Bugle 4057 – Britain in Crisis (Live!)

Oh there it is, the theme tune.

And that is now the official start of the show.

Hello buglers and welcome to the glamorous London area of London for the Bugle Live.

Please now welcome to the stage the all-time world record holder for most false claims to hold all-time world records.

It's the Balthazar of Bulchit Andy the truth mangler Zoltzmann.

Hello, Buglers!

Welcome!

Welcome to, welcome to The Bugle Live.

How are you all?

Good.

I do hope you're more specific than that when you go to see the doctor.

How are you feeling?

Boo!

So welcome, welcome to The Bugle Live.

This is doubling up as issue 4057 of the world's leading, longest running, most trustworthy, most unremittingly factual and only audio newspaper for a visual world.

Allow me to introduce myself.

I'm Andy Zoltzman.

I'm 43.

I like mealtime sports and not being dead.

And we are here in London on the 18th of January 2018.

The 18th of January, of course.

This makes it exactly 532 years to the day since the 18th of January 1486

which was of course Royal Wedding Day and

well a sensational day

there we go Henry VII

that's him shortly after treating Richard III like a giant pincushion and winning the Wars of the Roses before burying Tricky Dickie under a car park in Leicester and

That is him with his new lady wife this day 532 years ago Elizabeth of York And we take a look back now at what the newspapers that day were saying about the big royal wedding.

Headlines such as, What is Elizabeth of York wearing today?

What was Elizabeth of York wearing yesterday?

What might Elizabeth of York be wearing tomorrow?

How to do your hair like Elizabeth of York?

How Elizabeth of York became a style icon?

Fashion tips for how to make your gable hoods, that's the pointy little hat there.

Thank you, Wikipedia.

Affordable high street versions used for just three groats, using only a dead goat and a bit of fence.

Plus, how to avoid plague, like Elizabeth of York, how not to die in childhood, like Elizabeth of York, and Elizabeth of York, how an ordinary princess from Yorkshire grew up to become a porn in a high-stakes political power game, bringing an end to two and a half decades of brutal medieval internecine warfare.

So I'm not sure our press has particularly moved on.

In the meantime, when it comes to royal coverage, as always, some sections of the bugle are going straight.

Oh, lordy.

I will never ever get tired of that.

So, in the bin this week, well, as you may have seen, the Bayer Tapestry is coming to Britain.

Here it is.

Here's some of the classic highlights there.

And it's going to the British Museum apparently, which means that it's not going back when something...

When something goes to the British Museum,

one tapestry enters, no tapestries leave.

Of course,

we have a special feature section on the Bear Tapestry in the bin this week looking at what the Bear Tapestry was for.

No one knows what it was originally for.

Some historians think it was a picnic rug made for a very, very large family who liked having picnics while sitting side by side looking out over a cliff.

Another theory is that it was, in fact, at 68 meters long and

kind of that kind of width.

It was in fact the cover for three cricket pitches.

Another theory is that it was a decorative sorry for William the Conqueror's young daughter.

He ordered a 68 centimetre waist, but due to a misprint on the order form, it came in at 68 meters,

causing her considerable body image issues for the rest of her life.

The Bayer tapestry, well, for sceptics amongst you, the Bayer Travesty, more like.

68 meters of Euro trash, triumphalist, badly sewn propaganda

plus occasionally a man with his plonker out

about how the French basically cheated at Hastings we weren't ready

we weren't ready we'd fought Vikings two weeks before that

and King Harold was of course killed by a French archer who was clearly in an offside position when

The arrow was fired.

Ref, how could you not see that?

Possibly because the ref had also been shot in the eye with an arrow.

We'll never know.

A lot of violence in the the, as you can see here, a lot of violence.

Yeah, one night taking a dive there by the looks of that, not a lot of contact.

Also, some huge amounts of violence and occasional bits of gratuitous nudity.

It's almost like this tapestry was in fact commissioned by a 21st century TV commissioner who said, yeah, all this history shit is very interesting and all that, but let's have a bit more sex and a fk of a lot more death.

Also, should we be taking this tapestry?

There are only three women depicted in the entire 68-meter length of

tapestry.

And should we accept, in this day and age, this patriarchal overgrown handkerchief until it is more gender-diverse?

I mean, it's not the 11th century anymore, people, so not until Brexit goes through at any rate.

And then we'll get it back.

And then we'll add a couple more panels to it showing Bertie Brutsel, who's boss with Nigel Farage pulling the arrow out of King Harold's eye and throwing it back.

My great concern with the bear tapestry is, well, obviously, it's like the Trojan horse all over again.

As the old old saying goes, I fear the Greeks, especially when they're bearing gifts, and even more especially when they're French.

And clearly,

clearly, you look at this.

There's going to be a load of French soldiers stitched into that, aren't they?

And it's going to burst out in the middle of the night and ransack London.

Although it will be in the British Museum, so more likely they just get distracted by some really interesting Sumerian pottery.

And it's a two-way process, this, of course.

In return, Britain is set to lend to France as a gesture of gratitude the skeleton of a dead horse,

like for like,

Napoleon's favourite horse, Marengo,

which is French for main course.

And

it's

a little bit of casual culinary racism there.

Right, now it is time to introduce our two guests.

for this evening's bugle

in order of southernmost hemisphere of origin first.

Firstly, from Australia, it's Alice Fraser.

Hello Andy, hello Chris, hello buglers.

Hello Alice.

How are you?

I'm well thanks.

There we go.

That is.

For those of you listening at home, that is Alice's name with a shitload of flamingo.

F ⁇ k you.

and this is even worse.

Did you guys come in earlier today?

I had to run a gauntlet of illuminated flamingo light installation

art puppets which were arrayed outside the doors of this venue in what I can only consider a deeply personal and deliberate insult.

I think of it as a hate crime, frankly.

Despite my repeated assertions that I believe the valorization of the flamingo to be both a display of bad taste and boring, thoughtless, self-indulgent hipsterism, and a Barbie-based colour preference based on the relatively recent historical attribution of pinkness with qualities like femininity, childhood, and magic that borders on bird racism.

Like when you put the purely pink-based preference for these birds next to the reality that they are claw-footed monsters which suck mud, steal babies, and fly like a clumsy pterodactyl housewife wearing a cheap feather boa from Anne Summers.

Take that, flamingos.

The flamingo has just been birded by Alice Fraser, for those.

I always assumed that all flamingos were girls and that parrots were the boys, the blue ones.

Gender essentialism, Andy.

And now, from the northern hemisphere, on the bugle for the first time, one of the finest comedians in Britain, please give it up for Mark Steele!

Hello, Mark.

No animals for me?

No animals.

Well, no, but are there any animals you've got a particular personal beef with that Alice has with the f ⁇ ing flamingo?

Oh, no, you you can't be nasty about animals now can you well that's Attenborough's fault isn't it yeah

terrible names hate rabbits but you can't say that nowadays

they don't like it much either when you

family show Alice family show

different generation

the biotapestry there that see all of that something you're talking about there reminds me of how I was taught history and how wrong it is because the first thing that any of us, certainly adjuration, what you know, the first thing ever about history, when was the Battle of Hastings?

The first thing is when you get to school, eight, nine years old.

Come on, the important thing, when was the Battle of Hastings?

1066, when was the Battle of Hastings?

When was the Battle of Hastings?

Dates, dates, dates, as if that's the most important thing.

And of course, the least interesting thing about the Battle of Hastings is the date, isn't it?

All the fascinating things.

And I thought, you know what?

I bet even five years afterwards people couldn't remember, could they?

I bet in 1071 they're going, oh, it can't have been five years ago already.

Oh, no, it was 1068 when Ken got leprosy.

It must be.

That's a shit way to teach history.

If you told someone an amazing story, you know, oh, I was out in Australia and I went swimming, there was a shark, I presume there usually is.

Yeah, but when was it?

Was it August the 9th?

Was it October the 14th?

So if I'm following you correctly,

your assertion here is that we should take dates out of history?

No.

No, that isn't what I said.

I said it's not the most important thing.

So, right, it's time now, Chris, for top story this week.

And the top story this week, if you thought 1066 was bad, welcome to 2018.

Britain is in crisis.

Particularly the NHS,

which

we've struggled with generally in this country.

Who here likes the idea of not dying of the first significant illness they get?

Give us a cheer.

There we see the root of the problem.

That

means the NHS is more expensive than it was when people just accepted the death and illness that God gave them.

But

now we want to live as long as possible.

And that's cost.

Using the system.

Yeah, exactly.

So my personal view is that to get it, we needed three strikes in your out system.

You're allowed three goes on the NHS.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And you will see people will not waste their GP's time with the fing sniffles.

Yeah, with fucking.

Well, or even little heart attack, because that'd be a bit like the review system, wouldn't it?

In the test matches, you've got three goes, so you'd be like, oh, it's only a little heart attack, I don't want to waste one.

Tell you, save us a lot of money.

Jeremy Hunt there, he is talented, I believe.

I think of it, I mean a lot of them in the current cabinet aren't.

That is an immense talent he's got.

Because to make that many doctors and nurses that angry.

I mean, these are people who spend their entire professional adult lives just being calm under the most extreme circumstances.

They're trained for years to go, okay, yes, it does appear to to be quite a bad wound, but we will dress it.

Don't worry, Mr.

Simkins.

We'll look minister the nurse, will you, Minister?

It's going to be fine, okay, we're going to pull through if we could just go.

And he's got those people going, you fing bastard!

Come here, I'll fing swack your head in, you

I'll fing have you!

I'll fing have you!

I do apologise, that's very unprofessional.

Breathe in!

Breathe in!

That is a talent, isn't it?

People, the whole profession, he's known as angels, and he's got them hated.

That's genius, isn't it?

A lot of people say Jeremy Hunt has no qualifications for being health sex drink.

That's untrue.

I've done some research into the man.

He has some very relevant qualifications.

One, he used to run a business exporting marmalade to Japan.

What more do you fkers want?

Two, he once wrote a book calling for the abolition of the NHS.

Maybe not at all.

And three, he he once bought a stethoscope from a charity shop because he thought it was a shower fitting.

So there you go.

An article on the BBC has claimed that the NHS is, quote, hemorrhaging nurses, according to figures that show one in ten nurses are now leaving the NHS in England each year.

Then hemorrhaging, I like that choice of words, leaking away the number of people who can spell incorrectly define the word hemorrhaging, like blood out of an open metaphor.

Figures are showing one in ten nurses are leaving England each year in what could be called a decimation if they hadn't redefined the word decimation.

I mean if you use the word decimation you could save up the term hemorrhaging for the sick people who are now hemorrhaging internal fluids with increasingly inadequate assistance due to a now decimated nursing staff.

Lovely linguistic there, Alice.

I can't, I mean why is it that nurses are leaving the health service?

I mean it's almost as if the attractive package of having to work brutally long hours for fall money,

much of which you spend wiping the arses of nearly dead people whilst being used as a political football and routinely undervalued by politics and society, isn't attracting youngsters.

No.

I don't know why that is.

No, they're not.

They're leaving in huge numbers for reasons ranging from them being foreign and you know Brexit, to them getting better paid jobs in other parts of the medical sector or in other countries, to the fact that if you want people to behave like selfless heroes cleaning up other people's literal shit, you don't also want to be metaphorically shitting on them via bad pay and policy.

There is only so much shit a person can take

as you can.

That was Falling Apart, wasn't it?

There we go.

Your favourite.

So, also in Britain Falling Apart News, Carillion,

everyone's favourite construction company.

Sorry, sorry, sorry.

Thanks.

That's going to make no sense to people listening at home, Chris.

That's their problem.

These guys, they got it.

Just in the edit put that laugh after one of my jokes.

The second biggest construction firm in Britain has gone more belly up than Luciano Pavarotti swimming backstroke.

Boom.

Put the A into liquidation.

And it turns out that they have been spending

way too much money on projects.

And the interim CEO said, we were building a Rolls-Royce, but only getting paid to build a mini.

Now, I am not an economist, Mark, but that

seems, in layman's terms, unbelievably stupid, isn't it?

Well, I think with this, like, for, what, 30 years now,

really, the

governments,

including Labour, have just all the time, with anything, tried to argue everything has to be modernised.

We can't have services in this outdated way where the state runs them, it's got to be given to business.

Only business has got the wisdom and the discipline to be able to.

And so, you know, and it's and that's why it's all worked out brilliantly because now we've got efficient, marvellous people like Carilion who would never imagine, and the newspapers, I'm sure, they've been fairly sort of kind really to the Carilion people.

Whereas

if they find that Salford Council or something has like bought a packet of digestives that they lost, that's your money they're wasting!

So

I'm sure they're being equally fair.

And this is the thing, though,

for 30 years the idea has been nothing can work unless it's given to business.

Everything.

Lamp posts, they're inefficient, but you need little meters in them.

If they were given to business, and you'd have to put 5p in and it'd give you just enough light to get to the next one.

Why Why should one person pay for someone else's light?

I've got a torch.

They had quite a wide range of

jobs, Carillion.

Not only do they build stuff, they manage hospitals and prisons.

They do school meals, they look after homes for the Ministry of Defense, they build railway lines, football stadiums, and aviation projects.

They work in the oil and gas sector, local governments, financial services, and they clear snow off the roads in Canada.

Now, I know a thing or two about multitasking.

I can simultaneously look up a cricket statistic and

think about looking up another cricket statistic.

That is my.

It seems like they probably needed to learn to say, no, no, the snow can stay in Canada.

We've got to...

Well, yeah, I mean, because the sort of company that's going to lose a billion and a half quid,

it's a good job we haven't given them anything that important, really.

It's just

feeding kids and building stuff and drilling miles under the ground through our geological structure to get tons of explosive gas from beneath our land.

And

luckily, they've proved their efficiency, so I'm sure all that's gone well.

Well, I mean,

on the plus side,

they do have some core values.

One of which,

and not only that, but their core values are at the heart of everything they do.

And this is, according to no less a source than their own website.

Because they say a company can be financially successful and highly efficient, but it needs a heart too.

And that heart has currently been ripped out of their chest and has been smeared in the faces of their former employers.

So their values are we care, we achieve together, we improve, we deliver.

And we ignore profit warnings and go tits up, despite having billions of pounds worth of contracts.

No, I think it's about time we laid the bugle values out, our bugle mission statement.

We are full of shit.

We believe the world is also full of shit and that we can contribute to to it being even more full of shit.

We're generally a bit behind schedule and we deliver.

And I actually did literally deliver my own child in my own bathroom to that.

That is a value.

We talked a little bit about Toby Young on the bugle last week,

everyone's favorite pillar of the nation.

Now, Mark, you have had a bit of a

clash of the British title.

We get on well.

Right.

Well, this is, I mean, I think, in a way,

I felt sorry for the Conservatives, really, getting lumbered with him because they couldn't have known what he was like.

Because

on the face of it, he's such a warm-hearted, knowledgeable, intelligent sort of chap.

And also, all the things that got him into trouble, all the tweets and so on, they were just private little things that there was no access to.

You wouldn't have known about it unless you had access to Twitter or a newspaper.

And

46,000 of these tweets that he deleted that were saying things like, Look at the tits on that, great tits on that, she's got great tits for an 18-year-old, and things like that.

And then, but this is why it's gone too far now.

If you can't say 46,000 things about tits that you later regret

publicly on Twitter, you can't say anything anymore.

PC gone mad.

Yeah, so it is.

And so

I do feel for the Conservatives because, you know, it is always the people you least expect that turn out to be slightly

sexist.

And one of the things he wrote, he wrote an article.

That's the sort of thing when they're saying, but, well, all right, some of these things are quite...

One of the articles he wrote was about the nuisance of wheelchair ramps in school.

You've got to admire somebody who gets angry.

Look, the bloody wheelchair people have got a ramp they can get down.

Oh, what about the silent majority who've managed to learn to walk?

We don't need a ramp, we might prefer a step.

I know we can go down the ramp as well, but what if I prefer a step?

And I know there is still a step, but it's right the way over there.

Why should I have to walk over there for a step just so this wheelie can get down a ramp?

We could edit that to make Mark look really bad.

Then he'd actually be like, Mark, at last you've seen the light.

So

about a year ago, right, there's a film that I'm sure some of you have seen, Daniel Blake, around about a bloke who's had a heart attack and he tries to get disability benefit and he can't and it's all disastrous.

And then Toby Young wrote this big article about it saying that for me, he said,

he said, although I don't know anybody who's tried to claim disability benefit, for me the film is nonsense because the things that happen in it just don't ring true.

That was his phrase.

And I thought that's a marvellous attitude to have, to be able to write in newspapers that something that has been the result of years of research and hundreds of people looking into it.

Yeah, but I just, it doesn't ring true for me.

So therefore, what you've said is bollocks.

And I thought, well, that'd be a really good...

sort of weekly television chat show that he should have, Toby Young, where he could interview people.

It could be Toby doesn't ring true.

He could have Ellen MacArthur on there and tell her she's talking shit about sailing around the world because although you've done it, I thought about it once while I was having a shave so it just doesn't ring true.

And he could have like, he could

tell Raheem Sterling and Stormsey what it's like to be black in modern Britain.

He could have Stephen Hawking on there and say, oh, you don't know.

It doesn't ring true any of your shit.

I know what it's like to spend all the time looking at stars.

And then he could moan at him for saying that, look, look now we've had to build a ramp for the so you could get in there.

And Toby I got very so I wrote this in an article and he got very cross about it and then he put on Twitter, I don't know if it's one of the 46,000 is deleted.

He put on Twitter a little while ago that the BBC, I should never be allowed on the BBC because I support regimes that have killed 110 million people.

And I was fascinated.

And now this, I thought, to be picky, I'm going to be picky here and ask how he came to that conclusion.

Because

I know you could easily brush it off if it was just 105 million.

There's that crucial tipping point.

It's around about 107 marks.

I don't know.

And I said to him, look, I don't mean to be rude, but, you know, can you have any, have you got anything to back this up at all?

Because I'm a bit touchy about...

Not even that.

Giva, that even leaves genocide in its way, doesn't it?

So I thought, oh, can we just say anything?

Can I say, well, you should never be on the BBC because you support invasions by the Daleks?

You just make up whatever shit you like.

That's why he's so worried about the ramps, clearly.

Yeah,

there's no topping that, is there?

You've ruined everything.

Who put these here?

So,

I mean, maybe he's including people who've died of old age in

the world.

Yeah, I don't know.

I don't know, but I did ask.

I mean, he has not got back to me yet, but maybe he's writing down all their individual names.

I don't like, I'm just honestly, I don't like Joseph Stalin.

I'm just going to lay that out there.

The bugle does not endorse Stalinist politics.

But if I had to choose between going on a dinner date with Joseph Stalin or not going on a dinner date with Joseph Stalin, I would choose the dinner date, but only because A, I like food.

B, I'll probably get a decent 10-minute stand-up routine out of it.

C, I know Stalin reacts badly to rejection.

And

I really want to see my family again.

D, because I want some explanations for that crazy shit he did.

I reckon if I'll loosen him up with a couple of bottles of wine, it all might all come flooding out.

Probably something to do with his mother not loving him.

And also, above all, E,

I want to see how he reacted when I ordered the most expensive bottle of fizzy French wine on the menu and then insisted that we split the bill equally between us,

just so I could use the term champagne socialist without a hint of irony.

Well,

I started wondering with him that

he's just because he runs schools and that, didn't he?

This was he ran a free school and

what the Conservatives did was that they wanted to put him on this board that was going to look after universities or sort of assess universities.

But that's a, I don't know, it'd make them interesting, wouldn't it, if there was that, if there was that loose with facts that you could just shout whatever you like and it doesn't matter and score, because it would liberate in them a way.

They could teach things like a fridge is a type of aeroplane, and the Second World War started because Hitler wanted to marry Dame Judy Dench, and she wouldn't let him.

And you could just

be restricted from all this bollocks where you have to say things that have got some vague connection with the truth.

That's what faith schools are for, isn't it?

Don't worry, I'm already going to burn in hell.

You can't, you cannot add to eternity.

In human ingenuity news now,

since the dawn of time, man's insatiable curiosity and desire for exploration has driven human technology, but also mainly sex.

From fire, which derived from people rubbing two dry penises together until

until it got too dark to see what they were doing and they had to invent fire.

That is why the Bible came down so hard on homosexuality.

It's basic health and safety.

It's like not eating shellfish.

To the wheel,

to weapons,

fashion, and literature,

we have been motivated by the desire mainly to put our bits in things and have other things put into us.

One of my annual favourite rituals, apart from watching the strongman competition and explaining the relationship between Buddhist philosophy and capitalist consumerism at Christmas,

is

in the world.

I am.

I love to read the annual roundup of human home science and intrepid ingenuity, known as What Doctors and Nurses Got Out of People's Butts This Year.

It's a list whose origins have been lost in the mists of time since the first caveman looked speculatively at a phallic vegetable and thought, ooh, why not?

This year, among a cascade of exciting instruments of self-exploration I have extracted with great effort a few.

My favorite among the selected year of 2017 are two red apples

for the person who wants to get creative about their fiver day.

Sorry, whole apples.

Whole apples.

Not just a core.

Red apples, not even peeled.

I think they've taken some sort of guidelines about fiver in completely the wrong direction.

Another favourite of mine is a 19cm long eggplant.

For somebody who has watched too much Japanese pornography or takes suggestive emoji too literally.

A powered up and vibrating mobile phone.

Which could be a sexual thing or it could just be that your partner's gotten sick of you being constantly on your social media and decided to make good on some graphic threats in in the middle of date-night dinner.

A pair of house keys.

They're always in the last place you look.

Because there is all

thanks for stepping on my punchline, Andy.

Because

there is always more than one way to unlock a man's heart.

And a pair of barbecue tongs

which were sent in by the experimenter in order to receive an earlier attempted insertion.

Oh, so then what was sent in to get them?

It could be like the old woman who swallowed a fly, couldn't it?

Exactly.

Well, they keep.

The army up there now.

They take all the fun out of fairy tales these days.

Honourable mentions go to a cat food can, three AA batteries, two AAA batteries and a D battery.

and one into the penis of a coaxial cable.

That's taking virtual sex one step too far.

And that is this year in Up the Butt.

Isn't that kind of stuff that makes you such a good like-for-like replacement for John Oliver?

That's bullshit.

Right, tongues.

Tongues.

Oh, God.

There's probably someone in here going, oh, I've only ever put a tin of sardines and some ping pong balls up there.

I'm quite conservative.

I mean, the surprising thing mainly is how many of them believe that doctors and nurses will believe just I accidentally sat down suddenly

as an excuse.

I was having having a barbecue up my arm.

How are we doing for time, Chris?

We're not like in the worst state we've ever been in.

Okay.

We need to move on to the sports section now.

I mean, it's not a classic punchline, but thanks for the laugh.

Well, let's start with the Australian Open Tennis.

Players have been once again struggling in the heat, brutal heat, in

Melbourne.

Get used to it, mate.

Right.

It's coming for you.

Or is it?

That is the future.

The world number 83 necromancia Planchez Milib of Tenezuela

retired with heat stroke after hallucinating that she was a roast potato and dousing herself in gravy at the end of the second set against world number 82 Krolopina Granichenko,

who herself was accused of wasting time by doing a penguin impression before each serve.

The Ukrainiko-Beloroshi star explained, I was trying to mentally convince myself that it was really cold out there.

Whilst on the men's side, World No.

83, Rumbustian Flout of Australia, despite losing it completely in the punishing sun and demanding he be paid in Bitcoin.

Well, he got through anyway after his opponent, World No.

82, Panicus Puebb, from one of the Americas,

claimed that the extreme heat had caused him to change gender, like he'd heard about a lizard doing in a TV documentary.

She now joins the women's draw for the third round under her new name of Ethel Pwebb.

Organisers room to be considering a new heat rule whereby once the on-court temperature exceeds 50 degrees Celsius, players will no longer have to use their rackets and tennis balls and instead just stand in the middle of the court slowly baking until one of them gives up and a winner is declared.

The

tournament, the Australian Open organiser, Larakin in a Cork hat, she

Miss Miss Corkhat explained it's not fair for the players to have to play tennis in such stifling heat, but enduring dangerous potentially lethal temperatures is what the Australian Open is now all about.

We want to see athletes literally melt until at least one player is reduced to a simmering pool of oddly coloured gill on the baseline.

We don't consider this tournament to have been a success.

So, um

oh, tennis,

the authorities defended making players play on in such brutal temperatures.

The tournament director, Grice Bubbrill, explained, if we ever have to play Venus or Mercury in an interplanetary tournament, we're going to need players who don't wimp out the first sign of their internal organs literally cooking inside them.

Besides, tennis didn't start climate change, so why should we be the first one to cave into its demands?

Look, Andy, if you didn't want to play a pointless sport in like insane heat, you shouldn't have colonised Australia in the first place.

Good point, to be fair.

If only someone had told us that in

1770, when was it 177?

The date doesn't really matter.

Classic!

Well, in fact, it was

well it was

Captain, I've got a little Captain Cook fact for you here.

He was became on this day in the year, hang on, let me just get the, I've got to have an actual

1778, 18th of January, Cook became the first European to discover Hawaii.

And there was an alert message sent in

saying

European colonization threat inbound to Hawaii, seek immediate smallpox inoculation and hide museumable artefacts.

This is not a drill.

It's

Winter Olympics imminent and as you know the bugle is now an absolutely key part of the British Winter Olympic bid.

Thanks to Axel Brown, the member of the British

Bob Slay squad, who emailed us in a couple of weeks ago.

And he he has, well, he demanded that we cover the Winter Olympics in a specific form.

Now, I had a friend who was into winter sports.

I had a friend who was into winter sports, but he's very intolerant of haircuts.

Even suggested judicial punishments for people who had specific styles of haircut.

He said to me, fringe, imprison.

Buzz cut, exile to a penal colony.

Cornrows, torture.

Bob, slay.

Boom.

Sorry, Mark, for what you're about to witness.

Can only apologise.

For his training, he had a flock of birds to chase down bumpy hills that he'd named after Britain's greatest long-distance runner, Mo Farrah.

He called them his Mo gulls.

He was Jewish, my friend.

Always pleased to see me as a fellow member of God's chosen people and greeted me very enthusiastically whenever the winter sports season was on.

Gave me a giant sharlom.

On his long training expeditions, he would spend a lot of time

thinking about the market value of the planets in the solar system.

If I was trading shares in planets, Andy, he said, I would hang on to Jupiter, I would sell Mars short, and buy Earth long.

Buy Earth long, buy Earth long, buy Earth long.

Anyway, like many sports stars, he had a lucky toy, little dollar Bill Clinton's wife, made of soft feathers.

That's nice, I said.

Yeah, he said, it's my downhillery.

You're right, that's the appropriate response to that.

I could have done a lot better.

He got a horrible injury, though.

He was practicing naked to try and toughen himself up for the Winter Olympics.

So he scraped his private parts on the tarmac.

And when he was in pain, he adopted this kind of strange Geordie accent.

And I remember him saying to me after he'd had this horrible,

horrible scraping genital injury, Andy, I've got nordickskiing left.

Nordic skiing.

Come on, Nordic skiing.

It's all the cross-country stuff.

I mean, for effort, if not achievement, that deserved something.

Anyway, I took him out for dinner.

You're a fjord to make that kind of joke.

I took him out for dinner.

He said, I'll have a minestrone, a massive portion of cabbage with mayonnaise, and the meat special of the day, please.

And the waiter said, okay, soup, a giant slaw lamb, super, super giant slaw lamb, super nice.

Do you want them combined?

He said.

That's a niche event, anyway.

No, I'll cook myself, he said.

I can't take the risk of my food being contaminated.

I'm a professional athlete.

He brought his own equipment.

He brought his own heavy-based frying pan.

He said, I'll put my skillet on.

Let's get the skillet on.

Right, we'll just do a, I think I'll edit some of them out.

But anyway, he was obsessed,

he was strangely obsessed, my mate, with the sexuality of leading figures from history.

He kept a load of evidence, proof, he said, that the Venerable Bed, the 8th century monk known as the Father of English history, was in fact homosexual.

He kept all the paperwork in a special secure metal box that he called his Beadsgate in.

His Speedsgating.

He even wrote a song about it.

It was only one minute, 45 seconds long.

It was a short track.

Anyway,

some of these people are are really not enjoying it here today.

See, guy down the front, he's curling up into a ball.

These people down here, they're not liking it.

One person down here rejecting it, another person looks like he thinks it's tedious.

This woman, she's angry.

They look along the faces.

One face says no, then bored, that's no, bored, cross.

This guy's borderline delirious.

His nose is twitching, his eyes dancing.

In this

in

his In his eye sockets.

Alice.

You're going to have to jump in here.

We need a good joke.

That's key.

Jump in if you can.

Oh, come on, people.

Come on.

I've suffered as much as you did.

If you don't do something now, I'm going to lose the crowd.

Well,

I think the British Bob Slay squad might just have lost all its support.

F you, Axel.

Right.

All of them.

Yeah, Dunmark.

Yeah, I was pretty.

I missed out a couple of sports, but it's, I mean, to a degree, I mean, the most, I think, I don't know what the record number of puns in.

I did all American Presidents in reverse chronological order once.

I mean, look, Andy, your puns are like the Winter Olympics in that

the person participating in them thinks they're important and good.

Yeah, but still, even people who don't like them have to admire the effort and dedication that's gone into the preparation.

The Winter Olympics should just be called 115 different ways of sliding, shouldn't it?

And now down a load of snow on a biscuit tray.

Now on a lawnmower.

Yay, gravity!

Gravity and ice.

Great double act in the 1930s.

Right, I think that's us pretty much done, isn't it, Chris?

Yes.

Great.

No doubt about that.

We are, in fact, over our contractually obliged time

by about seven minutes.

So if you can discount the least funny seven minutes of the show, whatever that may be.

Whatever that may be.

Here we go.

It's been an absolute delight talking to you.

Please show your appreciation for our wonderful guests tonight.

Mark Steele on Bugle debut, Treet Davimir and Alice Fraser.

Chris the producer, thank you for coming.

We'll be back next week.

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.