The Mailbag: A Depressing Podcast

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

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This is a Global Player Original Podcast.

How are you doing?

This is Producer Randy, and you're listening to Here Comes the Guillotine: The Mailbag, with Frankie Boyle, Susan McCabe, and Christopher MacArthur Boyd.

If you have a problem, issue, or a dire need just to be heard, then email hctg at global.com.

Enjoy the episode.

Can I just say something?

Welcome to Here Comes the Guillotine mailbag episode with me and some other boys.

Is it officially here comes a mailbag?

Here comes a mailbag.

Officially, here comes a mailbag.

Can I just say something?

Yeah, Hemmy.

You know, all that stuff about Native Americans and natives in various places traded stuff for beads and bits of coloured glass and all that stuff.

That whole

trope,

so did everybody.

So did we.

We have traded the earth for coloured baubles.

I get paid

and coloured pieces of gold that get put in my hand at the end of the day and then I go give those pieces of gold to a landlord.

If they'd seen what you were trading your

life for, for anime figures, and I don't know what stereotype

I don't like anime figures

how dare you assume that I have do I have anime yeah I probably do actually yeah

yeah I have a wrestling mask I've never like I can't trust anyone that's if you went into some guy's house and he had like a schoolgirl with a big sword kind of like yeah still a schoolgirl my friend I bet she's there's this whole trope in Japanese culture about like um and this isn't a lot of stuff in Japan

an old lady and a young woman's body the mind of a three hundred year old and the body of a twelve year old and the Japanese go absolutely crazy for it

I think that's a very disturbing thing to be interested in

for them or for me no for them right okay good thank you I'm not anyway uh yeah but like it's in the legend of Zelda Lady Imper oh it's not Lady Imper but it's uh some scientist um the ages herself and she's like a young kawaii girl but she's like an old lady and then uh what's the other video game um

what was it called the three houses

um some kind of dragon warrior game basically and it's like a goddess and a thousand year old goddess and the body of a young girl and it's just come on guys can we just stop try shag can we just have video games where the hero is a middle-aged italian plumber

please for once for a hedgehog maybe a blue hedgehog

um Um who wears red shoes.

Would that be possible?

And just stop with the

are Sonic and Tails a thing?

Did they fuck each other?

Um

I think Miles do you know um

Tails is uh surname?

No,

Tails Prower,

but his middle name's Miles.

So he's Tails Miles Prower.

Because he's very fast.

Very funny, very good.

Do you like Doctor Robotnik?

Not really aware of his work.

Right.

He's the best.

Your body?

Yeah, yeah.

He's got a big mustache.

Played by Jim Carrey.

I probably never got that far in the game.

That's the end of the first level.

Exactly.

Um, right.

Sorry.

Uh, here comes the mailbag.

Sorry for that deviation into Japanese.

Susie's not here, by the way.

Video game lore.

Don't know how you can tell when it's Elda and Sonic and Mario Oval made an appearance.

Susie's had to go pick her cat up in the carriage.

So, apologies if you're one of the many people who hate it when Susie's not here.

Okay, hi, here comes the guillotine.

Firstly, I just want to thank you all for the podcast.

2024 was a tough year for me, and I want to thank you for the laughs.

My question is a dilemma that I hope you can help me with.

I very recently went through a bad breakup.

Both myself and my ex are performers.

And as a result we overlap a lot in the same circle since a breakup I have been finding making anything incredibly emotionally painful.

The last thing the world needs is another set with sad boy energy.

So using that painful material is not an option.

Have any of you been in this position and if so how did you get through it?

I am open to all suggestions.

Much love, Paul.

PS, I'm sure you're aware but Scotland has its own early form of guillotine called The Maiden.

Unfortunately, never used for revolutionary means, but still a fine addition to the list of Scottish inventions along with TV and cloning.

A lot to take there.

Certainly showed the

ADHD nature of a comedian there.

And it was quite coherent, and then he just lurched into cloning.

Yeah.

So this we think.

of course, you can.

This we think is a young comedian who split up with his girlfriend, and imagine a girlfriend, yeah, maybe a boyfriend on the comedy scene.

And it is now like

it makes creating stuff painful.

I think creating stuff

can be painful anyway.

Let's get out of there.

Yeah, yeah,

um, and as you know, all my favourite quotes are from terrible sources.

And one of my favourite quotes is Alanis Morris set about songwriting.

What did you say?

It's cathartic, but it's not healing.

And I often think

writing stand-up or writing jokes in any form is a bit like that.

It allows you to get things off your chest, but it doesn't necessarily help you make any progress with them.

I would wonder how difficult it is

at any stage of comedy to go somewhere else for stage theme.

Do you know what I mean?

If what you're worrying about is staying creative,

there's loads of places you can go and play where you aren't going run into an ex

yeah yeah.

Go to Liverpool.

If you don't live in Liverpool, go to Manchester, go on the road.

Don't just do open mics in your hometown.

Go, I'm gonna go another town for a week, I'm gonna get an Airbnb, I'm gonna do all the open mics, I'm gonna go see shows at the Soho Theatre and try and fall in love with someone in the artist bar.

What immediately occurs to me if someone says, I can't get away from someone in my local stand-up scene is like

uh do you wanna get away from them?

Do you know what I mean?

Are you wallowing in that pain?

Because

that's a really unhealthy space to be.

You should get away from

failed relationships.

As we've talked about previously on the pod, you should not look, you should not look at your that wasn't an expod, that was just us chatting over lunch, wasn't it?

No, was that recorded?

Yeah, fuck.

I thought it was a real conversation.

No,

it was an unrecorded conversation.

It's often difficult to tell, isn't it?

It's a little blur now, but

I think it's easier than you're making out.

And there's also that thing of like creative cop it,

you know, where you go, oh god, I'm finding it really difficult to write because

I haven't cleared out that room that I was going to write in.

It's actually a copy because you find you find the

creativity difficult.

Do you think what was the name of that cunt?

Sassoon.

Siegfried Sassoon.

Siegfried siegfried sassoon that cunt do you know what i mean the warp the warpots yeah is that his name yeah he was gonna be siegfried how was his name was

a soul caliber character siegfried sassoon he was in the fucking trenches he was lucky wasn't it school you

fucking bully here man

fucking voldo sassoon um

but he was literally in the trenches bursting lice with a lighter yeah you know, fucking trench foot.

His foot turned grey and his toe fell off, and he was still penning

him and Wilfred Owen were sitting down blowing each other and writing these fantastic poems.

And those were the that that was the best things.

That was the highlight his day was fucking burning lice with his fucking fag.

His pal gets fucking head shot because he deigned to smoke a flag near the parapet.

Do you think he would say, Oh,

I'm in the Manchester Open mic?

See, I wish I was in the First World War.

I'm doing XS Malarkey and the Comedy Balloon, the longest running open mic in the Northwest.

And what if I cross eyes?

He's got Pauline there

on my way in.

That's his ex in my mind.

You think his ex is his hand, and that's why you can't see me get away from her.

He's drawing a face on his hand.

She's like, oh, I need to work on my microphone technique.

I'll just move this out of the way so you can get a better look at me

Um

yeah, maybe

um ah yeah is that that's that Chuck Bukowski hanging to it?

He there was uh obviously there's a lot of Chuck Bukowski things such as um

you know drinking a quart of whiskey at the the dog racing and then going home to

um seduce your n elderly next door neighbour and say some racist stuff.

But another Chuck Bukowski's thing was that um

he's got that hang about like you cannot be waiting for the perfect scenario to write your thing.

People are in the trenches, people are raising a family and then they've got half an hour where their kids go to sleep until they need to get up for work and they'll write their novel.

You cannot keep waiting for the perfect desk and the perfect study with the perfect lighting.

That's not where creativity comes from.

It's like if you don't have to say it, you're not going to be able to say it.

Also, if you're a comedian, you have the perfect opportunity to create material with a better subtext.

Yes,

and also,

the last thing the world needs is another set with sad body energy.

You can't go into making art thinking, what does the world need?

You have to go into it thinking, what is the most purest

expression of me?

And if I'm sad right now, then it's going to be some sad stuff.

Here is my truth.

Think Marvin Gaye

I mean,

do you think people want to know what's going on at the moment?

Probably everybody's a bit worried about what's going on.

I better do something a bit more upbeat.

No, I didn't.

No.

He got

a guy.

Do you know this?

He got a guy who was the world's best bass player, but he had the idea for the bass line and he got this guy, but he was completely hammered.

Right.

So he got somebody to find him in a bar somewhere, and the guy does the bass line for what's going on lying down on the ground because he can't stand up.

Wow.

that's beautiful.

My favourite mommy album is Here, My Dear, his divorce album.

There you go.

There's a lot of very funny lines in it about how bitter.

It was Berry Gordy's daughter.

Surely not.

It was better, some some relation to Berry, Berry Gordy's sister or something.

And he was basically trying to get out a Motown contract and he was trying to divorce somebody who's related to Berry Gordy and his life was fucked fucked completely.

And then there's one song called Out of Space Freaky Journey where he's like, Let's smoke weed on Venus.

And you're like, Man, even in the midst of a divorce, this guy's just inventing space disco, interstellar space disco.

And you just think, Marvin Gaye, be more like Marvin Gaye, Paul.

Yeah,

I think we've dealt with that pretty well.

And did you know about the is he talking about the Iron Maiden, do you think, with this kind of guillotine?

Have I heard of that?

The maiden, it's like not a primitive head chopping,

you know, a primitive primitive guillotine with a like an axe.

I guess Google might tell you.

I thought it'd be like the Iron Maiden.

You kind of just start throwing out questions about 13th century execution methods.

So if you type in Maiden Glasgow, there's an Iron Maiden tribute band called Maiden Glasgow.

Iron Maiden's going to have quite a lot of trouble in this area.

Maiden, Scotland, Scotland.

That's another Armiden tribute band from Dundee.

Maiden Scotland guillotine.

Oh, look at that.

Fucking hell.

The Maiden, also known as the Scottish Maiden, is an early form of guillotine or gibbet that was used between the 16th and 18th centuries, well dated there, as a means of execution in Edinburgh.

The device was introduced in 1564 during the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots, and was last used in 1716.

Pet you didn't use it on her, because didn't the guy have to have a few cracks at it?

Yeah, he had a

blunt blade

and she was raging.

If you were like

proper Aristotle, you got the sword.

So Henry VIII sent for like France's best sword guy to come over and take his wife's head off.

Wow, that's actually quite

feminist.

It must have been like that thing where you see the sword coming out and you're like, you know what?

It wasn't all bad.

He cared a little.

He cared a little.

He didn't have me crushed beneath a boulder.

He got a pretty decent

swordsman.

The person under sentence of death placed his or her head on a crossbar, which is about four feet from the bottom.

Lead weights weighing around 75 pounds or 34 kilograms were attached to the axe blade.

The blade is guided by grooves cut within the iron edges of the frame.

A peg, which is in turn attached to a cord, kept the blade in place.

The executioner removed the peg by pulling sharply on the cord, and this caused the blade to fall and decapitate the condemned.

If the condemned had been tried for stealing a horse, the cord was attached to the animal, which on being whipped started running away, removing the peg, thereby becoming the executioner.

Executed by a horse?

Executed by the very horse that you stole.

How does that play in when you get to Valhalla?

Do you know what I mean?

Is there a special subsection for people who were executed by horses?

You accidentally go to horse Valhalla.

Everybody's a horse but you.

And the chat is dire.

Everybody talks about hay and jumping and sugar cubes.

There's got to be all sorts of people who technically died in a fight who end up in Valhalla.

Just Jakeys.

You sit next to a Viking berserker

and you got hooked in the garage smoking section.

Your head hit the deck and at the wrong angle.

Make a million dollar baby

by some guy in a casapian tribute.

Now you've got to spend eternity fighting Odin's finest.

Now Oldion, the great old dragon, is feasting on your soul.

You're like, fucking, how'd this happen?

This has gone badly.

Sorry if you're not a video games fan.

And then I've spoke about

Skyrim there as well.

We played Skyrim a lot recently and it holds up.

Mate, I'm thinking, as soon as he's not here, I'm thinking of getting into, what's it called?

Kingdom Come To?

Kingdom Come Deliverance.

Deliverance 2?

Kingdom Come?

Somewhere.

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2.

Yeah, I've heard it's good.

Basically, I've got to go and be the King of Bavaria.

And there's a lot of stuff online where people are like, oh, you make a kind of healing potion, but you've actually got to go and find all the fucking items.

It doesn't just identify them for you.

And it's an absolutely time-consuming nightmare.

You need to introduce each herb,

ground them in a pestle and mortar individually.

Then you have to time it.

You don't just click make potion.

You dump all this stuff.

If you leave it too long, it spoils.

And everything's like that.

It's not just a potion-making game.

It's like if you want to pick a lock, you kind of have to actually pick the lock.

And you start off as a blacksmith's son, so you don't know anything about fighting or anything.

And everybody kills you.

Apparently, there's a dog earlier on that barks at you, and if you get too close, game over, you've been bit to death.

It's like really unforgiving.

I'm gonna go back and kill that thing when I'm the king of Bavaria.

The first thing I'll do, man, I'll get it fucking executed by a horse.

That's great.

Yeah.

I've been invited on a video games podcast.

Oh, I noticed I haven't.

You are invited.

I just don't pass on invitations to you because you don't like doing stuff.

But if you were welcome VGC with me,

what is it?

It's like a Scottish games journalist called Jordan Midler interviews us.

What does VGC stand for?

Video game Chronicle.

I'll see what you're doing next Monday.

I'm probably too shy at video games to be on there.

Thank you so much for your message, Paul.

I recently had a breakup and it's hard, you know, it's very hard.

I once dealt with uh a breakup by playing roller coaster tycoon for six days straight without changing underwear.

And it worked.

Well, an army looking at it, I had one about seven years ago and I'm still pretty much suicidal.

So,

you know, there's a whole rainbow of experience out there for you, Paul.

You either plunge yourself into a seven-year

depression, which results in a very depressing podcast.

Depressing podcasts are

quite a depressing novel.

You

between two and three depressing novels.

This is the kind of attitude you need, you know.

You're not sitting going, oh,

Pauline,

the woman engraved in my hand, you know, you're getting on with things.

Could we just make up Pauline?

Yeah.

Ah, okay.

Yeah.

Because his name's Paul.

Like Paul and Pauline calf.

That's probably where that's come from.

But I would say it's all grist for the mill, brother.

Is that an expression?

What is grist?

I guess it's like stuff you would put in a mill.

Yeah.

I guess it's like...

To make bread or to make something like flour.

Yeah, flour.

And then you.

Yeah, okay, cool.

Yeah.

It's all grist for the mill, Paul.

So whatever going on in your life, it will.

If you're an artist, it will be filtered out into

some horrific stand-up, which you might then get to perform on BBC Radio 4 at some point for

the festival in front of a bunch of blank-faced drunks.

Yeah, blank-faced drunks, and the oldest people in the world who are somehow older than, like, if you Google oldest person, you're like, Well, they look okay compared to these freaks.

Compared to Radio 4's fringe.

I did one on there one time, it was like um they came to see my fringe shows, they were like, Why might you host this Radio 4

fringe thing, thing,

live show?

And I was like, me,

why don't you come and see the show?

So they come and see the show, and they're like, this is great.

This is exactly what we're hoping for.

And I'm like,

okay, I guess I'll do your show.

So I go and do the thing, and I've got an hour on the show.

I just break it up into bits in front of the acts.

Can he act on?

All goes fine.

And then they come up at the end, like really panicked.

I'm like, can you just go on and do anything else?

I was like, Well, I don't really have anything else, that's kind of the show you can't see.

And they're like, But we thought you'd know not to do that.

Do you know what I mean?

We thought you'd know not to do your shows.

Yeah, there's that thing where everybody people

who are in places where they're really self-sensing, or people of that mentality, imagine that everybody else is like that.

So they're like, Well, you wouldn't actually go and tell anything, you'd have a different thing.

But but that's so it seems so obvious to them that they wouldn't even mention it.

Yeah,

yeah,

It's um it's hard to bear working with these people.

Is that me?

That was me.

Oh, good.

What is that noise?

It's a dog that kills you in Kingdom Come Clue.

Deliverance.

Yeah, the first one's supposed to be one of the most unfigured games.

And then this one really doubles down on the here's some advice from the VGC.

My good friend Jordan Midler.

He said get to the wedding.

and if you're at the wedding and you're still not enjoying it don't keep playing it but make sure you at least get to the wedding because that's like a good run-up

and it's also true in most relationships let's face it uh so paul thank you so much and peace and love in the new millennium brother i hope you get over your breakup it's hard but um

time heals all wins

and then you die well death death heals all wins death heals all wins brothers

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.

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

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