A World of Pure AImagination

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers, I am Andy Zoltzman and welcome to episode 4293 of The Bugle.

This is a Bugle live special comprising highlights from not just one, not just three, but actually two live Bugle shows recorded on Friday the 1st of March in Glasgow and Sunday the 3rd in Norwich.

Over the next X minutes, where X is the number of minutes our Supreme Overlord producer Chris has decided is appropriate for this week's bugle, so probably somewhere between 2 and 600, you will hear me, Josie Long, who did the Glasgow show, Felicity Ward, who did Norwich, and Anuvab Powell, who did both, joining us via the internet from Rumbai, speaking truth to power and speaking bullshit to power, and truth and bullshit to things that aren't particularly powerful as well.

It's the bugle.

That's sort of how we generally roll.

Power's not listening anyway, so we might as well say what we want.

Anyway, here are your highlights from the first two shows of our UK tour in front of our truly stunning Bugle live audiences.

Let's start with some anniversaries.

3rd of March, we are recording on the 3rd of March.

On this day in 1857, France and the United Kingdom declared war on China.

It was the Second Opium War.

And to show the heroic civilizing influence of Victorian Britain on the world, it was a war, a just, noble, divinely ordained war in which Britain forced the legalization of the opium trade onto China when we consolidated our position as the world's leading drug dealer.

Good on you guys.

You've done some good things in this world

and that is definitely one of them.

So yeah, that was you know not too many statues of that.

I think that's part of the history that we don't like to talk about.

We like statues of old dead men who we pretended did good things and we don't like it when people in Bristol tip them into canals.

I think the difficulty about having a statue that's dedicated to opium is that it would be a heroin addict lying on the ground.

But it's part of our history.

It's your culture.

Auntie Felicity, that opium does not get as much love nowadays as it used to in those days.

And I'm quite sad about that.

I just wanted you to know that.

Also, Britain shipped loads of opium to China,

got all of China to get high on drugs, and then spent that money bringing tea to India, and that's how India became a leader of tea.

And now, you know, we've got rich out of tea.

The Chinese don't do drugs anymore.

It's not the good world that, you know, that could have been.

That's what I'm saying.

Right, okay.

So we can claim credit for all that.

And we gave you cricket.

What more do these fkers want?

These fkers?

Not to be called these fkers, I reckon.

I realize, out of context,

some things might look bad written down.

This is being recorded.

I've just tweeted it out.

You're cancelled.

Another anniversary

this weekend on the 1st of March 1692, the Salem witch trials kicked off in Massachusetts, USA.

There they are, that's what a witch looks like.

That's what witch trials look like in 60.

Good throwing on that.

That's Sarah Goode.

Sarah Osborne and Tatuba, the first

defendants into the crucible.

And of course in those early trials there was a screen down between them.

They had a trial on either side.

That is one for the snooker fans.

I've already done my favourite joke of the show.

Sorry, right.

Of course it used to be big business, the major league witch trial season.

And well, Salem, the Salem Cauldron skeptics, as they were, were trying to come back from a disappointing 1691 season, when the Newport necromancy naysayers

won.

The Baltimore evidence fabricators were also looking strong ahead of 1692, but Salem managed to pick up a couple of very useful, promising young magistrates in the draft and had a really great.

I love sport.

But of course, sadly, the woke brigade soon shut down witchcraft trials as a form of public entertainment because no one can have any fun these days, or indeed in the late 17th century.

And America instantly embarked on a course of equal justice for all that has continued unabated to the present day.

Also, on the 1st of March, in 1893, electrical genius Nikola Tesla gave his first public demonstration of radio.

Chris,

are you sure that's his demonstration of radio?

Every great scientific achievement is preceded with a failure.

Right.

And that sort of isn't quite radio.

Okay.

But it was the first picture I've found.

Right.

I mean it's possible that that is what happened with the world's first football phoning.

Just the

it looks like a behind the scenes from Ghostbusters when they cross the streams.

Yes.

Just look how brilliantly bored the guy is at the bottom.

What a little emo.

Electricity we get it.

They did some weird, really weird things in the early days of electricity.

There's a film of

Thomas Edison electrocuting an elephant.

Who's seen that?

Yes, yeah, it's there.

It's on the internet, isn't it?

I'm not making it.

You people, I mean, I'd have thought everyone in Norfolk, which, with all due respect, is not the world's most exciting county.

I can't believe you've had the option to watch a video of an elephant being electrocuted harmlessly in 19 harmlessly because he would have been dead by now.

Well, he would have been dead by now, anyway.

So, that makes it harmless.

Right.

Just quickly, can you talk me through the elephant?

What?

Is it a video?

Is it like a documentary or is it a reimagining?

That took a film.

Can you look it up, Chris?

I'm not making this up.

This guy's seen it.

What did you make of it?

Yeah, it is.

But it was ages ago, so it's fine.

That's basically how we learn about history in this country.

Yeah, it was disgusting, but it was ages ago, so let's just move on.

It was...

Yeah, okay.

That's all I need to know.

Okay.

also coming to the origin of the Donna Ka Bab.

Too soon?

Too soon.

Top story this week.

What the f has happened to British politics?

George Galloway,

he used to be an MP here, didn't he?

Was it?

Yeah, quite a long time ago now.

Was it this part of Glasgow or it was literally here.

So that's why we chose this venue because we look into the future.

George Galloway, the renowned cat impersonator and gobshite, is an MP once more.

Yeah, yes.

I don't know when I saw that the results came through last night.

I was in Aberdeen recording the news quiz

for Radio 4.

It was just on, I'm sure you were all listening to it before you come here.

And I walked back, Josie, to the to the hotel, and I looked up into the sky, just after the result that came through that George Galloway had

won.

I looked up to the skies and I saw what I thought was a shooting star.

And actually, it was the corpse of Cleisthenes, the founder of democracy in ancient Athens,

who just spun so fast in his grave, power-drilled his way out of it and was circling the world in a low orbit, shaking his fist, saying, for f sake, Britain, what the fk are you doing?

I had a similar thing because I thought to myself, I wonder what Gramsky would say about that, like about what's happening now.

And I found in his prison diaries what he said is:

pessimism of the intellect, not George Galloway, for f's sake.

For f's sake!

Porca Madonna!

That's the worst swear I know in Italian.

Older listeners might remember Gramsky as Ounski.

Tough, come come on.

That's quite a good decimalization joke.

Right.

He's a unity candidate because literally everybody thinks he's a cat.

Not Saddam Hussein.

Now.

Andy,

I was doing a quick bit of research on George Galloway and I have a question.

There aren't that many parliamentarians that have been on Celebrity Brig Brother pretending to be a cat and have met Saddam Hussein.

Not many.

Not many.

Some have done one, some have done the other, but not many have done.

I think Disraeli did the 19th century celebrity big brother.

I mean, it's so the Rochdale by-election, which took place on the 29th of February, which means that Galloway is going to be an MP for 20 years.

He got a loophole!

And this is so Labour's, Labour's Labour ditched their candidate, Azer Ali.

I can't remember what, I think because he batted too slowly for modern I'm getting the wrong Azer.

That is a very niche cricket jump.

I realize this is maybe not the right city to do it in.

But

this is after footage emerged of him sharing conspiracy theories about the terrorist attacks in Israel.

Deeply offensive, ignorant and false.

With three characters sadly written out of the script of the 1937 Disney Smash Hit animation Snow White.

But were they also used by Azer Ali about his own comments?

But it's it's not a lot, I don't think, in a supposedly mature democracy to ask your elected representatives to be smart enough not to fall for batshit, crazy conspiracy theories.

That seems like fairly entry-level stuff, but that's how it ended up.

He only got 4,000 votes.

And when you're absolutely thrashed in an election by someone best known for lapping milk like a cat and being friends with one of the world's most bastardish despots, you've probably got to go back to the drawing board as a parliamentary candidate.

Galloway came out and said he's going to make Rochdale great again.

His deputy, Chris Williamson, refused to condemn Hamas's attacks on the 7th of October.

To which I guess the obvious response is, learn to fing multitask, you numbskull.

Because I think it's possible to

hold more than one

opinion at once.

And I think this is, you know, often when you see that, he was on the radio and he just refused over and over again to condemn Hamas's terrorist atrocities.

And similarly, the way I see it it is that when I go to a restaurant,

when I say no, thank you, I do not want the freshly hacked crocodile carpaccio for starter, it doesn't mean that I want you to feed the chef to the crocodile.

I should just, I have in my time offended Jews,

my grandmother specifically,

as a six-year-old from a very lapsed Jewish household.

We went to see my Jewish, extremely Jewish grandmother in South Africa and she asked what I'd like for dinner.

And I said, Do you have any pork?

It's not a great opener.

It's not a great opener.

And I never saw a look of more concentrated disgust in anyone's face until I played the Manchester Comedy Store in 2004.

Come on, fair play to her for coming.

She was 98 at the time.

I mean, it is.

Our politics is just fed at the moment, isn't it?

I mean, all the old certainties have just melted away.

Speaking as a Scottish person, I'd like to say your politics is fed.

Well, it's all going beautifully up here, isn't it?

Well,

it's not as bad.

Andy,

I was just looking at

his record when he was an MP for Bradford West.

And it appears that when he was an MP there, he spoke just 16 times in the House of Commons, sometimes going for six months or more without saying a word.

So he might be an excellent Member of Parliament, actually.

The sad part is you wish he'd do that when he wasn't a member of parliament.

The result was described, I saw in one of the papers, as Keir Starmer's worst nightmare.

I'm not sure that's true.

I think the worst nightmare is that one he had of a giant fire-breathing donkey that escaped into a courtroom whilst he was prosecuting a sexy Mickey Mouse for fornicating with a bench.

But maybe that was just his weirdest nightmare, not his worst.

But anyway,

moving

into other, well, sort of related political issues, Lee Anderson,

the former Conservative Party chair, who

I'm sure you're all familiar with his work.

He's a part-time member of parliament and full-time TV provocateur

who

claimed that London Mayor Sadiq Khan was was being controlled by Islamists with a specially adapted PlayStation controller that could make him do spontaneous karate kicks and 360-degree somersaults from a standing start?

This is what I have to do with news now.

I find news so upsetting, I have to make up bits to go on the end.

That's it, that's the problem.

Half the stuff, you just find yourself being like,

and that's not sophisticated enough.

It is for this show.

Lee Anderson used to pretend to be a Labour guy, didn't he?

Yes.

Who is it?

Well, I don't know.

I mean, you can probably answer that in four letters.

But I mean,

maybe that's not sophisticated enough either.

But I mean, he, yes,

basically, sort of hugely Islamophobic,

even too Islamophobic for the current Conservative Party.

And that is

quite a high bar, I think.

So

he claimed Islamists run London.

And to be honest, I'd I'd never really associated extreme Islamism with really annoying traffic calming measures that increase traffic up trunk roads.

But anyway, apparently that's what they're up to, Joseph.

Now, Andy, just a quick question.

Now,

claiming that Islamists run London, isn't that very offensive to all the billionaires and oligarchs from China, India, Russia, and the Emirates who've spent billions trying to actually run London?

They've put in the work, they get none of the credit.

Yeah, I mean there is an irony in this, isn't there?

That

Lee Anderson, he claimed that Sadiq Khan has given the city of London away to his mates.

And for a Conservative MP to accuse someone else of giving London to his mates, that should provoke a terminal meltdown of our national

arm.

The next line where he says, which isn't fair, I was going to give it to my mates.

You know, this chaos feels very familiar.

You know, your Prime Minister, I think, we're coming to this, Andy, but I think your Prime Minister recently said that he feels like there's mob rule going on in the United Kingdom.

What I was confused by is that it's his mob that's running it.

So

it reminds me of that bit in Faulty Tower's, the sitcom, where someone complains to the waiter and the waiter complains back to the customer saying the food is shit.

That's basically what mob rule?

Have you?

I mean, is this going to be a more efficient form of government, do you think?

Well, it couldn't be less efficient.

And Sunak, he complained about mob rule, and then he joined farmers on a protest.

So it doesn't count as a mob if they're wearing wellies, I think.

That's a key.

Historically, I feel like, do you remember the Countryside Alliance?

Yes.

And the papers were like, well, this is great.

Well done.

Yeah, absolutely.

And then the students, they were like, kill them all.

That's what the papers sound like in my name.

I'm the telegraph.

And I'm the time.

And they get married.

And they have a baby.

And what's the baby?

The guardian.

The mail.

The mail.

If it was the guardian, they'd be doing some DNA tests.

Going on in the ugly.

Who says romance is dead?

Shall we move on to India news?

Yeah, get that.

Scuba diving a prime minister prays underwater news now.

This is one of the great things about being alive today.

You get genuine newspaper headlines that are so f ⁇ ing ridiculous, it makes you glad to be alive.

Anuvab, you're going to have to bring us up today.

You are, you're obviously a very keen scuba diver yourself.

I don't know if you've ever prayed underwater with or without a Prime Minister.

Just your Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, who is, I think it's fair to say, divisive.

Well,

he prayed underwater.

Can you explain why?

I'm not sure.

Do you think Rishi Sunak would ever scuba dive to pray?

I don't think, no.

No is the short answer to that.

I don't think Rishi Sunak is a human being.

And so if he went into water, I think he would just melt and then fall back down to hell.

Right.

Okay.

Fair enough.

Anuvabh, tell us exactly what happened here.

Well, you know,

it's hard enough to explain this in person, Andy, let alone at one o'clock in the morning on a headset,

halfway across the world.

But basically, what happened is that in ancient Hinduism,

there was an Atlantis-like city underwater off the coast of India, and our Prime Minister on a Sunday went looking for it.

There you go, that's him.

It looks like the cover of a tinted comic, but that is indeed the Indian Prime Minister.

He dove underwater of the state of Gujarat to look for the lost city of Dwarka

and he couldn't find it.

So he did some nonsense prayers.

And

this is what happens, I think, when you've been single as long as he has.

He has a lot of Sundays free, and he has the backing of 1.3 billion people.

So he decided to go looking for a lost Hindu city.

Now, I'm a lapsed Hindu, and

I only believe in the 12 of the 130 million gods, so I'm considered a very bad Hindu.

But it appears that if you're a Hindu and you go diving looking for stuff,

the world media will follow you.

So the Prime Minister of Britain currently is a practicing Hindu.

And who knows, in the month of May, when you have your elections, he may be diving in the River Thames looking for votes.

So,

Prime Minister, we have started a trend here of Prime Ministers who dive looking for things on a Sunday because they're single.

So much about this.

Number one, he's done it on a Sunday.

You've got to have a hobby.

Fine, do that.

Also, I'm a lapsed Catholic.

This is surely where some kind of joke already.

A lapsed Catholic, a lapsed Hindu, and a lapsed Jew walks into a theater in Norwich.

I tell you how I'm lapsed.

I've had heaps of sex with condoms.

That's why I've had sex twice.

So

I read this story and I was like, oh my god, the sentence is just the sentence alone is on such a bell curve, isn't it?

It's like Indian Prime Minister

Standard Standard scuba dived and we're off to a lost Hindu city.

Hold on to your oxygen mask.

We are ascending because to offer underwater prayers at the site of an ancient temple.

Ding, ding, ding, ding.

Didn't want to read anymore.

I'm like, it can't get better than that.

I don't want any details.

Do I dare read the story?

And then I read the story.

I mean, like that by itself, it's got extreme sports.

It's got politics.

It's got history with mystery.

But Andy, I was wrong.

I opened the story and it reads, first sentence, the 70, 73-year-old made made an offering of a peacock feather wand to the temple remains.

Yes, please, where is the mini-series?

Where is the six-part documentary?

I want all of it.

I want all of it.

I f ⁇ ing love India.

Now, you know, Felicity, it's a very good point.

Here's the thing.

Our Prime Minister is a very big fan of the gentle Russian Democrat Vladimir Putin.

And

Mr.

Putin, as you know, goes on these long summer holidays where he rides a horse shirtless.

And that gets a lot of media attention as a sign of his machismo.

Our prime minister wanted to do that, to get this kind of attention.

But if he was riding shirtless in the middle of New Delhi, it wouldn't be an uncommon sight to not get the kind of attention he's getting in a diving suit off the coast of Gujarat.

So, you know,

I think he's trying unique

to catch up with Mr.

Putin.

And I'm sure you guys as comedians have also tried to stand out from other comedians by diving underwater and such things.

I actually, because I grew up on a beach, I have been spearfishing before, and no big deal.

And sorry to brag, I'm hardcore.

And I remember chasing a groper, which is like a massive fish.

And when

you're spearfishing, you can only have a snorkel on.

I'm not a pussy.

I don't go scuba diving.

I hold my breath like a real man.

Anyway,

I remember.

I don't need a oxygen mask, mate, I've got two lungs.

So I hold my breath, I go under, and it was behind the rock, and I sort of like swam around the rock, and then it surprised me and came around the other side, and I went,

and then I choked, and I didn't kill the grouper.

Well, I grew up in Tunbridge Wells.

What was the last animal you caught?

My wife!

So I didn't, your wife is beautiful.

I didn't mean it like that.

I panicked to say something, and your wife came out.

She's better than you.

I don't know why I said that.

That's the first fact in the history of the bugle.

There we go.

Ding up.

There you go.

That's the fact.

Also, I keep expecting Anuvab to just hit the screen and then just go, yeah, runway three is clear now.

About to do that, exactly.

Right, some other Indian news before we go to the interval.

Anuvab, very exciting wedding

between the son of India's richest man

and his childhood sweetheart, with pretty much every single A-list celebrity in the world other than Felicia and me have been invited.

Are you going, presumably?

Yes, Adi, I'm going.

I'm going as part of the catering team, just eat some snacks.

Look, Lukeshabad is the world's fifth richest man.

He lives in the world's most expensive house.

His son is getting married.

The following celebrities are in attendance.

It's going on tonight.

There's a minute-by-minute update on the Times of India if you want to follow it,

because the second course of snacks have just been served.

Celebrities are in the city.

Are there any

British MPs stealing those snacks there?

Yes, I'm joined by George Galloway in the catering.

He's coming out to do a proclamation song.

Mark Zuckerberg is in India.

Bill Gates is in India.

Rihanna is performing.

Mohammed bin Salman, the king of Saudi Arabia, is here.

As I narrate this guest list, it's sounding really dubious except for Rihanna.

But the most interesting thing about this wedding, it's touted to be the most expensive wedding in the world, just the sort of thing you need in a country where still half the population is below the poverty line.

It's exactly the sort of thing you need.

Now, the most interesting

is taking place in a zoo.

The groom is a huge fan of rescuing wild animals.

So, some of the biggest celebrities in the world, the names I mentioned, and also Ed Sheeran and various other British celebrities, I think David Cameron is in attendance, who will all be in a zoo

and they'll be able to do all this partying and all that, and also be able to walk around and pet wild animals.

So, Andy, Felicity, if on Monday a bunch of famous people in the world have been eaten, you know why.

I mean, that's the dream.

It just needs one caterer with a key

to walk around and just surreptitiously open a couple of lion cages, set up some GoPros, let the magic-I mean, it's it's Edison and the elephant all over again, isn't it?

Glasgow news now

and well there's only one place to start in Glasgow News

this week

oh that works very well

Chris Chris unfortunately your reaction there suggests that was an accident you could have you could have claimed that

so Anubab what's happening here is we've got a little

picture of Willy Wonka that came up but your head is is over the top of the top of Willy Wonka.

So you are now looking like someone who's just disappointed Scottish children.

This, I mean, you all know what we're talking about,

possibly the greatest news story of the millennium, would you say?

A world of pure imagination, it was, in that you had to imagine anything was actually fing there.

So there it is, the Willy Wonka.

Did anyone here go to it?

No.

No.

Does anyone know anyone who actually went?

One.

And I mean, it was.

I mean, Josie, you are our Glasgow tourist attraction correspondent.

I am.

I mean, this is absolutely sensational, isn't it?

Yes, every now and again, if you endure the horror of the world, you get a little treat.

And very much that was the case for the people who went there as well.

They got one jelly bean at the end of it.

What happened was,

people were promised an an immersive experience that would delight them.

They were promised catgating,

catchy tons,

exacerbate lollipops, truly a pasadice of sweet teats.

That was the AI-generated website that the man who organized, and I say organized using air quotes, the event, didn't bother to edit the fake words out of,

which could have been a hint as to what happened.

Um, you know, who amongst us hasn't dreamt of a passer dice of sweet teeth?

Um,

family show.

Yeah.

And it's so blank.

It's um,

it was £35 a head.

Yeah, it's not cheap.

Although I watched a TikToker who was this American, she was like,

it was £35.

And this is Scotland.

That's a lot of money there.

I was like, get f.

Go and get your prescription.

See how much it costs you, huh?

Huh?

We've all got 35 quib quiz.

We're not spending it on insulin.

Anyway.

It was just the bleakness.

It's that combination of utter, I guess, bethos.

And it just kept on coming.

Like, the headline of it is, children left in tears at sparsely decorated warehouse.

which, you know, it's a picture of Victorian cruelty.

And then it it just got better and better because more and more pictures surface.

So you have a picture of this woman, this brilliant actor who's trying her best and dressed as a meth lab and palumpa.

It's good because I feel like actors, particularly working actors, have a lot of their dignity stolen from them.

And this is their chance to kind of

fight back.

Yeah, then my favourite part of it was

because the guy, so I did some research on the guy.

The guy's name is Billy Cool.

Billy, Billy Cool, not spelt that way.

And he has previous.

He organized a community Santa's grotto.

And then

after the community had donated loads of toys and gifts, he just cancelled it.

He's a reverse Father Christmas.

And yeah, so my favorite part of it is because Billy Cool just got AI to design it all, when the actors were like, Where's the script?

He was like,

AI, right?

Just script.

Write the script, which is nonsense.

I've downloaded it.

I would love to read you some of it a bit.

But the best part of it is that AI invented a villain.

And the villain who is not in Charlie in the Chocolate Factory is called the unknown.

Which I feel like the AI would be scared of the unknown.

Because that's all the AI only knows about knowledge.

We're all scared of the unknown, Josie.

Well, you shouldn't be, because it was a crap villain.

And then, yeah, so I downloaded the script.

We can read some of it if you like.

But the unknown, so the poor guy who was supposed to be Willy Wonka, who,

there he is, God bless him.

He actually looks just like Timothy Chalamay, so I know why they got him.

But the name that they give him, that the AI gave gave him, was hang on, Willie Macduff.

Willie Macduff, I don't know.

And

the unknown.

The unknown is an as yet unknown, which is apt,

actor wearing a kind of

sort of

mannequin mask, unmovable, and a grey

I'm gonna say snood, but no, that's not the right word.

Like a mumu, a grey mumu, and he's hiding behind a mirror.

And there's a video of this poor guy being like, watch out, everybody.

And then the unknown just comes out like this.

That's very angular in the movements.

And it's not that it's bad.

But it is that it's bad.

Yeah, I'd love to read you a bit from the script.

The best thing about the script is the AI, he's obviously said to the AI, AI, write me a brilliant script about Willie Macduff from the famous film

taking people around his haunted warehouse.

And

the AI said, no problem.

And the AI has just put in loads of things that the crowd would do.

So halfway, like all the way through, it will be like, the crowd leans in, laughing and giggling.

It's like, AI, you're a bit arrogant here.

But my favorite part was, and let's not forget our secret inventions, the soup-flavoured jelly beans, designed to keep the wee ones clean.

Like, AI, that's

soap.

Kind of soup and soap.

Also,

no child will be delighted by being kept clean, right?

Second, hot and spicy beans that, and then it says in brackets, lowers his voice,

attract the birds.

Brackets, winks.

That's a story for another day.

Or perhaps a question for your parents.

Then

in brackets, the audience chuckles, appreciating the playful innuendo.

I mean, often the audience chuckles, appreciating a playful innuendo.

And then the thing that's the big thing that Willie Wonka th that the uh unknown is trying to steal

that he thinks children would be interested in.

The AI.

The anti-graffiti gobstopper,

which, according to the script, honestly, the script's a delight.

It's 15 pages long, and you will not be able to get through it.

Behold, the culmination of imagination and ingenuity, the anti-graffiti gobstopper, a suite so powerful it can make any room sparkle without lifting a finger.

Right, firstly, why is the AI obsessed with cleanliness?

And does it bode ill for the fact that soon AIs will decide that we ourselves are a parasite to be cleaned?

Secondly, the unknown.

Brackets sneering.

That's right, Macduff.

Imagine the chaos, the absolute power of turning tidiness into turmoil.

What the f does that mean?

And then the audience gasps, tension mounting as the two adversaries stand ready.

Suddenly, the room transforms into a battlefield of lights and lasers.

Willie uses a device resembling a futuristic remote, activating traps and illusions around the lab to thwart the unknown's advances.

And then the guy was like, okay, so I've got all this stuff in the script.

Where is it?

And the guy went,

just do your best.

It was a happy time for Glasgow.

So, what's that?

The stuff from the start, the

sweet, what's it?

Sorry, the

cat gaucating, catchy tons, the exacerdrail, lollipops, and a pasta dice of sweeties.

This is the same software that Robert Burns used, I don't know.

Dead animals news now.

This is what the people of Norwich have come to see, the dead animals section.

Well, I mean,

obviously you're a city with many, many churches.

We're going to start with this story, the story about this dead animal.

I'll story about dead lion and Christians being up in arms that Lyle's Golden Syrup have

changed their logo.

The Lyle logo there, it's the oldest unchanged brand logo.

It's been updated from the much-loved decaying lion corpse being feasted on by bees

to a more generic one you can see on the bottle there, just a kind of generic

super cool lion face not being feasted on by bees or fresh out of the hairdressers.

And people are absolutely f ⁇ ing furious.

Now

I'll be honest, when this story broke, my initial thought was,

how the f ⁇ have I never noticed that was the logo on golden syrup before?

Who, I mean, Chris, you hadn't noticed it, did you?

Nope.

No, Felicity, did you know that?

Let's do a quick straw poll of

give me a cheer.

Give me a cheer.

Give me a cheer if you had noticed it.

Give me a cheer if you hadn't.

So I think slightly more hadn't.

Maybe that just shows how unobservant we are as a species.

What about give us a cheer if you did notice it and thought it was creepy or you've just accepted it your whole life?

Yeah.

Andy, Andy, look, I've been looking at this photograph for a couple of days now and

to some of us it doesn't look like it's you know it's just a bunch of insects biting the lion.

It looks to me like the lion is sleeping on an imaginary polka-dotted bed.

It could possibly be that.

But the origin of it is quite interesting.

It was the so Lyles,

as was often the case in the 19th century, was a very Christian organisation.

Personally, I'm not, as I said,

I'm not a God-fearing man, and that feeling is entirely mutual.

So the origin is the story of Samson in the

Bible.

Have you heard of the Bible?

Platinum-selling early publishing sensation.

And

the story of Samson.

So you see that the slogan underneath, out of the strong came forth sweetness.

And it's the story of Samson, the celebrity mullet pioneer and demolition man, the self-styled Fred Dibner of the Old Testament,

the original Big Sam.

And he, obviously, he slayed a lion with his bare hands, as people did back in those days.

And then a few days later, he came back to admire his handiwork and found that bees had made a hive in the decaying corpse of the lion and thought, I'm going to have me some sweet old lion corpse honey.

He also used it as a perfect, worked in marketing, Samson in the Bible, and used it as one of the earliest marketing slogans for his new perfume.

Out of the eater came something to eat, out of the strong came something sweet.

Lion corpse,

par Samson, pour homme, pour famme.

Pour zebra.

So they used this

story.

And they thought, well, obviously, what better way to market syrup than a festering lion corpse with swarms of bees gnawing away on its decaying flesh?

But, you know, it was 1883.

People didn't have PlayStations and YouTube in those days.

So people enjoyed

pictures of dead lions being feasted on by...

I mean, again, I mean,

why can't

apparently it's not politically correct now to have this, you know, this corpse?

I mean, why can't people accept that the simple fact that the decomposing corpse of of a lion being feasted on by feral insects is the most appropriate way to tell customers that they are about to buy some syrup rather than a bucket of eels or a power drill.

So that's why you need this

kind of logo.

I read the article and I just thought only a Christian would grieve the loss of an image of a dead lion being swarmed by bees.

Let's get sentimental over a carcass.

Come on guys.

Maybe I was just thinking in the the context of tonight, that this was actually just a 19th century premonition of India's richest man-son's wedding,

post-Rihanna, when the lions have got out, feasted on half the guests, and then been shot dead.

It's possible.

It's definitely possible.

Absolutely correct.

Absolutely correct.

Thank you, Alivab.

I appreciate the support.

Thank you.

If we attended this wedding, we'd probably get to see this lion.

Can I just say

that working in advertising in the 1880s, whenever the syrup came out, seems far more interesting than working in advertising today?

Are they definitely bees?

Yeah, they're bees.

Well, that's just, I mean, that's bad advertising because bees make honey, not golden syrup.

Well, they make golden syrup if they're using a lion corpse instead of a regular hive.

Can't argue with the Bible.

Right, we all love giving gifts and even more than that we love receiving gifts.

An estimated 2% of people in the world will have a birthday in the next week.

And buying a present is, of course, never easy, unless the person you're buying it for is a deranged, militarily obsessed dictator in a reclusive nation.

And Vladimir Putin recently had to buy a birthday present for Kim Jong-un,

even though it wasn't actually his birthday.

his buddy, his protege, and his soulmates, and he got him an armoured car.

Now, what greater gifts can there be?

Have you ever bought anyone an armoured car, Josie?

I've lost count.

Right.

What I love is, I love that this has to be news.

Like these two weird guys behaving like 13-year-olds in love

has to be news because they might also kill us all.

So whatever the weird, creepy stuff they do together, we have to be like, right, well I suppose that means that they're going to bring out the nukes, I suppose,

the armoured car.

But the exciting thing is that apparently Putin's gift violates international law.

So this could be Putin's al Capone moment.

We've got him banged to rights on a gift wrap.

It's very exciting.

I mean it's a huge, it's a very touching gift, Anuvab, from the Kremlin Gremlin to the the Pyongyang gangster.

Um a lovely new set of wheels.

Um and being both armoured an armoured car and a limousine, the gift will enable Kim Jong-un to indulge his his two favourite hobbies, which are not being assassinated and going on hindus.

So it's um

look,

yeah, I'm Andy, you you have a good point here.

Look, we need to understand something about the world, right?

People who've been shot at will exchange gifts differently from people who haven't been shot at.

Very wise words.

This is making sense as to why Ronald Reagan got me that tank.

Some other exciting gift news from

America.

New York Medical School has basically given free tuition to its students after a one billion dollar gift from a ninety-three-year-old woman.

I mean,

do you think that it's a good idea to

let medical students come out able to perform their skills without the overbearing pressure of a lifetime of debt?

Or is that just going to make them casual?

Well, you've got surgeons in Scotland doing great.

Here's what I

like this story so much because I'm so happy for those students and because it involves some of my favourite things: a billionaire being dead,

a billionaire's money being given away to something they would hate.

And

I was delighted by it, and also saddened by it because it shouldn't be so seismic.

When I saw the reaction of the students and they're weeping, and it shouldn't be so seismic to say that studying shouldn't land you in a lifetime of debt.

I thought a lot about it because so

obviously the only good billionaire is a dead billionaire

and this guy had a billion dollars in stock that he gave to his widow now she said she said she's 93 years old she said that she immediately knew she wanted to give it away for free tuition

she died he died sorry she's fine as of the recording of this show

he died september 2022

Now, it's not September 2022 anymore.

She's had 18 months where she's been living it up.

And now she's living off the interest, no doubt.

Now she's giving it away.

But I've been thinking about it.

And so, if all it takes is one billionaire to die, for all of those people into perpetuity to get free tuition,

so what I'm thinking is if we kill, there's 3,194 billionaires.

If we kill them all, that's basically

at least all the medical degrees in the east coast of America.

Right, okay.

But, but, but, obviously, not every billionaire is just one billion.

I've done the sums.

So, Elon Musk, that's he's 215 billion, his net worth.

Jeff Bezos, 199 billion.

And I know what you're thinking.

And yes, we can kill Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos 215 and 199 times, respectively,

due to tech developed by Peter Thiel and that weird anti-aging dad guy, Brian Johnson,

who in turn will then be killed 0.4 of a time and 7.3 times.

I was trying to write something that you might like, and I couldn't do it.

I'm starting to understand how people hear my cricket stats.

Thank you very much for listening.

The talk continues, and you can be there, logistics permitting, on the 9th of March in Cambridge, the 10th in Birmingham, the 16th at the Warwick Arts Centre, the 24th in Leeds, 28th 28th in Edinburgh, and the 30th at the Lowry in Salford.

Details and ticket links at thebuglepodcast.com, where you can also join the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme to help keep the show free, flourishing, and independent.

Plugs time now to hear more of the wonderful Bugle co-hosts you've been listening to this week.

Go to josielong.com.

That's for stuff about Josie Long rather than Felicity or Anuvab.

Josie is also doing some shows as part of the Glasgow International Comedy Festival at the end of this month.

FelicityWard.com.

Felicity is doing shows around Australia over the next couple of months.

And Anuvab is touring his show, The Department of Britishness, around the UK in May and June details about that and all his other stuff at anuvabpow.com.

We will be back next week with highlights from our shows in Cambridge featuring Josh Gondrelman and Alice Fraser and Birmingham with Neil Delamere and Nato Green.

Until then, Innominé Bullshit, Amen.

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.