The Mailbag: Late Night Frankie III

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Hello and welcome to Here Comes the Guillotine.

Here comes the mailbag special edition, which I'm doing myself.

It's me, Frankie Boyle, in the style of a late-night radio host, getting you through the night on a long drive home by listening to Scottish People's Problems being dismissed.

Good morning all.

Love the podcast.

May I ask, do you think humanity is going backwards?

If so, why?

I often wonder As a species, how can we simultaneously be so intelligent and so stupid?

Maybe you can enlighten me a little.

Many thanks.

Matt Wales.

Well, Matt, you'll be happy to hear we're not going backwards, we're dying.

And dying is a type of going forwards, whatever you say about it.

And some of this stuff is actually

propelled by innovation, you know?

So we're inventing AI.

that will use more resources, that will use more energy, that will use more water in particular, that will hasten our demise, you know.

And so there's not really a backwards motion to it.

I mean, I think in Britain, sometimes you get

tricked by that a bit because, like, Britain is kind of going backwards in terms of living standards quite a bit, you know, and a lot of the high streets bordered up and all that kind of stuff.

But in Britain,

I think it is kind of regressing in that they can't really build houses.

I think you get you get confused by your locality where you go, Oh, well, Britain has slid back.

Like, you used to be able to see a doctor, you pretty easily now you can.

You see all these little things in your life, but humanity, don't you worry, humanity is fucking plowing forwards towards the fucking cliff edge at a rate of knots.

Glasgow's always been my favourite city.

I love visiting it, and I enjoy living in it.

But I do see

the differences.

Maybe 20 years ago coming to visit here, living in Canada, my dad would bring me over.

And it seemed...

it seemed like a town back in the 90s and now it just seems like

you know a city there's a lot of skyscrapers going up it reminds me of a bit of a a Toronto we've a sort of soulless around the skyscrapers

because I sort of think of it as a bit underdeveloped in some ways do you know I mean when you when you've been visiting other cities over 20 years

and then you you come back here you sort of go oh fucking hell this has really not moved on in some sense also I mean it's deeply fucking Philistine at its heart like the the local politicians really seem to hate people and they seem to you know they're talking about knocking down the steps in Buchanan Street galleries and stuff like that and you're like yeah because that's one fucking good thing you know that's a place where people can congregate and it's a place where you can sit down and you don't have to pay money you know in the city centre and you can have a nice view and all that kind of stuff and they're just like get rid of that you know they have no real

sensibility or care for other people and that seems to be in Glasgow the sort of person who gravitates towards decision making and local government and obviously it's fucking capital as well um but yes it's um

I think just you you know you'll just see nice bits paved over and

you'll see

just all that thing where you see playgrounds and bits are fenced off for a year year and all that good stuff.

And you're just like, well, learning this really like as as a city, a lot of it doesn't work.

Like the public transport, you know, if you were relying on public transport to get about here, and particularly if you're like an elderly person or something like that, the buses don't turn up on time, you know?

The staff and the the you know on the buses and on the trains and on the tube, they're all really fucking nice people.

You've got some of the fucking best people at work there.

But the the actual infrastructure and the thing you're running doesn't really work

i get the train to work i get the train every day and i enjoy being on the train but the lack of

serviceable areas is

so stark in glasgow you can go to north of glasgow and springburn feels like it's cut off from the city center it's only a 20 minute walk but you have to

go across a couple of motorways and

yeah the um

even just trying trying to get down to Castle Milk.

Yeah,

I've done that walk from Castle Milk to the city center before just because the sun was out and

that takes like a good hour and a bit and there was no buses.

At least you survived, Andy.

Yeah, I went into a pub called

The Oasis.

Nice.

And it was the first time in a while where I looked around and everyone looked at me.

And

it was

it's kind of like the last of those remnants of little pockets of pubs where everyone's over sixty-five, they're reading the racing post

and

that probably doesn't exist anymore, that pub.

Well, I don't know, I think it's a bit like church, like people with grey hair die, but other people kind of take up those seats.

I think there'll still be plenty of like old man-y type boozos.

I don't like that phrase as well, they go, Oh, an old man's pub, you know, in Glasgow and it's a kinda it's a kinda fucking gentrified shorthand for somewhere that we can go that there are normal people but they won't kick our heads in

oh there's an old man's pub down here the doublet

did on a docks myself but i live near a school but not near any other fucking stuff

and kids are like there's fuck all around there and yet these kids you fucking see them coming my way slush puppies Fucking hot dogs.

Kids will find shit to eat anywhere.

You're like, where the fuck have you got that?

You must have jumped on a fucking bus.

Like, well, free buses were under 22s.

Right, maybe they're using the bus passes, but they don't give a fuck.

They'll fire out and, you know, get like Pecora.

There's nothing around here for about fucking two miles.

Yeah.

But they'll find it.

I don't think I had Pecora until I was maybe 14 or 15.

Alright.

Yeah.

Wow.

Never really don't remember ever having it in Canada.

That.

But like, I grew up in in Del Rye North Ayrshire and there's like four very decent Indian takeaways so when I first moved to Scotland I had Pecora probably every week and it was great yeah it's fantastic I might have been like 16 17 because it was the thing you got when you were pissed but you couldn't be bothered with getting them to make you a pizza

so like it's that was a quick thing the 12 minute wait for a pizza at that time of night is uh uh

it opens the risk of confrontation because a lot of people will be coming in at the same time.

Yes.

In and out.

Yeah, and also it depends how you get back home.

If you get in the night bus, people are going to want some of your pizza.

There's all kinds of um conflict opened up by a night pizza.

Picora, you know.

You can hide that in your jacket and just disappear into the night.

Exactly.

What if we dealt with that?

Well, I forgot the original question.

Has humanity going backwards?

No, sadly not.

If only.

Yes, the um the old man pub signifies, I think, that we're going forward because you age into the old man pub.

Do you know about the archaic revival?

No.

So the archaic revival is this thing

where it was like a re

a re-engagement with magic and alchemy and the occult um that would have happened in I guess like the 17th century, but like one of the seats of this was like Bavaria, and

they were sort of like,

well, let's kind of look back at the last time humanity was sane, you know, because that's a kind of thing that societies do in moments of crisis.

They go

women's last, and many of this made sense, and they sort of look at, you know,

alchemy and that whole kind of period.

And there's a sense to which

the renaissance is that for uh the classical world do you know what i mean and then like let's let's try and re-engage with when this worked so maybe that is the thing for humanity now is to go well when was the last time we sort of made sense i mean we might say the 1960s the counterculture of the 1960s was the last time anything kind of um

rational and and interesting was getting said

and um we might try and re-engage with that.

Just to try and finish on a note of hope.

Hope.

Such an optimistic word at this time of day.

Yeah, I mean, I think, I don't know.

Hope is kind of deadly as well.

You know, that whole thing about the hope that kills you.

I mean, it is really.

I had a friend who was just like really in love with this woman.

He could never really get over it.

And you're just kind of like,

it's the hope.

It's the fact that you haven't given up completely.

You know, and if you could, you could be happy with someone else who's a nice guy.

But, you know, you've kind of got to get beyond that hope sometimes.

Find that hope in your heart and strangle it.

Late night.

Frankie Boyle, Frankie Boyle, Frankie Boyle, Frankie Boyle, Frankie Boyle.

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

If you have a problem, dilemma or issue that you think Frankie, Susie and Christopher can fix, email hctg at global.com

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