In the Public Interest?

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Hello, before we get started, just a heads up that this episode contains some strong language and language that might offend.

Hello, and welcome to Strong Message Here from BBC Radio 4, a journalist and a comedy writer's guide to the use and abuse abuse of political language.

It's Helen Lewis.

And I'm Amanda Unucci.

And this week we're looking at when private communications become public and how the tone of the political conversation has changed.

First off though, this was a big week for you, the week that you ascended to National Treasure status.

You were profiled on Imagine, the greatest honour that the BBC can bestow on a person.

To be Yentobbed.

You got the full Yentob.

You spent your life observing people.

How did did it feel to change out to be the one that was in the middle of the day?

Because the making of this programme was I was being filmed over the course of five years.

Not constantly.

Five years?

Five years.

The conversations about this programme started about five years ago and various camera teams came on set to film me.

And I realized I hate it.

being looked at while working specifically.

So for the first two or three years, I was mostly running away from the cameras and they got very little footage.

So then they gave us these mini cameras that you just sit in the desk and you sort of forget they're there.

So that as you're having conversations like we're having now, you're not so hyper-conscious of them.

And some interesting stuff emerged from that.

But I was then brought in a couple of weeks ago to watch the finished programme.

And it was just the weirdest thing.

I felt I was watching my own obituary.

That's what I felt like.

You know, it was various people on it saying nice things, but I kind of thought, have I just died?

Is this it?

Is a viewing room in BBC television centre heaven or indeed purgatory or hell yeah that was the weird thing and then I become slightly disassociated from it in that the person on the screen was someone else to the extent by the end I thought he seems quite interesting actually more interesting than I thought I have that sometimes when I read an article that I wrote so long ago that I've forgotten about it and obviously it was yes it was written by somebody with the exact same sense of humor as me so I find myself laughing at my own jokes because I've forgotten that I made them yeah and you see it's very weird that the you of 10 years ago both is and isn't the you now, right?

You would assume that there was some obvious point of continuity between the two of them.

Occasionally, as you're flicking through and you come across on UK gold or whatever it's called now, I don't know what it's called, Dave, Stacey, whatever, up the past or something.

Carry on up the past.

There will be an old Alan Partridge programme on

probably, I'm Alan Partridge.

And again, it's so long ago, and I'm not someone to go back after something's made to go back and re-watch things.

so you know I haven't seen it for like 20 years and I have genuinely forgotten what the next line is and then I laugh and I think I shouldn't be laughing it my yeah but also no I want to be the person who's never seen this bit of Alan Potterish because I've I've never had that before yeah but also again it's written by somebody with exactly the same sense of humour

has managed to kind of copy our style but I have um I have a different problem which is that having been through that experience of cancellation in the 2010s where people were genuinely trying to sort of drum me out of

public life and my jobs.

I am absolutely paranoid about being overheard.

I don't think I could say yes to something like that, where, you know, not that we switch the microphones off here and I treat you to my unexpregated views on

all my various bigotries, but that I just

feel so paranoid about the idea of people taking things that I said and twisting them.

It does give me a point of sympathy with politicians, knowing that, you know, being defined by words in a way that you didn't mean them or that they made sense in context to the audience, but that that version of you becomes bigger than the actual you.

Yes.

And you can see the fact that we all have microphones now and we're all journalists now.

When a question is put to a politician, you can see the terror behind the eyes as they think what you just articulated, which is, I must get this right.

If I say the wrong word here, there'll be hell to pay.

And what that does is is one of two things.

The either panic and say the wrong thing and there's hell to pay or

it becomes so bland and anodyne what they say just to kind of not give in to that that you're put off by what they're saying you don't believe them because it feels politics speak rather than humans speak well let's start by asking a question i don't know the answer to maybe you have an answer to it has political speech become blander or spicier in the last 10 years since the advent of people carrying smartphones and microphones around well it's weird isn't it the people who you would label professional politicians I think, have become bland.

So the whole of the last election campaign was very much campaigning on fewer and fewer issues.

The Starmer campaign, the Labour campaign was very much, let's not talk about any of this.

Let's just say it's going to be hard.

And, you know, until we get in, we won't be able to know how hard it's going to be.

I can't think of a single Starmer speech, actually, you know, that is memorable.

No, which is

quite, because actually rightly so, in fact.

Right, and actually, Theresa May's speech when she became Prime minister i would say she and starma are sort of on a level and kind of their oratorical appeal neither of them are natural speakers in that sense her downing street speech i still do remember because it said some things like it's harder if you're a black boy here you might get stopped and searched it said some quite brave and powerful things and i haven't seen that speech from starma yet he has consciously maintained a very dull personage let's stop

no no kind of gimmicky slogans you know it you know it's going to be great with starma unless you're a farmer and you know that kind of

Let's, yeah.

Which isn't as if he hasn't said things that weren't difficult or brave.

You know, I think lots of the stands that he took on anti-Semitism in the party, you know, the fact that he kicked out the previous leader of his party.

He's someone who has taken some big calls.

You can tell when he makes speeches, but there's a, even though the words might be unexciting, there is a hint of emotion behind them.

You can tell that that's from...

Let's call it his heart.

Whereas others, you wonder whether it's because there's been a meeting where they've said, you can't say this and don't talk about that and let's not say anything about this for the moment.

But to the other side of the, because there's two ways you asked about the politician, I think, so I think the career, as it were, the obvious political professional politicians that know the ones who market themselves as not politicians, you know, your normal guy and girl, you know, you're

overtly anti-established.

Oh, you're anti-established.

They've become much more of a, they now say publicly what I suppose we would have thought people 10 years ago would say privately, but never in front of a microphone.

Yeah, I think a really interesting example of this is so I covered the 2015 Labour leadership race when I was at the New Statesman and I interviewed Yvette Cooper, who, along with Andy Burnham, they were the two front runners.

They were the kind of insiders.

They'd both held serious positions in the party before.

But Yvette Cooper, now home secretary, very, very serious person.

Obviously has spent her whole life dedicated to politics, but I don't think anyone would say that she is

a great interviewee.

I remember the headline I wrote on it was discipline over dazzle.

And unfortunately, they both of them ran up against Jeremy Corbyn, who came out and said things like, maybe we should leave the European Union, maybe we should leave NATO, austerity is bad.

Part of the reason that his popularity became so instant was that people felt this great sense of release that they just felt, oh, here's a guy who's lived his whole life.

His politics have been the same all his life.

He believes it.

Andy Burnham has an element of that now as mayor of Manchester in that he feels, maybe more when there was a Conservative national government, he feels he can perform the role of the

anti-national government figure who can ask provocative questions of national governments.

Yes, I think number 10 always see that as Andy Burnham advertising himself as just in case you get bored of starmer, just in case anyone needs a Labour Prime Minister, just

here, I'm in my, you know, other Labour blokes are available.

Yeah, yes.

No, I know what you mean, though.

I think America obviously has a long tradition of governors becoming president because I think that is a role that gives you some independence outside the party structure.

You have your own constituency that you can then, you know, both Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor of California did take interesting stands on stuff because they had a power base.

Yes, but also they market themselves very much on, you know, what you see is what you get.

Like two examples of microphones being left on when politicians didn't realise it was, you know, Gordon Brown during the campaign in, was it 2010?

Saying she's a bigoted woman.

Mrs.

Gillian Duffy, yeah, he went to interview someone in their home and came out and didn't realize the microphone.

The light was still on.

And that really, you know, didn't help.

Whereas the Trump tape that everyone thought would just blow his campaign and fall apart,

the Access Hollywood tape very

thing is when you're a star, they let you do it.

Yeah.

You got to get in there and grab them by the pussy.

And in fact, people thought, well, that's just what he's like.

You know, that's what he would say.

You know, so there are no revelations here.

I think that's one of those things where you have to remember people really did think that with New Kiss Candice.

I remember watching Saturday Night Live and the host that week was Lynn Manuel Miranda, who wrote Hamilton, and he did a riff of Never Going to be President Now, which is one of the lines from Hamilton, pointing in the SNL corridor at a picture of Donald Trump.

There was a kind of, oh, well, he's blown it, obviously, now.

Spoiler it, he had not, in fact, blown it.

That's what's interesting to me is that I've been trying to work out a kind of taxonomy about when these leaks hurt people and when they don't, because it's not always, there's no really straightforward rules about when they do what they're doing.

Is it that when they reveal an aspect of the personality that is contrary to what the public projection of that personality is.

I also think there's a lot of reverse engineering in the way people vote.

So when you talk to people during that campaign about Trump, even people who would never use that kind of language themselves would say, oh, it's locker room talk.

Yes.

And they would, because they wanted to vote for him for other reasons.

I've been in a few locker rooms, not that many.

And I never did hear

that kind of.

And he had huge votes among white evangelicals who would never use that kind of language themselves.

But because they wanted to vote for him for other reasons, there was a kind of retconning about why that was okay.

And I think that's sometimes what happens.

If people just really like the candidate, they will find a way to explain themselves.

Whereas I guess when leaks are, as you say, if leaks make someone look hypocritical or if they're already slightly unpopular, then people will say, well, you're just a, you're just a fraud.

Yeah, yeah.

And I suppose maybe in the last year or so, there's been another shift, which is under the freedom of speech banner, there's now almost an encouragement to say, not just to say what you like, but to make it more provocative than you thought you ever could.

Well, I've had a lot of things.

There's a kind of golding that's going on.

Well, there's definitely, I mean, again, this comes back to what we were saying a couple of weeks ago about the kind of who's to be master element of language, which is about I get to say things that I want, and that proves how powerful I am.

There was a post on X by J.D.

Vance, vice president, about some of the Doge staffers and

they had been found out secretly to have these pseudonyms under which they were posting racist comments.

And he said, you know, I cannot overstate how much I loathe this emotional black male pretending to be concerned.

My kids, God willing, be be risk-takers.

They won't think constantly about whether a flippant comment or a wrong viewpoint will follow them around for the rest of their lives.

They will tell stupid jokes.

They will develop views that they later think are wrong or even gross.

I make mistakes as a kid, and I thank God I grew up in a culture that encouraged me to grow and learn and feel remorse when I screwed up and offer grace when others did.

If I believed that J.D.

Vance were going to apply that principle systematically, I would actually endorse it wholeheartedly.

Because I think that is, you know, I remember when Marie Black, who at the time, she's the SMP MP, was the youngest MP in Parliament.

And then all these old tweets that came up that were mostly things like Smyrna Fey's Drink of the Gods, correct take, but that were kind of slightly, you know, just the kind of things, and it was like, well, she was 21.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And I think there is, you know, and she'd posted these things as a teenager.

That level of grace should be extended.

We're talking of grace, though, I mean, our old friend, Eileen Musk.

Come on, Eileen Musk.

Yes.

It takes against that in that, you know, if you provoke him, there is no filter on what he'll say back.

He will say that as part of his right to say what he likes and freedom of speech, although it's freedom of his speech, really.

That's the thing.

I just find it very hypocritical.

If you look at the fact that they're now trying to make it so that the White House press corps is no longer selected to the travelling pack by the White House Correspondents Association, the independent body, but is hand-picked by the administration itself, then their commitment to the freedom of speech is paper thin.

But you're right.

So, for example, what he called an astronaut a full retard, fully retarded.

And it's one of those things where, A, don't have a go at astronauts.

Everyone loves astronauts.

It's like the way everyone loves penguins.

Everyone loves astronauts.

It was because the astronaut disagreed with something Musk had said.

Yeah, he said he was wrong about something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He said that the two astronauts were left up in space for political reasons.

Yes, when there's actually, there's no point launching a capsule and spending lots of money when they're, I was gonna say, they're quite happy up there.

I'm sure they drove up.

But there was, you know, there was a risk that something might have gone wrong with the capsule that was bringing them back, so they had to wait till a fully safety-tested one had gone.

But it was interesting that that word, I don't think you would have heard in public life.

No, that would have been considered a word that was incompatible with government service,

what, four or five years ago?

And there is now this, you know, look at the arm gestures, the notorious arm gesture, the, the, from the bottom of my heart that Musk did.

100% not a Nazi salute.

I mean, I was willing to give Musk the benefit of the doubt as being an awkward guy, but Steve Bannon, the former Trump strategist, clearly did one of those, like, you know, when like a toddler does something naughty and then they look around.

But you mentioned Steve Bannon.

I mean, he on camera this week talked about, you know, the worst enemy of Israel is American Jews.

You know, he went full anti-Semitism on camera.

There was absolutely no sense of I better be careful what I say here.

Yeah, and Dominic Cummings, who was formerly Chief of Staff at Number, attended a tweet this week about savages coming to Britain.

And it's like sort of 19th century kind of

exactly.

You know, to quote that political theorist Gary Lineker, it it is very much the language reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s.

There's a lack of prohibition anymore.

There's a sense that something has been crossed now, where we can now say all the things you thought we might be thinking, we're just going to say out loud now, because there's nothing that can be done.

You know, we've proved the point that people should feel free to say what they like with no political or even, you know, legal consequences.

But do you think that the wholesale leaking actually ever changes anyone's mind about anything?

I'm thinking about the fact that all of the COVID-era WhatsApps, thousands upon thousands of them, were leaked.

And they

lost.

Yeah, but they revealed basically that Boris Johnson was quite flaky and didn't really pay any attention, didn't take things seriously.

That Dominic Cummings was trying to bring a mathematical lens to things and was immensely frustrated with Boris Johnson.

That Matt Hancock, everyone seemed to have disliked heartily.

And I just found myself reading them, thinking, yeah, sort of what I thought they would be like.

Yeah, yeah.

I suppose, though, if it's, for example, if it's something like what are they called, Trigger Me Timbers, that was the.

This was the WhatsApp group that got Andrew Gwynne, had his whip suspended for it.

And in fact, you know, if you're going to call yourself Trigger Me Timbers, then, you know, there's a clue there as to what the language might be like.

And they were leaked for public interest reasons by whoever leaked them.

I suppose that was because they were showing certain political public figures expressing views that were inconsistent with the views they were expressing publicly.

I found it very difficult.

I remember I used to cover online abuse a lot in the 2010s and there was a great thing that Mary Beard said after she'd had a lot of trolling, which was that it was very difficult because the papers wouldn't actually report what was said to you.

Yes.

So people got the impression she said that they were just being rude about your hair.

Whereas it actually was this stream of violent misogynist rhetoric.

There's a similar problem when we report these WhatsApp leaks, which is I had difficulty finding out what was actually said in Trigger Me Timbers because the first thing I heard was somebody making a joke about an elderly constituent not being around at the next election.

And I thought, slightly tasteless, probably not best in a semi-public forum, but I can understand.

Did you not go on the internet?

Because it would have all have been there.

But then I was struggling, you know, because actually often sometimes the reporting is slightly not wanting to put the worst stuff in front of you.

Then you find out that some other stuff is in there too.

And it's very hard to make these judgments without seeing stuff in the full context.

And I think that's what's so dangerous about and makes these language of private communication so difficult.

It's what you say to a friend when your entire backstory, your history to each other.

It's hard to judge that out of context.

Yes, and in the reporting of them, there are certain newspapers now that don't, whatever the print equivalent of bleeping is, are stressing.

I have an ideological position on this, which is I will say it and I want to report things as accurately as possible because people need to see.

I think we have gotten to this slightly odd Victorian culture where there's lots of things that are happening, but one mustn't speak of them.

You know, the sort of like the verbal table legs are covered.

Yes.

And then you go online and you just see this screed of stuff.

And I think I don't want to turn away from that when I'm reporting on it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I suppose that's what, I mean, Jesh Phillips has been very clear in reposting, but without the names, the type of vile abuse she gets, but to give you an insight into what it is that she and other campaigners.

A few days ago, they had a select committee where they brought in the head of European compliance or head of safety at X, which then devolved really into what happens always when they get the social media companies in front of a common select committee, which is MPs reading out tweets that have been sent to them and going, Do you, like, you know, like if someone being summoned to the headmaster's office, do you think this is a nice thing to say about someone?

Are you proud of yourself?

Is it therapy for them just to get it out?

I genuinely.

I don't want an hour being able to swear at social media.

I think it is.

Yes.

Because if you're an MP, you get so much vile abuse, so unbelievably racialized, sexualized insults.

I mean, someone did a study once, the sheer amount of abuse that that Diane Abbott was getting as a very rare black woman in Parliament at the time was just extraordinary.

You know, vivid death threats and people sort of saying, you know, one of the ones that was mentioned in the Common Select Committee was somebody saying, you know, you should be taken to the gibbet.

And the MP involved said, I didn't know what a gibbet was until now.

Now I've found out.

But the thing that's interesting about that is that those are people posting publicly, but as far as they're concerned, anonymously.

And what came out to me after covering a lot of those trolling cases is that people were sort of angry and disgusted when their real names were discovered and perhaps they were prosecuted from them.

They sort of thought that there was a space where you were allowed to say and do everyone.

It's called the internet and nothing there is real and no one should take it seriously.

I've always thought, right from when it became a popular thing, things like Twitter and Facebook and so on, was I've always thought, treat it like it's the radio, as in this is a public forum.

It's not private one, it's public.

So, you know, you're not censoring yourself, but you're just being mindful of the fact that your audience is not necessarily just the person opposite you.

Yeah.

In a pub.

But I think that or a locker room.

But I think that there has been a relaxation about swearing, particularly in public life.

You know, you would probably not have heard politicians swear in public, even, what, like 10 or 20 years ago?

Yeah.

There was an enormous outcry about the fact that some book revealed that Tony Blair had said, I won't use the exact word, but had said basically be effing Welsh.

Yes.

It was an example of his anti-Welsh racism.

Now I just, that barely registers on my personal story.

Or Rishi Sunak talking about someone who was promoted in cabinet.

The book by the Simon Hart, the chief former whip, he was a whip, yes.

Saying Rishi Sunak said someone had been promoted saying, I can't remember the quote, though, was it something like she's an effing waste of space?

Or a maniac or something like that.

I mean, it was always assumed that people, yeah, that people said this kind of thing in private behind closed doors, but there was an assumption that politicians put on a serious public face.

But I think even that is eroding.

Do you remember somebody telling me, a reporter telling me about a Blair cabinet reshuffle, and they're all outside number 10, and John Reed, do you remember?

John Reid came out and suddenly shouted.

Any news, Mr.

Reed?

And he just went, Fuck, it's health.

Oh my god, I've got to run health now for the next year at least.

You know, the thing about that is, that's funny.

That's objectively very funny.

And it's sort of honest, isn't it?

Yeah, oh no, don't make me start at the NHS.

I think that is genuinely quite relatable.

Like, it's not a promotion, is it?

It's a poison chalice.

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I think one of the things that's interesting, if you go back and watch the thick of it, one of your

minutes

in my memory, yeah.

The swearing in that is kind of obviously deliberately gothic and extravagant, but that's migrated into public political language now.

Yes, which is a curious thing because actually it was there because when I researched, I was told it's a very stressful, match-o-mainly environment, you know, high pressure, a lot of effing and blinding goes on.

And I just thought, well, we've got to show that, but there's nothing more boring than the F-word just being used on its own repeatedly.

So, how do we make it more interesting?

Which is when we, you know, we come up with the elaborations around it, usually implied threats of physical violence.

And it became a fun thing to do at the end of a writing day.

Let's write some more Malcolm swearing.

So, we invented swearing.

We invented a development of the original swearing, but that invention has now been taken as the standard by which political operators have to, you know, people go into politics because they want to be like Malcolm, and I keep telling them, but Malcolm was the problem.

Yeah.

Well, I also wonder whether or not actually in private things have got more HR compliance.

Yes.

Yeah, Malcolm wouldn't exist now.

He'd be out.

Because I started my journalism career at the Daily Mail, which again was exactly what you're describing, a very macho environment.

And one of the ways that that manifested itself was through a lot of swearing.

If you remember, Paul Dacre, then the editor, was once accused of delivering what people called the vagina monologues because of his use of a particular swear word.

And I've never since worked in a workplace like that because actually overt swearing at work has been driven out.

Yes.

And I think politics is a carve-out still, particularly because of the way that Parliament works.

Because you have 650 MPs who are essentially sole traders.

It's one of the big problems with dealing with bullying complaints is it's not a proper workplace and HR doesn't really apply in the same ways.

And I think the same is true.

If you end up working for an MP who's a sweary maniac, you haven't got a lot of recourse in the way that if you work for a merchant bank or a library or whatever it might be, you have.

In a way, there's a kind of thing where some of these big, the big boys are kind of living out people's ids that they can't express themselves.

So the Financial Times in the wake of Trump's victory had a piece about what people felt, you know, the moment it was.

And language came up a lot.

One of these bankers said anonymously it's brilliant you'll be able to say retard and pussy again and you're like is this your major political concern it's quite high up maslow's hierarchy of needs that one but i think it speaks to a fact that lots of people who are attracted to that style of politics feel that workplaces have become too feminized too nice not competitive enough you know what zuckerberg said about wanting to restore masculine energy

and kind of swearing is a bit of an outlet you know and a sign of that that you were allowed to say taboo words prove that you worked somewhere like that so maybe there's a feeling that that you want politicians to do the things that you feel that you can't do.

I think that maybe explains some of the, you know, if you're Donald Trump, nobody can tell you what to say.

You can say mad things.

No one can tell you what to say.

That's a sort of power fantasy enacted through language.

Talking about power fantasy, I remember directing Death of Stalin, and there was a scene where basically a lot of people were shot.

And I looked at all the background artists, and this is what it does to you.

I went through them one at a time, and I went to point one.

You're dead, you're alive, dead, dead.

You You know, I was killing them with my finger, just pointing at them.

It was sort of method acting style in a sense.

It's weird.

You know, you can see why there's so many stories of directors who have gone absolutely crazy.

Yeah, that's where we've come to, really, I guess, our analysis ends, which is that if you live in this hyper

exposing society, that politicians can go one of two ways with their language.

One, they can clam up and try and carry the Ming bars across the slippery floor and never say anything interesting and just get on with it, or they can go entirely opposite way, let it all hang out.

I have no secrets, there's nothing you could publish, you know, there is no compromat on me that you can publish.

I've done it all already, and you've kind of got to pick you've got to pick your lane, haven't you?

Pick one of those, you can't half-ass it.

No, which brings us on to Elon Musk.

Oh, no,

I don't want to know what the story is.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it was just in light of the fact he sent out this email to everyone who works in government saying you have 48 hours to describe exactly what you have done in the last week.

And for a laugh, I thought I'd post the question: you have 48 hours to tell me exactly how much Elon Musk is an arse.

It's just a bit of fun.

I'm just using Musk here.

I could have used someone else.

It just took me back to the glory days of Twitter when Twitter started up.

You could actually have fun corresponding because the responses came in thick and fast.

Well, I have to say, this callout was so popular that I got a text from Radio 4's own Adam Rutherford saying that his favourite insult was one coined by the physicist Franz Wicki, which is spherical bastard, which is someone who's a bastard from whichever angle you look at them.

So, you know, feel free to go back and use that in your everyday life.

So, I'd like to thank,

you know, I don't have their real names, so some of them do, but among the many replies, and I have to say, this is objective in that there is a poll out in the UK saying 70% of people dislike Musk.

So, you know, it's all this is all scientific.

And for balance reasons, I will say he has founded a number of extremely successful businesses and attained enormous wealth and power.

So

I tend to to put that in the debit as well.

But anyway, I just want to say thank you for it.

Answered the question, tell me exactly how much Ellen Musk is an ass.

Paul says the necessary words do not yet exist.

Control Decay says Musk is such a massive arse, he has to have minions carry it like a bridle gone.

Mike Linwood said Ellen is such a massive arse that if he did something half-assed, he would still put in more effort than anyone else in the history of the world.

Dave Bowen says Ellen is such a massive arse, he sits next to everyone.

Iaman Griffin says Musk's ass is so big he keeps his trousers up with the Earth's Van Allen belt.

Oh, he's just got some hybrid

sponsors incepts are all banging into each other.

And finally, X-Ray Delta One says, he's an arse within an arse within an arse.

He's our seption.

Well,

I should unpick that.

However, Teslas are a very popular brand of car.

And he has put a number.

I watched a rocket launch.

I watched a SpaceX rocket launch that's on my I wouldn't say bucket list because that sounds depressing yeah but yeah

I was in Cape Canaveral in Florida and I just thought this is amazing you can do this

why keep online

yeah why does he stick to doing that I know I know anyway other bastards are available

before we go Kirstam has a new slogan as displayed in the number 10 press room secure at home strong abroad Very nice, almost strong message here.

Pretty good, but needs more weird metaphors.

However, when he was making his defence announcement in the Commons last week, he inched his way towards a good, bad metaphor, which is: we must bend our backs across this house because these times demand a united Britain and we must deploy all of our resources to achieve security.

Bend our backs across this house.

You have to be huge to do that.

All I've got in my head is an image of people limbo dancing.

All I have is baby got back, the mix-a-lot song, which is

not something I thought about in relation to Kirstarma before, but there we go.

That's Keir Starmer's metaphor tree.

I'm going to hang that on it.

Excellent.

Thank you for listening to Strong Message Here.

We'll be back next week.

All our episodes are available in our feed, so make sure you subscribe on BBC Sounds.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

Best Medicine.

Dissecting funny and fascinating medicine.

I think pain management is the best medicine.

Bibliotherapy.

Therapy Therapy by books.

Sleep.

Well, Spot the Comedian.

Celebrating medicines past, present, and future.

I think transplantation is the best medicine because it can completely change someone's life.

Defibrillation?

Oh, defibrillators.

Okay.

Amazing machines.

That much is clear.

Sorry.

Clear!

That's the new series of best medicine from Radio 4 with me, Kiri Pritchard McLean.

Available now on BBC Sounds.

Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We the man to be home.

Winner, best score.

We the man to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We the man to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs.

Playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

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