White Noise

Hello Buglers and welcome to the first bugle of 2021.

A year that will surely see at least some of the following things happen.

The end of the Trump presidency, the first one at least, maybe also the second, the re-legalisation of films that are not sequels or spin-offs, an Olympics, the first Olympics to take place in an odd-numbered year since at least 393 AD.

Interesting to see how much difference that makes to the medals table at the end.

We could see more medals won by athletes born in odd-numbered years, which might prove something or other.

We could see this year the resignation of the COVID virus, either in humiliating retreat at having been vaccinated shitless, or having simply achieved all its career goals as a virus, or through having had enough of Boris Johnson's stupid smirking face.

And we will almost certainly also see the full resumption of the British Empire.

The planet is back, people.

2020 has been consigned to the history books, where it assuredly belongs with all other years.

I'm Andy Zoltzmann and I will as always be chronicling absolutely everything that both does and more importantly does not happen this year here on the Bugle official podcast of record for the human race.

And to begin with, I'm joined to A, finish off the bits left over from our review of 2020 show and B review 2021 so far three and a bit days in.

To begin the Bugle year, I am joined for two purposes.

A to finish off the bits left over from our review of 2020 show and B to review 2021 so far, all three in a bit, stroke four days of it, depending on where you are in the world, by Alice Fraser, who essentially lived through two 2020s simultaneously via The Last Post and The Real World.

Alice, I mean,

that was a shit year to do twice in one go, wasn't it?

I mean, yes, Andy, except I played them off against each other, like the red robot and the blue robot and the rock and sock and robots, and they sort of cancelled each other out.

And I'm also joined by

our fellow veteran of the review of 2020 show from a few days ago and my fellow Brit revelling in our newfangle found cosmic Brexit freedomization.

It's the former European Nish Kumar.

Hello Andy, hello Alice, hello buglers.

Happy New Year and more importantly happy new bugle.

I have started the year in the way that I mean to go on with it, Andy, by which I mean Nigel Farage has got the hump with me.

We are

the new year is four days old, and I've already wound up Nigel Farage.

I appeared on a talk show in Britain hosted by Graeme Norton, called the Graeme Norton Show, unsurprisingly, on New Year's Eve.

And

due to an unfortunate timing in the edit, at 11 p.m., exactly as the UK left the European Union, I was on BBC One making some jokes about Brexit.

And Ferragio

has got the hump because I described him, if I may quote from the Daily Mail article describing the events, as a sack of ham brought to life by a witch's curse whose blood type is real ale.

And Nigel has received those comments

exactly as poorly as you might have anticipated.

He's got very upset with me.

Another piece of news at the moment, Andy, is that the current Doctor Who is likely to step down at the end of her tenure.

The end of this series will be the end of her tenure as the Doctor.

And what I would suggest is if the BBC really wants to irritate large sections of this country, name me as the new Doctor Who.

Can I act?

Of course not.

Absolutely, under no circumstances can I act.

I have played myself once and it was a struggle.

But if you really want to cheese off a section,

let me start the campaign now for me to be named as the new doctor, Doctor Whomar.

Thank you.

Well, I'd vote for that.

I presume it's going to be put to the public now that we've reclaimed a democracy from Brussels, because Brussels, you know, Brussels was responsible for making Sylvester McCoy Doctor Who back in the day.

That's a fact.

It was a European Parliament decision.

Well, Nisha, I, for one, am deeply invested in this long-running frenemies to lovers, will they, won't they, epic, where you both sort of, you know, fight each other, but secretly you love each other.

We are recording on the 4th of January 2021, meaning it is 2020 years exactly since the 4th of January 1 AD and the moment when Mary famously said, please, Joseph, can you take him for just an hour or so until sunrise?

I'm absolutely knackered.

To which Joseph responded, not my kid, not my problem.

Does that mer stuff not knock the little blighter out anyway?

On this day in 1903, Topsy, an elephant, was electrocuted at Lunar Park, Coney Island, and it was filmed by the Edison Film Company in a film entitled Electrocuting an Elephant.

And I mean, it is

true.

Have either of you seen the film of Topsy, the elephant being electrocuted in 1903?

I have not, Andrew.

I have seen a still image of the film that I was being sort of invited to click on, and I refuse that honour.

Clickbait from 1903, sensational.

Hashtag spoiler alert.

I knew what was going to happen.

Yeah, and I haven't seen it because I'm not in the business of watching hundred-year-old animal-based snuff movies, Andrew.

It's what inspired the young David Attenborough, apparently.

I have seen the gritty reboot.

Well it is

a zombie bigger elephant.

The zombie elephant sequel.

But it began way back 117 years ago now, began a great human tradition of filming weird shit that really doesn't need to be filmed.

and you can trace the direct lineage from that down to such such productions as

Smurfs 2

and also you know cats being surprised by cucumbers is very much the the direct descendant of elephant surprised by being treated like a death row inmate for the crime of having tusks with being an elephant aforethought

as always a section of this new year bugle is going straight in the bin and this week in the bin new New Year's irresolutions.

Every 1st of January 7 billion odd humans set themselves apart from all the other creatures on God's not particularly good earth and challenge themselves with New Year's resolutions, targets for self-improvement and personal achievo progressions that in an estimated 99.94% of cases end in one or more of failure, forgottenness

or full-scale futility exceeding abandonment, the three Fs, which coincidentally is a secret code used by the British Secret Services when referring to operations to safeguard the prime minister the foreign secretary and the home secretary um the big the three f's um previous uh new year's resolutions that have failed to be met include uh my new year's resolution to sort out a proper andy's altsword website um 0 and 20 on that one uh my new year's resolution to take over the world and usher in a new global era of peace harmony and progression also 0 for 20 but it is very much dependent on me getting the website sorted out first it's really hard to take over the world without a strong online presence and also my new year's resolution to kick my big game hunting habit which is tricky so i haven't got one yet so it's a bit hard to shake so uh given that resolutions always fail we have for you bugle new year's irresolutions uh things for you to just give up on uh without even really making any effort to achieve in the first place uh here's an irresolution for you take less exercise think about exercising five times a week but only actually do it a maximum of one time a week and that includes a briskish walk to the nearest booze shop don't bother catching up with old friends.

That's a good irresolution to make.

What's the point?

No one's got anything positive to say these days.

Drink less, well, drink less water.

Buy more pointless stuff to clutter up your home, just to distract you from the gloom of reality.

Maybe another giant wooden duck.

I've got a spare one if anyone needs.

And give up all hope by February.

And then waiver even on that and suffer mild outbreaks of unjustified optimism throughout March.

And also, final irresolution.

Don't learn to understand ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

It would be interesting, but what's the point?

Anything that

you guys are determined not to bother doing

as your New Year's irresolution this year?

I mean, my New Year's resolution was to say yes to more stuff and also to say no to more stuff.

Right.

So if I can do both of those at the same time, we're easy.

Well, that's quite an Australian thing, isn't it?

Oh, yeah, nah.

That's...

Yeah, nah.

That's quite an easy one to achieve down there.

Nish, anything that you've uh not set your eyes on?

I think this could be the year that I finally don't learn Mandarin, Andy.

I've got a really good feeling about 2021 finally being the year I don't learn how to speak fluent Mandarin.

I met a lady and she I asked her what her job was, and she said her job was a Mandarin translator.

I said that's easy, it's sort of like an orange.

And

she didn't get it at all,

She was not happy.

Andy, I've just been to andyzaltzman.co.uk.

Oh, right.

Chris and I've just been showing exactly the same.

Has it been shut down?

Has it got my tour date from about 2015 on it?

It's got it all.

I mean, it's got shows you're no longer a part of, a 2018 tour.

It's got the podcast is on a platform that you can no longer listen to it on.

All right.

okay.

It's wonderful.

I'll put it on the to do.

It's really wonderful.

It's just, I've been so busy with the last 11 months, just jetting around the world, barely had a moment at home on my own to sort these things out.

So

I, for one, am extremely excited about your 2018 tour.

Well, it was a good tour, Nish.

You're right to be excited about that.

Yeah, I'm very excited.

It's satirist for hire, and I'm going to be emailing it a satirical suggestion of you satirizing your own website.

Do you know what?

I think I've had that requested numerous times before.

I've just signed up to your carrier pigeon mail drop route.

All right, good.

Yeah, yeah.

Wear goggles.

That section in the bin.

Top story this week, leftovers from 2020.

Due to time constraints, we didn't quite finish everything we're planning to get through in our review of 2020 show, possibly because the year was so jam-packed full of shit that we couldn't compact it all down into a single 90-minute disc of uselessness.

There was a lot that we were planning to do.

We planned to have an interview with the COVID virus, a world exclusive,

but that sadly was shelved and now the virus is a bit too busy, still no real clear idea what its motivations are.

Wanted to talk to about how it views its year in the limelight, what its future plans are and what it now makes of the new mutant tribute viruses that have popped out of late, the best of which, of course, is the British virus, the British mutant virus.

Going GB.

This is what Brexit enabled us to do, to create the world's best mutant virus, way better than the South African mutant virus,

which is ostentatiously

contagious.

The British, you know, it's way, way more efficient than the traditional OG virus i believe youngsters call it but uh it's uh just more british it uh just gets things done in a much more polite and organized manner um

so um uh so no interview with the uh with the virus uh and various other uh things we were we were hoping to uh to get round to but uh but didn't nish um what what uh took us through the things that you were planning to talk about last week as we look back uh on last year and we because we need to finally tot up exactly what last year scored before comparing it against the start of this year.

Well Andy one of the things that I wanted to highlight is this is sort of multifaceted

it's a complex organism when you're considering the failure of the British governmental response to coronavirus.

There's a number of levels at which you can exact it's like in it's like the film Inception Andy.

It's failure contained within failure contained within failure.

Right?

And one of the elements one of the slightly I would say unsung heroes of the British government's total finging up of the coronavirus response is its corruption, which is has sort of slightly gone unnoticed in this country, but didn't go unnoticed by the New York Times, who stuck their goddamn American noses into our business.

Well, they conducted quite a large investigation into about 1,200 central government contracts that were made public, that had been handed out to various companies to provide various services for the coronavirus response including sort of providing protective equipment for hospital workers

put together those 1200 contracts were worth a nearly 22 billion US dollars now of that 22 billion you I mean first of all let's not be around the bush that's not chump change okay

that's not exactly 22 billion dollars even I with my BBC wage can admit that is a f of a lot of money

of that 22 billion, about 11 billion dollars went to companies either run by friends and associates of politicians in the Conservative Party or companies with no prior experience of

responding to medical pandemics or companies with a history of controversy.

And it really reminds me of my favorite Frank Sinatra song, and it goes a little something like this: It's only corruption if it's not white people.

Interesting number from old blue eyes there.

Let's face it, if this was a different country, we'd be throwing around borderline racist phrases like banana republic.

But it being Britain, all this is evidence of is our post-Brexit future, where we will be conducting business without the red tape of laws.

And the problem with this is a sweet taste of freedom.

The problem with this is that it wouldn't have mattered in some ways, at least in the short term.

I mean, there's a longer term impact on the health of the body politic of this nation.

But in the short term, it might not have mattered so much if the response had been effective and people hadn't, and again, this is me using some legal terminology, been so f ⁇ ing dead.

If people had been marginally less fing dead, we might not have been, this might not have been something that's so concerning.

But there's no doubt that this country has totally fed its coronavirus response and a part of it has to come down to the fact that contracts have been handed out around the dinner table at various supper clubs in west london and my concern now as we move into 2021 is obviously the hope for this country really at this point is the vaccine we have no other hope for us beating this coronavirus there's no sense of us managing this pandemic it's all about the vaccine can we can we not just wave the magna carta at it yeah well we we actually have tried that we tried waving the magna Magna Carta at it, we tried pointing at a picture of Winston Churchill aggressively, and we've tried singing Vera Lynn.

And so far, the goddamn non-British virus has refused to cooperate with any of those British tactics.

But my concern is now with the vaccine rollout, the government is going to hand out a contract for the vaccine to an MP's neighbour's nephew, who's then going to drop all the vaccines and yet somehow inexplicably win the contract to clean up the now useless vaccines and smashed containers.

well i mean that's you know that's you know in many ways this is what we voted for um

in 2016 with uh you know the freedom to f things up on our own terms i mean essentially what what what this illustrates niche is how you know 45 years of being part of the eu has softened us as a nation to the extent where we can't be corrupt efficiently and we need we need to rebuild that that corruption to the to the levels that we had back in back in our our glory days because for too for too long Brussels has been making us you know pretend to go by you know some regulations and you know that's that's that's we've lost our edge we've you know if we'd been an independent country all this time not only would the corruption have been you know worth twice the amount you said billions and billions of pounds but we would also have cured not just COVID but all known diseases already So I think this justifies those multiple votes that I placed back in 2016

in favour of Henry VIII.

Well, just quickly

on Brexit, Nish, we've had

well this is the 4th of January now, so a few days now,

the agreement having been signed and Britain

in the early days of its journey into interstellar freedom.

I mean, it's an interesting deal, a trade deal that means that we trade less, an unleashing of freedom in the unconventional form of restricting our freedoms, horizons and possibilities, a taking back of control by a parliament philosophically incapable of exercising control, and a restoration of democracy overseen by a government that treats democracy like an unwanted Christmas sex doll.

It's

strange.

Strange, exciting times.

Yeah, it's very strange, exciting times.

And the consequences of Brexit are already hitting home for my family, for example.

I just before we started recording, I received a string of text messages from my brother who has just arrived back where he lives in Berlin.

And he

has just had to queue for the first time.

He's a German resident, but he's had to queue for the first time through the non-EU passport queue.

And I got a text from him that really sums up the entire process.

It was just three words, so fing embarrassing.

Which I think is the translation of honi soique malipense.

And of course, you know, we have the, you know, it was part of it was to get control back to the mother of all parliaments.

And if indeed our parliament is the mother of all parliaments, it is a very old mother, old, deranged, sitting in a rocking chair by a curtained window, mumbling something about how Bernard still loves her.

Yeah, either that or it's a mother from a Greek play who ends up f ⁇ ing her son.

Family show.

So was the play.

Alice,

what further delights from 2020

took your attention?

Well, I think what further delights from 2020 are going to continue to have repercussions through 2021 is probably the theme of 2021 so far.

I think everyone secretly had their fingers crossed that it would be a clean slate do-over

moment when, in fact, 2021 is just the same thing, but more so.

More disappointingly so, because we had a brief window of completely unfounded hope that

these massive

epic movements of economies and people would stop and take a break and maybe think about what they'd done and go for a run and eat clean for a few days.

Yeah, well, I did my best, Alice.

Yesterday, I made way too much vegetable soup with our leftover Christmas vegetables.

So I had to put some in the freezer.

So I put it in a pot and I put a little bit of tape on it.

And I wrote, vegetable soup, 3rd January, 2020.

And

unwittingly, I thought, oh,

that's the wrong year.

I'll tell you what, what I'll do is I'll see if it's magic soup and if time has indeed gone back to this time last year.

But sadly, it was parsnip-based soup rather than magic-based soup.

So I can only apologise.

Maybe when I get it out of the freezer, it will reactivate.

You can do the last post all over again.

Andy, you making too much food is not a new development.

Yeah, I've been to Zaltzmann Christmas before.

That is not a

corner has been turned.

Vegetable soup, but made with ham stock.

So just in case you're thinking that my vegetable soup had gone kosher,

No.

No, I'm not prepared to cross that bridge yet.

Andy, you're so committed to upsetting your forefathers that you're even injecting ham into places it does not belong.

Bacon-flavoured chewing gum now.

Oh, that's a good idea.

Look the um

2020 was a real year for culture, so I think it's worthwhile covering it.

If by culture you mean people at home watching other people at home, and I do.

Never before have we been able to perv on our exhibitionistic neighbours around the world with such ease via Twitch, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, like a consensual live version of Rhea Window.

It's been a long time since I watched that film, but I think it was very sexy.

Last year, reaction videos showing reactions to reaction videos ended up causing a nasty Doppler effect where everyone on earth was simultaneously defending themselves from accusations of insensitivity and at the same time thanking their fans.

On the flip side of that, cinemas took a big hit with everyone's vague feelings that sitting in a carpet chair full of historical farts wasn't exactly the pinnacle of

COVID safety, and that crystallised into a brutally stressful binge-watching habit around the world that is nonetheless the only thing hiding most people's fragile relationships together.

A shared taste in Netflix is the glue, and let's say the kind of glue that you use to put a post-it note on a wall.

Seriously, I don't know why cinemas have survived for so long.

They are like wet look hair gel.

The moment you stop using it, you realise it was a terrible idea all along.

Whoever wanted to go to the cinema except to justify eating decades-old popcorn from a cardboard bucket whose size was always a prank that wasn't ever meant to be taken seriously.

No one is ever meant to look at that bucket and go, oh yeah, I'll try.

Anyway.

That's good to hear, Alice, because I've always liked on the bugle to have co-hosts who, in their different ways, are very against cinema thriving.

And, you know, John went about it one way with his

gone about it a different way.

Well, reluctant though I am to offend Tom Cruise, who's made it his mission to bring back big screens,

I feel like that could be compensatory in the same way that often men of his size like big cars.

We've learned this year from culture that despite tabloid press blowing up crazy stories of celebrities that

play up these celebrities' bad judgments,

all we needed to prove that there's no way you could make celebrities appear more off the planet than they are was

like three weeks.

Like three weeks without their handlers before Madonna was in a milk bath.

And now,

you know, without their management, half of Hollywood is rapping half-baked opinions about complex political matters that they found in YouTube rabbit holes and brought out to the light of their billions of fans.

Critical thinking and discernment might not literally be inversely correlated with visible or six-packs, but I'm just saying most Hollywood actors don't edit scripts.

You know, like they're not

chosen for their...

They're just their job is to say stupid things like they mean them.

Anyway.

Well,

for me, I think culturally in 2021, the big race, the big cultural race is going to be to create a sculpture that can never be toppled, whether that's physically with a spring-loaded anti-topple sculpture that will just bounce back to upright, or a sculpture that that no one could possibly ever take offence to.

And

I think maybe in London again, we were ahead of the game with the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square.

I mean, that's basically the only statue that can't at some point piss someone off.

It's just a

pretty sure that pissed some people off.

Can't even statue anymore any day.

Can't even statue anymore.

Sport, I'm going to have a quick look back at the year in sport in 2020 and frankly it was shit.

Sport had a really shit year, but still way better than reality.

Sport proved once again its immutable superiority over the real world.

And you know, for a while, there was this harrowing vacuum of sport, which made you think, you know,

what was the point?

What was the point of fighting all those world wars?

What was the point of the development of civilized?

What was the point of even climbing out of the sea to evolute in the first place if we we could not watch competitive sport?

I mean, that's essentially why evolution began, was that fish had got bored of watching swimming, which is quite a limited spectator sport, with all due respect to Chris,

who was

a keen triathlete.

I mean, it's not the most,

it's not the most exciting phase of the triathlon, the swimming bit, is it?

And I mean, triathlon's not the most exciting.

Anyway,

it's great what you do.

But

this was my sporting highlight of the year.

And I was very lucky to get to go and watch a lot of cricket in my parallel, my own parallel universe as a cricket statistician for the BBC.

But my sporting highlight of the year was an egg and spoon race in my next door neighbour's garden when they were having a birthday party.

and they had an egg and spoon race up and down their sort of 10-yard London garden and I just happened to be coming out of the house and could see over the fence and it was the first competitive sport I had seen in months

and it just lifted my soul.

I thought oh this is the first glimmer of hope that some form of normality can resume.

So that was you know at the start of last year I did not think that watching my neighbours have an egg and spoon race would be a genuine highlight of my year but that that is how indeed it

turned out.

And you're slightly underselling your experience with cricket in 2020.

You didn't just watch cricket, you lived in cricket.

There was a period in the summer where buglers may recall Andy was living in a hotel in a cricket ground, bubbling with the very sport he loved so dearly.

You were basically like Tom Hanks in the terminal where your nation had been, had just ceased to exist, and you'd become a citizen of pure cricket.

And what a world, what a world that was.

Well, it's like Tom Cruise in Terminal if Tom Cruise in Terminal was a massive aviation buff.

Nish, obviously, as the Bugle's Indian farming protest correspondent, well, one of our two Indian farming protest correspondents that we have on the roster,

2020 was quite an interesting, a busy year for you in that role.

Yes, it was.

I mean,

it was a controversial appointment when the Bugle newsroom allocated me this beat and not the several actual Indians

that the Bugle has on staff.

But, you know, it's a role that I've taken very seriously.

Yeah, it's been a

it's been another complicated year for the Indian government, a government that very much puts the ah into India.

The

for people who aren't aware,

there's been a string of large-scale farming protests in India due to some new laws that were introduced in September

under the sort of overall banner of the Model Farming Act.

Now, a lot of India's population are rural workers, and so

there's a huge amount of pressure on the government to deliver for them because of the increasing issue of farmers losing money.

Now, these new laws are designed, the government claims, to make earning money a little bit easier for farmers.

But the concern is that it actually opens Indian farmers up to the free market and could lead to their prices being undercut and could lead to more wage losses.

Now, so obviously, that's inspired a string of protests across the country.

The government has responded, well, I guess in a way that a lot of governments respond by claiming that a lot of the farmers' claims are fake news and misinformation and has also responded by having some pretty heavy-handed tactics by the police.

And when I say heavy-handed, I mean the giant gloved hand of Thanos from the Avengers movies.

It has

it's not been a particularly edifying spectacle.

There is some positive hope from the 4th of January, which is today as we record, the government is supposed to be meeting with representatives from the farmers union in the hope that

in the hope that there'll be some resolution to this situation but what this really means is in terms of incompetent cack-handed governmental responses in 2020 it really the final of those that competition really is the Nishkumar Derby it's

it's India versus England the country of my family's birth versus the country of my birth.

Who is going to pull away in this semi-final before the obvious final with the other uncontested competitor of the United States of America?

I mean, surely no niche.

It's not like that, is it?

This is more like America was so far different that it set up its own sport.

And, you know, this is, we've got a kind of cricket-baseball dichotomy here.

America's just off the chest.

It can't compete with anyone else.

It's not even seeking to compete with anyone else.

Yeah, it's the world series of incompetent governance.

For buglers who aren't aware, in the 1980s, a British politician called Norman Tebbit introduced something called the Tebbit test which was designed to prove to establish the loyalty of British Asians by determining which team they supported out of India and England.

They're actually using that as the COVID test in a lot of schools.

In terms of the Tebbit test in this competition, I'll say my answer is the same as the Tebbit test in cricket.

I support whichever one is winning and so

and anyone who says otherwise is a pardon my French idiot you don't speak very good French

it's not what I would call tray good we don't need to yeah exactly

them a rendezvous is going to go back to me calling being called a good old-fashioned British meet up with some

but in terms of the who's actually going to win in this decisive India versus England governmental incompetence competition, I believe the country of my birth may have finally pulled ahead.

Because the Labour MP Tamujit Singh Desi actually asked Boris Johnson a question at Prime Minister's question time about the Indian farming protest.

Because a number of MPs are trying to get the British government via the Foreign Secretary Dominic Robb to pressure the Indian government into changing its tactics for how it handles protests in future.

So

Tamujit Singh Desi asked Boris Johnson about the Indian farming protest and whether the British government would be committed to helping the protesters be treated fairly by the government.

And Boris Johnson responded by saying this: Our view is that, of course, we have serious concerns about what is happening between India and Pakistan, but these are preeminently matters for those two governments to settle.

Now,

I

don't

know

how Pakistan has made it into that that sentence.

Are relations between the two countries, much like the foods of the two regions, spicy as all hell?

Yes, they are.

Do Pakistan have anything whatsoever to do with the current farming protests in India?

No, they don't.

This is concerning for the Prime Minister and, let's remember, the former Foreign Secretary

of the United Kingdom.

Either our Prime Minister is a class A fkwit,

or Boris Johnson.

Or Boris Johnson.

And in many ways, this is as likely as the first hypothetical I've set up.

It may be that Boris Johnson simply refuses to recognize the partition of India and Indian independence.

Well, that could be all, that's all part of Brexit as well, isn't it?

It's taken us back, taken us back through history it's uh

it's um

i thought i'm starting to think actually boris johnson's i don't know it's we watched uh we watched the film tenet the other day and i thought there's something about things going backwards and forwards in time and at the same time and it's not going to end well that's all i'm i think brexit is basically a subplot of tenet somehow in that it is completely incomprehensible and uh not really what it's suggested it was going to be in the trailer

Time travel means time travel, Andy.

Do I need to explain it any more clearly?

Well that wraps up 2020 and the official final score for 2020 is zero.

Zero out of whatever you want it to be out of.

So let's see if 2021

can beat it with our official review of 2021 so far.

Here in Britain we are well coming up to 85 hours into 2021 as uh as we recall we've touched on uh on brexit so far australia heading up towards the the crucial hundred hour mark always a key landmark in uh any year and uh well a lot of excitement alice because everything has changed in australia because right the end of last year your national anthem changed Yes, the Australians All Let Us Rejoice national anthem, which narrowly won a vote against Walting Matilda for our national anthem back in the day, and is generally recognised to be quite a bad and boring national anthem.

He's going to have one word changed.

For those of you who are not familiar with the Australian national anthem, the word is young and free, is going to be changed to one and free in order to avoid offending the old.

No, in fact, it's in order to avoid offending the people who were here for 80,000 years and might resent being called a young culture.

So they've decided to change this one word as a gesture of inclusiveness towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island

people.

And ah, look, I don't know if you've heard the Australian National Anthem, but I don't think that's the only word that would have.

I mean, it goes, Australians, oh, let us rejoice, for we are one and free.

With golden soil and wealth for toil, our land is girt by sea.

Okay, girt is the word that I have an issue with here.

Girt is never used in any other context in any other place.

It's like tis at Christmas time.

It's just an out-of-date word.

It is only ever used in this context.

And look, just there's so much in the national anthem that I would change, beginning with the tune and going on to almost every other word in the Australian National Anthem.

The fact that there is an Australian national anthem that was basically written by white people for white people and that it's taken them so long to change just one word feels like any change that we have regarding, for example, a treaty with the Indigenous people is going to be incremental indeed if that is being written one word at a time.

Maybe if we edit the Australian National Anthem enough, it'll become a treaty eventually.

Well, of course, we in Britain, we changed a word of the national anthem back in 1952.

King became queen.

Oh, yeah, our land abounds with nature's gifts of beauty, rich, and rare.

Why are we selling them to the Chinese all the time then?

Now, of course, Nish, we're in the UK, we're not really in a position to give national anthem advice.

Not since we caved to the PC lobby in 1952, as you alluded to.

Absolutely unbelievable.

You know what?

You can't fing say anything these days.

And as I've said before,

we're asking the wrong wrong person, God, a deity whose recent performance has been at best questionable, to save someone who already has supreme medical care and security detail.

And, you know, if only we've been asking God to save our flickeringly intermittent and illusory sense of national cohesion or our school playing fields or our pretense at having an evilly, vaguely moral political system or even our pubs, then, you know, we might be in a better position.

The Queen, she's okay.

She's got it going on when it comes to saving herself and being saved by medicine, as I said, security and magic spangly hats.

Some suggestions have been made that

we could update our national anthem as well to I Wish It Could Be Brexit Every Day,

My Humps,

or You Can Stick Your Decades of Peace and Prosperity Up Your European Arses,

which I think was

an early

Lonnie Donegan skiffle number from the 60s.

I'm always impressed even when a song like My Humps has landed on your cultural radar, Andrew.

I'm always fascinated to know the backstory of how you, the black-eyed peas, are something that has registered on your radar.

Oh, right.

Well, you never heard the non-broadcast pilot of the bugle.

It was a very different show.

That song is 16 years old.

Is it?

Oh, wow.

Right.

Okay.

It all makes more sense now.

Right.

It's old enough to get married to old Woody Guthrie song now.

Not saying it's right.

It's lethal.

Bit of an age difference, though, Andrew.

Bit of a contentious age difference between my humps and this land is your land.

Well, so far, 2021 is scoring 0.1, making it the greatest year of the decade so far.

Stay tuned to the bugle for the next 12 months to see if it can hang on on to that lead.

It could be a real nail biter, judging from the way it started.

Thank you very much for listening, Buglers.

If you missed the end of year review show, we will be making it available when, Chris?

A couple of weeks' time or so?

It'll be four weeks after it went up.

So

yeah, the end of Jan.

And we thanks those who did tune in.

I hope you enjoyed it.

And we'll should hopefully do some more live shows during this year

and even in person, hopefully,

at at some point within the next decade.

Thanks to Nish and Alice.

Any shows to plug?

I mean go back and listen to the last post.

Savage is on Amazon Prime.

I have a podcast called Tea with Alice that I'm going to try and do more regularly again.

I think if you live in the UK

you can see me an hour of me do stand up on Prime video.

That's no, you definitely can.

In the UK on Amazon Prime you can see an hour of me do stand-up live from the Soho Theatre.

And let's face it, you can see it if you live in different countries because, as I said before, and I'll say it again, the bugle listeners are a pack of f ⁇ ing criminals.

As an Australian, I take that personally.

I will be back

hosting the news quiz from later this week.

It returns for its

January to February series.

So do tune into that on your wireless or download it as you prefer.

Thank you for listening.

We'll be back next week with Bugle 4179.

I don't believe I gave the number for this one, but I'm not sure anything needs numbers anymore.

And we will play you out, as always, with some lies about our premium-level voluntary subscribers.

To join them or to make a one-off or occurring donation to the show, go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

When attempting to attach a poster to a wall, Claire Swift was struck by a quite revolutionary idea.

Eureka, she exclaimed, staple guns, they can indeed save the planet.

A modified firearm that can fire staple foods at people who need them most could be just what the UN needs, turning the destructivity of the weapons trade into a positive benefit for all humanity.

High-speed snacks.

Now, it's just a design and health and safety issue.

This is a surefire winner, concludes Claire.

Colin Baird likes Claire's idea but would instantly look to upscale it.

I'd go straight to a long-range intercontinental ballistic pasta cannon that can be speedily adapted to do rice or potatoes depending on the weather and to make sure people get a balanced diet.

Colin concedes, I'm not a logistics person, someone else can do that side of things.

And anyway, I'm already planning out my Bolognese source missile.

Richard Lambert has developed a computer program to write a classical opera in the style of Giuseppe Verdi about the story of how the rock band The Who wrote the rock opera Tommy.

I just wanted to see what happened when opera styles clashed explains Richard.

In the end though he adds, my special keyboard just churned out some brass band music accompanied by someone singing about Roger Daltry having an affair with Violetta out of La Traviata, which I guess about averages out musically.

On the subject of brass band music, Simon Haynes was surprised by the number of trumpets, trombones and tubers involved when he was finally dragged along to his first brass band concert.

I'd always thought it was brass band, as in brass prohibited, rather than brass basically compulsory, admits Simon.

I am now filled with regret for cheating my trumpet-loving soul of a lifetime of happiness.

And finally, Boris Yelnikov is rightly proud of his name, and has been known to break the conversational ice by claiming that he is Count Boris Yelnikov, the hero of a lost sci-fi novel by the 19th century Russian literature star Fyodor Dostoevsky entitled The Ice King from Outer Space.

It's obviously a lie, admits Boris, but it certainly helps get the chat going in the queue at a coffee shop or at an awkwardly silent wedding, a tense poker evening or even a high-level job interview.

Here endeth the 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.