of jolly music to it.

It was like,

and it was a xylophone kind of just this fox being eaten by maggots.

The marimba.

I loved it.

I like fast-forwarded footage of things decomposing.

What's it called again?

Time-lapse?

Time-lapse footage of people decomposing, now animals decomposing.

It's reassuring.

Yeah.

It's reassuring.

And to dust we shall return.

Yeah.

So,

um, what does Des like to?

I mean, I would just say if you're gonna, this is a startlingly earnest response to the question.

If you're gonna write for a topical programme, listen to the programme and see what the kind of house style is and house rhythm.

I think comedy writing is a lot about finding the rhythm.

You think this is a sincere inquiry about he's someone who's sending in like uh but if breaking the news is like open access right okay i would say it genuinely the first point would be think about the the word you're ending on i mean that's think about the way the sentence is ending and whether it can end um in a different order so that there's so as to maximize surprise i think that's the main note about short topical stuff and the last syllable preferably um well yeah i mean sort of the later the better but also you can think about

the difference between hard and soft stops.

So if you're stopping on a word like bang or clap, that's a hard stop.

If you finish on a word like guillotine or vaccination or something like that, where they'll laugh, particularly if the laugh is contained in the word or the surprise is contained in the word, that kind of counts double.

And also it helps to vary a monologue, you know,

if not everything ends in a hard stop, so then people aren't just listening to the rhythm.

I think that's good if you're ever at a stage where you're

working with people and writing monologues for them.

Yeah, it makes up the dynamics of it.

Yeah, and you just want to think about

what the dynamics of the word order are, and what

I guess like if you were writing prose, people, or poetry, really, people would be thinking about it as meter.

I think you get that in comic prose as well.

And that's really what monologues are a type of comic prose almost

so sometimes what you'll find is you're looking at a line and you're largely going can I shave words out of this does this still maintain the same impact with less words that's what you're doing as a stand-up and sometimes when you're writing for broadcasting you're just trying to get the right rhythm to it so you can actually kind of find that you're adding words or you're changing the the word choice um

and you know, sometimes you're adding an adverb, quite often, or you're adding

an adjective.

And

yeah, I think you basically have got to kind of break it down and think about the words.

I remember this guy going to me one time, how do I write jokes on Twitter?

And he was a good comedian, and he was like, But you know, I just kind of get my Twitter going, and I sort of said this kind of thing to him, and he was just like, I just cannot be fucked with that.

What do you mean?

Yeah, of the kind of like pouring over every where every word should be and you're kind of like well

that's kind of

what it is.

Yeah.

Um

I I just think the shape especially because of the way that people read things is different from the way that people say things.

Like I remember someone was talking about how the way that we teach children to read is all wrong because we ask them to sound out every syllable but that's not how A that's not how words work and that's not how we read things we read sentences as a whole like in big chunks whereas

so you shouldn't really like spell things out and it's i think that that's different from the way that we hear things which is

like if you're reading a sentence i don't know about you sometimes i skip to the end of paragraph and i go back and read it and it's like all out order maybe that's because i'm mental but it's the whole the whole thing has to look like a certain way This is why there isn't a lot of funny prose.

We might have talked about this when I did that book launch thing with you, but you know people always go oh this is a really funny book and you read it and you go i like smiled twice

this is the funniest thing yeah and there's not a lot of there's pg woodhouse which i think is consistently funny um even that breaks a lot of the rules of kind of comic prose but um

the way the eye works when you're reading is that we tend to look at a sentence as a whole

see if there's any things we're going to struggle with.

We do all this subconsciously and the eye moves moves to the end of the sentence and when you're writing a joke like a traditional two-line joke the

surprise, the novelty and the comedy is generally contained at the end so that you're dealing with the fact that the person has already looked at the end and you've got to think of ways of tricking the eye and working around that and often like when I'd write columns I would insert jokes in parenthesis in the middle of sentences try and stop the eye basically and go over I can get to the end of that bit and then have something on the end of the sentence yeah but you've really you've got to have a strategy for that'cause most stuff I I read that's um

comic prose and

generally doesn't hasn't really thought about that very much and become it means it becomes quite s quite plodding, it becomes quite one-paced.

Sometimes you see that when you're watching someone just stand up, you're like, you need to mix this up, you need a bit longer but in here or you need a couple of jabs or something.

That's just

you need to just disrupt this.

It's difficult for new people, isn't it?

Because you're just like,

sometimes the advice is you need more good jokes.

It's like a quick, a key thing, no?

So, like, when you first start out, it's like a new comic.

This is the standard new comic thing:

I've got this set, it's blowing the roof off.

I've got 10 minutes, but I can't slow down.

Sometimes I get booked for 10 minutes and I've just gabbled this thing.

And you go,

that's because you don't know it well enough.

So it's actually a really simple problem.

And you just need to learn it better.

And then you can pause on the big laughs.

And you can learn how to ring everything out in that 10 minutes.

And then, so you've talked to those people, like when I used to do classes and stuff, they think, I've got a really big problem because I can never stop.

It's like falling down a flat stairs.

And you're like, you know, you just need to know it better.

And then you get people who sort of quite complacently go, they've been 20 minutes for a year or two years.

And they'll be like, you know, it's good, but I find I kind of speed up.

Do you know what I mean?

So you're going through it all at one pace.

And you sort of think, you know, you go on and other people storm and you just do okay

and you find it's all kind of one pace.

And you're like, that's actually quite a big problem because you need more big laughs in there.

That's why the person who's killing it can slow up, slow down and speed up because they have much, they have the control that's given to them by big laughs.

And that's a kind of horrible note to give someone to go, well, you need to to go away and write better things.

Yeah.

Big time.

There you go.

It's a technical conversation about comedy and a discussion of.

To be fair, it was from a comedy writer who I'd imagine is trying to get into the game and is doing breaking the news.

I think it's cool that there's kind of open access things like that.

And then you was that new one in that's there's one in England as well, isn't there?

BBC News quiz is open access.

Is it?

A talk shine.

They have a writer's room, but maybe as well.

I would say EMs are open, it was called.

It was the new open access BBC Radio 4 thing.

If you're doing that kind of work or you're trying to do that kind of work, front load your stuff.

I mean, it's so fucking obvious, but just put the best 10 fucking jokes at the top.

Put the bag as it.

Try and write more than they'd expect, because then they're like, fuck is there someone we should be hiring?

I would also say don't be too concerned about their voice.

I know everybody is the opposite of everybody else's notes, so take that into account because everybody's like, oh yeah, I really learned to write in their voice or whatever.

Like a good act or someone worth writing for, Disney need it in their voice to make it the voice.

Yeah, and Des is fucking look at Des is what he can have anybody's voice.

Sometimes he's a boa constrictor who's posing as an actual boa constrictor who's replaced Susie in the show-do who's looking at my legs, the snake, and it's like that baby deer that he consumed looked a lot like Susie.

We only have his word for it, really.

Fuck He was wearing corn bells,

he was wearing a red penny bullshit.

Nah, Susie's okay.

I got a text from her.

Yeah, she said I'm inside.

I don't know that means.

Well, there you go.

Thanks.

And again, that's Mike from South of the Misty Mountains.

Thanks a lot, Mike.

This is just a nice one.

This isn't even a question, really.

Morning, folks.

It's Friday morning.

The sun is blazing, and I'm on annual leave.

I'm sat watching The Foreigner on Netflix with the curtain shut.

Thank you, Christopher.

Thank you.

Love the poetry.

Not a question, just a guy watching a Jackie Chan versus the IRA.

Oh, yo, yo, yo, yo, yi.

I wonder what you would make out of this kneecap stuff.

I'd like to see that.

Jackie Chan is kind of Kier Starmer's enforcer.

Who's

kind of...

He's lost his family, hasn't he?

To the IRA.

So he's just kind of going, you know what?

Fuck it.

Well, you can pitch it, certainly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is a big long one.

You want to hear this?

Why not?

Hi, Frankie.

Etal.

What does Etal mean?

And everybody else.

And everybody else.

Big fan.

Much bigger.

than I'd comfortably admit without being a bit embarrassed.

One of my favourite comedians and writers.

I don't know whether you'll get this, but I hope so.

This is really just a thank you for all you do.

I love your comedy, writing, political takes.

I'm a big fan of Here Comes a Guillotine 2 with Susie and Christopher.

It cheers me up to know my humour is not as dark as I sometimes think, and you can find humour in the worst of situations.

I know you're just chatting with your mates, but I really enjoy learning bits about Scottish and Irish history, culture through the podcast.

It's better when Susie is there, though.

She offers a better balance and keeps things warm.

on topic.

She may be here.

We don't know if she's here or she's not.

I can hear Oasis coming from the inside of that snake.

She offers a bit of balance and keeps things more on topic.

I think Frankie and Christopher can descend down a niche rabbit hole quite easily.

Ascend?

We can ascend.

We can ascend up a niche rabbit hole to the rabbit heavens where the rabbit god lives.

El Ra, wasn't it?

In Warship Dine?

That's right, yeah.

The rant about cyclists in pedestrian areas was a particular favourite.

I was crying with laughter.

Frankie, your newsletters are great.

I hate mailing lists generally.

More emails, more spam is a burden of modern life, but I'm generally excited when I see a new one from you.

It's whimsical, random, very uncapitalist.

Not trying to sell anything, just here is what I'm up to.

Might that be because I don't have anything to sell.

You can also check out my mailing list, substack.com, if you want.

CMB, as you were.

That is very much an attempt to sell stuff there.

Another reason for writing and a small hope of a reply is I've wrote a film noir crime novel.

Long time in the making.

Does he say I have wrote a film noir?

I've wrote...

So he's not got the tense correct for.

I have written a film noir.

I've wrote a film noir, scandy noir, crime novel, long time in the making.

Any tips or helpful advice on publishing it?

I've been sat at the last stage of editing for ages as I'm uncertain how, when, where to go about getting it published successfully.

Much love and gratitude.

Keep up the thought-provoking and hilarious work.

Looking forward to your new crime novel and the Dungeons and Dragons episodes of Guillotine.

Kind regards, Elliot.

What do you have to say?

I would say have a quick glance over it for tense and grammar errors.

If you've wrote Rote at any point, if you've written Rote at any point.

Perhaps make the narrator have English as like a third language or something like that.

That would be a way of glossing over what now seems to be an inevitable catalogue of errors.

Put it like that.

That's not bad advice.

Get someone you trust, whose opinion you trust, whose taste you trust,

to read it.

It's not a bad idea.

Mark Jennings has a new joke that's really, really good.

Are you allowed to just burn your friend's jokes on podcasts?

By the time this comes out.

Oh,

yeah,

it'll be out, especially something.

He's got a new bit where he's like, one of his pals had to write an essay for something.

Now, Mark went to Glasgow and he's got a degree in English and stuff.

So he asked Mark, he said, I've got chat GPT to write this for me.

Can you look over it?

And he was like, you've not even put the effort into writing it.

You know, I may put the effort into reading it.

It's like,

you have to put that at some point.

I mean, I've properly mangled this joke, I think, to be honest with you.

I hope so.

Ah, fuck's sake.

I think, you know, you send it to a publisher.

I mean, that's the thing.

You send it to a publisher.

I don't have a publisher for my new book either.

What are you going to do?

Send it to a bunch of publishers and hope for the best.

Would you go to the people who don't mean time again?

Yeah, no, I think the thing is like they get first look or something like that.

But there's no guarantee anyone wants to publish fiction.

And like a lot of publishers don't publish very much, you know, a year.

So they're choosing what they want to have as their,

you know, it's a whole different.

It's not just we're going to publish this book because we think it will sell well or something.

It's much more, this is the brand, this is the brand, this is the outlook of this publisher, this is the sort of thing we're into and we're promoting.

Um, like in like a record label, or even even a fringe producer, but even more than that, because the companies are tighter, is my guess.

So, it's like if you're creative director of a small publisher and you're like i like this book you're head of publicity you're head of um

advertising whatever as well they've got to be into it as well because they've got to spend a year selling this book um

and you've also got to go well i like this but i don't really have an editor that's good at

doing, you know, whatever, romantic fiction.

You know, that's not kind of what we do here and I don't know how I'd start getting this together.

Yeah, it's an interesting thing you get, right?

People go, oh god, fucking celebrity getting a novel published, right?

And you're like, loads of fucking celebrities like novels and don't get them published.

Right.

Because it's like, you can he fix a bad book.

It's no like paying a ghostwriter to write an autobiography or something.

If someone's written a bad novel, it's not they're not going, let's take a year and unpick this thing and fucking rewrite this section.

I mean, it's like

you hand in your draft,

they go, you maybe get two sets of notes from a publisher,

and then it's on to what's called a copywriter, where it's someone going, well, this is the American spelling of that word, or you know, this would be capitals because it's a brand, or that kind of thing.

So there's really not the

time there in their process to fix your bad novel.

So, really, I mean, it's largely didn't you?

Not saying that your novel's badly at all.

What about self-publishing?

Is that

yeah, there's a

does he self-publish?

I don't know.

But I certainly know a guy who I think I think is doing self-published stuff and it's really good.

And I would always get his book when it comes out, and he does about one a year.

And

yeah, you can sort of build an audience like that, I think.

And maybe that would be better than some types of deal that you could get.

Yeah, and I would just say, obviously it's great that you've wrote a novel and stuff, but

you know record your own uh

audio book release it as a podcast brother get on the podcast game you know embrace new media is what i would say to people if you're trying to be a novelist in the year

2025

that's hard man you know it's kind of a dead not a dead medium is people read books people buy books but i think you kind of have to be known to really shift any kind of of copies you know would people be buying osmond's book if he wasn't the guy from pointless among other things do you know what i mean yes because they're streamlined for you know accessibility and and the titan and that type of stuff but i think his face oh that guy he seems clever he seems like he could write a good i think you have to be the type of famous person who seems like they could write a good book yeah you know even if danny dyer wrote a fucking brilliant romana Clef Buildings Roman fucking coming of age thing about growing up and a cockney war zone.

Or medieval France.

Or a medieval France.

Perhaps both.

Perhaps

Charlotte sometimes he goes to sleep in a bed and he wakes up as a kind of Anglo-Saxon.

Kenna.

Yeah.

I would read that.

If Greg Wallace wrote a a sort of

calm Tobin style book about

young Irish women travelling to America in the 1920s.

I don't think it would sell very much.

I don't think he'd baby publish it, he'd be pulling the pudding off just as he wrote it, the very thought.

Ship full of sweaty Irish women.

Unable to complete the fucking manuscript because he's stupid.

Dies from dehydration, just like one of the passengers would on the ship.

Yeah.

Which if it ever happens, somebody

somebody they write something and it affects them so powerfully that they can't even publish it because they're driven mad by their own fucking outpourings i said to my pal i'm sort of trying to finish this code of crime novel as society is disintegrating and he was like that's a kind of novel that's a better idea for a novel the meta yeah

um

i think though there's a slight thing that i feel sorry for authors with a bit of a profile because i don't really get this because i don't really do the press stuff but

you've got less chance than ever of selling books right and it used to be that they just published them going fucking one thing in a hundred sells you know let's get the cover right yeah and let's try and get you to do hey on why or something right

but now because of the richard osmond success if you're a new author with a bit of a profile you've got pretty much no chance of selling books, coupled with publishers who treat it like a lottery ticket.

So this could be the next.

This could be the one.

This could be the next fucking Osmond.

So like

I certainly know a couple of people who feel they had to do a load of intrusive press

for books that

clearly were

only ever going to sell so many.

You know what I mean?

And you end up doing these fucking three-page

interviews that mention mention the book at the bottom.

All the publicity for books is always really funny.

They go, Oh, we can get you to set a crossword for the fucking Guardian this week or something, and we'll put

a link to the book.

It's always something.

Email learners make crosswords.

No, but well, I think that was one something got asked to do.

But what I think, um,

there's things like what's your favorite

socks or something, some wee bit that they do on the fucking Financial Times weekend, yeah, and you get to fucking write 300 words about socks, and then at the end, they put a link to it, And you're like, nobody is reading my Danny Dyer medieval knave novel off the back of this socks pattern.

Knave forward slash slag, I believe, was the working title.

Wake up in one world with a knife, go to sleep, and fucking slagging.

Fucking hell.

Please check out Danny Dyer and his daughter's podcast.

Also,

when Dad meets it and starts behaving like a slag in medieval

dealership

he wakes up in the fucking what they called the stocks people are throwing tomatoes

i was just at a rave last night damn ruins a car sale by talking extensively about his gosh hawk that he's been hunting with

i mean let's make it let's make it let's make it i think um

There's also that thing, it's hard to feel really sympathy for Tom Hex, but that thing of like when he not to go on about my favorite podcast, the Adam Buxton podcast again, but he Adam Buxton says that one of his least favorite episodes of his own podcast was when they got Tom Hanks and he was buzzing for it.

But then Tom Hanks was there to promote his book of short stories.

And he thought that this podcast wasn't like an informal chat with a guy who's introduced it by walking his dog.

He thought it was like

a literary salon and he was really perplexed and like upset by the line of questioning, the quite friendly, casual line of questioning that Adam Buxton was doing.

He thought it was like the fucking London book review or something.

I think if you get upset by

Adam Buxton, maybe take a look at yourself.

Take a look at yourself, Tom Hex.

Yeah.

Couldn't believe he was in the new Wes Anderson film, The Phoenician Scheme, because he was supposedly.

Are we talking Buxton?

We talking.

Fucking.

I don't think it's that out of the idea of possibility that Buxton could be part of the Wes Anderson.

He was in fucking Hot Fuzz.

Andy Ellikhunt.

And Richard DeWaddy was in.

I mean, Joe Connish.

Yeah.

Maybe together

they're a kind of Anderson-ish.

An Andersonish pair.

Have you seen the Phoenician scheme yet?

No, and I never will.

Oh.

It looks bad.

It's good.

Well.

It's something.

It's definitely something.

When I get Wes on this podcast, man.

Once the snake dies.

As a regular third guest.

Yeah.

Susie.

Replaced by Wes Anderson.

Wes Anderson.

Hi, guys.

Hi.

You know, when I met Owen Wilson.

What does he sound like?

I mean, he's kind of a Texan guy, Wes Anderson.

He's from Texas, I think.

Well, when I met Owen Wilson.

When I decided to do a book, a film about an oceanographer, I said it's gotta be Bill Murray and Steve Zissu.

There's no way he sounds like that.

It'd be great if he did.

The Paris Review.

What was that one he done?

The Paris.

You saw that one instance in France, it's Blackweight.

Oh, it's great.

It was something to do with the letter.

Yeah.

What the fuck was that?

He's from fucking Boston now.

Dog of Isles wasn't the best work, was it?

Imagine it just came out that Bill Barr had done all Wes Anderson's movies and it was just a character.

He'd be

that, yeah, I did it.

Yeah, you know, symmetry.

I love that shit.

That would bring me no limit to my joy.

Um, well, there you go.

Uh, what was the question?

All right, how'd you get a book published successfully?

We answered.

Send it to some publishers.

Let's see if it's up there.

I have a

um, technically, my childhood dream was to be a stand-up comedian.

My other childhood dream was to be an author.

And I think at some point I would like to be an author.

And I have, I will technically die an author because I had a short story published once.

And it was one of my proudest achievements is that I've been published.

Even though I don't have a novel or a collection of short stories or anything.

It's like, you know what?

There's a book out there

with some words.

So I would just say, send it to.

Yeah, get in touch with.

Like,

there's a really good thing, not a good thing necessarily, but it's on Twitter.

Or Twitter doesn't exist anymore.

Whatever.

Do you know that Expo North thing?

Hashtag Expo North.

And every year you could pitch, you could do a hashtag, and all the publishers in the UK, like the local publishers, would read all these pitches that were on Twitter.

And most of them were fucking shite.

I pitched the

oral history of the Trident Desister to them, and they were like, great, write it.

And then I just went, ah.

So, this is sort of like

this is memorial device, but for a

Fazlane-based disaster?

Yes, it'd be like, what if Faslane exploded and wiped out half of Scotland and we all became kind of irradiated fallout refugees?

But in this I was reading Chernobyl Prayer, the thing that Chernobyl, the TV show, was based on.

And like, I was reading Meet Me in the Bathroom, the kind of oral history of the 1990s, early 2000s New York post-punk scene.

And it's like we can't think we're together.

I was going through it, man.

I was going through it.

But it was, yeah.

I just love old histories.

You can really skip to like,

you can get to it because you don't need to write any of the shite other than the dialogue.

You know, it's just dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, dialogue.

I only realise now I'm into the last kind of 15,000 words or something in the book, but it's kind of majorly influenced by doing that talk with Bob Odenkirk.

Oh, really?

So Bob Odenkirk wrote a book which is called Comedy, Comedy, Comedy, Drama and

in it he sort of tells his life story but he is

really interested in being a comedian and being a sketch writer and a sketch comedy and not very interested in being an actor which is like fine but I you know I'm a comedy guy.

So in the course he's an amazing sketch performer isn't he?

He's like they do the show Mr.

Show if you know which was great.

And then in the so in the course of the book he's um going oh and then I wrote the sketch for Saturday Night Live, and it was like Lassie, but Lassie was Charles Manson.

And Charles Manson coming out,

and they're like, What's that, check?

What's that check?

And so he's constantly through the thing.

It's really funny.

There's these little things he did, and you know, sketches he appeared and stuff like that.

And so, like, my book is like this guy, and he's like a kind of

horror Stephen King, Clive Barker type writer, but he's always been really successful, and he always stops and goes, Oh, and that's when I was writing the, I wrote an episode of The Twilight Zone, and it sort of went like this.

And you just do your little plot, yeah.

Um, and that's been fun, right?

No, it's yeah, I probably need to take some of those out because I was actually sort of you're having too much fun, and you're like,

Yeah, you need to write the fucking book out.

Um, that's cool.

I was uh, yeah, you said that when you came off stage with him, he'd done a fist pump backstage, and he was like, Double fist pump, double fist pump.

Woohoo!

Was this before or after his heart attack?

After, Wow.

Maybe he was just fucking...

He's a very fit guy, though.

I think I was just a very sort of driven person.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He always seems...

His acting, and I think you should leave season two when he's the

guy in the diner and the guy's going to his kid.

Oh, we can't get ice cream the way home because

when it's cold outside,

oh, the ice cream machines don't work.

And he winks at the guy and the guy plays along, but then that guy is like,

I know you're dad for a long time because we used to.

It's really stunningly well acted,

that whole bit.

I just think it's he's.

I know some people would say, oh, what about his award-winning fucking show?

I think that's better than his TV show.

I also think to some extent, Breaking Bad and Bear Call Saul, much as they try to sort of differentiate them a bit in the end,

it's the same story.

It's a guy

crushed under the pressure of his own moral choices.

It's a kind of, it's not exactly the same, but it's a reiteration.

Buckling under the weight of capitalism.

That's so much of.

But then that's, you know, that's what capitalism produces.

It produces, you know,

excessive versions of things that work.

And it's just sort of not

good.

But then at the same time, I loved the show and I loved the shots and I loved the thought and care that had gone into it and stuff.

But you're just like,

yeah, we do tend to end up with the things that worked over and over again.

I was just saying, buckle under the wake out of them because they're both skin and they may make difficult choices to survive.

Oh, yeah, I mean, exactly.

No, it's exactly that.

Hey, how are you doing?

Pruduous Andy here.

Thank you for listening to another episode of Here Comes the Guillotine with Frankie Boyle, Susie McCabe, and Christopher MacArthur Boyd.

Susie and Christopher are playing Edinburgh Fringe this summer, so if you want to head along, head to their socials for more information.

You can get all the episodes of Here Comes the Guillotine on Global Player right now.

Search for Global Player on your app store or go to globalplayer.com.

This is a Global Player Original Podcast.

We were discussing the how in Scotland it's the Empire biscuit, but it used to be called the German biscuit and in World War One they were like we kind of be saying things are German, so when you call it the Empire biscuit but then I was looking up a list of things and there was like freedom fries, but then there was also um

what was it called?

Something cabbage.

They tried to de-Germanify sour credit, like sour credit.

And it was called like Freedom Cabbage or something like that.

What was it called?

Or your toilet ticket?

Yeah, of course.

The best empire biscuit I've tried recently is from Inverness Cali Thistles Ground.

What?

It's so good.

That was really the most Andy Logue thing I've ever heard.

Really not

me?

Does that free?