Good COP Bad COP

The Bugle Audio Newspaper for a Visual World.

Hello Buglers and welcome to issue 4283 of the Bugle Audio Newspaper for a Visual World, the world's most authoritative source of unauthoritativeness since 2007.

I'm Andy Zotsman, it is the 1st of December 2023, and we are just one more than averagely long month away now from this absolute shithead of year being rightly terminated.

And to assess where we are at this

precise point in human history I have a most excellent pair of co-hosts with me today.

If you had told me 40 years ago that I would in four decades time be sitting in a windowless room in London about to record a podcast with Felicity Warden Stuart Lee I would have responded what what are you talking about?

But such is life.

That is exactly what's happening right here, right now.

Welcome back.

Thank you.

Thank thank you arguably you would have said who are they yeah 40 years ago and what is a podcast well exactly yeah and then you because they're actually even thin i've never actually listened to a podcast

really understand

and people keep saying i i i i lie actually i listened to some that i was on when i was promoting a film and i listened to them i went on them so i listened to them before i sort of were but i don't i'm not one of these people that people go running with them on don't they yeah well i i

always get recommendations from other people i'm like right got to listen to other ones.

People give me these recommendations.

I listen to one episode I'm like not for me.

I always just listen to This American Life.

Oh yeah.

I love it.

It's the only one consistently.

There's one that I can't say it's called the bugle or something.

But it's a lot of blah blah blah.

I'm smart.

I'm English.

You know.

And it wears.

I'm not smart.

I'm English is how you characterise all podcasts.

No, no, just the bugle.

All right, just the bugle.

All right.

Have you ever thought about calling it the buggle?

I just thought it'd be cute.

Buggle.

It It could be presented by you and one of the buggles.

Yeah.

Ellen Horne could do it.

Is the buggle something?

Oh yeah, they were a band for

a sort of new wave band.

Of course they were.

But they were so technical that they became Yes,

the Prague Rock Band.

Yes, co-opted them

into a version of Yes, basically.

And then Yes started to sound like a neuromantic band for a bit.

It's like when you have twins and one eats the other one in the womb.

Haven't we?

You must know video video killed the radio star.

Yeah.

That was the buggles.

And one of the things that

was.

One member of the Buggles is presumably a Buggle.

Right.

But it's spelt with two G's.

I mean, I think we need to just wrap the podcast up here.

I don't think we're going to blow any more minds after that little fact.

He's a night ago, wasn't he?

Video did kill the radio star.

Yeah.

He knew it.

What would you have made of podcasts?

Well, and that's the rebirth of the radio star.

Oh, yeah.

It is

in an unlicensed frontier.

A young man, and Andrew O'Neill was explaining this to me the other day, that the podcasts have managed to make massive stars of people that we don't consider of any value.

If you think about it, the podcast is actually the Easter of radio.

It's the rebirth.

It's the coming back from the dead.

Right.

Look, I don't know if that'll make the cut.

I couldn't.

I mean, Easter's.

Yeah.

It might have done, but it's Christmas is coming up.

Christmas is coming up, to be fair.

Yeah, you don't want to be able to do it.

It's confusing.

You don't want to cross the third.

They've banned Easter anyway, haven't they?

woke mob.

Yeah, they've banned.

Well, they've because they'd already banned Christmas.

They've banned Christmas, the banner feature, and it's just

Pentecost next, wasn't it?

The nine strove cheese.

Yeah, was there nothing sacred anymore?

Literally, it's going to be 360 days of Ramadan.

That's what they're going to do.

Ironically, shoving it down our throats.

Right, I think we're nearly ready to start the show.

Yeah.

Oh, we go.

We are recording on the 1st of December 2023.

On this day in 1878, Rutherford B.

Hayes became the first American president to have a telephone in the White House,

which must have been very...

I don't know who we

called.

Who's their phone?

I don't know.

I mean, it must have been tricky, though, hasn't he?

You know, wanting to have high-level diplomatic calls, but maybe...

Yeah,

there was no other country had a telephone at the time.

It's a bit like when CB Radio came out.

You'd talk to anybody.

Just doing Morse code with herself.

Just on the hang-up.

According to his Wikipedia page, The Fountain of All Truth, Rutherford B.

Hayes believed, quotes, that education was the best way to heal the rifts in American society.

Which sounds absurd from a more advanced modern perspective.

But some people did actually think this at the time.

We now know, of course, that to heal the rifts in American society, what you need is guns, opioids, vitriol, and stone-cold crazy TV stations.

But we can forgive his naivety.

He'd only just got a phone.

As always, always, a section of the bugle is going straight in the bin.

This week, well, a countdown to Christmas.

It's the 1st of December.

Have you got advent calendars?

I don't, but I will.

You're right.

I might buy one today.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'll get one.

I'll get one.

Yeah,

and a Christmas tree.

Although my kids think you should think it's wrong to get one before about the 14th.

Right.

To get one really early.

Yeah, of course.

And also, when I'm on tour,

if I go to York or St Albans, place like that, I was going that the Christmas shop place.

And I buy

a figure of from local history in a kind of embroider embroidered kind of stuffed figure that you hang on the thing so I've got like St Alban and I've got some bloke Harold from Hastings I've got all the not Harold from neighbors that is a different I've got all the different kings and things I hang them on it and and last year I went to an exhibition of folk horror at the uh at the Somerset House gallery and I've got folk horror ornaments from the Wicker Man and things like that your tree must be heaving it is and it's only very small as well but um

you can't see the the tree.

No, but

that's one of the things I do to keep myself sane on the road.

Harvest, Christmas ornaments.

Ironically, it makes you look mental.

But you know, St.

Alban.

I mean, he was classic.

What did he do?

St.

Alban.

St.

Alban.

Oh, he was killed by the Romans.

Most British saints, their main thing was that they were killed by the Romans.

Or the Vikings.

So

he didn't stand for anything, do you know?

He didn't stand for anything.

I mean, he barely stood for Britain.

Henry VIII killed a couple as well.

Oh, yeah.

St.

Edmund Campion Day today, of course.

I'm sure you're all celebrating it later.

Someone went to Catholic school.

Well, there's a number of different St.

Edmunds, that's the problem.

It's hard to brand

venerating the wrong one.

Don't you hate that?

It's Jimmy Savile all over again.

Yeah.

Actually,

the main St.

Edmund, his head was cut off by the Vikings, which meant that he couldn't be buried whole, which meant he wouldn't go to heaven.

But then a dog, the head, stayed alive and shouted, help me, I'm a head.

And then a wolf came and got it and carried it and put it with the body.

Right, this is a lesson in how history used to be written.

We have as our section in the bin this week a bugle advent calendar.

This year, each day of December, we will give you for free a line for a modern day parable for you to try to write the kind of routines that made Jesus, star of the first Christmas, the first ever arena comic, selling out 5,000 seat venues, albeit ones without a catering license in his heyday.

For the first of December, in your bugle Advent calendar of wisdom, do not blame the break-dancing tortoise.

It spins not for the joy of the groove.

For the 2nd of December, for a person without hope is like a pogo stick without footrests.

The third of December,

your words of wisdom are, drink not from a snowman's corpse, lest ye too should melt unto dust.

And finally, for the 4th of December, it's harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than it is for a rich man to live in tax exile in the Cayman Islands and own some yachts.

So do work those into your Advent parables, and we will have more through the rest of December.

Also, in the bin this week, a special Christmas music section.

Now, Stuart, I know a big part of your life is...

is music.

What's your view generally on Christmas music as a?

Did you know that I was involved in a Christmas number one?

Were you?

Yeah, no one knows, which gives you an indication of the failure of

the charts to penetrate.

Well, enough success.

Yeah,

a routine of mine was...

heavily sampled into basically the vocal line of a song called Coming Over Here by Asian Dub Foundation and we gave all the profits to Kent Refugee Action Network and it was the Christmas, no New Year number one, about two years ago.

Oh really?

Yeah, and in the in downloads and sales, physical sales, but not in

streaming because at at streaming, Nan just sits in the kitchen with Wam's lost Christmas on

forever.

When you say Nan, do you mean me?

Yeah, probably me.

So,

and there's a really good 12-inch of remixes where they took loads of other bits of the routine and chopped it all up.

I'm very excited.

There's a quite embarrassing video where

I look like one of those people that used to be in punk bands who've now got diabetes

with some really cool blokes playing behind me.

Yeah, it's great.

And is it played at a lot of Christmas office party discussion?

No, it isn't.

It's not played at all.

Any Christmas point.

But yeah, but it's really funny, actually.

I was telling someone the other day that I had a Christmas number one.

And if you say that to someone and they've not heard, they think you've must have gone mad.

You go, yeah, I had a Christmas number one, actually.

It's like when people go, oh, I used to be a king of Spain or whatever.

That's derange, isn't it?

You're the guy on the bus now.

Yeah, yeah.

You're the guy on the bus.

Anyway, we review this week's,

this year's big potential Christmas hits, including Little Badonka Donkey, an AI crossover duet between the late post-war British megastar songstra scener Gracie Fields, who hit the charts in 1959 with Eric Boswell's famous donkey sploitation ditty Little Donkey, and the contractually behatted

six-foot six-inch country star Trace Adkins, whose 2005 hit Honky Tonk Badonka Donk, is widely credited by historians as setting Western civilisation back 1500 years.

Also, we look at a specially remixed Christmas-themed version of the Velvet Underground's I'm Waiting for the Man.

We are, as I said, 1st of December

on Little Lou's Christmas list, or will his reindeers get hold of it again?

26, that means a good price in this economy.

That's quite an old song.

Also, we review What Is That Screaming Woman Doing in My Brand New Manger by Ian the Innkeeper, featuring the hygiene inspectors.

And 50 years after they almost topped the Christmas charts, 1970s British glam rockers wizard back with I'm quite happy with it being Christmas once a year, a sober and reflective reassessment of their economically naive and socially divisive 1973 number four hit, I wish it could be Christmas Every Day.

You're like the Grinch, you know.

What's wrong with Wizards?

It's nice, that is.

You save your ire for the Tories.

Leave Birmingham's Glam Rock sensations alone.

Well, they finally accepted that 365 public holidays a year would leave mountains, Himalayas of debt even for future generations.

Just what a capitalist would say.

The relentless promotion of Christmas would marginalise other religious festivals, stoking tensions at a time when the world needs compromise between faiths, not inflexible dogma.

It's a good lesson, not as catchy as the original, but far more socially responsible.

That section in the bin.

Top story now.

Well, the environment is being fixed.

As we speak, the world's leaders are meeting in Dubai at COP28, the Environmental Conference super franchise that just keeps churning out sequels year after year, even when they become derivative, unoriginal, unambitious, and pointless, as is generally the way with sequels.

I know you're both massive fans of global environmental conferences.

Are you particularly enjoying this one, Felicity?

Yeah, this is a good one, isn't it?

This is an absolute beauty.

As you know, the president is also the CEO of an oil company.

Is that

my details right on that one?

Unbelievable.

And

there are accusations of oil deals being struck, but he is saying that that is not happening.

Now, if they are happening, that is gaslighting.

And at this level, absolutely unacceptable.

Now, if this gaslighting was solar-powered, then absolutely they could go through.

It's the unsustainability of the manipulation that I don't agree with.

I mean, it's possible that this man who is the chair of UEA's national oil company, Adnock, it's possible that he could chair a conference ultimately fixed on the eradication of his own company's main product.

It's possible.

This is how I do this for Isante.

But it's a bit like asking Colonel Sanders to chair a conference on making the whole world vegan.

Or, I've got another version of it.

It's a bit like asking Ronald MacDonald to be the mascot for the International Cow Methane Reduction Day.

And then, or, but this is niche, but some people really like it.

It's It's a bit like asking Ted Nugent to compose a song for international don't fly around in a helicopter shooting wild pigs with a machine gun day

Which and most people won't know who he is or that he did that but the people that did know that will think that's great I think even if they don't the image of Ted of anyone called Ted Nugent in a helicopter shooting wild pigs great I'm on board.

Yeah, it's a good image but Will it shame Sultan al-Jabba into into not

doing oil deals at the anti-oil conference.

I should point out that he's from the UAE, not the UEA, which is the University of East Anglia.

Oh, God.

That's why I was so baffled by this story.

I mean, I know that the standards have slipped in education and that it's basically up for grabs and run as a commercial business.

But I thought Sultan Al-Jabba had taken over the University of East Anglia, probably explaining the reduction in funds of its famous English literature department, and was converting it into

a thing based on the ownership ownership and acquisition of climate-unfriendly energy companies.

Now I realise the seven pages I've written about that are completely irrelevant.

Yeah, so this is the 28th cop.

And you know, we're all familiar with good cop, bad cop.

We're now reaching hypocritical cop, belated and ineffective cop, half-assed promises cop, and cop, who we're pretty sure was a very well-known criminal until very, very recently, which seems to be the one that we're in the middle of.

Now, I guess, I mean, in a way, I mean, holding it in Dubai is Bold?

Yeah.

I mean, I guess

it's just awful, isn't it?

Holding a conference about how to slightly mitigate the impact of the end of everything in a city that is a metaphor for the excesses and costs of our oil-addicted global economic system is almost,

I mean, it's almost waspishly appropriate, is it not?

Can you, is there a better place to hold a conference that is guaranteed to fail?

You're right.

I think that it's like when you...

Would you prefer to call someone someone racist after they behave racistly and then go I'm not a racist or would you prefer them to say yes I am a racist I just think if you know it is going to fail no one's going to agree it's going to achieve nothing hundreds of people are going to catch planes to get there emitting so much pollution into the air probably negating anything that they agree

So why not have it in the UAE?

Yeah.

Why not?

This is the kind of thing that, I mean, you know,

every other week I write a column for the Observer about the news.

And sometimes when David Mitchell's extra busy being in a play, I have to write loads in a row.

And by the end of about 10 weeks, I mean, I don't know how you do this because this kind of news.

Trying to think up jokes about it.

It makes me so depressed to having to deal with it and to having to read it.

And I mean, it's just, it's so awful.

I don't know how anyone involved can not be so ashamed of themselves that they just kill themselves.

It's just absolutely horrendous, isn't it?

And

that's why the young people feel utterly let down and are chaining themselves to bridges.

Because it's like a

smack in the face, isn't it?

To everyone.

It's just absolutely obscene.

And in fact, talking to Christmas number ones,

I did a benefit for

Just Stop Oil the other day, because I'm a terrorist, basically.

But a young woman who cried on the bridge was there.

Remember, she was ridiculed for crying on a bridge.

She chained herself to a bridge and then cried.

And all the papers go, oh, look at that young woman crying on a bridge.

Basically, if you're not chained to a bridge crying, you're not paying attention.

Everyone should be chained to some sort of structure emitting fluids from some orifice at this point.

But she's aiming for a Christmas number one.

Right?

Yeah.

In fact, she's done, she's really stuck it back to them in a really unself-conscious way, where she's made a video of, which includes footage and samples of her crying on the bridge which is the thing they all thought was ridiculous what's her name i'll write it down louise uh

while you're doing that stu half an hour ago i wrote this while trying to write jokes i wrote do you know andy i love doing this show i love hanging out love making gags and jokes with you but i find satire hard and it literally only occurred to me today is because it's all so depressing isn't it like we make jokes about these corrupt politicians ruining our waterways and aren't we smart for noticing and bringing it up but geez at the bottom of it all it's just sad.

We watch our literal life source be tampered with by the appointment of people who do not think they'll ever be affected and could not give a shit about the people who will.

There you are.

Yep.

I mean you're a cool.

I wrote exactly the same thing.

Exactly right.

It's Louise Harris and her song saying

called We Tried is now number two in iTunes downloads.

Which again, you'd think would be news wouldn't you but because it's because of who it is it's there's just it just won't get covered except in a derogatory ray by Sarah Vine at the Daily Mail yeah but she's number two and what I said to her when I met her was I went oh um I had a Christmas number one actually and she went who are you and obviously you didn't because of her but I said you need to try and concentrate all the sales in but actually it's number two anyway and that's without the advice that's even without my advice as a former Christmas number one

it's so that that means

loads of people don't think it's ridiculous that she cried on a gantry above the M25.

So that's what she calls herself.

She goes, I'm the girl who cried on the gantry above the M25.

There's one of the things about the just-up oil lot is they kind of don't, they don't, they're so believe it, they don't realise how they can, they make themselves sitting targets for Sarah Vine-type columnists by crying on gantries, but they have every right to do that, you know.

And so she's owned it, and you can, by a record of her crying on a gantry, set her to a kind of a reasonably nice sort of pop song.

And what you've got there is you've got

how media is consumed.

So written media in newspapers, that's been consumed by older people like us and we get outraged.

Younger people are online.

Younger people are streaming music.

Younger people are downloading music.

That's how they're consuming their news all online.

So it's just, you know, the people that read papers will be dead soon.

Yeah, so actually, although we're...

I mean, we all will.

Yeah, although we've both expressed very depressing thoughts about about the cruelty of Andy asking us to even try and write jokes about this.

He's a real priest.

What you're saying is young people...

they're getting different information from different sources and they feel differently about this.

And they're hopeful, they're activated, they're motivated.

I have nothing but faith in Gen Z.

I think they're extraordinary.

They're taken to the streets.

They're protesting all the time.

They put their bodies on the line.

It's very easy to, in

heated middle-class homes to go oh look at all they're you know if they wanted to um they're not getting their message to the right people it's like f you yeah they well they are clearly yeah they are yeah it's to each other yeah and they will grow and they will grow and they will grow and they will keep recruiting younger people and younger people and we will be phased out and I don't care if I'm if they even go you're probably a boomer I mean I'm the last generation of Gen X I'm nearly a millennial but if they want to write me off I I would rather be written off and watch them grow in their strength and their hope than have any of us have anything to do with it.

Do you think that's the most positive thing anyone's ever said on this normally quite cynical project?

I think it might be, actually.

And it goes very much against the

branding of this show, which is that the hopes of the young should be crushed.

I'm on antidepressants, question mark.

But I mean, it is.

Yeah, having my kids are teenagers, yours are about the same.

And there's that element where you want to expose them to the news, but also protect them from it, because it is so sort of unremittingly awful about the future.

And it has sort of reached a bizarre point as a parent where, you know, recently I found my son, my younger child,

alone in his bedroom selling illegal weaponry on the dark web.

I hate that one.

And I thought, well, at least he's not listening to the Today programme on Radio 4.

I thought, you know, that's now better.

Yeah.

He consumes news differently online, you know?

Objectively, we are a loss-making planet.

Yeah.

So, you know, long-term, destroying everything on it might actually make sound economic sense.

Well, it doesn't need to be lost-making.

I don't want to jump ahead because I know you've got an order for these stories, but there's.

I mean, we're on the first story.

Well, I know, but the axolotl, right?

Oh, yeah.

He's got, he's got, he wants to talk about this campaign to save the axolotl, which is a

lizard in amphibian thing in a lake in Mexico.

Mexican walking fish.

Yeah, Mexican walking.

Now, 20 years ago, there were 6,000 of them.

Now there's 36 in that lake.

But they're really popular because one of them was in Minecraft.

So people really like them.

But the problem that Axolotl has got, this is why nature is lost-making, is no one...

owns it as a brand or represents it.

So its image gets used everywhere by Minecraft.

If it has a character in Minecraft, it would be earning loads of money for nature.

So basically things from the the natural world need to have representation.

Ideally, by Avalon, we get very tough deals for them, as you know.

I don't see that.

I mean, so I mean, well, maybe we should talk about the axle.

But then, but then, see, nature's things from nature are used all the time to make money, but they don't get any money.

Like Disney has got Donald Duck.

Do ducks get any money from that?

No.

It's got Mickey Mouse.

Do mice get any money from that?

It's got a goofy.

Do goofies get any money?

No.

Right.

And it, so it's sort of, It's kind of, we kind of forget that we do monetize it all the time, but it doesn't, but rather like people that write for Marvel Comics, it doesn't get any money from the characters.

I think the problem is actually with, you know, they're trying to start a campaign in Mexico where they ask people to virtually adopt axolotls.

And I hope it is not a visual campaign.

Axolotls are one of the single ugliest animals on the planet.

Okay, look, I'm gonna just have to jump in here because, I mean, the axolotl, unquestionably, has a a distinctive vibe, particularly the leucistic axolotl,

which is a rather pasty-faced creature.

They're all pasty-faced.

Kind of plumpish, jowly-face with weird, sticky-out gills around the sides of its head that makes it looks like it's got fairly advanced axolotl pattern baldness.

I would say that's a strong look for the title.

And I resent you suggesting that

it isn't.

I would describe them as, and I'm sorry if you take this personally, an embalmed penis wearing a ruff.

Oh, right.

Actually, that was my online dating profile.

That was his nickname at school.

And that was just the teachers who called him that.

He's not out of Birmingham glee yet.

We had an axolotl as a pet.

Right.

Did you?

Of course we did.

In Australia.

Yeah, really.

They're deeply unusual family.

How you feed an axolotl, one, every day you assume they're dead.

They look dead and they don't move.

And then they move and you're like oh god oh no okay they're not dead what you do is you cut off a tiny bit of liver and you stick it on a wooden skewer and then you lower it down next to their mouth and they stay very still and then eventually they go they go

and that it is terrifying what a relief when ours died yeah an absolute relief yeah right that's monstrous with the thought of that they are prehistoric yeah yeah it is they're so ugly the authority is because people are asking them to adopt them.

They won't get adopted because they're not attractive.

Yeah.

Well, they become more popular because they are now stars of Minecraft.

I mean,

I'm not an axolotl, but I am adopted.

And I can tell you that when I was a kid, I was given this book about being adopted to explain to me...

So I always knew.

It was called Mr.

Fairweather and His Family by Sheila Katzinger, I think her name was.

Anyway, it was very good.

There's a scene in it where the mum...

and dad go to a big room full of babies and the woman from the charity goes, do you want that one?

And she goes, no, I don't think that's quite right for us.

And then they will come back another time.

And the next time they come back, she goes, we've got this one now.

And they go, oh, that's more likely we'll have that one, right?

So I was thought I'd been, I thought that you were actively chosen, that,

you know, your adoptive parents would choose you over another baby.

Like getting a mud crab at a Chinese restaurant, picking it out of a fish.

But my mum actually said that that wasn't the case, even though she'd given me this dishonest book.

And with the Church of England Children's Society, very good charity, it's called the Children's Society now, and I pay them money, you know, obviously as I should.

But

they just said, we've got one for you.

Just take it or leave it.

You have to have it.

So that's how you get rid of an axolotl.

You basically put it in an amphibian.

You could get any amphibian.

Right.

You might get a nice-looking frog or something.

But if you get...

the axolotl, you have to keep it.

Okay.

So

with this adoption is you don't get the axolotl.

You're sponsoring it.

Yeah.

But yeah, you buy it dinner, but no strings attached, apparently.

That's just pure adjustment.

You don't have to f ⁇ them afterwards.

Is that what you're saying, Andy?

Axel Rose, that was short for Axolotl.

Do you know?

No, it doesn't know that.

That's a f.

An anagram of it.

It's just an abbreviation.

Axolotl Rose.

His middle name was Lottl.

But I mean, it's been a tough third millennium for Axolotls.

Because,

I mean, it's brought a lot of it on itself, the Mexico-based amphibious evolutionary quirkster.

It can't be asked to grow up.

So it doesn't ever get rid of its gills like proper amphibians do.

And it's got this permanent smirk.

So it's been...

So basically, it just looks all the time.

You're saying it's insolent.

Like it's sardonically grinning.

Yeah, yeah.

Maybe taking a sideways look at the news in the lake that it lives in in Mexico.

So presumably just annoyed the other creatures that would then eat them to teach them a lesson.

Also, the destruction of their natural habitat over several hundred years didn't help either.

So,

but interestingly, it's renowned for its sensational ability to regrow limbs and organs.

Did your pet pet ever

were you tempted to like chop its leg off and see if it grew back?

I was tempted, but I didn't do it.

I was tempted to chop its head off.

No, I'm joking.

I didn't want to kill it.

It was just a weird thing to have in your house in a fish tank, always looking at you.

Like

a Mona Lisa

with less artistic integrity.

There was a story, Stuart, that I know caught your eye because you've always wanted to be either the UK Environment Secretary or the spouse of the UK Environment Secretary.

And

there's a well, I mean, as you mentioned earlier

on in the show, this potential conflict of interest with the wife of Steve Barclay, who was

I think you just have to say everyone is an interim now, interim environment secretary.

Yeah, oh, isn't it?

Well, it's it's another thing of what we were just talking about earlier, of the impossibility of trying to achieve anything about the environment when everything's so utterly corrupt.

I mean, we know that

in Australia this week,

the argument against privatising Australian water companies was made in Parliament by reference to what's happened here.

They basically said, if you want your rivers and sea to be just full of excrement, then do this, because that's what's happened in Britain.

We're now an international

yardstick of

awful political.

What's happened is everything was sold off to companies.

The companies

maxed out everything they could borrow against the companies to give all their shareholders money.

Now all the companies that own the water

system are in massive debt.

They haven't spent anything on infrastructure.

We've left the EU so there's no rules stopping them from

because of Brexit there's no rules from Brussels

about water quality or whatever.

So it's completely

just out of control.

And the Brexit thing's interesting because there's now

so much human executive in the English channel, there's a risk it would harden into a crust and migrants will be able to walk out.

But

you've got to do something about it.

You've got to stop the water companies continuing to pay massive share dividends to their shareholders whilst not investing in the infrastructure.

And while it's cheaper for them to discharge sewage into the rivers than it is to pay the fines.

And one of the people that's responsible for this whole story, the new Environment Secretary's wife,

works for, is on the board of Anglia Water that are being investigated for thousands of hours of sewage discharge.

And he, as Environment Secretary, should be holding her to account, which is bizarre because it means his day job

is to ask her to stop doing that.

But then at night they go home, how was your day, dear?

I investigated your company.

How was yours?

I tried to avoid being censured by your department.

It's absolutely idiotic.

It's like having Batman married to the Joker, isn't it?

Or

it's as if, I've got another one, as if Dick Dastardly had been married to Yankee Doodle Pigeon, which is a bit niche.

That's the word I always get it.

But I just think we need to put that out there, that no government can say they're serious about the international laughingstock of our pollution issue.

when the new environment secretary is married to the

head of one of those companies that are doing it.

They're not to be cooperated with.

They've got to be held to account.

Unfortunately, you know,

it is a big business issue as well, which the Tories aren't good at handling.

Well, it's just quite hard to monetise fishing turds out of rivers, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

There's not really a way around that, unless you can find that you can use them to fuel aircraft.

In which case, we've got a huge surplus here, if anyone can find any use for them.

Well, I like to think that we have

a race to the bottom inspiration reciprocity agreement where we are using you as an example of what would happen if we privatise our waterways and you have used our immigration system of shipping people off inhumanely to other countries where you've tried to do that with Rwanda and good on you for trying.

And hopefully they stick with that very useful, cheap, humane plan.

But

I think it's really sweet that the the Commonwealth are looking at how we can get to the bottom.

Sharing is caring.

Sharing is caring.

One final item of

news.

This involves the interim Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak,

who's found another creative way of getting absolutely f ⁇ k all useful done by cancelling a meeting with another Prime Minister because of what that other Prime Minister said he would like to happen to some 2,500-year-old bits of marble.

Incredibly creative from Sunak.

This regards the Parthenon sculptures,

which have been hiding in the British Museum, disguised as the Elgin marbles now, for over 200 years.

The Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis was due to meet Sunak in London this week, last week, but Sunak cancelled at the last meeting because Mitsotakis had said that the Parthenon sculptures should be returned to Athens, where they allegedly

were made in part of the most influential period of creative expression in European civilization's history.

I mean would say that would meet.

He would.

So I mean

they did offer the Greek Prime Minister the consolation prize of a meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden instead but they I mean that is a serious burn.

I mean we had a at home we ordered a new fridge freezer this week and it couldn't be delivered and it was really annoying because because they said they could deliver it and then they said they couldn't get it up the step to go in our back door so we I mean that was pretty annoying but at least the company responsible had the decency not to offer us a meeting with Oliver Dowden instead.

So it wasn't Oliver Dowden should be allowed near anything to do with culture right.

When he was culture secretary someone in an interview I saw someone said to him what's your favourite kind of theatre and he said commercial theatre like it's a genre like theatre that makes money is is a genre of you know

yeah I mean it's a difficult situation the The path, I mean, obviously the

I think they should go back to Greece.

Because the, I was reading about this French art thief, Stefan Breitweiser, he's called, and he didn't, he didn't sell,

he stole

two billion pounds worth of art.

right from uh and but he just kept it in his little nice little suburban house in his bedroom with his girlfriend and they used to like to wake up to the most beautiful things in the world he had no idea and he couldn't sell it anyway because it was so hot the stuff he'd got.

But he basically, that's kind of what we are, isn't it?

The British museum kind of place went around the world just taking loads of stuff during a period where we felt that other people didn't really understand what they'd got.

So, but how are they going to get it back?

That's the problem without causing a diplomatic row.

Well, I'll tell you what I did, right?

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, and I bought it in 1980 in a rather nice edition from Panther with a paperback with a slightly spooky picture of a weird man on the front.

And then I, when I moved, every time I've moved, I've put all my Ray Bradbury paperbacks in a line and I've realised it isn't there.

And it really depressed me.

And I tried to buy it, but that edition, I wanted the same edition that I'd read as a kid, but it wasn't anywhere, not even on eBay.

So it must have been quite a short print run of that.

Then,

in 2000, about 18 months ago, I was at Josie Long's in...

in Glasgow, the comedian Josie Long, where she lives with Johnny from Johnny and the Baptists.

And I saw a copy of it on the shelf there, and I realised that I remembered I had lent it to her in 2005 when I was touring with her.

And she never, and I thought, you know what?

It's been really embarrassing if I go, is that mine?

And you've still got it 17 years later.

So I took it off the shelf when she wasn't there, looked inside, it had my 12-year-old writing, and put it in my bag.

I didn't want to cause a fuss, and that was the best thing to do.

That's what Greece needs to do.

How do you do that with 17 statues made of mud?

But she doesn't even know that I've done that.

I mean, she'll know now.

Hope she listens.

But

that's what they've got to do.

They've got to get them out.

Because British people aren't going to notice they've gone, are they?

No.

No one's interested in culture here.

A little bit of chloroform on a cloth.

Security guard.

Over-the-mouth.

Backpack.

Yeah.

Very sturdy backpack.

Break them down.

Sure.

And then reassemble them at the other end.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I've got a little song

that Rishi Sunak could sing.

Okay.

I say Elgin marbles, you say Parthenon sculptures, I say international collections, you say stolen items, British museum, Greek history, let's call the whole thing off.

Christmas number one's got Christmas number one written all over him.

I hadn't followed that semantic issue.

Is that what they're they call them We call them the Elgin marbles after the man that stole them.

But they rightly call them after the place they were from.

Yeah, which is what they are.

And they call them international collections here.

We call them stolen items.

I say we like I'm Greek.

I'm absolutely not.

I'm married to a Greek family.

Oh, right.

Well, I don't think you should be allowed to comment on this.

You've got your two biased here.

It's true.

It's interesting that he would choose to make such a fuss about how we have to preserve this culture when every other aspect of the arts in Britain is being underfunded, destroyed, and dismantled.

Why is he suddenly giving, you know, like, we've smashed up the BBC, they tried to sell off Channel 4.

They underfund all theatre.

Everything gets pulled everywhere.

You're pulling arts teaching out of schools,

you're having, you know, and yet at the same time we must keep those old sculptures that we stole off the Greeks.

It's an attempt to create a culture war wedge issue as usual, isn't it?

Those bloody Greeks, they're trying to steal our Elgin Warbles.

Only Lishy Sunak can be trusted to keep

the Elgin Warwicks here.

I mean there are various arguments sort of put forward for why we shouldn't give them back.

Questions are posed such as if you give the Parthenon sculptures back, where will it end?

To which the answer is, I guess, I don't know, it might end there.

Each case is different.

But this was a public artwork.

As I said, one of the most influential creative periods in the history of European civilisation, inextricably linked to its location.

So even if

you generally think stolen things should stay where the people who've stole them have put them, as long as they were stolen a long time ago by a British person in a natty outfit.

I think the Elgin marbles is quite a unique

artwork.

Also, if Elgin hadn't filched the marbles in the first place, people say they'd be in a much worse state than they are now.

And I guess the answer to that is if British people had tried to build the marbles two and a half thousand years ago when the Greeks built them, they'd have been a small earthenware pot with a crudely drawn bison on it.

See, when you talk about the Elgin marbles here, you may as well be talking about Australia,

just the whole country.

You know,

if we hadn't stolen it and started a white colonisation,

what kind of society would you actually have?

A better one.

Which is better.

One that was meant to be there.

One that would belong there.

Yeah, well, what you would have had is one

where the ecosystem would held together better.

I mean, it's interesting, isn't it?

I am still astonished.

Like, even,

I feel like, and this might be wrong, even if you asked very right-wing, very racist Australian people, if you had to choose between a white person and an Aboriginal person from country, from the land, like from that part of Australia, that I think even them would say, I think the Aboriginal person would be able to maintain the land better.

I think, and I don't know why we don't push that harder at a governmental level.

Having said that, we did just vote as a nation, 60-something percent against Aboriginal people even having a voice in Parliament, not even a binding voice, just a voice.

Just a voice.

Amazing.

I think people say, oh, more people visit the British Museum than visit the Acropolis Museum, which was built specially for the

Parthenon marbles.

But if that was the only criterion, the British Museum would be giving them to the Louvre in Paris, which gets even more visitors than the British Museum, or possibly putting them on a pornographic website, which gets probably the most visitors of any cultural institution in the world and some of them are absolutely f ⁇ ing filthy.

Those Greeks were absolute animals.

They were filthy.

They absolutely loved it, didn't they?

But also the stats on that, not everyone visiting the British Museum sees the Parthenon sculptures.

I've never knowingly looked at them.

Really?

Yeah.

But they're in quite a grey...

sort of room.

So you think they're camouflaged then?

Also, I don't want to sound like if I go there quite a lot and look at specific things, but that's not one of the things I've looked at.

But also, you know, if you go to the British Museum, there's lots of stolen stuff you can look at, and you might go to see the Parthen Sculptures,

you might not.

But if you go to the Acropolis Museum and you get to the room that these marbles will end up in at some point, and you think, I can't be asked with this bit, then you have to question what you're doing, not just in Athens, but out of wherever you live.

That's a good point.

Yep.

Can we just say, have you seen the front of the Greek newspaper go?

Oh, no, I haven't.

Oh, it's just a picture of Sunak with something like, f off.

I think I saved it.

It's uh.

Well, the old saying goes, I fear the Greeks even when they're asking for what is rightfully theirs.

There it is.

That's the Greek newspaper, Greek national news for a picture of Sunak with f Q bastard written on it.

That is, that, and the sewage is our international standard.

That is not real.

It is B

Q bastard, the front of a Greek newspaper.

Oh there you go.

To be honest,

99.9% of all satire can be summarised in the words f keyboard.

Yeah, they play that's like

well I think that's probably a good note to end on, isn't it?

It's brightened my day.

It's worth it.

Right, it's plugs time.

The Bugle live tour is taking place in March, the 1st of March in Glasgow, 3rd of March in Norwich, the 9th in Cambridge, 10th in Birmingham, 16th at the Warwick Arts Centre, the 24th in Leeds, 28th in Edinburgh and 30th of March in Salford.

Buy your tickets to all of those

instantly.

Also, if you want to join the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme to help keep this show free, flourishing and independent, go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

Premium level voluntary subscribers not only get access to the new exclusive monthly Ask Andy show in which I evade all your questions but also the forthcoming Bugle vinyl record which we are recording next week

and well hopefully that'll also help us pay for Stuart's rider of a hundred flasks of cabbage soup which

I assume you're still used to before every gig

last time I toured with Andy in the early noughties I was on a severe weight loss diet involving cabbage soup.

My friend took cabbage cabbage soup in high school for her skin.

She drank a lot of cabbage water and her farts stang

and so loud.

So voluminous.

Is that the word I want to use?

Andy's just plugged all his work.

What are you doing, Felicitas?

I am actually going out to Australia next year for the festivals.

I'm doing Gold Coast, Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney, I think Perth as well.

I have no idea the dates.

They're probably not even on my website.

So just keep googling over a time if you've heard your

city's name.

I'll be doing a show on the Central Coast.

Next June, I will have a show come out called The Office on Amazon Prime.

I don't know if it will come out before then.

And apart from that, I'm just gigging around the UK.

I'm back on tour with

basically until April.

I'm at Gless Square Theatre, middle of December to middle of January.

And then I've got a benefit at the Hackney Empire for Homer's Charity on the 1st of February with Rob Bryden, Kevin Elden, me,

Thena Kugblenu, Rosie Holt, Fern Brady,

and Celia AB.

Goodbye.

Celia.

Yeah, Celia A.B., yeah.

She's great.

Thank you for listening, beautiful.

We are off next week, but we will be back with a couple more shows before Christmas.

Until then, we will have a sub-episode out next week.

I think Chris is nodding.

We have enough.

I mean, literally half of this episode.

How dear you.

So we'll be sort of back next week and fully back the following week.

Thank you for listening.

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.