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Speaker 1 I will be in Australia for the next few weeks, hoping that the cricket can provide the distraction for everyone that it has so successfully provided for me since I was six years old.

Speaker 1 If you want to come to my shows, there is a Bugle Live in Melbourne on the 22nd of December, where I'll be joined by Sammy Shar and Lloyd Langford.

Speaker 1 And I'm doing the Zoltgeist, my stand-up show in Melbourne on the 23rd of December.

Speaker 1 And we've just added a possibly optimistic extra show in Sydney on the 3rd of January. The 2nd of January show is sold out, but please, please, please come on the 3rd.

Speaker 1 My UK tour extension begins begins at the end of January. All details and ticket links at andysaltsman.co.uk

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

Speaker 3 Hello buglers, welcome to the Bugle. This week's episode comes to you live from Brisbane, Australia, where Andy is attempting to watch cricket.

Speaker 3 Before we crack on, did you know you can send a loved one the gift of a bugle subscription? Go to thebuglepodcast.com for more info. Now, on with the show.

Speaker 4 Welcome, welcome to the Bugle Live, the first ever Bugle Live here in

Speaker 4 Kingsland. Is it Kingsland now?

Speaker 4 Are you still

Speaker 4 hanging on?

Speaker 4 All right, you've only just got over Victoria going, have you?

Speaker 4 So how are you on the monarchy in general?

Speaker 4 You do realise that you do have to keep it now forever.

Speaker 4 Because if you ever get rid of the monarchy now, it will look like you were only keeping it whilst Prince Andrew was involved. So, you can't do that.

Speaker 4 That is a bad look, Australia. So, um,

Speaker 4 so

Speaker 4 so, welcome, welcome to the Bugle Live. Uh, how many of you listen to the bugle regularly?

Speaker 4 Come here, how many listen to it occasionally?

Speaker 4 And how many have never listened to it at all?

Speaker 4 Welcome. So, well, this may be a slightly confusing show

Speaker 4 for you. So, The Bugle is the world's leading and only and longest-running audio newspaper for a visual world.

Speaker 4 We've been going since before podcasting was invented,

Speaker 4 since 2007. Who's been listening for over 18 years?

Speaker 4 Well, thank you very much. I've finally made it to

Speaker 4 Brisbane. So, this is doubling up as issue 4,362 of the Bugle.
It's a weekly show.

Speaker 4 The mathematically minded amongst you might notice that there haven't been 4,362 weeks in the last 18 years, but we skipped out just over 3,700 at one point.

Speaker 4 So here we are, it's issue 4,362, and we are here in Brisbane, the city where English cricket comes to die. Who's?

Speaker 4 Who's someone hacked?

Speaker 4 Has someone hacked this script? My script? No, sorry, I had the AI script creator set to grim realism.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 anyway, we'll touch on that later in the show, but

Speaker 4 let's first meet the crowd. So please all answer.

Speaker 4 What's your name?

Speaker 4 What do you do for a living?

Speaker 4 What's your favourite mode of transport around Brisbane?

Speaker 4 If anyone didn't say boat, you are a f ⁇ ing lunatic. Those boats...

Speaker 4 Those boats are sensational. You don't know how good you've got it.
Let's have a round of applause for

Speaker 4 the city cats.

Speaker 4 And now let's meet our guests for today's bugle. Firstly, right here, right now, here in Brisbane in 3D, it's the wonderful Alice Fraser.

Speaker 4 Hello, Alice.

Speaker 4 Hello.

Speaker 5 Hello, Andy. Hello, buglers.
It's so good to be here.

Speaker 5 I'm delighted to see you. Normally, I'm a big head on the screen, and now the bugle has come to me at last.

Speaker 4 And quite often, you're a big head on the screen at 5 a.m. your time.
Yeah. Which is not traditionally funny time.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 so, this is your revenge gig.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it's definitely done damage to my brain. I sometimes wake up at 4:30 in the morning being like, I'm hilarious.

Speaker 4 I think there might be members of the England cricket squad who've been suffering something similar since the Perth test.

Speaker 4 Also, joining us via the the wonders of the internet, if the internet is still working as it was when we set up the Zoom call an hour before the show,

Speaker 4 fingers crossed, joining us from London, it's producer Chris and Nish Kumar.

Speaker 4 It's working.

Speaker 4 I can't, I cannot believe, and I can only thank everyone at the venue for making this work not normally I have I have Chris doing this shit I have no practical skills in life hello Nish hello Chris how's how's morning in London it's 913 a.m.

Speaker 2 in the morning now that is not a time that I am accustomed to being awake I had to get up at I had to get up at 7 a.m.

Speaker 2 to do some sort of f ⁇ ing line test I I couldn't hear what Alice said but I assume it was wanging on about reproducing but um

Speaker 2 listen uh today I feel like do you remember when Mark Wahlberg published his morning routine a few years ago? Today I feel like pure Wahlberg. Got up at 7 a.m.

Speaker 2 Coffee, dump, line test, another coffee, another dump, bugle. I'm set up for the day.

Speaker 4 That's Nish. Two shits, Kumar.

Speaker 4 Coincidentally for any cricket fans, the same number of shits that the great West Indian George Hedley had on the morning of a test match.

Speaker 4 That is the one and only fact of the show.

Speaker 6 And Andy,

Speaker 7 with all this fine work, Andy, are you also going to pick up the edit of this week's show as well?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I'm going to edit it.

Speaker 4 Can't be that f ⁇ ing difficult, mate, can it?

Speaker 6 Yeah, well, let's find out.

Speaker 4 It's the second of the seven. On this day in 1932, just 93 short years ago, it was the first day of the Bodyline Cricket Series.

Speaker 4 Too soon. F ⁇ ers haven't stopped complaining about it in over nine decades now.
Oh, it's a bit fast and hurty. Right.

Speaker 4 On this day in 1697, St. Paul's Cathedral, the celebrity church in London designed by Sir Christopher Wren, was consecrated.
The previous one had burnt down during the Great Fire of London.

Speaker 4 And it just shows how much more effective Christopher Wren's dome is than the old spire as a means of getting prayers through to God. Because the previous St.

Speaker 4 Paul's Cathedral burnt down once per approximately 350 years, whereas Wren's has burnt down zero times in 320 years.

Speaker 4 So that shows that prayers said through a spire

Speaker 4 are 100% less effective than prayers said through a dome, because presumably at some point in both of those churches, someone has prayed for it not to burn down.

Speaker 4 Bit of science for you. On this day in 1952,

Speaker 4 a human birth was televised live on television in America. That is a genuine fact.

Speaker 4 On the 2nd of December 1952, a human birth live on KOA TV Denver. And for whatever reason, that has not caught on as a TV show.

Speaker 4 People seem to prefer home improvement shows, reality shows, and live sport. But you know, it could have gone the other way.

Speaker 4 Maybe if it had been a better birth or with better pundits, I think the pundits weren't great on the birth. They just said, well, everyone tried hard.
That's all you can ask.

Speaker 4 Well, you want a bit more. You want a bit more technical analysis from your sports punditry.
Maybe if it had been a more elegant birth, if such a thing exists.

Speaker 4 It would have caught on like sport has, and now we would be here in Brisbane about to watch Australia versus England in mass birthing

Speaker 4 rather than cricket. Would be long, drawn out, and painful.
Actually, that's basically test cricket for England and Australia if I want.

Speaker 4 Why do do you think it's not caught on? Alice is a listener.

Speaker 5 Okay, and I have so many questions. Up what end was the camera?

Speaker 4 Oh, I don't I don't know.

Speaker 5 I mean, there was only like two channels back then. What was the counter programming?

Speaker 4 What were you sitting

Speaker 5 across to?

Speaker 5 And thirdly, I imagine that it hasn't caught on because at that point standards wouldn't let you scream very loud.

Speaker 4 But it's

Speaker 4 there's a delay on your laughter, Nish, that makes it sound

Speaker 4 seriously creepy.

Speaker 4 Anyway,

Speaker 4 the live birthing show is no longer on television, which leads me to believe, Nish, that you must have been involved in it somehow. If it's been on.

Speaker 4 Right, as always, a section of the bugle is going, where Brisbane?

Speaker 4 It's going where? In the bin.

Speaker 4 I'm afraid that's the only graphic of the show, pretty much.

Speaker 4 I used to be quite good at making graphics, but I've forgotten.

Speaker 4 But anyway, you get the in the bid one.

Speaker 4 And your section in the bid this week is Australia Facts.

Speaker 4 Who's heard of Australia?

Speaker 4 About half of you.

Speaker 4 Fair enough. Here are your Australia facts.
Australia is so big that it can be seen from space.

Speaker 4 But not always. It does depend on a number of factors whether Australia can be seen from space, including how far away you are.

Speaker 4 Space is even bigger than Australia. And

Speaker 4 Australia starts to get a bit blurry after a couple of million miles. And once you're from beyond that, you can't see Australia from space.

Speaker 4 If you're in, say, the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.5 million light-years away, you cannot see Australia from space.

Speaker 4 And even if you could, it would look like it did 2.5 million years ago when England was losing to Australia at the Gaba.

Speaker 4 It also depends on which direction you're looking.

Speaker 4 You won't see Australia from space if you're looking out of the wrong window of your spacecraft or you're looking outwards into more space rather than downwards towards Earth.

Speaker 4 It depends on how clean your spaceship windows are, whether you've been kidnapped by aliens and blindfolded.

Speaker 4 If you're an alien and your eyes work differently to human eyes, maybe through a form of visionless sensory experience, so you might be able to feel Australia from space without actually seeing it.

Speaker 4 It depends if the world's pointing the right way and if it's flat or not. And it also depends what day of the week it is.
Did you know that Australia cannot be seen from space on Thursdays?

Speaker 4 No one knows why.

Speaker 4 Another Australia fact, Australia contains numerous lethal creatures.

Speaker 4 You're proud of them?

Speaker 4 Has anyone here ever been killed by one of the lethal creatures in Australia? They can't be as bad as people make out.

Speaker 4 These range from the eastern brown snake, the box jellyfish, the shithead spider, the fed off kangaroo, the non-vegan shark, the very horny crocodile, the nuclear platypus, the exploding koala, the unfair dinkum, which is like a possum but with a serrated metal tail that can slice a truckle of cheddar in half,

Speaker 4 and the plummeting wombat, which descends from the skies at over 400 miles an hour.

Speaker 4 If you survive more than a month in Australia without being eaten, poisoned, or head-butted to death by its flora and fauna, you're immune to everything. That's a fact.

Speaker 4 Australia is hot, so hot in fact, that chickens in parts of Australia lay souffles rather than eggs.

Speaker 4 A fact about Australia, Australia lies about how much it worries. It often says no, but it never really means it.

Speaker 4 Alice, you had gone Australia fact.

Speaker 5 Australia is a monotreme.

Speaker 5 It's not laid an egg yet but when it does it'll breastfeed.

Speaker 5 It's also got a poison spur.

Speaker 4 I can see this being a recurring feature of the show now.

Speaker 5 It's also got a poison spur but we just call that Tasmania.

Speaker 4 Family show, family show.

Speaker 5 I mean they say that that a lot in they say family show a lot in Tasmania.

Speaker 5 Family show.

Speaker 4 Nish, have you got an Australia fact?

Speaker 2 I actually do have an Australia fact. And that Australia fact is that in 2004, I was on my gap here in Australia.

Speaker 2 And when I was in Cairns, I tried to learn how to surf from a company called the Surfing Dog, whose tagline was, if we can teach a dog to surf, we can teach you.

Speaker 2 And I don't want to give too much away, but they are legally unable to use that as a taglid line.

Speaker 4 Chris, have you got Australia facts?

Speaker 7 Yeah, well, it's been much reported over the years by many conspiracy theorists that Australia doesn't actually exist and it's a liberal conspiracy theory dreamed up by liberals and the likes in, I think, Washington, D.C.

Speaker 6 based pizza parlour basements.

Speaker 6 But the extension of that, which I'm sad to report, is that means that England are losing the ashes to a TV film crew.

Speaker 4 Haven't lost it yet, Chris.

Speaker 4 Come on.

Speaker 4 Right, that section is in the ben.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 4 Australia news now and Alice, you are the Bugles Australia correspondent. So we're looking at the the sort of life cycle in Australia.
Let's start with a bit of Australian childhood news. Who here

Speaker 4 has experienced childhood?

Speaker 4 Who did it in Australia?

Speaker 4 So that's quite a good, healthy proportion of that

Speaker 4 Venn diagram. But childhood is about to change for Australian kids because the government is set to ban social media, children under 16s from using social media.

Speaker 4 They're banning children from the simple joys of being anonymously harangued by strangers, presented with unattainable and undesirable standards of what and who they should look, talk, act and think like.

Speaker 4 So what is going to be left for Australian kids to fill their time other than the harrowing reality of the human condition?

Speaker 5 I mean, we've got to go back to the good old days of just bullying each other in person.

Speaker 4 What made this nation great?

Speaker 5 I mean, it is a bold move. In order to protect children, you must ban them.

Speaker 5 You know, the solution to bad people doing bad things on a platform is to remove all the good people, take away the innocence and hope. It's an understandable impulse.

Speaker 5 We've all seen a YouTube think piece about Netflix show Adolescence. We know online is toxic to children and also to adults, but mainly to children and we can control children.

Speaker 5 It's basically like the campaigns in the 80s and 90s to get kids off the roads because people needed to drive drunk to work and they kept going to work over the top of children and other children kept getting kidnapped.

Speaker 5 So instead of moving the cars and perverts indoors, they ran big safety campaigns to put the children safely inside on screens where it turns out all the perverts were hiding all along.

Speaker 5 Now, of course, the movie is to get them off the screen, isolated both from the bad influencers and the friends, and leave them with, I guess, their own thoughts and feelings, which might be the worst thing you could possibly do to a teenager.

Speaker 5 But in bright civic engagement news, the children are suing the government, which is

Speaker 5 good.

Speaker 5 they I mean of course they are challenging as they have a God-given human rights adjacent right to communicate freely to share their thoughts and fears and dreams and horny 47 part TikTok sapphic wigged fan fictions

Speaker 5 There's two 15 year olds who are bringing this, Macy Newland and Noah Jones, they're bringing a suit against the government saying it infringes on their freedom of communication and they suggest that instead of banning children from social media in order to protect them from harmful content, the government should clear the harmful content from the social media and let the children play, which is all well and good, but has one fatal flaw, which is to say, what do they think social media is?

Speaker 5 Except harmful content.

Speaker 5 If you stripped out all existing harmful content from the internet, it would just be one benevolent old lady called Gladys saying she loves ham sandwiches and seven billion people in the comment section calling her an evil leftist Nazi R-word, K-word, N-word, Karen, cut.

Speaker 5 The business model of these companies is entirely predicated on farming the worst human qualities of using hyper-charged billion-dollar algorithms to machine milk us for rage juice because it turns out that breaking the atomic bonds of social trust produces a mushroom crowd of money and we don't have to worry about any further knock-on effects.

Speaker 5 No more to the judge. Thank you.

Speaker 5 I'm not offering any solutions here, Andy. I just think we should go back to when computers were buildings full of women moving big cards from one slot to another.

Speaker 4 So, I mean, you're right, it's not all social media content that is harmful. It is, the latest estimation is it's 99.94%, and that's a terrible fing number.
Terrible, it's a very niche joke.

Speaker 4 So,

Speaker 4 Nish trying to return Australian childhood to what it used to be, which involved trying not to think too much about Australia's national origin story.

Speaker 4 Hoping you don't get abandoned in the outback by your mad father in your school uniform. Did that happen to everyone, or was that?

Speaker 4 I saw that film.

Speaker 4 Did that happen to any of you here? Or not?

Speaker 4 And hanging out by the river, playing Stick or Crock, which is

Speaker 4 a game you generally only lose once. So

Speaker 5 or worse, Sticky Crock, which is where they pour glue all over the back of a crocodile and throw the children aboard.

Speaker 4 Nish, what's your view on this? I know you take your role as a social media influencer very seriously indeed. So what's your message to Australia?

Speaker 2 Yes, obviously I'm in a prime position to comment, being being as I am the world's first reverse influencer.

Speaker 2 I don't know if everyone's aware of this, but in my recent years I've actually been sponsored by a lot of brands to not be seen wearing their products. So I'm in a fantastic position.

Speaker 2 Listen, look, here's what I would say. Okay, to the teenagers of Gen Z and Generation Alpha.

Speaker 2 I understand that this ban feels regressive and actually what we should be doing is policing content on social media companies. Unfortunately, we can't because none of them really exist.

Speaker 2 They're all more powerful powerful than any government could possibly be. But what I would say is take the ban as an opportunity to not engage with social media.

Speaker 2 Take it from a millennial, the first generation to be experimented on by social media companies. We are mentally, and this is a technical term, f ⁇ ing in the head, okay? Because of...

Speaker 2 What we've been exposed to and we are trying to ward you off these things. Millennials these days are like Jeff Goldblum in a Jurassic Park sequel.

Speaker 2 We are just engaging with you in conversations about these things as you say, No, no, this platform's fun, this platform's fun, and we're there going, Yeah, yeah, it all starts fun, but then there's the screaming and the running.

Speaker 2 It's like a monster movie where a scientist has created a new life, and then it turns out there's loads of previous failed experiments in the basement saying things like, Mastered is good to us, he gives us pictures of dinner.

Speaker 2 And my only

Speaker 2 compromise I'm willing to offer is as an outreach to the younger generations is if this ban is going to be maintained, that is fine. Under 16s can't use social media.

Speaker 2 But what we then need to do is also introduce an upper limit on the ban. Because let's be honest.

Speaker 2 Let's be totally honest here. If we're talking about the damage caused by social media, obviously we have to talk about the children that have been bullied.

Speaker 2 But we also need to talk about all of the people above the age of 50 that have been radicalised.

Speaker 4 At one point, and

Speaker 2 this is going to be hard to believe for people in the audience, J.K. Rowling was a woman who wrote children's books.
I know that is hard to believe.

Speaker 2 That is incredibly hard to believe. She was a woman who wrote children's books.
And your aunt at one point believed the earth was round. I know that this is going to be hard to believe.

Speaker 2 At one stage, your uncle was capable of seeing a person of colour in the street without saying, well, well, it's an invasion. That is true.

Speaker 4 That is true.

Speaker 2 It was possible.

Speaker 4 It was possible.

Speaker 2 And if we're going to maintain the ban, I say we ban all over 50s from all forms of social media apart from LinkedIn. Let them by all means send their pointless

Speaker 2 CVs around to each other until the world ends.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Well, Nish, I'm 51 and I like to think I've been a trailblazer by posting on Twitter about once every two years.
So I'm a hero.

Speaker 4 My My question, though, Alice:

Speaker 4 Is social media so much worse than what children have experienced?

Speaker 4 But we think of like fairy stories, basically involved granny-eating wolves that could speak, cannibalistic witches, questionable confectionery-based architecture, frankly, atrocious parenting, assorted sexual crimes, gossameth in relationships based entirely on princes being handsome and princesses being pretty, institutionalised misogyny, ageism, a harrowing lack of televised sport,

Speaker 4 and frankly ill-advised footwear. I mean, that's

Speaker 4 that not worse than what social media

Speaker 4 is giving them?

Speaker 5 Not only is it significantly worse, I also think we need to ban fairy tales and fun from children.

Speaker 4 Right, we're building a better world here. Also, I mean, you think of the influence of religion in the past, and I know it's a big influence here as it was in Britain.

Speaker 4 You know, Bible stories, basically, you're saying to children, you are going to burn in the fires of eternal hell if you so much as think about a boob or a plonker.

Speaker 5 And to me, yes, Andy, yes, let's ban God.

Speaker 5 Let's storm the gates of heaven and bland God to his face.

Speaker 4 I just see social media as being a much more fast-acting, efficient form of institutional religion.

Speaker 4 And it just gets the abuse and the psychological scarring done within minutes rather than across several months and years.

Speaker 5 Just God, and at his right hand, a Jesus made out of shrimps. At his left hand, a thousand-eyed minion.

Speaker 4 Right, moving on to other Australian news now and the Wiggles involved in a national controversy. I mean, this is a story that has shaken Australia to its core.

Speaker 4 Are you Wiggles fans?

Speaker 4 Yeah, and the massive, for those of you who not heard of it, either here or listening to the recording, massively successful band whose music has entertained the children of Australia and the world for over 30 years.

Speaker 4 Basically, they are to Australia, Alice, what the Beatles and the Rolling Stones are to the UK. Is that fair?

Speaker 4 Or what Nirvana and Megadeth are to the USA in terms of cultural heft and the way they represent the true soul of their nation?

Speaker 4 Is that fair Australia? Have I got that about right? Yeah, good, okay, there we go, good.

Speaker 5 It's about the shape of it.

Speaker 5 It's a sort of a terrible scandal. The Wiggles have had to say, hey, kids, we don't

Speaker 5 condone ecstasy.

Speaker 5 Because

Speaker 5 they appeared in the background of a music video about the drug ecstasy, dancing and having a good time, which is what people who are on the drug ecstasy do.

Speaker 5 So it was an implicit endorsement of the drug ecstasy to their extremely vulnerable two and a half year old audience.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 the whole problem is one of age here. The wiggles are too old to be seen condoning ecstasy.
Their audience is too young to be exposed to the concept of ecstasy.

Speaker 5 Arguably, the wiggles are too old to be exposed to children. But I guess...

Speaker 5 I mean, they are slowly replacing themselves one by one. It's very Theseus' wiggle.

Speaker 5 The problem really is is that one of the reasons that the wiggles are so successful as a children's group, they're one of the more tolerable children's music groups because the original guys are actual musicians with actual musical talent and you don't get to be a musician with actual musical talent for however long they've been around, which is it now, about 140 years.

Speaker 5 You don't get to stay relevant without having a lot of friends who are doing cocaine and ecstasy and all of the other drugs. How do you think they found Dorothy the Dinosaur?

Speaker 4 Well, I mean, for those of you not less familiar, some of the Blue Wiggle is one of the wiggles, renowned for his bawdy, innuendo-based, sexually graphic material. Yeah.

Speaker 4 As well as his reinterpretation of the works of Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker for the younger generation.

Speaker 5 Very famous song, The Big Red C to that one.

Speaker 4 Also renowned for his Thatcherite economics.

Speaker 4 And then there's the Tree of Wisdom.

Speaker 4 Yeah, you Tree of Wisdom fans,

Speaker 4 which shares the immutable verities of life with children, such as that today's tree is tomorrow's firewood. You can see the hollowness in his eyes.

Speaker 4 And if you sit under a tree for long enough, a bird will shit on your head. I mean, it's sub-textual, but it's definitely there.

Speaker 4 And now, the Wigglyk Eeuvre has largely steered clear of commentary on the social and economic impact of illegal drug use.

Speaker 4 Although reports have claimed that if you play the hit 2000 Wiggles Christmas album, You'll Be Wiggling Backwards, it contains barely concealed references to opium abuse.

Speaker 4 The The 2001 record, Hoop-Dee-Doo, It's a Wiggly Party, contains the letters L, S and D in its title.

Speaker 4 How much more evidence you want. The 2010 album, Let's Eat, sounds like an invocation to take ecstasy if you forget to clearly enunciate the T on the end of eat.

Speaker 4 2006 is Racing to the Rainbow. I mean, do I have to f ⁇ ing spell it out?

Speaker 4 And Lullabies with Love from 2021 contains multiple samples of the Velvet Underground's heroin. So, um...

Speaker 4 And of course, Nish, Keith Flint of the British Rave Legends the Prodigy, regularly cited the Wiggles as his musical inspiration. So,

Speaker 4 I mean, has this news reached the Northern Hemisphere?

Speaker 2 Yes, the news has reached the Northern Hemisphere.

Speaker 2 So, the full details of this are that they were in the background of a video filmed by a musician called Kelly Holiday, whose new song is called Ecstasy.

Speaker 2 So, this was done at the TikTok Awards earlier this month, where the band appeared on stage with Holiday.

Speaker 2 And the BBC News article about this said that the Wiggles had appeared in a song that alluded to drug use so I thought well let's see what sort of level of illusion we're operating on here the song is called Ecstasy

Speaker 2 and the

Speaker 2 the the lyrics to the song are hey girl come dance on me you and your pocket full of ecstasy so I mean

Speaker 2 It's alluding to drug use in very much the same way that Cisco's thong song is alluding to string-based underpants.

Speaker 4 You all thought it was a shoe song, didn't you?

Speaker 5 Which does make it creepier.

Speaker 4 I mean, the Wiggles obviously are the de facto moral conscious of modern Australia, but in terms of people who are actually in power,

Speaker 4 the Prime Minister has done something that a Prime Minister should never have time to do if he's doing his job properly and

Speaker 4 got married.

Speaker 5 Yes, yes, Andy.

Speaker 5 Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has wed at the age of 62 while in office, making him the first Australian Prime Minister in the history of the nation to say he'd do something and then actually do it.

Speaker 4 We'll just have to see if he means it long term, I guess.

Speaker 4 I mean, I think,

Speaker 4 Nish, I know you think Albanese's wedding is yet more proof of how woke the world is.

Speaker 4 This guy marrying someone just because he likes her rather than because it can facilitate a strategic military alliance or major trading partnership like a leader should f ⁇ ing get married for.

Speaker 4 I mean, this is wokeism gone mad, isn't it?

Speaker 2 Yeah, wokeism gone mad is actually my wrestling name.

Speaker 2 But listen, I was reading the details of this. I'm absolutely fascinated.
So, they've actually been together for a few years now. They met in 2020 when Albanese was leader of the opposition.

Speaker 2 And his wife, whose name is

Speaker 2 Jodi Hayden, accompanied Albo

Speaker 2 across the sort of 2022 and 2025 election campaigns and has been seen alongside him at major events, including a state dinner hosted by then US President Joe Biden and the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II.

Speaker 2 Now listen, I've been in a long-term relationship for 13 years, and as long-term relationships evolve, it can be harder to find opportunities to spend time with each other.

Speaker 2 You've got to schedule in date nights, whether that be dinner and a movie or the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II.

Speaker 2 And what a date night that is. And as part of date nights, listen, we don't want to be crass here.
It is important to express love physically.

Speaker 2 So my question for Albanese is, did him and his now wife f after the the Queen's funeral? And

Speaker 2 if they did, if they did, is that disrespectful? Or is it in many ways the ultimate tribute to our former monarch?

Speaker 4 I mean first Paul Keaton groping around the arse and now this.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so first Australian Prime Minister get married in office, although I think Harold Holt was trying to go on a date with a mermaid, wasn't he? I'm afraid that then.

Speaker 4 Too soon?

Speaker 4 Now it's UK falling to pieces news now. And...

Speaker 4 Yeah, things aren't going too well in Britain.

Speaker 4 How many Brits in today? Give us a cheer.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 how many of you live here?

Speaker 4 How many of you just come for the cricket?

Speaker 4 A few of you are welcome.

Speaker 4 But I mean,

Speaker 4 when I left the UK 10 days ago, everything was working absolutely fine. But

Speaker 4 so to see if things are still tootling along nicely, Nish, you are our

Speaker 4 UK correspondent, despite what the Daily Telegraph says. And

Speaker 4 look, Look, it's not, I mean, it's fair to say the Labour government, they've been in power now for about 18 months and they've not entirely captured the public imagination.

Speaker 4 They've sort of captured the public imagination very much like a baby spider captures an Apache helicopter in its web. So,

Speaker 4 and it was

Speaker 4 budget week this week.

Speaker 4 I know you're a huge fan of the principles of taxation.

Speaker 4 But it's not gone well for the government, has it?

Speaker 2 Listen, nothing gets me more rock hard than fiscal projections. Okay, we know that.

Speaker 2 We know that.

Speaker 2 I am always beating off to the word boobs on my calculator. We know that about me.

Speaker 4 In the words of J.K. Galbraith himself.

Speaker 2 Listen,

Speaker 2 it's been another bad week for the Labour government in this country. So it was the budget last week.

Speaker 2 Unfortunately, the Office of Budget Responsibility, a sort of non-partisan organisation that does all of the facts and figures around the budget and the projections, accidentally leaked the budget after someone clicked on the wrong link.

Speaker 2 That, unbelievably, is something that happened in this country last week. Their popularity is plummeting.

Speaker 2 And the next presumed Prime Minister of this country is Nigel Farage, a sort of experiment to bring a pint of real ale to life.

Speaker 2 He is actually in a bit of trouble at the moment because some reports about the things that he's done at school are coming back to haunt him.

Speaker 2 Several people who were at school with Nigel Farage, he went to an elite private school called Dulwich College, just down the road from where Andy and I both live, said that

Speaker 2 one of the students said that a 13-year-old Farage would sidle up to me and growl, Hitler was right, or gas them, sometimes adding a long hiss to simulate the sound of the gas showers. So that's a

Speaker 2 one of a string of reports of racist behavior that Nigel Farage had engaged in he has said in response that nothing he did was directly racist or anti-Semitic suggesting that Nigel Farage takes an approach to racism the same way as a child does who just punches the air and says hey I'm just punching the air if you walk towards me it's your own fault he's the Bart Simpson of racism

Speaker 2 And here's the reality. The problem that Nigel Farage has is that these reports are unbelievably believable and only because of everything

Speaker 2 he has said and done since. Nigel Farage being a racist at school is about as surprising a revelation as if it turns out Trump is going to be in the Epstein Papers.

Speaker 2 When that's revealed to us, we're all going to have to pretend to be surprised. Nigel Farage is a racist.
That guy.

Speaker 4 Really?

Speaker 2 It's the same.

Speaker 2 The only people I'd be less surprised to see in the Epstein Papers than Donald Trump are Jimmy Savile and the child catcher from Chitty Chitty Bangbang.

Speaker 2 In summary, Andy, everyone in the UK is cunts.

Speaker 2 Some of them are cuts because they have good ideas but absolutely no political will to execute them and/or are sexually aroused by the concept of infighting.

Speaker 2 And the other c are cunts because they're simply cunts. That's the state of play.

Speaker 4 Thank you, Little Scrugs.

Speaker 4 But I mean, this

Speaker 4 government's policies are basically,

Speaker 4 Rachel Reeves said the tax, she's the Chancellor,

Speaker 4 the tax rise will help pay for £22 billion in fiscal headroom within five years. And if that doesn't inspire the electorate niche a bit of leeway in half a decade's time,

Speaker 4 I just don't know what will anymore.

Speaker 4 I mean, I've lost count of the number of marches I've been on in London with people calling for hypothetical future budgetary wiggle room at a vague point in the medium term future.

Speaker 4 It's basically what drove the Russian Revolution from memory. So if this doesn't work, if there's not what I mean one of the fundamental problem though is and this is true across all

Speaker 4 the whole world is that we are tax averse as a species.

Speaker 4 In fact do you know humans have avoided more tax than any other species

Speaker 4 in the history of the natural. We've only been around for what, a few tens of thousands, maybe a a couple of hundred thousand years.

Speaker 4 And we think the dinosaurs were here for millions and millions of years, never got around to avoiding tax, or indeed asteroids. So, you know, it shows what a special gift we have.

Speaker 4 Let me illustrate why it's a problem. Andy,

Speaker 2 that's not actually true. Birds are the number one tax avoiders.
Everyone thinks they're heading south for the winter as part of a migration pattern. That's actually not true.

Speaker 2 They're actually all flying directly to the Cayman Islands and spending enough time there that they can claim it as their primary point of residence.

Speaker 4 Yeah, rest of the world news, let's start with America and Donald Trump is saving the world yet again.

Speaker 4 Some scepticism there. Let me explain why Donald Trump, for those of you who've not heard of him, the Beethoven of bigotry, the Michelangelo of misogyny, the Pablo Picasso of parochial prejudice, the

Speaker 4 Leonardo da Vinci of ludicrously deluded victory ol, the there's one more, the Craig Revelle Hallward of crackbot reactionary hate-mongering.

Speaker 4 He has stepped into the breach and now look there's question marks over Trump's legacy and the long-term impact he's had on the planet, but I think you know, I guess it's one of those kind of ink blot type things, isn't it?

Speaker 4 Like the Rorschach test, where you look at an ink block and everyone sees different things. I think it's the same with Donald Trump.
So with the ink blot, some people see nothing, just an ink blot.

Speaker 4 Some people see the wings of a butterfly. Some people see two naked badgers wrestling to the death in in a giant bath of spaghetti bolognese.

Speaker 4 A few laughs of recognition there.

Speaker 4 Some people see England opener Zach Crawley hopefully driving outside Austin.

Speaker 4 So as with Donald Trump, everyone sees different things.

Speaker 4 And this week may be the moment that cements his contribution to humanity because he has stepped up to fulfil the world's unspoken heartfelt desire for the sweet caress of freedom's life-giving...

Speaker 4 No, sorry, to see for the film Rush Hour 4 to be made.

Speaker 4 I'm always getting those two mixed up.

Speaker 4 Finally, after years, decades, centuries even of waiting, that thirst for Rush Hour 4 is set to be slaked by the life-giving ministrations of the modern-day Messiah Corps egomania Saviour Savant, that is Donald J.

Speaker 4 Trump, the 45th, 47th, and probably last president of the USA.

Speaker 4 The latest move designed to pile food onto the plates of working-class Americans in the way that renaming the Gulf of Mexico and unveiling plans to build a ballroom in the White House have led to sausages and broccoli literally raining from the heavens directly into the open mouths of hungry American children.

Speaker 4 The fourth film in the Rush Hour franchise is finally set to see the light of day. Now, it's often we talked about politicians in the first half.

Speaker 4 Alice, you mentioned politicians saying he'll do something and then doing it, that being rare. I can't remember, did Donald Trump pledge to get Rush Hour 4 made for the people of America? I can't.

Speaker 4 My memory's a little hazy on this.

Speaker 5 I'm pretty sure that was, yeah, between asking his people to storm the Capitol and telling Melania that he loves her.

Speaker 4 Nish, I know you're a massive fan of the Rush Hour franchise, and it's been a long time.

Speaker 4 Who's seen the Rush Hour films?

Speaker 4 Yeah, but good?

Speaker 4 Kind of airplane fodder?

Speaker 4 Yeah, okay.

Speaker 4 I mean, I guess that's what's held up the production of Rush Hour 4. No one really giving a shit whether Rush Hour 4 was made.

Speaker 4 That's really also the director being accused of sexual misconduct of the kind that scientists only relatively recently discovered was absolutely out of order.

Speaker 4 And also there being plenty of other films already. But Trump Nish has hurled himself in front of the donkey of disappointment and turned that donkey into the buffalo of belated blockbuster.

Speaker 4 I mean this is a huge moment for the film industry.

Speaker 2 This is a huge moment for the film industry and it's arguably a bigger moment for the human race, Andy.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Rush Hour is a film franchise that I would say is largely forgotten about by everyone not exactly my age.

Speaker 2 But there've there'd been a fourth entry apparently in the works for a long time, but not been picked up due to thorough and phenomenal lack of interest.

Speaker 2 But now Donald Trump has stepped into the breach and has been lobbying for the film to his friend and backer Larry Ellison, who is the largest shareholder of the new Paramount Skydance mega company, a merger which possibly shouldn't have been allowed to be happening, but has only been allowed to happen due to the fact that the Monopolies and Mergers Commission is, I think, busy playing an actual game of Monopoly that's just got out of hand.

Speaker 2 Larry Ellison is a big, big Trump backer, and Trump has now been lobbying him, which is obviously weird that a president is lobbying anyone for anything. I mean, he's the f ⁇ ing president.

Speaker 2 I think technically he could, by presidential decree, order there to be a Rush Hour 4. In any case, he's been lobbying on behalf of Rush Hour 4, and it looks like it's going to happen.

Speaker 2 Now, Andy, you've already referenced, I think, the key element here, because a lot of people will be looking at this and thinking, why on earth is Donald Trump interested in Rush Hour 4 and not say the Home Alone franchise which he is of course featured in in Home Alone 2.

Speaker 2 Also if I remember the plot of the first Rush Hour correctly that is a movie where a black guy and a Chinese guy team up to defeat a rich old white man and I feel like that seems counterintuitive to Trump's current narrative but then you dig into it more and realize that the sequel is going to be directed by the original director Brett Ratner who had retreated from Hollywood after numerous allegations of sexual misconduct.

Speaker 2 In fact, the last thing Brett Ratner was actually able to get made was a documentary for Amazon and that documentary was about Melania Trump. So we see a little bit more clearly what's going on here.

Speaker 2 Donald Trump is just trying to get jobs for his friends and if those friends happen to be disgraced, accused sexual predators, then that is just Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 That is just Donald Trump taking the sacred principle of bros before homes to its logical end point.

Speaker 2 And I would say that if he's going to continue this policy, the new rush era is going to have a very different vibe and probably quite a different cast.

Speaker 2 If this is the policy he's going under, I would expect Chris Tucker to be directly replaced by a recently released from jail Diddy and Jackie Chan is going to be replaced by Kevin Spacey in makeup that I'm afraid to say is going to add another paragraph to his already bulging controversy section on his Wikipedia page.

Speaker 5 Oh, Andy, I'm so torn. Do we need yet another reheated subpar sequel? I'm talking about Trump's second term.
No, I mean, do we really need yet another tired cash grab based on reheated IP?

Speaker 5 I'm still talking about Trump's second term. Now, that is satire.

Speaker 5 No, but I mean, I am conflicted because, yes, on one hand, it's a well that's been gone back to so many times, surely we've had enough. But on the other hand, it is rush hour.
We like Jackie Chan.

Speaker 5 He seems fine. He seems like a fine guy.
And you know how far you have to go in Hollywood to find someone who seems like he might just be fine.

Speaker 5 I think Jackie Chan seems like he might be fine. He could be because he's foreign and the crazy doesn't translate so well.

Speaker 5 But I'm choosing to believe fine because if Jackie Chan isn't fine, whomst among us could ever aspire to being fine.

Speaker 5 I mean, he seems like he's on a lot of painkillers, but that's because he's crushed every single bone in his body in the relentless pursuit of making people childishly happy for minutes at a time.

Speaker 5 Can't we give him Rush Hour for?

Speaker 4 All right, I've not seen the first three Rush Hour films, but I've guessed what's in them.

Speaker 4 So, for those of you who've not seen them,

Speaker 4 Rush Hour from 1998, just a quick plot, I mean don't listen if you think you might watch it, involves a man contemplating taking his own life on Christmas Eve, but being saved by his guardian angel, who then earns his wings by showing the man the true impact he's had on people's lives.

Speaker 4 Rush Hour 2 from 2001, that involves the former Wales and Liverpool striker Ian Rush.

Speaker 4 staring down the camera for almost an hour whilst thinking about his favourite goals. It's oddly moving.

Speaker 4 And Rush Hour 3 from 2007 was filmed in one shot, involves two people stuck in stationary cars next to each other in a traffic jam.

Speaker 4 They talk, fall in love, and are married by a passing priest on a moped before an alien space laser vaporizes the entire planet. So hopefully

Speaker 4 that's brought you up. So I mean in terms of Trump's influence on arts and culture, Niche, obviously we can't say that he's a dictator in the way that

Speaker 4 he's behaved because he's a democratically elected leader with a mandate from the people of America to behave exactly like a dictator. But that's a key semantic difference.

Speaker 4 And obviously, you know, that's how a lot of dictators get their foot in the door. But

Speaker 4 he's not a fascist either. He just does the exact kind of things that dictators and fascists do.
But that's completely different. And we have to remember that.

Speaker 4 And so, choke-slamming culture before knee-dropping it and clattering around the head with a chair. This is just what America demanded at the ballot box.

Speaker 4 So what do you see next for him now that he's essentially dictating what movies are made?

Speaker 2 Well, I would say that I believe I might have misheard this, but I did hear someone describe Donald Trump as anti-semantic. Just to be clear, it is possible that I'd misheard that.

Speaker 2 But he...

Speaker 2 Listen, I think

Speaker 2 this is the start of the rebirth of Hollywood. The movies are back, baby.
I think he is going to again...

Speaker 2 I think he's going to take my suggestion and rewrite Indiana Jones from the perspective of the Nazis who are being constantly thwarted in their attempts to bring a low-tax economy to the people of the world by a meddling wokist university professor.

Speaker 5 Excuse Mr. Jones, I just went on a podcast and I don't know why you're calling me a Nazi.

Speaker 5 It's just we're just friends who happen to be on the same podcast and he is a Nazi and he says a lot of Nazi-ish things and I laugh and I vape. What?

Speaker 4 I think you've just summed up the state of human civilization, Alice.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Let's move on to one of Trump's buddies, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Speaker 4 None of his fans are in today?

Speaker 4 And look,

Speaker 4 like I mentioned,

Speaker 4 I'm a lapsed Jew, and therefore I think I'm contractually obliged to think that Benjamin Netanyahu should be allowed to do exactly what he wants.

Speaker 4 But he's asked for a pardon from Israel's president in his corruption case.

Speaker 4 I mean, you're very much the moral arbiter of the world, Nish.

Speaker 4 Do you think you should get one because of, you know, he's asked nicely?

Speaker 2 Well, listen, first of all, Andy, I've said it before, and I'll say it again. You are such a lapsed Jew, you are essentially a Muslim at this point.

Speaker 2 Although, actually, that's not strictly accurate, is it? Because there's a huge amount of overlap in the beliefs of those two Abrahamic religions.

Speaker 2 And you've directly made eye contact with me whilst eating pork dimsum and said, if I have both my feet off the floor, that makes it kosher. So I think you're...

Speaker 4 Look, Mish,

Speaker 4 there's always different ways of interpreting the ancient texts. That's all I want to say.

Speaker 2 This puts you in quite a unique position in global and religious history. As bad a Muslim as you are a Jew.
It's genuinely phenomenal.

Speaker 4 I'm a beacon of equality in many many ways.

Speaker 2 So listen, Benjamin Netidia

Speaker 2 is in the midst of a five-year corruption trial.

Speaker 2 This relates to bribery and fraud charges that have been around in the last half decade.

Speaker 2 Benjamin Netidia is now asking Isaac Herzog, who's the president of Israel, for a pardon on these bribery and fraud charges, arguing that it would be in the national interest.

Speaker 2 And listen, nothing says I am innocent more than please give me a pardon for all of these charges. It is.

Speaker 2 It's a stunning, stunning acknowledgement that you might be in trouble if this shit goes to trial.

Speaker 2 He's condemned the case as a witch hunt.

Speaker 2 He's basically said that the trial is tearing us apart, suggesting that Benjamin Etiyahu was now getting legal defense from the guy who wrote the film The Room. But it's a real shit show.

Speaker 4 He should.

Speaker 5 imagine though if this was the only thing he's ever been innocent of,

Speaker 2 Alice, you're absolutely correct. A stopped clock is right twice a day, and Benjamin Netanyahu, once every decade, will be innocent of the many things he's accused of doing.

Speaker 4 Well, it's hard to know how to end a gig like this.

Speaker 4 Sorry.

Speaker 2 That's all the people of Australia have been waiting for from an Englishman.

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 4 thank you very much for coming.

Speaker 4 Chris, when you listen to this bit back, good luck editing that.

Speaker 4 Thanks to the wonderful Nish Kumar, everyone.

Speaker 2 I love you, Brisbane.

Speaker 4 Thanks to the magnificent Alice Fraser.

Speaker 4 I've been Andy.

Speaker 4 See some of you tomorrow. Thank you.

Speaker 3 Thanks for listening, buglers. This was a two-hour show, including puns.
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