Bugle 196 – Jubilee Special

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The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world

Hello buglers and welcome to issue 196 of The Bugle, the official podcast of the London 2012 Olympics.

Hang on.

Did we ever actually sign that deal?

We didn't?

What?

Does that mean I'm not lighting the Olympic flame at the opening ceremony?

And I don't get to piggyback on you, Saint Bolter in the 200m in an exclusive live bugle commentary.

Oh, balls.

Balls.

Never mind.

I'll be back in London in another 64 years.

I'm Andy Zaltzmann, captain of the British Olympic water polo team.

What are you looking at me like that for?

Not that as well.

Never delegate, people.

I'm live in London 2012 and joining me from New York City.

It's a place.

Three words.

First words, one syllable.

Sounds like...

Oh no, hang on, I've already told you the answer.

It's the hipster quipster, John Oliver.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, buglers.

Andy, New York is, to put it mildly, a city of lunatics.

I believe that was the official state motto until they decided that calling it the Empire State might have less tourists cowering in fear in their hotel rooms.

But it doesn't change the fact that this city is full of crazy people.

That's a well-established fact.

I believe believe that the Statue of Liberty has engraved on its base, give me your tired, you're poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free, and also give me your bat shit nutcages, because I've got a feeling that this city's going to be awesome one day.

Now, my walk to work at times can feel like a walk through David Lynch's imagination, but

there was one snippet of conversation I overheard this week that was particularly wonderful.

An extremely drunk man, and this is a very drunk man at 8.30 in the morning, Andy.

That's a special kind of drunk, Was being held up against a wall by a police officer, and there was clearly a loud exchange going on back and forth between them.

And as I walked past them, I distinctly heard the drunk man blurt out, well,

I beg to differ.

And I don't know what they were talking about, but in that moment, it really felt like the drunk man had won that argument.

Because if you could be that drunk, that early, and still be that articulate, I think you should be allowed to go on your way in peace.

It appears we're in an ideological impasse, Ossipher.

So So I shall merely say good day to you, sir.

I said good day.

Seizing the moral high ground before vomiting up the side of a tour bus.

And the point is, when Billy Joel wrote, I'm in a New York state of mind, what he actually meant was, I think I'm about to take a shit on a subway car.

Yep, play it backwards, you'll see exactly what John means.

So as always, a section of the bugle is going straight in the bin this week.

A cynicism section to help guide you through through the rest of 2012, including the Olympics, Glorified Egg and Spoon Race, Jubilee, Tea Party for Simpletons, Ad-American Election, Champastiche of Democracy, largely decided in the early 19th century.

Oh, hang on, I've got that mixed up with the realism section.

Or was that comment itself part of the cynicism section?

I don't know, but it was rubbish anyway.

That comment, hang on, anyway.

Bugle 196.

Now, more bugles, John, than plagues that God had lined up for the Egyptians in the Old Testament.

Only got as far as 10.

He had some absolute doozies lined up, including the plague of slightly undercooked peanuts.

And that's the end of the intro.

So I just realised I didn't really have an end to that bit.

Big finish, Andy.

Big finish.

Big finish.

Like the women's javelin competition of the 1983 World Athletics Championship.

won by a large Finnish lady with the final throw at the finish of the competition.

That worked on two levels.

Okay, stop, Andy.

Let's get this bugle started.

started.

Top story this week.

Obama is killing it.

Stop, John.

I'm going to have to stop you there.

There is an even more important story than that because last Saturday, Harlequins became rugby champions of England.

It's arguably the greatest day in the history of this nation.

At least since the Germans admitted we had them pinned in checkmate in 1945.

Maybe even the greatest day since little William Shakespeare first picked up a pencil and said, Mummy, what the fk is this?

As the multi-pastel shaded heroes claim their glorious birthright on the holy sword of Twickenham with a display of rugby that even Jesus at his best would have struggled to match.

And it sent this half of the bugle noisily berserk and made his children say, What's happened to Daddy?

And I also think Johnny sent a message to the world that all is not lost as the joyous scenes were beamed around the world to a global T V audience estimated between 700 billion and

1 trillion people.

Warring factions in the world's leading troublespots laid down their arms, embraced and said Bob Dylan was right.

You'll not see nothing like the mighty Quinns and around the Middle East.

The sound of gunfire was replaced with the sound of rugby commentary as rival sides jointly realise that anything is possible if you put your mind to it and have a productive academy system topped off with a front rack former New Zealand fly-half.

That's basically a quarterback for our American listeners.

So that was it, John.

Harlequins, the team described by the former American President Abraham Lincoln as the last best hope of earth, delivered a message of universal redemption through a ceaseless communal striving for perfection, a message which surely now supersedes the teachings of the retired Messiah Jesus, the pro-celebrity Empire Smash Mahatma Gandhi, and the Nobel award-winning philosopher Richie Benno, and set an example that will truly save this planet from oblivion or worse, helped admittedly by a couple of questionable refereeing decisions.

Thanks be to the Quinns.

Amen.

Sorry, John, you were saying.

Is that out of your system now, Andy?

I believe so.

Or is that likely to bubble up again later?

I believe so.

I believe that's done.

what a day though john rugby was the winner andy rugby and the quins

top story this week obama is killing it right now and by it i mean people obama is killing people right now

Andy had emerged this week that President Obama personally oversees a kill list of insurgents who could be taken out with drone strikes if the opportunity arises.

And look, we've all got a kill list.

And

married couples often each draw up a list of the names of five people that they'd love to murder if they get the opportunity, without the other partner getting angry or turning them into the police.

It's the backbone of a healthy marriage.

You're allowed to kill Jessica Simpson if I'm allowed to kill Tom Brady.

Okay, deal.

Now, the fact...

The fact that the president has a lot of...

That's a little snippet from John's speech at his own wedding.

I just wanted, there was just one of the contractual contractual terms that needed to be going over before that final bullet was played.

The fact that the president has this list isn't as surprising as the details that come with it.

The New York Times reported that there is a secret nominations process to designate terrorists for kill or capture by drones during high-level discussions.

And first, let's be clear.

kill or capture.

Now, you might think, kill or capture, how the f ⁇ does that work?

How do you capture an insurgent with an unmanned drone of thousands of feet up in the sky?

Well, what happens is this: the belly of the drone opens up and a fairground grabber comes out and reaches down to try and scoop up the insurgents in its claw.

Unfortunately, the insurgents have now got wise to this and they've been covering themselves in butter so that they just slip out of the claw just as it's tantalizingly close to lifting them off the ground.

The US military usually tries a few times before getting frustrated and just launching hellfire missiles at those pesky buttering insurgents instead.

Do they not also have some magnetic ones as well that just try and hope that the insurgents are wearing 19th century style German helmets?

That's right.

The point is they've exhausted all the options before just raining the pain down upon them.

And this system really makes everything a lot easier because not only are you killing people with an almost chilling video game type ease, but you're also managing to reduce the figures of taking prisoners to Guantanamo as you're not taking any prisoners at all.

Only one prisoner has been taken into American custody under President Obama.

The rest have been very conveniently vaporized.

And apparently the president has insisted on approving every new name on the kill list, poring over the terrorist suspects' biographies on what one official called the baseball cards of an unconventional war.

And they really are baseball cards, Andy.

I've got a few of them here.

They have a picture of the terrorist on the front and some of their statistics on the back.

So here's one.

This is Abdullah Rafiq.

It says it's his rookie year in the Global Jihad.

His numbers are pretty good, Andy.

He has a hate the West percentage of 84%.

That's very promising.

He's launched five ambushes on international forces.

Two of them have been successful.

But believe me, batting anything over 300 in that category could be Hall of Fame numbers.

Here's a little personal information about him, too.

He likes dinner with friends, long mountain walks, and the song I'm Sexy Not Know It by LMFAO.

What is it about that song, Andy?

Everyone seems to like it.

Well, this system's been in use ever since, of course, the FBI bumped off Babe Ruth in the late 1940s.

And on the current set of cards, you've got Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al-Qaeda head honcho at the moment, Osama bin Laden, I knew it was all a hoax, and Derek Jeter, which is a possible logistical mix-up, but possibly not.

I guess we will have to wait and see for history to be the judge on that.

But it has to be said, John, that America does have a pretty checkered records of assassinations that that makes you think this baseball card system is potentially risky.

Of course, it has succeeded with Salmon Bin Laden, John F.

Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, Che Guevara, Shergar, Mother Teresa, Lenny Bruce, Buddy Holly, and Jesus.

But failed with Fidel Castro, Colonel Gaddafi for a long time at least, Kim Kardashian, Jesus, second time around, Barry Bonds, the Queen Mother, Bill O'Reilly, Rick Morales, Mikole Gorbachev, and E.T.

So it's a hit and miss at best.

I think the kill list must carry some real sway in the terrorism world though, Andy.

It's like a Forbes list of f ⁇ kwits, a who's who of huge arseholes.

If you're not on that list, you're nobody, Andy.

And yet, any terrorist who is considered but doesn't make the kill list should not feel too bad about it.

It is an honor just to be nominated.

And they should know that they are still monstrous dickbags, whatever that panel says.

Besides, those awards are always political, Andy.

So often it's who you know, not what you've done.

Well, also, you know, it's not all about awards, is it?

They should be being dickbags just for the sake of being dickbags.

Awards and places on these lists, they're just a little bonus.

There's only one thing that could make this secret presidential kill list more chilling, Andy, and that's if it was actually a secret presidential f marry kill list along the rules of the f marry kill game where you have three names and those three actions and you have to decide who gets what.

One of Obama's lists had the names Bin Laden, Newt Gingrich and Silvio Berlusconi on it.

It looks like he chose to kill bin Laden.

He probably had sex with Silvio Berlusconi, which would put him in a group that includes 64% of the world's population, which only leaves one thing, and that is that we might be about to have a new Mrs.

Gingrich on our hands in the future.

Oh, President Obama, you're about to become the least happy woman in the world.

There's also a big controversy that Obama has embraced a method of counting civilian casualties that counts all military-age males in the strike zone as combatants, unless there is explicit intelligence proving them innocent posthumously.

Well, that seems to be the key word in that sentence, John.

Shoot first, deflect questions later.

In the old traditions of U.S.

justice, no smoke without fire.

And of course, let's not forget a posthumous exoneration is very much more satisfying than an exoneration granted when you're alive.

You can be even more smug about it.

And incidentally, for those of you not familiar with it, posthumous is a Greek word for main course.

Thank you.

It is somewhere.

It's a pretty impressive.

It is some pretty impressive semantic witchcraft that the administration have been doing.

By effectively counting all these males as a competence, it's essentially a cup and ball morality game.

Where's the innocent civilian?

Is it under this cuff?

No, there's nothing there.

Better luck next time.

Their argument seems to be that al-Qaeda is generally a paranoid organisation who don't like to be around strangers.

So if you're around someone who's up to no good, you're probably up to no good as well yourself.

And the New York Times report showed that there's actually high-level discussions around this particular logic as well.

And I quote, participants do not hesitate to call out a challenge, pressing for the evidence behind accusations of ties to al-Qaeda.

What's an al-Qaeda facilitator?

asked one participant, illustrating the spirit of the exchanges.

If I open a gate and you drive through it, am I a facilitator?

And I guess, I mean, mean, it's complicated, Andy, but what this essentially means is that we must all teach our children in the future that it is just not worth holding the door open for anyone anymore.

It's just too dangerous.

That person could possibly be an insurgent.

You just can't know for sure.

Chivalry has essentially become aiding and abetting terrorists now.

That is what you should say to your wife, Andy, when you let the door swing back and hit her in the face.

I'm sorry, honey, but I need guarantees that you will renounce the global jihad.

Well, as you said,

the basic attitude is that people in any area of known terrorist activity are, as you say, probably up to no good.

One anonymous official was quoted saying, innocent neighbours don't hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs.

So the basic American philosophy is if it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck, shits on your car like a duck, and tastes damn good with some plum sauce wrapped in a pancake, it's a f ⁇ ing duck.

And the thing next to it is probably a duck too, even if it looks like a chicken and is actually better fried up with cashew nuts and yellow bean sauce.

It does suggest that Barak Obama must be an absolute nightmare when he does the family shop.

So Barak, love, did you get everything I need for my Nissois salad?

Yes, I did, Mickey Moo.

I sure did.

Here you go.

Tin of tuna fish.

Oh, Barack, that's a can of baked beans.

Well, they were in the same aisle.

And here's some eggs for you to boil up.

Thanks, my darling Elvis President.

Oh,

hang on.

Those aren't eggs.

Those are crystal wine glasses.

Well, they came in a box, like eggs do, and they're eggs.

With a glass stemming around base, love.

Okay, Funka Trong.

They're shaped like girl eggs, not boy eggs.

I suppose you bought some little potatoes for me, did you?

Yes, here they are.

I'll pop them straight in the bowl.

Those are bullets, Barrack.

Well, you can fit them in your pocket, like bullets, and fire them out of a gun, like potatoes.

What are you complaining about?

Has my range of accents coming on?

Pretty good.

I didn't think I'd go for the fuller bomber.

Hmm.

Seemed a bit

risky.

A little risky, Addy.

You do a good one though, don't you?

You're a baseball.

Well, let's leave that as a hypothetical.

Syria update now.

And there are currently doctors all over the world holding up maps of Syria like x-rays, looking at them and saying, oh, shit, this does not look good.

Somebody paid the hospital chaplain.

The Syrian town of Hula was the site of a horrendous massacre over the weekend with more than 108 people slaughtered, including women and children.

And the international community has launched into action, firing some of the most powerful words in their arsenal at the Assad regime, sparing no adjective to defend the

Syrian people semantically.

There seems to be very few sentences that we are not willing to deploy over there now, unless any of those sentences contain the words, we are going to physically do something about this.

The international community's response to the Syria crisis that's basically lies involved finger-wagging, tutting, head-shaking, and issuing resolutions beginning, now, seriously, mate, come on.

And as a result of all the, there's been a lot of horse trading, John, about this issue.

A lot of horse trading.

The result of that's just been one very confused horse strapped to the roof of a kebab van outside the UN building in New York, knowing, well, this could have gone a f ⁇ of a lot better than it did.

And one of the great problems is that Syria's long-term allies and trade partners, Russia and China, are not so much dragging their feet on the issue as standing with their feet stuck in blocks of concrete, saying, if you lend me a toothbrush, I'll start chiseling this concrete off my feet.

And then we can really start moving.

Hang on, who's that ringing the doorbell?

Oh, it's a delivery.

Great.

My new concrete socks.

I'll just put them on.

Yeah, I wear my socks outside my shoes if you've got a fing problem with that.

Kofi Annan, whose Syrian peace plan is currently looking as peaky as the Himalayas right now, has vowed to investigate.

Well, hold on.

Vowed to investigate.

Assad must be shaking in his furry tank slippers right now, Andy.

That's the best you've got.

And anyway, that is a misuse of the word vow.

The word vow promises much stronger action than investigations.

You vow to take vengeance on someone.

You vow to not rest until your enemy is dead.

You don't vow to set up a committee to uncover further details of the thing that just annoyed you.

You don't hear Russell Crowe during Gladiator saying, My name is Maximus Desimus Meridius, commander of the armies of the North, general of the Phoenix Legions, loyal servant to the true Emperor Marcus Aurelius, father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife, and I vow to launch a full and vigorous investigation in this life or the next.

The UN have today issued a statement saying that

these acts may amount to crimes against humanity.

Now that word may is, it seems perhaps a bit of an understatement.

I guess we shouldn't jump to conclusions.

The UN has ever going out on a limb on this one, the limb of a baby gerbil burrowed down safely in some nice warm sawdust after having its limbs hacked off.

The horrendous truth is, we're going to do absolutely nothing.

about this, partly because of Russia and China, but especially Russia, are going to block any UN resolutions to take any action.

Even after the Hula massacre, Russia's deputy foreign minister said it was premature for the Security Council to consider any new measures.

That was after a massacre when people had their hands tied behind their backs before being stabbed to death in their own homes.

To say it's premature to talk about any new measures doesn't just take balls, Andy.

It takes Russian balls, which are huge painted balls with a succession of slightly smaller balls inside them.

Hillary Clinton said the case for military intervention was growing stronger every day, saying, The Russians are telling me they don't want to see a civil war.

I've been telling them their policy is going to help to contribute to a civil war.

And I guess they've been telling her back, Hillary, I don't know how else to tell you this, but we don't give a shit about this, okay?

Does it help to hear it like that?

We don't give a shit.

Stop bothering us with this shit.

Assad's team have blamed rebels for the atrocity, saying that they're trying to spark just such an international intervention, before adding, No, is no one buying that?

Ah, fair enough, but it was worth a pop though.

Still, before you do pop over to Syria to intervene, you might like to check exactly where we are on a map.

You'll find us on the page marked Political Tinderbox.

Good luck.

So, what are the options for the international community?

Well, it seems that's very restricted politically.

It's a delicate game of political jenger, and you just never quite know what's going to happen.

So, perhaps the most important thing we can do is start to try to get inside Assad's head and try to understand what makes him tick.

And the world leader who's leading the way on this approach is none other than the American president himself.

And that's good.

To explain how he's doing this, I'll refer to an interview with People magazine that Michelle Obama, the First Lady, has given,

in which she revealed that one of the president's songs of choice to sing to himself

around the house and in the shower is LMFAO's I'm Sexy and I Know It.

Oh my god.

Which, as buglers will know, is also a personal favourite of Bashir al-Assad.

It's catchy, Andy.

It's the one thing that brings despots and presidents together.

We're not as different as we think.

It's a bonding tune, isn't it?

I'll work it out.

It's something that we can share.

When they're starting to try and get negotiations together,

this should be their pump-up music.

They're sitting around the table, play this whole song, and then say, listen,

we've all got fashion in our pants.

We know we're not afraid to show it.

I'm sexy and I know it.

And then

they can all dance a bit to get the blood pumping, and then they can settle down to start talking like rational, moral human beings.

Just so you know, if

both Obama and Assad

realise that they are both sexy and that they both know it,

then

that is

like Reagan and Gorbachev coming together, isn't it, over their shared love of table tennis in the 1980s?

Can we please stop playing that song?

Well,

for copyright reasons, all right.

That's one of the few I can think of.

Chris, if your body doesn't automatically move when that song starts playing, then you are medically dead inside.

The convulsions count.

Britain news now, and we're all going to die for one day only.

Because for the first time in 40 years, British doctors are going on strike.

21st of June, John.

It's going to be an extremely bad day to be ill as our doctors lay down their stethoscopes.

take a day's break from telling people to say are making people say oh and thinking to themselves eh.

And I haven't fully followed the dispute, John.

It's something to do with pension reforms and this government reneging on the deal made with the doctors by the previous government.

Tinkering with a pension system that was apparently working and delivering a surplus to the Treasury.

But the way the debate's been framed in public is either doctors being ludicrously selfish, given that they are already earning quite healthy pensions, or the government just being nakedly political about it.

It was revealed in the Independent newspaper that the last last time doctors took industrial action in 1975, death rates actually fell.

So this could actually be

good news for this country.

And also maybe politicians can learn from this because, you know, doctors have been accused of putting self-interest first by going on strike.

But, you know, if only politicians would do the same, if in fact they went on strike for 29 or 30 days a month, they might stop shitting out all the legislation that is causing so many of these problems and other strikes.

So I think maybe there's something to be learned from everyone.

The British Medical Association said that emergency care would still take place as doctors did not want to put patients at risk.

But they then said that also the doctors reserve the right to shout scam!

Scub!

SCAB at the patients whilst they are being operated on.

SCAB!

Forceps please nurse.

SCAB!

SCAB!

SCAB!

And it's in the context of the broader dispute over the NHS reforms, which have been billed as the change of a lifetime.

But they are the third change of a lifetime the National Health Service has had in the last 12 years so it turns out that the lifetime in question is that of a hamster or a Japanese television or even a hamster stuck inside a Japanese television personally I don't fully understand why these reforms are necessary you know I've never died so I'm happy with the NHS and I guess it's like the old saying if it ain't broke don't fix it but then there are other people who think the old saying should go if it ain't broke break it and then tell everyone you've got to fix it because it's broke Or maybe if it ain't broke, keep spending until it goes broke and then sell it.

I don't know.

It's a very complicated debate.

All I know is that the NHS debates is very much like a negligently managed octagonal abattoir.

It has many sides and is full of bullshit.

And

very much.

When the government came into power, they'd pledged to ring fence NHS spending, very much in the same way that the French revolutionaries had pledged to ring fence Marie Antoinette's neck.

They'd also pledged to stop top-down reorganisations of the NHS in the same way that the French revolutionaries had pledged to stop top-down reorganisations of Marie Antoinette.

And the coalition also pledged that they would put the patient first in the same way that the French revolutionaries

that put,

it's a bit of a stretch this one, they put Marie Antoinette's head first into a basket.

That will have to do.

That will have to do.

And in the efforts to make us healthier as Nation, there's been complaints that people are not really treated like human beings anymore.

And people say, I can't program patients like computers.

And I would also add that, conversely, computers cannot be treated like human beings.

We got a new one about this time last year, and we could not get it to breastfeed for love or money.

And when we tried it on the bottle, it just went mental.

And do not get me started on bath time.

Feature section now, Jubilee!

Oh,

party in the UK!

It's party time, Andy!

P-A-R-T.

Why?

Because the Queen has been on the throne for 60 f ⁇ ing years.

That's f ⁇ ing why!

England is about to embark on a four-day holiday weekend to celebrate the Queen sitting on the throne for 60 years and not dying once, Andy.

Not even once.

There are going to be street parties.

The whole country is going to be united in celebration.

And I heard rumors that we might actually firebomb Dresden again just to put a cherry on this Jubilee cake.

£424 million

has apparently been spent on food, drink and decorations.

BNQ alone has sold 100,000 meters of Union Jack bunting.

Sainsbury's alone has sold 364 miles of bunting.

If the Queen's Jubilee is about one thing, it's about bunting, Andy.

British people have been bunting the shit out of anything that doesn't move.

People have bunted babies, and rightly so, Andy, because there's no baby more beautiful than a beautifully bunted baby.

Well, it's very interesting, actually, the origin of bunting.

Of course, it goes back to another very significant royal occasion, Queen Victoria,

when she got married.

And bunting is, in fact, based on her wedding night, Knickers and Bra and Prince Albert's posing pouch, which after a rombustious night of newly married royal mutual concrotulation and passionate du slouberage, were seen dangling from the curtain rail of a Buckingham Palace window the following morning.

People instantly assume that the triangular pieces of fabric were a celebration of their happy nuptials rather than the result of the amorous rending and hurling of undergarments during the matrimonial scramble stiltering.

And bunting became a standard part of all British royal celebrations, which is lucky because if they'd looked in the window on the other side of the bedroom, today's bunting would, instead of nice little triangles of material, look eerie like a gimp mosque, whip, riding saddle, water machine gun and roast chicken.

BNQ also said that he has sold 3,100 Jubilee gnomes.

I know this is hard for other world citizens to understand, but British people like to commemorate any event with a gnome.

Who could forget the beautiful beautiful Queen Mother open gnome coffins that your gnome could lie in state for as long as she did?

So beautiful, Andy.

Also the new line of Leveson Inquiry gnomes have proven very popular this year.

So you can have your own parliamentary media investigation at the bottom of your garden.

So as you say this weekend, we mark 60 decades of Her Majesty staying relentlessly, unapologetically, inspirationally, and most importantly, Britishly alive by firing her down the Thames on a a magic flotilla.

Pop her on a boat and off she pops.

It's like one of these increasingly trendy living funerals, John, where you have a send-off with your buddies whilst you're still alive.

And she's doing it Viking style.

She's just kidding.

Right.

Drist off the end of the Thames, literally in a blaze of glory.

Yeah, there's the only thing that's different.

from her and a Viking funeral is that she's alive and not on fire.

Those are those only two differences.

There are going to be huge spectators for the Thames River patching, which will feature more than a thousand boats with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh on a specially decorated royal barge.

It will be decorated with the decapitated heads of 500 special Jubilee competition winners who each had to finish the sentence, I would like my decapitated head to festoon the Royal Jubilee barge because in less than 75 words, it's going to be stunning.

Yes, the much-loved non-executive ceremonial despot who has ruled this country for 60 years with a rod of wood, well, snooker goo.

Well, to be honest, John, she's getting on a bit.

She's 86 now, and she's in pretty good shape.

She's well past the age when most people would have wanted to sell her house, put her in a home, and forget about her.

And by that age, I mean five.

Sorry, it's just my daughter woke me up really early this morning.

But it is a fundamental part of British identity, John.

You can probably remember from when you were British.

And the monarchy is an institution as British as a queue of grannies dressed as Winston Churchill in tweed wire fronts, which, when photographed in the air is shaped like a battered sausage twitching a newspaper all whistling the theme tune to Indiana Jones whilst doing a Morris dance on the graffitied roof of a needlessly delayed train expressing confusion about British national identity in a rapidly changing post-imperial 21st century world before sitting in a Taiwanese made plastic replica of Stevenson's rocket dropping apples on our heads simultaneously patting a dog and telling it to fk off raucously downing a pint of cheap Indian tea straight from a union jack mug whilst watching some people people sing songs we all know really well on the telly quite shitty before crying about something, then silently weeping into an old leather football at the nagging sense that our best days are behind us.

That's what this country is all about, John.

England's green and pleasant.

God save the qu uh oh no this one, hang on, five letters.

I think it's an anagram of queen.

Queen, God save the queen.

God save the queen.

And in case anyone is worried whether there'll be a Buckingham Palace balcony appearance or not, relax, there will.

She's not going to fing blueball the country, Andy.

The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, and other members of the royal family are going to appear on the palace balcony to watch an RAF fly past.

There will then apparently be a foie de joie, fire of joy, a celebratory cascade of rifle fire given as a salute by the Queen's guard from the forecourt.

The Queen will then, as is tradition, pull out a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher and attempt to shoot one of the planes down.

If she is successful, the country will be given an extra day off work.

And then of course Andy, to close the Jubilee celebrations down, the queen will appear once more on the royal balcony holding a stereo above her head to lead the country as one in a dance to her favorite song

hundreds of thousands of people on the streets of london as one

With the Queen

backing her royal behind up on the balcony.

I've got passion in my pants and one is not afraid to show it.

I am sexy

and I know it's quite

time.

Girl, look at that body.

One works out.

Apparently that's what Princess Anne had as the first dance at her wedding back in the 70s.

She was a princess ahead of her time.

There's been a lot of complaints, John, about the cost of the Jubilee.

She said, was it £424 trillion?

Was it, I think, you wrote it as?

But just think of the cost of the alternative to the monarchy.

This is always the complaint about the cost of the monarchy.

I feel if there was an alternative, if there was a President Blair, for example, the entire current cost of the monarchy would not even start to cover the cost of cleaning the graffiti off the front of Buckingham Palace every morning.

Wow, those are some big letters.

Four very big letters.

Right, Brian, you start at the C, I'll start at the T and we'll meet in the middle for lunch.

Still, I guess technically he does come from Scotland, so he is a Celt.

Oh, it says.

Sorry, my mistake.

But in many ways, the Queen's setting a very bad example by living so long, 60 years on the throne.

Frankly, too many.

I mean, they say you should say

10 years in a job and then move on.

And she stayed six times that amount.

And partly it is our fault.

We do keep asking God to save her.

and we had the same problem with her mother the queen mother who just refused to die and in fact in the end had to fake her own death and is now living in Vegas with a Puerto Rican Warican dancer called Jorge

and there is a great deal of genuine excitement here and part of it is unquestionably you know a respect for the queen who's managed to not be an elected politician for six decades now but also due to the fact that the jubilee has involved giving everyone an extra bank holiday and this john is the way to to this nation's heart.

We saw it last year with the royal wedding.

And in fact, you know, if Brenda and Paul Snouted from Birmingham were to get married in Birmingham Registry Office and just announce to the country that everyone can have a day off work, they would have half a million people lining the streets shouting, you f ⁇ ing heroes.

And in fact, if Hitler in 1940 had simply said, I'm going to give you all three extra bank holidays a year, we'd have been waving the Luftwaffe down, saying, there you go, pop your little Mesher Schmidt down there and we'll put the kettle on.

But it's interesting that patriotism is a slightly awkward thing in this country.

It's not something that we're as comfortable with as Americans are.

Samuel Johnson, the 18th century Wordswiz,

wrote that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, which suggests A, that scoundrels have a very ill-honed survival instinct.

Prancing around waving flags, wearing silly national costumes and singing loud but simplistic ditties about your country are the most secretive of refuges.

I would also suggest B, scoundrels probably love sport.

And C, that this nation is currently awash with scoundrels.

Unless patriotism is also one of the first refuges of people who just like a bit of old-fashioned pomp and distraction from the general shitstorm engulfing the world.

And to conclude the Bugle Jubilee special, some queen facts.

The Queen has not broken wind since 1951.

She is a qualified electrician, a skill that she learnt in the war, and before her coronation in 1953 she wired up her crown to flash on and off when she officially became queen.

The queen owns 10 decoy queens that are used to distract royal correspondents so she can privately indulge in her private hobbies such as golf, pub quizzes, erotic jigsaws, and sweropics.

And f,

and f, and

f and

to the side, and f

and

back to the f and

f and

this is why tonight's bugle is late.

Andy, and I think you might have just written your citizen cane.

However, despite this, the last time the Queen is known to have sworn in public is when Diego Maradona scored his famous hand of God goal in the 1986 World Cup quarter-final between England and Argentina.

Her exact words were, oh, f ⁇ it, the cheating little shits.

I had two grand on Jorge Baruchaga to be the first goal scorer.

The Queen invented the sport of corgi surfing inadvertently during a Buckingham Palace garden party in 1963.

And also, when talking to the Queen, you're not allowed to refer to her her as Lizzie, Betsy, Mrs.

II, Queenie, Mate, Darling, Honey Bunch, Your Sugar Cheeks, unless you use the full official term, your Royal Sugar Cheeks.

Other things you should not say to the Queen include, you're not my real mum, you are my real mum.

I've had the blood test back.

Now give me a cuddle and a crown and tell me how many of those soldiers I'm allowed to take.

You're not allowed to say, you look sensational, oh mercy.

Also, you should try and avoid saying, pull my finger, or shit, everyone, she's got a fucking sword and and she's waggling it over that guy's neck.

Take her down, take her down.

And nor should you say, where's the crappy images?

That Corgi Carpacho has gone through me like a medieval sword.

What, was I not supposed to eat it?

Well, well, I wasn't going to complain, but the chef had left rather a lot of fur on it.

I did like the way it wiggled in your mouth, though.

Very nouveau.

Was that Blumenthal?

Did that?

Was it Blumenthal?

And the final queen factor is the queen is a regular bugle listener, and her favourite episode was Bugle 69, featuring a penis on the roof story.

Your emails now and we had a fantastic email from Robert Wolfson who simply said it was mentioned on the last podcast and I thought that would make it happen.

Rob, London.

And he attached the image of a photo of the Queen Andy with the Olympic rings tattooed onto her forehead.

A clear violation of the IOC copyright rules.

So it will be on the Bugle Twitter feed until the IOC or the palace get in touch and comes to take it down.

So you're going to want to look at it early.

The queen with the Olympic rings on her forehead.

It's where the Olympics and the Jubilee meet.

There'll be more of your emails next week.

Do keep them coming into info at thebuglepodcast.com.

And don't forget, you can listen to the bugle not only on thebuglepodcast.com, but also on our SoundCloud page.

Soundcloud.com slash the hyphen bugle.

Wow.

Wow.

I reckon I could get I could be a DJ, like an afternoon radio DJ.

It's a weird situation, Andy, when competence becomes somehow disappointing.

Well, that's all in the greatest week for humanity since the beginning of time.

The

oh, that's us done.

That is us done.

I think we should probably leave it at that.

I've got to go and do a gig in Milton Keynes.

Oh, that's a good question.

I've actually got a couple.

You know, after one of the jubilees died down, you can come and see me in Portsmouth at the Easney Sellers on Sunday evening.

And there's some more tour dates coming up.

The details will be on thebuglepodcast.com websites.

There's no finer way to commemorate the Queen being not dead than that.

Was that your Milton Keynes wrist alarm, Andy?

Is that like the bat signal from Milton Keynes?

It was.

Goodbye, Buglers.

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.