Not Enough Boffins (4191)

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers and welcome to issue 4191 of the Bugle audio newspaper for a visual world.

I'm Andy Zoltzman.

It is the 19th of April 2021 and the world, I'm pleased to announce, is no longer going to hell in a hand cart, but only because the hand cart fell apart, because the contract to make the hand cart was given to a company with no hand cart making experience, but friends in high places.

So now we're just stuck in between the earth and hell, without even the prospect of the reassuringly predictable moral consistency of hell to cling to.

To discuss our current predicament in between these two worlds of existence, joining me this week, not for the first time and for the first time respectively, from

also respectively 10,500 miles away as the crow flies or 7,000 miles away as the squirrel burrows in Melbourne, Australia, and about 8 miles away as the car drives, as long as it doesn't get lost.

And with respectively, 0 and 2 uniwatts, or vice versa, it is, or either, or they are, Alice Fraser, and, for the first time on the bugle, Chris Addison.

Hello!

Hello, Andy!

Hello, Chris.

Welcome to the show.

It's great to have you on after all these years.

Long time listener, first time caller.

So I'd just like to say hello to everyone in Class 4B at Broad Oak Juniors, and can you please dedicate your next pun to my mum and dad and anyone else who knows me thank you

well you chris uh i think you've just revealed the bugle secret which is that uh the guests are not booked we just randomly call and luckily get through to andy's ultimate or not as the case may be on my very very busy phone line um

uh so uh chris when we we first

worked together well almost 20 years 20 years 20 years I figured it out.

We first talked about it after the 2001 Edinburgh Festival.

That's when we started to plan things.

Yes.

I wasn't even born then.

Yeah.

We did a radio show called The Department with another guy

whose name I forget.

Sun Loser.

That's how I think of him.

John, something or other.

And well, it's great to have you on

finally.

I mean,

it's been, we then did seven-day seven-day

Sunday oh yeah that's right, yes, yes

the uh much lamented uh seven-day Sunday when was that though was that I have a feeling that was like 2012 or something it was well we definitely covered the 2010 general election because I remember that being a tough show the week after god yeah you you and I had to sit in a room with John Pinot who every so often would look at us and then we'd have to say something to stony silence.

Yeah, that was election night, wasn't it?

That was election night.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was grim.

all of these fond reminiscences are sort of casting into the shadow my anniversary today, Andrew.

My four-year anniversary was yesterday of me coming on the bugle for the first time at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

Indeed, so

that was four years, did you say?

Yep, four years.

Time flies when you're having fun.

That is an interesting thing.

I must have been having fun because I didn't expect to be this old this quickly.

So you've been involved.

I'm not that I'm old, I'm just older than I expected to be by now.

So to put this in context,

I've been working with Chris on and off for five Olympic cycles, and you've been part of the bugle for now an entire Olympic cycle.

That's the standard of time measurements that I like to keep on this show.

How are you going to deal with the fact that Olympic cycles are now not quite...

I mean, they're in the...

They'll average out.

They will average out at four.

That's all I will cling to.

As a cricket statistician, averages are your main currency, aren't they?

Absolutely.

absolutely, Chris.

And you know, I ignore the bit in between the cancellation of the Olympic Games in 300 AD or whatever until they were reborn.

Otherwise, the average gets completely out of kilter.

So, we are recording on the 19th of April.

Well, another important anniversary, Alice.

1770, Captain James Cook first sighted the eastern coast of what is now Australia.

So, how is that working out?

It depends who you ask, and he's alternate.

If you ask the people who were here before he arrived, not well,

not well, not well at all.

But, you know, we're British, we tend not to ask these questions of people who might give the wrong answer.

I mean, also for the people who arrived shortly after him, the convicts, not good for them either.

Just

either side of that equation was happy for the most part.

But at the point that, you know, that's true at the time, you know, there was a great deal of misery, bloodshed, the forcible taking of land, but all that time later, Tim Tams.

So, you know, swings and very much roundabouts.

Yes, indeed.

And the ashes as well.

And the ashes.

That wouldn't have happened were it not for James Cook looking at the right side of his boat on this day in 1770.

As always, a section of the bugle is going in the bin this week, April.

April is in the bin, a special April section.

Scientists have discovered this exciting news for the month of April, that contrary to the claims of the former Team GB poetry celeb and Nobel Prize winner T.S.

Eliot, April is not in fact the cruelest month.

Monthologicians have found that in fact April is on average only the fifth cruelest month of the year, although they do acknowledge that this may have changed since the advent of social media when anonymous abuse merchants are most active during the dark winter months.

And this we also investigate in our April section.

Could April be ditched post Brexit to enable Britain to get to summer a month before the rest of the European Union?

Or could it even be postponed to the end of November to add some spring optimism to the difficult later months of the year?

I don't know.

I don't care, but at least we have the choice now.

And finally, we investigate allegations that April is a hoax.

New evidence suggests that the month didn't even exist in earlier times and was a hoax concocted in the early days of ancient Rome.

And we ask, if it is a hoax, what should be there instead?

What are we being denied?

What is April hiding?

That section in the bin.

top story now holy shit the world is doomed now it's uh I mean Chris it's great to have you uh on a show in a week where it does seem that the world is doomed I mean admitted that could be any week at the moment or indeed for most of the last few thousand years of human history but I mean it has been you know an incredible week NASA has thrown a flown a drone on Mars big whoop it's still a pointless shithole sorry I mispronounced that Shitholek.

It's an old Jewish term for uninhabitable desert, which also explains the 40-year wonder.

No way, Moses, we're not living here.

It's a Shitholik.

Football is being torn asunder.

Coronavirus is varianting the shit out of itself.

Please give it up, Crownhead.

You've made your point.

Those words could also apply to more than one story this week.

And an explosive new allegation has suggested that voting in the 1974 Eurovision Song contest might not have been entirely meritocratic.

In short, as the French would say, plus Assange, plus C'est la fking memers, fucking tula everything up.

So let's begin with the Ukraine situation.

As we speak, a summit is being held.

They always work.

And

there are tensions.

There are tensions in the Ukraine.

Chris, I know you're a massive fan of Cold War nostalgia.

Huge.

Are you enjoying this?

Well, am I enjoying it?

I don't think enjoying is the right word for any of these things.

I do think Vladimir Putin, who I'm a big watcher of, Vladimir before this week, perhaps best known as the inventor of spaghetti Putinesca, which is a delicious pasta sauce of tomato, garlic, onions, nova chock, and just a little bit of time

just to cut through.

Yes, right, Andy.

I mean, I think you might be the first of the co-hosts I've had on the show whose lead-off gag has been a pun.

Oh, well, when in Rome.

I can only imply that.

Welcome to the show.

Yeah,

there must have been something very subconscious going on.

Nonetheless, but saying that Putin.

Saying that Putin is known for aggressive behaviour and is a little like saying that Ludwig van Beethoven is known for writing the odd whistle-able tune.

It's absolutely relentless with him.

Cannot get enough of the old aggression.

Things have gone far enough.

This is what I think.

And so today,

I think...

I would like to pitch to you that you start the bugle campaign to get Vladimir Putin laid.

He's been displaying precisely the kind of escalation in attention-seeking behavior you associate with drunk young men who haven't copped off in a provincial nightclub at one o'clock in the morning.

He's appeared topless on a horse, didn't get laid.

He annexed the Crimean Peninsula, didn't get laid.

So he sent hired assassins to point half of Salisbury, didn't get laid.

This massive build-up of armaments at the Ukrainian border that

he's absolutely desperate to let fly is essentially a very threatening metaphor as to how he's feeling right now.

Somebody, and it doesn't matter who, Andy, somebody needs to f ⁇ Vladimir Putin stat.

That isn't.

Okay, I mean, so essentially, he's part of the sort of in-cell movement.

That's what you say.

Vladimir Putin is.

Well, yeah, I mean, I think the man is clearly the amount of aggression being built up by that man.

Yeah, I mean, Alice has got him.

He's certainly put a lot of people in cells.

Fuck offers.

He started the show.

Have you done a pun yet, Andy?

Is it possible that the two people on the show without you, but not you, have done a pun?

I've been clean for a couple of weeks.

You can stop at any time, can't you?

No, no, just don't put temptation in the middle.

It's the fate of the master to watch the students outgrow him.

I think it's ridiculous that NATO doesn't have a plan for Putin.

This is the tensions eased last week after Joe Biden called him because I suspect that Putin thought that was a booty call, basically.

Biden is relatively old and frail, and he might not survive that task.

So the obvious...

The obvious candidate for the job is Boris Johnson, a man who is famously led by his penis, or before Dominic Cummings resigned, led by his two penises.

Even he might balk at a night at the Kremlin.

Merkel's resigning, so there's no way she's going to do it.

The Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurtz, good-looking young man, but he's got a bad leg.

Pedro Sanchez, who is coincidentally, Pedro Sanchez Andy, is coincidentally Prime Minister of Spain and winner of the 2021 senior global politician whose name sounds most like someone made it up as a lazy stereotype award, beating

French finance minister Amélie Aronion,

Italian Foreign Secretary Giovanni, hey, what's the matter with you?

And British leader of the House of Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Anyway, Pedro Sanchez can't Netflix and chill because he gets an allergic reaction to caviar.

So I suggest that NATO go the murder on the Orient Express route and wait till Putin falls asleep and then they all f him and maybe we'll get some peace.

That is my pitch.

Right.

I mean Chris this is a terrible preset.

I mean I to be rating the f ability of various polit political leaders, I think, is disrespectful to the offices which they hold and the kind of horrible university lives that they had.

I blame first Justin Trudeau and then Disraeli for putting fability on the table.

Disraeli?

Disraeli.

Dreamboat.

Banging.

Really?

Absolute dream boat.

I mean, each of their own, I guess, but you know.

Who wouldn't?

Alice, I mean, obviously, Australia on military tenderhooks over the Ukraine situation because so often

wars in the Crimea lead

within

on

previous evidence within 20 years to the start of an international sporting rivalry, if I can remember my 19th century history correctly, and the start of Anglo-Australian cricket.

What's the reaction to the Crimea situation down under?

We're enjoying it very much.

Fashion moves in cycles, Andy, and I saw some slap bands in the shops the other day, some hypercolour t-shirts, and it's nice to know that nuclear weapons are back on the table as the negotiation tactic of choice.

I think it's a beautiful thing to witness these things coming back around again.

Does fashion move in cycles?

Because I think

when it comes to me and fashion, that cycle crashed into a disused quarry when I was about three years old and has never been sincerely.

This Ukraine president, Vladimir Zelensky, is saying that it needs these nukes to defend against Russia if it's not allowed into NATO.

And

if I'd known that this level of strong-arm tactics was effective when I was in high school, I mightn't have been so ostracized by the cool groups.

You know, in a girls' school, Andy, I don't know if you know this, in a girls' school, you can never rule through love, only through fear.

No, I'm a bit out of the loop on

girls' schools, to be honest.

I mean, the Russian military have been moving towards the eastern Ukraine border, and it's prompted a stern international reaction with the UN passing resolution 2154 which states

can you please not do that and an upgraded an upgraded statement also come from NATO

saying I mean seriously now really that's enough if this carries on we will have a serious discussion about not awarding any more Olympics and World Cups to Russia for at least the next year so the international community is starting to sound a bit

a bit stronger.

Ukraine has warned Russia of painful consequences

and Joe Biden is ratcheting up sanctions due to Russian influence in America's cyber attacks, interfering in elections, in media and business, in Hollywood in the 1950s and in baseball's World Series controversially won last year by the Moscow Bolsheviks.

So

I mean also America's today threatened consequences.

They wouldn't have called it the World Series if they only wanted American teams in there, India.

America's threatened more consequences.

I mean this could be double consequences for Russia.

Consequences from Ukraine and America.

Beautiful vague threat consequences.

If the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny dies behind prison bars, he's reporting in a weak state after

a long hunger strike.

Mass protests are planned for Wednesday

of this week.

Navalny has been incarcerated for some time now for the crimes of surviving a previous assassination attempt and then with opposition aforethought going back to Russia.

So it's um it's uh

clearly, it's it's hard to be optimistic about any form of uh Russian military expansionism, but there is some hope from protesters in Prague, who I think have taken the strongest action against Putin's government.

They have erected a statue outside the Russian embassy in the Czech capital of a golden toilet, the best kind of toilet, on a special plinth, the best place for any toilet, on which is sitting a naked Vladimir Putin, the best kind of Vladimir Putin, holding a toilet brush and a toilet roll, the best things to hold if you want to symbolise the corrupt stench of autocratic monarchy, with his underpants round his ankles, which is emphatically the best place for Vladimir Putin's underpants because it makes it a little harder for him to run away.

And also there's a bottle of Novichok nestling in those underpants, which is probably the best thing to use when air freshener simply won't cut the mustard.

So, I mean, it remains to be seen whether the shitting Putin statue will be more effective at constraining the expansionist twattery of the Kremlin from the Kremlin than the international community's mumble threats, but at least it can't be less effective and has the added bonus of being a statue of Vladimir Putin taking a shit with his undies around his ankle.

So there we go, something to cling to.

I mean, Andy, this opens up horizons of new mediums for satire, for satirical expression for me.

I'm already planning my next bugle will be done entirely in interpretive dance.

It's a great audio medium, to be fair.

You know, of course, that

Putin

Russian for chamber pot.

So it's a.

Of course it is.

It's entirely in keeping.

And it will be very interesting to see if when this statue is inevitably removed from outside the Russian embassy, if there are Conservative MPs lining up to say, oh no, you cannot simply eradicate history by removing a statue.

Actually, the sculptor has said it doesn't represent Putin.

Specifically, it represents all women.

I've forgotten that one.

That was good.

And a quick quiz question for any buglers who are not fully aware of the situation.

Who or what is Ukraine?

Is Ukraine A, a form of precipitation featuring small stringed instruments?

Is it B, a device for lifting pregnant sheep out of quarries?

Is it C, Hugh Crane is a cabinet minister minister who signed a £2 billion deal with a friend from the tennis club to supply PPE for the NHS, from which all that was delivered was a maxi pack of frozen pita breads with elastic bands stapled to the ends to work as workers' tasks, and a shipping container full of slightly damp Halloween outfits and a handwritten note saying

these should work.

Cheers, bud.

Or is it D, a large European nation currently concerned about a build-up of Russian troops near its border, especially after Russia nicked a big bit of that country just a few short years ago?

Do send your answers to Moscow.

there was a fart of a pun in there andy i'm not sure you've ever actually wafted implied one quite like that before

well it's been a tough day for chris uh as a as a fan of tottenhotspur we're recording this on monday we'll touch more on the story later on but uh jose mourinho your

your own personal messiah has just been sacked and uh spurs have emphatically joined the side of all evil with the European Super League.

How are you coping?

I mean, part one of those things, you say it's a tough day, it's actually a very nice day.

Very happy.

Part two: look, if you're going to be on the side of evil, you've just got to hope that evil wins.

That is a great film tagline.

I don't follow sports, but whenever I hear that anything has happened in sports, I assume it has to do with sexual assault.

Well, no, this is financial assault, which is

not always the same thing.

Moving on in the holy shit, the world is doomed section.

Well, one of the trendiest things in global news these days is things finally coming to an end after lasting way, way, way longer than was originally hoped and planned due to a series of early mistakes and avoidable political errors.

And, well, it's not just COVID that's on that bandwagon.

Afghanistan has jumped on it as well.

Now, I wrote a joke round about 2002, hoping for trying to find something positive from the American and British Afghanistan campaign.

And I was hoping, I don't even remember this joke, Chris, from

back in the team, but it might even have made it into the department, I can't remember.

Hoping for a final answer to the previously unsolved question that has echoed through eternity.

If two wrongs don't make a right, how many wrongs do make a right?

And that was essentially what the Afghanistan campaign seemed to be an effort to answer.

And here we are, nearly 20 years on, still no answer, and America is abandoning the research project with this intractable question still

hanging in the air.

It's going to withdraw all its troops in time for the, oh my fing God, we can't let this go on for more than two decades, symbolic 11th of September anniversary.

Any positives to come out of the last two decades in Afghanistan for either of you?

See, I I sort of I understand the problem.

I understand the problem for the Americans, you know, because sure, sure, Andy, it's only been 20 years.

But you want to go before you've outstayed your welcome, don't you?

For some time now, the Taliban have been making yawning noises and talking about having to be up early for a meeting about how they can stop girls from going to school.

Well, the American military has essentially got its guitar out and started singing bad vampire weekend covers.

But to be fair to them, it is difficult.

What is the etiquette for leaving a country you've spent two decades occupying with your military?

It might be, I thought it might be useful for us at this juncture just to go over the social rules for invading and occupying another country.

So first of all, it's important to remember that when you receive an invitation, you absolutely should not RSVP as this completely gives away any element of surprise to your invasion.

In terms of arrival times, try to arrive within 15 minutes of the stated start time and not say a decade after the radicalised jihadists you funded for years have kicked the Soviet Union out of their country.

That's just embarrassing for everybody and it makes it very tricky for the host to know when to put the casserole in the oven.

The issue of what to take for your hosts.

That's a drive of a casserole, isn't it, Chris?

You don't need to time it right.

I'm telling you.

Let it sit.

I'm telling you, Andy, by the time the US had turned up, that was nothing but ash at the bottom of a Le Croze.

That's what that was.

What to take your host is a tricky one.

You don't want to be bringing the traditional bottle of wine to an Islamist regime.

So what might be a reasonable substitute?

Well, according to De Brett's Guide to Etiquette, anything up to a trillion dollars in military equipment and personnel and tens of thousands of lives is considered reasonable.

Another issue that's an absolute minefield is the minefields.

It's generally considered quite rude to sow your host's bathroom with under Lino explosives and fail to clear them up before you leave.

And lastly, do send a thank you note the next day, something along the lines of, dear Taliban, thank you for a simply wonderful occupation.

We absolutely must not have you over to ours anytime soon.

If you just follow those simple rules, I think we wouldn't have got into this situation.

I mean, that's the great thing with etiquette, isn't it?

It just gives you a guide through the difficult times.

And they've definitely been difficult times.

Difficult times.

Alice,

have you enjoyed the Afghanistan two decades, the majority of your life on earth?

I mean, the declaration that they will withdraw feels, as Chris indicates,

a little too late.

They're planning to withdraw from Afghanistan.

Withdrawal is actually surprisingly effective as a form of contraception, but it doesn't work when you've been fing someone for years and only decide to withdraw when they are well and truly impregnated with the consequences of your military action.

We can all just cross our fingers, hold our breaths and hope to see the geopolitical babies spawning into the future.

It makes me wonder when America gave up on the idea of being world leaders by virtue of being, I don't know, better at the race of nations and committed themselves to fully just ankle-tapping all major geographic regions that look like they might be acquiring any sort of you know togetherness or forward momentum.

President Biden has announced that after a conflict of almost 20 years involving hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries, civilian and military, untold disruption, the surprise and astonishing rise of the Afghanistan national cricket team up the international rankings, and the steadfast refusal of the Taliban to do the decent thing and

right off back to the Middle Ages where they came from.

The American military will be withdrawing by the 11th of September.

Now, if the history of Afghanistan is a reliable guide and the last 20 years suggests that it is probably the most reliable guide to anything in the world these days, then the official history of the campaign, its end and its aftermath, is not especially likely to conclude with the words, and they all lived happily ever after.

Well, it strikes me, Andy, that's because the withdrawal is based on two misapprehensions by the Americans in their agreement with the Taliban, isn't it?

The first is that the pinky promise is recognised in international law, and second is that the Taliban recognize international law.

They've just been going.

The third is that the Americans recognize it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Fair point.

I guess if we've learned one thing from this, and let's hope there is at least one, ideally, more things, it's that when considering invading Afghanistan, read a history book first.

But that was not the MO of America's president at the time, George W.

Bush, the fitted John the Baptist to Donald Trump's Jesus.

And

Bush has a new book out this week of medium-grade paintings of immigrants in America.

And I mean, these are awkward timing, to be honest.

As Afghanistan hoves back into the news, George W.

Bush is publishing a book of not especially impressive paintings.

It's not clear if being forced to sit for a portrait painted by George W.

Bush was one of the enhanced interrogation techniques developed under his administration as part of the war on terror.

But it could well have been.

Confess to what we tell you you've done, or you're going to have to do eight ten hour sittings for George.

And yes, when we say life means life, that applies not just to your likely prison sentence, if we ever get around to actually putting you in court, but also how he wants you to pose.

Togs off.

Well, I mean, just as if we didn't need further concerning news, monkey humans are being bred in laboratories.

I mean, this is really a sign that we're basically just giving up now isn't it and acknowledging that it's time for a full Planet of the Apes scenario.

Scientists, them again,

have been putting

making monkey embryos containing human cells.

I mean these are scientists playing God with fire, let's call it what it is.

And

there have been other mixed species embryos in previous experiments

including human cells implanted into pig embryos.

I believe former Prime Minister David Cameron, more of whom

later in the show, was involved in some of the early research on those projects, so I think the techniques were refined over time.

Monkey human, do we see this as a positive move, that

the failing human genes could be improved by going back to our ape brethren and cistrin

to find superior makeup for our DNA moving forward?

I hate this kind of story, Andy.

It always makes me confront the fact that I don't know how to pronounce chimeras.

Chimerous chimeras.

I don't know.

I don't know how to feel about this.

I would like to say I welcome our new ape human hybrid friends, neighbours, and probably children.

I can only hope that being brought up in clinical laboratories as organ farms for humans to use, that they will be bred to have more critical thinking skills than their human soon-to-be subjects.

First of all, I would like to say that the news that monkey human hybrids have not yet successfully been released into the world will come as a surprise to any stand-ups who've done the Friday late show at Junglers.

That's the first thing.

Obviously, this sounds like a good idea because which of us hasn't dreamed of creating a monkey-human hybrid army to help us with e.g.

personal security, housework, and just, you know, when we get a bit lonely?

No, I'm saying we've all seen Helena Bonham Carter in Planet of the Apes.

But the problem is that if the past year has taught us anything, Andy, it's that science just can't keep a lid on things.

One day, you're in your Wuhan lab trying to win a bet about whether you can engineer a novel coronavirus.

The next, millions of people are dead, and the ones who aren't are booking two-hour slots to go and sit in a freezing beer garden on a Tuesday afternoon just to break the monotony.

So, there is absolutely no chance that the monkey humans are not going to escape from the lab and start breeding.

It's going to be like the parakeets all over again, if parakeets sat in trees flinging turds at passers-by-that's my concern.

I'm sure they can be trained to do that, the the parakeets.

We've got some caulkers around here in the

you used to live in Streatham, of course, didn't you?

When I first knew you lived, just up the road from where I've been.

The parakeets here are spectacular.

They always look a little confused, as if they're slightly aware that

something that colourful has no business in Britain.

No.

I think the pro the problem here, as I see it, is too many scientists, not enough boffins, right?

Whatever happened to boffins?

Because we used to hear a lot about boffins, but they're not so much these days.

Boffins are fundamentally benign adorable klutzes in white lab coats with haircuts not dissimilar to yours Andy who engage in colourful yet harmless research and or winning World War II and or designing a monorail.

Any subconscious desires that they might have to create projects that threaten the very existence of humankind are usually stymied by the fact that Boffins can't really get anything very much done because they get too shy and tongue-tied around their brilliant and bustily attractive lab assistant, Miss Phelps, and or surprisingly hunky lab assistant Carruthers.

Scientists, on the other hands, are ruthlessly efficient, amoral fact trufflers with the cold, dead eyes of Paul Hollywood.

There's no project that they won't take on, however questionable.

They created robot police dogs, they developed the technology that gave us Twitter, and they, Andy, invented gravity, which is the number one cause of people falling over and toast going on the floor.

So, bring back Buffins, and all this will, this kind of stuff won't happen anymore.

Amen.

Amen.

this is an unbearably good debut show chris i'm heartbroken working on my own solo show i thought i'd just phone this one in

well

i've i've not i've not written anything for 15 years i've had a lot of time to think

well if it's year beginning and ending in any number there's probably a lobbying scandal going on here in the united kingdom um and well it's involving david cameron uh this time the

hypocrite, the reigning British chaos causer of the year.

And he stepped up his campaign to scoop the tide for a record sixth consecutive year by getting involved in a sleaziest lobbying hoo-ha concerning the catchily named coronavirus large business interruption loan scheme, all thumbbills,

as well as involving a collapsed finance firm, a civil servant who seems to have been simultaneously moonlighting for that finance firm and mooning at the concept of conflict of interest.

He's been sending desperate begging texts to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who didn't reply with the you that seemed appropriate.

And Cameron's own finely honed, catastrophic lack of judgment has been brought back another bit of old nostalgia from political times gone past.

All as savoury as a sugary meringue-based dessert.

And like the other Eden mess, the longer this one stays out in the sun, the less appetizing it gets.

When he became prime, he sort of pledged to clamp down on political sleaze.

And he didn't so much clamp down on it as leap into its arms and kiss it firmly on the mouth.

I mean, absolutely.

I mean, by clamp down, he meant do his kegels.

Family show.

Do you know what?

I don't think I've ever heard anybody say that word out loud.

It's nice to know how to pronounce that.

It's your shimmerer.

It's my shimmer.

Yeah.

Shimmer a keggle.

I was like, go to school with a girl called Shimmer a Kegel.

You're fitting right in, Chris.

Now, when David Cameron came to power, Chris, in 2010, on that night where we were on the radio with John Peenard,

he said

that year, in this party, we believe in competition, not cronyism.

Which, with hindsight, is like hearing a 1970s priest saying, we believe in God, not institutionalised mass abuse.

Cameron was also photographed hanging out with Lex Greensal and the renowned assassination fan and independent journalism sceptic Mohammed bin Salman.

So, I mean, Cameron's proved to be, when it it comes to

lobbying,

not so much Gamekeeper turned poacher as poacher who used to pretend he was actually a conversationist, now admitting, actually, I just love the look of fear in the eyes of a rhinoceros when you stand over it with a cocked machine gun saying, Look at me, look at me, you horny, snouted loser, look at me.

Rhinoceroses, the unicorns of reality.

That's great.

All right.

That's a really good metaphor, isn't it?

This is your expectation.

This is real life.

I'll tell you what, it's been another cracking week in David Cameron's ongoing crusade to eradicate shame from British public life.

He is very much the frontrunner to go home with the coveted statuette of two massive brass balls at this year's fewest fks given awards.

He has been using, back to Cameron, who is, I mean, yeah, the one-man economic downturn, a man who looks like a freeze frame of a pork chop exploding.

A man who looks like the main character in a Pixar film called Dave about an anthropomorphized drink problem.

A man who looks like a reboot of the fly in which Piers Morgan accidentally teleports himself at the same time as a bin bag full of strawberry yogurt.

Anyway, he, the fact that he, that Greensill advised him when he was catastrophically Prime Minister, then he advised Greensill when he was catastrophically head of a financial services company.

It's just one more example of how the current British government and their cronies are essentially the world's world's longest running continuous experiment into the Kruger-Dunning effect.

They are too stupid to know how stupid they are.

To a man, woman and barely functioning collection of cells and nerve impulses, they are remarkable.

They have the unshakable self-confidence of people who wouldn't stop if you walked in on them wanking and the kind of absolute lack of knowledge of their own grave limitations you would normally associate with contestants in the early rounds of X-Factor.

Take for example Andy Matt Hancock, a man who looks like he knows where Anne Frank is hiding and is absolutely desperate to tell the man over there in uniform.

It emerged this week that his sister owns a firm that was given an NHS contract and that Hancock himself took a 15% share in the company two months previously and failed to declare any of that, thinking that no one would notice.

A government spokesman said, and I am paraphrasing, but only slightly.

Nothing to see here.

Everything is completely normal and exactly as it should be.

Other occasions on which this response would be equally accurate and appropriate include the last flight of the Hindenburg, the 2011 Fukushima nuclear reactor health and safety check-up and Jeffrey Epstein's autopsy.

It is a fing jambles

from soup to nuts.

Anyway, returning to Britain and we must touch on this story this week.

This week, Britain has bidden farewell to a giant figure in public life, a selfless servant of the country, an exemplar of quiet dignity, wisdom and commitment who strove to make the United Kingdom and indeed the world a better place to live and a true inspiration to many whose extraordinary lifespan almost a century and whose contribution to the nation encompassed the decades from the post-war era to the present day.

The sad death of politician Shirley Williams has hit this country very hard.

But we also had Prince Philip's funeral on Saturday, the social event of the year.

So far, the tabloid press were so stricken by grief they were barely able to write 30 articles a day slamming Prince Harry and his insufficiently British wife.

And it was impressive in the circumstances that despite their pain, they heroically managed to combine their funeral coverage with slamming Harry and Megan

for an incredible range of perceived infractions.

Alice, how's the...

Obviously,

Prince Philip was

your

de facto king in Australia

as much as ours.

How is Australia coping with

the loss?

Well, certainly we are slightly less than the UK, but we're negotiating the delicate process as

public figures and comedians of what to say and whom we might be offending by saying, for example, drawing attention to

things that Prince Philip has done or said or thought or been seen to do in the past.

But really, I feel like this isn't a sort of a blown-up worry, but everyone's worried about upsetting or offending or speaking ill of the dead because really isn't saying the worst possible thing at the worst possible time the best possible tribute to a giant among men.

Yeah.

Will anybody ever be as good at that again as him?

We've seen the passing of something, I think.

Passing of the culture.

The big news in global royal circles now is that now that the funeral's happen, Andy,

and Prince Philip's wish to be made into bullets and fired into unsuspecting wildlife has been observed, the Queen is back on the market.

It's been a 73-year drought for people hoping to marry Elizabeth II, but like Hallie's Comet, the opportunity comes around every three-quarters of a century.

By now, the new Lord Chamberlain.

If they don't make David Attenborough King, I will be furious.

Well, I don't know that that's how it works within a monarchy.

But look, I'll tell you what, right?

Let's just go through a few of the people.

Don't bring this back round to Putin.

I just beg you.

Don't bring that back.

Why doesn't she...

No, no, that wasn't what I was going to say.

What I was going to say was, you know, obviously, eventually she's going to get tipsy with her girlfriends in a weather spoon.

They're going to put the ruler app on her smartphone and they're going to persuade her it's time to get back in the side saddle.

So who are a few of the people, who are some of the profiles that are going to be coming up that she could get up with?

Now, so first up, Harold V of Norway.

At 84 years old, Harold will be something of a toy boy for the non-agenarian monarchical singleton.

Sadly, there is a small problem that he's already married, although given that he and his wife only wed in 1968, that 53-year-old Unionandi has pretty shallow roots by the Queen's standards, and there's absolutely no reason she couldn't subtly drive a wedge between the young lovers, off her shoulder to Krine, and just wait for Harold to come to mama.

Norway seems like a natural territorial acquisition for Elizabeth, too, as she's very used to ruling countries with unenviable weather and self-harming attitudes towards the European Union.

Swipe right.

Vajira Longkorn, King of Thailand, at a sprightly 68, he's still an absolute lad and a ledge.

He's certainly got an eye for the ladies and will go after any bit of ermine trimmed skirt he can, having married four wives over the last 44 years.

He sure knows where to put his orbs and scepter, if you know what I mean.

If you don't know what I mean, I was referring to his cock and balls.

He currently has two wives, although one of them is technically a concubine, a dangerous choice given that their spines can really hurt you during sex.

But would the Queen really be prepared to share attention with two other women, or four, if you include Meghan Markle and the late Princess Diana?

Not to mention the fact that a palace in Bangkok is maybe not the best acquisition for a family that's trying to keep Prince Andrew on the leash.

Swipe left.

Pope Francis.

Whoop!

That's right, Pope Francis.

Because Big Frank is not only head of Catholicism, the world's campus religion and second largest user of gold paint after the contestants on RuPaul's drag race, he's also sovereign of Vatican City State, which is the geopolitical equivalent of owning the freehold on a beach hut and calling yourself a homeowner.

Vatican City State is so small that most of the maps of it are full scale.

It's lacking in certain amenities, airports, a public transportation system, hospitals, etc.

But on the other hand, it's bits of it that are a church to bits of it that are not a church ratio is comfortingly high for anyone who is either religious or likes candles.

Pope Francis and the Queen have much in common, mainly dresses, hats, and waving at people from balconies, but the real attraction would be the opportunity finally to finish what Henry VIII started and absorb the rest of the Catholic world into the Church of England as God Herself always intended.

Swipe right, swipe left, swipe up, swipe down, in nominee patriis en fili, et spiritus sancti.

Amen.

I give up comedy.

That brings us to the end of this week's Bugle.

I'm afraid our dinosaur reassessment section has been postponed, as has our early coverage of the football crisis that we will touch on.

Dinosaur news is never really breaking news.

Yeah, not really.

Not really.

The ship we missed for a million years.

There's no urgency to it, is there?

We will touch on them in future weeks.

Thanks, as always, to Alice Fraser, who's now finished at the Melbourne Comedy Festival.

Any more shows coming up?

Yes, I will be doing shows at the Sydney Comedy Festival.

Kronos, my new solo show, is available there.

I will probably be streaming it again to my Patreon subscribers, patreon.com slash Alice Fraser.

And I have a podcast or two under the Bugle umbrella, The Last Post, which we are doing a live show of next.

The next episode of The Last Post will be live, and you can get tickets on thebuglepodcast.com.

Click on the live link.

Also the Gargle, which is the weekly glossy magazine to the Bugle's audio newspaper for a visual world.

And the live

Last Post show is this coming Sunday, the 25th of April.

Is it good?

8 p.m.

UK time, Chris.

Chris is giving it the nod.

I'm so impressed that you got there, Andy.

That's wonderful.

Well done.

And the guests will be me and John Luke Roberts.

Oh, John Luke Roberts.

There we go.

Chris,

anything to plug?

Yeah, yes, the second series of the TV show that I make with Simon Blackwell and Martin Freeman called Breeders is currently on FX for our American listeners and FX on Hulu.

It's on every Monday night, and you can catch up on FX on Hulu.

And for British listeners, it is on next month on Sky at some point.

And it's on various places around the world that they don't tell me about.

What do you mean, as in places around the world they don't tell you about because you're British and there's only certain places in the world that we learn about at school, which are the same.

Yes, well, they don't tell me just in case it freaks me out.

The idea that

also, I think you just don't want to tell British people that their culture is being accepted somewhere further abroad just in case you take it as a cue to invade.

Yes, of course.

This is simply a safety procedure.

And if you want to listen to the department featuring Chris

B and John Oliver from the distant past, I think someone put it somewhere on the internet.

Did they?

Officially.

I'd like to re-listen to those.

I wonder what that would be like.

Well, they're still funny, I think.

Yeah, yeah.

We're going to have a live listening party on Twitch.

That would be good.

They're so dense, they're so full of jokes.

There's a lot of jokes in that show.

There's a lot of jokes in that show.

Yeah.

Oh, well, we'll make the TV show one day, Andy.

One day.

That's what we have been saying that now for 18 years.

Yeah, 18 years, yeah.

Yeah, good.

Anyway, it's been a pleasure having you on.

And do come back soon.

Yeah.

Thanks for having me.

It's a treat after 13 years to get to come and do this.

We'll be back next week, Buglers.

Until then, we will play you out with some lies about our premium-level voluntary subscribers.

To join them and have a lie told about you,

join the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme at thebuglepodcast.com.

Click the donate button.

You can also give a one-off or recurring donation of any size to keep this show free, flourishing, independent, and without ad-OS.

Goodbye.

Picking up on the monkey human hybrid story from this week's Bugle, Charlie Pearson suggests a better cross-breeding scheme for humans would be with cockroaches.

Cockroaches can survive anything according to their reputation, says Charlie.

I reckon if we can splice their surviving anything DNA with our human skills, we could pollute the world to our hearts content and not have to worry about whether or not it would still be inhabitable.

That could be a real boost for the financial markets.

But David Irish is not so sure and would instead recommend a human barracuda cross-breeding program.

If the sea levels do keep on rising, explains David, we might as well prepare ourselves for the inevitable and pick up some innate sea-dwelling skills.

Also, barracudas are ugly bastards which might help cure us of our obsession with personal grooming.

Barracudas don't waste their time with special creams and cosmetic tinctures and frankly they're all the better for it, concludes David.

Abhinav Merotra would go one step further than that even and try a three-prong hybridization strategy that cross-speciesizes humans with foxes, parrots and whales.

We would end up as a terrific all-round species, says Abhinav, with added cunning plus a willingness to cut down on food waste by rifling through our own bins, a heightened ability to agree with each other just by repetition, and we could travel the world in an environmentally friendly manner by migrating across the oceans.

Greg Blaug is having none of this.

Good luck getting that one past the plankton rights lobby Abhinav, he skepticises.

Greg himself would prefer a human-leopard flying squirrel genetic cross-splodging.

I love trees and I've always fancied living up one, states Greg boldly.

I'd also love to have leopard spots because, well, who wouldn't?

And flying squirrels were onto the awesomeness of wingsuits way before we were.

And finally, Curtis Edge is not particularly interested in cross-breeding humans with any other species because he is suspicious of words ending in the syllables Ellie.

We always referred to the television as the telly when I was growing up, leading me to believe that all words ending in Ellie were similar shortenings.

My politics tutor at university was thus disappointed when I submitted an essay on the influence in the development of modern political philosophy of the Renaissance diplomat and writer Niccolo Machiavellovision.

Here endeth this week's lies.

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.