Bugle 4136 - 2019 in review

Hello booglers, producer Chris here.

We continue to receive missives from this parallel universe.

At least we think that's what it is.

What is it with half a glass of water?

And what's going on with New New Zealand?

New New Zealand.

I don't know, but the last post does.

So please give it a listen.

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Place, place, place, place, lace, place, place.

New Zealand.

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers, I am Andy Zoltzmann and welcome to issue 4136 of The Bugle.

This is not a normal bugle episode, but I am counting it as a full bugle.

Please do not argue with me.

What you are about to endure, enjoy, sorry, enjoy, I'm always getting those two mixed up.

This week is a big old chunk of my 2019 decertifiable history show from the wonderful Soho Theatre in London.

This week's bugle is in fact the entire unedited first half of that show and in fact the first half was quite a lot longer than the second half if that makes sense.

Let's just call it a half anyway.

I mean there wasn't really an interval.

It was just that the show had two main sections.

Look it doesn't matter.

Anyway that's what you're about to hear.

A few notes.

The bugle bleep machine has been switched off.

There will be no bleeps this week.

So if you are listening to the bugle on a large portable speaker in a nursing home for the easily offended and linguistically sensitive, please be warned.

It is all artistically justified, of course, but I do say f quite a lot.

Off.

I said, switch it off.

Thank you, Christopher.

The show was recorded on the 3rd of January, so the odd line might have dated it a little.

And there are a few lines that you may recognise if you've been listening to recent bugles, but not too many, though, I think.

And some of the most successful franchises in the world, after all, rely on saying the same thing every week, over and over again, again for all of time, mentioning no major global religions.

Also, whilst there is no full new Bugle episode this week, please bear in mind that it wouldn't have counted anyway.

Because all the news in the world, and this is a planet after all that is wobbling on the edge of various precipices like an indecisive spoil-for-choice 1920s silent movie star, well, everything has been rendered completely irrelevant by Prince Harry and Meghan sensationally abandoning Britain just when we needed them most.

How is our manufacturing sector going to recover without them?

How do parents like me explain to our children that Prince Andrew is in effect closer to becoming king than he was a week ago?

And how are we going to survive economically as a nation if we cannot marry off Meghan and Harry's holy royal progenies to the Saudi Arabian royal family or Mark Zuckerberg's kids or whatever alien being Elon Musk brings back from space in the next 20 years?

Our long-term plans are out the window.

So because of this, all human life is on hold right now.

So we might as well listen to my stand-up review of 2019.

We joined the action at the Soho Theatre shortly before the scheduled start of the show.

There have already, I must say, been a few ominous sounding off-stage announcements about voices being raised in the dressing room about Andy Zoltzmann, that's me, apparently being in floods of tears, and there are doubts over exactly what is going on.

And then this absolute bombshell.

Ladies and gentlemen, we do now have

further updates for you on the situation.

Unfortunately, Andy Zoltzmann has cancelled tonight's show.

He will hold a press conference to explain, which will commence imminently.

At this point, you can hear Alice Fraser pushing a lectern onto the stage.

A truly sensational level of theatricality, I'm sure you can imagine.

Hello, everybody.

Thank you for coming.

I'm Andrew Zaltzmann's press secretary.

We sincerely apologise for the cancellation of the show.

Andy will be coming out in a minute to make a brief statement.

We would please ask for no flash photography, flash painting or flash sculpting.

We strongly believe that portraying the form of Andy Zaltzman in any medium is an offence to the gods.

And he is in enough trouble with enough of them already.

Also, we would request kindly no screaming and no throwing of underwear.

Please calmly place your underwear in the bins provided.

Andy will be taking some questions afterwards.

Please sit in stony silence and welcome to the stage Mr.

Andrew Zaltzman.

Good evening.

Firstly, thank you very much for coming at what I know is a very busy time of the millennium for you all.

Secondly,

many apologies for cancelling the show tonight.

I will try my best to make up for it by holding this press conference and taking your questions for the next hour.

I should explain why it is that I have cancelled the show tonight.

I take my responsibility as official chronicler of the year in these certifiable history shows very, very seriously indeed.

For the past four years, I've performed this satirical review of the year show here at the Soho Theatre.

In it, I attempt to cast comedic light on the events of the previous 12 months, to hold up, if you will, the medusa of satire to the already reinforced concrete face of politics.

However, this year, this past year, 2019, has absolutely fucking beaten me.

Hands up, 2019-5, Andy's ultimate nil, it has gooshed me up like a proper haddock.

This last year has been too ridiculous, even for me.

And bear in mind that I make a living talking bullshit for a living and obsessing about cricket statistics to a literally professional level.

I know ridiculous when I see it.

And 2019 was, to all practical intents and purposes a fake year.

It was a fake year.

It was like Naught BC all over again.

Furthermore when in 2016 I first agreed to do a yearly review show beginning in mid to late December looking back at the political 12 months that decision was taken safe in the knowledge that with the fixed term Parliament Act

safely in place there would definitely not be even a single other general fucking election until deep in the year 2020.

Moreover, given that Britain had not had a December general election for almost 100 years, this seems like the perfect time of year for doing a show that did not have to be fucking rewritten four fucking days before the fucking one fucking started.

However,

due to a combination of unforeseen circumstances, including a fringe political issue of infantile internal Conservative Party squabbling of no great public concern, being forcibly metastasized into an unendable psychological chunderstorm, fracturing the entire United Kingdom in an unwinnable game of tantrum tennis as British politics realigned into a human centipede of blame, resentment, recrimination, and stropped-out delusionism, which pitted generation against generation, nation against nation, region against region, family against family, fiction against fiction, bubble against bubble, and perception against reality, in an unprecedented battle of what I would call navel gazing, if only it wasn't really so much navel gazing as performing open stomach surgery on ourselves on our own national kitchen table using a jar of peanut butter as the anesthetic,

occasionally looking up how to do surgery on the internet and then thinking, no, we're British, we know best.

Then hacking ourselves open with a rusty bread knife, trying to read the future from our still twitching entrails, saying, Yes, I've seen it.

There it is, the will of the people.

Look, everyone, it's the will of the people, or is it a half-digestive sausage?

Or are they indeed one and the same these days?

Ow, that hurts.

If only scalpels weren't illegal, thank you, Brussels.

Before collapsing like an overstretched metaphor.

Then,

because of that, whatever I was talking about at the start of this sentence did, in fact, come about.

It was again, yes, the general election four days before the start of this run, which began on the 16th of December.

So, what was the point of carefully writing, honing, rehearsing, and perfecting a show when I would have to redo the whole thing in less than 100 hours right before the gala opening night?

Now, admittedly, as those of you who have seen me before may know,

that is not how I've ever done any of my previous shows.

It is the principle that counts.

Furthermore what is the point of doing a show when you have no idea even of what news has been breaking since walking on stage?

How long have I been on now?

Total silence, typical of the ignorance and apathy of the British public.

I've been on

just like a few minutes on.

God knows I don't even look at the news now.

I just guess what's happened and it's never as bad as things actually turn out.

I imagine by now Boris Johnson has announced that he's extending the White Cliffs of Dover, an extra 800 meters up and 500 miles around with a special osylogrant resistant coating.

Incidentally, I love a statistic, White Cliff of Dover is the average Brexit voter.

I assume by now Health Secretary Matt Hancock has announced that the Conservatives are building 1,250 brand new hospitals on the grounds that they're not dropping atomic bombs on any of the hospitals that already exist, which is in effect.

It's in effect the same thing, isn't it?

It isn't the same thing if you think about it, while being held face down in a bucket of bullshit custard.

And by now, I assume that Donald Trump has, oh, in fact, nothing, nothing I could write in this gap here, nothing I could write in this gap

could be as fucking ridiculous as what he's probably done.

I was just thinking to myself last night that what this world really needed was an extrajudicial killing

in a region that's been a political tinderbox pretty much ever since God

pointed at and said, yeah, round about there, that'll do.

This already fundamentally pointless show is rendered further futile when I think ahead to what may have happened by the end of the run on the 8th of January, by when Nigel Farage will be on television 25 hours a day, eight days a week, saying, well, it isn't real Brexit because we're still physically attached to the Earth.

It's not Brexit.

We've blasted ourselves into space and are drifting independently but Britishly through the endless vacuum of the universe, which is what the people voted for in 2016.

By the 8th of January, the SNP will be camped outside the walls of York, for old time's sake.

Nicholas Sturgeon will be painted head to toe in woad, riding a wicker unicorn, eating a voodoo Winston Churchill and screaming, I am Sturgeor the Annihilator.

And I will turn England into a Haggis milkshake.

You can't take that chance.

On the 8th of January, Boris Johnson will be slapping his cock on the cenotaph, saying, Is there nothing, nothing I can do that will stop you supporting me?

Leading to newspaper headlines on the 9th of January from the Tory supporting media saying, Boris Johnson's Wang pays moving tribute to the fallen.

And this bit itself about what might have happened by the end of the run has already been made pointless by what's happened in the last 24 fucking hours.

A worst start to a decade since the asteroid funked out the dinosaurs on the 1st of January, 6 million BC.

66 million BC.

Very important to get that.

Facts write and report it.

So I'm done with this nonsense.

I cannot satirise the year 2019.

And let me explain how I generally write the certifiable history shows.

Have any of you been to see the show in previous years?

So, generally, how I write the shows, I generally begin it in mid to late December, run it through to early January, is every year at 5 a.m.

on the 1st of January, I get up, I sit down at my desk, I get out my typewriter, and I write 100 different versions of the show

based on what I expect to happen over the course of the year.

Then, on the first day of the run in December, I just pick the one that's proved most accurate

and do that.

But this year, I have a hundred absolutely unusable shows, a hundred hours of gold dust routines that no one will ever hear now, including this one.

This is a superb routine that I wrote.

The Theresa May wins a Nobel Prize for Compromise routine.

That's gone.

The wonderful routine reflects on how Theresa May won a landslide victory in a snap summer election with 99% of the vote after reaching the perfect Brexit compromise, a 1,000-year transition period, which pleased both sides by not giving, but also definitely not not giving either side what they wanted, but also not giving either side what they didn't want or did not not want the other side to also have and/or not have.

I think

I might have got that slightly wrong.

But anyway, the point is

that's the confusion we're in.

Does anyone feel sorry for Theresa May?

No, I felt a little bit sorry for Theresa May.

I do not think we can blame Theresa May for her failure leading up to her

departure from office in 2019, for her failure to drive our national Robin Reliant to the summits of the Kilimanjaro of Brexit.

But I think we can blame her for the fact that she crashed that Robin Reliant ten times into the same tree

on the A23 heading south outside Croydon.

And

she essentially failed with a one thing to do list, which is quite impressive when you think about it.

I guess she learned how difficult the art of compromise is.

I think we've learned that.

As a nation, I guess we all know, all parents know how difficult compromise can be.

Say if you're a parent, you have twins, and one twin really likes cricket, and the other twin really likes platypuses,

and you come up with a compromise birthday treat that involves going to see someone whack a platypus with a cricket bag,

you will end up with two disappointed children

and some understandably hostile media coverage, which is

essentially what happened to Theresa May.

Theresa May for me was very much like a golfer in a Foresomes game of golf.

Foresomes like you see in the Ryder Cup, you take alternate shots with your partner.

And her partner has played an absolutely terrible shot, shanked it way off, massively incompetent shot, shanked it way off to the right of the fairway.

It's in heavy rough.

It's behind some trees.

It's down there.

Of course, her partner's then run off the fairway, giggling to sit in this shed and write a bullshit autobiography and get

paid a quarter of a million quid for doing corporate speeches.

But the point is, Theresa Maid's in a really awful, awful situation, pretty much an impossible shot.

Like I said, she's down and there's a heavy rough and it's been raining, so the grass are really awkward.

And

she can't decide.

She can't really see a line into the green because of the trees.

She can't work out where to go go over the trees.

There's a little gap in the tree, so she could try and hit it low through the gap in the trees.

But the fairway slopes down to the front of the green, but of course, there's bunkers.

There's bunkers at the front of the green.

The green itself slopes back left, and back left is

a water hazard as well.

So it's pretty much impossible.

And of course, it's cloudy as well, so you can't even see the contours of the fairway, which makes it even harder to judge the distance.

And so she consults with her caddy and trying to work out exactly what

he walks down to the fairways to try and get a kind of visual of what she needs to do, and then try and build out that mental image of what she wants the shot to do.

And of course, the wind is the fact as well.

She picks up a bit of grass,

just drops a bit of grass, and it's going left to right.

But she can see the flag on the green going right to left.

It's obviously it's swirling.

I mean, it's just it's a really, really, really difficult shot.

And she just consults with her caddy once more and then kind of decides what she wants to do, and just does a few practice swings on to build up that muscle memory of exactly what she wants the ball to do.

And she hits it with those finely honed forearms of hers, and then she walks over to her golf bag and takes out a sledgehammer

over it

and shouting, Get in the hole!

And that bit has been getting longer and longer.

Sadly, due to the cancellation of the show, I won't be able to do that routine.

Other comedians will still do that, but not me.

That's going, that's good.

I should have said there is a shredder next to the lectern.

You don't get that from McIntyre, do you?

So many good routines wasted this Brexit crossover day routine.

I don't know if you enjoyed Brexit Crossover Day, a joyous nationwide day of celebration marking the day.

It was, I think it was August the 18th, when the number of people in Britain who were too young to participate in the 2016 referendum overtook the number of leave voters still alive.

Destined to be remembered as one of the greatest days in the history of British irony, alongside the first time a British person in Britain said, tell you what, I'm sick and tired of all these people coming into our country uninvited and taking all our stuff.

I think that's a better joke than you're giving it credit for, but to be fair, you're both laughed at some of your jokes.

On Brexit crossover day, each of the remaining Brexit voters was paired up with someone who'd been too young to vote.

In 2016, there was a particularly touching scene at St.

Glabber's Hospice in South Shittsbury, where

97-year-old lifelong Europe sceptic Clafford Grabhorn cradled the newborn baby paraphernalia Hoggins Flinch

as he passed away, giggling, pointing at her innocent little baby face, mumbling his final words, fucking priceless.

Wait till she realises what's coming over the next hundred years.

Don't worry, Pet, in my will, I've left you my copy of How to Train British Strawberries to Pick Themselves.

I was convinced 2019 was going to be the year in which God finally came out of retirement.

I mean, because he's been eerily silent for way too long, anyway, he's slacked off, hasn't he?

I mean, if not 2019, then when?

You have to ask.

I was convinced he was going to come out of retirement and tell the world that the one true faith was

interesting.

I should have seen what was drawn on it.

So I realized early in 2019 that my hundred predicted versions of the show that I always do were not even going to cut the most French of mustards.

And so I wrote more

new versions

during the course of the year and events have rendered these versions also, and I quote myself speaking right now when I say this, absolutely, unusably, irretrievably obsolete.

This Hong Kong routine about how the international reaction to the Hong Kong crisis was.

And then there was this big bit I started writing on the flagrantly absurd prospect of Boris Johnson becoming Prime Minister.

What's happening now is that I am trying to ram a large file into the shredder.

On the file are the words, reasons Boris Johnson should not be Prime Minister.

Yes, that is the sound of me whacking a shredder with a large file.

On the last night of the run, the shredder got absolutely demolished.

I am the very epitome of rock and roll.

Back to the show.

That's also gone.

But here we are.

Yeah, here we are.

This is the state that we have reached.

Boris Johnson is our de facto

Are you enjoying Johnsonian Britain?

I mean, can we trust him?

Is the Pope a cucumber?

Not currently, and all evidence suggests no.

I mean, he already claimed that he would rather be dead in a ditch than delay Brexit beyond the end of October.

And he ignored the compromise.

I didn't want him to be dead in a ditch.

I don't want that kind of violence, that talk of death.

I wanted the compromise solution of him being alive, permanently in a ditch.

Is that what brought a country together?

If anything he's remained more and more prominently not in a ditch than ever before.

And so we had this bizarre situation for a while where we had an unelected prime minister who'd eviscerated his own party of moderates and dissenting voices, who whinged like a toddler about the open public procedures of the Supreme Court and Parliament, but yet told millions of people on the People's Vote marches who wanted to vote on something that they were the ones being anti-democratic.

We had a government that stopped its own bill going through Parliament, then complained about Parliament stopping its bill, a government that refused to release a report on covert Russian influence in British politics because,

well,

no smoke,

no, I don't know, lots of fucking smoke, no fire, I don't know.

A government, a cabinet, that was a veritable who's who of who patently shouldn't be whom.

What the fuck are Dominic Raab and Pretty Patel apart from lessons to children to pay attention in school?

We had a nation creaking after a decade of austerity, hate crimes rising, its public services crumbling or flocked off or being strategically withered, its wealth dissipating into the tax-averse ether, leaving a food banks and billionaires kind of society, led by a literally acting Prime Minister who piled falsehood upon the section, presumably on the grounds that if you tell an even number of lies, they multiply into a fact.

And yet, on the 12th of December, Britain looked at all this and thought to itself,

yeah, that'll do.

Yeah.

I cannot write a show about that.

I can't write a show about how a sitting government ran an election campaign that basically said, We have been nation-breakingly shit for over nine years, it's time for more of the same, and won.

And fucking what?

They ran a better opposition campaign than the opposition,

possibly due to this routine, the evidence from this routine that I wrote in October when the election was called.

I wrote this routine based on what would happen if Jeremy Corbyn won the election.

Now, that was with hindsight and indeed foresight.

The biggest if since Rudyard Kipling

started projecting the titles of his poems up onto the night skies above Gotham City.

And it was a moot point anyway, because clearly if Corbyn had won, this show would not be taking place.

Because the day after the election, everyone working in the creative industries would have been on the first train down to his new gulag in Cornwall.

Well, he hot-footed it with the royal family to Gloucestershire to hide them in a forest and then shoot them in a basement.

Must stop reading Telegraph.

And I think Corbyn's campaign can be compared to Captain Scott.

And Captain Scott turned up in Antarctica with nothing but 40 crates of beer, some ping-pong bats, a karaoke machine, and an extremely optimistic packet of Johnnies.

I mean,

I love history.

I mean he probably would have lost anyway but he really did not give himself the best chance of winning.

I think we can all agree on whatever you thought of Corbyn, Labour chose the wrong leader in Jeremy Corbyn.

Do you agree with that?

No.

No?

Do you agree with that?

I'll tell you what who would have been a way better leader than Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour Party.

They shouldn't have chosen him.

What they should have chosen was the idea of Jeremy Corbyn.

That would have been a far better leader.

Just the kind of the well-meaning, avuncular, geography teacherist, social justice fan and inequality sceptic, rather than the harrowingly incompetent reality.

There is a famous old saying in politics, I don't know who said it first, and that famous old saying is, do not allow anti-Semitism to fester inside your political party.

It is at best a historically tainted brand.

Even even if

even if your opponents are basically doing the same with Islamophobia, don't fall to that temptation.

Is it not easy to avoid is that not the easiest thing to do as a leader of the Labour Party to avoid institutional anti-Semitism?

Besides this whole idea that there's this Jewish conspiracy running politics and running showbiz?

That's bullshit, isn't it?

Exhibit one.

Was Corbyn himself anti-Semitic?

I don't think so.

But he was certainly not as anti-anti-Semitic as he needed to be.

And on Brexit, the defining issue of our times on Brexit, he sprang into action like a fossilized dinosaur penis.

And obviously Brexit is the issue more than any other issue that has led to the cancellation of tonight's show for which I apologise once again.

I just, I can't do it anymore.

I can't do any more Brexit jokes.

I can't satirise Brexit.

And, you know, I've written some really quite pertinent satire about Brexit over the past four years, and frankly, it's made little or even no difference.

So maybe it was time just to let it go.

And in case any of you have missed it or have been recording it and are going to watch it later, let me summarise the government's argument on Brexit.

What they've essentially said over the past 12 months is we are just a humble nation of only 17.4 million people.

Hard-working, real people, but we punch above our weight as a country, albeit we generally punch ourselves in the face above our weight.

We won the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, so how hard can complex 21st century global trade agreements be?

What was right for a Britain in a tainted knife-edge vote in 2016 will be right for a Britain in a billion years' time.

Look over there, it's Lenin.

Don't worry, if all else fails, we'll reactivate the Queen Mother.

Now, we'll be Thelma, you be Louise, let's fucking do this thing!

And incidentally, Thelma and Louise is a very, very different ending to a film if there are a load of innocent children in the back of the car.

So

Brexit has beaten me.

It's beaten me not just because I can't shake the sensation that we've sold off our national soul in exchange for a handful of some distinctly non-magic beans but because I like words I use words consensually let me emphasize that and

Brexit has given language a total merciless flogging now I have here the shorter Oxford Brexicon here that says all the

the Brexit language that we need to get an angle on Brexit itself of course a new term people thought well it's a portmanteau word from meaning British exits not that it's actually from the Basque language you know this

ironically it's from a European language the Basque language which is spoken in the Basque country which is in the Basque country

a little joke for any Basque separatists out there

nice market but a ticket sell is a ticket sell

I'm huge in Bilbao now anyway but the point is it's two basque words bre like the Spanish bue meaning cow or bull and then shit

so um

and of course the term get Brexit done has been one of the most confusing three-word terms in human history.

What it actually means is begin the process of starting to get Brexit done, which will hopefully include at some point finding out exactly what the fuck Brexit is, which will be quite helpful in trying to get it done.

End the uncertainty, that's another phrase we've heard a lot of, that means begin a prolonged period of greater uncertainty.

Bring the country together.

That's a phrase we've heard a lot.

That means desperately hope that eventually Britain falls in love with itself in a kind of national autoerotic Stockholm syndrome.

United Kingdom, that's an interesting phrase that we've learned over the past four years.

What that actually means is England.

Make me as well.

Clear that up.

Dithering, that's a political term meaning due process.

Betrayal is now a term commonly used in the right-wing media, meaning the workings of a functioning democratic system.

Ditto the word plot, which you might have read about in in the telegraph and other newspapers, about these Machiavellian behind the scenes webs of deviousness conducted through the murky, unaccountable method of votes in parliament, shown live on national television, with the decisions of each individual MP published instantaneously.

How much more fucking underhand can you guess?

The national interest, that is whatever you personally think the national interest is.

Points-based immigration.

What is points-based?

What does that phrase mean?

Points-based immigration, that means asset-stripping other countries are people they need far more than we do because we simply can't be asked to fund and train enough of our own.

Let's call it what.

And also Australian-based points is Australian rules immigration is not something to aspire to.

Australian rules immigration is very much like Australian rules football in that it is needlessly violent and aggressive, despite there being a colossal amount of space.

And then

we have

the

other

Brexit language, the Brex monto words, the words that have sprung up from Brexit, Brexistential crisis that we've been going through as a nation.

Brex wife or Brex husband is the spouse you've not had a coherent conversation with for the last three and a half years because they spend all their time shouting fucking fuckers at the television.

That joke works equally well for both sides, let me emphasise that.

Brex Spectrep, that is the coating of Spittle on your TV screen after Michael Gove has been in the news.

Then we have mathematical terms like dy by d Brex,

which

in Brexit calculus is working out the unexpected derivatives of Brexit by asking why.

And the result gives you the current rate of national decline

and that explains why I'm never on television.

I mean, I didn't math the whole, but I had to look it up.

I've no fucking idea.

Now, anyway,

abstract Brexpressionism.

You might have seen this superb, fascinating art form in which you can say or do anything and then claim that is in fact Brexit.

And of course, brextrasensory perception, which is the ability to notice benefits of Brexit that other people and the vast majority of economists simply cannot see.

So language has taken an absolute battering, but I realised the moment I realised I couldn't do the show this year, for which I apologise again,

was the morning after the general election, the morning of the 13th of December, and something my son said to me, and it was a very exciting election for us as a family, because it was the first time that my kids have voted in a general election.

They're twelve and ten, but

you've got to start them early, haven't you?

And I've got no problem with electoral fraud.

You can't complain about apathy and fraud.

Can you?

Because they're not show commitment to the process.

And also, what's it?

10,000 hours.

That's what it takes, isn't it?

To reach elites world-class at 10,000 hours.

And yet, we never practice it.

We've got to start our kids early.

I want them to be brilliant at voting by the time they're my age, by which time we'll have had another 26 general elections and we'll be about to have a referendum on whether to buy Lincolnshire back from China.

You've got a 10,000 hours.

No one practices.

Who practiced before the election?

None of us practice.

Why do we keep fucking it up?

We just turn it.

Roger Federer wouldn't turn up the women without any practice.

Are you holding your hand?

You're just scratching.

All right.

And

we're not taught about it either.

We're not taught about voting.

It's going to certainly wasn't.

I mean, some of us stumble upon our parents' copy of the 1970s joy of voting.

Kind of pencil drawings of people toddling off to the church or with a democracy in their hearts.

But we're not taught.

We certainly weren't taught how to vote at my school.

Admittedly I went to an all-boys private school and I was taught things like Latin and the life cycle of a frog and

the laws of rugby, but I wasn't taught, you know, for example, how to vote properly, how to vote objectively with the long-term interests of the country at heart.

I wasn't taught, I wasn't taught, you know, that, or I wasn't taught how to raise children, or how to talk to women, or whether or not women are real.

So I didn't get a complete education, so I left school and I turned 18, or he's voting age, and I didn't know these things, albeit that I was able to explain the laws of rugby to a bucket of tadpoles in grammatically perfect Latin.

It wasn't completely wasted.

I'm not saying it was a wasted.

education.

But so my son came downstairs, he'd gone off to, and obviously he'd grown up in my political bubble, and so he was on very much the same end of the political seesaw as me.

And he came down, he's very excited.

He came bounding down the stairs on the morning of the 13th of December, saying, Dad, dad, we did it.

16 and a half million votes for the remain parties, under 15 million for the leave parties.

That's slightly more decisive than the referendum was the other way, Dad, isn't it?

So, so who's the new Prime Minister?

Is it the man who's like Father Christmas?

And I said, Look, son, just because he has a beard, makes completely unaffordable promises, and is not that fussed about Jews

that does not mean his Father Christmas.

I have a few very important things to explain, son.

So I sent him off to his room with a copy of Maisie Votes in a first-past-the-post-general election.

He came back a little while later with some questions about our electoral system.

He said, Dad, I'm only 10 years old and all that, and I know you tell me not to pay attention at school.

And I said, Yes, son, learning about the world as it is will only upset you.

He said, Yeah, I get that, Dad, but it seems to my admittedly only 10-year-old brain that our electoral system is, how shall I put this delicately, fucking shit at maths I said look dad we've been here before in 1983 Labour got only 9% more votes than the SDP Liberal alliance 8.4 million to 7.7 million but they got nine times as many votes 209 to 23 how can that happen that seems rather silly dad I said well it's not silly son it's sensible that is how we prevent electoral corruption in this country because why would you bother wasting millions and millions of pounds crookedly buying an election like they do in other stupider countries when you can just sit back and let first pass the post basically have the same effect as an almost Magaby level of electoral fraud.

He said, all right, I understand that now, Dan, but how come in 2005, Tony Blair got a majority on under 22% of the available vote?

And I said, well, son, that's because of our heroically, I might even say patriotically low turnout.

Because we fought wars for this.

We fought wars for our right not to use the freedoms we were fighting those wars for.

Now go and play with that chainsaw.

He said, doesn't first pass the post lead to massive disenfranchisement?

Dad?

I mean it said in the Maisie book that in 2015 the Greens and UKIP between them got one sixth of everyone's votes but only two out of 650 MPs and I said I wish I'd never had you

and he said dad given all that given all that why is it that our second chamber the House of Lords is elected by 0.000%

of the population chosen instead through an arcane strain of barely medieval cronyism and I said well son that's the clever bit that's what makes the rest of it seem fair by comparison

And he said, Dad, it seems to me that First Pastor Post is a cancerous force at the heart of our democratic nation.

It foments confrontation and irresponsible short-termism.

It stifles political evolution.

And I said, Yes, but it's our cancerous force at the heart of our democratic nation.

And he said, Dad, Dad, he said, the first part of the post might be unarguably a very good system for some things, for deciding, for example, horse races.

You know, I'm not denying it is very good at that, way better than most legs or your favourite sexiest nay.

But as a means of deciding elections, Dad, first part of the post is patent me an anachronistic relic, unfit for the world you somewhat hypocritically expect me to grow up in.

And I said, who the fuck is writing the Maisie books these days?

And I said, look, son, you've just got to ignore it.

For this, this is a different election.

All the old rules go out there.

This is the Brexit election.

Single issue election.

Brexit, we've got to deal with it.

Brexit is the elephant in the room.

And he said, well, it's not just the elephant in the room, is it, Dad?

It's the porcupine in the pillowcase.

It's the snake in the spaghetti pan.

It's the piranha in the toilet bowl.

And above all, it's the shark on the patio.

In many ways, the most disturbing of the lot.

It definitely shouldn't be there, and it cannot possibly end well.

And he said, in any case, Dad, how can you have a single-issue general election?

The clue is in the name, Dad, general election.

General, it's as ridiculous as deciding the Nobel Prize for Literature based on which of the nominees could write the most pornographic limerick.

It's as ridiculous, Dad, as deciding the winner of a Cricket World Cup final based on, don't even fucking go there, Dad!

And he said, Dad, is it any wonder our democracy leads to the same flawed politics over and over again?

And I said, well, son, we've got to be patient.

As the great philosopher Aristotle himself once wrote, if you keep putting your penis in the same pencil sharpener, one day you will have a very, very sharp penis indeed.

He said, well, Dad, how do we reach the point where just seats have just become normalised and lies eventually just gestate into accepted truths?

And I said, well, son, as the great philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli himself once wrote, if you keep putting your cock on the barbecue, eventually people will just come to think of it as another sausage.

And he said, Daddy, I don't think Niccolo Machiavelli did write that.

And I said, why did I give you that?

What would Andrew Neal do?

Wristband.

Just let me live in the privacy of my own delusion, son.

Look, kid, you've got to respect democracy.

Just like you've got to respect your great Uncle Terence because he fought in the war and his family.

And he said, what, great Uncle Terence who ate that live hamster in front of us the other day?

Yes, him.

Whilst dancing on the table?

Yeah, great uncle Terence.

With his plonker out.

Yeah, you know, Terence.

Yep.

In front of the whole congregation.

Yeah, Terence.

At Great Aunt Gladys' funeral.

Yeah, him.

Well, he's still a better bloke than Vladimir Putin, so case closed.

Anyway, if you're so fussed about First Pastor Bose, why don't you just ask the government nicely if they'll change it?

Well, Dad, because turkeys don't vote for Christmas, do they?

I said, well, actually, son, that's rather naive of you.

Turkeys might vote for Christmas if you offer them the right package of tax cuts and promised to invest in the infrastructure in their turkey coops and tell them they've got a straight choice between Christmas or American Thanksgiving, abracadabra, Christmas landslide.

And he said, okay, Dad, but surely more to the point, First Pastor Bose is here to stay because the turkey industry is never going to vote against Christmas.

And I said, fuck you, kid, you unpatriotic piece of shit.

What was right for Britain in the 19th century is right for Britain now.

And he said, what?

So you want a two-mile an hour speed limit on all roads, do you, Dad?

And all vehicles having to have a bloke walking in front of them waving a red flag.

Is that what you want?

And I said, oh, typical London-centric elite.

Going with the two-mile-an-hour urban speed limit rather than the four-mile an hour rural speed limit that real people were using at the time.

Isn't Wikipedia fun?

And it would be a red flag, wouldn't it?

You fucking trot.

He snapped and threw his portal in Clement Attlee at me and waggled the dice newspapers in my face.

Look, Dad, look at the numbers of votes and then look at the newspaper headlines about landslides and overwhelming mandates.

Is this whole fucking country fucking mad?

I'm a fucking 10-year-old primary school kid and I can say it's fucking insane.

I said, can you please not swear, boy?

You know I don't like it.

Just accept it.

It's there in black and white.

There was a massive swing to the Conservatives.

No, there fucking wasn't, Dad.

Stop being so deliberately, numerically illiterate.

I said, but I'm British, son.

110% British.

And misrepresenting the will of the people through an arcane electoral system is a core British value.

And he said, that's another thing, Dad.

How is it the more we bang on about British values, the less we seem to actually fucking have them?

And I said, God save August.

And he said, Dad, can you not see that after this election, fundamentally nothing's changed regarding Brexit?

This country remains more polarised than a bear painted head to toe in Tipex.

And I doffed my cap to him approvingly and said,

yes, son, but the people have spoken.

He said, yes, and what they've said is we are possibly marginally in favour of Remain, but in a geographically inconvenient way, exacerbated by the fact that some of us are a bit more fucking stupid about tactical voting than others.

And I said, why can't you just shut the fuck up and look at the number of seats one like good British newspapers and broadcasters do?

How can we move on as a country, son, if we do not pretend that we've moved on as a country?

And he said, it's a contract, Dad.

This is democracy in the same way that being punched in the face by a boxer wearing gloves made of craft singles is a cheese course.

And I said, it's still cheese, isn't it, son?

It's still cheese.

Anyway,

it suits us, son.

First past the post

suits Britain as a nation.

Because on the first past the post, at every election, the majority of people have not voted for the government.

Giving more than 50% of this nation carte blanche to moan our fucking asses off for the next five years.

And he said, I hadn't thought of it like that, Dad.

The scales falling from his eyes like someone who's just rugby-tackled a molting mermaid.

He said, count me in, dad.

I love complaining.

I said, daddy's boy.

The last thing you want to happen in a democracy is what you actually want to happen.

Because then you've got nowhere to jab the severed finger of blame other than into your own regretful eye socket.

And he cuddled me and said, Dad, put the news on.

The next five years are going to be fucking awesome.

And it was that conversation that made me realize that I can't do a show this year.

Therefore, the show's off.

And

we have to accept that times have changed.

We've maybe moved on.

We've moved on in this country.

We've moved on democratically.

Our values have changed.

Things like reality, truth, nuance, and logic are just outdated relics that we're quietly laying to one side, along with other social antiquities that we've gradually shelved over recent years, like the poor, the disabled, dignity for the old, libraries, a functioning legal system, a manufacturing sector, objectivity, empathy, Scotland,

a decent test match number three batsman,

the correctly used apostrophe, and the Liberal Democrats.

So

here we all have to accept, here we all have Boris Johnson as our Prime Minister, and he was praised for coming out the morning after the election for supposedly conciliatory words and giving that speech that he gave

in Downing Street.

Now let me say that that's the easy bit, isn't it?

Standing

at electorum, giving a pre-written speech is

one of the easiest

things to do in the world?

World, world.

That is the best.

That joke has gone in this entire run.

Johnson has offered to build bridges.

over the plains that he himself has flooded.

Now, as we in London know, beware Boris Johnson when he is promising to build a bridge.

I mean, he said he wants to heal divisions, a touching gesture, rather like Hannibal Lecter after his surprise appointment as the head chef at your children's primary school, pledging a healthy vegan menu.

How did it happen?

What is actually being planned long term?

I guess it may come down to how much Hannibal Lecter wants to keep his job.

And that concludes the first half of 2019, the certifiable history that marks the moment that the show made a transition to its second phase, a press conference featuring me and my old sparring partner, The Dog of Doom.

More from The Dog of Doom over the forthcoming months, years and decades.

Thanks to all buglers who came to see the show live.

And if you've enjoyed what was essentially there, a free stand-up album to start your year, or if you just like the bugle in general, do help to contribute to the ongoing existence, freedom, independence and idiocy of the bugle by going to the webpage and clicking the donate button.

We will be back with a full bugle next week if the world is still in one or maybe two pieces.

In the meantime, to play you out, here is the first batch of new decade lies about our premium voluntary subscribers.

Music please.

Ted Perlman has made an economic study that has concluded that a rise in the popularity of decorative chandeliers can sometimes presage a similar if delayed rise in the popularity of computer games.

Chandeliers became increasingly popular during the latter half of the second millennium, notes Ted.

And now look at computer games.

You can't move for the bloody things.

John Price has also detected a historical link that might be worth the Boffins investigating further.

The extinction of the notoriously flightless bird, the Dodo, in the late 17th century, and the subsequent development of human flight, beginning with hot air balloons in the 18th century and now pinging millions of people around the world every day in aeroplanes.

It's almost like the dodo's feathery flightlessness made people think, well, we obviously can't do that either, says John.

They had to die, so we may fly.

Lilush and Vinny do not believe in purple carrots.

They are almost certainly a hoax, claims Lilush.

Everyone knows carrots are orange.

Whatever next, a cucumber made of granite?

Vinny is determined to get to the bottom of this scandal.

It's like beetroots all over again.

They're clearly knock-off potato, says Vinnie.

A cross between a proper law-abiding spud and a vegetable crime scene.

Russell Smith Becker has long believed that the origin of basketball dates back to the French Revolution and began as a fun proto-sport that evolved amongst the freelance cleaners who had to tidy up at the end of a long day's guillotining.

Russell has calculated that the modern-day basketball is exactly the same size and weight as the average French aristocrat's head plus late 18th century wig.

Kenton McBride, however, has a very different creation theory for basketball.

Kenton asserts that the sport began as a means of covertly passing food to resistance soldiers during the 14th century Byzanto-Mexican war, when locals would lob loaves, joints of meat and occasionally large melons into the chimneys of the houses occupied by the resistance, in the style of a modern-day Steph Curry three-pointer.

Alex Russell further postulates that the backboard on a basketball court began as the reverse side of a bogus sundial affixed to the chimney pot, ostensibly to help the humble ordinary folk caught up in that Mexico-Byzantine conflict to time their compulsory afternoon naps better, but it was in fact placed to aid the food dunkers to get their food down the chimney with their first shot.

Esteban Dominguez Buniface does not believe in nominative determinism, and has not done so ever since meeting a man called Armageddon Plague Marauder, who it transpired was in fact a quietly spoken accountant whose hobbies included collecting 19th century porcelain rabbits and making his own scented candles.

Todd Podzemny had a great uncle who was a quite brilliant magician until he found himself in a top security prison after mixing up his words and and saying Alcatraz instead of Abracadabra.

Todd's great uncle lived out his days in solitary confinement after turning the prison governor into a bunch of flowers.

Samuel Kinns hopes the technology will soon be available that will mean that when people honk their horns in their car it is only audible inside the specific car at which they are honking rather than making all other road users think why is some bastard honking at me?

All I'm doing is overtaking on the inside then swerving in front of them to sneak through a traffic light.

And finally, Will Hardy, meanwhile, finally is a renowned fan of tin.

I love saying tin, says Will, and I love, love, love elements with a misleading chemical symbol.

I mean, SN, what on earth is going on with that?

Will also recommends molybdenum as a word with quotes a terrific mouthfeel.

It sounds like you're climbing into an immersion tank full of jelly, which I am in favour of, theoretically.

Here endeth this week's lies.

Bye-bye.

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.