Space Junk, Big Trains & Hot Potatoes - Bugle 4359

Speaker 2 The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Speaker 3 Hello, buglers, and welcome to issue 4359 of The Bugle, the second half of our 18th anniversary live stream live show in London.

Speaker 3 Last time we heard from John Oliver, this week it's Nishkuma and and Alice Fraser dealing with everything else in the world as it was way, way back in late October of this year.

Speaker 3 Alice will also be joining me for the Bugle live show in Brisbane on 2nd of December. Tickets and details for that and the Melbourne show on the 22nd of December are on the Bugle website.

Speaker 3 My Australia special Zoltgeist stand-up shows are also on sale. Details at andysoltsman.co.uk.

Speaker 3 The shows are in Perth on the 26th of November, Brisbane on the 3rd of December, Adelaide on the 14th, Melbourne on the 23rd and Sydney on the 2nd of January.

Speaker 3 And my UK tour resumes from the 31st of January. See you all at at least some of those shows.
Also, the last few official limited edition 2025 Bugle Christmas jumpers are still on sale.

Speaker 3 Grab them before they take their place in the annals of fashion history.

Speaker 3 Guaranteed to make you up to 20,000% more awesome this Christmas, give or take, which is, of course, what Christmas is all about.

Speaker 3 But now, to issue 4,359 of the Bugle, recorded on the 26th of October at the Leicester Square Theatre.

Speaker 3 Alongside me on stage in London was producer Chris, occasionally pressing buttons as I got ready to introduce our two guests.

Speaker 4 Please welcome back from the other side of the world, Alice Fraser!

Speaker 1 Welcome back!

Speaker 5 And from the other side of the stage, Nish Kumar!

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 welcome back. How's the interval for you, Alice, in Australia?

Speaker 6 The sun has come up, so that's a treat.

Speaker 7 That is a relief.

Speaker 1 That would have been, I mean, what a dramatic way to find out about the end of the world. Alice is sitting in.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 2007, October 2007, is when the

Speaker 1 who's been listening since the very beginning.

Speaker 1 Oh, thank you.

Speaker 1 Losers.

Speaker 2 Fing losers.

Speaker 1 Fuck you.

Speaker 1 Alice, what were you doing back

Speaker 1 in 2007?

Speaker 6 In 2007, I was at university. I had just gotten Facebook so that my parents could see photographs of me doing fun things over the other side of the world.

Speaker 6 More hopeful times, Andy.

Speaker 1 Nish, what about you?

Speaker 2 I was listening to the bugle, baby.

Speaker 2 I was a listener.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Strong work. Strong work.

Speaker 2 I was listening to the bugle, but then, unlike these losers who are in the room, you pick me out of the crowd like Courtney Cox in the Dancing in the Dark video.

Speaker 2 And since then, I've always seen myself as the cox to your Springsteen.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 8 I've got photos.

Speaker 1 I didn't know Bruce had multiple penis syndrome.

Speaker 2 Why do you think they call him the boss?

Speaker 1 Nish, uh, obviously, you know, this is the highlight of your week, but I'm not the only highly influential global media person you've met.

Speaker 2 Uh, you've met this person. No, I uh uh

Speaker 2 fittingly on the week of the Bugle's 18th birthday, I closed a very satisfying narrative loop. Now, longtime listeners will know and remember that my Wikipedia page was subjected

Speaker 2 to what can only be described as an act of cyber terrorism. And I say that you'll remember it because you c did it.

Speaker 2 So it actually started because my little shit cousins from Australia defaced my Wikipedia page because they found out I had one and that anyone could edit it.

Speaker 2 And they changed it so it said my name was Nishant in inverted commas Madam Lily Kumar.

Speaker 2 Then the defacement escalated. They said that I weighed a total of seven

Speaker 2 I don't even know how many kilograms that is. There's about 15 zeros there.

Speaker 1 That's two zeros too many for me.

Speaker 2 Listen, I've got junk in the trunk.

Speaker 2 Then I opened it out to the bugle, and then it sort of became an act of cyber terrorism.

Speaker 2 It said that I am often referred to as the brown John Oliver and was being lined up to be the first brown Smurf.

Speaker 2 Then they changed my website to a website called BuryMeWithMyMoney.com.

Speaker 2 I don't even know what the f ⁇ that is. It continued.
They said that one of

Speaker 2 my first Edinburgh solo shows was called Who Is Bish Luna?

Speaker 2 And then things really, I would say, got out of hand. It said between 1999 and 2002, I started a semi-nude stage production of a Christmas Carol that ran for four weeks every September.

Speaker 2 The show was cancelled after its 2002 run when it was revealed Kumar had been using the production as a front to launder money made in the illegal trade of ivory Colonel Gaddafi face masks.

Speaker 1 What's the golden rule?

Speaker 5 No smoke without.

Speaker 2 Then things got even worse. In October 2017, E4 announced that he is to front a new chat show project called Naked with Nish due to air in February 2018.

Speaker 2 The format has described that a fueling naked Nish Kamal will interrogate a host of clothes celebrities about the more intimate aspects of their private lives.

Speaker 2 Guests announced thus far are Lily Allen, Steve Coogan, and Nigel Farage.

Speaker 2 The guests will be scored on the basis of how excited Nish gets.

Speaker 2 So, I believe that is the sum total of the defacement, Chris.

Speaker 2 So, just to bring things now fully round to a full narrative closure: this week I interviewed Jimmy Wales, the CEO and founder of Wikipedia, who has a book out.

Speaker 2 I talked to him about it, and then he signed my copy of the book to Madame Lily.

Speaker 2 Buglers, a loop has been closed.

Speaker 6 I'm heartbroken that Naked with Nish isn't real. I'm not wearing trousers right now in honour of.

Speaker 2 Actually, this of all weeks, a chat show with Lily Allen would really pop off.

Speaker 1 Right, shall we get on to our first story of the second half, Chris? Oh, God, hang on.

Speaker 8 I can't do two laptops.

Speaker 1 There it is. I could have done it on laptop.
I could have actually used the.

Speaker 1 I'll do the next one on the

Speaker 1 right.

Speaker 2 No one needs to see you have an asthma attack.

Speaker 1 That was another one of your Edinburgh shows on.

Speaker 6 Just smoke machines the whole time.

Speaker 4 Australian news now, and Australia is at war simultaneously with China and with space.

Speaker 1 Alice, China has attacked Australia from

Speaker 1 space

Speaker 1 by dropping bits of defunct satellites all over the massive sandy landmass. You must be very concerned that the long-awaited war between China and Australia is finally coming to pass.

Speaker 6 Well, Andy, yeah, we've got pieces of debris raining out of the sky into the Western Australian outback, setting up the equipment needed to film Mad Max Thunderdome.

Speaker 6 Actually,

Speaker 6 I do have an inside source on this because my cousin Alice is a space archaeologist and I have reliably been informed that saying my cousin Alice is a space archaeologist sounds like I've just made up an alternate universe version of myself who is more successful and exciting and fair.

Speaker 6 I do have previous.

Speaker 1 But I actually

Speaker 1 do have...

Speaker 6 Do have a cousin. My cousin Alice aka other Alice is a space archaeologist.
She specialises in the mapping and tracking of space junk and I asked her to explain this story to me.

Speaker 6 So fundamentally scientists of space junk have been increasingly concerned that we're filling the sky with rubbish on decaying orbits around the globe, which makes it A, increasingly dangerous for people shooting themselves up there that they might bump into something, and also inevitable that increasing amounts of space junk are going to start falling out of the sky.

Speaker 6 I asked my cousin Alice what the implications of this are, because I'm not an

Speaker 6 expert, and I don't know if we're talking like one more thing a year or 1,000 things at your gender reveal party falling out of the sky. Hooray, the baby is Sawyer's.

Speaker 6 Hey, it's better than the family who had to call their kid like her because a frozen dog coat hangered great aunt Enith.

Speaker 1 Probably should.

Speaker 6 Anyway, I did ask my cousin Alice, but she didn't reply because she's too busy panicking about the implications of all this cascade of space junk that's about to splat us, I assume.

Speaker 6 I don't know what to think about this story because I'm not an expert and like nobody listens to the experts anymore, which I know

Speaker 6 that nobody is listening to poor Boffins with their decades of expertise reading graphs while Johnny Cum TikTok is making millions of money misinterpreting to an audience of tepid teens and quiverling capitalists.

Speaker 6 The point is, I know that nobody's listening to experts because this is the first time you're hearing this story in a comedy news show.

Speaker 6 And even if it's not the first time you're hearing about the story, you probably read the headline and figured you understood the story enough and you didn't click through. And

Speaker 6 if you did click through, you didn't fact check.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 6 even if you clicked through through and fact checked you didn't ask a space scientist unless you are a space scientist in which case you're not a space scientist in this field and if you are hi cousin Alice

Speaker 1 so I mean apparently the tensions with China have just been raised from no worries to some worries which is then

Speaker 1 pretty concerning for Australia

Speaker 1 Nisha actually another uh your 2015 enemy show was called My Space Junk wasn't it and um that was um

Speaker 1 really it was one of your most graphic shows up until that

Speaker 2 yeah but it was a very out-of-date show about a then largely defunct social media app.

Speaker 2 It took them a second, but they got there in the end.

Speaker 2 Alice, is your cousin Alice Alice Gorman, the associate professor of Australia's Philippines? I read, she was quoted in the f ⁇ ing article I read about this. They said that she was called Dr.

Speaker 2 Space Junk, which really shows you they are giving out degrees for anything these days.

Speaker 1 I mean it's an increasing problem, space junk.

Speaker 1 Our orbit is cluttered up with an estimate there's over over 10,000 satellites have been blasted into space since the first one up went up there, which I think was 1837.

Speaker 1 Six. Six, sorry.

Speaker 1 Over

Speaker 1 fact check. Fight bullshit with bullshit.

Speaker 1 Which I think is going to be on

Speaker 1 the back of the new £8 coins that are being produced next year.

Speaker 1 In Latin, it will sound very sophisticated. Over half of the 10,000-plus satellites in space have retired from satelliting, and there are over 25,000 bits of space junk plinking around in orbit.

Speaker 1 And so there are quite big concerns, Alice, that there might not be enough space for all the billionaires to get up there as well alongside all the space junk. I mean, where now

Speaker 1 for the likes of Elon Musk who dream of

Speaker 1 living in orbit and running us from space?

Speaker 6 I mean, it is a genuine problem. They have to track the junk so that people don't hit that on the way up.

Speaker 6 But I'm hoping what will happen is eventually there's so much space junk that it provides a metallic shell that completely encircles the Earth and protects us from global warming.

Speaker 6 That said, it could just cook us like a wet casserole, not 100%.

Speaker 1 It's like wrapping a fish in foil and sticking it in the oven.

Speaker 1 Which is fine if the fish is dead.

Speaker 6 Don't worry, they will be.

Speaker 1 UK news now. Oh shit.

Speaker 2 Actually, that was the perfect sting.

Speaker 2 UK news followed by a British man going, oh shit, was

Speaker 2 completely the perfect sting and I think should now be used every time we talk about the United Kingdom.

Speaker 1 I'd like to see all BBC news bulletins just start with a news reader going, oh shit.

Speaker 1 That's what I'll do, they already bleep out the first six words at the top of every hour on regular camera.

Speaker 1 So Nish, you are our UK, the Beagles UK correspondent.

Speaker 1 Bring us up to date with what's going on this film.

Speaker 2 Well massive news Andy, racism is back.

Speaker 2 Now in many ways racism

Speaker 2 Okay, the the next the next three to five minutes could be very awkward.

Speaker 2 Racism is like the James Bond film franchise. It's intrinsically British, it's it's never going to go away, and these days it's largely owned and distributed by the tech industry.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 2 Katie Lamb, who's the Conservative MP who some is describing as the future leader of the party and who is currently the shadow home office minister, said this week there are a large number of people in this country who came here legally, but in effect should have been able to do so.

Speaker 2 They will also need to go home. What that will leave is a mostly, but not entirely, culturally coherent group of people.

Speaker 2 So we've now just gone from the whole, let's get rid of the illegal immigrants to just, let's just get rid of anybody like slightly darker than mid-white.

Speaker 2 Like that, we're really expanding the remit here. And there's a lot to unpack with that comment.
Clearly, it's absolutely soaked in xenophobia and intrinsic prejudice.

Speaker 2 But my eye was drawn to the idea that even without immigration, Britain is a culturally coherent group of people. This is a nation of royalty and football hooliganism.

Speaker 2 This is a nation where the working man and the aristocrat are united by two things, tea drinking and binge drinking, where everyone from the humblest shoeshiner to the wealthiest aristocrat is united by a desire to not speak about their feelings and then get so drunk they feel the need to smash up a shop.

Speaker 2 It's a nation of sexual repression and graphic pornography. It's the nation of stiff upper lips and flares up R ass.
It's the nation that produced the Beatles and Shawadi Waddy.

Speaker 2 And it's called the United Kingdom and it's made up of four countries, three of which absolutely hate the other one.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 bit harsh on Wales.

Speaker 1 them as often.

Speaker 2 Listen, the second they allowed Ellis James to be their cultural emissary, they were f.

Speaker 2 So in continued racism news, Sarah Poachin, who is Reform UK's MP for Runcorn and Hellsby, complained that every advert now seems to feature black and Asian people as she responded to a viewer on Talk TV who had complained about the demographics of advertising.

Speaker 2 Poachin said the view was absolutely right and that it didn't

Speaker 2 reflect our society. I feel that your average white person, average white family is not represented anymore, blaming the woke liberati and the artifati world.
First of all, just say my name, okay?

Speaker 2 If you're going to call me out, don't do it euphemistically. Now, I will say, it's not clear what this absolute f ⁇ ing imbecile is watching.

Speaker 2 Like, what channel or streaming service she has tuned into that features exclusively non-white people in all of the adverts. But I do have one question.
Give me the name. I need to get on it.

Speaker 2 Because...

Speaker 2 And that's not just for my own career. That's for your benefit as well.
If you put me on that network that's only screening adverts with black and Asian people, I'll have it done within the week

Speaker 2 now West Treating the health secretary as this morning described her comments as racist and part of the reason we've sort of tied ourselves in knots about everything is we've no longer we're no longer really sure what is and isn't racist anymore right so now people are putting flags up in towns all over the United Kingdom right and they're saying that they're doing that out of solidarity for British culture and hostility towards immigrants that have taken over the country and some people have said you can't say that that the flag is racist.

Speaker 2 Now, it is the thing. This is part of my guide to what is and is not racist, right? The British flag is not racist.

Speaker 2 If you are looking at it during an Olympics or a World Cup, if you are looking at a British or English flag during an Olympics or a World Cup, that is not racist.

Speaker 2 If you're waving the flag because you read on a far right-wing blog that you should wave a flag to stick it to the immigrants and the Browns, that is racist.

Speaker 2 Objects can change depending on the context that surrounds them. That's why no one looks at pictures of Germany in the 1930s and says, boy, that place must have been chock full of Hindus.

Speaker 2 Listen,

Speaker 2 Hitler and Gandhi might have been swastika-toting vegetarians who had issues with the Brits, but that is where the similarities begin and end.

Speaker 2 And people keep asking, fundamentally, are these rallies that we've been seeing in London races?

Speaker 2 So last month, there was a rally where 100,000 people descended on London to protest what they called the kind of swamping of the country country by immigrants and a need to assert British culture and British values.

Speaker 2 Now, people keep saying not everyone on that march was clearly racist. Here is where I land on this, right? 100,000 people, not all of them can be racist, right?

Speaker 2 However, it was a racist event because if you're still continuing to blame immigrants for all of the ills of society that are caused by a collapsing economic model, that is not fact-based and therefore it is quite literally a prejudice.

Speaker 2 Now, to contextualize this, a week after that rally, 100,000 people descended on Wembley Stadium to watch Oasis. Now, not all of those people can have been Oasis fans.

Speaker 2 However, when they saw Liam and Noel Gallagher stood on stage, what they could no longer do was deny that they were at an Oasis event.

Speaker 2 They can't say,

Speaker 2 they can't say, no,

Speaker 2 this wasn't an Oasis event, okay? This was not an OASIS event, it was an event for people with legitimate concerns about people looking back in anger.

Speaker 1 Which is pretty much what the Tommy Robinson

Speaker 1 look, I mean, I may have said this on the bugle, but I think you can't say that that protest was racist unless you judge it by the people who organised it, spoke at it, and the things that they said.

Speaker 1 Other than that,

Speaker 2 there's no way that you can. This is classic Wokerati nonsense.

Speaker 1 Let's look more specifically now

Speaker 1 at the the well the Kefili Seneth by-election,

Speaker 1 which I know uh who voted in it?

Speaker 1 Yeah, congratulations, well done. Um uh I did as well.
I vote in every by-election because I

Speaker 1 give a shit, not like you lazy fuss letting democracy happen around, you find a fight. And it was um

Speaker 1 it went I think it's fair to say, um, additionalised that it didn't go particularly well for uh the ruling Labour Party who'd won every election in Kefili for more than a hundred years but only uh got just over ten 10% of the vote.

Speaker 1 Plaid Cymru managed to beat reform UK, and I've never known Plaid Cymru be quite so popular in England

Speaker 1 as they have

Speaker 1 this week.

Speaker 1 Lindsay Whittle, the winning candidate, he said he would promise to work like a Trojan for every man, woman, and child in Kefili.

Speaker 1 In other words, to spend 10 years fighting a losing battle, then make a really bad deal involving some horse-themed merch.

Speaker 2 Andy, we hope that's what he meant.

Speaker 2 We hope he meant that Trojan and not the type of condom.

Speaker 2 Because otherwise that means he works most of the time but occasionally we're going to need to source a morning after MP.

Speaker 1 Alice I imagine the Kerfili by-election has been huge news in

Speaker 1 Australia.

Speaker 6 Yes, Andy, massive. It's eclipsing everything here.
It's been taken as a referendum on Keir Starmer's leadership of the Labour Party,

Speaker 6 Keer Starmer's sentient Excel spreadsheet.

Speaker 6 He dreams not of a better world, but of perfectly aligned pivot tables and a society where all emotions can be logged on a risk assessment matrix.

Speaker 6 His smile is a cell that has been manually formatted to emoji colon slight underdash upturn.

Speaker 6 On the bright side, while yes, a hearty rejection of Labour's slogans before Bogan's approach to improving material conditions for the working man

Speaker 6 it is also a bit of a spit in the eye for reform Nigel Farage pledged to throw everything at the campaign but they came in second

Speaker 6 and you know

Speaker 6 There's an upside. It feels like we are, if we're rejecting sort of large institutions, we're maybe also rejecting the up-and-coming institutions that hope to replace them.

Speaker 6 And I'm hoping actually that we go back to small village life, return to just voting for your six aunts into politics and then eventually we can form principalities and then larger sort of nation states and start the whole thing again.

Speaker 1 I mean this in terms of where Labour are now, a year and a quarter or so,

Speaker 1 under a year and a half still since the

Speaker 1 election, obviously you know this is a disappointing result and time is of the essence for Labour who are already looking ahead to the next election they might realistically win, which is in less than 19 years now.

Speaker 1 The 2044 general election, they'll obviously inevitably get thrashed in 2029, that's just the way politics is now. Success is an impossibility.

Speaker 1 They'll flatline in 2034, they'll make a barely discernible micro recovery in 2039.

Speaker 1 So they'll be targeting enough seats to form a coalition in 2044, probably according to my computer's predictions, with the newly formed Progressive Yesterday-Tomorrow party,

Speaker 1 co-led by 102-year-old Neil Kinnock, an animatronic Laboo boo, Claudia Winkleman, and whoever the incumbent Doctor Who is at the time.

Speaker 1 It could be you, actually.

Speaker 2 Listen, I'd be happy to take down that franchise as I've taken down many others before it.

Speaker 2 Also, how has Laboo Boo landed on your sphere of understanding?

Speaker 2 I can't be the only person who heard Andy Zaltzman say laboo boo and thought, have I mishurt?

Speaker 2 Who the f did you learn about laboobu? Sorry, laboo buy from

Speaker 2 Gold laboo boo!

Speaker 1 Sorry, what was that?

Speaker 2 Gold laboo boo. Gold laboo boo.

Speaker 1 Is that...

Speaker 2 Were you expecting that to be a sort of Manchurian candidate moment?

Speaker 2 And someone in the audience be activated to assassinate me or any.

Speaker 2 It really felt like that was a code word and no one has been activated.

Speaker 2 Oh, gold laboo boo was that was something that everyone shouted at I've just remembered what that is.

Speaker 2 F ⁇ ing hell, I made you look like a f ⁇ for absolutely no reason.

Speaker 2 I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 Here's what happened.

Speaker 2 A couple of weeks ago, Andy, my career is in an interesting place.

Speaker 2 About three weeks ago,

Speaker 2 in the space of four days, I interviewed the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis about the current state of left-wing politics in Europe and in the wider world.

Speaker 2 Then, four days later, I commentated on an event where comedians wrestled with pro-wrestlers.

Speaker 2 And I wore a gold jacket, and someone in the audience said that I looked like a gold laboo boo,

Speaker 2 which I then announced at the at-capacity Hammersmith Apollo, which prompted three and a half thousand people to start chanting the phrase gold laboo boo at me.

Speaker 2 So when that person shouted gold labooboo, it was a reference to my own body of work, which I'm I'm sorry to say, not as familiar with as I am weirdly with Andy's body of work.

Speaker 2 I do apologise, that was an excellent and relevant thing to have yelled.

Speaker 1 You don't

Speaker 1 got time. Right.

Speaker 8 Yeah, who here filled in the bugle first ever official hot potato survey?

Speaker 2 Yep,

Speaker 2 results in animals there appears.

Speaker 1 Should we do that now? If you want to. Let's do that now, right? So

Speaker 1 we'll come back to a couple of the stories. So

Speaker 1 just explain exactly what it was, Chris.

Speaker 8 So we thought to celebrate our 18th birthday, we'd go official and find out truly what the world thinks, what buglers think.

Speaker 8 And the results are just in based on a series of questions that we asked online. These are the results answered by a thousand people over the period of seven days.

Speaker 8 And so first of all Buglers really fing hate Donald Trump

Speaker 8 94.3% of them think he's had a negative impact on the world

Speaker 1 just go back go back

Speaker 2 who are these people who are these women

Speaker 8 well another another fact that turns up later on that of nearly 1100 people who are surveyed five identified as right-wing right so

Speaker 2 yeah but also you I know these fing people okay, because as I say, I was one of them for many years,

Speaker 2 and so I understand the way they think. Those five will have answered in some character, it's like Attila the Hun or some shit.

Speaker 8 Well, it's a I tried to ask them a simple question: Should we be bleeping words? And we got a proper wedge issue result here, right?

Speaker 8 Where it's completely inconclusive, and you go, okay, fine, people just about want more

Speaker 8 than

Speaker 8 some said just, some said just,

Speaker 8 and then we got on to basically four pages worth of answers

Speaker 1 honky honk honk honk ding ding popty ping

Speaker 1 I mean 2016 at the pleasants yeah

Speaker 2 yeah that was 2016 at the pleasants someone answered not asked TBH

Speaker 8 Just just one thing, and let's give them a bit of credit, just very quickly. Buglers think conspiracy theories are bullshit, which is nice.

Speaker 8 99.3% believe in the moon landings, 74% believed that absolutely all conspiracy theories are bollocks.

Speaker 8 The one you most believe in is the COVID lab league and the Mandela effect, and only 0.4% of you believe that 5G is dangerous.

Speaker 2 So, fair play. Again, they will have answered in character.
Like, you, I know these people, they are, no offense, absolute lunatics.

Speaker 8 And finally, I think the big issue here was we had to find out what your favorite sport was.

Speaker 8 And

Speaker 8 disappointingly, cricket did not win.

Speaker 2 Oh my good lord, that is there is genuine shock in this room.

Speaker 1 There is. But also, looking at that, that's everyone's favorite sport.
People have voted a lot of times there.

Speaker 1 That adds up to well over a hundred.

Speaker 8 They just had to say which one they like, they were allowed to like more than one. Right, okay.

Speaker 1 Wow. Well, if anyone, so 34.4% like cricket, to the remaining 65.6% of you, you are dead to me.

Speaker 6 But Andy, to be fair to the bugle audience, cricket is not their favourite sport because carrying a single joke through time for over a decade and pretending that it remains relevant is their favourite sport.

Speaker 6 I got a message from John Luke Roberts, comedian,

Speaker 6 just yesterday saying, can you please unpack this for me? He had been accused of sucking up to the bugle

Speaker 6 and wasn't quite sure what was meant by that.

Speaker 6 So he said, I posted toying with changing my name to Honky Tonk Babadooka Donk and somebody asked me if I'm sucking up to the bugle, why would they ask me this?

Speaker 6 And I said, there was a bugle joke about a tank that was called the Badonka Donk tank.

Speaker 6 Many years ago,

Speaker 6 only bugle fans would think a 10-year-old joke would be in your head right now.

Speaker 6 Why not pun runs? But that's their favourite sport.

Speaker 1 Pun runs as a sport. Yeah, pun running.
Pun running, there we go.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, that may, well, you know, I mean, we saw what happened with the first instance of that sport earlier on today.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it caused John to leave the call. Yeah, exactly, yeah.

Speaker 1 As it caused him to leave the show initially.

Speaker 1 Let's, in terms of conspiracy theory, I mean, they are more and more ridiculous. There was one last year that windmills cause cancer.
Did you see the report?

Speaker 1 It was generally reported that they were on right-wing chatram's this theory that went

Speaker 1 sorry

Speaker 2 tilter windmills no you didn't have to tilter them but the interesting thing was only this audience would heckle with a reference with a reference to Don Quixote

Speaker 2 biggest group of virgins I've ever seen in my life

Speaker 1 Nish.

Speaker 6 Nish, if that is Byron, I don't want to be by right.

Speaker 1 That's my favourite donkey, Don Quixote.

Speaker 1 Better culture, better culture.

Speaker 1 Yeah, windmills caught. Obviously windmills don't cause cancer.
I know this because my great-uncle Wilfrid never saw a windmill, didn't die of cancer. Joined the DOS.

Speaker 1 Admittedly, he died whilst trying on a pair of crocodile shoes way, way, way before they were ready.

Speaker 1 Right, let's move on now to

Speaker 4 double-decker trains news now.

Speaker 1 Hugely exciting news for fans of or people who hate single-decker trains, I guess.

Speaker 1 Eurostar has ordered 30 double-decker trains which could come into the service, come in service in the year 2031 at a cost of £1.7 billion, or to translate that into realistic UK railway infrastructure projections, could come into service as soon as the year 2197 at a cost of just 849 quadrillion and maybe soluble if it rains and have square wheels that are so hot they melt the track on contact.

Speaker 1 And the project will also come with a luxury 12-story six-star hotel for the exclusive use of bats. So

Speaker 1 Britain has generally eschewed double-decker trains, which are widely used in places like the entire rest of the fing world.

Speaker 1 The reason we've generally avoided double-decker trains is it raises the possibility of people having somewhere to sit if they bought a ticket. It's not what rail travel is about.

Speaker 1 Would we have won the fing war if we'd had double-decker trains to sit on? No, we fing wouldn't.

Speaker 1 And also because Queen Victoria, who was monitored during the development of the railway network, reportedly didn't believe in stairs.

Speaker 1 Or was it lesbianism? I can't remember. It was one of the two.
One of the two, possibly both.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 increased capacity trains and wider range of destinations across the continent we once called home raise the prospect of a huge increase in passenger numbers.

Speaker 1 And experts have predicted the queues to board the trains at St Pancras International will take somewhere between seven hours and 12 years. So

Speaker 1 Nish, I know you're a huge fan of having as many um decks on a train as yeah

Speaker 2 I'm a huge fan man uh but I will say this will not stand in this specific instance.

Speaker 2 We did not vote Brexit so that we could have two floors worth of trains travelling to those frog leggy insurrender monkeys, okay? And the o l double decker for buses, double deckers buses,

Speaker 2 that's Britain, double deckers of buses and those chocolates we had in the nineties.

Speaker 1 That's the only thing.

Speaker 2 That's the only double deckers are for buses and 1990s chocolate, not for trains. Trains are single decker.
What is this, bloody India? And they're sitting on the roof of the trains.

Speaker 2 This is not what we voted Lee for. And the only way this thing will fly under Prime Minister Nigel Farage, the answer to the question, what if Gao was a guy?

Speaker 2 The only way this thing is going to fly if that second deck is exclusively used for deporting immigrants. That is the only way

Speaker 2 Now we in the Reform Party, I joined the Reform Party in the interval.

Speaker 1 Rejoined. Rejoined.
Rejoined, yeah.

Speaker 2 I'm a huge fan of brown people in the Reform Party. It's like turkeys voting for Christmas.
My apologies. Fireworks voting for the Barley.

Speaker 6 I'm for it, Andy.

Speaker 6 As long as the implicit class system of the double-decker is rigidly enforced, people on top, on top, people at the bottom, and also it is a topless double-decker like those roof-off tour buses.

Speaker 6 You know, there's a tour guide up front, they're a jaded uni student. On your left, some tunnel, on your right, some tunnel.

Speaker 6 You can't see through the walls of this tunnel, but behind it is a terrifying weight of water that could crush us all in an instant.

Speaker 6 I think we put the rich people up top, but we have it open, like the top of the double-decker tour bus, so that their top hats and oar heads all get knocked off

Speaker 6 Train guillotine from London to Paris the French will welcome you with open arms and no pants

Speaker 2 This is not why we voted leave

Speaker 2 We don't know why we did we're working through all the reasons

Speaker 2 Double-decker trains no

Speaker 2 Making trade easier. Also, it turns out no

Speaker 1 I don't want to rake over the old smouldering coals of Brexit again.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 net migration rocketed up to way more than it was before Brexit. So if you're an irony fan, these have been wonderful times.

Speaker 1 But I don't think we'll really move on as a nation until we start asking ourselves a very important question about Brexit, which is, is reducing massively complicated political and economic problems to vastly oversimplified binary choices?

Speaker 1 Is that right or wrong?

Speaker 3 And until we really, really get to that.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 let's move on to.

Speaker 2 That is classic, man.

Speaker 1 That's really good.

Speaker 1 One genuinely, genuinely exciting, heartwarming story, which you might have seen last week about a woman who has Parkinson's

Speaker 1 playing the clarinet during surgery, having

Speaker 1 and playing it better than she'd been able to for years as as Parkinson's advanced um and uh she underwent deep brain stimulation during this uh uh this uh uh this this operation and my my father had Parkinson's for many years and is an absolute remorseless shit of a disease so I'm not a fan and I'm sorry if I offend any Parkinson's fans in when I say that

Speaker 1 you know on this show I always say what I think and um I don't like it.

Speaker 1 Um some people have expressed concerns that this is a dangerous precedent has been set whereby surgeons refuse to operate unless their patients provide some entertainment.

Speaker 1 It starts with a simple tune on the clarinet and before you know it, you have to be juggling a basket of kittens whilst playing I'm Too Sexy for My Shirt on an underarm bagpipe before they'll give you so much as a f ⁇ ing appendectomy.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 also concerns that children will use this technique to cheat in music exams, trying to trick their way to a distinction in grade four by sneaking in a brain surgeon under an unusually baggy hat.

Speaker 1 And also

Speaker 1 so I mean obviously you know,

Speaker 1 the relationship between medicine and musical instruments stretches back through history.

Speaker 1 I mentioned on the bugle some time ago that Florence Nightingale developed the harmonica during the Crimean War as a means of working out whether patients were still alive or not. Just

Speaker 1 pop it in the mouth.

Speaker 1 You can tell if they were particularly upset because they got a bit more bluesy.

Speaker 1 And also the cello and violin were invented as a means of testing the eyesight of clowns recovering from being hit over the head with frying pans.

Speaker 1 Could they tell us something was smaller or just further away? So that's

Speaker 1 Alice Edmund.

Speaker 1 This is a very

Speaker 1 exciting development.

Speaker 6 Call this an exciting and heartwarming story Andy. This is toxic capitalism.
It's not enough to be getting brain surgery.

Speaker 6 The idea that we have to be constantly working, productive, turning our hobbies into monetized side hustles. Next, you'll be telling me she's Twitch streaming her clarinet brain surgery.

Speaker 6 The person who performed the surgery was neurosurgeon and Professor Kumar Ashkan, the fing show-off.

Speaker 6 When asked to comment on this procedure, he said that the clarinet playing helped to fine-tune the position of the electrodes deep inside her brain until she was able to play the instrument.

Speaker 6 He went on to say, Yeah, sure, it's impressive that she can play a musical instrument while getting brain surgery, but it's not exactly doing brain surgery, is it?

Speaker 6 He then referred news channels to his Etsy shop, his podcast, and his OnlyFans page.

Speaker 6 And it's not unheard of for brain surgery to happen with an awake patient, despite the uncomfortably Hannibal-lekter aesthetics of it. It does help to fine-tune the surgery.

Speaker 6 Unfortunately, now this patient is fully optimized for clarinet playing at the cost of all other metrics.

Speaker 1 So, sure,

Speaker 6 she can play clarinet with the heartbreaking lyricism of a classical maestro, but if you ask her to count her 10, she'll do it in clarinet.

Speaker 2 Hey, we're in real trouble, Zultzman, you and me, if they extend this to other art forms.

Speaker 2 They start getting us to do a gig while we're under brain surgery. I don't know how they're going to measure it.

Speaker 2 Well, he seems to be really struggling.

Speaker 2 The other dogs have to be like, no, no, no. I've seen footage of the gigs.
This is how it normally goes. Jesus Christ.
I don't know what... Have we cut the wrong nerve?

Speaker 2 He's taken down a whole network.

Speaker 1 How How has this happened? No, that's normal.

Speaker 2 The brain surgery is working. We have returned him to the mean.

Speaker 2 There was no signs of brain activity when you and me did that gig at Andover.

Speaker 1 Too soon. Too soon.

Speaker 1 It's our own shared Vietnam.

Speaker 1 I mean, 18 years, Chris,

Speaker 1 Nish, Alice, what do you think another 18 years?

Speaker 1 What do you think the world will be like in 18 years, Nish?

Speaker 2 Well, I think it's going to be very difficult for us to do this show during a road war.

Speaker 2 But I do think we will find... I've watched Mad Max.
There's not a lot of people doing our jobs.

Speaker 2 The closest is the guy playing the guitar that shoots fire out of it that's strapped to the top of the truck. I mean, I guess

Speaker 2 I'm immediately human sacrifice.

Speaker 2 I have no like post-apocalyptic utility.

Speaker 2 So I guess I'm just out of the game. So I'm excited to know how you're going to keep this podcast going whilst we sort of are in a hand-to-hand combat war for food, resources, and water.

Speaker 1 I mean, just you know, in terms of human sacrifices, sometimes bearded guys going through human sacrifice end up doing quite well long term. But um,

Speaker 1 that's um,

Speaker 2 yeah, but it's a real mixed bag because they somehow magically turn white.

Speaker 1 Alice,

Speaker 2 in

Speaker 1 18 years' time, obviously I'll be fine. Post-apocalypse, people will always need

Speaker 1 puns and cricket stats.

Speaker 1 You see the director's cut of Mad Max. There's a lot of people doing cricket stats.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's a really weird bit where Tom Hardy just reads from a wisdom annual for half an hour.

Speaker 6 Andy, 18 years ago, you and John would source your news from reputable newspapers of note.

Speaker 6 You'd script up your jokes, or loll gaggeries, as they used to be called, on wax tablets with soapstone styluses.

Speaker 6 And then you'd seize your wooden megaphones and go to the amphitheatre, short for amphibious theatre kid, and you'd scream your jokes into his mouth.

Speaker 6 It was a he, because, of course, it was before women were allowed anywhere near satire, as it was considered that access to too many facts would blight our wombs.

Speaker 1 Anyway, the.

Speaker 1 Was it wrong, Alice?

Speaker 2 A lot of satirical shows outside of the bugle have maintained that policy, Alice.

Speaker 6 Tell me about it.

Speaker 1 Everyone else got a career out of this f ⁇ ing show.

Speaker 6 Anyway.

Speaker 6 The amphibious theatre kid would go to the houses and ponds of every bugle listener and tell them all the jokes in exchange for a wooden penny. That's how it used to be.
Now we're where we are now.

Speaker 6 18 years from now, can you imagine how powerful the bugle will be? What world-spanning influence we will have?

Speaker 6 What fully sentient bedonka-donk tanks we'll be sending out into civilization to assassinate plastic flamingo lawn ornaments?

Speaker 1 We will be

Speaker 6 at the cutting edge of technology.

Speaker 6 We'll be beamed directly into the eyes of children in 0.25 second incremental episodes, fighting for their micro-attentions against 18 other propagandists from all other quartiles of politics.

Speaker 6 In the brief period we have these children's minds before they grow old enough to subsume themselves into the Amazon Borg, an AI blob of glut that supplies infinite demand while demanding infinite supply.

Speaker 6 They'll subsume themselves into the blob of glut in service of one of three, they get to choose one of three God Emperor Hive Mind Business Merger personality orbs, either Musco Trump, a jabber-the-hut style floating slum ternity,

Speaker 6 Emperor Huawei Jinping, an eternal body made up entirely of dissident kidneys, or

Speaker 6 Perma Frost Poutine, a shirtless cryogenically frozen zombie Putin covered in cheese curds.

Speaker 1 The best commentary.

Speaker 6 We will of course defeat all other channels and become the dominant micro-narrowcaster, eventually becoming everyone's second, fourth, and other even-numbered thoughts before we start serving ads and insisting everyone upgrade to the premium Bugle service, which will also have ads, but ads of a slightly higher quality.

Speaker 2 Just as long as the ads only have white people in them.

Speaker 2 This show is a bloody wokist wet dream.

Speaker 2 A woman, a brown, and a Jew. At least Chris is here for some normal.

Speaker 8 That's what everyone says about me.

Speaker 1 Normal.

Speaker 1 I think that's the latest in a live bugle before we've had the first you, Chris.

Speaker 8 I think they saw the sheer look of panic that whether this technology would work or not at the start of the show and gave me a pass.

Speaker 1 We got time.

Speaker 2 I think you can do a

Speaker 1 thing. Well, one final story reaching us.

Speaker 1 A collection of 1980s pop and rock stars.

Speaker 2 Two in a night is rough.

Speaker 1 Have announced that they're to record a charity single to raise awareness of the housing crisis. This amidst reports that local governments are turning to porter cabins as a stopgap solution.

Speaker 1 Yes, this crisis could make prefrab sprout up everywhere.

Speaker 1 More and more people are living in crowded houses, creating a

Speaker 1 squeeze on accommodation. And what's, let's face it, it's not a big country, but one whose housing is in dire straits.
And we can't just stick with a status quo and have people living in a box.

Speaker 1 Is that long-term the cure? I mean, sure, these buildings go up really quickly, just like that, wham. But it's a short-term fix.
And soon enough, they'll run out and they have to put in a new order.

Speaker 1 Now, obviously,

Speaker 1 there will be architectural and aesthetic and planning issues having ported cabinets next to older and bigger buildings. Inevitably, it will be a problem.

Speaker 1 The clash of style, councils will have to make a call on that.

Speaker 1 And some people are making a political capital out of it, blaming immigration, but these kind of people they just enjoy division.

Speaker 1 In terms of the materials used, prefabs get a bad rap because of what they're made of, but it's not valid. And we need to dispel these myths.

Speaker 1 But maybe prefabs are better than older natural materials, certainly better than using lumber, because the beams degrade, they get woodworm. The timber, frankly, goes to Holywood.

Speaker 1 Don't blame me for this. I didn't write it.

Speaker 1 I simply read it out.

Speaker 1 There we go.

Speaker 1 Oh my god. I don't know if that's a glimpse into the past or the future.

Speaker 4 18 years from now.

Speaker 1 Thank you all for coming here to the Leicester Square Theatre. Thanks to the Leicester Square Theatre for having us.
Thanks to GoFasterScribe for doing the live stream.

Speaker 1 Thanks to all of you watching at home, all up to 8 billion of you

Speaker 1 watching at home. We will be will be reporting on the world for at least the next 18 years.

Speaker 1 I'm writing checks that my dietary habits cannot catch.

Speaker 5 Show you a priest once again for John Oliver.

Speaker 1 He's not there anymore.

Speaker 5 The absolutely wonderful Alice Fraser!

Speaker 5 The unstable internet connection, Nish Kumar

Speaker 5 playing for the Blue Days in the World Series.

Speaker 1 I've been Andy, goodbye, thank you for coming. Ultimate!

Speaker 3 Well, what a way to mark 1.8% of a millennium's worth of pure, unadulterated truth. Join us next week as we embark on the next 18 years of Bugles.
I will be joined by Helen Zaltzmann and Josie Long.

Speaker 3 If you want to help the Bugle complete the remaining 97.4-ish percent of of the millennium as a free, flourishing and independent show devoid of advertisements, do join the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme for which, alongside the warm glow of being on the right side of history, you will get access to our almost monthly Ask Andy show in which I, Andy Zoltzman, answer your questions about anything in the universe.

Speaker 3 To make a one-off or occurring contribution to our voluntary subscription scheme, go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

Speaker 3 And don't forget to buy your tickets, and if you want to, everyone else's tickets, to the live live bugles in Brisbane on the 2nd and Melbourne on the 22nd of December, and to my stand-up shows in Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney, and to my UK tour extension, Zoltgeist A Second FWAC, which begins in early 2026.

Speaker 3 Until next week, goodbye, and thank you for listening.