Bonus Britain Bugle!

Hello Buglers, I am Andy Zaltzman.

Welcome to Bugle issue 4275 sub-episode A for Abought Mission to do a full bugle episode this week.

Why is there no full episode this week?

Well, I blame Time.

There isn't enough of it these days and it never stops, the remorseless little shitbag that it is.

Normally, I do reach a vague rapprochement with time, whereby it lets me record a bugle, with the trade-off that I don't then also have time to invent more dance moves.

But this week, no luck, the little clock-waggling life interfere simply ran out.

However, we do have a very special treat for you from our recent live show in London.

We dedicated a whole section to the extravaganza that is the United Kingdom in 2023, and you can hear it in full in this sub-episode.

Over the next 25 minutes, we will bring you the full smorgasbord of life and politics in Britain today.

Shoplifting, accusations of wokery, dishonest MPs, and the biggest question of all, what's better, Britain or vampires.

If you are a premium level voluntary subscriber to the Bugle, you will get to hear the first of our subscriber-only ask andly episodes in which I will field your questions with my version of answers.

If you're not currently a voluntary subscriber and would like to become one and thus elevate yourself to a higher plane of human life, go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button and thus you will help keep this nearly 16 year old podcast free, flourishing and independent as it enters the second 12th of its scheduled 192-year lifespan.

You will also earn the right to fire me questions for future R-Scandies, which will take place on a monthly basis.

Okay, I will now pass over to me, Chris Addison and Alice Fraser from just a couple of weeks ago, live in London's renowned London district.

Right, let's crack on.

We have the best thing ever competition.

Round one clash.

There's yes, you've got to get through 22 rounds to win

from all 1.3 trillion things in the universe.

And

we started it last November already through to round two, the enchilada, the minibus magnetic whiteboards and sliced bread

Although didn't have quite as comfortable a round one victory as his reputation suggested it would

pushed surprisingly hard by an episode of the 1980s cop drama Cagny and Lacey who'd have thought that But we have what a clash we have for you today here at the Bugle Live.

We have the unicycle versus Britain versus vampires versus the m6 motorway

And we'll even let you the audience have a vote at the end.

I mean, I think we can rule out the unicycle straight away.

Sorry if I offend any professional unicyclists in, but.

Yeah, but it's obviously half as good as a cycle.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, unicycling has been ruled out in the next two Olympicses.

Olympics.

Yes.

I think you'll find it's Olympices.

They were trying for straight unicycle racing and unicycle jousting as a combat sport, sadly.

I mean, I'd watch it.

But

The M6.

We've got any M6 fans in?

Chris?

Yeah.

M6 till I die, man.

Yes.

On the M6.

Unfortunately, since they turned into smart motorways, that's...

Yeah.

Because

you grew up in Manchester in a service station.

Knutsford services.

Grew up in Knotsford Services.

And, you know, I've got to say, you know,

we had our good times, our bad times.

Sometimes Sometimes when the boys from Sandbatch came up, we'd have a rumble.

But

it was all going well for us till T-Bay came along and then took all the glory.

But sadly, I think the M6 is out of contention.

I don't know if you've ever been on the M6 as a...

It's Britain's longest motorway, Alice.

230 miles, as an Australian.

Can you imagine a road 230 miles long?

Yeah, that's my driveway.

But sadly, it was voted Britain's shittiest

motorway recently.

I don't know if you saw this news, it came bottom of the motorway popularity league.

Genuinely they

specs.

No.

I mean it's a famous motorway.

It's famous for hosting the Charnock Richards service station.

Only a couple of fans in I'd have thought there'd be more.

Yeah.

Yeah, well exactly.

Also it's been used by a range of celebrities, the M6, ranging from David Beckham and rock band Def Leopard

to former monarch the Queen

who did Birmingham to Carlisle in a horse and cart in under two hours.

Finging sensational.

She was absolutely magic.

And the children's TV pioneer Werzel Gummage, the former scarecrow famously snapped by paparazzi in a stretch limousine with fellow TV character Supergran en route to a secret late district hotel assignation in the 1980s.

But the M6 has sadly fallen on hard times, particularly because they turned some of it into smart motorways, which have proved very unpopular with motorway fans, who've not responded positively to its combination of annoying, dangerous, unpredictable and condescending.

Because it turns out that people sitting stationary in a traffic jam going at zero miles an hour do not appreciate being told that the speed limit has been dropped from 70 miles an hour to 60 miles an hour because of f ⁇ ing traffic.

But as Britain's bottom-ranked motorway, the M6 now faces a relegation play-off against the top-ranked A-road, the A303.

And

if it loses, there are fears that the M6 could tumble down the road leagues without the funding of being a motorway and end up as a barely drivable one-lane country road within five or six seasons.

It'll be like the M17 all over again.

The M17 you say, I haven't heard of that.

Well, exactly.

It's now just buckets close and unloved cul-de-sac in the outskirts of Snutterbridge.

Sad to see.

So I think the M6 is out of it, which leaves us with Britain versus vampires.

Now, which is better?

Let's take a quick straw poll before we show you the evidence, the current evidence.

Who thinks Britain is better than vampires?

And who thinks vampires are better than Britain?

To put it in context, you're asking that question in a subterranean lair.

So well, it's not looking good for Britain.

We could be knocked out in the first round.

Wouldn't be the first time.

I wouldn't know.

The 2014 World Cup all over again.

Too soon.

So, well,

let's start with Britain, which is

having a little bit of a troubled millennium so far, I would say.

It's

not started tremendously well.

But then the last one didn't start that well for us either.

Within, what, seven decades or stuff, we've been taken over by the Normans, and things have never really recovered, to be honest.

And, well, the state of Britain at the moment, we are facing another epidemic.

According to the boss of John Lewis, so soon after the COVID epidemic, we're now facing a shoplifting epidemic.

There's no vaccine as of yet,

and we don't know whether to shut down or go the Swedish route this time, who knows?

Retail fests are up by 26% last year, and so soon after the museum lifting scandal as well.

It's very concerned.

I mean, is this just our natural heritage

coming out, you know, our great national tradition of nicking shit?

Listen, as Napoleon once said, Britain is a nation of shoplifters.

I do feel that these modern shoplifters lack ambition, right?

Okay, you've shown us that you can half-inch nappies and a pack of batteries, fine, but big deal.

They're light, they're easy to carry.

You can't just keep nicking the same things.

You've got to move on.

You've got to keep challenging yourself, or you really don't grow as a shoplifter.

Maybe move on to like multi-packs of own brand lager, a bit more unwieldy, a bit more of a challenge.

Once you've aced that, how about going into Wix and trying to nick a sink?

Are we?

Brazenly walk to the back of an optician's and lift one of those machines that puffs air into your eye for no other reason that I can see than for the amusement of everyone who works there.

Incidentally, just as an aside, have you ever had sex with an optician?

They're very needy.

It's so off-putting.

Are you enjoying this?

Is this good?

How about now?

And now?

And about now?

What if I turn this over?

How about now?

I saw my optometrist the other day, which made him a bit redundant.

Just to hold you on this encouraging shoplifters to up their game role here.

Are you slow walking us into the British Empire?

Worked last time.

Shots have tried a number of anti-shoplifting measures, including offering free coffee to police officers and having a security guard in a pantomime cow outfit wandering up and down the meat aisle.

And that's more to make people feel guilty than to stop them picking stuff.

But

just one security guard in a cow outfit.

Is it the bottom or the top?

Well, I mean, apparently it's cutting into the profits here of Primark, famous fast, fashion, slow morals brand.

It's been hit with this rash, not, Not, I mean, it's to be expected that it would have a rash, but not from its workers this time, or from the horrible chemicals with which they impregnate the cloth they use.

But

I feel like I would like to victim blame Primark here for devaluing labour so much that this feels like a victimless crime.

Have any of you in here ever shoplifted anything?

What?

What did you go for?

Chocolate.

Chocolate.

Chocolate.

Right, arrest this man.

Well, the thing is, I mean, you've got to, because we have, it's not just shoplifting.

We need to set an example.

We've got a great problem with

big companies not paying enough tax, obviously, corruption in politics.

But we have trickle-down economics, but we have trickle-up morality.

And as long as this guy is nicking chocolate bars from the corner shop or from Sainsbury's or whatever, as long as anyone here ride a bike?

Yeah, and have you ever, you right, have you ever gone through a red light?

Liar.

You know, until people like you are obeying traffic signals, how can we expect our politicians

not to go anything?

You know, we have to set an example that they will follow.

So,

anyway, I mean,

moving on, so one of the big stories of the last week or so.

Hang on, before we move on, I think this bears saying, right, because you're being very down on shoplifting here, but I think it's just good to see new skills developing.

You know, it does seem like finally we're seeing signs of the new Britain emerging that we've been promised post-Brexit.

I do feel that shoplifting is all very well, but if we're going to have a proper British post-EU crime wave, we need to be incentivising highwaymen.

That's the next step.

Just haven't seen that many around in the last couple of centuries.

Fortunately, all the roads are going to shit.

And if fuel inflation carries on the way it's going, pretty soon the cheapest way to get around will be by horse-drawn carriage.

So conditions will be pretty ripe for their return.

That's going to have the knock-on beneficial effect of reviving the British cape and three-cornered hat industries, not to mention revivifying the dying craft of hanging bodies in gibbets by the roadside.

Sure, schools are falling down, but do we need to rebuild them?

Couldn't we just encourage urchins, sorry, children to form gangs of singing pickpockets run by men in really bad prosthetic noses?

It's the British way.

Another problem we're facing as a nation now is obviously, and this isn't from me, this is from none other than our Deputy Prime Minister.

Yes, does anyone know who he is?

It's Oliver Dowden.

He is Deputy Prime Minister.

We now have Grant Shaps as our last line of defence against invasion as our Defence Secretary.

Oliver Dowden, oh there's Shapsi.

We'll come to him in a bit.

Oliver Dowden, Deputy Prime Minister, has warned that we need to be clear-eyed in this country about the threat that China poses to this nation.

This is, however, the same Oliver Dowden who claimed that the West as a whole was being weakened.

He said this last year, was being weakened not by

its endemic corruption, not by the short-termism of its attitude to the world, but by some people wanting to use different pronouns.

So he doesn't always throw his darts of blame into the treble 20 of truth.

But

he's very worried about the threat China poses because they've infiltrated none other than the Conservative Party,

an alleged spy within the Tory Party.

I don't know how in the Tory Party they tell the difference between

a potential spy and a useful billionaire.

It's...

You know, it's very much like trying to tell the difference between a penguin and a bollard when you're driving across Antarctica in a snowstorm.

It's so...

They look so alike sometimes.

Are you terrified about the you know, I mean, there could be Chinese is anyone in here tonight a Chinese spy?

Yeah, so we've got about the same number of shoplifters as Chinese spies in today.

You worried about it?

You know, the guy who was arrested has protested his innocence, which, to be fair, is what a spy would do.

But so many of these.

Yeah, it's also what someone who isn't a spy would do as well.

So that makes it so hard.

Potato, potato, Andy.

So many of these sleeper agents spend so long undercover before they're activated that even they don't know they're spies.

It could be any of us here.

Well, not Andy, because he's very clearly a British agent tasked with spying on the former Empire.

Went to Oxford, head for remembering numbers and stats, a cover job that legitimately allows him to travel the Commonwealth.

Tick, tick, tick.

But anyone else could be a Chinese spy and not even know it.

So in case you're worried it might be you, here's a quick quiz to help you determine whether you are in fact a Chinese spy.

Okay, question one.

You are served spring rolls in a restaurant.

Do you A, lick your lips and eat them greedily?

B, worry that you're going to fill up on this shit before the real deal arrives?

Or C, immediately dismantle them and check inside for instructions.

You and your partner decide to build a fancy middle-class garden building.

Is it A, an office?

B, a gym?

C, a nine-storey pagoda with a big gong in it.

Where do you feel you are most likely to encounter a waving cat?

A

Pixar movie.

B, one of the many animals do the funniest thing Instagram accounts you follow.

C, the massive collection of white porcelain ones all round your kitchen.

Finally, what are your feelings about pandas?

A, they're cute.

B, you're ambivalent.

C, if you see another one of those fluffy bastards eating the bamboo out of your garden again, you're going to run at it with a Chang sword

if the answers are mainly c you may want to check in with mi5 on the way home

um interesting that the uh

the graphics went halfway through that bit are we what does that tell you yeah

you didn't put money in the meter

i mean how is that a very aging joke man

do you think we should be because i mean you look at the state of britain should we be flattered that china can still be asked to send even a half-assed 25-year-old f ⁇ ing spy to do some basic espionage on us?

I mean, it's always nice that someone's interested, isn't it?

I guess so.

There are a lot of concerns about Chinese influence in our politics, with the danger that it could result in infrastructure projects being completed on time

within budget.

Albeit with certain human rights issues in the lay-bys.

But British scientists are hopeful that a new home testing kit will soon be available to help you tell if you're not a spy.

I've got a prototype of it here.

You just have to breathe into it.

You wait five minutes for the result.

And then if you scuttle straight off to a secret room and send a message to Beijing and Morse code on an encrypted phone line about your test result, you are probably a spy.

So thank you.

There's another thing Britain is under threat from.

And this isn't from Oliver Dowden.

This is from Grant Shaps, the aforementioned Grant Shaps.

Let me introduce him properly.

Grantolomeu Shapuchadnezzar, slayer of foes, bulwark against the forces of evil, clawhammer of never-ending justice, defence secretary of the ironclad heart.

I like that in these two pictures on the left-hand side he looks like he's about to do the thing that he's regretting on the right-hand side.

You might be able to see that the detail here,

that's his name back.

that says Michael Green, isn't it?

So that was

one of his alter egos.

Does that mean that he's a spy?

Well, I think he's beyond the level of incompetence to be recruited for hub.

But he is our Defence Secretary, and he's warned that our entire British defence industry is threatened by ethical investing.

That pause and confused laughter is the correct response.

So basically,

if you bank ethically or invest your money ethically rather than in British defence companies, if you choose not to allow your money to fund the slaughter of children, you are risking British safety.

I mean, he says it's poses a greater threat worse than the Romans, the Normans and the Vikings.

He's not said that, but he might as well have done.

ethical investment I mean how great a threat is people applying morality to economics well I mean I just love that it's a warning rather than the exact thing that people intended to do when deciding to invest ethically like this is what voting with your wallet looks like if people wanted to invest in weapons development or the British defense industry they would the fact that a huge chunk of the British economy and foreign policy are based on creating and selling weapons and then selling the solutions or counter weapons to those weapons is maybe the thing that people people might have the moral objection to.

It just seems genuinely inconceivable to these people that a moral objection might not be overridden by an economic argument.

But to be fair, it is a lot of money that they're talking about.

Just think about how many children's hospitals we could build with the money we'd make selling weapons to people who want to bomb children's hospitals.

And have you considered that those children are so foreign while our children are so local?

I thought you woasters were into local produce.

And speaking of local produce, are you suggesting weapons should be built and developed overseas?

Think of the carbon footprint.

Are you suggesting that applying capitalist business growth incentives to a constant escalation of weapons technology, even the absence of your nation being actively at war with anyone, might itself cascade into perverse incentives to cultivate or create foreign wars?

Oh, that's absolutely what you're suggesting.

I see.

But have I mentioned money, though

and how delicious money is

I mean a lot of it is just to do with branding because I have these arm fairs at the XL every year or every couple of years or something they are the next one is to make it a bit more exciting for kids who might end up working for the arms trade they're rebranding it as little Johnny Bang Bang's boom bam bastic death tech jamboree which should get them

So I think that's better, isn't it, Chris?

I mean, it's all about, you know, it's just about projecting the right image, isn't it?

Well, look, first of all, being lectured by Grant Schapps on ethics is like being lectured by David Beckham on the evils of tattoos.

Secondly, defence companies need funding.

Are they not the richest bastards around?

Do they not make Jeff Bezos look like some bloke who runs a corner shop?

What investment could they possibly need?

But if we're going to take it at face value, this is about the ESG ratings of defence companies.

ESG is a measure of the sustainability of a company and its output.

And the letters ESG stand for environmental, social social and governance.

So to be fair, let's consider the defence industry in each of those terms.

Environmentally, could not be more sound.

It is one of the few industries actively tackling the issue of overpopulation.

Admittedly, it's doing that in quite a localised way, concentrating on the number of people still alive in, say, the Donbass or Syria, but you have to start somewhere.

From a social point of view, the industry really brings people together, often in mass graves or to memorial services, but that's just quibbling.

And

they are incredibly inclusive.

They're as happy to provide the means of massacring people of colour as they are white people, perhaps even more.

Most of their work currently is being done in Africa, and there aren't many companies you can say that about that don't either involve China trying to extract raw minerals or the staff wondering who should be CEO now at Yevgeny Prishgotin's been falling out of a plane.

And as for governance, not unlike the current British cabinet, I don't really know what that means, so I'm going to ignore it.

See,

we need to crack on a bit much.

Well, just quickly, there was, I mean, a Brexit story.

I don't know if you're enjoying, have you been enjoying Brexit so far?

Don't worry, it'll come good in the next, what, thousand years, I think?

Like Hitler's Reich.

Reich.

Which also had a few teething problems in the first decade or so.

But Brexiteers are very cross at the moment because at the last night of the problems, the most British of ceremonies, people were waving EU flags.

And there's been.

There's been

outcry, according to

the newspaper reports.

I mean, this is, well, it's fucking hilarious, isn't it?

I mean, is this because have you found any good benefits from Brexit so far?

Because I mean, I was strongly opposed to Brexit

for numerous reasons, for social reasons, economic reasons.

I thought it was better for Britain to stay part of the EU.

And I wanted my children to grow up the same opportunities to travel and work in Europe that I never really took advantage of.

But that said, I'm a British political comedian.

It's going to give me six decades of material, so I did vote leave.

But so,

I mean, what have you found?

What have been the good bits for you so far?

Could you, Chris?

And when you're editing this together, could you just put the sound of tumbleweed at this point?

That would be great.

When I read this story,

and I thought absolutely everyone involved in it can f right off.

Every single one of them needs to get a fing grip.

There's actual shit going on that requires our attention and energy.

And Battle of the Smuggos is not it.

Jesus H Christ, the H stands for Hebrew.

They keep that quiet.

I'm not unsympathetic to the Remainer cause.

Remainer through and through me.

If you cut me open, I'd complain that it's a bad time to cut me open as AE waiting times have really gone up after Brexit.

Seriously, guys, what did you think that would show?

The crowd at the last night of the proms are a bit remainer-y.

It's like showing the crowd at a Metallica concert are likely to have later-life life hearing issues.

All it did was get Harvey Proctor and Isabel Oakshot and all those other PERMA furious lather merchants frothed up again.

Honestly, it felt like being a young parent again.

We just got them to sleep.

Why would you wake them up?

What is their problem anyway?

They won.

Why are they so cross all the time?

They don't need geopolitical solutions to imagined problems.

They need any two of a therapy B a hug and C a restraining order

The big three I mean you say the NHS waiting list that's actually there's been some good news on the waiting list

Well, they have gone through the psychologically crucial 7.7 million barrier because at 7.6 million you can see yourself being treated within 30 years but 7.7 million just feels so distant

But two out of five people have said that their health worsened whilst they were on an NHS waiting list and this is good news for me because it surely means that making people wait is flushing out the three out of five who are perfectly fine.

You know if your health is getting worse that's simply proof you do genuinely need treating.

So we just need to rebrand it.

It's not a waiting list it's just an illness confirmation list.

That's the um

and um yeah so much of it is it's all about it's all about you know how you use language.

I mean there's a lot of euphemisms.

We talked about inventory shrink with shoplifting and you know what some people call a weaponized instrument of fear that can unleash mayhem on an uncontrollable whim, eyes burning, mouth frothing, bursting with murderous intent,

thirsting to slake its bloodlust for the taste of raw flesh, other people call a doggie.

Thank you for listening to this sub-episode.

Do strap in for the first Ask.

Andy coming your way very soon, which will feature questions submitted at the live show by the live audience.

We will be back with a regular episode next week featuring Nato Green and Alice Fraser.

Until then, goodbye and do join the voluntary subscription scheme.

Seriously, it keeps the show alive and fire us your questions for future Ask Andes.

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.