Bugle 4067 – Celebrate Forgery

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers and welcome to issue 4067 of an audio newspaper that has now outlived more than 99% of the chickens that were alive at the time of our first episode in 2007.

Most of of them we've outlived by an extremely long way.

Take that, you feathery nugget nerds.

You've been old.

It is Friday, the 4th of May, 2018.

I am Andy Zoltzmann and I'm 43, the same age at which the world's oldest spider has just popped its eight clogs after being stung by a wasp yet more tragic, Creepy Crawley on Creepy Crawley violence.

But it means that I am now officially older than the oldest spider in the world.

Shove that in your webs and wait for it to die before vomiting on it, You excessively lived, short-lived arachno losers.

That's two speeches I've taken down.

What a shell this is.

I'm in the UK, very briefly, in between New Zealand and the USA.

I'm literally having a very long week.

Extra 16 hours for me compared to most of you losers by the time I land in Atlanta tomorrow, ahead of the start of the Radiotopia Live Torch begins on Monday.

That is just the kind of guy I am.

I've literally lived 9.5% more than the average human being this week.

What a guy.

Joining me this week, back in London, the Bugle's official correspondent for the Asian continent, past, present, and future, representing the

how many billion people live in Asia these days, Anubab?

Four billion?

Four?

Yeah,

let's go five.

Yeah, we've got

two-thirds of the world.

Yeah.

Anyway, well, it is Anuvab Pal.

You're representing that two-thirds of humanity.

Welcome back.

That's correct.

I feel I'm capable of representing that many people.

I think for that many people, what you really need is one person.

This is the simplest way.

Anything else just gets complicated.

I think so.

I think so.

So you have been back in London doing your show at Soho Theatre, and we are recording a radio show on the 23rd of May called Empire at the Backyard Comedy Club.

So do come along, Buglers, if you want to see us discussing Empire and architecture, essentially.

Apparently, yeah, apparently something had happened 250 years ago.

Some of you had come over

just to have a look.

Yeah, maybe just you would handy letters.

We've been around for a while.

I had been around at the time.

But we'd be studying buildings built on loot from empire on both sides.

Right.

Yes.

So some of us that got rich.

Yeah.

And some people here that got rich.

Yes, and stayed rich for, well, the nation's stayed rich essentially ever since.

So thank you.

Yes, we're very, very grateful eternally, as is reflected in our government's policy towards Indian students.

Being politely told to fk right off.

Correct.

So what have you particularly enjoyed about your trip to Britain this time?

Britain and very interesting.

You know,

I am dealing with certain things that I'm unfamiliar with.

British politesse.

Right.

You know, I'm learning things about British polites.

When someone says, excuse me, I have a slight issue.

Right.

It could mean I've murdered their whole family.

An understatement is one of our great national characteristics.

I love that.

I love that.

You know, because if someone in India came up and said, you've murdered my whole family, it means that they have a slight issue or something.

It's the reverse.

It's hyperbole where I live.

Also, I'm encountering for the first time that you have a very lively drinking culture.

Oh, yes.

This is your first full encounter with that, is it?

Yes.

And it is not often that I see, you know, lots of portly financial executives on a Friday evening stumble out of pubs, as you call them, just wrecked as humans.

I saw one individual in Charing Cross.

I was walking around in Charing Cross, and you know, as a foreigner, I like observing foreign cities, and he was a rather portly gentleman, like something straight out of a PG Woodhouse story.

And he was drunk off his mind, and he missed his bus, and his cheeks were red.

And he was standing in front of the Lyceum Theatre that has the Lion King going on.

And there's a massive poster of Mufasa the lion, and he was growling at this poster.

And I thought to myself, this is Britain, Britain, Britain that I have known as the ruler of the whole world.

Pax Britannica, two-thirds of the planet, the sun never sat.

The sun never set, or sun never sat on the empire either.

The sun never set on the empire either.

And, you know, Regulata Regina, they used to say in Latin, the rule of the queen over the world.

This empire is reduced to this one portly man called Gus

shouting at the poster of an African lion.

That's very much a one-man metaphor for the decline and fall of the British Empire.

When Gibbon wrote about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, it took him about 30 volumes, didn't it?

Chris, how many volumes was Gibbon's decline and fall of the Roman Empire?

Give me two sex.

This is the kind of info you should have at your fingertips at all times.

If not all the volumes in front of him.

Six volumes.

Six volumes.

Six.

Six, not thirty.

No.

Thirty if you ripped each of those six into five separate bits.

But all of that for the Romans is reduced to your saying, one gentleman shouting at a poster.

Yeah.

Making lion noises.

He was growling.

Yeah.

Edward Gibbon, from the photo, oh, sorry, the painting on his Wikipedia page does look like how you just described that gentleman.

Maybe it's Edward Gibbon.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, it could be, yeah, the reincarnated soul of Edward Gibbon now.

I mean, it's just symptomatic of the way we want instant results now in the 21st century.

You know, if Gibbon was around today, he wouldn't have written his six volumes and how many countless thousands and thousands of words.

He'd have just barked at a poster and put out a tweet saying, yeah, it all went to shit with Rome because they started drinking lead or something.

It's succinct.

Succinct.

Well, is that progress?

Yes.

I think so.

I mean, you know, at one point, Andy, you ruled everything from Cairo to the Levant.

Well, Cairo's in the Levant.

Yeah, yeah.

You ruled everything from the Cape Cape.

Well depends which way you go around the world.

If you head west from Cairo, then I mean that's basically it, isn't it?

Yeah, correct.

Correct.

So you had all that, you know, the whole world, and now you have a man shouting at a lion.

Yeah.

We've still got Gibraltar.

You do have that.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, we've still got the Falklands and a lot of penguins.

So, you know.

We're on the comeback trail with Brexit.

Are you familiar with Hexit?

Hexit.

So I only discovered it this week with local elections.

There is a London borough called Havering, which unlike most of London is quite right-leaning, very pro-Brexit.

And they have a movement to secede from London and become part of Essex.

Really?

From the little I know of your nation, right, it's not geographically very large.

Correct.

And within your United Kingdoms, you already have three or four different kingdoms.

You have Wales, you have Scotland, you have...

Yes.

So all that's left is for tiny provinces to secede.

Yeah.

And so there are more things you add to your flag.

Yeah, I mean, that is going to become complicated, isn't it?

When,

I mean, you look at the American flag, it's an absolute mess, isn't it?

Well, stars and stripes.

Well, for Argo.

So, yeah, I mean, I think fundamentally,

what Britain truly wants to be, and we're going to get onto this later, the famous old saying, An Englishman's home is his castle.

Correct.

So, essentially, that means that we all want to be our own independent state.

So, basically, we all need a flag with, I don't know how many different families there are in Britain.

20 million?

Yeah.

Is that a punt?

Yeah.

20 million tiny little pixels on it, each representing each independent constituent nation of the United Kingdom.

And you know, now that you're such a cosmopolitan nation, if everyone has their coat of arms, it'd be fabulous.

I would love to see the Patel family coat of arms.

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

This week, we are looking at home improvements.

Now, Anuvab.

Yes.

I've been obsessed by your home improvement programs because it just seems like that

British people love redoing homes.

Yes.

They move into a home and they immediately start getting uncomfortable.

Right.

And the TV presenter shows up and says, why don't you break down this wall?

And it seems like you also go into really ancient and medieval things.

Like you'll find an old church and then pitch that as a home to someone.

Like you're one step away from going to the Stonehenge with a bunch of home buyers and saying, imagine this with a flat screen T V,

a roof.

There seems to be a continuous home discomfort

with being settled in one's home.

Well, I mean, I think that also might explain some of the our imperial history that we've been discussing earlier on, in which we used to turn up and try and improve other people's homes on their behalf, very generously.

Yes, I mean, it is, it does, I think now there are home improvement programmes on British television now approximately 8,000 hours a week

if you include all all channels.

Anyway to mark this

we have a special bugle home unimprovement section looking at how well because moving house is one of the most stressful things you can do in life.

Yes.

Along with divorce, bereavement, presidency, invading Russia during winter, watching a particularly closely fought test match or reading below-the-line comments under an article about immigration.

And it is right up there with all of those things.

So really you want to avoid it rather than do it.

So we have some very handy tips now to reduce your chances of having to move house.

And the simplest way of doing this is by rendering your own property completely unsaleable.

And we're not talking about easy cosmetic stuff like a pile of used syringes on the front lawn or a mural of Mussolini in Flagrante with a Kawasaki motorpike on the front wall of your house.

No, we're talking about genuine value-destroying modifications that will render your property of significantly reduced financial value, including the ceiling cellar or seelar.

Why dig down when you can hang up?

Suspend a stone-walled wine cellar from the ceiling in your living room.

Keeps your wine at a well-regulated temperature.

Also means that your living room ceiling is now at effectively waist height, so you now have to crawl to your sofa or it will become known as the crouch couch.

And there are some modifications you can make, some new accessories you can get for your house.

No man's Landing.

Spice up the landing of your house, a traditionally overlooked part of your upstairs, by transforming it into a First World War-themed no man's landing, replete with barbed wire, clagging mud, and the ever-present threat of death.

It really helps you appreciate the sacrifice made by your forebears as you attempt to struggle to the bathroom for a tinkle in the middle of the night without getting snagged on the wire or stuck in the three feet of swamp-like filth.

Comes complete with optional robot sniper, suggested accessory, wipe-clean carpets for the rest of your house.

Also, the jacuzzo,

which is the new luxury home accessory, a hot bubbling bath pool with rare wild animals in it.

Guaranteed talking points at parties.

Also, educational as it can teach your children very, very quickly and extremely graphically about how Mother Nature's food chain works.

But, you know, a jacuzzo in your house, that's going to put off potential buyers.

Anyway, the point is, make your house worth less and the temptation to sell significantly removed.

I think, and even that house, given your housing market, will probably sell for a million million pounds.

Support for the bugle is brought to you by Simply Safe, home security done right, which is incredibly frustrating for me, having spent most of the last 10 years as a secret cat burglar.

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Top story this week, cheating news.

And there has been some glorious cheating in Indian education.

Now, it is a highly competitive country.

It's doubled in population size in, what, 30 years?

Yes.

Fundamentally, during the course of the cricketing career of Sachin Tendulka, one of the greatest cricketers of all time, the population of India doubled, more than doubled, in fact.

Which suggests that his batting really gave India the horn.

Good God, yeah.

And who can blame them for the purity of those drives?

Whatever motivates you.

Exactly, yeah.

I mean, it's, I think it makes him, I mean, just scientifically, you can prove he is the sexiest cricketer ever based on the number of new human beings that he has generated.

Correct, correct.

He's literally the father of the nation.

So, anyway, the point is, it's a competitive country to get ahead.

People will do anything, and particularly at school, I think it's, I mean, there is some heroic levels of cheating in Indian education.

Correct, Andy.

And I think you're specifically referring to an incident in a particular part of India where some students decided to staple some currency notes

to their answer papers as a means of connecting with their examiner.

Yes.

And Andy, you seem to have a small moral issue with this.

Whereas,

you know, where I'm from, you know, there is no no way to stand out among 5,000 examinees

by just your answers.

No.

Right?

No, that's fair.

So I think some ingenious students, and this is why entrepreneurship is thriving so well where I'm from, decided to put like a 500 rupee, thousand rupee note staple it along with a poem and a joke.

Because you may go to jail for that, Andy, but you will admit the examiner will remember you.

Well, that's got to make an impression.

I mean, also, I mean, it depends what the exam is in.

If you're writing an essay on the ethics of corporate taxation, that is possibly top marks, isn't it?

Just a basic bribery.

Correct.

And that's in that case, it's not even bribe.

It's evidence.

It's like a chemistry lab experiment where you're attaching it.

And Andy, do you not have that in your culture?

Like, I know you have Oxford-Cambridge entrance exams.

Do people...

Well, we do it in a more subtle British way in that we pay

tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of pounds for our children's education.

And it has it essentially exactly the same.

You know, if we just stapled all those banknotes, and I've benefited from this as much as anyone, to our exam papers, it would be a more open and honest way of showing how we do education in this country.

That's my question, Andy.

I mean,

is it inappropriate, do you think, if you're answering the thing on Macbeth,

you know, and you write your thing and you know that you're an idiot and your answer, it's horrendous.

Is it inappropriate in your culture to staple, say, a £500

note in 20s

and put it in the paper.

Okay, so rather than a £500 note which might not look particularly authentic.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean I guess it's,

you know, we live in a transactional economy.

Everything has its price.

And also bribery is, I mean, let's not get away from this.

It's a valuable life skill.

Thank you.

You know, from everyday simple bribes like slipping someone £2.50 over the counter in exchange for a surreptitious cup of coffee, no questions asked.

Yeah.

Apart from the question, do you want a muffin with that?

No.

No, I don't.

If I wanted a muffin, I would have asked for a muffin.

To right up the scale to major bribes such as, as discussed, corporate taxation or the entire lobbying industry.

These are valuable life skills that children need to learn and get on top of.

You know, I've always been impressed by cultures, Andy, where when you bribe stuff, things got done.

You know, one of the difficulties in the culture I live in is when you take away bribery, nothing gets done.

Right.

Because that would just be expecting the individual to do their job for the salary they're getting.

Right.

That makes it a very boring world, Andy.

Yes.

I cannot function in a system where there is not a parallel system.

So I don't know about your culture, but I suppose your students write the answers and then hope to get in.

Well, yes, I mean, we're not averse to the odd bit of cheating ourselves.

And there was a story this week about

prominent YouTubers.

Yes.

Which is, you know, people who

apparently earn huge amounts of money from advising children to cheat in their exams, apparently.

Excellent.

So, yeah,

it's each culture has its own different way of

doing it.

It was interesting as well that writing poems to examiners was a rather more kind of romantic way of

going about this, appealing to

their soul and their heart rather than their wallet.

I guess, I mean, it again depends on

what exactly you're writing, you know, what

exactly you're writing in that poem.

Yeah, some of them were romantic, indeed.

But some combined.

They had a poem, they had some jokes.

So they wanted to show the range of talents.

So they did not know what a differential equation was.

But they're like, you know, here's a limerick.

There was a man from Madras who had bulbs of grass.

Here's a thousand rupees.

And here's a joke.

You know, 12 people walked into a bar.

And

so I'm saying, isn't an examination...

The point of it is to show a range of who you are as a human being.

And also, I mean, again, I mean, this, what you've just said shows one of the issues India is facing in terms of overpopulation, that generally here it's a man walks into a bar and you've gone with 12 men walk into a bar.

Yeah, right there, right there.

It is crowded.

That's the mumbai version.

Correct.

A bars are larger, they have Italian names and you 12 people walk in right there.

Everything is bigger, Andy.

And, you know, this, this, I think this archaic system, honestly, of ethical exam taking.

Yeah.

You know, I think that it's boring for the examiners as well.

Well, it is.

And also, I mean, you look at the future.

what skills are our children going to need?

Yeah.

Everything's going to be done by robots, by computers, you know, knowledge.

No one can possibly be as knowledgeable as

even a medium-sized memory chip these days.

So teach them the skills they will need.

They're going to need mental flexibility.

They're going to need, you know, as you say, bribery.

Correct.

And most importantly, the element of surprise.

Yeah.

Because, say, if you're a GCSE examiner, you open a paper, I assume it's still done on paper.

Yeah.

Everybody else is just answers.

Right.

This guy's put in a small marsupial.

You have the attention.

There's the element of some

attention.

You have his full attention, Andy.

And that's what we're exploring, Adi.

This is why we are the future of the world.

We're exploring things that you've traditionally introduced to us, like exams in the English language and playing with it.

They're hoping that perhaps the examiner is a lonely, pathetic, underpaid individual in a small town in Uttar Pradesh.

And for a second, there'd be some glimmer of love

from an 18-year-old boy.

It's very Plato, actually.

It's very sort of, for a second, it's like, oh.

You've done very well to find so many positives in this story.

I'm impressed.

We're building a better world.

I think.

First, take off their clothes, put them in prison, fail them.

I think that's the way to go.

In other sort of related cheating news, a museum in France devoted to the little-known artist Etienne Terrous, who lived from 1857 to 1922, has reopened after an extensive refurbishment.

And having discovered that 82 out of the 140 works of art by Etienne Tirouse that it possessed in its world-leading Etienne Terrouse collection were, in fact, fake.

They were forgeries.

I mean, it suggests that the art forging industry is not

at its best.

I mean, why bother with Etienne Tirouse when you could be forging Van Gogh or Monet and earning the big bucks?

And I realize here in Britain we're not necessarily going to have too many museumic legs to stand on in terms of fake museums.

I went to the British Museum recently and there was literally almost nothing British in it at all.

I also went to the Museum of Forgery and I just didn't know whether or not to trust what I was seeing in it.

But

it's a wonderful effort from the people of southern France to bother faking so many pictures by this relatively little-known artist.

Correct.

So I guess it wasn't done by ATN, whatever.

It was probably done by a person called Jeff, who lives somewhere.

And here's the thing, though.

Again, here in the West, there's a lot of focus on genuine things being genuine.

Where I'm from, Andy, copying is an art.

So if you can create a counterfeit that's as beautiful as the thing, it's almost more valued when I'm from than the original piece of work.

In fact, many original artists have died penniless.

We do the same thing with medicines.

Some Western country will come up with some rubbish formula

after spending 30, 40 years researching.

Anyone can do that.

But we make millions of them for four rupees.

Now, what is the real art?

The real art is in the copying ending.

And I think that I'm disappointed in the museum that they're not celebrating the forger.

Right, so they should have chucked out the 58 real pictures.

Yeah, yeah.

And maybe the forger's done a better job.

So the original Etienne is just some rubbish human who just came up with the original thought.

But now the original thought is what is the value of original thought?

Yeah.

We're getting very philosophical now.

I bought a um in my local charity shop I bought a uh Cézanne picture for ten pounds.

Correct.

And uh uh it was a

it looked you know

reasonably decent quality to my untrained eye.

I spent ten pounds on the picture and I thought well just in case.

We do very occasionally hear these stories about people buying something for two quid and selling it for three hundred billion pounds later when it turns out that that uh Andy Warhol put his cock on it or something in the 1960s.

So I spent £10 on the picture and then £20 having it valued by an online art valuation website who confirmed that it was in fact not an original Cézanne, as suspected.

But I thought I couldn't put...

Yeah, I couldn't have it on our wall at home without nagging down, well, could it, you know.

Yeah.

Now you know confidently that you're down £27

and you have a fake on your your wall.

I think that that's.

But also, like, original stuff shows up.

Going back to the housing thing, didn't you guys have something where someone was digging their lawn and they found Richard III?

Oh, it was a car park in Leicester.

Right.

Yeah, they found

a king no longer in working order, fair to say,

after he cocked 100% negative injuries at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.

And he was discovered rather

inelegantly clonked to pieces underneath a car park.

Right.

in a home improvement effort, I think.

Oh, right, yeah, I forget that detail, yeah.

But then they found it was the authentic Richard III.

Yeah, it wasn't.

It wasn't

an imitation of Richard III.

Yeah, which was great.

And, you know, it's probably the most exciting thing that's happened in Leicester in,

I don't know, 50,000 years, I think.

Other than, of course, them winning the Premier League football title.

But it was interesting, actually, that they found the body of Richard III and then just a few short years later,

against the odds, won the Premier League.

So that just shows how amazing the British royal family is.

And also I'm fascinated by the

historians and the archaeologists whose job it is to confirm that is indeed Richard III.

I mean, they say that they have all this sonar technology now.

I wonder what they do.

I mean, because what Richard III things are around to prove that it was the guy?

I don't know how they did it.

Chris, can you remember?

Was it DNA?

They were able to identify that the body was from the exact time.

Yeah.

So, and then they also had a DNA test so they could check that it was definitely of his bloodline and that it died at the time they thought he died.

So like it's not 100% him.

It's just probably him.

Right.

Yeah.

Because they couldn't do what American crime shows do, which is have him lay on a table, you know, forensic thing, bring in relatives, remove the cloth and just ask if it's him right

they did also find a receipt in his pocket for uh

exchanging uh one kingdom for one horse

a bill of leading yeah this is a little uh little shakespeare joke for any fans of the bard

but andy in in the 1400s it wasn't a car park then was it i don't believe so if it was it it was a money-losing car park it was i mean there was always always space in it, to be fair, but.

I mean, Leicester's always been a car parker.

Thank you.

Thank you for that, Chris.

Let's move on to the Swedish faking one of their national dishes.

Yes.

The Swedish government has admitted that Swedish meatballs

do in fact go back to a recipe brought back by the Swedish king Charles XII from Turkey 300 years ago in the early 18th century.

So the Swedish meatball is a fake.

It is a cheat.

It's a cheating dish.

They nicked it from Turkey in the early 1700s.

And one of the things I hate about Scandinavians, Andy.

Oh, right.

Well, this is going out on an interesting group.

One of the things I dislike about Scandinavia.

Apart from their wildly successful economy and their high standard of living and their free education, national happiness ratings.

What else?

Apart from that, it's like a Monty Python.

Is there

this desire to not lie?

Because they actually,

this is a horrible thing, because they actually went in and said we would confess and say that Swedish meatballs came to us because Charles XII, one of their apparent kings, went to Turkey, ate it, brought it back, right?

And then...

And then essentially, all these years later, someone in the health ministry, for no apparent reason, was not comfortable with just living with the lie,

which to me is incomprehensible where I'm from.

Right, yeah, yeah.

I mean, you know,

for the longest time, if you guys had still been around for another 100 years, we would have claimed the beef wellington as ours.

Well, we claimed the chicken tiger masala.

As yours, yeah, as you should.

As you shouldn't.

Yeah, as you should.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it is odd, isn't it?

I mean, certainly, well, I mean, as I think we've probably discussed on the Bugle before, Britain as a nation does does not always confront its historic bloopers or apologise

for little procedural glitches that may have resulted in the starvation of millions of people or the pilfering of large diamonds.

Tiny bureaucracy.

So, yeah, I mean, Sweden is sharing too much.

Too much.

Who wanted to know?

We knew them as Swedish meats ball.

Now, is it going to be Istanbul meatballs?

But knowing the Swedish, they'll probably pay reparations for it.

You know what I mean?

Like,

you know, they'll I don't know what the Swedish national dish is, but they'll probably send over tons of it over to Ankara.

Yeah.

And why do that?

Why be?

Which is why I love this press release, because in The Guardian, it said the Swedish government came out and revealed this abruptly and for no immediate apparent reason.

Yeah, again, well, that's

again, testament maybe to a country where there's just not enough

important things happening that the government ends up, all right, right, what's next on the agenda?

We appear to be economically pretty stable.

Yeah, I mean, there's a few little things here and there related to immigration, inequality, whatever, but nothing we can't just back to one side.

It's a consumer-driven economy.

Oh, let's apologise for a 300-year-old meatball recipe.

Correct.

Correct.

And I think there was a Swedish person who said something like, I don't know how I can live with myself.

Yes, the older tweeting, my whole life has been a lie.

Yeah, yeah.

Andy.

There's always hidden victims in these things.

When there's a Mumbai monsoon, we were trying to do a podcast.

Yes.

And there was a chance of essentially the entire studio being flooded and us drowning.

That's when you say, I don't think I can live with myself.

Because I think the natural elements are against me.

Not when you have something like this, when you've just found out that the meatballs that will always be there may have originated in the Orient.

It's a tough time for Sweden.

All our thoughts are with our Swedish buglers as they come to terms with this shocking revelation.

Britain news now, and we've had a bit of a political upheaval here.

Now, I've been in New Zealand in the last week.

I've just flown back yesterday, and I'm flying out to America tomorrow.

So, I've not entirely kept on top of this story, but Amber Rodd, our Home Secretary, resigned after it became clear that she hadn't been as 110% truthful as we want our politicians to be.

And she claimed she wasn't aware of any immigration targets, despite having told the Prime Minister herself of her intention to increase deportations by 10%.

So I guess it's a semantic thing.

When does an intention become a target?

I mean, this could be dragged through the courts for

years.

I mean, I guess it also shows the danger of setting specific numerical targets.

And it would have been far better for Amber Rajis to set a vague thematic target of making Britain a full, heartless shit of a nation.

And that is much more measurable in many ways and achievable.

And she was going very much the right way about it, as we were, as discussed in the live bugle in Melbourne, sending British people back not home.

Yes, it was

bizarre.

But I have a question, Andy.

Everyone has targets.

People who have day jobs have targets.

And this lady had a target to achieve certain numbers.

And yes, it may have been better if her target said some people should leave at some point in time.

Yeah, but

keep it specific.

Yeah.

You know,

but she had numbers to achieve, right?

Could you, I don't know much about your system of government, but could you, for example, have done it like, you know, when you overbook an airline seat?

Yeah.

So clearly the Home Office feels there are too many people in Britain, right?

And they needed to achieve a certain number.

Could they go to the public and say, right, if you want to give up your seats,

and do you you think some of your people would be willing?

I mean, I don't just.

Well, yeah, I mean, quite a lot of people have already got off to Spain, haven't they?

I mean, certain former podcasters jumped ship and moved to America.

So, I mean, it's

some compensation, like a tiny amount, like say £600 and a voucher from Top Shop.

Yeah.

You know, something specific.

I mean,

that would be an absolute stampede towards every single airport in Britain for that, I think.

We are motivated by money, as proved by, for example, every single election campaign we've had in the last 25 years and more.

Also, there has been now, the government has apologised for

what it has done

in the Windrush case, people who've been living here for decades and decades.

Apologies a little bit belated, given that it was something that it would have been so easy not to do, you know, just to conduct yourself with a basic level of decorum and humanity as a government.

It's like saying sorry after baking someone's pet cat into their birthday cake.

It should never have reached that point.

The apology is too little, too late.

And I have a question about Andy, and it was similar to Eric when we talked about Brexit as well.

It seems like your government tries to take a thing that's not, no one's paying attention to or is not broken.

Yes.

And then somehow break it.

Yes.

Well, we've done that with electoral fraud as well.

In the local elections this week,

which resulted in not much of a major significance happening, both parties did okay after a fierce campaign that was fiercely fought within the parties as the Conservatives attacked the Conservatives and Labour attacked Labour fundamentally.

Yeah, basically a boxing match in which both fighters stood in opposite corners punching themselves in the balls.

Isn't democracy fun?

That's our parliament.

So to deal with the almost non-existent problem of electoral fraud in this country, they started making people

turn up with official ID.

And a lot of people who didn't have this were older people

who were then turned away from the polling station.

The turnout in our local elections is generally about 30%.

And if you turn up trying to vote in a local election and then are not allowed to, this is insanity.

If you turn up, you should automatically be allowed to vote as often as you want, just for showing the commitment to be asked.

Yeah.

One vote for your neighbor.

And electoral fraud was not a big thing in your country.

Almost negligible.

And I think this is a sad indictment of our culture.

Because to vote in the general election here,

basically, you just need to turn up and they have a list of everyone's name and you get a polling card, but you don't need to take it with you.

You can just

say, who are you?

And they cross your name off.

And you could basically just say, anyway, you just point, I'm Elsie from number 34.

And

electoral fraud in this country would have been a piece of cake and we haven't bothered with it.

Even with this open, I mean, do we not even care about our politics enough to commit basic entry-level fraud?

What kind of nation are we?

Correct.

Someone, you know, let me give you a small anecdote from a culture where we thrived on electoral fraud.

Now, of course, they have electronic voting machines, so very the whole it's very disappointing.

But when I was growing up in the 80s in Calcutta, I showed up to vote in my local municipal election and I met a local thug outside the polling booth and he said, Oh, yeah, he looked at my name and he said, Oh, you've you voted, and I said, Who voted for me?

And the thug said, I did.

But it's clear, something got done.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and and uh just shows commitment.

Yeah, and I signed my name, and he was there was sort of a veiled thread because he was a big guy, yeah, and he'd done it.

And I asked him, Who did I vote for?

Yeah,

and he told me who I voted for, and that's properly done.

Now, that's the thing, that's not a problem in your country, apparently.

Yeah, no, no, we just can't be bothered.

A leading British political party emailed the Bugle email address this week asking us to cast our vote.

Right.

But addressed as Dickwads.

Now, if you showed up to vote, you'd have to prove some idea that you were Mr.

Dickwad.

Or that you were a Dickwad.

Yeah.

I mean, that comes easy for some of us.

I mean, clearly, there is a flip side to this

in this era of the hostile environment.

And the new

Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, who's the son of immigrants himself, has pledged to end this whole idea of a hostile environment.

We'll see how that pans out.

But fundamentally, what the great mistake made by the people who are the victims of this heartless policy was that they were not

Russian oligarchs.

And if they'd only taken the trouble not to be

people who came from the Caribbean in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, but been dodgy billionaires from Siberia who'd stolen their nation's mineral wealth, they would have been fine.

Before we wrap up this week's Bugle, we have a special Bugle feature section quiz now.

And the quiz is all about the forthcoming Bugle live shows

around the world over the next few months.

Thanks enormously to everyone who came to see my solo shows and the live Bugle shows on my Southern Hemisphere tour.

They were a lot of fun for me and I do hope you as well, if you're in the audience back next year, all being well.

But now is the quiz on the forthcoming Bugle live shows.

Question: One: The Bugle will shortly be embarking on a three-city USA tour.

This is after the six-date Radiotopia tour, which begins on Monday, the 7th of May, to which a new date in Brooklyn on the 10th of May has been added.

All details at radiotopia.fm slash live.

Following the Radiotopia tour, the Bugle will have three live shows featuring the all-sibling brother and sister pair of Andy and Helen Zoltzmann.

Plus, via video link from across the Pacific, Alice Fraser, who is not related to either me or my sister.

Your question is, three of the following four American sports franchises are fictitious.

One is real.

The three fictitious ones are from the cities

that are about to host the Bugle Live.

The real one is not.

So spot the three fictitious franchises and you'll know where we'll be doing Bugle Live shows.

The four franchises are one,

the Dallas Cowboys.

Two, the San Francisco Schnitzel Flagellators three the Portland Meows and four the Seattle STDs

the Dallas Cowboys sounds like a lion

doesn't sound like a team at all well you're wrong in fact

pens down for question one San Francisco on the 15th of May Portland on the 17th Seattle on the 19th question two the Bugle Live will be taking part in two of the following six festivals this coming August which ones your options for the six festivals are?

Yes, I do.

The Junior Hells Angels Vroomvroom Kaboom Fest 2018, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, with dates on the 15th and 22nd of August,

the Baffin Island Summer Festival of Nocturnal Tropical Wildlife, which hopefully will have fewer fatalities than last year's version, Rosh Hashanah,

or the End of the Road Music Festival at the Llama Tree with a Bugle live show late on the Friday night, which I believe is the 31st, with Alice Fraser.

Alice and I will also be doing stand-up sets

on the comedy stage at that festival.

Of course, well, it's Edinburgh.

I mean, pens down, Edinburgh and the end of the road.

Rosheshana is in September, it's not in August.

You don't need to be a rocket

expert.

So just a rocket

Friday night at a music festival.

Yeah, it's about midnight as well.

It's going to be absolutely prime podcast territory.

Do come along if you're at the end of the road.

To accompanying music.

The Bugle is doing two live shows at London's Utterbelly later this summer.

They'll be taking place on which two of the following three celebrities beginning with Jay's birthdays?

A.

John Maynard Keynes, celebrity economist.

B Jesus Christ, alleged Messiah.

And C, American pop songstress Jessica Simpson.

Well, I mean, I'm sure you know their birthdays, don't you?

Of course.

Memorised.

I thought Jay-Z would be on this list as well.

No, he's not.

Jesus Christ, of course, famously born 25th of December.

Everyone knows that.

John Maynard, Keynes, 5th of June, Jessica Simpson, the 10th of July.

Thank you, Wikipedia.

Well, it is those

Keynes and Simpson bugle dates on the 5th of June and the 10th of July.

Also, a satirist for High World Cup special on the 5th of July.

Come to that too.

And finally, the final of these questions.

Question four.

The Bugle is taking a show to the Lowry Centre in Salford in October.

Sadly, L.S.

Lowry, the artist after whom the centre is named, will be unable to be a special guest at the show on the 7th of that month, as he sadly died in the year 1976 at the age of 88.

But if he was able to be a guest on that show, what would he probably spend the entire show doing?

A.

Puns about factories, chimneys and urban life.

Oh no.

B

painting pictures of stick people going about their daily business in an industrial landscape.

C, an oddly dispassionate striptease.

Or D, the kind of up-to-the-minute satirical commentary in which this podcast exclusively deals.

Well, C, obviously.

You know, you get a vision of your future and it's not great.

The answer is B.

He would just paint as his shtick.

Anyway, if you've got the answers to any or all of those questions right, you have won the right to buy a ticket at face value to any of those shows particularly uh the ones forthcoming in america uh the radiotopia live tour starts on monday in atlanta 7th of may then durham washington dc brooklyn on the 8th 9th and 10th new york city on the 12th boston on the 13th then the bugle live is in san francisco on the 15th portland on the 17th seattle on the 19th and the rest all details are on the website now chris is that correct thebuglepodcast.com click on the live link i made it we are joining the 20th century The late 20th century at last.

Annivab, it's been an absolute delight

having you on.

Do come and see our radio recording on the 23rd of May

at the Backyard Comedy Club in Bethnal Green.

Where we celebrate the deceit and treachery of empire.

Yeah, I mean, let's

celebrate

on both sides.

Yeah, look at that.

Thanks very much for coming.

Buglers, thank you for listening.

Until next time, 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.