Just Like a Pill

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.

You've got a sweet there, Christopher.

I hear every sweet for something.

I heard there's

Akani.

You are ruffle?

No, I've had a ruffle.

You want a

okay, we've eight.

Well, there's a bag of banana bread.

It's not really a sweet.

Start plowing into a savoury treat.

One cannoli.

One cannoli.

You want it?

Obviously one cannoli over here.

Lots of people.

Throwing cannolis around like it's

very non-Jedi from catch them.

Use the force force look.

Let's hear it.

ASMR cannoli eating with freaky boy on it because we can't avoid it.

Listen to that.

The key ingredient is sadness.

Laboratoire espresso cannoli.

It's fucked up because ASMR is so popular that you would almost be better just eating on your microphone rather than saying anything about your life

about your feelings.

You're better off just getting a comb and going tough,

tapp, taff.

I would always think that about like moderation or censorship in something.

You know, anytime you do something like an article or something, and they'd be all over, like, every kind of clause had to be kind of justified, and they wanted to change everything or stuff.

And you're like, if I just wrote something like, I boiled a pan of water this week, and I'd never really looked at a pan of water before.

It's like the most.

At first, the surface of the water trembled.

I thought, is this going to work?

But next thing you know, bubbles appeared.

That would go through on the nod, and sort of Adrian Chiles has kind of realised that.

Adrian Chiles has mastered that of the bubbling pan.

Yeah.

Yeah,

I would often have that reavery.

The less content there is, the less censorship there is.

It sounds obvious, but

it makes sense, but yeah.

You ever get an ASMR?

Well, would you call the CAMAP ASMR?

Probably.

It's a type ASMR.

And it's rain music, rain noises.

And you might think I misspoke there by saying rain music when you

now have rain pounding down on a fucking piano while it plays.

I was on a flight, and you could have audio options and stuff to listen to.

And you could get pink noise, brown noise, and white noise.

It was different colours of noise that you could get piped into your head to kind of go over the sound of the engine and the baby screaming and the people ordering five cans of beer at once.

Pink noise should just be pink

singing.

Get done.

Yeah, pink.

She's...

What was her songs again?

Because I'm a freak.

No, that's Redhead.

I'm the only person who's ever confused.

Pink and Redwood.

She's the one that's like,

girl, you are beautiful.

And that's Christina Aguilera.

Who's Pink?

She looks gay, but she's

anyway.

We're not discussing who Pink is this week, can you?

Yeah, that good song.

You beat the red light chains.

It was like, yeah, it was like

the theme from the first Charlie's Angels.

Oh, it was a kind of, I don't know who wrote it, but it doesn't sound like a Pink song.

But it's pretty cool, and it's kind of a metaphor for show business.

Oh, I see.

The degradations of show business.

I thought it's pretty good.

Pink.

The greatest hits so far.

She's got a song called Just Like a Pill is a big song.

You're just like a pill, instead of making me better.

You keep making me ill, you keep making me run just as fast as you can to the middle of nowhere.

Just like a pill?

Just like a pill.

That is terrible.

That's great.

Choosing Lady Mamelad, obviously.

What?

Choosing Lady Mamelad.

They're kind of...

Remember the remix from Moulin Rouge?

Oh, right.

With Missy Elliott, I think, and a few other people.

Beyonce, maybe?

One way I'm on top of Missy Missy Elliott's get the party started.

You know that song?

Get the party started.

I'm coming up.

I'm coming.

I don't know these songs.

I'm coming up, so you better get this party started.

Get the party started on Saturday night.

Imagine starting a concert with that.

You could only go up.

Listen to this.

This is great, man.

This is a great song.

Feel Good Time by Pink and William Orbit.

Orbit?

We don't know.

Is the guy who really wrote the song?

Because it doesn't say like any of Pink's songs, right?

Listen to this for a bit of bleak poetry.

We go where we like, we got overtime, we get paid to rattle our chains, we go in the back, paint our money black, spend it on the enemy, sleeping in the church, riding in the dirt, put a banner over my grave, make a body work, make a beggar hurt, sell me something big and untamed.

And the whole thing is a kind of metaphor for

the bleakness of being used by the show business devils.

Paint your money black and spend on the enemy seems like something from a middle chapter to say nothing.

You know, some kind of dirty money.

Paint your money black, spend it on the enemy.

It sounds like Blood Meridian.

I've been listening to Blood Meridian lately.

Yeah.

And that's the kind of shit people get to in there.

They'd always be putting banners over graves and spending their money on enemies.

What is it in the first chapter where the judge comes into town and he accuses a priest of being a paedophile?

Well, there's a guy giving a it starts with a guy giving a kind of tent revivalist speech.

Most American Christianity comes from tent revivalism.

And

this guy, the judge, appears at the back, a seven foot tall, hairless, bald man.

And everybody's listening to this preacher and then he goes, This man was wanted in four states.

He was was ran out of Utah for having Congress with a goat to goat I see and the guy's like what he's like he can't even read he's

memorized chapters from the Bible and to try and defeat this the guy starts to read out bits of the Bible desperately but by then gunshots have been someone stands up and says I'll shoot the son of a bitch

alarm in the tent is general someone gets a knife and opens the the stitches of the hide tent and they start to run it into the mud and they can hear gunshots and general alarm within this tent that the judge has caused.

And they make their way through this mud swamp back to what's called the hotel, to a bar.

And he says to the judge, How do you know that man?

How did you come upon that preacher?

And the judge goes, I never saw him before in my life.

In fact, I never heard his name before this day.

And the judge had just said this to cause fucking havoc.

It was a troll.

An early troll.

It was an early version of troll in which you would go in a religious meeting.

Ride three days.

And it was a better time for it.

You probably had a telescope, but you could see him following your tent thing.

It's like a spyglass.

Oh, no.

Is that that seven football thing?

I don't even need the telescope.

I know he's there.

The way the sun

glints off his dome in the friscalatin dusk.

Great book.

Great book.

Not a...

It is a page turner.

Not a

pool side read, you know.

It's a biblical, biblically poetic recreation of the American frontier, I suppose.

But in this case, the Mexican frontier.

Yeah.

As they settled the West and stuff.

Did you know this, Christopher?

It's Cormac McCarthy's response to

Moby Dick.

Really?

Yeah.

So it's set in, is it 1849 or 1850 that Herman Melville writes Moby Dick?

It's set in the year he wrote Moby Dick.

And it's his

version in which the judge is Moby Dick.

Or the white whale?

The seven foot torpedo.

Wow.

That's crazy.

I've not read Moby Dick.

Is it good?

Yeah, if you're interested in details about ships,

you have got a fucking treat in store for you.

Should we do

that?

Oh, this is the mailbag, but in the style of pink.

I'm reading mail, so you better get that bag open.

I'm coming up, I'm reading.

Oh,

get the mailbag started on a Tuesday afternoon.

We don't get paid to answer your questions.

No one advertise.

Keep us locked inside.

Why do we do this?

Hey, folks.

I really enjoy the podcast and look forward to every episode and the unrelenting bleakness of it all.

Well, I hope you enjoyed that

little discussion about pink and blood meridian.

However, I've somehow only just realised that the intro doesn't say hey it's Bruce Randy here.

They thought that producer Randy was a guy called Bruce Randy.

Hey it's Bruce Randy here.

It's not Bruce Randy, it's producer Andy.

Lots of people also hated Andy because they thought he was a posh hutchy cunt.

But now they've realised he's Canadian.

He's an actual it's not that he has a transatlantic accent he is transatlantic.

He has transcended the Atlantic to be here.

He's an immigrant who's re-immigrated from his roots.

He's boomeranged.

He's boomeranged back

and um

great guy.

Loving it.

He's loving life in Scotland.

Sometimes you meet a guy who has an American accent or a North American accent who has never been there and that's a red flag.

But if somebody is legitimately from there

that's fine

it's like you had a a field full of trees i guess a wood you would call it and it got devastated do you know what i mean and it got it got ground into your field or whatever but you kept some cuttings and you planted one back i mean that's just what the old wood was like that's what hindi is like with scotchness he's a kind of essence of scotchness he's like when they find um a woolly mammoth frozen in ice and they take the dna and they try to build a new mammoth.

He's like a baby mammoth.

And is that not a thing of beauty?

Baby mammoth, Bruce Randy.

To defy Christ.

Bruce Randy, the baby mammoth.

Copy Christ.

That's what Christ has maybe seen.

Everybody do this.

I don't really see how it helped him dying.

Do you know what I mean?

Jesus?

Yeah, he's like, wait till you see this.

I've got magic powers and I can die.

And you're like, well, if you can show us how, I can die and come back.

If you can show us how to do that,

that would be useful.

But you simply flaunting your ability and then leaving has left us in much the same position we were in before you arrived.

Imagine he died and then he never left.

Christ was still around.

You'd be like, well, fair enough.

You're clearly the son of God.

He's been here for 2,000 years.

He's fed on.

He's fucking.

Who have gone completely?

You know how mental people are by the time they're like 95?

It would be absolutely fucking Doulale by name.

He'd be cracked.

Anyway,

hey, it's Bruce Randy here, so that's something.

Can you settle an argument with a friend?

Would you expect a random person in the street to know straight off the bat about different types of birds that you see about the place?

Cheers by Josh.

What a mad question.

We're thinking he means birds rather than women.

Ornithopods, I believe they're called.

That's what you call birds?

Ornithopods.

All right, okay.

That's what they call dinosaurs who were bird-shaped.

There's two different types of dinosaurs, I believe.

They don't know anything about dinosaurs.

If dinosaurs had worn clothes, the clothes would have worn away by now.

We don't know.

What?

Yeah, that's true.

If dinosaurs had built cities and worn clothes, it's so long ago

only the bones would have been fossilized.

So

we we haven't found them, but they could have been cutting them out in fucking flip-flops and all sorts.

We don't know.

I thought, you know, I've been watching a lot of zombie stuff.

Yeah.

The walking dead.

And also The Last of Us has started now.

And there's a bit where there's a lot of there's a science element to it, some remnants of science.

And you're like, okay, you can work out how to get rid of zombieism, right?

That's the big, that's the fucking holy grail for you.

And The Last of Us?

Well, for every zombie scientist, any any scientist in a zombie scenario is like, how did they stop these zombies, right?

Obviously, right.

But are they kind of like focusing on the wrong thing?

Because things that we are at the cusp of, like bringing back the woolly mammoth, bringing back direwolves, bringing back dinosaurs,

you know, how many fucking...

Let a few T-Rex.

and velociraptors and mammoths cut about the place for a bit your zombie problem might be over or would it be the old woman who swallowed the fly and suddenly you've got a fucking zombie T-Rex and a fucking zombie pterodactyl?

Is that what happened?

That's what happened.

That's what happened.

Why did she swallow the fly?

I don't know why, but there's a zombie pterodactyl.

You've ate a zombie dog, to your zombie cat, to your zombie burst, eat a zombie cheese, to eat a zombie.

That's not the order.

Perhaps she'll die and then come back to life.

Perhaps she's immortal.

I hope that woman's alright.

What is it?

Oh, yeah, In The Last of Us.

I've not seen any of the programme, but this won't spoil it for her.

I don't think

you'd have to be very particular for this to spoil it for me.

Yeah, okay, let's get it.

In the news series,

the

therapist, there's a town therapist.

I mean, which seems like everybody has so much overlapping trauma.

How can you go out?

I saw my whole neighborhood,

you know, get eaten and my friends' entrails get directed.

My ma made my face.

At that point, maybe,

you know, I don't know how useful therapist is, but this is what they've gone with.

They've got a therapist lady.

What town is this?

It's like they've built a frontier style town.

It's very much about the.

As often, American zombie stuff is about the frontier.

And

the actress is

Kevin's mum from Home Alone.

And I say, who's that actress?

And Thor went, Kevin's mum from Home Alone.

Oh, fuck.

Chit Creek.

And I went, oh, you know, there's probably some pun you could do about zombies there, but I'm not going to do it.

So we watched for 10 minutes.

I've not thought about it at all.

And then I went, I'll eat your brains, you filthy animal yeah and it's just it's a sub-program isn't it like you don't have to ask your mind to do it you're just naturally full of fucking useless skills reflexes and shitness

you're just full of shitness you're just full of like

you know that's the sign of a playful mind though it's a playful mind there's a lot of kind of um

diarrhea-brained freaks out there who kind of they don't have a playful bone in the body, you know.

So I think it's a nice thing you should like about yourself.

How did this get onto Bert's?

Oh, Bert, like oh, you want you to regenerate willy mammoths and dinosaurs to solve the zombie problem, but you think that actually they'll eat the zombies and the zombie blood, we'll poison them from inside out and zombify them, and then you're dealing not just with zombified humans, but see yeah, I don't know what world we're bringing those things into.

But to get back to the question,

would you expect someone to know about birds?

Here's what I would imagine: they've been in the park, Josh and a friend, and their pals went, Look, there's been a Victoria Park, Vicky Park, look at that heron, look at that coot, look at that

duck.

And Josh has went, wait, what?

And he's like, a duck.

He's like, do you think you expect me to know about different types of birds?

That's just a bird.

And the other guy's went, you should know about different types of birds.

And he's went, well, do you know what I'm going to do?

I'm going to email.

Here comes the guy to your email address and ask if it's normal for somebody to expect you to know off the bat about different types of birds.

The email isn't normal.

The email to us is far from normal.

Not knowing about birds is one thing, but to email this to us is a symptom, Josh, that you're a deranged.

But what muds?

Like the top 10 birds?

Fuck, what's that?

Seagull?

Top 10 birds?

Seagull, pigeon, hawk, duck, duck,

crow, dove,

top 20, dove, peacock,

doves?

Just pigeons?

I do.

They're like white shapemen, just

pigeons,

clan pigeons.

Wow.

Do you like birds?

Well, you know, I love birds.

You know, I try to befriend them.

They're

standoffish at best.

I see loads of TikToks and Instagram reels about look, I've got this bird that lives in my back garden and he loves me and I feed him and he jumps on my shoulder and I'm like, I want that life.

And I did actually when I was living in my last flat, I got a little

tub of seeds and I went down to the park and I would throw the seeds in the ground to try and make crows like me, but they didn't really like them.

Do you know you get any use you feed crows ham, don't you?

Oh mate, if you're looking for something to feed to your crow, you can't go wrong with cashew nuts.

Cashew nuts and salted cashew nuts.

It's a very rare crow that would need to take a cashew nut and they'll be grateful of it.

But it depends on the crow density whether they'll befriend you and the footfall.

So if you're someone that's really busy with loads of people and loads of crows you're just some random fucking protein they saw in there.

Whereas if you're in the botanic gardens or something like that and you befriend a crow, he's going to remember you and you feed them multiple times, you will befriend that crow.

Josie Long has a very funny bit on a new show about how crows can hold a grudge for 17 years

and the average age of a crow is twelve.

It's quite funny.

Crows can also they think maybe pass on their generational grudges.

To their children.

Yeah.

The same way that dr trauma is passed on generationally.

Yeah, don't trust that cunt if this guy turns up with drugged cashews

be on the alert what was that thing have we spoke about that that thing i um

people talk about generation trauma like oh my dad freaked me out about this type of stuff but actually

there's stuff of like

it's the way that like all cats are afraid of cucumbers because they remind them of snakes even if they've never been taught to fear a snake there is a part of a cat integrity a genetic memory that means that cats see the shape of a snake and go fucking hell, even if you know they've never they've never they've never met one in their life.

Does that make sense?

Be fun to scare a few cats with ever, wouldn't it?

If you didn't love you had a a kinda like um a nemesis a grudge.

If you're a crow who has a nemesis cat, which may w pr quite common if you have access, if you're listening, and I do hope that um there are some crows who are listening to this.

If you do have access to cucumbers, you could use them to scare.

Have you ever had a bird?

Had one?

No.

I had a budgie growing up in my nana's house called Smokey.

And I don't know how I feel about them as an indoor pet.

Not just, oh, I know why the caged bird cries and stuff like that, but like, they're very loud.

I don't need a lot of flapping in my life.

Do you know what I mean?

I'm never like, oh, I wish there was more flapping in my flat.

Just begging for death.

That's...

also,

you've taken ownership of your nana's budgie.

I think so.

Yeah, I thought that was your granny's budgie.

And I think you probably said to your parents, Can I get a budgie?

And they went, Well, that's kind of your one.

Yeah,

probably.

I consider it to be the family's budgie.

They allowed you to consider that so they didn't have to get a fucking budgie and listen to it fucking plead for death and scream in their fucking ears every morning.

It's wild.

I was just in Australia there and I went to the Melbourne Botanic Gardens

on like the second last day I went.

I was there for a month.

On the second last day I went to one of the most beautiful parks in the world and I realised I could have gone every day if I wanted to and I just left it to the last minute like an absolute

mistake I would have made.

No.

There was a waterfall, there was

flying fox colonies, there was war memorials, there was watermelon slushies, there was I mean there was everything,

it was amazing.

And it might as well have been built out of Aboriginal bones.

Yeah.

It was pretty fucked up.

Yeah.

The whole I was saying that.

I think

going to Australia, it's like if you went to heaven and you're like, this is class, and God's there, and he's like smiling and he's really funny and cool.

And then you found out that heaven was built from like devil bones or something.

And there was a whole race of people up there who loved heaven and lived in heaven for thousands and millions of years.

And then God killed almost all of them, and then like banished them.

Does that make sense?

Strange a better hope, God is white.

Yeah,

Zephyr's not.

Well, it's just

all bloody Elmite.

I'm in hell.

I can't believe it.

You know, I'm not having a great time.

It's heap shit.

Feed the income, you know, send me

satellite classes.

Tato is raging.

Bloody devil.

Got a charity in my arsehole.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, crazy, crazy, crazy country.

What did you have?

It's what they deserve.

Yeah.

Anyway,

I was in the park.

I was in Melbourne Botanic Gardens.

And

budgies.

In Australia, there is.

And you get this in London as well.

Someone said Jimi Hendrix released Cloud of Budgies into Parakeets or something into London.

Parakeets.

But over there, you get flaming galas and you get budgies flying around.

And it's like.

Wait, a flaming gala is an actual bird?

Yeah, yeah.

I only know that from fucking Home and Away.

Flying Gala.

Yeah, anyway, you flying gala.

They're like really cool.

And the first time I went to Australia, I actually had a haircut quite similar to the Flaming Gala.

So I felt kind of one amongst them.

I can't amongst the pigeons, so to speak.

Because they filmed the matrix in Australia,

I felt there should have been more Australian stuff in it.

Right.

People being called a mongrel.

Doing the matrix, bent backwards, and a boomerang goes over you.

And then it hits you when you snap back up.

Hits him every time.

They invented the boomerang to get Neo.

That kind of always bends backwards when you throw stuff at him.

So that's where the dream time comes from.

That's the Aboriginal dream time.

They viewed reality in, is it nine dimensions or eight dimensions?

I'm not sure.

I would love to learn more about

my dream table.

Yeah, yeah.

But I would love to learn more about the Aboriginal Dream Time.

We go and do our Matrix there.

Every gig in Australia.

Have you heard about this?

When you do the Melbourne Gone Festival or the Confestivals over there?

It's broadcast simultaneously in the Dream Time.

An audience of enraged Aboriginal ancestors?

Well,

every gig starts with, we like to acknowledge that this land, like you go to a stand-up gig, everybody sits down, gets a drink, you sit down, and then our noise goes

and it goes, a voice comes over, not you, the performer, a voice comes over and it goes, we would just like to acknowledge that this land is of the local people and we want to pay our tribute to elders past, present and future who inspire us and all this type of stuff.

Then it goes,

please welcome to the stage, the comedian.

It's like the tonal shift is the first time you hear it, you're like, that's startling.

But then the sixth time you hear it, it's this thing, but then like people don't stop talking to it.

People are just like, I can't, I can't believe it.

I can't believe that he said that about that.

People are just like, it's so ingrained.

It's such a nice gesture, but the way people, it was really, it's a really baffling country to be in.

I liked it, but it was a bit like,

this just feels crazy.

It does feel like being in heaven, but heaven's like an evil construct, you know.

Feels like being a damned angel up there.

Anyway,

and there's loads of birds flying about.

They're all beautiful.

It's a big walk up to that.

There were budgies in the park.

That's what we've got there.

Do you know, one of the most romantic things in my life,

me, my girlfriend, and some comedians, we got a bus tour out to the Twelve Apostles, which are these massive rock formations in the ocean.

You drive for like four hours, five hours in a bus.

And then on the way back, we stopped in a small town to eat noodles.

And it was during the

the the the the bat population every night they fly from the the place they feed to the place they sleep and like in the distance just this big cloud of bats swept across the the the the sunset.

It's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in my life.

that sounded like i was getting emotional i was trying not to burp i think they know that by now

one of the most romantic things that ever happened to you is you saw a cloud of bats while eating noodles

that's not that can't be a surprise

what's one of the most romantic things you've ever seen

beat that frank

i'm gonna go with that as well

yeah there's nothing more romantic than the swarm of blood-eating parasites blotting out the sun while me and a group of other comics

eat noodles.

I'm a lifer.

I'm in circuit.

Jin Hao Lee was one of the people.

Does that change your opinion on how romantic it was?

It does, yes.

Plus five romance

in the presence of Jin Hao Lee.

He's a romantic buff.

Yeah.

Are you buffed me?

They'll tell you that much.

The whole day was buffed by him, very much like the concept of bardic inspiration in DD.

Oh, yeah,

you had plus five to any dice row.

Yeah,

it was beautiful.

You should have seen it, them sweep across the sky.

I don't consider them parasites.

Well, that's because you're not a horse.

Do you know what I mean?

You might have a very different view if you were a horse.

Well, they're not bothered me.

Live and blood.

Call that parasite if you will.

They don't just eat blood.

They eat fruit?

Two?

Yeah, you've got to balance it out.

Yeah.

That's right.

Maybe that could be any.

So anyway,

can you settle an argument with my friend?

Would you expect a random person in the street to know straight off the bat about different types of birds that you see about the place?

No.

I mean, it sounds like it's come from.

it comes from something else between you and this person.

You've gone, yeah, everyone would know a thrush, and I don't think they would, and really it's about something else in your relationship that isn't working.

Yeah, and you need to deal with that.

I would consider throttling your friend

in a sexual way, whatever,

okay,

violence, purely sexual, Christopher, Andy.

I think this is a bit of a dead end.

Prudu Sandy 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.