Britain's Rail Network Is Almost As Good As Ukraine's

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Buglers, hello.

Oh no, I've got it the wrong way around.

I always feared this would happen.

Oh no.

Well, who knows what effect that will have on the rest of the show?

It's a bit of a game.

Am I Zoltzmanande?

Oh, no.

Oh, no.

All right, I'm going to have to make a couple of adjustments and switch myself off and on again.

Shutting out.

Hello, buglers.

Ah, view.

We're back on track.

Welcome to issue 4254 of the Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

It's the 21st of February 2023, and I am four-time Wimbledon champion Rod Laver.

Joining me today, I have the former US Open champion Pancho Gonzalez, and from Spain, it's Manuel Santon.

Oh no, I've got that thing where I'm mistaken for 1960s tennis players.

Let's give it another go.

Hello, buglers!

I'm Andy's ultimate.

I think we're good this time.

Welcome to issue 4254 of the Bugle.

I am in the shed in London.

Joining me this week from just up the road here in South London.

It's Nish Kumar.

Hello Nish.

Hello Andy.

Hello Buglers.

I will be maintaining the correct order of greetings.

Good.

That's just as it should be.

How are you, Lish?

I have drunk, I would say, slightly too much coffee.

So

if people think I have a loud and annoying voice and I talk too quickly already, get ready.

I'm fing jacked.

So, I mean, when you say slightly too much,

what are we talking about here?

Because we were recording at midday UK time.

So, I mean,

what have you packed in?

Addy, we're talking five double-strength Americanos.

Right.

That's too many.

That's too many.

I've basically done a couple of lines of Chang.

Basically.

Basically.

Basically, I'm on cocaine.

And I'm concerned that my performance of this bugle is going to mirror the character arc of Henry Hill in the film Goodfellas.

It's going to start exciting.

It's going to get really exciting in the middle.

And then it's going to descend into a dark well of paranoia.

I'm going to end this bugle on the Witness relocation program.

Where are you getting your coffee from?

Also joining us, and I've no idea how much caffeine is pumping through his bloodstream.

From Mumbai, India, it's Anuvabh Pal.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, Nish, how are you?

Yeah, good, thanks.

Well,

what's your caffeine, stroke, other addictive substance instincts?

It's much later

into the evening for Anuvab, so it's much more socially acceptable for him to have had the amount of caffeine I've had.

Exactly.

So I'll tell you what I've been inhaling.

It's very different from what Nisha's been inhaling.

I've been inhaling asphalt and concrete.

Oh, right.

It's an early Oasis song as well.

Exactly.

Exactly.

1993, one of the early hits.

Now, both of you are obsessed with.

Well, basically, the chord sequence is very similar to a Beatles song.

Anyway, let's not dwell on that for too long.

Look, both of you are observers of India, and I don't know if you've read about this, but basically India is undergoing the largest infrastructural development projects in history.

So

under Prime Minister Modi they've decided that nothing before this existed in India, so they have to build every road, bridge and house imaginable

at the same time.

So if you travel around India, and the last week I was in three different cities, India is one large construction site.

The air quality index in Mumbai today is four hundred, which is the same air quality index of any city after an earthquake.

Just to do this podcast, I'm not making this up gentlemen, and I'm not doing this for comedy, just to do this podcast, I had to go out in the road and request three different digging companies to stop digging.

There are actually five around me.

I requested three of them.

And I'm not making this up.

So I am well for tonight and then I'm dead tomorrow.

That's the power power of the bugle.

We can interrupt infrastructure projects in India.

That's the power of this podcast.

Although I will say,

interrupting any infrastructure projects or doing anything in India that might upset the BJP could result in the bugle being investigated for tax affairs.

Great.

Yes.

On this day, in 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto.

What a manifesto that was.

The original version, of course, not the director's cut, extended version that some prominent communist leaders evidently managed to get hold of.

The one with the extra bits about exterminating millions and millions of our own people and living in great palaces.

Also, today is Pancake Day, Shrove Tuesday.

The famous Christian festival commemorating the famous day when a teenage Jesus turned some eggs, milk and flour into a surprisingly convincing picture of the moon in all his

early miracles.

As always, a section of the view that's going that's great.

As soon as you embarked on that, I was excited.

As soon as you embarked on that, I was excited.

You know, when you see you feel someone's like, it's at the moment.

I'm a huge watcher of Manchester United Football Club, and at the moment, when Marcus Rashford runs down the inside left of the opposition's defence, there's a real sense of excitement of somebody making an attack in an area in which they have huge strength.

And you riffing on the theological origins of Pancake Day is that is saltman

that is zaltzman at his strongest i thought i could have taken it a bit longer i just did a little kind of neat layoff really rather than a full powerful run into the box and slamming it into the top corner

i i was really wondering nish how andy was going to bring history into a pancake

well there is history in everything which brings us on to our section in the bin which is a make history history section um we don't usually do this but this is a a paid-for promotional pull-out section by the International Anti-History League.

Today, Tuesday, will quite literally be history by the time you listen to this,

Buglers.

And history, frankly, has had its chance and it's proved that it brings nothing but anger, confusion, and disappointment to this planet.

And ask yourselves these questions.

Do you find history overwhelmingly long?

Whether you think there's been

13 billion years of it, or just six short millennia, delete according to favourite book.

Do you find it annoying that you can never truly and completely understand how we've got to where we've got to?

Because, and I quote, too much shit has already happened for me to get my fing head around.

Herodotus, 433 BC.

Do you find that history quite often tells you things that are really inconvenient and contradict what you like to tell yourself about the world you live in today?

Well, it's quite possible that you work in politics, but why not then throw history in the bin in this co-production between the Bugle and the Anti-History League.

We are attempting to get rid of all history.

It's mostly full of tragedy, suffering, failure, cruelty, exploitation, bastardry, shitheaditude.

And

Chris, you need to bleep the bleeps out here.

Being absolute

for these b ⁇ s.

Also, if you're one or more of white, male, well-off religious, non-religious, or alive, the chances are that history does, could or should make you feel a bit guilty about shit that happened then and how it influences shit that's happening now.

So we are trying to get rid of history and to support the Make History History campaign for just £49 a month.

You can help us remove all traces of history from initially the internet and then the entire world.

And as a special promotion, you can nominate a single piece of history to remove instantly

from the history books right now.

And Ivam, I know you're a big fan of history.

What would you take out first of all in our efforts to expunge all traces of the known past and just make the world a happier place?

If it's Indian history, the current government have already removed the British and the Mughals.

So I'd have to go even further back.

I think

I'd have to remove the early

sort of Turkish and Uzbek people that moved to India.

So, you know, we'd have to go back.

All right, they've gone.

Vasco Dagama, Animab's coming for you.

I'd have to go as far as that as him, him, yeah.

But do you want an individual removed or a whole kingdom?

I don't think.

Well, you know, I'm not a huge fan of the Romans.

Okay, you've taken out the whole Roman Empire.

Yeah, because they've left too much behind, and I don't think they've given other people enough of a chance.

You know, like, I, you know, like, for example, we don't know much about the time around Jesus.

We don't know, like, where are all the statues and stuff from Judea, you know, but the Romans, they've got a circus, they've got buildings, they could show you the place where Caesar was stabbed.

It's too many things.

I think

there's not an equitable distribution of historical ruins in the world.

And I think we should take away some from a lot of ruins and give it to people with no ruins.

I think that might be the motto of the British Museum.

They just haven't quite got the balance right.

Yeah.

You know, for a long time there was a debate going on in India as to what to do with the town of Serangapatnam, which is where the famous battle happened where the British defeated Tipu Sultan and essentially conquered India.

That was the big, big battle.

And the there's massive field there, there's nothing there now.

And the local member of parliament wanted to erect a massive statue of Bruce Lee because he was so fan

of Bruce Lee.

So again, out of context history is something I'm a big fan of as well.

I'm a huge fan of that.

Something something quite complicated happened here.

Well, everyone likes Bruce Lee.

So maybe we could just...

Is there any way we could compromise on popular historical figures?

Bruce Lee, Dolly Parton,

Denzel Washington, people that everyone likes.

Right, we're making the world a better place.

There's going to be so many statues of Beyoncé in 100 years.

I mean, what single piece of history so we got rid of the Roman Empire, which does mean for the rest of this podcast, we cannot use any English words that have their origin in Latin.

I guess a lot of the news this week happened on verandas.

Yeah, so it might be quite a lot of fairly Germanic swearing, I think.

Nish, what bit of history would you like to take out?

Well, it depends.

Are you talking about if I could erase the history?

Does that mean the events of what happened around that person never happened?

Because if that's the case and we're giving ourselves that amount of power, you've got to lose big Addie H, as I call Hitler.

However, if all we're doing is just removing that person's name from history, I quickly rescind my Hitler claim because I'm pretty sure quite a few conspiracy theorists on the internet are doing that.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolute level best.

So I'll withhold my answer until I know the full parameters.

Great.

Well, the Make History History section also given to you you in association with Brexit.

That section in the bin.

Top story this week.

Well, this week brings the one-year anniversary of Vladi Putles, the Kremlin Kremlin, the Moscow megadick, getting his career high strop on and starting the Ukraine war, deciding to inflict untold chaos.

bloodshed and misery on the people of Ukraine rather than just sort out his own self-image issues.

It's

It remains hard to believe, does it not, a year on, that someone who'd invaded Ukraine and Georgia and actively supported Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian war with barely a twitch of political condemnation or recrimination from the international community in return would invade Ukraine again.

But he did.

He did a year ago this week.

And it's, I think, fair to say it's not gone well for Putin.

It's not gone well for humanity in general.

And this week, Joe Biden, the American president, made a surprise trip to the Ukraine

to express his support for the extraordinary resistance the Ukrainian people and military have shown.

I think that sent a powerful message to Putin's Russia that the US, NATO and the West in general are still, one year on, prepared to do anything for a decent photo opportunity.

And there cannot be a stronger message than that.

What have you made of past year and

Biden's trip this week?

You know, I've just been obsessed with a petty detail.

There's something about Biden getting into Ukraine on a secret train.

Yes.

A ten-hour train.

Yeah.

I mean, I can't bring up 1939 because Nish has removed all that from

with mathematical precision.

He's removed that.

I thought in 2023 you could secretly get in and out of countries in other ways if you were the president of the United States.

Well, just, you know, like being teleported there.

You think that must be.

I mean, it does make you think.

I mean, it took a 10-hour train from Poland to Kiev and through the, you know, the war-torn nation of Ukraine.

It's pretty lucky he wasn't trying to get from London to Manchester.

As a British person, it was galling to hear that he was able to get a train into a country that's been actively bombed

without even the hint of a rail replacement bus service.

Yeah, it's been

we're coming up to a year since

a marble that someone drew eyes and the mouth on, Vladimir Putin, decided that the Botox had drifted into the common sense center of his brain and he decided to have a war.

And the thing is, Andy, you're right to observe that he'd already invaded the Ukraine before.

And we tried everything.

We tried everything as an international community to condemn him.

We gave him an Olympics.

We gave him a World Cup.

If only we had moved Wimbledon to Moscow,

maybe,

maybe

that would have been the thing that pushed him over and stopped him behaving like a total.

But as it is, all we did was give him an Olympics and a World Cup, and it didn't change his behaviour, and the carried on

Putin hit back with his own State of the Union address, which has happened today as we record, in which,

well, he surprisingly tearfully admitted that he'd got it all wrong.

He just had a bad morning a year ago, started a war, and then he couldn't see a way out of it.

And he's really sorry, and he'll change.

He will change, he'll make it up to people.

And he just wants people to understand him and appreciate his poetry.

And he had a doggy that died when he was a boy, and it left him with anger and abandonment issues.

And we'll all see the funny side of it one day.

My Russian is a bit rusty, admittedly.

But

yeah, I mean, it's, well, I mean, it remains just

an absolute scar on

the 21st century, this whole this whole pro any any shards of optimism for you i mean listen the the the international community has

you know has actually it does seem to have slightly woken up to the threat of vladimir putin that he poses to citizens all over the world including in russia uh you know he's been summarily imprisoned imprisoning protesters and political opponents for years and years and years none of this kind of despotic action is new behavior but previously we had responded to it by giving him major sporting events as previously discussed and turning our financial system in London as a way for him and his cronies to launder all of their wealth so in a sense the one positive from this is that maybe we particularly in London we will stop being the global laundromat for the dirtiest money in the world

and also I guess you know it it might also if you're if from the point of view of leaders of the Conservative Party it might mean that they get slightly more varied tennis opponents, because they mostly have to play against Russian donors at tennis.

And it'd be quite nice if they can branch that out, because you worry, because, you know, there's a sort of Russian style of tennis that maybe

that's a bit restrictive.

It's not even just tennis meetings.

Maybe former prime ministers of the Conservative Party will stop having secret meetings with high-level members of the Russian government without their security detail present, as one Boris Johnson did.

What did he do?

Probably tried to get Yevgeny Lebedev pregnant.

That's possibly what happened, because that's what the guy does.

The guy tries to get absolutely everybody pregnant.

But

I guess the other positive thing is Biden is sending a pretty strong message out

back home

because

he did go there and said that he talked a lot about the war being not just about the freedom in Ukraine, but about freedom and the freedom of democracy at large.

And he congratulated the Ukrainian people for stepping up in a way that few people ever have in the past, whilst emphasizing that there was a broad bipartisan support in Washington for the Ukrainian cause.

And there is a broad bipartisan support for the Ukrainian cause, as long as you don't include a massive chunk of the Republican Party.

It feels slightly like this trip was as much about sending a message to the Ukrainian people as it was about sending a message to the American government, because the Republican Party, large sections of it, have voiced quite strident opposition to America sending any kind of weaponry to Ukrainians.

And this week,

Biden obviously made his visit, and on Twitter, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is the congresswoman who represents the congressional district that I believe that's known as the mid-15th century.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is basically a couple of bits of firewood away from a full witch burning.

She is,

she absolutely would

she would watch the Crucible and go, this all seems above board.

Like she's that, she's got that sort of old-fashioned idea.

I think she might suggest that it was the Crucible suggested that America was already going woke in the 1690s.

Just a bit, well, a bit easy, for example.

She responded to

Biden's the official POTUS Twitter account tweeting pictures of Biden and Zelensky on his Ukrainian visit She quote tweeted that and said this impeach Biden or give us a national divorce We don't pay taxes to fund I mean in the case of a lot of members of the Republican Party She could have stopped that

We don't pay taxes to fund foreign countries wars who aren't even in nate who aren't even NATO allies

I don't need to tell you this.

The grammar is an absolute soup there.

She somehow managed to spell allies A-L-L-Y apostrophe S.

The average Ukrainian speaks considerably better English than Marjorie Taylor Griffin.

She said, we aren't sending our sons and daughters to die, to dies, D-I-I-E-S.

Again,

it's unbelievable.

We aren't sending our sons and daughters to dies for foreign borders and foreign inadverted commerce democracy.

America is broke, criminal cutters and cartels reign, and you're a fool.

The two things I take away from this are, well, there's three things I take away from this.

One, it is incredible that members of the Republican Party have seen a kindred spirit in Vladimir Putin, a shiny-faced homophobe.

But it is also incredible that she used the phrase national divorce.

Because I believe America did attempt a national divorce.

I believe that they did attempt a national divorce until the nation's marriage councillor, aka A.B.

Lincoln, decided to step in and try and stop the divorce from happening.

And it is a pretty big claim to suggest that America needs to have a new civil war with a picture of the American flag as part of your Twitter name.

Surely at least she's got to change her photo to a picture of the Dukes of Hazard car with the Confederate flag on it.

The other thing that makes me think is no one hates Americans more than members of the Republican Party.

Man, they hate America.

They cannot stand it.

Now, this is the same woman that decided to shout in the middle of the State of the Union address, right?

Yes.

I guess that never happened in America while the president was delivering the State of the Union.

They didn't have a live heckler.

I think this is the first time.

And I know that our parliament has been quite brilliant in many ways because we've had snacks thrown at each other.

In the 90s, we had all-out brawls.

We had sacks of cash being sort of thrown to show that there's corruption.

But there were Indian members of parliament who congratulated Marjorie Taylor Greene because finally she said the world's biggest democracy has met the world's oldest democracy.

And both parliamentary behaviors seem similar because we identify with that, you know, that you should be able to shout with no sense of decorum in the middle of the State of the Union address.

I'm pretty sure someone once heckled Big Barry O.

I think someone shouted, you lie at him during the State of the Union.

But anyway,

these are history-making moments, and it it is incredible.

It is an incredible coincidence that the Republican Party make history by shouting at a black person and a president who was that black person's friend.

Anthony Blinken, the Secretary of State, has

also warned that China

is

already providing assistance, non-lethal support, as he said, which is also a tagline for the new range of bugle-branded non-exploding underwear available from our website now.

Sorry, already sold out.

He said there's now concerns that China could be about to offer Roscoe, Roscoe,

Moscow or Russia, an upgraded package involving things that also go bang.

And Blinken said if China provides Russia with weapons, that would cause, quote, a serious problem for us and in our relationship.

And I guess that's true of any relationship, isn't it?

Always puts strain on a relationship when you do start supplying lethal weapons to a blood-crazed despot.

I know, you know, it's certainly the biggest strain I've had in my marriage, which had been largely happy over 18 years now,

was when I sent

a box of chainsaws to Colonel Gaddafi.

And it put

real strain on things.

I'm fascinated by the use of the phrase non-lethal support.

Technically, football fans are providing non-lethal support to their teams every time they cheer for them.

In terms of non-lethal support, I guess you'd say sports fans cheering on a team.

Lethal support would be the example of me supporting Andy Saltzman at the Andover Lights when I was Andy's support act, and what I did to that room was lethal.

Now, listen, I just have a quick question about World Wars.

I've been thinking about World Wars a lot.

And, you know, the last nice one we had in the 1930s, you know, apparently they had a bunch of months of something called a phony war.

So, just like what's going on now, I guess they started a war and then over winter they did nothing, and then they started another war in the summer.

And a lot of people are saying that this sort of thing might be what Putin is doing now.

The trouble is, I don't think you can keep the Instagram generation hanging around that long.

I think if you're going to do do a World War for the Instagram generation, you can't do like nine months of nothing and then a Chinese balloon and five months of nothing.

You know, I mean, I don't think this is a James Cameron film.

People are not going to wait 15 years for the next installment.

I think it has to be a quicker thing.

I don't know.

What do you guys think?

I mean, maybe, you know, I mean, I'm in my 40s.

I could wait a while for the World War to play out, but I mean, my 23-year-old cousin, who's on TikTok all day, I don't think she can.

Right, so I'm going to surprise Crimean the bugle to accelerate the process of global Armageddon.

Or at least make it interesting in the winter months.

That's all.

While we're on the subject of James Cameron movies,

the

Republican senator and total asshole, Lindsey Graham,

weighed in on the subject of if China was to help deliver weapons to Russian forces in Ukraine.

He said that it would be a catastrophic thing to happen to the relationship between the US and China.

And he drew this analogy: it would be like buying a ticket on the Titanic after you saw the movie.

Now,

that makes absolutely

sense.

But

more concerningly, what company is selling tickets to the Titanic after the movie has been released?

Did White Star Liners do a promo cruise tie-in to the release of the film?

Well, actually, I mean, also, you know,

that actually would be quite a sound investment because, you know, the market for Titanic memorabilia is quite buoyant.

You know, people are still fascinated by it now.

I'd like the boat.

Exactly.

If you could get, if you could, could find a ticket to the original Titanic, that actually might be an economically sound thing to invest your nation's money in.

It's probably better than going on an actual cruise.

But of course, it's not just China and Russia that poses a threat to the United States.

Some very concerning news reached us this week via the internet, which is that America's greatest threat now is coming from a Canadian pig.

And not just any pig, but a super pig.

The Canadians, it seems, from skim reading and quite possibly misinterpreting the article, have been covertly breeding a hybrid crossbreed of a domestic pig and a wild boar, if you will, a kind of pork monteau,

resulting in

a new oinkster that could threaten American democracy almost as much as some of America's own presidents and TV channels.

This, I mean, this is a huge concern, isn't it?

That these pigs could infiltrate America, join the ranks of wild pigs in America, which there are apparently over 6 million.

This Canadian super pig, apparently,

can build snow caves to survive harsh winters.

And if you give them enough time and a bit of funding, they could probably break into bank vaults, work undercover as an actuary, and probably play tennis to a high level.

These animals are described as being like a cross between Albert Einstein and a 1980s French rugby player.

Not in those those terms, they described as incredibly intelligent and highly elusive.

And I mean, where now for America?

It's under all these threats, and now there's this potential invasion of feral, ice hockey-obsessed Canadian

hybrid pigs.

What is America going to do about this?

I have to say, the first thing I thought when I saw this headline was, wow, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is really plumbing some obscure back catalogue comic characters.

Now that they've reached super pig, I think we're in real trouble here.

I also am fascinated by the use of the phrase elusive to describe a pig.

Because if there's one phrase I do not associate with pigs, it's elusive.

There's definitely very few occasions I've gone, whoa, that pig got away from me.

My God, it's like James Bond starring Babe.

It's unbelievable.

But

they are doing quite a lot of damage.

The wild or feral pigs cause about 1.5 billion dollars worth of damage every single year and the the pigs are also

the pigs are also creating competition for food in the wild because they're accomplished predators again

These are not words that I associate with pigs unless babe three is going to be a very very dark and brutal horror movie

it is a huge worry for and just to put that sum of money in context, $1.5 billion a year of damage caused by wild pigs in America already.

That is over 1% of a Brexit, which is estimated to be damaging the British economy by £100 billion

a year.

And that's...

So wild pigs, I mean, that's quite a good chunk of a Brexit.

That shows quite what these pigs are doing.

I guess the difference is the damage done by wild pigs in their feral natural state has slightly more of a discernible purpose than Brexit.

But still, 1.5 billion is that's that's a lot of gratuitous carnage.

I watch a lot of films, okay?

I make no apologies for that.

Here's what I know from disaster cinema and action movies.

If you've got a wild, like genetically engineered wild animal on the loose, what do you have to do?

You have to release a second genetically engineered wild animal.

This is, we are simply in the opening act of Godzilla vs.

Kong.

And what I suggest we now do is try and get a lion to f a dog and make a mega dog.

That's the only way out of this situation.

The only way you're going to catch a super pig is with a mega dog.

Mega dog.

Indian news now, and well, this is a story that we hinted at earlier on.

Tax officials have raided the BBC offices in Delhi Delhi and Mumbai.

It's been viewed as potential revenge for a documentary that the BBC aired that was critical of Narendra Modi and Uvab, your

overlord and master.

Just explain what's happened, why, and whether...

The BBC is indeed, as has been alleged on Indian media, funded by China.

And if so, does that mean that they will start paying me more for my cricket stats?

Yes, is the answer.

That's the one-word answer.

Now, look, I really don't know what this Guardian article is going on about.

There's a headline in various British newspapers,

there's an opinion column in the Guardian this week from a gentleman called Keenan Malik, who says, India enjoyed a free and vibrant media, and now Narendra Modi's brazen attacks are a catastrophe.

So the BBC did two documentaries on Prime Minister Modi, who apparently in the year 2002 was responsible for some small bits of genocide.

Again, the Supreme Court let him go, so I don't know what the people are talking about.

So he was freed.

But there were some human rights reports and rubbish like that saying he was guilty.

Not a large number of people, only 2,500 people died.

And again, again, it was widespread violence, various communities died.

It just happened to be 99% Muslim, but it was widespread.

All communities were involved.

Just statistically, it just happened to be by completely by mistake one particular religion.

So you know, he's being blamed for all of these things.

And the BBC decided to do a documentary to see where India is now

after these attacks, etc.

And they said that apparently Prime Minister Modi was in some way responsible and that

he should take account and the BJP is somehow fascist.

Now, I've seen no evidence of this, right?

This is a free and fair country.

Everyone listening to this, I want you to know this, including the people who've tapped my internet.

I want you to know.

And whatever version of this recording is going to the home ministry, I want everyone to know that I live in a free and fair democracy.

And I see no connection, zero connection.

And, you know, both you and Nish are political observers of Britain and India.

You would know this.

I see no connection between a tax raid on the BBC three days after the documentary came out.

None.

Tax rates happen in India all the time.

Somehow, statistically, they happen two or three days after you criticize the government.

But

that could just be how the income tax department operates.

I mean, you know,

how do we know the inner workings of the income tax department?

You don't.

So, you know, it's a a range of possibilities.

So, again, you know, I am fully supportive of what the income tax department does.

I've just about to file my returns.

So, you know, they're a wonderful, wonderful organization.

They just, they just timing happened to be unfortunate.

It just happened to be just literally two days after that.

And, you know, there are things you have to do in an income tax raid, which is fairly common, like...

keeping about 50 journalists sort of imprisoned overnight over three days and taking away their telephones.

These are things you just have to do.

I mean, you guys have faced it, I'm sure, with the HMRC.

You know, you've gone in there,

they've taken away your telephone, you can't go out.

I mean, it's just standard, you know, because you filed the wrong expenses.

It's a consensus, really, isn't it?

Yeah, so I don't really know what the BBC is complaining about.

You know, it's

you know, it's just an unfortunate timing issue.

And, you know, there's really, I have no complaints on Prime Minister Modi.

He's doing a fantastic job.

And, you know, I mean, I suppose if we did this podcast a different time where the two people posted outside my door had left,

then perhaps we could have a different discussion.

But currently, I really don't know what the fracker is all about.

The Indian government apparently described the documentary, Nish, as colonial propaganda and hostile garbage, which I think was also words said about my act and your act at the Andover Lights

on their way out.

Maybe there were Indian government people reviewing that show, gentlemen.

They're everywhere.

There is so much hypocrisy at work here.

This Elon Musk, the sort of dog shit Tony Stark, had said that he was an absolutist when it came to free speech.

However, when faced with the prospect of Narendra Modi and the BJP, Musk caved completely, and Twitter has removed clips of this from

its website.

It's very,

very, very sinister.

Also, the hypocrisy doesn't end just at Elon Musk, a spokesman for the BJP, which is the Edder-Modi's political party, took the opportunity to describe the BBC as the most corrupt organisation in the world.

Now, an Indian politician accusing somebody of corruption is not so much the pot calling the kettle black as it is the pot bribing a string string of people to refer to the kettle as black and join in calling it black as often as humanly possible.

Look, I mean, you know, I just slightly to disagree with Nish.

He's absolutely right that there was a loss of electricity at Jawal Nehru University where they tried to screen this documentary.

But, you know, there are power cuts often in Delhi.

And sometimes they happen to be...

targeted in a specific room at a university.

And there's power everywhere else, but you just that room happens to lose electricity for a couple of hours.

It's perfectly normal.

And then again, again, good point, Nish.

You know, who is more objective?

The British Podcasting Corporation, which is an independent body covering news all over the world, or an Indian politician who's a spokesperson of the government?

Now, who is more objective?

Now, obviously, the Indian politician.

And just one last point I want to make a quality.

Lots of authors and writers have been saying, you know, we don't have freedom of speech in India.

Comedians are saying we don't have, you know, the government is very strict, etc.

That's not completely true at all.

Arunathi Roy, the famous novelist who won the Booker Prize, wrote a scathing piece on Prime Minister Modi, came out in The Guardian last week, and she's happy, you know,

everyone's happy that she wrote it, and she has complete freedom to write this.

She's sitting in Norway and writing it, but that's a different thing.

You know, we

you know, that's just where she happens to be, and that's fine.

You know, Salman Rushdie, noted novelist, has been saying, you know,

terrible things are going on in India about the BJP right after he came out of his attack.

And, you know, again,

he's saying that, you know, very much

within, you know, I mean, right now he happens to be in New York and he hasn't come to India for the last four years, but because they didn't give him a visa.

But again, he's free to say these things.

There's complete freedom, gentlemen.

So

I don't know what the issue is here.

Moving on to some UK news.

Since we last broadcast to you, Nicholas Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland and head of the Scottish National Party, has unexpectedly resigned, essentially due to the fact that

British politics has become so toxic that if you washed it with water from a British beach, it would end up cleaner than it does.

And you can't really put it in any greater context than that.

She resigned whilst...

She is still well ahead in the opinion polls and the SNP, although its popularity has been declining, is still ahead, which does suggest that she has not read the British Manual of Political Resignations, in which you are supposed to leave in total and abject chaos.

You're supposed to insist you are right all along, and you're supposed to be so unpopular with the voting public that even your own pencil screams and runs out of the room when it sees you.

But she's left, as I said, ahead in the polls and admitting regret at some of her decisions and

mistakes.

So it's a very unusual sort of resignation for a British politician to make.

No, and I tell you what, it's this absolute, and I hate it, Jacinda Arden's influence.

People resigning with dignity and giving speeches where they emphasise their humanity has no place in politics.

You should be frog-marched out of there by your own MPs or you need to resign being weighed down by so many scandals that you're actually physically incapable of standing up.

And and also i mean we we talked about this on last week's newsquis which you could hear at buglers if you want to hear it uh on bbc sounds nish was uh uh part of that team um that uh

she has outlived uh

in terms of her term of office uh four prime ministers um so she's on on the fifth uh now and she came to power in 2014.

the only possible explanation is that In 2014, she went into an antique shop, she bought a magic lamp, she rubbed it, and she was granted three wishes by a genie.

She asked, firstly, for an infinite supply of red suits, secondly, for an invisible triceratops to accompany her wherever she goes.

Obviously, she got those two.

And thirdly, to stay as First Minister of Scotland, while there were five different prime ministers in Westminster.

Now, on the basis of how many prime ministers there had been up to 2014, she should have been in power until about the year 2040 rather than 2023, as has been.

She also called on politicians.

This kind of concept of this kind of how toxic and confrontational politics has become.

She's called on politicians to reach across the divide.

But the problem is we're in the 2020s and when politicians reach across the divide it's generally so that they can extend a middle finger to whoever is on the other side of that divide.

I'm always interested in

these wonderful sort of leaders who, like Jacinda Arden, I think her farewell speech, she said she didn't have enough left in the tank.

And

Nicholas Turgeon, her speech said, I've spent a lot of time on Nicholas Sturgeon, the politician.

I'm now interested in the person.

I just,

there aren't enough men politicians with graceful speeches.

But first of all, they don't seem to leave.

And when they leave, it's always, you know, I'm sorry, those were not my pants.

You know, it's always up like that.

Douglas Ross, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, that's the Conservatives, the Conservative Party in Scotland, accused Sturgeon of presiding over a decade of division and decay.

Now,

that's a Conservative accusing another politician of presiding over division and decay.

Now, of course, it's quite possible that he meant this as a rare compliment from a Conservative politician to an opponent, but it's also equally possible that

that distant sound you're going to hear is the concept of irony just disappearing down the plughole of politics.

He accused Sturgeon also of governing in her party's interests rather than the country's and

said that she'd left the nation in a state of paralysis due to the toxic legacy of a referendum.

That is a conservative making those allegations.

Irony,

you will be much missed, but you are now dead.

In other arts news,

well, this is an astonishing story.

A German ballet company director has been fired after, and I wish I was making this up,

smearing dog shit in the face of a critic who had criticised his productions.

Now, obviously, that's not just a response to criticism, that is assault.

Ideally, he should have collected the dogologue, put it in a bi-degradable plastic bag, and then made his point forcefully, perhaps in the medium of a bit of dance to say that he disagreed with the critic, but he he smeared dog shit in the critic's face and refused to apologise, and he's now been fired.

But I mean, this is, Nish, I mean, I know you, like me, have not always been on the receiving end of unalloyed critical praise.

Have you ever been tempted to respond with some sort of physical

counter-attack?

I mean, listen, I think all of us would be lying if

we said that at no point have we ever contemplated smearing dog shit in a critic's face.

I think every one of us, I think everyone who has ever received a negative review would be

absolutely telling lies to themselves and everyone around them if they said they hadn't thought to themselves, find me the nearest dog Xanus.

I have a mission.

But here's the thing.

Crucially,

You give it five seconds and you go, oh, that would be wholly inappropriate.

I don't know what has happened to this person that he mislaid those crucial five seconds of dog shit contemplation.

I don't know what has happened to this person's life that he didn't go, oh my god, it's a bad review.

It would be an extreme overreaction

to even confront this person in real life.

Well, I don't know, gentlemen.

I mean, this I feel like it's done quite a lot for ballet audiences This might get

people back to watching ballet again.

I think some physical violence is necessary when audiences are dwindling.

I mean, I'd just like to bring up the playwright Henry Gibson in this instance.

When he wrote Doll's House, the famous play,

his critics hated it so much that a group of people followed him around for a whole week trying to throw stones at him.

Even as he was trying to drop his son to school.

Now, that group of people that hated the play so much dwindled but never went away.

So even on the seventh day, there were still five or six people trying to throw stones at him.

That's how much they hated the play.

And I think it's done a lot for Dolls House the Play.

It's still produced.

I think,

I mean, I think, although, you know, instead of actual shit,

it's much better if, you know,

some sort of language can replace actual feces.

Like, I'll give you an example.

The very first play I wrote, I worked in the theater for many years, the very first play I wrote, the name of the play was Fatois, and it was about two failed novelists.

And the reviewer, writing in Time Out, did a very good job.

And his last line of his review was, This Fatois needs no death sentence.

And I thought that's such a good line.

I could meet him somewhere and find a dog and throw feces at him.

But I need to think of a line cleverer than that

i would say and buglers are aware of my professional history if i were to smear dog shit in the faces of everyone who has written negative things about me in the british press i would basically be filling a dog bowl with dog food and an inordinate amount of weapons grade hot sauce at the moment

It would be a real drag on my week-to-week schedule if every time someone wrote something negative about me in the press, I smear dog shit on their face.

Maybe this guy's just enjoyed too many years of

unadulterated praise.

I would say to him, I wish I'd been able to talk to him before he

crouched behind the dogs.

Listen, if you don't realise, as you're crouching behind a shitting dog, ready to pick up its fecal matter to smear on the face of someone who wrote wrote something slightly negative.

If in the crouch you don't realize

things have gone very badly for you, then I don't think I can help you.

Even as I was trying to provide a solution, I thought, no, because as you're standing next to the dog's arsehole thinking, right, come on, give me the good stuff, if you don't realize that what you're doing is stupid, then you are beyond help.

Well, that brings us to the end of this week's Bugle.

We have to wrap this this up quickly because it's Tuesday afternoon and I have to go and humiliate Nish on the football.

Nish and I have to go and play football together down in Crystal Palace.

Anything to plug before we go?

No, I just want to quickly say I'll be reviewing the game, so I look forward to

some dog shit through my mailbox later in the week.

If you live in the UK, episodes of Hold the Front Page are still available on Sky On Demand or Now TV.

I say episodes, the entire thing's available.

So you can watch that if you want.

Or not if you don't.

Thank you for listening, Buglers.

We'll be back next week.

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.