The Crowd Heckled 'Sexy!'

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello!

Welcome, hello, hello, hello.

Thanks.

That's the that is the correct way to respond, okay.

So we've got to get going with the show now.

Thank you very much.

Welcome to the Bugle Live.

This is the Bugle Live Show here, once again at the Les Square Theatre, doubling up as issue 4274 of the Bugle, of the world's last bulwark against the dangerous, suffocating grasp of truth.

I am Andy Zoltzman, and if 400 randomly selected people in a London theatre were to describe me, they would probably say

I heard it.

We all heard it.

Sorry.

I've had most heckles in my time, but not that.

We are here on the 16th of September 2023 meaning it is the International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer

The crowd seems to be a little bit split on the ozone layer some fans some skeptics to me what a layer that is the ozone layer easily one of my favorite layers of all time doesn't make a big fuss about it just gets on with the job a terrific little oxygen allotrope as well ozone

sweeps up all that dangerous ultraviolet light like a podcast host at a breakfast buffet sorry am i sharing too much?

I've actually got some ozone and oxygen because they're both made of oxygen.

This is a bit of ozone.

This is a bit of oxygen here.

The difference, there's three little bits of oxygen in it.

Sorry,

am I confusing you now?

Anyway,

should it be called the ozone layer?

There are under 10 parts per million of the ozone layer actually made of ozone.

So should we, but then again, I do guess I call myself a comedian.

Who, Chris, did you?

Who wrote this this week?

We do have a special bugle appeal.

If you have any spare ozone, please put it in the ozone collection bucket on the way out at the end of the show.

And on Monday, Chris and I are taking a hot air balloon 20 kilometers up in the sky, where we will release the ozone back into the wild.

Also on this day, 16th of September 1959, the first successful photocopier, the Xerox 914,

there is.

What a photocopier that is.

It was

introduced to the world in a televised demonstration in New York.

The inventor Chester Carlson thrilled the watching world and expanded the limits of human communication by photocopying his arse, then

giggling to himself, pulling his trousers back up and saying, nothing is ever going to be the same again.

Prior to Carlson's invention, the most efficient way of people fulfilling the basic human urge to make copies of their arses was by chiseling them in marble.

Michelangelo and office Christmas parties was a lethal combination.

or by sitting on a canvas covered in wet paint.

But that made it difficult to do that unnoticed without people saying, You've got paint all over your trousers.

So, this is a huge breakthrough for human technology.

Now, as always, a section of the bugle is going, Where?

It's going where, London?

I still enjoy that.

This week, we have a special

strong word.

We have a special.

This week in the bin, Prime Minister's Books.

Now, we exclusively revealed on last week's bugle that Liz Truss is threatening to publish a book

about the 2.7% of a full electoral term that she managed to heroically endure as Prime Minister.

She will go through with the publication unless her demands are met.

Truss,

to be fair to Truss, she is still a medal contender for best Prime Minister of the decade so far.

And we've had exclusive

pre-release copies of her books.

He's apparently going to argue that her downfall was partly due to there being too much support for the global left.

And as you will, of course, recall only too clearly from, what, about a year ago, it was a cabal of card-carrying commies in the 1922 Committee of Backbench Tory MPs.

who quite Sovietically and with Marxism aforethought scuttled her dreams of an economy of eternal chaos.

But she's not the only Prime Minister bringing books out, of course.

Theresa May, there is The Abuse of Power, which is sadly not a heart-rending account of the weight shaming of former Indian spin bowler Ramesh Power.

Nor, sadly,

Folding Shades.

This is why I can't do club gigs.

Nor is it a biomechanical explanation of how the darts career of multiple World Championship winner Phil the Power Taylor was all down to his strong core musculature, the abuse of power would no doubt have been a scintillating read.

If you can't be asked to read the whole thing, luckily, I've got this new book summarizing device on my phone that can condense all books into six words.

I'll just scan it in and I'll tell you what this book says.

Right, I've got a reading.

Geez, that guy, what a cunt.

So, um, that's uh

dragged it out to 80,000 words.

He's on a winner.

Um,

Boris Johnson himself is actually also writing a book about his period in office, a book that will put the me, the I, another I, another me, another I, one more me, and two final I's into Memoir of My Time as Prime Minister.

Um,

and um, former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison is publishing a children's book.

Chris, have you got the cover up there?

This is the um

there it is, uh, got a copy of it here.

When Ona Wildebeeste goes for a graze, no, he's trying to humanise his.

Have you got any Australians in?

And he's got Morrison fans in?

There you go.

So

it's a lovely picture book.

He's trying to humanise himself, but the book does suggest that he still hasn't developed the humanity that he was missing as a politician that might help him succeed more as a children's author.

I'll just read you a bit now.

As Louis the Lion's teeth sank ever deeper into her oh so wildebeest beastian flesh, the pain and imminent inevitability of death scalded the synapses of her wildebrain.

Winona's mind flashed back through her life.

She remembered the time she'd seen her mother Wilmer clawed down, slain and disemboweled by Louis' uncle Levi,

and when her brother Wilfrid was shot in cold blood for sport by an American tourist called Derek from Texas.

And as Winona's final wildebreath spluttered into the hot African air, droplets of her bloody desperation speckling against the sunset of the day and of her life, she emitted a final wildewimper of ultimate agony, her inescapable solitude echoing off the canopy of the TV documentary Cruise Truck.

The last words when Nona heard with a director saying, Yeah, that's the money shot,

and an ecstatic David Attenborough cackling, You never get tired of it.

Fill up my flask while it's still warm.

Louis roared as he finished his num-nums.

Yuck, he said leoninely, I don't even fing like Wildebeest.

I prefer zebra.

Zoe, the zebra's ears pricked up.

F, said Zoe, breaking into another oh-so stripey run.

I fing hate my life.

So

that's Scott Morrison's new career.

And well, on that subject, it's time to meet our two guests, one of whom is from the other side of the equator.

Please welcome the southern hemisphere's very own Alice Fraser.

When she walks, she moves so fine.

Welcome like a fun lady.

Welcome Alice.

Welcome.

What have you got in there?

I've got about half a child Andy.

About 50% of a baby on its way.

Do they.

Because

obviously you're Australian, they grow from the other way up, don't they?

Yeah, oh no, you just print out like one limb a month and then you assemble it later.

Are we learning?

How was the Edinburgh Festival?

I was a delight, it was really lovely.

I really enjoyed it, particularly the part where I said, I'm not going to be back next year, and everyone went

well.

I haven't been back for four years, and the number of people I've heard say, I wish you were in Edinburgh this year, is one.

That's my wife.

Anyway,

joining us today, still languishing outside the top 1,000 in the men's tennis rankings, which is bad news for him, but good news for us.

Otherwise, he'd probably be trying to pick up ranking points in a sparsely attended tournament in Tashkent.

Instead of which, he's right here right now.

It's Chris Addison.

Can I just say how offensive I find at how much taller your microphone is than mine?

You can't be offended by biology.

Not in this day and age.

Good night.

How are you, Chris?

I'm good.

When does Richard Herring get here?

Yeah, I'm great.

Thanks, Andy.

Really good.

I think it's time for top story this week.

Saturday put a bit more effort into that this time.

I'll never do it again, I'm sorry.

Space, the final frontier, or just a waste of space.

We'll try and answer that question for you now.

It is, of course, one of the oldest questions facing our planet ever since the dinosaurs ruled the world, is why are the people in charge such idiots?

And another question, the dinosaurs never got to the bottom of that.

Another question is, is there anyone else out there?

Certainly a question I asked myself when I did my first show at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2001.

The Duck of Doom.

And sold one ticket on Duke.

And I asked for my money back.

And this week we've been turning the Bugle telescope skywards to find out if there might be something, anything, anywhere, that might come to save us from ourselves.

And the James Webb Space Telescope...

I mean, that deserved a woo.

That is an amazing piece of technology.

But they gave it such a boring name that no one gives a shit about it.

Big Jim has been snooping on the aliens for us

and it might have discovered evidence of life on a faraway planet just a million billion kilometers away.

It's one of the ones in the top corner there, I think.

The 20-month-old telescope has found evidence of dimethyl sulfide, a chemical known to be emitted by living creatures, and it's just 120 light years away.

So I guess it's going to take a while to get confirmation.

Well, I mean, it is suspected dimethyl sulfide, which can only be generated on Earth by phytoplankton.

So options are the potential traces are wrong.

They've got it wrong.

Their instruments are wrong.

Or there are other ways than phytoplankton to make dimethyl sulfide or we are only a couple of hundred million years away from sentient life.

New friends.

That billionaire Brian Johnson will live to meet our new friends.

I have to be honest, I'm so antisocial.

That is about the rate at which I make new friends.

I mean, it's interesting, it's exciting because the possible phytoplankton, or mitoplankton, as I like to call them,

are on what they call a Goldilocks planet, which is so-called because it's full of porridge.

You know,

Mama Bear's bowl has to have been quite wide and flat for it to have gone cold while baby bear's bowl stayed the right temperature.

Because normally, like, that's the law of thermodynamics, right?

A smaller bowl would get colder at a quicker rate, and presumably they're all served in the same.

They might have had a motley collection of them, but they might even have a double-walled bowl for keeping porridge warm, but only one of them.

But oh, yeah, only daddy gets that one.

Right.

The bloody patriarchy, honestly.

Anyway, the science journalists are calling the traces of dimethyl sulfide alien farts, which confirms my belief that scientists talk to science journalists like their six-year-olds

who need to be lured into eating their information vegetables through the medium of toilet humour, sexual innuendo, or fairy tale.

To be fair, my nearly two-year-old loves porridge but refuses to eat it unless you're telling her the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, which explains why I've thought too much

about bowl size.

Chris, I think I'm right in saying you are the only Bugle co-host who has been abducted by aliens.

Well, I'm the only one who has refused to sign the NDA

at the time.

This obsession with finding extraterrestrial life is the giveaway to me if you're looking for what the whole point of the James Webb Space Telescope is.

There's no way that a space telescope named after a man who worked for NASA in the 1950s is anything other than a project to find sexy lady aliens and spy on them when they're getting ready for bed in their underwear.

They keep making ever more sensitive telescopes, Jodrell Bank, the Hubble, the James Webb.

Clearly, they're not going to stop until they develop one that can actually see through the bras of the sexy lady aliens.

When they say that they've discovered microbes on the planet, do they mean bacteria?

Or does microbes mean the kind of really short robes that you get at Victoria's Secret?

And I must deny your assumption that the boring name has led it to be sort of unremarked upon.

It's a highly controversial name, the James Webb Space Telescope.

It's named after a highly divisive figure in NASA's early administration whose views and actions would be regarded by many people today as unacceptable.

It's posted some very troubling content on Twitter and when called out just doubled down on it, although in its defence it did write some very funny episodes of Father Ted.

I may be getting confused, but that's the gist.

So, um but but the m it's not just America, the Mexican Senate has been hearing uh testimony on ex on extraterrestrial uh life.

Have you got a picture of the uh the alien that's um

that there

now who thinks that is an actual alien?

Certainly not the man who's looking far off to the right.

Like, nobody touches it.

It's clearly made of papilla-mâché.

This was paraded in front of the Mexican Senate.

Two shriveled bodies who claimed to be alien remnants from almost 2,000 years ago.

The guy who presented them is called Jaime Mossan.

I don't know if I pronounced that right, or Jamie Mosan.

but he was a sports journalist who has become a UFO enthusiast.

I mean, I can see myself going the same way, to be honest.

He described it as the queen of all evidence.

In other words, it's not going anywhere anytime soon.

And objectively, it's completely absurd.

So, I mean,

were you convinced by this, Chris?

Well, no, because the science community has rebuffed the claims by pointing out that they're bollocks.

Surgical grade horseshit.

Horseshit isn't used that often in surgery to be fair but when it is you do need the really good stuff.

So if these mummies are not alien what are they?

Well let's look at the evidence.

They're three foot tall.

They found them in Peru.

They're Paddington aren't they?

He's hunted and killed Paddington and Aunt Lucy and presented their desiccated corpses to the Mexican Senate.

There's no point trying to deny it.

They claim that they found eggs in the abdomen.

Yeah?

Anything else?

Because it sounds to me like you're trying to stop us noticing that behind the eggs is a marmalade sandwich.

This has the makings of an international incident which could very easily get out of hand.

There is precedent.

We don't want a repeat of the great wombel wars of the 19th century, when Britain took up arms against Prussia after it became clear that Bismarck had been capturing and farming wombles to use their pelts as trims for Kaiser Wilhelm I's summerweight pajamas,

sending Prussia's minority wombel population underground, then overground, but never wombling free.

The war was harsh, a lot of stuffing was spilt.

Several crack battalions of Teletobe infantry were massacred, a tragedy later blamed on the difficulty in maintaining disciplined battle communications when all you can say is uh-oh.

Both Trumpton and Balamory were razed to the ground by Prussian artillery, and to this day, conspiracy theorists argue the whole thing was a false flag operation to cash in on the reconstruction organized by Bob the Builder.

The war dragged on for years and years.

It might have been over much more quickly were it not for the fact that children's characters aren't allowed to work after 7 p.m.

Never again, Andy.

Never again.

Oh, the womblanity.

And that's where that famous Bismarck saying, blood, iron, and goggly eyes came from.

I mean,

were you impressed by that?

Do you think they're genuine aliens, those 2,000-year-old little...

Is Is this a trick question?

No.

Because I think if you look at those and you think they're real aliens, then you should get a job pretending those are real aliens.

Like I just.

Let's move on now.

Chris, let's have a sting for the next second.

There we go.

Romance news now, and the date of the year

has taken place.

It's a superb piece of audience participation.

Over the last week or so, we have had the, well, a bromance bubbling to the surface between

two men who maybe struggle for meaning in life.

Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un.

The love that dare not speak its name

have met in...

I mean...

Feel the chemistry.

Is it the love that dare not speak its name because it's going to be arrested and jailed?

This is, yes, I mean, it's international politics' least relatable double act.

They met for a chat in a Cosmodrome this week, as you do on a first date.

North Korean famine and repression fran Kim, Fan Kim called his country's relationship with Russia the number one priority of our foreign policy.

And that is number one of a list of zero.

Both men riding high in the world's top baddies rankings, of course, also discussed North Korean agriculture.

What a date.

And Kim Jong-un, the yun, of course, is short for Uncle Slayer.

The

13-time winner of the relative you least want to see turning up at a family gathering award,

said that North Korea and Russia will stand together in the fight against imperialism, at which point Putin said, for f ⁇ sake, Kimbo, did you say against?

He talked about this before.

Much was discussed.

They talked about military equipment.

Boys will be boys.

They

talked trade links.

Not a lot for Kim to slap on the table as North Korean leader in trade talks.

A bit like me discussing hair care and makeup tips with the Pope.

And of course they chatted about whether North Korea will ever repeat their run to the Football World Cup quarterfinal in 1966.

But I mean, what did you excited by this

meeting?

And

particularly the transport, the armoured train?

Because I know, Chris, when I did some gigs with you on tour, well, early in our careers, and I remember you used to insist on going on an armoured train at 28 miles an hour.

I love a train.

I mean, there's been a lot of mocking going on about how slow this train is.

Have you got a picture of the train?

No.

Okay.

Then I can say what I like.

Do you remember when Chris emailed us yesterday and said, have you got any pictures that you'd like me to put in the slideshow?

Yeah, but I like to keep him on his toes.

That's just lady.

He did ask me for a picture, and I have got that one.

I'll tell you what, then, in which case, do you want to go to that bit?

Fine, let's go to to that bit.

F it.

It's good to have North Korea back in the news, Andy, because it allows us once again to consider that timeless question, what the f is it with those hats?

The North Korean military, the North Korean millinery more like, am I right, mic drop?

The United Nations estimates that approximately 48% of the North Korean budget goes on stupidly fing enormous hats, and another 5% goes on Kirby grips to keep the stupidly fing enormous hats in place.

For a country that's pretty paranoid about not letting its citizens defect, providing the military with the kind of hat that can be turned upside down and road to freedom seems counterintuitive.

Well, over a third of the injuries sustained by members of the North Korean military are just the next being really sore.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of four things that the stupidly fing enormous hats are more stupidly fing enormous than.

One, two zeppelins tied together.

Two, Donald Trump's real golf handicap.

Three, Jupiter's second largest moon.

Four, five hundred and forty-eight life-size replicas of Rishi Sunak.

Picture out.

Alice, I know you're a huge fan of Korean-Soviet Russian

negotiations.

What were the highlights for you?

No, genuinely, I'm just pleased that Kim Jong-un armours his train.

I think it's a positive message about protecting yourself from STIs.

You're pretending this train is not a penis substitute.

You're kidding yourself.

And I mean, it's not just armoured, it's very armoured.

There's at least 90 high-security carriages, all bulletproof.

So, I mean, I assume that means there's not going to be any little Kim Jong-uns coming anytime soon.

They apparently did not discuss the threat of nuclear war.

Are you, I mean, what's your view on are you for or against this stage?

Let's just do a quick

canvas of the audience.

Um who would like to see a nuclear war break out?

Again, who's against it?

No, I mean so it is swinging slowly.

I mean it's to be more so that's basically where Brexit was about three years before the referendum.

So

um but they didn't discuss it.

They also failed to discuss the inconsistency of refereeing at the Rugby World Cup, uh the return of the Australian soap opera neighbours, uh reform of the House of Lords and the decline in the use of the rule of three as a rhetorical device.

Shame.

Shame.

Looking at pictures of Putin meeting Kim, we're once again reminded that the Venn diagram where set A is labelled non-more evil and set B is labeled completely fing ridiculous is basically a circle.

It's a constant surprise that the men who consistently topped the year-end polls are most likely to have wiped out a country when hungry and and most inventive breaching of the Geneva Convention look and behave not unlike characters who didn't quite make the cut in the heyday of Warner Brothers Looney Tunes.

I know that we shouldn't judge people because of their looks, but really the evil community seriously need to get themselves onto an episode of Queer Eye for the Bad Guy.

Kim Jong-un is supposed to be one of the most fearsome and ruthless leaders in the world, but he looks like the logo for a pan-Asian fast food chain.

So much so that I was thinking he could be the face of my new porn-themed string of Korean restaurants, Bao Chicken, Bao Bao.

I've just written boo.

Meanwhile, Vladdy the Baddy, the man who poots the inn into Putin, increasingly resembles his own Madame to Swords model.

At this point, it's beginning to feel like the easiest way to assassinate him will be to light the wick.

If you've got any other ways of assassinating Vladimir Putin, do send them into thebugle at thebuglepodcast.com.

Bugle feature section now.

And our bugle feature section this week is bees.

Can't live with them, can't live without them.

Could you just blow our entire sound effect budget on that?

It's worth it.

Spent four months training that beef to sit on the mic.

Well, whatever you think about bees, whether you think they're fing annoying or you're wrong, then

they are nevertheless quite important, apparently, according to scientists.

But they've also been responsible for, well, one of the greatest escapes that didn't involve clinging to the underside of a fing lorry

of the month.

As far as we know.

Of the month.

So far.

This was a couple of weeks ago now, but we didn't get a chance to do it on the bugle.

So we thought we'd save it for this.

One of the greatest escapes of the millennium, in fact, five million bees broke for freedom in Canada after making the truck that they were being carried on in hives crash.

on a road.

Interestingly, I mean, the headline said five million bees.

It was exactly five million bees.

Not a bee more, not a bee less.

Every single one of them with a bizarre fixation about lights, picnics, and the economics of the honey industry.

And the police said most of the bees have now been recaptured, although when they counted them up, there were only 4,935,732 bees, meaning that 64,268 bees remain at large from the original five million.

So I don't know, I mean, what you think is worse.

Five million bees escaping from one truck or one bee escaping from each of five million trucks.

I am for bees, I am pro-bees, Andy.

Bees, sexy, sexy bees who keep us all alive by doing something that isn't, but isn't quite not, jizzing in flowers.

Yeah, you've never looked at them under a microscope, have you?

Yeah.

Yeah, I emailed Chris back when he asked for peaches.

Look, I didn't.

I didn't pay that much attention in Sex Ed, but I'm pretty sure from the diagrams that when a man and a woman love each other very much, they'd bisect each other in half along the vertical axis and lie on top of each other half and half.

No, but that's something bees were meant to teach me, actually, along with their frenemies and fellow flower lovers, the birds.

According to Greenpeas, honeybees perform about 80% of all pollination worldwide.

A single bee colony can pollinate 300 million flowers each day, and 70 out of the top 100 human food crops are pollinated by bees, which means everything you eat hasn't quite been fed by bees, but has at the very least been feckandly molested by the stripy little perks.

Hashtag B2.

I need a snooker cue to just tap the table there.

I'm just giving you a series of bee facts to contextualise bees for.

You bees are yellow and black because they're so racist they can't decide between yellow face and black face.

The fact that male bees die during intercourse doesn't stop them from lying about how much action they've had.

Oh, I'm so dead, man.

I killed myself all over at tits.

Do bees have tits?

Bees are the inter...

Yeah, they do.

My kids are in the show, Chris.

Bees are the international mascot of human polyamory and the pinnacle of achievement for a human polycule is to be so successful at polyculing that it can make its own honey from various bodily fluids and sell it at a local farmer's market until that was made illegal in 1978 because someone got hired for Polycule's mushroom orgy honey and ended up eating their family's aged donkey.

Another B fact.

Be the best bee you can be is not a feel-good slogan for self-improvement, but a call to a dystopian future where we all wake up drones subservient to the chemical signals of a giant central queen.

That's my B facts.

I know I sounded like there wasn't going to be another one because I ended on an inappropriate interrogative intonation.

I would blame my being Australian, but I'm going to blame the formatting of my document here.

So what, there was another bee story that paleontologists have discovered mummified bees preserved in their cocoons for 3,000 years.

No coincidence that the first recorded picnic happened 2,999 years ago.

I wish the fuckers had all wiped themselves out.

I mean, would you like to, I mean, Chris, what's your, I mean, are you for or against bringing mummified bees back to life to see what they can teach us about?

My initial thought on seeing this news story was, the mummified bees sounds like a distressingly popular early naughties band formed entirely by ex-public schoolboys.

But then I thought, is this what Sugarpuff Supremo the Honey Monster was trying to communicate to us for all those years when he kept repeating, tell them about the honey mummies?

Either way, the mummification of bees indicates the presence of a very sophisticated and and highly skilled bee population because they're very small and it takes really steady hands to get that hook up their nostril and pull their brains out.

Scientists are apparently planning on reviving the bees because there's nothing more fun than launching a mummy bee plague on the world.

Though if it means Brendan Fraser will come back to the action movie game, I'm in.

But I mean, what would they tell us if we could bring these bees back to life from 3,000 years ago?

Would they tell us the secrets of what really happened in the Trojan War?

What made Pharaoh so weird?

How henges worked?

And how many prehistoric villages it took to change a campfire?

These are all the.

Andy.

I'm sorry to break it to you, but even 3,000 years ago, bees couldn't talk.

Couldn't they?

Well, let history be the judge of that.

I've got a couple of bee facts as well.

Julius Caesar wanted to ban bees from Rome because he found them really annoying.

But when he was being stabbed to death, an amusing thought struck him that it was a bit like being stung to death by a swarm of giant bees.

Thus he became the first person to use the term buzz off

and then died.

If you stood all the bees in the world on each other's shoulders, they would stretch all the way to the sun and back, but only if the sun was a lot closer than it is.

About three million kilometers away rather than 150 million kilometers, which ironically would kill all the bees anyway, as the plants would die and the bees would burn.

And finally, according to research, bees are ironically very bad at spelling.

This is fascinating to me because,

listen,

obviously, what you've done here is you've decided that we're going to do a feature, and none of us knew about bees, and all of us have gone away and researched bees.

That's basically what's happened.

I didn't know, I downloaded a book by one Professor Austin Herring, who is the Emeritus Professor of Entomology at St.

Dunstan's College, Cambridge.

It's a book called The Naked Apiarist: Elementary Mistakes in Beekeeping.

Listen, here you go.

There are three types of bees.

Honey bees, which live in colonies, bumblebees, which live alone, and let it bees, which come to you in times of trouble.

Although some scientists say that one's a beetle.

The most important bee in the hive is the queen.

If the queen dies, the worker bees have to create a new queen by getting a pawn to the other end of the board and swapping it.

Because of their crucial role as pollinators,

as has already been explained, if the bees were to disappear, 90% of our food crops would not grow, but this would also include celery, suswings, and roundabouts.

Although bees are well known for their yellow and black striped colouring, their away kit is blue with orange speckles.

For their size, bees are highly intelligent.

If a bee went on mastermind and was asked its specialist subject, it would be quite difficult to hear the answer as they're very small.

In law, it's an offence against the crown to kill a bee, but only if it's inside a swan at the time.

Bees buzz, not as is commonly thought because of the speed of their wings, but because the baffles have gone in their exhaust box.

Bees actually only wear dealie boppers when they're on a hen night.

Bees rarely eat honey as they get sick of the stuff at work.

Bees evolved as a species a lot more recently than you might think when Jeff Goldblum accidentally teleported a wasp with a hippie.

Right.

Well, I think we all need to go and think about what we've done.

Research has come out that showed that Dracula, the fictional Transylvania-based vampire and crucifix skeptic, was in fact a tofu-eating Wokeeratis,

more likely to order a jackfruit tempeh and aubergine smoothie than a pint of fresh virgin's blood, because research has shown that the blood-sucking, fang-faced, bat-bothering count who famously never existed, had he been the 15th-century Romanian beefcake and impalement aficionado Vlad the Impaler Dracul, from whom he took his name, he might have been vegan.

Because

basically, what we've got from this news story is that the real Vlad, the real Dracula, Vlad the Impaler, who wasn't Dracula but had the same name,

probably would have eaten carrots and other stuff.

They've kind of taken some DNA samples, I think, from letters that he licked or something.

And

scientists, who for some unknowable f ⁇ ing reason reason use their incredible expertise to analyze 500 year old letters what the f ⁇ are you doing science can you please focus have worked out that he wasn't

so basically the story is Count Dracula if he'd been real life and someone completely different and not a vampire or a duck

might have been a vegan

that is news and the lesson of that

Never meet your heroes.

They're never quite what you want them to be, are they?

Was Dog Tanyon a real dog?

I asked myself.

So it's been a tough time for vampires.

But just explain, Dancy Lagarde, obviously, one of the leading vampire fiction writers.

Yes, online bestseller and self-published romance maven, Dancy Lagarde, has thank you

in the book that I am writing in honor of Dancy Lagarde.

I've been asked the question by a number of fans: why vampires?

Why so many vampires appearing in romance?

And so this is a slightly academic essay

on vampires.

Much ink has been spilled and much blood has been sexualized in the discussion of why vampires are A, in culture and B, so sexy.

From the simple scientific use of vampires as a medical explanation for anemia, why is my teen daughter fainting all over the place?

And being horny?

Must be a floating man-bat.

To

the sexification of vampires.

They always ask for consent.

Hot.

They penetrate you in multiple places at once.

Super hot.

They're cold.

Hot.

Vampires have always been a powerful place for humans to stash their fertile imagination seeds and let them grow.

In a world

In a world where there are few taboos against even casual one-night stands, it's difficult for a romance author to create and build the kind of slow-burn escalating sexual tension that makes banging the ultimate expressive explosion of true love.

And the description of a sex climat into an of a sex climax into an emotional climax over and above the standard galactic descriptions of jizzing or lady jizzing.

For many an ambitious romance writer, then, the options for making sex sexy again must either be religion, rivalry, or vampirism.

It's not very noble to take your penis from the gaming table of mutual longing in a world where sex isn't going to ruin your lover's reputation.

If penetrating the object of his desire might turn the noble hero into a blood-crazed monster, the reader once more has skin in the game.

And the author once more has penis in the vagina.

And as Dancy Lagarde has said when asked about the place of vampires, in the Dancy Lagarde

canon,

maybe it's just as simple as some people just like having their necks sucked on.

The end.

Right.

One final story.

News has broken this week that some varieties of wine grape

could be threatened by climate change.

And this is bad news for a...

This is very, very bad news.

It's very bad news for a friend of mine who ran a few vineyards.

And I said, well, how are you going to deal with this problem?

And he said to me, well, Andy, I need to think like the world's richest entrepreneur.

I really need to put my Elon Musk hat on.

So, anyway, we went camping to try and just think about it.

And we went in the vineyard area of France.

And we stayed in this place with fancy cabins.

There were four of them, cabins A, B, C, and D.

And the woman in the first one, she was a religious woman who just lounged around on her couch all day.

And I can't remember her name.

I just referred to her as Cabin A Sofa Nun.

I'm afraid I can't remember her name.

I've got a sofa nun blank.

So we watched some films together when we were staying on the campsite.

But my friend just likes sinister films set on cross-channel ferries, a genre he calls PNO Noir.

He also found solace in the Bible,

but

he was particularly intrigued by the story of the birth of Jesus and the gifts he was given afterwards.

And I said, Well, which gift would you like most if you're a parent of a young baby?

And he said, Well, I like gold.

I'm ambivalent about frankincense, but I'd rate myrrh low.

He got very cross about some of the Old Testament stories, including the David versus Goliath story.

And he decided to email David about his choice of weapons, and he wrote in the subject box, Re-Sling.

He said,

And he said about the sling, if I was in a fight with a big guy, I sure as hell wouldn't want to use that.

Sir Slee?

We talked about our favourite London skyscrapers.

He's got very strong opinions on skyscrapers, and he said basically yes or no, yay or nay.

And so he said the Gherkin, a yay, the shard, a nay.

I heard someone just say, oh, there.

It was a very bored, oh.

Anyway,

my mate

used to know Roald Dahl, used to watch football with him, and apparently

Roald, he was a particular fan of the French team that won the 98 World Cup, and he loved their midfielder, Zinedine Zidane.

And I said to him, I didn't know he was a Zinn van Dahl.

So we had to get a tram we had to get a tram across

we had to get across Paris and

all the buses were delayed and we ended up getting on a tram and the tram got stuck and my mate couldn't control his anger.

Worst tram in the world, he said.

Anyway,

don't worry, we're nearly done.

I lost touch with him for a while and then I saw him again the other day.

He had like a

little urn

full of, you know, he'd just come back from a crematorium.

I said, oh, what was that?

He said, oh, it's an elderly relative cremated.

It's my Gran Ash.

But

he.

I hope you appreciate the fact that I haven't done Semyon yet, because that would have been too easy.

But anyway, he won a competition from an American museum.

You could enter this competition, and the prizes were Greek pottery.

And so he rang them up to claim his prize.

And they said, oh, you've won a vase.

I said, no, no, we pronounce it Vase.

He said, well, we pronounce it Vase here.

Which one would you like?

And he said, I'll have the fifth one.

And she said, I'll send you Vase-E.

Such a shame to end on that.

But the way he won it was

he had to name the competition, the final question, was the top ten towns and cities in Nevada by population.

And he got nine out of ten.

He got all of them.

He got them all barrino.

All barrino.

All barino.

Right.

And um.

There we go.

I think.

Tremalis.

I think.

I think I should have ended on the Gran Ash one.

I think that would have been a good way to go.

Right, are you done?

What do we miss?

We just happened to need to go to the toilet at that exact time.

What did we miss?

Sorry.

Right.

What didn't you miss?

That's it.

That is the end.

I mean, contractually obliged to do those puns.

I'm sorry if some of you hated them.

But yeah,

that's showbiz.

Right, thank you very much for coming.

Thanks to the Leicester Square Theatre for having us.

Thanks to Chris, as always, for everything he does to keep his podcast going.

Thank you all for coming.

Thanks to Alice Fraser and Chris Addison.

Goodbye.

Tossman.

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.