Up Sh*t Creek, aka The Thames

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers, welcome to issue 4298 of the Bugle Audio Newspaper for a Visual World.

I am Andy Zoltzmann and for this week's show we take you back in time, a week, to the final live show of our bugle tour of the United Kingdom.

We were at the Lowry in Salford on Saturday the 30th of March.

A whole different month, if you're in the UK a whole different tax year, but a very enjoyable show for which I was joined by Tiffany Stevenson in Salford and Alice Fraser via the wonders of the internet, plus an extremely delightful Salford-O'Mancunian crowd.

Appropriately enough, given that we were at the Lowry Theatre, Stroke Art Centre, I began the show by challenging an audience member to a quiz about the great artist, LS Lowry, after whom the place is named.

It was opened,

was it

2001, I think?

Round about then, by the then Queen Elizabeth II.

You heard of her?

Yep,

only a few of you.

Interesting.

The former 71-time British monarch of the year and

professional banknote and coin model,

Elizabeth Elizabeth II interesting sequel unusual has quite such a long gap between sequels 349 years but that's the sequels do tend to run long as well so um she she opened this uh venue uh with a she did her own show actually sensational show involving her avant-garde punk madrigal crossover act um with some surprisingly high risk trapeze work um

so named of course after the famous artist uh LS Lowry

are you all fans of his yeah who thinks they know quite a bit about LS Lowry big local hero?

Yeah?

Who's

yeah?

Okay.

We're going to put you on the spot now.

We're going to do

a quiz.

See how much...

See if you know.

Do you think you know more than Chris about Ellis Lowry?

Okay, well, let's first find out.

I'm going to give you one minute of questions on Ellis Lowry.

But

it's like Mastermind, so you can't interrupt.

just

to make it fair.

So have you got a clock, Chris?

Yes.

Okay, right.

So is your question listen very carefully.

Question one: Start the clock.

Ellis Lowry was born Lauren Stephen Lowry in 1887, but in just 88 years, he established himself as one of the most influential artists of his lifetime, painting urban life in his distinctive matchstick men style on subjects raining in subject matter, from subjects such as football crowds to subjects such as mill workers.

After an unhappy childhood in which he did not own a PlayStation or learn the macarena, Lowry and his family moved to Pendlebury, but never went on a family holiday to Las Vegas, Thailand, or even Euro Disney.

Instead, the always and proudly bipedal Lowry has studied at the Manchester School of Art under the tutelage of the French Impressionist painter Monsieur Vallette, or Valette La Palette, as he was also known.

And as he approached the age of 40, Lowry, aged nearly 40 at the time and in his late 30s at the same time, began painting the cityscapes he would become renowned for.

All the while, of course,

working as a rent collector for a property firm, living an ascetic lifestyle in which he eschewed alcohol, women, heroin, and erotic necromancy.

Instead, chronicling mid-20th century working-class life in the Manchester area using paints, paintbrushes, canvases, easels, and shit like that.

But after the death of his father, with his elderly mother, from whom he would eventually hero some clocks, not well at all, and subsequently dead, Ellis would often paint in the middle of the night.

Thereupon, in 1953, having been an officially war artist, Ellis Lowry was appointed official artist for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, or Betty Baubles, as she likes the name of the time.

But oh, you're out of time, I'm afraid.

And you scored zero points on your chosen subject of L.S.

Lowry.

Okay.

The correct answer to the question was L.

Lowry begins with the letter L.

So, Chris, you only need to get one question right to win.

I'm ready for this.

I'm on the buzzers.

Okay, here we go.

How many times did L.

S.

Lowry win Rear of the Year?

That's zero.

Correct.

He actually died in 1976, just a few months before it was actually formed.

And actually 10 years before Annie Mann even won Rear of the Year.

Michael Barrymore, just for the record.

That's the level of knowledge I was expecting from you.

Good.

Well, I enjoyed that bit.

Interestingly, though, though Lowry never won Rear of the Year, Peter Bruegel, the 16th century Dutch townscapist who's very much the Ellis Lowry of 1500s Holland, he did win Renaissance Man Monthly's Golden Cod Peace Award for most shapely junk no fewer than five times in the 1550s and 60s.

There's a lot of facts in the bugle.

If you've not been before, it's

you know, this is not technically a BB show, but inform, educate, and entertain those wreathian values I carry over to my work on the bugle.

So we will have a bugle fashion section with our bugle fashion tips.

Two fashion tips.

One, don't bother with it.

And two, just make up your own mind what clothes you like.

There you go.

That's all the fashion tips you ever need.

And we'll have the latest and our best thing ever competition, which we launched a little while ago on the Bugle, trying to find the best thing ever.

A lot of people say something is the best thing, and we thought we'd better find out.

So we're testing out everything in the universe against all the other things in a knockout competition.

I think it's going to take 568 rounds and around about 20,000 years.

And finally, water slides versus the concept of hope.

Who prefers water slides?

And who prefers the concept of hope?

Well, water slides have romped to victory there.

And we've given up on hope, and I think that is a good thing for humanity.

Hope only disappoints people.

You need to be pessimistic, otherwise, you'll be disappointed.

And we are joined by not one, not three, not four, but two wonderful Bugle co-hosts.

Joining me firstly here in 3D.

Please give it off to the wonderful Tiffany Stevenson.

Welcome.

Hello, Tiff.

Hello, how dare you besmirch fashion when I'm on the show?

Outrageous.

Also, as you've mentioned, water slides.

Let's just get this out the way at the top.

And I know you're going to say it's a family show, but I'm going to say the concept of hope because

I once went on a water slide and got an unexpected enema.

Which is the worst kind, in case you're wondering what kind of enema that is.

I went down very quickly and the water came up back the way.

Yeah.

This This guy in the front is like, oh, it's the beginning of the show.

Is this where we're going?

Andy's still struggling to open his water.

I'm pouring it into my glass just so we can get is this what you paid for?

Live water pouring.

Listen, this is ASMR.

People do pay a lot of money for this shit.

If I just talk really quietly over it in a sexy voice,

it's water, in it.

That's water.

Oh, well,

what an appropriate way to introduce our next bugle co-host,

joining us also in 3D, but one of the D is the fifth D that no one fully understands, so you'll only see her in 2D.

Joining us from Australia, as long as the internet works, it's Alice Fraser.

When she walks, she moves so fine,

like a flyman.

Crimson dress that clings so so.

Hello, Alice.

How's Australia?

Hello, Andy.

Hi.

Everything in Australia is fine.

It's Easter here, Andy.

It's already Easter.

The Easter bunny has arrived in our household, which is exciting.

I feel very fond of Easter.

It's where my 60-something-year-old Jewish Buddhist father will approach either me or my twin brother, adult human beings with offspring of our own.

And

he comes in with like full Meryl Streep, meets Sean Penn, method acting, sincerity, and he goes, What's that behind you?

I just saw a giant bunny.

And then

due to like some weird combination of like gaslighting and upbringing, we will 100% buy in and be like, where did it go?

I wonder if it brought us something.

I don't know.

At some point in our childhood, we missed the window to go, the Easter bunny isn't real.

I assume we just decided we didn't want to pop the chocolate giving bunny.

I mean, that's very much, but we're still fully committed, and I assume we will be until we die.

I mean, that's really very much how Easter began, looking at it from a Jewish perspective.

I got a new Easter bonnet.

Well, I hit a rabbit with my car, so I say.

So, yeah, I mean, it's a tough time of year.

I prefer the Friday to the Sunday as a

juke.

But

he was guilty.

I mean, mean, don't judge him by today's legal and ethical standards.

According to the letter of the Torah at the law of the time, he was guilty.

Messianic in charge of a donkey.

Literally banged to rights.

But

that did end up costing us a lot of market share.

Do you think he just went out on a bender on Friday and was just hung over, and that's why he reappeared on Sunday?

Just quite possible.

Anyway, as I said, this is doubling up as issue 4,298 of the Bugle.

We are recording here in Salford on the 30th of March, 2024.

Are you enjoying the year?

No?

It is actually statistically shaping up to be one of the top five best years of the decade so far.

It is a bit of a shit of a year in a prick of a decade and a finger of a millennium so far.

But

onwards and upwards.

And millenniums often start badly, if we may go back to the first Easter.

And on this day, well, this weekend in 2014, the first same-sex marriages in England and Wales were performed 10 years ago.

So, obviously, we knew at the time we were warned this would come

at a bit of a risk.

That we thought, yeah, social progress is worth taking the risk that it would spark an increase in natural disasters.

As we have been warned by various scientific research, that

tolerating and legalizing same-sex marriage would provoke divine vengeance in the form of natural disasters.

But anyway, we've got some of the stats now.

It's been going over 10 years, so we can actually look at it statistically.

So we've got a graph here for you.

So this is

natural disasters per year in the UK before and after.

You see, I put the dotted was legalised.

So let's firstly, and this is an exponential scale, because that's how, like the Richter scale, that's how natural disasters are measured for some reason.

So let's just have a quick look at, let's start with earthquakes.

So that stayed very much at naught.

It only goes back to 1880, of course, and we've had to project this bit because we don't know for sure if it's going to stay at naught.

But the trend does seem to be very much no massive earthquakes, even though we have legalized same-sex marriage.

Let's see, biblical-level tsunamis.

Again,

very much

zero, so it turns out it was a bit of fear among me going.

And what about volcanoes?

All right, that's a bit of a bit of a risk.

A bit of a risk going forward.

But anyway, but so far we've got away with it, so that's that's good news.

Ten years ago,

right?

As always, a section of this audio newspaper is going, where, Salford?

It's going, where?

That's always my favourite part of the show.

Justifies my entire career, to be honest.

Right, it's time for top story now.

The last 12 months have seen, I think, a new national record number of physical metaphors for the state of the nation: crumbling school buildings,

and a weeping, vandalized train looking out across a high street of boarded-up shops, an empty prison cell with a please don't escape if you're a terror suspect poster with the N apostrophe T of don't crossed out in marker pen, and lonely turds sunbathing sadly on empty British beaches.

But I think this has reached possibly its highest moment this week

with this sensational story.

Two of the world's leading universities have been instructed not to throw small people into a river.

So specifically, this was the Oxford-Cambridge boat race, and

they were asked not to throw the cocks into the river or jump into the river after the races because the Thames is too fing full of shit.

And so the Oxford Cambridge boat race has carved that unique place in the global sporting calendar as the dullest event in the universe.

But it was perhaps

the last bastion of tradition where large men can throw a small person into a river without the woke brigade getting their old, you know, you can't do that hat on.

But sadly, Britain's shit-infested waterways have now stepped up to the plate and cancelled the throwing of the winning cocks into the Thames at this year's boat races.

The traditional ritual of celebratory size shaming has been ditched fundamentally because, as I said, Britain has literally gone to shit.

So, I mean, Tiff, where do we go as a nation?

If we can't even throw little people who shout at big people in Rhine

into a river, what have we got?

Do we force them to raise a river?

What do they even shout?

Harder?

More?

Basically.

Left.

Generally straight, I think.

Left, bit, left, bit, left, front in the boat race.

I liked how the article about in the Guardian just had the headline, dirty boat race, which as a cockney really delighted me.

Yeah, basically, the Oxford and Cambridge Rowers have been advised not to jump in as the war contains E.

coli.

So they'll just have to console themselves with the fact that their fathers have made millions in profit from the water companies.

I mean you know you're in trouble as a country when even the wealthiest people doing their vanity of small differences paddle off are having to do it up the same shit creek as the rest of us, Andy.

Up shit creek with eight paddles per team.

Not even Oxbridge gets you clean rowing water when the government is letting corporations piss their toxic waste directly into the the innocent mouths of the nation's waterways.

I feel, Andy, that I should clarify what the boat race is for people who aren't deeply embedded in and conscious of the class wankery that has historically formed the backbone of British culture.

If you don't know what class is like in Britain, this is for the listeners, don't worry about the people who are currently watching the show in real life.

If you don't know what class is like in Britain, it's basically like getting given your Harry Potter house, but instead of Gryffindor at age 11, it's at birth and you get sorted into supermarkets like Chinless Harrods Wanker, Sainsbury's Chimney Sweep, Sturdy Salt of the Earth Aldi Man, or Shops at Waitrose but has to check the prices.

It's called the boat race to distinguish it from all other boat races.

It's a boat race between Cambridge and Oxford, which are two hallowed institutions, academic institutions steeped in the glory of having produced some of the most renowned and influential people in Western history and most of the c.

I went to Oxford but statistically

Andy went to Oxford for undergrad.

I went to Cambridge for post-grad and Tiff's been significantly more successful in T V and movies than either of us despite having been assigned Oliver Twist at birth.

I do like the River Action confirmed they'd be implementing safety measures because water quality is an ongoing concern for the boat race.

This is going to shock you guys, but water quality has an impact on pretty much all of us.

Like,

I'm interested, I guess, because there's the women's boat race, which has been going how many years?

It was 79 years since we were considered worthy of sports.

I think, well, women were discovered

by

scientists in Cambridge in I think 1934.

Yeah.

In Franklin's research, was it about

you see why I get all those acting parts now

Andy there's breaking news on this story of course which is that Oxford lost and the Oxford team captain has blamed it on the water quality

the team captain's called Lenny Jenkins which is a name that reminds me so hard of 2005 early viral Leroy Jenkins that I feel really sad that you had to be on the internet at a very specific period of time for that to be funny to you.

But he said that his team were vomiting before the start of the race

and blamed it on the water quality.

And in part, saying that Jews Row Pumping Station, the less said about that name, the better.

It's less than one mile east of the Oxbridge race.

It spewed untreated sewage for four hours and 16 minutes yesterday, which

is fun.

There's a map and it shows all the sewage and it's called a discharge map.

Ew.

Yes.

That doesn't make it sound like they've served their sentence and now being put back into the community to contribute in a more positive way.

Because it is one of the world's least interesting sporting events.

The same two teams every year, the same course every year, made easier by the fact that they closed the river off to all the other boats during the races, which makes it a f a lot less interesting than it could be.

And now they have both men's and women's boat races on the same day, which is great news for

equality between the sexes, that women can prove that their event can be just as tedious as the men's event.

So that's that's progress.

Well, in the men's race today, Cambridge lined up in their familiar 1-1, 1-1, 1-1,

1-1, tiny little one formation.

Oxford

had apparently been planning to

try and throw the light blues off their rhythm with a new avant-garde 3-1-2-2 line-up with a false cox floating in the gaps between the lines.

But sadly, they ended up in practice with six of their crew in the water just because the boat wasn't wide enough.

So they went back to the old formation.

It was early in the season, of course.

Oxford had pinned their hopes on the creativity of their flair Brazilian number four, Rolloxinho.

Such an unorthodox rower, of course.

He sees bits of water to put his oar in that other rowers don't even see.

It faces the wrong way, he drops his shoulder, he spins, he throws in a dummy paddle.

So unpredictable.

His movement is like nothing you usually see in top-level rowing, but it doesn't really work.

And he tried an ambitious overhead reverse stroke with just 100 yards to go in the final practice race against Snutterbridge University.

Ended up with him and two of his crewmates splashing down on the riverbank, facing police charges for disturbing a roosting goose.

So he was dropped to the bench.

But with the amount of drugs being used in Britain finding its way into the water system and these latest sewage stats, there are now hopes that pure untreated Thames water is going to be bottled and sold as a new soft drink brand, Coke coli.

Well, the fact that I got as much applause as laughter suggests that was more for effort than achievement.

Andy, for the broader context of this,

this is all in the context that water companies have released record spills of raw sewage into the sea in 2023.

I sort of contest this as a premise because I don't think you can spill a record amount.

After a certain amount of time, it ceases to be spilling and becoming.

That's semantics, though, though, isn't it?

What do they call it?

They call it dry spilling.

It's when they just tip it into a river when it isn't.

Oh, is that sort of you chuck it in your garden?

I thought that was.

But you know, that is more euphemistic than poisoning the entire country, I guess.

Can I do that with my turds?

So I'm going to the loo and it's raining outside, and I'm like, I don't want to flush this.

I'm going to lob it

in Next Door's garden.

Can I use that as a defence?

I didn't know women did that kind of thing.

I was not taught that at my school.

Equality.

Equality, Andy.

But it's, you know, one of the traditional sights and sounds of the British springtime.

Now, the comfortingly familiar clonk of fist on face outside a pub, the honking blarp of our national irony alarm as the latest immigration figures show how much immigration has gone up since Brexit.

And of course, the migration of newly born turds from our decrepit

out via the sea before they finally settle on our gloriously uncomfortable beaches.

This is what Britain is

today.

So, the figures, I mean, as you know, I love a stat.

Apparently, raw sewage was discharged for 3.6 million hours in 2023.

Now, that's a lot of hours, and a lot of hours more than there are hours in a year.

That is

3.6 million hours is 411 years.

So, how do we put this in context?

So in a single year, we've been pouring shit for 411 years

into

our rivers.

So put it in context, 411 years, 3.6 million hours.

That's the average time Boris Johnson spends thinking about himself in the average decade.

The bugle has now spilled an estimated 450 hours of shit into your listening ears.

In 16 and a half years, and that's, you know, we consider ourselves to be leaders in that field.

3.6 million hours is over 110,000 complete five-day test matches

not including lunch and tea breaks and allowing the extra half hour for slow overage so that's that's

a that's a lot of that's a lot of but I guess that's that's part that's one of our Brexit freedoms is it not

that Brussels had stolen from us I think that's that's what it was that's what it was at that and watching unpicked British strawberries slowly rotting in the fields every summer so we've taken those those freedoms back I do have have an adverb for the tourist board.

Oh, yeah, let's do it.

If you'd like me to do it, just based on some of these stories that we've spoken about so far, could we get some

very English music?

Oh, that is horrific.

Okay.

England, come for the raw sewage.

Stay for the rich kids rowing in it.

England, where the energy bills are higher than a teenager at a festival.

Enjoy eating at our community pantry, trademark Penny Mordant.

Visit the Museum of Curiosities and watch our billionaire leader and his wife pretend to load a dishwasher

and make pancakes.

England.

For the VIP travellers, join one of our exclusive members' clubs.

The House of Lords could be for you.

Peer into the perks of peerage.

Buy your way into more riches.

Our potholes can be seen from space.

Experience living history by catching one of our recently reintroduced Victorian diseases.

Dysentery, cholera, typhoid or

leptospirosis.

Head to the gift shop and grab your Keep Calm and Carry One Ripped Off Tea Towel.

Pick up a discharge map.

anywhere you see a tourist board sign which is the poop emoji in St.

George's Cross colours.

England.

Right, let's move on to Lego in American news now.

The well Lego and I mean this is again, this is a news story that there's so often we get a story that sort of seems to encapsulate everything about the world that we now live in and this is Lego who are Lego, the famous Danish brick company,

not real bricks, do not use them as real bricks.

I feel I've missold it now.

Lego has asked police in California to stop superimposing heads of Lego men to mask criminal suspects' identities in photos on social media.

Where can humanity go

from here?

That is a lego man who's killed someone obviously i like he's got the appropriate face for someone who's just been arrested

um sorry we're talking about america can we use the correct term legos

am i right california legos

in america

americans say legos i don't know why it's pluralized but we it's like math maths so you think why is math singular and legos plural don't know right this is why everything's gone to shit in america

I mean, this is, obviously, America's got a few crime.

I mean, in a way, this is good, just trying to get kids involved in

glamorising police work.

I think, you know, I'll get to play with Lego,

which, I mean, obviously American police work doesn't always purely involve playing with Lego.

So,

I mean, this is,

do you think this is what all we should be doing just to try and lighten the mood of news, Alice, is to get more children's toys superimposed on new.

I mean, would you know if you're watching the footage from the latest horrific war zone around the world, if there were just loads of My Little Ponies in the pictures, do you think we'd maybe take the issues more seriously?

Yeah,

I think Guernica would be a lot better with My Little Ponies in.

This is war is hell, but friendship is magic.

Care Bears.

Get some Care Bears in the business.

I think that's the theme of Band of Brothers, actually.

Look, I think this is a really sad thing for the Lego business because they're having their name associated with crime.

It's not as sad for them as it is for the one guy, Lego head Larry, who's now been citizen arrested in the street 142 times.

Poor Larry.

Not only does his head look like a Lego, it's really easy to capture him by just hit him on the head with a brick that has a dent in it the exact same shape as the lump of his head?

And he just sort of dingle dangles until the until the police arrive and release him with apologies.

And then he's late to his magic, the gathering, gathering again.

Sad.

This is part of Lego's adults-only range, actually.

There is an adults-only range.

Is there?

Yeah, I've made a Harry Potter's Hogwarts Castle out of the adults-only range, yeah.

Right.

Yeah, so um,

I've been paid by big Lego.

I mean, uh, yeah, this I think we should have, it depends on the crime, depending on the on the kids' toy.

You know, you could have a Mr.

Potato Head, that's quite neutral, but I think if it's a sex offender or someone that's been, you know, arrested for that, you should have Nosy Bonk.

Now, it's a very specific 10 people in the audience.

Remember who Nosy Bonk is?

Do you know who Nosy Bonk is, Alice?

It's a...

I do not know who Nosy Bonk is.

It's a kids' TV character who...

Huh?

Jigsaw.

That's it he looks like jigsaw yes from the saw films basically that's who nosy bonk is but with a bigger nose and he wore white gloves and he just used to walk around creeping out kids

so I think nosy bonk would be a good one or maybe mrs pepperpot if it's less of a

if it's less of a violent crime did he wear white gloves because he was a snooker umpire

referee

referee sorry my mistake god how could i get that wrong i think

I think Lego should lean into this and start, you know, start a crime sort of

crime line of Legos.

You know, I know the tagline already.

It's a that where the Lego, crime, where the punishment always fits the crime.

There might be already a Lego prison because Fisher Price had one.

Fisher Price Toys had like a whole town where you get like everything you get in a town.

So it was like a shop, a spirally car park that you could do your cars down, a theatre, and a prison.

All the essentials, basically.

My son, when he was about seven years old, made a Lego mausoleum.

We had some friends around for lunch, and we left him while we were cooking, we left him playing with his Lego in the living room.

And then when we went through and sat down with him, my friends asked, Oh, what have you made?

And he explained, No, this is a,

a, I can't remember what the setup was.

It had a room with sort of like tables, and then he lifted up the floor, and underneath it, there were a load of Lego men lying down.

And this is where all the dead bodies are.

Oh, dear.

Where the f does that come from?

So, come on, should we do,

we'll do one more animal story.

Do you want to do

goats or sharks?

Goats.

Goats.

Wow, it's that West Side story all over again.

Right, so

let's okay, well let's do it.

Well let's start.

We'll do goats quickly.

Okay.

And then we'll do

a quick goat.

A short goat.

Well this is the astonishing news that scientists, yet again not doing their real fing jobs,

have been studying the smell of teenagers and have concluded that teenagers smell like goats.

Fing hell science!

You must be ashamed of your fing colleagues.

What this guy's doing.

They've discovered that teenage body odour contains unique compounds that smell of sweat, urine, musk, and sandalwood and makes them smell like goats, particularly goats that use a sandalwood grooming product.

Focus science.

This is a new Lynx body spray that we haven't tested on the market yet.

But I like the fact that they've described it almost like a sommelier.

They've gone into the smells.

The odors of these acids are described as cheesy, fruity, and plum-like,

musty, coriander-like, and fatty, goat-like,

wax-like, earthy.

I'd pair this with chicken nuggets and a can of monster.

It's basically,

yeah.

Also, that sounds eerily like my online dating profile.

Yeah, so sandalwoods, which I think is what Jesus made his clogs from.

Musk, they smell of musk, that's the power of the man.

Not only weeding his technology into every little nook and cranny of our lives, but now he's making our teenagers smell like him.

I mean,

that is worrying Elon Musk, or to give him his full name, Elongated Musker Hound.

And then urine and sweat, but it's just possible that our teenagers are more nervous about the future, so sweat more and then piss themselves.

So

I think it's accept the goat smell for now because once you get into you know for teenage boys accept that smell because once you become a man you have different smells then and when you're a man you have to have different men's freight you have to have something with oak in it smoke coffee leather whiskey old horse

gymnasium memories

burnt down library restored 18th century barn

Discarded scrum cap those kind of things there when you start moving into the high-end gentleman fragrances that's what you're going to be going for.

That is what the AI image of Andy

wears when he's going out on a weekend to attract the ladies with his third tail.

He'll just pop on a bit of Havana insurrection

and off he goes into the night.

Alice, you are the Bugle's official dating apps.

Of course, I've been with my first wife.

I'm in Showbiz, let's be realistic,

since

1996.

It's nothing that I don't say to her face on a regular basis.

So I missed out on the dating app.

There was

Grinder, wasn't there?

That pairs you up based on your view of really defensive opening batsmen in Test cricket, I think.

Actually, we're here in just down the road at Old Trafford.

My now wife and I watched Gary Kirsten score a 00 and our relationship survived.

So we were meant to be together.

That is a niche gag, not really a gag, just a fact.

Alice, so well apparently

dating apps have turned not just into a distraction from the immovable and certain solitude of life, but into a career.

Yes, indeed.

So if you've read Sterano de Berjac, you know this story.

Vita Select is a global company that does the legwork, the messaging, not the f ⁇ ing.

And so they'll create.

Legs?

I'm doing it wrong.

They'll create your profile for you.

They'll swipe and message with prospective dates and do all of the stuff that is involved in getting to know someone,

which is deeply upsetting on a number of levels.

Oh, sorry.

Sorry.

I just got a message on my interdimensional phone.

Do you mind if I check?

Oh, fine.

It's an ad.

It's terrible how they expect you to just read these.

This one says,

a new novel is out by self-published romance maven, an online bestseller

Dancy Lagarde.

The 75th in the Whoops, I Fell in Love and I Can't Get Out series of historical romances with a supernatural twist.

This one is set in the historical period of now.

Heraldine is a busy businesswoman beset by constantly having to do business while wearing sheer stockings and stiletto heels under a demure yet alluring pencil skirt.

She's got no time for dating, she's too business, but sometimes she longs for the strong arms of a lover.

So she gets her personal assistant's personal assistant to sign her up for a dating service and woo prospective men on her behalf.

Sterling Bladeling is an internationally renowned ballet ninja

and exiled half-goblin lord working as a mercenary source lord in the land of the fairies.

Sorry, winter.

By day he fights with his sword and by night he is haunted by the angry ghost of Dania, his dead ex-wife who keeps hassling to get Battenko back on the dating scene through the medium of sexy dreams.

Again, unbeknownst to Sterling.

Unbeknownst to Sterling, she's created a dating profile on his behalf and is flirting with Heraldine's personal assistant's personal assistant, the magnetically non-binary Jeffrey Mayer, who is pretending to be Heraldine but secretly falling in love with the person pretending to be Sterling, but who's actually the divorced and dead ghost of Sterling's ex-wife?

Who will untangle this sexy tangle?

What happens when Sterling and Heraldine show up at their first date?

Heraldine with a series of bullet points on a cue card and Jeffrey Maya stricken with a misplaced jealousy feeding her lustful lines on an earbug from a nearby table while Sterling is alternately astonished, aroused, and possessed by his horny ex-wife.

Find out in Swipe Right for passion if you liked Mrs.

Doubtfire but felt it lacked gratuitous fingering.

This is the novel for you, with a brief yet sensual cameo by Colin Firth as a comically confused waiter who accidentally gets fellatioed in the chaos.

The Guardian called Swipe Right for Passion a work of soaring ambition.

The New York Review of Books said, quote, upsetting yet arousing, end quote.

Well, thank you for listening, Buglers, and thank you for listening to all of our recordings from our live shows through March.

And thanks if you came to those shows, they were a huge amount of fun as live bugles always are.

We have a couple more in london in june and hopefully some more dotted around the universe in the not too distant future don't forget you can get alice's dancey la guard book on pre-order now via the bugle website where you can also join the bugle voluntary subscription scheme to help keep this show free flourishing and independent premium level voluntary subscribers will not only receive an exclusive vinyl edition of the bugle but will also receive the also exclusive monthly ask and Andy Show.

Go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button to give a one-off or occurring contribution.

We're back with a regular show next week featuring Alice and Nish Kumar recorded in various spare rooms, bathrooms, sheds, or other assorted available spaces.

Until then, goodbye.

Hi, Buglers, it's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast Mildly Informed which is in podcast feeds and YouTube right now.

Quite simply, it's a show where me and my friend Richie review literally anything.

So please come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.