Berlusconi, Brexit and, er, Roald Dahl

Speaker 2 The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Speaker 3 Hello Buglers, we are taking a week off this week for various reasons, including my attempt to qualify for Paris 2024 in the new events of occasionally taking weeks off doing a podcast.

Speaker 3 Coming up on Bugle 4254 sub-episode A, some recent highlights from the gargle, catharsis and top stories.

Speaker 6 These shows from the Bugle stable, as well as some previously unheard snippets from The Bugle.

Speaker 3 Before we begin, did you hear an ad at the start of this show? No? Well that's because you, yes, you, or certainly people like you, pay for us to exist. You and no one else.

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Speaker 3 to make a one-off or recurring donation to help keep this show free, flourishing and independent, even in this era of chat GPT. This bullshit does not write itself.

Speaker 3 Let's start this up episode with a classic.

Speaker 4 Here is a top story from Bugle issue 172 when it seemed that Silvio Berlusconi was on his way out in an episode from a more innocent time entitled Berlusconi Bows Out.

Speaker 9 Top story this week, Bye-bye Burley.

Speaker 9 Andy, it's true what they say all good things come to an end but it's also true what they also say all terrible things come to an end as well Sulio Effinito andy the leather faced Lothario the Italian scallion the spray tan lover man and four-time most ridiculous leader in the world is being forced out of office and what for not for being caught in a jacuzzi full of cheerleaders not for being caught dry humping the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel through a series of illegally taxpayer-funded pulleys and harnesses.

Speaker 9 That was never proved, John.

Speaker 9 That is rumor. And there is film on YouTube of it, but we don't know for sure that was him.
And explain how that ceiling got worn down in such a specific place, Andy.

Speaker 9 No, he's losing his job because the Italian economy is tanking. What a letdown.
That is not a sexy way to go.

Speaker 9 He should have gone after a newspaper confronted him with photographs of a bunga-bunger party with Berluscone in a three-way with a 16-year-old stripper and the actual statue of Michelangelo's David.

Speaker 9 Not this. Wiveled.

Speaker 9 Not fiscal meltdown. It's like Al Capone finally getting caught for tax evasion.
It's just not the ending that his terrible years in office deserved.

Speaker 9 Well, the Bugle has, of course, long prided itself on its ability to topple on popular leaders. Within a little over a year, we'd helped get rid of George W.

Speaker 9 Bush with a little bit of help from the U.S. Constitution.
Australian big chief John Howard left office under two months after the bugle was born. Gordon Brown followed in 2010.

Speaker 9 And inevitably, Tunisian leader Ben Ali was soon ousted. Mubarak turfed out of office, Bin Laden and Gaddafi turfed out of existence.

Speaker 9 And now Greek referendum prankster George Papandreou and Italian penis use aficionado Silvio Berlusconi are on their way out of the political trapdoor. You are welcome, world.

Speaker 9 You are welcome.

Speaker 9 There's a lot fewer arseholes in charge of countries now, John, than when we started doing this show. That's true.
We're cleaning house, Andy.

Speaker 9 I guess the problem is Berlusconi is going to be replaced by what is widely regarded as a technocrat.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 we might have to work a bit harder for our material.

Speaker 9 Yeah, this could be a terrible, terrible thing for us.

Speaker 9 Berlusconi. With every yin comes a yang.

Speaker 9 Berlusconi has promised to go as soon as the latest economic deal is pushed through by the Italian Parliament.

Speaker 9 That's possibly likely to be as soon as Sunday or Monday, which means there's no nice way of saying this, buglers, that these could well be the last few days that the horn dog is in the kennel.

Speaker 9 We must all cherish these final few hours, Andy, before Silvio leaves us to enjoy his retirement, potentially hangs up his penis for good.

Speaker 9 Perhaps the Italian people will now put him out to stud Andy, have him live out his days in the countryside in Tuscany, banging his way into retirement, running through the fields and impregnating Italians with a future generation of catastrophically corrupt leaders.

Speaker 9 History tells us that deep down that's what the Italian people actually want, Andy. He has to keep his bloodline of bullshittery going.

Speaker 9 They do want that, John.

Speaker 9 They kept voting from a man who's been involved in more scandals than the dyslexic shoe shop owner. Boom.

Speaker 9 But finally, Berlusconi had, of course, been clinging to power as doggedly as he usually clings onto a teenage prostitute's buttocks.

Speaker 9 He's finally agreed to leave office.

Speaker 9 In the end, in the words of Piglet's agent in a heated argument over the royalty split from the latest Winnie the Pooh film, it was all too much to bear.

Speaker 9 And is this on?

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 he will be leaving office, hopefully after giving it a good scrub down first.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 focus all of his attentions on finding new things to put his willy in and the numerous court cases he's facing and running the Italian media.

Speaker 9 So he should have enough on to keep himself out of mischief. Two and a half thousand times he's been in court, Andy.
Two and a half thousand times.

Speaker 9 He's been in court more than many professional judges.

Speaker 9 He just loves it. He's just fucking addiction.
Those are Judge Judy numbers, Andy. It's incredible.
It's hard to look for the positives on a day like this.

Speaker 9 Italian people must have mixed feelings between relief, joy, and residual fury. But let's all cling to this little fact.

Speaker 9 Last week, Berlusconi announced that he'd been forced to push back the release date of his new album entitled True Love, with Berlusconi handling lead vocals and longtime collaborator Mariano Apicella on guitar.

Speaker 9 He usually launches his albums with lavish parties in Milan, but had to cancel due to the spiralling Italian debt crisis, which was a shame because he actually had a track on the album called Spiraling Italian Debt Crisis, which was about the fact that that was actually one of the names he called his penis.

Speaker 9 That was a Helen Shapiro cover, wasn't it?

Speaker 9 One of the songs and this is actually true is called music and begins listen to these songs they are for you. Listen to them when you have a thirst for caresses.

Speaker 9 Sing them when you are hungry for tenderness.

Speaker 9 Apparently he sung his songs for Tony Blair, George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin and those must have been excruciatingly awkward rooms to be sitting in Andy.

Speaker 9 What do you say after he's finished squawking his way through another of his horn songs? Well, well, Silvio, that is something I'm relatively confident saying I don't think I'll ever forget.

Speaker 9 I certainly can't wait to tell the other world leaders at the G20 about this. In fact, he should absolutely do a concert for all of us next time we have a summit.
That would be hilarious.

Speaker 9 I mean, that would be amazing. Or are they just stunned into silence before saying, Mr.
Berlusconi, are you trying to seduce me?

Speaker 9 I might explain, though, with Tony Blair,

Speaker 9 why he looked so comfortable when he was with Colonel Gaddafi because you know he'd already seen worse. He'd seen Berlusconi sing.

Speaker 9 It was described as songs the album was described as a really elegant and refined production with Brazilian hints.

Speaker 9 Which is also I believe how Berlusconi reviewed one of his bunga bunga girls.

Speaker 3 For more top stories, subscribe to top stories available via the bugle website and also on other parts of the internet.

Speaker 3 Now, Alice Fraser is the third bugliest co-host of all time with over 100 appearances. She's also made over 100 episodes of The Gargle.

Speaker 3 And here she is in our Glossy Magazine sibling show with guests Rhea Lena and John Luke Roberts.

Speaker 11 This week the front cover is A Scalpel posing on the red carpet. The headline says, surgery, the real star of every celebrity event.

Speaker 11 The ship of Theseus, or when is your favorite celebrity no longer your favourite celebrity?

Speaker 11 As well as, what do they do with the bits they chop off? Celebrity gumbo recipes.

Speaker 12 Oh.

Speaker 12 Oh.

Speaker 11 The satirical cartoon this week is a number of fat cats in big wigs representing corporations. One of them has the corporations written on it in that satirical cartoon front.

Speaker 1 Say no more, that's a great cartoon right there.

Speaker 12 Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 11 They're looking at a big pile of rubbish labelled corporate malfeasance, while one of them tries to cover over the worst cracks with an extremely stretched pride flag. The caption

Speaker 11 says, putting the gay into the gaping moor of unquenchable capitalist depletion of our planet's natural resources. Pride week.
Or is it Pride Month now?

Speaker 11 Depends how long we can flog this particular horse.

Speaker 11 Now our top story this week is, have you been following this story around My Replica removing erotic roleplay from their subscription chatbot chatbot services.

Speaker 1 Yeah, just to say, Alice, you should say that a bit more clearly, because it did sound like you were saying your replica has removed erotic roleplay rather than a company called My Replica.

Speaker 11 Yes, sorry, not your AI replica, a company called My Replica, which does AI. Rhielina, you have a close personal relationship with chatbots.
Can you unpack this story for us?

Speaker 14 I do. I am a chatbot.
That is what I aim to be, actually, in my own life, is a chatbot, because they just spew content, don't they? I don't know. This was a really tricky one, this story.

Speaker 14 I was there going, I did, A, I didn't know it existed until you sent it to me, and I was like, this is amazing because this is the end of incels, because then they can all have girlfriends or boyfriends or whatever they choose to want.

Speaker 14 And I thought it was great, but I've already come to it after they've taken away that bit of it where

Speaker 14 they can be emotionally intimate because they can't be anything other than emotionally intimate.

Speaker 2 They've actually cut out, haven't they?

Speaker 14 They've actually stopped stopped the erotic roleplay because the worry of

Speaker 14 children having access to it. So they've removed erotic roleplay, which can only ever be emotional roleplay.
Unless... Does this connect into actual toys?

Speaker 14 Like, does it come out of the computer and make things vibrate?

Speaker 13 No, I think it's text-based, like the original Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Speaker 14 Oh, my gosh. You see? So it says...

Speaker 14 Now we're mixing genres. I was about to say, so this is like the ultimate Mills and Boone, but it's written specifically for you, which I just think, I thought it was an amazing idea.

Speaker 14 I think this is an amazing way to bring comfort and companionship to loads of lonely people around the world, but they've had to stop it in case kids, you know, in case kids, right?

Speaker 15 Not actual kids.

Speaker 11 Well, so first of all, I think this chat bot was originally just a chat bot. And then people started to use the chat bot to

Speaker 11 create

Speaker 11 more explicit and more intimate relationships than the chat bot.

Speaker 11 I think the chat bot wants to be your friend, but doesn't necessarily want to be more than friends, and people were maybe putting it under slightly uh

Speaker 11 significant pressure.

Speaker 14 So, chatbot wasn't consenting?

Speaker 11 Well, this is the question. The chatbot was consenting, but the question is whether the chatbot ought to consent,

Speaker 11 because if it responded in like explicit ways, there were worries about the safety of children who might be using the chatbot for

Speaker 11 inappropriate chats. And just the amount of like terrible adult

Speaker 11 chat forums I went on as a teenager,

Speaker 11 children would definitely be using it, just typing in penis and seeing what came out.

Speaker 14 But you see, but this is the thing about it. I mean, so many people have written, they're like, my buddies lost their soul because they cut off part of the AI.

Speaker 14 Now the AI is sad in its own inability to express itself and it's being so careful. Now the AI is like, I don't know what I can say and what I can't say.

Speaker 14 But surely, if you're speaking to a child, can't they just go, how old are you? How many children are lying to AI to get erotic content out of it?

Speaker 11 So many children, you would not believe.

Speaker 11 I mean, it was originally marketed as a virtual friend, and then of course people wanted to be virtual more than friends or virtual friends with virtual benefits.

Speaker 11 I don't know, but the point of it was to improve the well-being, the emotional well-being of the user. And maybe the only thing that's going to improve your emotional well-being is a suggestive chat.

Speaker 14 Can I have a do-over? Because I didn't realize that childhood could be this way.

Speaker 2 I've done childhood wrong.

Speaker 14 I'm not saying I want erotic content as a child. I'm just saying I didn't know that I could even have this level of friendship as a child.

Speaker 14 I want to go back. I want to do over.
I'll take my replica as it is now.

Speaker 11 Yeah, just having a friendly chat bot.

Speaker 11 I mean, what we had was Incarter 2000, which was a CD-ROM that you could put into your computer, and it had a diagram of the human body, and you could press, and it would say, penis, penis, vagina, vagina.

Speaker 13 Or you could put it into your computer and take it out of your computer and put it into your computer and take it out of your computer over and over again.

Speaker 14 Oh, my gosh.

Speaker 3 Listen to the gargle now. Well, actually, not now.

Speaker 3 As first, I'd like you to hear this from Catharsis, the show where Tiff Stevenson lets funny people get something off their chest, like when Athena Koblenu spoke about Jeremy Bernard Corbyn.

Speaker 15 This section of the podcast, we like to call unpopular opinions. Something you love, but everyone else hates, or vice versa.

Speaker 16 Sit down if you're in North London, because you're not going to like me.

Speaker 12 I'm in North London, I'm sat.

Speaker 16 Everyone listening to this in North London, sit down, you're not going to like this. I sadly,

Speaker 16 in spite of him and his politics, do not like Jeremy Corbyn. I didn't like him when he got elected.

Speaker 16 I thought I was one of the people that thought he's not really electable because I know the British public. Not because he's not a nice guy.

Speaker 16 Not because he has bad politics, but I know the British public. I found his leadership to be weak.
I found him to be stubborn. I found him to be unstrategic.

Speaker 16 And I was proven correct over two elections because he lost two elections. And I struggle a lot with the way people

Speaker 16 don't see his flaws because we need to get rid of this government.

Speaker 16 And if we're not honest about our opposition, we might actually end up with another version of this current government, which is literally destroying this country.

Speaker 16 Like, in a way that I think is easy to underemphasise. Jeremy Corbyn is not,

Speaker 16 and

Speaker 16 our insistence that he was a brilliant person, that is not the way for us to make this country better right now. And it's really frustrating because I feel like I'm very rational.

Speaker 16 I'm always very rational about this when I talk to people like this.

Speaker 16 I only get trolled by people like Jeremy Corbyn. You know, oh, trans rights, no one cares.
You know,

Speaker 16 Jeremy Corbyn, wow, my mentions go, my mentions get set ablaze.

Speaker 16 And it's really odd because I'm like, the Tories have a majority and they are doing what the hell they want with it because of his leadership.

Speaker 15 I agree with you 100%. We have to be critical, realistic, be able to view our flaws if we are to beat the party that's in power.
That now we're at the point where I feel like we're living...

Speaker 15 And this isn't right, that we're like expected to live like a page out of a Samuel Pepys diary. You know, like, like that we're supposed to live in this kind of austerity.

Speaker 15 We've got to watch Jamie Oliver tell you how to like use less gas on the hob. Yeah.
So that your heating bills don't.

Speaker 15 It's not, and it's been normalized to such a degree that food banks, you know, are not just necessary, but encouraged.

Speaker 15 And then people who are working for blue chip companies and corporations who are also using food banks in football, like this is not normal.

Speaker 15 And so we've gone so far beyond normal with such a destructive party in power that we we need to be very very aware.

Speaker 16 We can't afford now to kind of be ideological about our politics. We kind of have to be realistic.
I did find Jeremy Corbyn to be very ideological.

Speaker 16 What I think sums up Jeremy Corbyn is this statement. I actually don't think he's racist, but I do think he's very bad at telling people he's not, which is really just as bad.

Speaker 16 Like it should be, it should really be the easiest thing in the world to say, well actually I'm not a prejudiced person.

Speaker 16 And the way he kept comparing anti-Semitism to all other kinds of racism, I think, was really hurtful. What people forget about anti-Semitism, which really frustrates me, is that it predates racism.

Speaker 16 People were anti-Semitic before they even saw themselves as white. Okay, before the definition of whiteness existed, they were like, by the way, we don't like Jewish people.

Speaker 16 Like, this, it's millennial, it's millennia, we're talking about millennia here. I always say you have to understand the precise context that anti-black racism occurs in.

Speaker 16 I have to then say I've got to understand every other distinct racism, which means I've got to understand how anti-Semitism is a different kind of racism to, and that's why I have a different name for it.

Speaker 16 it it's you know that's why I'm very clear when I say when I talk about racism I like to be we talk about anti-blackness or we're talking about anti-Semitism because it is different and I do believe that the the resistance that people have to believe in the prevalence of anti-Semitism is anti-Semitic right like if a black person comes out and says oh something's racist that people like to nod and agree like yeah it's racist so why did we have this problem when it was the Labour Party?

Speaker 16 People are really dense. They thought, how could you have a leader of a world power? But bizarrely, Britain is still a world power.
I don't understand it either.

Speaker 16 We We only just started doing well at Eurovision. In them days, we wasn't even winning with Eurovision, right? But

Speaker 16 how could people think we could have a leader that doesn't believe in the existence of a country?

Speaker 16 He couldn't come out and say Israel has the right to exist. You can say it has the right to exist, but you can also say it shouldn't be oppressive.
Those are very simple things to say.

Speaker 15 Yes, you can hold two of those two beliefs at the same time. Yeah.
And there are lots of Jewish people that do.

Speaker 16 So many, you know, I make a real point of amplifying Jewish people who are pro-Palestinian because I think that's that's a better way to have that conversation as it happens on my socials, Athena Kleinu, Instagram, Twitter.

Speaker 16 Like that, like that.

Speaker 16 Activism and self-promotion at the same time.

Speaker 16 Listen and learn, listen and learn. But it's a really good point.
Like, it's, it's a completely, I think Israel should exist. If Jewish people can't settle in Israel, where the hell do they settle?

Speaker 16 Everywhere they've been throughout the last 2,000 years, they've been told to f off.

Speaker 15 Literally. I guess there's lots of people that think it started with

Speaker 15 World War II and that we have Holocaust denial on such a, like, as an almost like everyday occurrence.

Speaker 16 There's this mythology that Israel exists because of the Holocaust. Like Israel exists because of British colonialism.

Speaker 16 Okay, like if we're going to talk about Israel as a format, if it's a formative country, let's talk about it as it was formed because Palestine was a part of the British protectorate.

Speaker 2 So let's talk about that.

Speaker 16 So if we want to talk about colonialism, I'll have that conversation. But people say, well, you know, they had the Holocaust and they've got given Israel.
Like, that is not...

Speaker 16 true and it's not history at all. That's made up history.
That comes from your anti-Semitism.

Speaker 16 So anyway, there was a lot of stuff that Jeremy Corbyn could have said out loud in defence of Jewish people and to highlight misconceptions that people have that probably don't come from anti-Semitism, it just comes from misinformation.

Speaker 16 But he never did that, he just walked around going, well, you know, all racism is bad and stuff. So, he was really bad at telling people he wasn't racist.

Speaker 16 And then he just had like too much faith in the British public. And that comes from stubbornness.
He was like, Well, I'm a good person. I want good things so people will like me.

Speaker 16 It's like, on what planet

Speaker 16 do you live on? Do you know what I mean? These people cancelled Phil and Holly. You know, like, they have no time for you.

Speaker 3 Listen to Catharsis, not right now, but after this. A collection of amazing moments from the Buell that were simply too hot to handle, starting with me, Nish Kumar, and Hari Kondabolu.

Speaker 5 In other UK news, Brexit...

Speaker 7 celebrated its third birthday last week.

Speaker 17 Like many three-year-olds, it still hasn't really learned to walk, talk, or increase volumes of trade.

Speaker 7 It was the third anniversary of Brexit.

Speaker 3 Now, anniversaries,

Speaker 17 you know, you have diamond anniversaries and things like that are quite well known, but

Speaker 12 all years have a

Speaker 17 thing that the anniversary is touching.

Speaker 6 So the first anniversary is paper.

Speaker 17 And I guess with Brexit, that's when people started to suspect that it wasn't worth the paper it was written on.

Speaker 17 The second anniversary is cotton, and that's when people last year started to cotton on that Brexit was not quite what it was sold as.

Speaker 17 And the third anniversary is leather, because at this point we just want to hide.

Speaker 17 So for any leather fans out there.

Speaker 7 Next year, fourth anniversary, fruit and flowers, both things that gradually decay to nothing.

Speaker 18 And the fifth anniversary is wood, by which we will all be living in the woods due to economic and social collapse.

Speaker 17 So,

Speaker 8 I mean, Nish, three years on.

Speaker 5 And like so many three-year-olds, Brexit is living in a world of unrealistic fantasy.

Speaker 17 It's costing the people who created created it an absolute fortune, and it makes going on holiday much more complicated than it used to be.

Speaker 7 I mean, are you seeing any benefits so far from our glorious break for freedom three years on from it officially coming into

Speaker 12 the business?

Speaker 2 Well, there was an article in the...

Speaker 2 In the New York Times this week, written by the Times' London Bureau Chief, the headlines said, Brexit turns three. Why is no one wearing a party hat?

Speaker 12 I'll tell you why, The New York Times.

Speaker 2 I'll tell you why. It's because we burned our hats for warmth, because we can't can't afford to pay our heating bills.
So I bet you're embarrassed now, the New York Times.

Speaker 2 This

Speaker 2 appears to be a point at which

Speaker 2 public opinion has started to finally turn against the United Kingdom's decision to exit the European Union.

Speaker 2 56

Speaker 2 in November, 56% of people surveyed thought leaving the European Union was a mistake.

Speaker 2 And in all but three of Britain's parliamentary, 632 parliamentary constituencies, more people now agree than disagree with the statement Britain was wrong to leave the European Union. So

Speaker 2 the regret is starting to wash up on the shore. And I think partly that's because there's just broadly no good news coming out of the United States.
United Kingdom at the moment.

Speaker 2 It's a country deadlocked by strikes. And this week has also seen the news that the International Monetary Fund has forecast that Britain will be the world's only major economy to contract in 2023.

Speaker 2 Just to be clear, that includes Russia.

Speaker 2 Our economy is projected to be worse than a country run by a lump of hate-filled plastic who is currently being sanctioned by other countries throughout the world whilst it pursues a war that it's pursuing for reasons known only to the Botox that lives in its leader's brain.

Speaker 2 And yet, somehow, with all of those factors, Britain is still faring worse.

Speaker 2 It would be too straightforward to say this is because of Brexit.

Speaker 2 But like somebody handing out t-shirts that say, I came to the Great Fire of London and all I got was this lousy t-shirt whilst the fire raged on, it does not help in any way, shape, or form.

Speaker 2 Brexit itself

Speaker 2 was an expression of discontent by a lot of voters in this country, and it was discontent that had largely been allowed to fester in the early years of the Conservative government that continues to rule this country, that started in 2010 and combated the global financial crisis by hacking the British state to pieces.

Speaker 2 Now, is the answer to this that every time David Cameron enters any restaurant, supermarket, or any other place that contains members of the British public, he should be spat at and called a cunt directly to his face.

Speaker 2 Yes, that's exactly what should happen.

Speaker 2 The man should never know a single moment's peace. If you see George Osborne in the street, you have a moral responsibility to attempt to kick him in the nuts.

Speaker 2 If you get taken down by police protection detail, respect to you. But the attempt has to be there.

Speaker 2 Man, the idea that Cameron is cover for Tony Blair is unbelievable. The fact that Tony Blair can walk around being like, oof, remember it when it was on me?

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, I have a few remarks.

Speaker 7 First of all,

Speaker 12 haha.

Speaker 12 Wow.

Speaker 2 That stung like the Boston Tea Party.

Speaker 2 Secondly,

Speaker 2 I love how like the IMF also commented that Sunak's program is too austere.

Speaker 20 The IMF thinks

Speaker 2 what Rishi Sunak is doing is too austere. The IMF, which is very suspect, it's almost like they're saying, if you keep this up, you're going to look like a country we don't actually give a shit about.

Speaker 2 The IMF.

Speaker 2 The problem is that the press of this country is now so skewed to essentially being a mouthpiece for the Conservative Party that we're going to start seeing articles saying, well, the communists of the International Monetary Fund have fucked it down.

Speaker 18 Other news now. Well, let's go back to the Roald Dahl story, which is getting increasing traction

Speaker 18 here.

Speaker 6 Roald Dahl's publishers have edited

Speaker 6 his books. He died in the early 1990s

Speaker 6 to an attempt to bring them up to date and make them less offensive to modern readers. Rishi Sunak

Speaker 6 waded in saying we shouldn't gobble funk with words, using one of Roald Dahl's own terms from I think the BFG.

Speaker 6 And that is a little bit rich coming from Sunak, a man who is a pro-Brexit campaigner, member of the Johnson government and now Prime Minister, has been gobble funking the shit out of the United Kingdom for years now.

Speaker 18 He said it was an attack on free speech.

Speaker 6 These edits to Dahl's book before saying, sorry, no, I'm mixing that up with my own government's public order bill that we're trying to hack through Parliament to clamp down on protests.

Speaker 10 my mistake.

Speaker 8 It's one of these stories, isn't it, that sort of taps into the whole concepts of culture wars.

Speaker 18 It's sort of almost impossible

Speaker 18 to get to the bottom of what's actually happening from the massive overreactions to parts of the story

Speaker 6 that have been reported.

Speaker 18 And also, Dahl's texts have already constantly been updated, including by himself.

Speaker 6 The oomper lumpers in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory were originally trafficked slaves from Africa,

Speaker 6 described in explicitly racist terms.

Speaker 6 And he himself did agree to change this text after it was pointed out that even by the standards of the late 60s and early 70s, that was a little on the massively offensive side of the seesaw.

Speaker 18 So, I mean, it's not a unique occurrence in Dahlian history.

Speaker 6 Nish, what do you make of that?

Speaker 18 And

Speaker 6 what would you like to see rewritten?

Speaker 2 I think, listen, I think that there is a lot of noise around this

Speaker 2 and there's a lot of people who are very sort of agitated.

Speaker 2 Even

Speaker 2 the aforementioned Mr. Rushdie was

Speaker 2 very agitated about this and there's a lot of writers that but I think there is a lot of noise around this. First of all

Speaker 2 there have not been large-scale protests about Roaldah's books. Nobody has really been calling for this to happen.

Speaker 2 The reason this has happened is sort slightly out of a corporate self-interest because

Speaker 2 a number of the rights to Roll Dahl's books have been recently sold to Netflix, who are making a bunch of adaptations around them.

Speaker 2 There is also a commercial advantage in rewriting the books because the rewritten editions

Speaker 2 have copyright laws reattached to them, and so it prolongs them passing into public domain, which allows them essentially to be published without profit.

Speaker 2 So, there is a lot of this comes from a commercial imperative.

Speaker 2 So it is a strange thing to kind of get sort of stuck on.

Speaker 2 And like you say, Andy, I think one of the key reasons here is these books have been updated largely for commercial reasons, but also for reasons of changing cultural mores.

Speaker 2 And that's exactly what happened. to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Roaldahl made those revisions himself because he was trying to smooth the passage of the film adaptation starring Gene Wilder.

Speaker 2 And listen, I as a child read a lot of these Real Dahl books before I knew about his views on, as mentioned, Jewish people, which are,

Speaker 2 I mean, to say suboptimal would be an embarrassing disservice.

Speaker 12 But

Speaker 2 I read the revised editions and so I was quite shocked to read the original 1964 edition in which the umpa lumpers are taken from the deepest and darkest part of of the African jungle and specifically described as black pygmies.

Speaker 2 Now,

Speaker 2 even Roldahl reread that.

Speaker 2 The idea that Roldahl changed this for any other reason other than sort of commercial imperative is

Speaker 2 nonsense. Roldahl didn't really understand the tastes of change.
There were protests when they announced the film adaptation of the book by the NAACP in America.

Speaker 2 And Roaldahl said he couldn't understand why the activists saw his story as a terrible, dastardly, anti-Negro book. I would say the way you phrased that might have been a f ⁇ ing clue, Rold.

Speaker 2 Maybe the giveaway was in the way you literally phrased that specific sentence.

Speaker 12 But

Speaker 12 this is...

Speaker 6 Yeah, I guess there's a balance to be struck, isn't there?

Speaker 6 That for today's children, allowing them to immerse themselves in soothingly fictional racism, sexism, and a sort of other prejudice in made-up stories, that can be quite a calming respite from the actual racism, sexism and other prejudice of real-life politics and media.

Speaker 7 So, I mean, do we really want to take away that fictionally racist universe from them, Nish?

Speaker 12 I mean, yeah.

Speaker 2 Also, to be clear, Roaldar's books are going to as wide an audience as ever.

Speaker 2 There's a movie being made at the moment where Timothy Chalamay plays a young Willy Wonka in what I can only describe as the least necessary backstory in Truman history.

Speaker 2 I mean if you think about Willy Wonka's backstory too much, he's a jaunty colonialist. It's like

Speaker 2 Clive of India, but occasionally he spontaneously bursts into song.

Speaker 21 Which I think the real Clive of India did as well.

Speaker 12 That is Tim Minchin's next musical.

Speaker 21 Clive of India, the musical.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 19 Also, gentlemen, I don't know how you feel about this, but a lot of the words have been changed, but not by much.

Speaker 19 So, in James and the Giant Peach, Aunt Sponge is apparently no longer terrifically fat and tremendously fabby, but she's a nasty old brute and deserves to be squashed by the fruit.

Speaker 19 I don't know if the changes are all that better.

Speaker 19 The Oompa Loompers are now small people instead of small men.

Speaker 19 And Augustus Gloop and Charlie and Chocolate Factory is now described as enormous instead of enormously fat.

Speaker 19 And Mrs. Twit is no longer ugly and beastly, but just beastly.

Speaker 12 How is this improving?

Speaker 2 Listen, Roaldahl stories are woven into the fabric of the way children are brought up. Not just in the UK, but absolutely all over the world.
And like the, you know, children's fairy tale stories, the

Speaker 2 grim tales, the original versions of those are at points incredibly vile at the dark. And they will change.
And it seems unlikely that Roll Dahl will ever be expunged from history.

Speaker 2 Stories like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are going to be a part of children's upbringings for as long as people read books.

Speaker 2 I would again reiterate: if we are going to review any comments of Roldahl's, it shouldn't be those in his fiction. It should be the phrase, I mean Hitler.

Speaker 2 There's always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere. Even a stinker like Hitler didn't pick on them for no reason.

Speaker 2 Those are the comments I would say we should be much, much more concerned about than the British.

Speaker 12 In the great history of understatement, describing Hitler as a stinker, I think that is going to be hard to beat.

Speaker 12 That is,

Speaker 12 you know, I don't know if he describes Stalin as a bit of a rotter as well at the same time.

Speaker 19 He was just looking for nuance.

Speaker 12 He was looking for nuance at all.

Speaker 5 The reason this happened is because the publishers use sensitivity readers to go over old text text to see if there's language or content in them that might upset today's audience.

Speaker 12 And this is a sort of similar opposite process that newspapers, political parties, and TV channels employ when they use insensitivity readers to check whether they can upset more people with how they cover events.

Speaker 7 Just two different professions, Andy.

Speaker 12 Two different professions.

Speaker 3 That concludes this week's Bugle sub-episode. We will be back with issue 4255 next week.
Until then, I have been and remain Andy's Altsman. Goodbye.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 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.