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The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers and welcome to the year 2023, the year that I predicted would happen as long ago as 2018.

It's always nice that we prove right every now and again.

I am Andy Zoltzmann and we are back after a somewhat extended two-month hiatus.

Back Back in November, my father died after a prolonged battering by Parkinson's and dementia, culminating in an epic and reassuringly peaceful 10-day snooze as he, in modern parlance, transitioned into a new post-existence phase of his personal journey.

As any of you who've lost someone to dementia will know, it is a strange, gradual bereavement rather than a binary state of alive and not alive.

And alongside the finality of the end of that process, the move from suffering to not suffering is a relief and mercy.

So I would like to dedicate this first bugle since he made that move to my father.

He loved sport, he really loved puns, he ate more bacon than is widely considered optimal in traditional Jewish circles and as a sculptor for most of his working life he didn't have a real job.

So it should be clear to you bugle listeners that he has been a significant influence on me in many ways.

Also since then I spent a month in Pakistan being escorted by very friendly, if extremely machine gun wielding armed guards to and from cricket grounds to watch England achieve one of their finest Test Series victories.

So that's certainly helped.

Now, joining me for the first bugle of 2023, we're kicking off the year with the dream team.

We have Nish Kumar and Alice Fraser.

Happy New Year to both of you.

Happy New Year, Andy.

My condolences and welcome to the fold of the half-orphan where we're nearly ready to join Pagan's gang.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, Alice.

Hello, Buglers.

Happy New Year to you all.

And again, many condolences to you and the Saltsmans.

Andy, I do believe that your strong commitment to puns is a lifelong tribute to your father.

Yes, if you'd seen his speech at my sister Helen's wedding, you would realise, actually, Buglers, from what you've heard me do over the last 15 years, you've got off pretty lightly.

So

how's 2023 shaping up for you guys so far?

We're nine days in.

But how are you rating it as amongst the greatest years of the decade so far?

I mean, sorry, achievement

because

I know, you know, Andy, so much of podcasting runs on momentum.

I took a brief break after giving birth to

take a pause on my Tea With Alice podcast.

It's meant to be a six-week break, and I am returning now.

Season two of Tea with Alice is out.

So now.

So

that's, what 15 14 months

yeah yeah yeah let's let's round it down to a year

yeah well I think I mean that was Chris can you remember how long the gap between

uh

the end of the John Oliver phase of the bugle and when it really began uh in October 2016

what kind of hiatus was that

it was a year and a bit wasn't it I think

we we were off there for 219 days seven months six days all right okay right but But we hadn't done many shows in the previous six months before that.

It had got a little sporadic, hadn't it?

A year and a bit then.

I'm going to claim that as the natural break between a season one and a season two of podcasting.

Nish, how's your year been so far?

So far, so good.

A lot of people are doing dry January, where they give up alcohol to compensate for the excesses of the festive period.

I will be doing drenched January

because I live in the United Kingdom in 2023, and at this point, the only way to cope with the state of this nation is to be permanently drunk that you really can't take any of it too seriously.

I am bugling sober because I do have some respect for institutions.

And given you've dedicated this to the memory of your recently departed father, it would be a bit gauche for me to be absolutely shit-faced on it.

I'm also observing dry January, but I think I might have misunderstood it.

I'm just not

having a shower or a bath for the entire month.

But you know, don't judge.

I'm 48.

I'm at the time of life where you try to relive your teenage years.

So what better way of doing it

could there possibly be?

As somebody who's currently in a house with two toddlers, I now know that there's such a thing as wet milk.

So

wet, wet milk.

I mean, it's

the thing when there's milk in a bottle, and then they drool all over the bottle, and then they hand you the bottle of wet milk.

You know that thing.

All right, yeah.

Bringing back memories now.

Well, that moves us

seamlessly into our section in the bin for this bugle, which we are recording on the 9th of January, 2023.

Just quickly, on the 10th of January in 1776, the last known example of common sense in American politics when Thomas Paine published his pamphlet entitled Common Sense, advocating that the American colonies quit Team GB and and go it alone.

It hasn't really worked out, but it's starting to look increasingly tricky to pull back and admit you've been wrong for this amount of time.

But our section in the bin is January personal challenges, because it's not just dry January, there's also January,

in which people pledge to be a little more cautious about things in general, ranging from high-risk physical maneuvers such as trying to run round corners as fast as they do in films, to taking online offers, claims and news headlines, which

are new insult.

Also January, in which you pledge to spend more time sitting in traffic jams giving yourself a bit of me time to reflect on your life career and goals for the next year whilst also attempting to overcome the metaphorical feeling of static futility that traffic jams represent uh panueri in which you have to find something to leave a scathing review of every day for a month and uh finally uh yan youiry in which you tried to persuade jan ulrich the german former professional road cats and drug cheats or as they were known during his career professional road cyclist to leave his windows open for the first 31 days of the year.

And before you complain, it's what my dad's gonna be.

Wow, wow.

I thought that had reached its natural end.

You just kept it going for a little longer.

Very much like my dad and his nursing home, actually.

Top story this week: chaos in America.

American politics has been brought to a standstill

in the election of a new Speaker of the House.

Kevin McCarthy, the Republican, has finally won the vote to become Speaker.

But it took him not one, not two,

but 15 attempts, 15 rounds of voting.

before he finally persuaded the more hardline Republicans to support him, which I guess does suggest that he doesn't have the most rock or most solid of support.

Because generally, if you have to ask for something 15 times before people agree to it, it's well awkward and will always remain awkward, even if they eventually say yes.

Whether that is taking on one of the most important jobs in US politics, whether it's asking for permission to bring your pet bow constrictor to work, whether it's membership of the Nish Kumar Superfan Club, whether it's an exorcism or a marriage.

I'd say maximum five asks on any of those before you take the hints.

It is an extraordinary kind of person who can take 15 rejections and keep trying.

He's the little train that could if it was the little train who shouldn't have.

This is the danger of teaching children they can be anything if they just keep trying.

I mean, Nish, it was quite extraordinary followings.

Even Donald Trump, the former president and insurrectionist with a black belt in self-interested social division, called for unity.

And, you know, when you're being told to unify for the good of the nation by Donald Trump, you need to take a long, hard bath with yourself.

That's like being told by Cristiano Ronaldo to play for the love, not the dollar.

I don't know what you're talking about, Andy.

He's gone to Saudi Arabia because he believes it to be the finest home for professional football.

Sorry, my mistake.

That was naive of me.

What did you make of this?

It was an extraordinary saga that sort of showed the unique wittery of American politics.

Well, I mean, we're living through history because Kevin McCarthy, as you say, was elected speaker on the 15th attempt.

And this was the longest confirmation process for a speaker since 1859.

And to put that in context, the US has fought a civil war since then, participated in two world wars, and there have been nine Fast and Furious films, plus the Hobbs and Shaw spin-off.

And I don't think I can give it any greater context than that.

It's not called a spin-off, it's called a Tokyo Drift.

Just

The Republican Congressman Patrick McHenry said at the start of his speech nominating McCarthy, it's been a long week.

The president has called this process an embarrassment.

Talking heads labelled this chaos and a mess.

And some would call it shambolic even.

But it's called democracy.

And really,

what could be more...

First of all, things can be more than one thing.

It can be democracy.

And it could also be an embarrassment, a chaos, and a mess.

What could be truer to the processes of democracy than a political party who attempted an insurrection, culminating in a vote where a man had to beg another man for his vote, and one of those men is currently under investigation for sex trafficking?

Kevin McCarthy is speaker, I mean, in name only.

Joe Biden described the entire saga as an embarrassment.

And Florida Congresswoman Kat Camak said well it's Groundhog Day but it isn't like Groundhog Day.

I hate to be a stickler for the details of the plot point of that particular movie but in Groundhog Day the main character learned something.

The Political Party

has come through a nightmarish process and it has learned literally nothing and it didn't even have the decency to attempt to throw itself off the top of a clock tower.

I think the extraordinary thing about this is that it is a really good speedrun show of what what this democracy looks like, particularly in the American government system, which is somebody who wants power and then slowly trades away important concessions until by the time they achieve that power, you cannot trust anything they do because you don't know how many pockets they're in.

That was how he finally got himself

over the line in this one-horse race.

I mean, he basically got over the line with the oldest political negotiating trick in the book, rolling over and giving in.

Concession followed concession as the harder right of the pseudo-Republican remnants of a once genuine political party have largely got what they wanted in terms of making sure the whole democratic process in America works as shitly as possible for all Americans.

So I guess this is, as you say, democracy in glorious action.

Well the most fascinating concession that he made in this process of slowly sucking all the cocks in the room was that it only takes one member to trigger an election.

So it only takes one person being annoyed with him one day to make him have to run this whole thing again.

So the final tally ended up at the 15th time of asking.

It was 216 to 212.

All the Democrats voted for their leader, Hakeem Jefferies,

but there were still six Republican holdouts to McCarthy.

And they voted as present.

So

they basically just said, look, we're here.

They didn't actually vote positively for him at all.

McCarthy then took to the stage,

visibly smiling, like a man who simply doesn't understand what's been happening to him for the last few days.

He said, that was easy, her.

My father always told me, it's not how you start, it's how you finish.

And he's right.

It isn't how you start, it's how you finish.

And how we finish is totally f ⁇ ed.

He is absolutely thunder f ⁇ ing.

He's had to make all sorts of concessions to some of the most wackiest whack jobs in the history of American politics.

And even then, in spite of having made concession after concession after concession, he still didn't secure the support of all of them.

Presumably, in Matt Gates' case, because he didn't make it legal to have s ⁇

President Biden congratulated McCarthy for his win in one of those classic political congratulations that carries all the weight and genuine sentiment of a resident in a block of flats congratulating their next-door neighbour for buying two new drum kits.

They don't mean it, and tension lies ahead.

Biden said he looked forward to cooperating with the Republican Party.

I think that was one of the signs of the end times in the book of Revelations.

And he added, the American people expect their leaders to govern in a way that puts their needs above all else, thus raising further concerns over the president's allegedly declining cognitive functioning and increasingly fragile grasp on reality.

I think it's so inspiring, Biden's constant faith in the possibility of cooperation with the Republican Party.

This is a drum he has been banging like somebody who doesn't realize they're married to a dominatrix, even though they have a spike up their ass.

Like, this is

family show.

It's not the only

shenanigan that has been going on in American politics since we've been since we've been off air.

Nish, I know you've been particularly taken by the the story of George Santos

who's been elected, if that is the correct words, to be the congressman for Long Island.

And it appears that he's not been entirely honest with, well, his electorate, America as a whole,

or himself,

and has basically just bullshat his way to power with a made-up resume stroke backstory.

I mean, Andy, this man's commitment to bullshit means this is the closest we will ever get to having you in the U.S.

House of Representatives.

His commitment to bullshit is beyond doubt.

The New York Times in December investigated his background and found that there was a litany of falsehoods, including him claiming to have attended attended Horace Mann private school in the Bronx, which he claimed that he didn't complete because of financial difficulties his family were experiencing.

But however, a school spokesperson told CNN that they'd searched the records, and there's no evidence that he ever attended the school.

He claimed to have earned degrees from NYU and Baruch College, which again, no one has been able to find records of.

He claimed to have worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs,

but again, there seems to be no evidence that he worked for either of those two companies.

And crucially, he also claimed to be a proud American Jew whose grandparents escaped the Holocaust.

He said in his campaign launch video in 2021, he said, I've seen how socialism destroys people's lives because my grandparents survived the Holocaust.

We don't have time to pick over the details of that.

We don't have time.

This man's bullshit is so aggressive, we don't even have time to pick over the details of that.

So he's called himself a proud American Jew who'd been to Israel numerous times and said that his grandparents were Ukrainian Jews.

His maternal grandfather migrated in the late 90s, in the late 20s, from Ukraine to Belgium.

There's absolutely no evidence of this whatsoever.

His grandparents, in fact, are from Brazil.

And when pressed on this, he said, I never claimed to be Jewish, which is again another lie.

It's a lie within a lie.

This man is inception lying.

He said, I'm Catholic because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background.

I said, I was Jew-ish.

What does all this add up to?

This means we have found a worse Jew than Andy Saltzer.

A man who last Tuesday told me it was fine for him to have eaten a bacon sandwich on his way to football because, and I'm quoting directly here, if you eat it in a car, that makes it kosher.

Amazingly.

No, that makes it kosher, Andy Kosher.

He also claimed his mother died in the 9-11 attacks, but she died in 2016 and there's no evidence that it had anything to do with respiratory difficulties caused by the fallout from those attacks because there's currently no evidence that his mother worked in the World Trade Center at any point he also claimed that he employed four of the victims of the

four of the victims at the Pulse nightclub massacre again

absolutely no evidence of that at all He also claims to be a sort of proudly openly gay Republican even though he was married to a woman until September 2019 again sexuality is a spectrum, and people can be gay, people can change their minds, that's the way things are.

But given this guy's track record, it doesn't look fantastic.

But he also claimed to have founded and run a tax-exempt charity called Friends of Pets United that rescued more than 2,500 dogs and cats.

Although Facebook posts show that the group existed, neither the IRS nor the New York and New Jersey Attorney General's Office could find records showing it was registered as an official charity.

He reportedly held a $50 per person fundraiser for a New Jersey animal rescue group, whose leader later told the Times it never received any of the proceeds.

Now,

this guy has lied about so many things, but the fact that he's lied about both 9-11 and dogs surely,

surely, should accept him from public life.

There's two things you can't do in America.

It's f around with 9-11 and dogs.

It's extraordinary the number of facets that this man has to his personality.

George Sandos, if that is indeed his real name, which at this point I can almost guarantee it isn't, has a looser relationship to the truth than I do with Insert Name of Celebrity Here.

I haven't been watching television.

The point is, like, he's genuinely, he's possibly lied about his sexuality, he's lied about his mother, he's lied about animal charities, he's lied about 9-11, he's lied about his religion, he's lied maybe about his sexuality.

Like, I just don't understand

why

it keeps working.

Well, I mean, I guess there is is a fairly simple answer to that, and that is that the entirety of American politics is dead from inside to out.

Like today, today, this morning, I said to my beautiful daughter, Did you just do a poo?

And she said, No.

But I could smell the poo.

And so I

did not take her word for it.

And I just feel like this guy's walking in to politics smelling like shit and nobody's changing his nappy.

I did read somewhere that some people are saying that actually what he is is an embodiment of the American dream.

Now, the word the there,

I would quibble with.

An American dream.

An American dream, the dream that you can cheat your way to the top, which is an increasingly popular American dream.

He is the embodiment of that.

I was fascinated by, as you say, Nish, this Jew-ish.

That is a load-bearing hyphen that isn't really up to the job.

In terms of the lies as a whole, I guess it comes down to that philosophical question.

Do you believe that lies as negatives multiply together so that one lie plus

so that one lie times another lie equals a fact?

So as long as you tell an even number of lies,

you're in the clear.

Or do they subtract from each other?

I guess that could run through the courts.

Just picking up on a few more of his claims, you said he claimed to set up an animal charity.

The actual truth is that he ran a fleet of 80 Donica Bab vans that sourced its meat by turning pets in people's homes and stealing animals from inattentive zoos.

It also turns out he was not, as he claimed, the winner of the 2015 French Open Singles title, nor did he save the life of Buzz Aldrin by safely talking him down from the moon when he was left there as a prank by Neil Armstrong in 1969, and nor did he discover funk music during an absinthe-fueled seance with Ludwig van Beethoven.

So many, many falsehoods on his seat.

But let's give him credit.

He has said sorry.

He said, I'm embarrassed and sorry for having, and I quote, embellished my resume.

Now, that is not

that's a bit more than embellishing, that's like Hannibal Lecter, it's like a Hannibal lecture apologizing for going a bit off-piste vis-à-vis my dietary preferences.

There are so many lies so elaborately distributed that I'm waiting for the solstice for like the sun to get into the right position to fall through the lies and like hit some treasure man because there's no

like there's no way he's putting these like like elaborate constructions up for no reason

during the various rounds of debates uh for the speaker uh no republicans would be seen near him uh and actually one republican member of congress actually did go to greet him realized who he was and immediately spun away and ran

that tells you how toxic this guy is republicans are embarrassed to be seen with him republicans who will happily sit down with school shooters and sex pets.

I've looked at this guy and thought, no, no, no, that would be very bad for the brand.

Hakeem Jefferies said Santos, quotes, appears to be a complete and utter fraud.

And again, at least this shows commitment to the Trumpian ideal, a complete and utter fraud.

At least we know where we stand.

He's gone all in.

on his fraudulence, not like some of these people, only kind of 97, 98%

fraudulent.

He also appeared at Santos in December at a gala in Manhattan, attended by white nationalists and right-wing conspiracy theorists.

So when we hear that he's the epitome of the American dream, I think we're starting to understand whose American dream this is.

I don't know how he can do it genuinely.

I once had an agent who put up a thing on my website bio that I was on a show that I wasn't on, and I got like a correction, and I still have nightmares about it today.

Other world news now and well of course it's not just in America where Trump's legacy can be seen thriving.

In Brazil

there has been complete and utter mayhem over

the last

day or so as fans of the

out-voted leader Jai Bolsonaro, people who cling to the idea of Brazil being an international egoparia and dream of the Amazon being concreted over and becoming the world's largest car park and claim the election in which their man was beaten by the returning Lula de Seville was some kind of combination of a fix, a hoax, a fantasy, and a conspiracy that resulted in the death of football legend Pele.

They have not taken reality lying down.

A quick trigger warning for some of our more democratically minded American listeners.

They violently stormed government buildings and attempted to tantrum Bolsonaro back into office in a cock-headed coup attempt.

There was a story

in The Guardian this week

saying that the number of people ruled by populist leaders around the world is at a 20-year low, a mere 1.7 billion, according to this report from the Tony Blair Institute, down from 2.5 billion in 2020.

Which, I mean, seems like a positive in a way that it seemed like there were now fewer sharks at large at various points during the Jaws franchise.

But

it's hard to be too optimistic about this when when you see the after effects of some of those populist leaders leaving office, like what we've seen in Brazil this week.

It's all bad stuff.

I believe at various points

in my appearances of this podcast, I've drawn attention to the fact that Bolsonaro may be a creature of pure coronavirus due to the number of times he has contracted the disease.

And like the novel coronavirus, Bolsonaro is a problem that refuses to go away.

Truly, he was the dodgy-looking mole on the back of democracy that we had surgically removed because it could have got very, very dangerous very quickly.

And it turns out we have not successfully scraped Bolsonaro off our backs.

His supporters have

stormed various government buildings in Brasilia and

I mean it's hard to know where they could have drawn inspiration from.

Actually, let me rephrase that.

It's very f ⁇ ing easy to know specifically where they could have drawn inspiration from.

The only way this could have been any closer is if they'd done it two days earlier on January the 6th.

Bolsonaro is even currently hiding out in Florida, which at this point is basically a state devoted to...

It's basically a penal colony.

It's America's Australian.

None taken, but I would say that if you want to make a pretty penny, you should head to, as a hairdresser, you should head to Florida.

that'll support an army of hairdressers.

Apparently, they were bussed in by more than 100 buses,

which just sounds like the worst school holiday ever.

And apparently, Brazilian justice minister Flavio Dino said the police already know who hired the buses and is going to investigate all the passengers who were on them.

And they've included in the article that I'm reading, they've included a picture of Brazilian Justice Minister Flavio Dino, who I do not trust because he looks way too happy to be the Brazilian Justice minister.

I think they've included a picture just because

he looks so delightful.

He looks like he should be on the cover of a university magazine where they're pretending to have more diversity than they have.

He just

so pleased to be there.

The spotlight is falling as we sort of move into the aftermath of this attack.

The spotlight is falling on various different social media outlets.

Twitter actually got rid of quite a lot of its disinformation office, specifically in Brazil.

so that doesn't look great for Captain Muskmeister but there's also a huge amount of attention on various WhatsApp forwards and WhatsApp has become an incredible part of Bolsonaro's rallying of his support via various bits of misinformation and if you don't realize the power of WhatsApp that's probably because you don't have older relatives from India because I cannot tell you the number of times in my family group chat people will be having a completely normal discussion and then someone will post an article saying, Guys, isn't it weird that Narendra Modi's penis is magic?

Anyway,

back to the chat.

Hope everyone enjoyed your cousin's wedding.

Prince Harry is about to release a warts and more warts memoir entitled Spare.

And the leaks and interviews around it are putting the

into.

I knew that family was dysfunctional, but not quite that dysfunctional.

The royal family, still, of course, reeling from the death of Queen Elizabeth II last September.

And come to think of it, reeling from the breakdown of Charles and Diana's marriage in the 1990s and the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936 and the establishment of a full parliamentary democracy gradually in the United Kingdom.

And of course, the execution of Charles I in 1649, which they've still not really recovered from constitutionally and or personally, and the Wars of the Roses, the Peasants' Revolt, the Magna Carta, and the Huha over the Crown after the death of Edward the Confessor in 1066.

it's all chipped away at the royal mythology and now we have this state where it's uh it's sort of tearing itself apart they've been on the back foot since king knut tried to f with the tide

um harry's put on his alligator outfit and started making allegations of all sorts of uh deceit of intra-family betrayal of selfishness and indeed of violence but i guess if we're going to keep a monarchy we should keep all these defining traditions of that institution you can't you can't keep the monarchy and not keep deceit betrayal selfishness and violence can you no of course this is what we signed up for this is absolutely what we signed up this is this is why we have a royal family as far as i can tell when i was a kid there were leaked transcripts of prince charles saying he would have liked to have been camilla parker bowles' tampon like As far as I can tell,

this is just dealing in the proud royal tradition of being weird entertainment for the people of this country.

Andy, I mean, I tried really hard with this.

Like, I read up on it and everything, but it all just slid off my brain like I was an oiled duck during an accident.

But I know people get really hit up about this.

I just feel like, I don't know, an actor from a show I don't watch married Meghan Markle.

I don't know why we care about what some guy who's not going to be the king thinks about anything.

I'm not going to be the king, and you don't listen to me.

I mean, wait a minute, if you're on this podcast list, that you're listening to

my joke has eaten itself.

I'm going to get joke indigestion, which is like normal indigestion, but it sounds like this.

Chris, can you please insert a comical farting noise with like a honk honk sound at the end here?

Don't cut the bit where I ask for it.

I think the audience likes to hear behind the curtain.

Well, I mean, I think fundamentally we do keep the monarchy

largely because of how everything else in the country has gone to shit.

And, you know, it's a useful...

It's the same reason we have sport.

And, you know, I'm not into into the monarchy I am into sport therefore I can successfully ignore reality for months if not years at a time and the monarchy fulfills that role for people who have not reached the elevated plane of human existence that is a deep-seated love of Tessmatch cricket

yeah and I mean and like our love of sport Andy these are sport and the royal family organizations mind in allegations of corruption and racism

well

even though the book has not been yet released I've been reading some of the reviews on Amazon.

There's one here that says, this is not a book about bowling, two stars.

And another one that says, I hated this book so much I didn't read it.

Tell Megan she was such a bad bride she ruined the concept of monarchy for my children.

Now when they ask me if royalty is real, I tell them no, royalty is just a communal fiction seated in an outdated combination of feudal and religious hierarchy.

And all because Meghan was a horrible hussy who stole Harry from me, Sandra, the rightful heir to the throne of Diana, four stars.

Well, I mean, the book has not been officially published in this country, but there have been various leaks.

And at the Bugle, we have managed to get hold of a copy written in

Biblical Hebrew, which of course I've translated

for you.

And here are now some exclusive excerpts from Spare read by our bugle roll insider, Elstridge Snodge, Grappleyard.

This section is from

the funeral of the Queen last year.

Do we have to go in the horse and cart, Dad?

I asked.

That's f ⁇ ing slow.

I know a guy who's got a Lamborghini could have given us a lift.

Tradition, son, too, replied my father.

If we stop using the horse and cart for public journeys, the whole edifice will start collapsing.

Besides, it's better for the environment.

I asked, isn't it also royal tradition that King Charles's tend to end up with no real need of a hat or a scarf?

That's only half a tradition, son, too, he re-replied.

The other half is that King Charles have shitloads of affairs with hot chicks.

What's your point?

The point is, Dad, I said, that it seems that we choose to keep some traditions and choose to ignore others.

Well, that, Sun-Two, is the most traditional royal tradition that there is in this country.

Here's another part from last summer, from, well, the Jubilee time, actually.

I knocked on the door.

Granny, as always, was looking cool and unflustered.

The bear, however, quite patently had no trousers on.

I could tell he was blushing intensely under his extremely convenient full-face fur.

I think I've misread the singles, muttered Paddington as he scuttled out, clutching a protective marmalade sandwich over his unignorably buried nethers.

Granny raised her eyebrows.

Tough being a single gal these days, she said.

I blame the internet.

And

another touching moment from Harry's relationship with the late Queen.

Granny finished her orb spinning practice for the day, chalking the setre as she put it down, ready for the weekly visit of Steve Davis, the snooker player laureate, that afternoon.

You ever wondered if the national anthem works, Hal?

she asked, gunning her Capri son in one.

Yes, Gran, I replied.

All Alright then, I'm going to show you.

Lads, crank it up, said Granny, with a click of the fingers.

The band of the 3rd Royal Artillery Regiment emerged from their holding cupboard and marched around the room,

brassily tooting God save the Queen.

Granny mouthed the lyrics of the first line, then nodded, pulled her crown down hard over her brow, sprinted at the window and dived out head-first with a gleeful wee!

The glass shattered as she flew crown first out of the fifth-floor window.

She twisted in the air, gave me a wink, and did the sign of the horns with both hands as she flew backwards.

At that moment, she was grabbed by a passing condor which gently took her in her beak, popped her back on the windowsill unscathed and flew off.

She did a couple of pull-ups on the curtain rail, then swung herself back into the room.

Once a week I do something like that, Hal.

This song f works.

You gotta get your shits and giggles where you can at my edge, ginger nuts, she said.

Last week I twatted a helicopter into a mountain.

Not a fing scratch.

And uh finally

this is from the alleged fight scene with uh Harry's brother Prince William.

I had William in what I I thought was a vice-like step-over arm lock channel clutch, but Kate clattered me round the head with a chair.

Will got to his feet, but Megan clotheslined him, and as he lay flat, I belly splashed him off the top turnbuckle.

Kate, who to be fair shows the benefits of having had stone-cold Steve Austin as a personal trainer these last days, got me fair and squares with a top-notch inverted atomic drop.

But even as my plums barked at me in agony, I saw Megs had Will's in a front face-lock, an inevitable precursor to her trademark brainbuster move.

Somehow, he slipped out of her grasp, but I got him in a wheelbarrow body scissors and threatened to bust the shit out of him.

Time to chuck in the corgi, bro, I said, but even as the words came out of my mouth, I saw Kate descending towards me.

Time seemed to stand still, and the light seemingly glistened off each sequin individually as she hoved into view.

Shit, it's the diving leg drop bulldog, I thought.

This is getting fing serious.

We'll have more exclusive extracts as they become available.

I feel like we might have

buried one of the key leads here,

especially for listeners of this podcast who have certain specific interests,

and that is that Prince Harry had frostbite on his penis when Prince William's wedding.

I feel it would be remiss of us, based again, as I say, on everything I know about the listenership of this show, to not talk about the fact that before Prince William's wedding, Harry had been on a charity expedition to the North Pole where he'd walked 200 miles and got

frostbite in his ears, cheeks and penis.

And

this is an extract from the book.

And the problem is now, Andy, you've already created this sort of veneer of...

Absolutely George Santos this entire story.

And I'm worried now that people are also going to think this is bullshit.

Because amazingly, it doesn't sound out of place with your bullshit.

There are countless stories in books and papers about Willie.

Again, Willie is short for William.

This whole institution needs to be bullshit.

About Willie and me not being circumcised, he reportedly writes in a memoir.

Mummy had forbidden it, they all said.

And while it's absolutely true that the chance of getting penile frostbite, which I believe was your wrestling nomadic, is much greater if you're not circumcised, all the stories were false.

I was sniffed as a baby.

What does all of this mean?

All of this means is I'm definitely going to read this fing book.

There's absolutely no way I don't read this goddamn book.

I have no interest in the royal family, but if you're telling me frostbite penis, William and Harry having a fight, I'm reading the book.

Congratulations, booksellers.

You've won this round.

Some of the other titles that were being circulated, Spare is a great and striking title.

Some of the other titles that were being circulated included Sun 2, The Art of Bore,

which they decided not to do because

even though he is marginally less boring than the rest of the royal family, he is still incredibly boring.

Too Sun, Too Furious, and Behind the Velvet Curtain is a beef eater, and he watches me poo.

So

none of them made the cut.

We just never know with the royal family.

It lives on purely because it is ridiculous.

Well, that brings us to the end of

this week's bugle.

It's great

to be back, and we will be back next week and in all subsequent weeks until the end of time.

Anything to plug, either of you?

Yes.

I have season two of Tea with Alice is now available.

So if you've not subscribed to that, do, or look me up at patreon.com slash Alice Fraser, where I do weekly salons and writers' meetings if you want to write with me, patreon.com slash Alice Fraser.

And don't forget also to listen to Alice on the Gargle, the

magazine system publication to this august audio newspaper.

It's the Sonic Glossy magazine.

I've always said Andy's great at self-promotion when it's other people's stuff he's promoting.

It's just his own self-promotion that he stinks at.

If you live in the United Kingdom, I am on television at the moment

on a show called Hold the Front Page, where me,

as part of my contractual obligation to only do any sort of travel-based shows with a white comedian, me and Josh Whitticomb went around the United Kingdom working at local newspapers and

hilarity ensued.

And in working as a journalist, it's part of my ongoing attempt to own the entire process, both of generating news and satirizing it.

But

every episode is available on Sky on Demand and Now TV right now.

And

it's also, it's on television.

I wish I had that information for you.

Also, the news quiz is back.

We did the first one last week.

You can find all of those on BBC Sounds.

Right.

Well, that brings us to the end of the first bugle of of 2023.

We will now play you out with some more entries onto the Bugle Wall of Fame from our premium level voluntary subscribers.

To join the Bugle Voluntary Subscription Scheme to give a one-off or occurring contribution to help keep this show free, free, flourishing and independent, go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

Here are the latest entrants to the Bugle Hall of Fame, our premium level voluntary subscribers who have made some key contributions to human progress.

Segar Srira Magiri came up with the idea of a line going around the centre of the earth to bring an end to all the debates about where north and south begin and end.

Cliff Flewett invented a musical instrument that you have to hold horizontally while blowing across a hole in the top and waggling your fingers around.

It was named after him and he's such a great guy that he didn't complain when they spelt it slightly wrong.

David Ownby disproved the theory that all roads lead to Rome using only a map, a ruler, a pencil and an awful lot of determination.

Daniel Hawksworth revolutionised Formula One as a sport when he suggested using really fast cars instead of goats.

And Stephen Morris also played a key role in the evolution of F1 when he suggested they dispense with the maths test at the start of races in which drivers had to calculate something using one mathematical formula before they were allowed to start their cars.

David Wright was responsible for Star Wars being such a big hit when he suggested to George Lucas that the story be set in space rather than in a fictitious town in rural Pennsylvania called Knobwrinkle.

And Josh Fares was equally influential on Steven Spielberg during the creative process for the film E.T.

with his suggestion that E.T.

should stand for extraterrestrial rather than ejaculating terrapin.

Paul Walsh, despite not being the Paul Walsh who played football for England in the 1980s, was able to persuade UEFA, the governing body of European football, to abandon plans to allow one player on each team to ride a horse and wield a mace during extra time.

And Annetto Sullivan was similarly a key figure in the evolution of modern tennis when she presented a paper to the tennis authorities proving that using eggs instead of tennis balls might help encourage tennis fans to eat more protein, but would, after an initial uptick, soon reduce the popularity of tennis as a spectator sport.

And finally, Roberto Tyley is widely admired in astronomy circles for his discovery that stars stop twinkling during daytime in order to save energy for when they can actually be seen.

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.