Flare in the Derrière (4200)

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers, and well, here we are.

Who would have thought it?

It's the 200th Bugle.

Again,

the second time this show has reached its 200th episode, this one, the 200th since our emotional 2016 relaunch.

I am broadcasting this from an open-top bus parading through the world where all of our 7.6 billion potential listeners have come out in force to mark this historic occasion.

Although, of course, Chris, the wizard audio genius that he is, has tweaked the audio to make it sound like I'm recording as normal in the shed.

But that's not happening.

I'm on an open top bus traveling around the world.

And no one could have predicted this day would come at least not until at least 2007 when i guess you you might have called it uh as the bugle came into existence then in the relatively early primordial super the podcasting universe but um but oh yeah we've been through a bit since then uh 294 episodes uh with um some other guy whose name i forget uh and uh now this is the 200th since uh we relaunched i mean much like the world in general for most of its early history the bugle was entirely covered by white european men um me and and john aided first by tom and then chris but since relaunch i like to think we've represented the scope of humanity at least a little bit more accurately and it all re-began

uh in October 2016 when Hari Kondobolu joined me in New York City and it has carried on rebeginning with new episodes in 199 now of the ensuing 247 weeks since then and sub-episodes in most other weeks that's a lot of hours of bullshit and I'm joined to mark this landmark moment in the history of this planet.

Sorry, this podcast, by one person who has been here since, well, basically, the start of the restart, and another who's only recently joined the

restart,

much after it finished restarting, but who was actually there before the first start

even started in terms of working with me and John.

So, firstly, I think, Nish, you did the second ever

bugle post-restart, as I recall.

And this is appropriate enough for such a momentous occasion.

Your 50th appearance on the bugle, apparently.

Spectacular.

I am raising my bat to the pavilion in celebration, and I'm very happy to be here for this bicentennial.

And like the bicentennial of America, I think we should celebrate, in spite of it isn't technically really the bicentennial, and there was actually quite a lot that happened before it.

And also, this entire enterprise has been built on horrific suffering.

well hang on let's just interrupt we've had a delivery this is the first live delivery also i believe the first appearance of the uh voice of uh my wife hello

uh welcome to the show thank you fired uh

oh well look at this look at this it's uh i believe the second second bugle cake we've had we had one for I think our first year here it is Chris you can take a screenshot oh wow hold on it's a full bugle cake

It looks pretty good.

Do you want a knife?

Do I want a knife?

What for?

Yeah,

sorry.

It was just the way

the way you were looking at me there was

well what a sensational start to this 200th episode.

A cake sent by an unknown admirer.

Obviously it was from Chris, but

when we were recording.

But there it is.

There it is.

Is it kosher?

Can you have a kosher cake?

I don't know.

I'm a bit out of the look.

If anyone could make a cake not kosher, I believe it to be, ironically of all of us, Andy, you.

Well, yes, exhibit one,

as well, Chris would be able to testify.

Chris Addison, that is, who I've not introduced yet, but there he is.

You were at my wedding for the

non-kosher cake.

I was at the wedding for the non-kosher cake.

It was about as unkosher as a cake can get, being as it was a leg of pig.

Jesus Christ!

It was a leg of pig, but it didn't just remain at your wedding, it then lived for some time in your house.

Yes.

And we used to write in your kitchen

and would go and visit the pig leg and take bits off it.

Mid-writing.

I think that made it kosher if you took bits off and disposed of them.

I don't know if the logo is the logo edible, Chris.

Yes, it is.

I asked for it to be.

I mean, I don't know what it's made of.

Bacon.

It's made of bacon.

Bacon, yeah.

Pure bacon.

Pure, concentrated bacon.

Oh, my God.

Andy's held up a piece of cake that looks like it was delivered by Edward Scissorhand.

Absolute mess.

His midwifery career did not go well, to be fair.

Yours has gone quite well.

One for one.

One for one.

100%.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: your poor wife.

That's the title of our next spin-off podcast from the Bugle Stable.

Anyway,

well, Nish,

since I've got this for you.

Here you are.

It's your Bugle 50th cap.

It happens in cricket.

When you play your 50th game, Bringdon, you get a special cap with the number 50 on.

So I've just put it on in Tip X on an old

obsolete bugle cap from the John Oliver days.

That's fine.

Next time I see you not on a screen,

I'll wear that with pride.

I actually wear my more current Bugle merch hat constantly.

I'll wear it all around the town.

I'll wore my socks to get my second vaccine shot.

Anyway, right, it's time to get on with introducing the second guest who's already kind of been introduced.

Welcome to a man once listed on the leaflets of the London Stand-Up Club as Christ Anderson.

It's Chris Addison.

Yeah.

Never quite lived up to that billing.

I've just got to change Chris's contact name on my phone.

That was for tax reasons, buddy.

How are you, Chris?

Yeah, I'm good, thank you.

I'm good.

I've bought you a voucher for a voucher.

It's part of a new scheme by which you can exchange a voucher for any vouchers.

The only company currently signed up to the scheme is the original company, so the only thing you can, in fact, exchange it for is a voucher for a voucher.

So it's a voucher for a voucher for a voucher.

But I do feel it's the thought that counts.

Happy Bugle birthday.

Well, I mean, that's sort of like an eye for an eye, wasn't it, in the Bible?

Yeah.

It's just, you know, not a lot of people.

It's pointless, wasn't it?

Yeah, an eye for an eye, a tooth for tooth.

We could just

stay at home.

It's a more civilized way of doing it.

As always, a section of the bugle is going straight in the bin.

This week on this 200th post-relaunch episode special, a competition where you can win a prize, a very special prize.

This is the 200th episode since relaunch.

So what we've done, using the number 200 as our inspiration is we've taken a sound from one of the last 200 decades of life on Earth.

You simply have to tell us which month and which year the following sounds come from.

Here is sound A.

Here is sound B.

And here is sound C.

We just need to know the month and specific year.

Do send in your answers.

If you get the month and year right for all three, you could wear the t-shirt that I'm currently wearing for this special Bugle 200th,

which has, well, Chris will post a very special t-shirt I've had specially made using a t-shirt that I owned and a bit of gaffer tape with some marker pin on it.

If you get them right you could win

not only the t-shirt I'm wearing, but a voucher for the new restaurant from celebrity chef Scluton Malvain, the culinary hypergenius behind behind a veritable constellation of Michelin star-spangled eateries, including the short-lived Gene Pitney-themed all-you-can-eat spicy buffet 24 hours from Ulsa, which was

closed on a court case.

showed that scientific research proved no link between spicy food and overeating and stomach ulcers.

Also, he's famous for his sandwich chain, The Tower of Bagel, based on the Bible story, in which the staff fail to understand what you've ordered and give you something completely different instead.

And of course, the protesta, the political protest themed Brasserie, that is still closed for refurbishment after its Russian Revolution themed November reopening.

But Malvain has just launched a new fine dining experience, the Jabbertoir, which combines a free at-table COVID vaccination or other inoculation of your choice if you're already double-jabbed.

The Immuno Sommelier will assist you, of course.

And alongside that, you get an unashamed insight into the realities of the meat industry with a micro-slaughterhouse trolley wheeled to your table, depending on what you ordered, of course, for for the slaughtering of your food.

Malvain is seeking, quotes, to make the diner contemplate the speciesial lottery of life, juxtaposing the facility of death for tasty animals with the miracle of scientifically extended life for us humans.

After a busy but slightly traumatic opening weekend, Malvain has just announced today that the children's menu will now be vegetarian only.

But you could win a meal for one at the Jabbertoir if you win

what month and year were those noises taken from competition.

Top story this week: football and what it shows about the general state of England, Britain, humanity, and the world news.

And we left you last week on a cliffhanger.

Would the England football team win its first major continental or global trophy since when was it we won the World Cup?

I forgot.

I forgot because I haven't seen any football coverage on the television since last Sunday,

19, something or other.

And not only would England win, but would England as a nation react maturely, good-naturedly, and sensibly in whichever a victory or defeat transpired?

Well, it turns out that it was one of those cliffhangers where the answers proved to be the obvious ones you'd suspected all along.

No

and no.

Nish, you are the official Bugle football correspondent.

Congratulations on that appointment.

Just, I mean, talk us through your experience of, because you're quite a football fan, aren't you?

But I know you're also something of a sceptic of the excesses of English football fandom and what it represents.

So, what were your emotions going through last week?

Well, listen, obviously, this is a very complicated moment for me, Andy, because unfortunately, this story covers my brief both as the Bugles football correspondent and its racism expert.

There was a point during the game, Andy, where I genuinely thought I was asleep and a dreaming.

Because when England were 1-0 up with a a goal that was scored by one defender crossing to another defender like 1970s Brazil

and then England kept the ball through a succession of short technical passing structures and the camera then cut in the stands to Tom Cruise fist bumping David Beckham.

I genuinely became convinced that I was dreaming the entire thing.

Unfortunately, England then lost on a penalty shootout and the three penalties that were missed were by Jaden Sancho, Marcus Rashford and Bakaya Saka, players who are all black and who are all on the receiving end of some sickening and yet sickeningly predictable racist abuse.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson immediately condemned the racism saying

to the racists, shame on you and I hope you'll crawl back under the rock from which you emerged.

To which I guess I would say What rock you going to crawl back under, big man?

Because this is an obviously there's been a contentious, this has been a contentious period for the England football team, in amongst an unprecedented level of success in a major tournament.

Because, regardless of whether England lost, this is the first time since 1966, and certainly in my lifetime, that England have made it to the final of the major tournament.

It's a young team, it's been an extraordinary achievement, there's a lot to build on, etc., etc.

etc.

Unfortunately, relations with the government have not exactly been smooth because of the England players' practice of taking the need to protest systemic racism.

Now,

initially, when they did this, after the 6th of June friendly against Romania, Boris Johnson's spokesperson refused to condemn either the knee-taking or the fans who booed the knee-taking.

Johnson said that when it came to taking the knee, he was focused on actions rather than gestures.

And if there's one thing this Prime Minister is focused on, it's action.

The dude fks.

And he

has got a football team's worth of kids to prove it.

Then, on the 8th of June, England football manager Garen Southgate.

He's got a pretty overstopped bench as well.

He's actually got a first and second squad.

On the 8th of June, Gareth Southgate, the England football manager and Latter-day Saint, and I will murder anyone who says otherwise, published a universally praised blog post explaining that taking me was an anti-racist gesture that the whole team had adopted after a long conversation within the squad where the black payers talked openly about their experiences of racism.

Then there was a screeching sound that sounded like a BG had taken a punch to the ball bag.

It was, in fact, the screeching U-turn of the Prime Minister trying to get back into the nation's good books when he condemned the booing.

However, his other ministers did not follow suit.

Pretty Patel, the Home Secretary whose latest round of immigration reforms included the phrase, and I'm quoting directly here, hey guess what, Pinkos?

I'm going to deport that trouserless freeloader Paddington Bear and he can eat his marmalade sandwiches in hell for all I care.

She said the booing was a choice for the fans and that she didn't support the gesture politics of taking the knee.

Patel has subsequently condemned the racism suffered by the players and has been rightly put in her place by England player Tyrone Minks, who claimed, you don't get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as gesture politics and then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we're campaigning against happens.

He could have saved himself a lot of time by just responding, f you, you hypocritical piece of shit.

Nish, it did show that.

I mean, obviously politics is not what it used to be.

But, I mean, it does show where we've come to, that the fact that the Home Secretary was being schooled on issues of social justice and basic human dignity by the Aston Villa centre-back, that comes as no surprise these days.

That shows what we are in third millennium Britannia, doesn't it?

Yeah, and it's not just Pretty Patel.

There are various Tory MPs who said that they were not happy with the taking a knee gesture.

One of them said that

they would not be watching any of the games.

Lee Anderson, he said that he was going to boycott the whole

of the European Championship in protest of the decision to take the knee because he said it showed support for a political movement and risked alienating traditional supporters.

And I think we all know what he means when he says traditional.

Hey, on an unrelated subject, my favorite Disney film is Snow Traditional and the Seven Dwarves.

Non-animated film is Traditional Men Can't Jump.

I mean,

Chris, I know you're not

a huge football fan.

I think that's probably

fair to say.

It's completely fair.

Did you watch the game?

I did.

I did.

I mean, I sort of felt like this was a big moment one way or the other,

as you suggest.

And it was.

It was a big week for racists and Italians, which is a Venn diagram with a reasonably hefty N intersection.

And as you say, you know, I'm not really that into football, so I was only half listening to the game.

But as I understand it, the Italian team of, I think, Vinsanto, Cantucci, Limoncello, Ciaobella, Ciaobella and Awasamada defeated England by correctly answering a tie-break question, complete the following in not more than 25 words.

We would like to win the European Championships final because England put it would end 55 years of waiting and offer some hope to a nation that has become uncertain of its place in the world and the Italians put we won't have to hear three fing lions for a while.

Really

for racists, this week mirrored the England team's experience of the final itself, with a very promising start early on, only to be be met with fight back, spirited resistance and eventual defeat and recriminations on social media.

Tyrone Mings, as you've pointed out, who sounds like some important Chinese porcelain nicked by a 19th-century Irish aristocrat and currently housed at Trinity College, but is in reality one of the fine upstanding young lions who have made this country proud in the way that they can port themselves both on and off the pitch, has risen even higher in the collective estimation of the nation after administering a thorough dick slapping to my first fascist Barbie, Pretty Patel, a woman who seems to have tried to model herself most closely on the child catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but forgotten about the delicious enticing candy part of the schtip.

Pretty Patel, the home secretary who takes the complex out of Napoleon Complex and puts the SS into compassionate immigration policy, had condemned the racist attacks on England players only for me to point out, and I'm paraphrasing here, that you can't be surprised if there's jelly everywhere if you've not tried to stop the man with the big f ⁇ off sledgehammer who was running towards the jelly in the first place.

Patel had previously condemned the players taking the knee as gesture politics.

Perhaps a different gesture would suit her.

Maybe if the players lifted their right arms out stiffly at a 45 degree angle, for example.

I mean off the pitch, it was all rather bleak, to be honest.

There was violence, racism, fighting, drunken hoodlummery, and high-level borish, tedious twattishness.

And that was just before the game had even kicked off.

The fans without ticket storming the stadium, scuffles were scuffled, blood was shed, fireworks were inevitably inserted into anuses.

Just the usual

free football.

Wow, Andy, now,

I think we need to take a second here and just contextualize that because I understand that this podcast has quite a wide and international listenership, and so we probably need to explain the fact that there was that is not you, you are not joking at all.

Yes, there was an England fan pictured in Leicester Square with a flare up his ass.

Yeah.

And as people, all of us who have backgrounds in stand-up comedy, that's something that we would expect to see in one of those clubs in 1984.

Not the knot in the middle of Trafalgar Square.

It's been very odd, hasn't it?

Because there was a huge backlash against it, and there's all this talk of, you know, how this team has brought the country together.

And it was true to an extent, but it has also highlighted how this country is very much not together in a lot of ways.

On the plus side, though, since the Bugle relaunched back in 2016, England, having not reached a semi-final for 20 years,

has now reached a World Cup semifinal and the final of the European Championships and another semi-final in a competition that no one really noticed.

That's three semi-finals since

the Bugle relaunch.

You're welcome, England.

Obviously, we are divided as a nation, and it looked really bad.

You know, we've seen the worst of ourselves this week, but it is a measure of quite how Gareth Southgate has transformed the culture.

That a photo of a powerful, middle-aged man embracing a 19-year-old boy has become an icon of goodness and hope to salve the bruised soul of a nation and not a career-ending scandal that causes the launching of a years-long, inappropriately, jauntily titled Police Operation.

Things are changing.

When it comes to

Pretty Patel

and her involvement in this, Nish, is it fair to judge her on her words and deeds?

Isn't that a bit old school, really?

And her refusal to condemn those who boo England players for taking...

And taking the knee, for those of you unfamiliar with it, it's a simple, unobtrusive gesture, just for a few seconds before the game, seeking a better world for all,

and or it proposes the complete overhaul of everything in the world and its replacement by a global Leninist superstate, superstate delete according to which newspaper you read.

But, you know, you can understand, you know, but is it fair to, you know, just

to not just assume that she's someone completely different and hasn't said or done any of the things she's said and done?

Well, I mean, it is, you know, the theme of this government is dodging accountability and consequence, like it was Boris Johnson being confronted by one of his biological children.

But due to the fact that this is the England football team, it is very difficult for them to weasel out of of this.

Because here's the thing.

People like this team.

People genuinely like this team.

They do things like make sure that children get fed when the government has given up trying to feed them.

But you've got to take the feeding children out of football.

No place in the game.

It's quite an extraordinary achievement.

And listen, there is something fundamentally depressing about the fact that my mother, who came to this country in the 1970s, me, who was born in this country in the mid-1980s, and Bakaya Saka, a 19-year-old boy, presumably all had a sort of similar emotional reaction to that because he, as much as me or my mum, knew what was coming next.

And that is very dispiriting that three generations of ethnic minorities in this country all knew that to some extent they were about to be on the receiving end of a huge amount of criticism.

And I, you know, it is very strange.

Bakaya Saka is 19.

I'm nearly 36.

He could technically be my son.

He definitely isn't because I, and I don't know how best to put this, have not opened my account.

If there are...

I am 36 and I don't want to give too much away, but if there are children out there as a result of my sexual exploits, they are not of voting age.

That's as far as I'm willing to take this.

But in spite of all of this, in spite of all the doom and gloom, something incredible has happened.

They have forced a conversation about the racism in the Conservative Party.

Because look,

the government spent the week saying, we've got to do something about this social media thing one what a company that employed someone that was found to have been racially abusing players said that they'd been hacked to which your obvious response is how much hacking is going on like have they managed to hack Boris Johnson's entire journalism career because that is very very harsh but Boris Johnson is being forced in public to reckon with the racist things that he's said in the past.

It's happened at a press conference yesterday.

It happened in the Houses of Parliament.

And that, more than anything else, is genuinely incredible because Johnson has said some pretty extraordinary and unpleasant racist things in columns over the last 20 years and has just gotten away with it.

And he's claimed that in the past these were remarks that were taken out of context and it was intended as satire.

Now I have read the articles, I don't mean the extracts, I mean literally the whole articles and I cannot see the satire unless you consider Boris Johnson's entire life to be a long, ongoing exercise in satire.

This is a man who was born with a mouthful of silver cutlery and, despite every single educational advantage, has managed to be repeatedly sacked for lying, incompetence, and sometimes lying about how incompetent he was.

This is a man whose columns have been filled with racial epithets and yet somehow became Prime Minister.

His whole life could be one satirical performance art piece called the unstoppable freight train of white privilege.

I do apologise, traditional privilege.

That was my wrestling name, actually.

Long career.

Yeah, so you're saying, Nish, that you think it is possible to draw a line between having a prime minister who's revelled in using willfully provocative racist language and

people being racist in the country of which he's prime minister.

Yes,

it's possible to draw that line.

And all it took was some, let's face it, supernaturally gifted children to point that out.

on the plus side

for Marcus Rashford one of the players who missed a penalty who's been a

real figurehead politically in in recent years with his campaign for for school meals and and other things he although he missed a penalty he has had a baby beaver named after him by a popular vote and I guess that you know once but that that's that's got to be you know actually if you had a choice score a penalty in a European championship final or have a little baby animal named after you, you're going to choose.

You're going to choose the animal, aren't you?

Yeah, because the penalty lasts for a second, but the beaver's going to be around for three or four years.

So, you know, fair dues.

Right.

I think it's entirely appropriate because now Rashford is the name for a beaver, and Johnson is the name for a cock

family show, Chris.

Honestly, yeah, but it's a really dysfunctional family.

It's like one of Boris Johnson's family.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, do you think there's all, I mean, I've certainly found this watching, that there was a part of me that, well,

I'm not that fussed about football, but I quite wanted England to win, but at the same time, there was a part of me that, as I watched it, and I'd seen all the footage from the

central London around Wembley before the game, and I'd been following the whole narrative of this team and its

sort of squalid element of its so-called fans.

There was a part of me that thought, well, you know, at least if they lose, those

won't get a moment of celebration.

And I found that really took the sting out of things.

Well, of course, the success of the England football team is not the only barometer by which we judge the state of the United Kingdom, and that is a barometer that really splits opinion and leaves bits of broken barometer all over the place in bits that aren't England.

But we also judge it by the ongoing chaos of the way we've dealt with COVID as a crisis.

And at the moment, I think it's fair to say that that chaos is in a particularly chaotic state as we have a mixture of the success of the vaccine rollout and the just total random inaneness of the rest of the government's policies.

As the old saying goes, and I believe Bob Dylan sang it in a song once, they say the most incompetent hour is right before the dawn.

That's

not really the, I mean, it's proven to be the most incompetent hours right before another

equally incompetent, incompetent hour.

And when it comes to the, you know, the sort of the vaccine element of it, I guess, you know, even a stopped clock is

approximately correct for a total of about 20 to 30 minutes a day.

And an untrained puppy left alone in a house with enough food for a year will at some point crap in or near the toilet.

So, you know, they've got to get something right.

But, I mean, at the moment, there appears to be absolutely no logic as things are

unlocked, unleashed.

At the moment, it's Nish, can you give any clarity to this situation?

Well, at the moment, it's

the vaccine rollout has been going well in this country, but because of the rush to reopen things while the Delta variant is spreading across the country, it feels a bit like Britain's COVID policy.

It's like that bit when Indiana Jones manages to get his hat out just before the wall closes on him.

Except having got his hat out, he then inexplicably has put his hat on and then stuck his dick under the wall.

It's an unfathomable turn of events.

Yesterday there were 48,500 new cases and the day before there were 3,786 new hospitalisations.

Now, that I am not a scientist, but that, I believe, is not great, right?

And there was also news this week that because of the spread of the Delta variant and because you know with 48,000 cases it's likely that people are gonna you know a huge number more have been exposed to it half a million people have received a notification from the COVID app telling them that they need to isolate because they've come into contact with someone that has COVID, right?

Half a million.

And the reason that that figure is particularly impertinent to me is I am one of that half million.

I am currently bugling from a biodome of self-isolation because I got a notification from the app.

I then looked into it because I had to, I had a string of gigs that I was supposed to do over the weekend.

I looked into it and it turns out that if you get notified that you might have been exposed to someone who's tested positive, you are under no legal obligation to self-isolate.

But I've decided that unlike the government, I'm going to follow the guidelines and stay at home and I cancelled all of the gigs.

Had I gone along the government's model, I would have done the gigs and also travelled halfway up the country and then groped my mistress's ass with such force, it looked like I was trying to touch the back of her throat.

Oh, that is a horrible image.

Well, I had to look at it.

He was trying to wear her like Thados with the Infinity Gauntlet.

Disgusting.

I mean, initially, I mean, it is possible that this notification that you got was, you know, it could have been, you know, journalists from the Daily Telegraph who just wanted to try and get you off the bill at a gig that they were going to.

I don't know if I've talked about this on here before, but I did once introduce the now Health Secretary Sergeant Javid

on stage at

an awards ceremony by encouraging the audience to not applaud him as he was a representative of a government who'd ruined this country.

I now am starting to see the potential in this ping as being Javid's revenge.

Yeah, the minute that he's health secretary, you are housebound.

The timing is too choice to be a coincidence.

Well, I had Sajid Javid as my support act once.

Did you?

Yeah, at the Lord's Taverner's Christmas lunch.

Managed to get through the whole thing without having any food thrown at me whatsoever.

Unless by food you mean laughter and applause, Nick.

Chris, how are you enjoying the

relaxation of the various lockdowns?

I think, you know, it's going to happen, right?

It's inevitable.

It's happening on Monday the 19th in the United Kingdom that we're opening the doors, we're taking our masks off.

And I think that it's worth

looking at what the future of the virus is because, of course, once we're all back together, it is going to mutate and there will be new variants.

So by August, the Zeta variant will be the dominant variant, and that's not as easily transmissible as the Delta variant, but it can untie your mask at the back.

Or, if it's feeling saucy, get your bra off with one hand.

The end of 2021 sees the rise of the MU variant, which is the first variant with self-awareness, making it both far harder to eliminate and also ineligible for a position in the current cabinet.

In 2022, the Omicron variant scores venture capital funding for a startup, a rival app to the NHS Track and Trace app that actually ⁇ ing works.

By summer, Mark Zuckerberg has bought it for $2 billion and within weeks the Omicron variant is snapped out on the town with Dua Leaper and gets into a highly public spat with the Common Cold, who's filmed outside Soho House with the Omicron variant in a headlock, screaming, who you call him f ⁇ ing common, bitch.

By 2027, the Upsilon variant is lawyered up and in court trying to reverse a legal conservatorship order that has handed control of all its affairs over to the pangolin.

Off the back of all the publicity, it releases a new album entitled Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Night Fever,

including the tracks Shake It Cough, Lung Tall Covid, and Sicking Up a Lot by the Bay.

And finally, in the mid-2030s, a campaign started by the dominant variant of the day, now identifying as a large family called the Hendersons, is finally successful in securing the vote.

34% of the electorate are now viruses, and Boris Johnson is never again not Prime Minister.

That is our immediate future.

So, on the 19th, everything goes, right?

Everything goes.

There's no need for

the mask mandate is dropped, everything is dropped.

And Sadiq Khan, who's the London mayor, has actually stepped in and said that it's still going to be compulsory for people to wear masks on public transport in London.

The Transport Secretary, Grant Schapp, said that was what he had expected and indeed wanted, which doesn't make any sense because they literally just dropped the law they literally just dropped the law what what what what can I just pick you up on that word that you use sense what

why are you even looking for sense

that's eight we're 18 months into this

thing

that's the thing right that that's where we are the thing is that about the pandemic is it's

boring and Johnson is bored and who can blame him the problem is that he's prime minister and like a lot of people who've wanted to be prime minister he's imagined before achieving his ambition that it's an interesting job and wholly failed to notice the difference between a job being interesting and one being extremely tedious but entirely terrifying people often think that skydiving looks like it might be fun only to find that 30,000 feet above the porter cabin they've just left their valuables in their immediate concern is at what speed the turd they've just involuntarily birthed will hit them on their inevitable return to earth.

And metaphorically speaking, that is where Johnson is.

You can't take a lecture on personal responsibility, especially about any form of protection from Boris Johnson.

A man who can't even be bothered to stick a Johnny on his ridiculously feckened cock and balls.

There could be something, maybe Margaret Atwood could pick up on this for a kind of handmaid's tale alternative reality that went the other way.

What?

Where we put Boris Johnson out to stud

it would be a better use of his time.

Yeah.

In amongst all of this chaos, the government have also found the time to pass two incredibly contentious bills.

One, which cuts our foreign aid obligation

from 0.7% of our GDP to 0.5%, a move that some people estimate could kill between 100,000 and 200,000 people around the world.

Nish, let's put this in context.

This is just a familiar recorrection back to the old days where our foreign aid contribution was I think minus 120% of our GDP.

I just think it's a remarkable commitment on this government.

They have shown real equality here because they killed between 100,000 and 200,000 people in this country and now they're just exporting that policy to the rest of the planet.

It's like cricket all over again.

It's good.

They've taken the UK approach, the UK aid approach from feed the world to feed some of the world to maybe feed some of the world a bit later to f the world that high energy rost looks delicious it'll go really well with all these vaccines we've stockpiled

yeah i can't i can't wait for the conservative party christmas single eat the world it's absolutely amazing People keep going, what has happened to compassionate conservatism?

This is compassionate conservatism.

What you have to understand is that the Tory Party has a fundamentally different cultural approach to death than, say, everybody else.

Where most of us consider being dead to be a bad thing, the Tories just see it as a very, very efficient way of avoiding having to pay any tax.

They see the consequences of this bill as all good, by the way.

For example, the United Nations Reproductive Health Agency said that over a hundred million pounds slashed from the UK contribution will directly, directly lead to around seven million unintended pregnancies, which is excellent as far as the Tories are concerned, because they'll be able to claim that under their government, every single person in this country will jump seven million places up the list of richest people in the world.

Expensive live stream smug-faced metaphor for everything that is wrong with the world news now.

And

Richard Branson,

the billionaire, former massively unimpressive rail franchise owner, has gone into space, or at least kind of gone into near-ish, kind of the out

the first bit of space.

And the world's reaction has been wow, which is an acronym, of course, for why oh why.

We'll try and answer both of those questions.

Why?

no good reason but that's okay because a bad reason will do uh in that case uh it's a simple answer why because he can and because the environment is fed anyway and because he can't solve all poverty so it'd be unfair to solve any by

squillions blasting himself into space instead and because icarus would have wanted him to and because if it's okay for a communist dog why shouldn't a capitalist human have the same life opportunity and blast themselves into space and also because take that Elon I got there fing first and also because it's not about one rich man going into space it's about making space travel possible for all humanity above a certain level of suitably stratospheric wealth.

So, you know, let's...

I mean, this has got to be up there in one of the, you know, the greatest moments in pointless plutocratic excess, hasn't it?

In the whole history of humanity.

It was great.

He looked like General Zod's albino brother.

Sir Richard, or since he flew to the edge of space, as we must now call him, Edge Lord Branson, managed to prove that that there's no intelligent life out there apart from the pilot and the woman who brought him his Bucks Fizz and Zero Gravity Peanuts.

He went very close to space, very, very close, and then ran away again.

What is effectively history's highest altitude game of knockdown ginger?

He first declared his intention to do that in 2004, but to nobody's great surprise, the Virgin's service to space was delayed by about 17 years.

Presumably, it was also standing room only, and the whole thing smelled of shit.

And why did he do it?

Andy, because, like a dog licking its own balls, he can.

But did you see?

See, the best thing about the whole thing for me was that nobody paid him the blindest bit of attention.

This segment that we're doing now is as much coverage as he's had.

It's like an Aesop's fable about vanity and the need to be noticed because he'd decided to go near space on the same day as the Eurofinal.

Nobody cared.

He spent hundreds of millions of dollars over two decades in an attempt to get to space.

And when he finally managed it, he got less coverage in the papers the next day than a guy in Trafalgar Square with a flare up his arse.

That was the rocket, the rocket that had the most coverage

the next day.

And that was like four quid fifty from a standard fireworks box.

No, I mean, the next journey for them is to for all of them to spend billions of dollars investigating technology that allows them to fly up their own fing arseholes.

Well, that's apparently £4.50 will do it.

Richard Branson, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos are in a three-way race, two races.

One to prove once and for all that no amount of money can make you look like a normal human being.

And the other to see which could be the first dickhead in space.

And this week, it was one small step for dickheads and another giant leap for dickhead kind.

And what concerns me is there's two things that concerns me.

One is that Branson has been surprised by an outbreak of public discontent about his dog shit journey into space.

Because actually, there was opposition in 1969.

I would like to point everyone in the direction of a poem by the great Gil Scott Heron called Whitey on the Moon, which is about the fact that African-American populations in 1969 were experiencing immense deprivation while the American government was financing the trip to the moon.

Whitey on the Moon is, of course, the working title of the first Star Wars film.

But it does concern me that these billionaires watched WALL-E, a film where humanity abandons a ruined planet for space and thought, brilliant idea.

These people have so much money and yet they cannot understand a children's film.

That's a good thing.

It's a very good film.

It's a very, very good film.

And also, the other thing that really sticks in my craw is that last year, Virgin Atlantic, Richard Branson's non-space travel plane company, got a £1.2 billion rescue deal from the British government.

Now, could he not have spent a bit of his fing space money on bailing out his fing airline?

Like, it's and the idea that Branson seems to think that he's somehow inspiring people, that by travelling to space, he's somehow inspiring people.

And maybe he's right.

Maybe somewhere there is a person who lost their job because of COVID, several family members to the disease, or maybe there's somebody whose home was flooded after the devastation wrought by this week's flooding caused directly by the climate crisis.

Maybe that person is looking at Richard Branson and thinking, wow, he went to space and he's a total.

Maybe if a can go to space, maybe I can do anything.

I mean, I quite literally can't

because I'm a person whose life has been negatively impacted by exactly the socio-economic conditions that have allowed people to exist in poverty while go to space.

But still, one can dream.

Dream one day of being a

in space.

From can't to

yeah that was one journey that was uh

in space was one of the things that was left on uh jim jim henson's uh

intro sadly um

well what next i'm like i'm like kirk at the end of wrath of canned

um so what next i mean obviously brandson's won the race for space so how are Bezos and Musk going to respond?

Well, reports that Elon Musk is now hoping by the end of the year to have launched a magnetic levitation giant millipede that can scuttle between New York and Las Vegas in under 20 minutes.

Whilst Jeff Bezos, who obviously with his dream of going into space before Branson, sadly now dashed and having to go in after Branson, well inspired by Greek myths like Icarus, maybe he's going to just spin that one back a bit and go the full minor tour.

And reports are that he is currently having a bull outfit made for him to mate with.

Could he just build a f ⁇ ing labyrinth and be done with it?

Anyway, might explain the divorce.

But anyway, whatever makes him happy.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk's long-term rival in the luminous electro-ferret madness of corporate Willy Wonkadam, Pilao Snork, is going the other way.

Snork, of course, is the techrepreneurial wizard whose companies include the internet of pointless shit specialists, Ego Big or Go Home,

Freewheel, who do riderless bicycles, and PogoStick, which is making solar-powered PogoSticks capable of boinging up to 500 kilometers on a single charge in boings of two kilometers each once the PogoPad network is up and running.

Currently, it's just two pads between Snork's Arizona mansion and his waterless zero-gravity swimming pool.

Anyway, rather than going into space, Snork has responded, next week he's going to burrow deeper underground than any human in history, drilling down 200 miles in his prototype GigaWorm Hyperburrow.

He will then spend 30 seconds outside his protective pot just to see what it's like.

And if it looks like there's any hidden kingdoms down there or an underworld, maybe a river he could cross into the afterlife even, and also to plant some lemon pips to see if they grow back to the surface to produce indestructible lemons 10 miles in diameter that could feed feed the world forever before returning to the surface.

Snorke says that the worm cast, which is predicted to rise 5,000 meters above ground, will be turned into a ski resort and bobsled academy for the deprived children of the world if they can find their way there.

Listen, if you're in Highgate Cemetery at any point in the next couple of days, you will hear some strange noises because Karl Marx is wanking in his grave.

Even he couldn't have predicted capitalism would go this badly.

Well, in fact, that takes on to our second competition.

We'll be back next week.

A couple of plugs for you.

There is a live bugle on the 7th of September at the Underbellies London Wonderground site in Earls Court.

Tickets available if you ask nicely or in exchange for money.

Tiff Stevenson is doing a run at Soho Theatre 3rd to the 7th of August at 9 p.m.

Do go and see that.

Anything to plug, you guys?

This show that I make called Breeders is on Sky TV and now

in the UK and FX and Hulu in the States.

Both seasons available now.

I am

tour tickets are still available for next year and I'm going to be in Edinburgh from the 16th to the 22nd of August at the monkey barrel unless

this island is consumed by plague.

Or you get pinged again.

If I get fing pinged again, I swear to God, I'm going to go round Javid's house and smack him in the face.

And I've been very clear about that okay but I guess could you not just get a load of people who've been pinged and get them all to isolate in the same place for that week a ping gig to a six day gig either that or I'm going to invest in adsorb I suggested Zorbing balls for social distancing right at the start of this crisis and they still haven't come in it's one of the great failures of government

Thank you for listening, Buglers.

Thank you well for your support over the last 200 episodes.

Your support with your ears, your laughter, your hard-earned money, your easy-earned money.

And we don't judge your time, your feedback, your merch purchases, and your tickets.

Here's to another 200 post-relaunch episodes, and maybe another 294 if John Oliver ever comes back to the show.

We'll be back next week to keep this show going for another 200 episodes minimum.

Stroke 200 years.

I'll pass it down through the family.

Go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

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.