Bugle 4138 A Long Tradition of Sedition

Don't forget to listen to the last post.

Oh, yeah.

Alice, tell our listeners who you may not have heard yet.

The last post is a daily podcast that is piped into my email every day from an alternate dimension.

There is an alternate universe, Alice Fraser, who hosts this satirical news podcast, and she talks about all the news that's happening over there.

I think it's groundbreaking.

I'm working with some scientists to figure out if we can send some emails back to her.

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I hope you tune in and subscribe.

I think there's a quite successful Andy Zoltman on that side of the

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Place, place, place, place, light, place, place,

water,

water,

the Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers and welcome to issue 4138 of the world's foremost gallery of the Newsula Podcastic Arts.

It is Thursday the 23rd of January.

I am Andy Zoltzmann for now at least and I'm in London where it is really starting to feel like we haven't hosted an Olympics for almost three quarters of a decade and that is not a feeling I'm enjoying even one little bit.

We are recording today in the Cock Lane studio.

Let's hope my guest joining me here in Cock Lane enjoys this street rather more than than 17th century celebrity writer John Bunyan, who came here in 1688, not to do a recording, I should add, and promptly died.

So best of luck.

It's Al Murray.

He was from Bedford.

Was it?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah,

I went to school in Bedford and he was one of those sort of people that was dangled over us as an example.

The thing about Cock Lane, of course, is when you put it into Google Maps, it says people also search for Ming Street.

Fanny Alley or whatever.

It's really funny.

Well, there was a famous haunting here by a ghost called Scratching Fanning, which I think probably the first time we recorded in this studio, we talked about in probably an almost infantile level of depth.

Come to the right place there.

Absolutely.

Yes, coincidentally, as I mentioned, the site of the well, in fact, the fraudulent hauntings turned out to be a fake, like so many hauntings.

But coincidentally, our second guest today is coming from the other side of a Skype call to Kolkata, India.

It's Anuvabh Pal.

Hello Al.

Hello Andy.

Hey.

Hello.

How are you and

how's Calcutta?

Well speaking of ghosts, I'm doing this Skype call from very close to the Victoria Memorial.

a large white thing left behind by Queen Victoria in India.

And it is rumored that her ghost haunts the building, even though she's never visited.

Well, I mean, that's the kind of talent that you get with royals.

I can haunt over a distance of

thousands of miles.

That's fantastic.

If she's doing that, I mean, I suppose once you're, you know, you know, once you've died, your spirit's free to wander.

So maybe she's on some sort of global tour of the places she never got to.

Right.

After Brexit, are all British ghosts going to be restricted to haunting in Britain only?

Freedom of movement.

We've started strong, Al.

We are recording on the 23rd of January.

Monday is is the 27th of January, which marks the 21st anniversary of the 27th of January 1999, which was the day I did my first proper stand-up gig

not far from here in Old Street at the Comedy Cafe.

It was a real sliding doors moment for me as I'd applied for a job at a cricket magazine.

I didn't open my gig.

If it hadn't gone well, I'd probably have given up comedy and things could have gone very differently.

I could have easily ended up spending way, way too much time watching cricket.

24th of January tomorrow Friday is Belly Laugh Day but luckily we're recording on Thursday the 23rd so a slight snigger is all we've got to wait for.

Imagine how much funnier this show would be if it had been tomorrow.

And the 25th or Saturday, which is when this show will essentially be released, is Room of One's Own Day.

So you can listen to this show with no belly laughs as God intended in quiet solitude.

As always, some sections of the bugle are going straight in the bin this week.

We have a vegan fashion section,

including the latest vegan fashions including foliphant mock ivory made from consensual elephant shaped trees painted with leftover out-of-date mayonnaise sachets.

Well vegan mayonnaise and the new material sweeping vegan fashion turfert.

Is it turf?

Is it fur?

It's turf but it looks and feels like fur.

Green fur that feels like grass anyway.

And it's the must-have.

must-have material for 2020.

January is hobby month for we review the latest hot hobbies sweeping the world, material-free knitting, all the relaxation of conventional wool knitting, but without any actual yarn.

Not only is it easier to get those tricky designs right, but also no unwanted, unneeded piece of half-assed clothing at the end.

And you never know, you might even be able to sell it to an emperor.

Bridge slamming, that's a great new fitness exercise.

Go to your nearest bridge and then criticise it for its architecture, its traffic capacity, and its inability to change before running home in fear.

And extreme pessimism, very popular hobby these days.

But we're focusing on perhaps the hottest hobby going around the world these days, freestyle blaming, with our special you and your grudge section.

It's nearing the end of January and the optimism and excitement of the new year has thoroughly worn off, replaced with the numbing realization that you, your country and your species are irredeemably stuck in a self-perpetuating cycle of underachievement, failure and self-justificatory delusion.

Who writes this?

Was it cage 189 in room 1643 again?

Those sodding monkeys and those f ⁇ ing typewriters.

Sure, I pay them peanuts, but A, they don't seem to mind, and B, I pay actual money for those peanuts anyway.

So, but even though the inevitability of disappointment in yourself and the world around you has hit home by now in the year like a heavyweight boxer who went for a run on a snowy winter's morning in nothing but his speedos, but forgot to take his keys with him, those f ⁇ ing monkeys.

But you can still keep things fresh, exciting, and unpredictable by concocting for yourself a new grudge to hold, a new target to blame for your perceived and or invented problems, a new straw man political scarecrow to pretend to be terrified about.

And this week, in our special supplement, the Bugle has paired up with America's top finger-pointing recrimination publication, The Grudge Report, and its editor, Danunziata Grip Ostracic, to offer you a special prize.

You can win a brand new resentment-fuelled car.

Choose from the Invecto Obloquy, the Cavilla Umbridge, the Chagran Censorio, the Mitsubolshi MiffMaff, or the Boris Minor.

All of these, not always helpfully, and often ironically, amongst the most environmentally friendly vehicles available today, powered by pure resentment.

Simply completes completes the following sentence in less than 20,000 words for your chance to win the Bugle Blame Game.

I blame the blank for blank because blank.

Choose from one of the following targets, the Greens, all children, Buddhists, the 1960s, the card game Chase the Lady, the past, Ruritanians, Maroon 5, Small Business, or Megan.

And choose one of the following global problems.

Climate change, climate change denial, the declining attention span of

whoever it is is supposed to have declining attention spans these days.

Wokeness, meaning that no one one is allowed to shout racist abuse on public transport anymore.

I mean, where will it end?

Infestations of giraffes, Antarctica, VAR in football, the sad decline of silent resentment, and killer sniffles, which are currently doing the rounds in considerable excitement in China.

Do send your entries into either hellobuglers at thebuglepodcast.com or the White House, Washington, D.C.

They could do with changing things up for election year, or any newspaper at the media.com.

They're always on the lookout for these things.

Entries will be locked in a sealed container and fired into space to deter aliens from bothering to come to this disputatious loon of a planet.

The deadline for your entries is the year 2074.

That section in the bin.

Top story this week, India news.

Anuvab,

India's been,

well, as is generally the case, in a bit of a strop with itself recently

over various things, including the citizenship law.

Can you just explain

what's what's been riling up the 1.3 billion people of your country well andy i'm i'm glad you you bring this up you know um

fortunately the british left behind a lot of good things the english language various buildings the railways and some very cute sedition laws

there is one in particular section 124a from 1860 which was basically to quell rebellion against the British.

And it said, whoever by words, either spoken or written, or by signs or visible representation, or otherwise brings or attempts to bring in hatred or contempt towards the government and the law of India shall be punished with, and this is the part that always confused me, imprisonment for life

and a fine.

Well, you know, it's good to cover your bases, isn't it?

Yeah, imperialism doesn't pay for itself.

Exactly.

Yeah, I mean, that's what people say.

They had overheads.

Dirage had overheads.

Come on.

Exactly.

You have to somehow pay for the constables.

And what we've done is we've kept that law for 70 plus years.

And now

India's embarked on a national citizens register, which is lovely if you've got four or five million people and you are Finland.

But if you've got 1.3 billion people and you're out to embark on who and who is not a citizen in an otherwise completely chaotic, insane mess of a place that has 140 religions,

562,000 dialects and languages, you're going to run into a few protests.

So I understand that in the state of Jharkhand, 3,000 people have been accused of sedition for protests against this

Citizenship Amendment Act.

I mean, that's quite a lot of sedition flying around there.

The law at Anuvab is

being controversial because for the first time it's amended the Citizenship Act of 1955 and made religion a basis for citizenship.

And it said that religiously persecuted minorities from some other countries can become citizens, but, for example, Muslims from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan cannot on the grounds that they are not from minorities and therefore everything is fine.

Is this another example of the unique logic of Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist government?

Exactly, exactly.

And that's exactly the law.

Again, you know,

basically, like you said, the new citizenship law says: if you are being persecuted anywhere around India, so if you're being persecuted in Pakistan, in Bangladesh, in Nepal, anywhere, you can come to India as long as you're a Hindu, you're a Sikh, you're a Buddhist, you're a Jain, you're a Parsi, and a Christian.

But if you're a Muslim, you cannot.

That's lovely.

But if you are in a country that has 250 million Muslims and

the second largest Muslim population in the world,

and some of their relatives are being persecuted, who just happened to have during the independence chosen to live in a neighboring country, they'll have to tell their cousins and in-laws, whoever is on that side of the border, sorry, you can't come, you have to go to Dubai.

I mean, this sounds to me, Anivab, like you're having another blast at us over the whole partition business, which was ages ago, ages ago.

And I mean, next time, next time we partition somewhere, which may be Scotland in the near future, we'll get it.

We'll absolutely nail it.

Exactly, exactly.

I mean, look, I think, you know, you guys did

as good as a job that you could in the six days that you had to draw a border.

I think if you carry on like this, I'm going to have to issue a fine.

But I have to say, Andy, even though there were some inefficiencies in 1947, we have perfected those inefficiencies and over 70 years have sort of made chaos a bit of an art form.

So the way I can explain this new amendment is, I guess, Andy, in cricketing terms.

All right.

You have my full undivided attention.

And I'd resent the fact that you left that off the list of things Britain left behind in India.

I apologize.

We do have cricket, but we've made it into a very different game that you won't be able to recognize.

So basically, it's like if you said in Britain, we will accept all Indians to come and live in Britain as long as they happen to be opening batsmen with beards under 30 who happen to have an Australian wife and whose last name is Diwan.

You're basically saying, I only want Shikar Dhawan.

India's only batsman.

But all Indian batsmen are welcome.

Yeah, I mean, to be honest, I mean, that's less needed now after England's last few test matches.

They've dug a couple of promising young batsmen out.

But I mean, a few months ago, we'd have taken it.

What's the threshold for sedition?

What are we talking here?

Have you got to publish something, or is it holding a placard?

I mean, or is it, you know, grumbling in the pub to your mates about the government?

What's the actual threshold?

Because

sedition always, that sounds like, you know, at least you've at least published a pamphlet

to do sedition.

Or maybe done a paper.

podcast.

I mean, that's modern sedition, isn't it?

I mean, we are right here.

Sedition Central from

Cock Lane Sedition Central.

But what's the threshold?

Al, that's a really great question.

So Indians, for the longest time, were very lazy protesters.

It takes a lot, it's very hot, takes a lot of work to go out of the streets.

Public transport is difficult to come by.

So to get Indians to protest over a long period of time, extremely difficult.

You know, we're not Tehran.

There aren't like nice little squares where you can gather and shout.

You have to navigate a bunch of cows, a bunch of people, you know, delivery.

It's a hard everyday life.

Andy, you've experienced it.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, not, I haven't been protested against in India, but working on it.

So to get Indians from cities across India to continually protest over what is now, you know, almost a couple of months and, you know, in small towns, big cities.

They've definitely, the government's definitely pissed some people off.

They've continued to say, oh, you know, this is nothing.

It's just a few students that shall scream and then they're going to go away.

When the protests have continued unabated, and these have just basically been gatherings.

I mean, they've just been small numbers of people.

And in India, small numbers of people, basically, what I mean is the size of all of Denmark.

Just tiny bits of people gathering and singing songs, protesting, saying, you know, you're dividing Hindus and Muslims by making this refugee thing a religious thing.

That's all they've been doing.

And so the government said, right, for the first time, the public have shown some tenacity.

They have started showing up in places, singing songs, writing poems.

We are going to bring this sedition law just to clear these crowds up.

It's the poems, though.

It's obviously poetry.

You know what these kind of poems would be like, wouldn't they?

I mean, protest poems are never good, are they?

Maybe, maybe the government.

I'm starting to change my mind about this.

A clampdown on poor student poetry.

I think we're all behind it.

I think this is what the Modi government needs to do to represent the thing.

No, you're absolutely right.

The one that's most popular right now that's being sung at all the protests is a poem which loosely battled it translates to we won't show citizenship papers.

And it's got, you know, various rhyme schemes, but none of which rhymes.

Oh, man.

And one of the big issues is, couldn't the protesters, with all this education, come up with a damn thing that at least rhymes?

You just don't want free verse being chanted by thousands of people at once.

That's first rule of poetry.

Especially when India pops into so many lyrics.

There was a man from Madras.

So, to answer your question, what they're doing is they're basically rounding up anybody that's in groups and saying, you know, you've been damaging government property.

You've been breaking cycles of constables.

You've been throwing stones at police cars.

And we're just going to gather you up and throw you in prison.

And basically, there is no law in India post-independence that gives you the right to imprison someone without without habeas corpus, which is they have to present you before a magistrate in 24 hours.

And the magistrate could say, my God, you're disgusting.

I'm throwing you in jail for three days.

But you have to go in front of magistrate.

What this sedition law does is you don't have to present them in front of anybody.

You could just keep them in jail to just teach them a lesson about bad poetry.

And that's what's happening.

And they didn't have a law.

that said that.

So they looked around.

They were desperate.

They said, okay, we don't have a law.

Is there anything the British did?

They found section 124a.

So that's what's been going on.

Uh, cities big and small in India every weekend, uh, especially a place in Delhi.

There's a place in Delhi called Shaheen Bagh, which has almost become protest central.

Bollywood stars are going there, actors are going there, writers are going there, uh,

the people to sing songs are going there, rappers are going there, um, and uh, the government is really losing the battle of popular entertainment.

Well, we've had that here, they just sound like the liberal metropolitan elite, those people.

To me.

Andy, it's absolutely correct that you say that because one of the things that's been going around on social media is the Prime Minister saying, because a lot of these protests are led by college kids.

And the Prime Minister at some point, some interview a long time ago, when he was chief minister, said,

you know, I haven't been to college.

What the hell is the big deal in college?

Anyone can go to college.

I'm self-taught.

You can't argue with that, can you?

No, I mean, logic like that is

simply impenetrable.

Yes, well I mean you should shut down all universities.

Imagine the money you'd save.

And the poetry that would be averted.

In terms of the sort of register of citizens, in Assam

last year,

almost two million people were left off and basically ascribed as illegal migrants out of a population of around about thirty million.

So if you stretch that out across India as a whole, that's over 80 million people who will essentially cease to exist.

Is this a concern?

Or I mean, is this not enough?

I mean, is this the way to deal with overpopulation around the world is just to tell people that they no longer exist?

Look, Andy, I think the best way to reduce population, you're right, in a country of 1.3 billion people, is just to tell the world we've got 600 billion people.

Who's going to check?

Yeah, and then just put the other half in one big house.

Because

I'll tell you a little bit about the citizenship registry that they're after.

So they want a national citizens' register.

So basically, what they're trying to do is go to a billion people and say, you, are you an Indian citizen?

And it's almost like a Monty Python sketch.

And you say, yes.

And they say, well, what do you have to prove it?

And you say, well, I've got a tax document.

I've got this tax thing from India.

I've got a national ID card.

I've got a passport.

And they say, no, no, no, that's not enough.

We need to know you were born here.

Do you have a birth certificate?

Do you have your parents' birth certificate?

And most Indians, you know, with at least 60% of people being below the poverty line,

still large parts illiterate in the north, they turn around and say, I don't have my parents' birth certificate because I don't even know who my parents are.

I barely know if this is my name, but

this is what's on the document.

So, this should work.

They're like, No, this is not going to work.

We need you to prove that you're a citizen.

So,

naturally, this citizenship registry thing is going to throw up huge problems.

So, the reason all these millions of people got left off the list was because they didn't have anything to prove that they were citizens.

And then the government decided that now they were going to put all these people in a detention center just because they were saying they were Indians and they didn't have proof.

Now, the difficulty with that is I don't have any proof.

Yeah, if they took away my passport and my Indian ID, all I have, Andy, to prove I'm a citizen of India is a photograph with such intendulkar.

I mean that's that's worth a lot in India.

And actually I have a question for you guys because maybe you could help us.

You say we might be able to help you.

We've had a bit of an issue in Britain with the whole Windrush shimozzle,

which sounds not entirely dissimilar to this, albeit arguably more racist.

So I'm not sure.

I don't know if we can help.

Well, you know, I'm just curious to know, what would be the most British thing that if you could prove, if someone knocked on your door and said, none of these documents are going to work, your red passport is not going to work.

I've never been to India.

That's the most British thing about me.

In the spirit of Queen Victoria, Empress of India herself, I've never been there.

We'd love to have you.

In fact, we'd love it if you ran for Prime Minister.

It seems like it's a free-for-all.

I reckon you could pass for a Viceroyale.

Well, I could probably.

The thing is, I imagine that the 318 votes I got in Fanet in 2015, if you upscaled those to an Indian proportion of the electorate, that'd be like

17 million or so, 80 million.

Minimum.

If I had to prove that I'm British,

well, I don't know.

I mean, obviously, if you cut me, I bleed red, white, and blue, but that's a dietary issue more than anything else.

But

I'm in an innate knowledge of the history of Test cricket.

I'm not sure that passes anymore, does it?

What's the most British thing about you, Al?

Oh, the fact that my grandmother was from Austria.

All right, there we go.

Science news now, and well, some hugely exciting scientific news.

I mean, obviously, it's quite possible that everyone who's listening to this podcast right now is already dead, particularly if you're listening to this five billion years from now or 200 years from now, depending on how Armageddon pans out, or if the coronavirus has wiped us all out by next Wednesday.

This is yet another virus before you get on to the science news that has apparently hopped across to us from the animal kingdom.

And yet, the vegan lobby wants us to stop eating our way through all our mortal enemies until we achieve safety, honestly.

But anyway, I mean, how worried are you about this?

Because I'm a lapsed hypochondriac, and actually, it's been quite nice to have another, you know, get the juices flowing again with a nice disease.

Basically, if you want to, if you want to, if you're on a paper and you need space to fill, you just say, you make up the name of a Chinese city.

See, there's been a flare-up, you call it mouse flu.

Eight have died, 40 affected.

That's easy.

I mean, how do we even know fake flus?

Fake flu.

You can't trust anything these days.

I mean,

I'm not that worried, but then I wasn't that worried about the bubonic plague in the early 1300s, and that turned out really bad.

I mean, I wasn't alive to be worried at the time, but still, the point stands.

But anyway, one way around this, Al, and you are our science correspondent, of course,

is hibernation.

Yes.

Well, scientists say, I mean, and of course,

there's another great bugle phrase.

Scientists say, they've been looking into the possibility of hibernation, of human hibernation.

And because rats and bats and, I mean, there are animals we know about the hibernator, bears and dormice, I think.

Dinosaurs.

Almost too good at them.

At some point, they're going to wake up.

At some point.

And they've looked into whether you can basically get a human to hibernate.

And the scientists involved in this said that there were no what the thing, the expression they used was quite interesting.

There are no showstoppers

around the issue of hibernation.

I think the main showstopper for me is I don't want to.

Right.

They can't make me.

I mean, this is the problem, isn't it?

The next thing, next thing we know, this will become fashionable, won't it?

And we'll all have to hibernate.

Yeah.

And life is PC Brigade.

Exactly.

The PC Brigade will be saying, okay, it's October.

You should be bedding down now.

Science at some point is going to have to stop.

Right.

Draw the line, give up.

Right.

Right, because there's no need for this, is there?

Well, I mean, I disagree entirely.

Wow.

I mean, I've been calling for hibernation for years, and mostly when I'm about to go to bed.

But lang self-interest aside.

To me, this is the most exciting science to emerge.

Tim Berners-Lee thought, what if I could help people all around the world anonymously abuse each other on an instantaneous basis?

Maybe even since Isaac Newton invented gravity, thus making tennis a way better sport, or even since Archimedes had the first inklings of the idea for the bath plug, or even since Pandora opened that box in the pockets of Big Pharma, of course, the ancient Greek troublemakstress.

But the benefits of hibernation for me, Al, it's good for the environment.

Yeah.

Because you don't need your heating on in the winter if you're hibernating.

Yeah.

You can massage unemployment figures, can't you?

Well,

if you're without a job for three weeks in a row, compulsory state hibernation.

Well, I mean, Anavabs, this entire Indian issue, half of India could hibernate, couldn't it?

Exactly.

I want that.

Yeah, exactly, while they're getting their paperwork done.

Exactly, exactly.

In fact, if you look around, most old people in India do, I think.

Which leads me to a question here, actually, about the definition.

Now, for example, after eating a really large biryani, I'm usually knocked out from about two in the afternoon till about two the next day.

Now, is that hibernation or am I just a fat, lazy person?

That is the tranquilizer they're planning to use for biryani.

biryani.

Do you know?

Well, most bears actually only hibernate after eating a leftover biryani out of a bin.

This is

one of the few things that it's not really discussed, is it?

But the whole idea is

you go really cold, don't you?

What about Mencara?

It's quite hard to hibernate in India because it's never cold, is it?

Unless you go up into the Himalayas.

I mean,

it's never cold.

When did it last snow in Mumbai, Anuba?

Well, probably the ice age.

All right, okay.

You've got long memories in your country.

Don't we know it?

To me, I see hibernation merely as an entry point.

And really, you want to go long term with this and go full suspended animation.

You know, the 50-year hibernation, I think we've talked about it on the bugle before, bribernation, paid for by the government.

And really, I mean, it saves taxpayers' money, it's what politics is all about.

And solve the declining birth rate in Western countries, wouldn't it people saying oh you know we're not having enough children but you just pop an entire generation in the freezer 10 minutes in the microwave bingo new generation to look after us when we're old I've come here for ideas today yeah they couldn't be any better could they this is incredible also I mean it's not a nightmare vision of the future no it's not it would make awesome reality TV as well but celebrity panel has to decide who to thaw out this week is it Eric the genius scientist who might be able to solve the world's agricultural problems with a new high-yield vegan sheep spelt hybrid, but is also a serial killer?

Or Doreen, a nice old lady who wouldn't hurt a flea and used to work in a charity shop?

Tough call.

In other science news, invisible aliens could already be among us.

This is according to another scientist, following comments from the British astronaut Helen Sharman, who was Tim Peake before Tim Peake was Tim Peake, but was a woman and not paid with taxpayers' money, therefore, and also before the age of OmniHype, so she didn't become Tim Peak, whereas Tim Peake did become Tim Peak.

Anyway, Helen Sharman, the pre-Tim Peak, Tim Peak, said that she believes aliens do exist and could be living undetected amongst us already here on Earth.

She might be thinking of communists.

It's hard to tell.

And

Samantha Rolfe, who is an astrobiologist, a watcher, by what logist, you ask?

An astrobiologist.

She says that if invisible aliens do live amongst us, they are most likely living in a microscopic shadow biosphere.

By that, she wrote, I don't mean a ghost realm, but they are undiscovered creatures, probably with a different biochemistry, which means we can't study or even notice them

because they are outside of our comprehension.

Honestly, I mean, yeah, I think that too.

Prove me wrong.

I mean, honestly.

Dear me, what's she on?

Like, what, 45 grand a year to come up with?

Yeah, it's a big conspiracy, isn't it?

I mean, you know, that is an easy life, isn't it?

Being an an astrobiologist.

That is an easy.

I hope you're listening.

Big astrobiology's got it sewn up.

Easy life, exactly.

Oh, yeah.

I reckon there's a shadow realm.

Not well, not a shadow realm.

I want to call it that, but like a parallel system of micro.

Fuck, for f's sake.

I mean, the problem, invisible aliens to me, just I mean, that's shit sci-fi films, isn't it?

Yeah.

Really, really.

Especially unproof.

I mean, a proper invisible alien would like knock your glass over.

Yeah.

Wouldn't it?

And nudge you occasionally or whisper in your ear something, you know,

turn the kitchen light off when you go to bed?

Something useful, wouldn't it?

But this is like, this is, this is,

baloney.

I'm sorry,

and I know I'm taking on astroscience here, astrobiology.

I know

one man prepared to make a stand finally

against the astrobiologist PC brigade.

Can't say anything anymore.

Well, no.

But this idea that you can't notice them because they're outside of our comprehension.

So, I mean, because it's quite hard to get your head around that.

I guess we've got to think of them very much like the Victorians used to think of children, or my all-boys private school used to think of women,

or even as Narendra Modi thinks of Muslims.

So, but basically, I mean, what this says to me is we've got invisible aliens perving on us in the shower, and I'm not at all happy about that.

Oh, I'm coming around to the idea of that.

Uh could it also be because, you know, these aliens are very sort of Victorian and polite and British and don't want to bother our world.

So they've made a little thing of theirs and they have their own Netflix and everything.

Right.

The polite alien.

You see, you never see the polite alien.

If you don't mind,

we'd like to stay on your planet.

There's not too much trouble.

Yeah.

Yeah, I could see that.

Yeah.

I mean, we, I mean, we, we, you know, we won't, we won't, we won't use up any of your natural resources.

Just want to sort of be hang around if that's all right by you.

Right.

Jolly good.

You're you're triggering our Indian guest at the other end of the line.

It was his idea.

We have been here before.

Jeff Bezos having his phone hacked by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia News Now, and this is one of the most extraordinary stories of

the millennium, any millennium.

The Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos had his phone hacked, apparently, by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia with an infected WhatsApp video link.

I mean, for a start, why are you in a WhatsApp group with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia?

Well, yeah, so that

intimates that they're pals.

Yeah.

And so there's treachery in this as well, isn't there?

Like, not only, so, first of all, it's like, hey, you know, let's be billionaires and hang out together.

And I'm the groovy crown prince, and, you know, and you're, you're, I mean, it's very odd.

It's that they should know.

Where did people meet at Davos, don't they?

People like that.

They probably met last year at Davos, didn't they?

And hung out.

And

their crown prince says, yes, you can bring Amazon to my country, but these are the things you can't sell.

And Bill's going, I don't know about that.

I'm not sure.

And then the next thing, you know, they're pals and they're exchanging funny videos.

Because it was a video clip, wasn't it?

That was created.

This is the intriguing thing.

What was in that video?

What was Jeff Bezos expecting from a video from the Crown Prince?

Was he expecting a cat playing with a cucumber?

A dog on a skateboard?

The new Avril Levine video, perhaps, maybe YouTube footage of Garfield Sobers batting at Lords in 1973, maybe top 10 spring break epic fails, or a cartoon instructional video about how to clean up after an assassination in an embassy, or even deep fake hardcore pornographicals featuring Steve Bannon, Martha Washington, Tutan Kármán, and the controversial 1960s tennis star Margaret Court.

Who knows?

Who knows what video he was.

But it is.

I mean, this is.

Also, it makes me think that our royal family needs to buck its fucking ideas up because I cannot imagine our equivalent, Prince Charles, even having the technological capacity to send a text message, let alone hack into the phone of one of the most powerful commercial human beings in history before months later, orchestrating the assassination of a journalist.

I'm not saying that the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia would do that.

I'm just saying he's got the logistical chops to hypothetically and actually pull it off.

um

i mean this is this

there's concerns that this could affect saudi arabia's attempts to lure western business and investment into the country which what by acting normal well we got what's normal this is normal shabby western behavior i think this is a major breakthrough for the crown prince he sent someone he sent someone a buggy message i mean welcome aboard welcome aboard your royal highness this is fantastic to you know i mean this is the next thing he knows he'll be sending out emails going, I have a million pounds in a bank, and if you send me a million pounds, it could be released.

I think that's basically how it already works, isn't it?

But yeah, if you're not put off by the illegal war, the gender apartheid, the political repression, the de facto slavery, the questionable record on press freedom and the targeted assassinations, having your phone hacked, that is the in the week that Terry Jones sadly passed away, the Waffa Thin ethical mint.

It is said that the reason that Mohammed bin Salman hacked into Chef Bezos' telephone was to find out any dirt on him because the Washington Post that Jeff Bezos owns was doing a lot of negative stories on Saudi Arabia.

And it appears that

the thing they found was the fact that Mr.

Bezos was involved in a

slightly illicit affair.

and details, murky details of his private life came out in the National Inquirer a bunch of months later.

And

it seems like it was seeded here that this bug led to some information from his phone, which led to this National Enquirer story.

I just tried to make a list of things they would find on my phone if anyone had to.

And I just want to know what would happen if Mohamed bin Salman went into your phone.

This is what I've got.

In my notes section on my phone, I've written from many months ago.

I don't know why.

Are there any fat Nazis?

If there was a race between a shark and a leopard who would win I've got a note from today remember to be clever parentheses bugle

shark versus leopard I mean that so much depends on who gets home advantage doesn't it

it's one hell of a triathlon

a bunch on the bike

but I mean it's gonna be tough for Saudi Arabia they're gonna have to pull out all the stops to repair the reputational damage we're talking an absolute deluge of top-level sporting events to wash this one away.

Uh, I mean, Olympics, Super Bowl, they could even host Wimbledon next year just to smooth this over.

Um, we are we have run out of time, and we've uh we've not even had time to turn to the Davos climate squabble or uh impeachment.

I would imagine the impeachment story is not going to completely go away within the next seven days.

Next week, we are recording uh on the day before Brexit, um,

so

that'll be a happy one.

Al, thanks very much for

coming on.

I've brought my Brexit pin.

I've got three now.

Right.

Three Independence Day pins.

They're all identical except for the dates.

Right.

Well, there's going to be one hell of a balloon this time next week.

Anuvab, thanks very much, as always, for your insight and wisdom on the wonderful situation.

Indian politics.

I mean,

it never stops giving does it well Andy you know I'm I'm glad thank you for having me it's been a pleasure

but Andy but I have to say you know it is what

Rudyard Kipling once said about India he said it looks quiet but something's always on fire

well I think okay

I mean that those are opposite words for us to end this week's bugle on thank you very much for listening buglers we'll be back next week until then goodbye we will play you out now with some lies about our premium level voluntary subscribers

Khalil Kasimali is of the opinion that helicopter is not an acceptable name for a child, is borderline for a dog, but is absolutely fine for a budgery gar.

However, Khalil would never own a budgie due to concerns about the ethics and more importantly, the methods of the smuggling industry surrounding the birds.

Jeremy Ryberkov recently overheard a heated argument between a couple in a fancy restaurant concerning the ethics of testing new luxury mattresses on laboratory elks, which culminated in the woman saying to the man, this is exactly why I'm never using Tinder again, and the man making an antler sign at her as he stormed out.

Corey and Jason Lubnevski in the same restaurant also overheard a row between a young boy and his grandmother who refused to pay out for the kids sponsored vegan January because, and I quote, I saw you running through a cobweb with your mouth open.

It certainly was a cranky evening.

Chris Carr was dining on a separate table and his dessert was thoroughly spoilt when a physical fight broke out between a professional mountaineer and the head chef over whether, if you planted an egg in the crevice of a glacier, it would hatch into an iced chicken.

Tucker Burley was unconvinced by a late-night TV advertisement for an inflatable chopping board, but by morning had convinced himself that it would actually force you to cut your food very carefully and give you the added bonus of being able to bing your food directly from chopping board into frying pan.

Christopher Fernaghi and Mim Glasby, who had never met until appearing in this light together, confided in each other that they had both for several weeks a few years ago had a recurring nightmare in which they found themselves pitching ideas for increasingly unwatchable and tasteless TV shows to a room full of disapproving former American presidents.

Christopher pitched the show Surgeon Sturgeon, a fish-based hospital comedy, to a stern-faced Zachary Taylor, whilst Mim proposed Beggars' Beliefs, in which a panel of celebrities have to guess the religious and philosophical leanings of homeless people.

The idea was tersely rejected by Rutherford B.

Hayes.

Ted Alkins, who by coincidence was having exactly the same recurring dream, had more luck.

His idea, a children's series for a religious TV channel called The Church Tables, about a fridge full of ecclesiastical vegetables trying to avoid being made into a salad, featuring characters such as Archbishop Turnip, Cardinal Carrot and the Very Reverend Radish, absolutely charmed the usually implacable Grover Cleveland.

Here endeth this week's lies.

Very carefully and give you the added bonus of being able to bing your food directly from chopping board into frying pan.

Christopher Fernaghi and Mim Glasby, who had never met until appearing in this lie together, confided in each other that they had both for several weeks a few years ago had a recurring nightmare in which they found themselves pitching ideas for increasingly unwatchable unwatchable and tasteless TV shows to a room full of disapproving former American presidents.

Christoffer pitched the show Surgeon Sturgeon, a fish-based hospital comedy, to a stern-faced Zachary Taylor, whilst Mim proposed Beggars' Beliefs, in which a panel of celebrities have to guess the religious and philosophical leanings of homeless people.

The idea was tersely rejected by Rutherford B.

Hayes.

Ted Alkins, who by coincidence was having exactly the same recurring dream, had more luck.

His idea, a children's series for a religious TV channel called The Church Tables, about a fridge full of ecclesiastical vegetables trying to avoid being made into a salad, featuring characters such as Archbishop Turnip, Cardinal Carrot, and the Very Reverend Radish, absolutely charmed the usually implacable Grover Cleveland.

Here endeth this week's lies.

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.