S2 EP17: Pierre Novellie

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Podcasts, there are millions of them.

Some might say too many.

I have one already.

I don't have any, because there are enough.

Politics, business, sport, you name it, there's a podcast about it, and they all ask the big questions and cover the hot topics of the day.

But nobody is covering the most important topic of all.

Why is that?

Are they scared?

Too afraid of being censored by the man?

Possibly, but not us.

We're here to ask the only question that matters.

We'll try and say it at the same time, Max.

What did you do yesterday?

What did you do yesterday?

What did you do yesterday?

That's it.

All we're interested in is what the guests got up to yesterday, nothing more.

Day before yesterday, Max?

Nope.

The greatest and most interesting day of your life?

Unless it was yesterday, we don't want to know about it.

I'm Max Rushton.

And I'm David O'Doherty.

Welcome to What Did You Do Yesterday?

Welcome to What Did You Do Yesterday, episode something, season two.

David O'Doherty is right in front of me.

How are you?

We have just recorded this.

I've never got to say this.

Normally, I do some phony baloney thing about how excited I am to do the episode, and then you reveal we've just done it.

But we've actually just done this one, Max.

Yeah, we're in the post-show glow of Pierre Novelli.

That's where you find us.

I had a lovely time.

I think it's a really good one.

I think it's one of our best.

I don't know how much credit we should take, but I think Pierre should take a huge amount of credit because his day was good and he told it brilliantly.

What do you think the definitive one is?

If someone says to you, what episode will I listen to?

Well, as somebody who would like people to listen to this episode in its entirety, I would say the Pierre Novelli.

There hasn't been a bad one, David.

I mean, I suppose, you know, Nish Kumar is the OG, right?

Yeah.

That's the original.

It's true.

That was the Big Bang from whence all of the turds dissipated out into the universe.

But yeah, we now reach almost a year into recording the Niche pilot.

Are we?

Yeah, we are.

Wow.

The first one wasn't released until October, I think.

It was a slow release.

It was like the porridge oats of podcasts,

wasn't it?

It is a delight to have Pierre Novellian, who, as we discuss, has featured twice in previous episodes of this podcast.

He's such a funny man.

Check out everything he does.

He does Bud Pod with Phil Wang.

He's got his book that's just come out in paperback, which is called Why Can't I Just Enjoy Things?

A Comedian's Guide to Autism.

And he's got a sensational new Edinburgh show that's, I think it's 7 p.m.

in Monkey Barrel for the month in August that a lot of people are saying it's the one to watch, Max.

you sit there, I'll stand here, and it is actually at 7:05.

So it's important to say that because lots of people could turn up at seven and think after four minutes, they could get a drink.

This is bullshit.

He's not turning up.

They said seven on What Did You Yesterday, and he's not there.

And he'd sell out, but all his gigs would be empty, and he'd be very confused.

So, yeah, 7:05 at the monkey barrel.

And here it is: here is what Pierre Novelli did yesterday.

Piano Velli, welcome to What Did You Do Yesterday?

Thank you very much.

Thank you for having me.

Now, this is interesting because you have starred in a previous episode.

I mean, I think it's not unfair to say you were a supporting actor in the Rhys James episode, in which Tom Rosenthal was the star.

You didn't eat enough pineapple to really sort of make it as a main character.

So it's a bit like sort of one of those characters you see a bit at the beginning, and then this is the episode where we focus on you.

Also, in the Phil Wang episode, when he's having his upstairs painted, I'm pretty sure you arrive in that episode as well and do a podcast downstairs.

Why I didn't enjoy the dynamic between Phil and the painter, which seemed to have a sort of upstairs, downstairs vibe.

But you were privy to that as well.

Yes, I'm like,

yeah, one of those characters in sort of succession or maybe one of those sort of portmanteau Netflix series where you think oh he's episode three then we'll get his perspective on the murder and we'll see what he saw and it'll be a whole different thing yeah yeah but hang on Rhys James Phil Wang have you been in every episode of every episode

I'm wondering

I've I've always been there watching I'm with every comedian really in their hearts when they do anything

whenever a riff is riffed I'm there that is what I say you were there when Daro Brian was phonetically masturbating.

You were by Nish Kumar's toilet.

You were under the duvet when Amy Gledhill had a hair dryer, just heating it up.

Wow, this is so exciting.

Yeah, I'm like those drawings you see of like a guy driving a car and a sort of ghostly Jesus is also driving the car.

That's me, but with comedians fucking around.

But Lord, when I was in trouble, why was there only one set of footprints?

Because Pierre Novelli was carrying you.

Let's get serious now about you're now

his main character, Energy.

That's what this is.

When did you wake up yesterday, Pierre?

Yesterday I woke up around 8.30, I think.

I had some other smaller wake-ups from midnight because I still slightly jet lagged.

Damn it.

You can't ask about that.

It's of no interest to this podcast.

No interest to any of our listeners, yeah.

You've caught me yesterday on an incredibly transitional day.

Oh, excellent.

Yeah, I woke up around 8.30 and I woke up in a sort of rural hotel.

Wow.

A rural child-friendly hotel.

No idea why he was there either.

He'd eaten a banana sandwich in New Zealand and then woke up in Gloucestershire or some English place like that.

You're pretty close.

Yeah.

Okay, so set the scene.

Who's in the rural hotel?

Oh, hang on.

Does the room have a name?

Is it called like Cleves or is it just room seven

your instincts are unrivaled it's called marjorie ah you're in marjorie of course yeah

is it a nice room marjorie

yeah it's got a sort of permanently installed dehumidifier which is slightly unsettling yeah marjorie's damp marjorie has long-term damp problems that's the thing about marjorie marjorie is so damp that they're willing to like paint the pipe into the window hole

that's how damp marjorie is yeah poor marjorie i know yeah the dampest of the rooms and the dampest of old ladies too but okay so is there anyone there with you no my fiancé had left the day before which is of no interest to us but have you not left for good no no

okay good

interruption it's not an anti-french thing but i'm trying to bring back faience

for fiancée you know the way over time language changes and words that were were Latin then become sort of anglicized?

Well, I'm trying to just with fiancée in particular, just faience it.

So can you say that again, please?

Well, spelt in the feminine way, right?

So I guess it's fiancé.

Fiancé.

Withdraws.

Overruled.

Overruled, Your Honor.

But it is faience for if it was a man, and then fiancé if it's a a lady.

It's actually faienc if it's a man.

We just go hard on this.

He knows too much.

He knows too much.

Okay, so you're alone in the rural hotel in, where are we?

The Cotswolds.

Where did you say you were?

In Devon.

Oh, that's nice.

Has there been a murder in the hotel?

Richard Osmond style?

Not yet.

What a day we picked.

What a day.

Oh, I can't wait for...

I hope you guys run this long enough that there is a genuine crime clue and confession in the

middle.

That would be so cool.

We need to get fewer comedians and more murderers on.

Yeah, actually, harder to book.

Yeah, the

murderers are usually something like a traveling salesman.

You know, it's one of those sort of jobs.

And also,

he was quiet and kept himself to himself, which personally I don't think would make a great podcast guest.

Like, the intro is he's a traveling salesman, he's quiet and keeps himself to himself.

Ladies and gentlemen, what did Bernard Hayes do yesterday?

But you'd listen for that bit like at the end of a Poirot where Bernard just explodes and angrily confesses to his slaying, just really screaming, peeking the microphone in rage.

And then the producer has to say, could you just go to cool settings and just turn your microphone down a bit and do that again?

Okay, so it's 8.30.

Do you...

You're in Marjorie.

What do you decide to do?

I know I'm going to see my family for breakfast in a bit, but I decide to do something that we all like to do, I think, especially comedians who are in hotels a lot.

It's time for a morning bath.

Oh, excellent.

Yeah.

Oh, lovely.

Great.

I'm the bath correspondent of this podcast.

Is it a large bath?

Is it an incredibly hot bath?

Do you put things in it?

I'm fortunate in the sense that Marjorie has been equipped with a bath that I can actually fit in.

Big lad.

He's a tall lad, Max.

No, I'm not I'm a wide as well.

I'm a wide boy.

So I normally, if we were in any sort of travelodge situation, the bath would be almost medically unwise to wedge myself into.

I cut off blood to my hips kind of thing.

You know, this is a wide enough bath that I think, okay, great.

Yeah, I run it hot, and the hotel bathroom had a kind of mysterious jar with a stopper in of presumably generic and easily replaced bath salts.

Yeah.

Oh, how marvelous.

Do you put them all in?

Just one?

Do you pop one in, or they're little balls, or is it like a sand situation?

It was like a sand situation.

Yes, exactly.

A sort of a wizard's kind of bottle of obscure crystals

pouring into the bath.

Yeah.

Wizard's dandruff is what it's called.

So what I like to do is have a teaspoon of cumin, a tablespoon of paprika, and a sprinkle of wizard's dandruff.

And then you get into it and you'll have a boner for a year.

It's called a goulash bath.

It's a Hungarian shower.

Full of potatoes and dumplings.

Okay, so does the bath have a, does that make it sort of bubbly or just sort of does it change the colouring or the look of the bath?

It gives it a sort of saline texture and a sort of very, very vague lavender smell.

Okay, lovely.

Now to David, who wants to ask how you get into the bath.

How do you get into it, Pierre?

Ooh, as a big lad.

I'm a big lad, too.

Yes, we're both bathing rugby boys.

Rugby bathing boys.

Sounded so sinister, that, David.

Sounded really bad, grinder chat.

That's what it sounded like.

Two big lads getting into the bath.

Well,

he's balls deep in Marjorie, so I'm not trying to pick up Pierre.

I get in when it's almost done filling.

I like to lower myself while it's still going for optimum adjustments.

No surprises.

So the tap's still running.

But what David's interested in, we've established this, we've spent a lot of the early days of this podcast talking about all the different ways you can lower yourself into the bath and then establish

there only is really one way of doing it.

This infuriates me.

Pierre, what I like to do is I go as hot as poss, okay, and then I add some cold to bring it to.

It's hard because your hand, as you're measuring, whether it's too hot, has acclimatized to it.

So then you have to.

It's the introduction of the foot that really reveals the temperature.

I stand in it to the point of pain and then slowly just start to sway my little ball bag, which at this point has developed a sort of leathery, fireproof texture to it.

And I teabag it into the goulash.

There follows the rest of David O'Doherty.

At this stage, your ball bag is like one of those pouches from Game of Thrones filled with coins that they sort of throw at each other.

A leather pouch that you'd throw at a mercenary dismissively.

I said, bring him.

David does that on the streets of Dublin with his ball bag.

And I suppose as you're sort of lowering your ball bag, the steam is kind of lowering it as well, right, by heating it.

It's sort of getting longer inherently from the approaching warmth.

Oh my go- No, that does not happen.

I don't...

Yes, I'm 49.

Yes, I need glasses.

But I refuse to get glasses because that'll be an acknowledgement that I'm aging.

And so would a distended ball bag.

That from standing above it, it just starts to sway to pendulum through the water.

But we're not here for David's 59-year-old bull bag, we're here for your 34-year-old bull bag.

That's what we're here for.

Bang on,

if you need someone to age a ball bag, I think there's no one better.

It's like

sexing sea life, it's so difficult sometimes because it's already wrinkly.

It's wrinkly when you're young.

I once went on You Bet, and I could, just from looking at the ball bags, and every character from every Australian soap opera and do each character.

When Darren Day was the host, I got all of them.

Harold Bishop, actually, she's a very easy one to get, but you know, it's hard between Don Fisher and Alf Stewart, but I did it all.

Anyway, how are you lowering yourself into the butt, Pierre?

Give us your bath.

We'll pop a picture of Pierre's ball bag in the show notes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They don't let you do the picture round of the pub quiz anymore.

You can't do anything these days.

You can't even have a whose ball bag is this round in a pub quiz

through the keyhole.

But whose ball bag is this?

I would say I'm lowering myself in the standard way.

I think

feet facing the taps, arms for support.

Yeah.

Ass first.

Yeah.

I conversely, like a coward, I shield the ball bag as much as I can.

Yeah, yeah.

Do you sort of squeeze it up above the legs?

I sort of don't let it be first.

I try and angle the ass down.

I try and shield the men from the horrors of war.

It's a good name for this episode is Don't Let It Be First.

Whereas, you know, David is very much, you know, over-the-top lads.

You know, they're the infantrymen at the Som.

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Yeah.

Yeah, so I think I had that on, and I was treating myself to the two untouched free packets of biscuits in the bath.

Oh, this is great.

Yeah.

What biscuits have we got then?

Have we got a shortbread?

What's in the, what have we got?

It was a shortbread biscuit with raisins in, which, you know, okay, fine.

That's the punishment round.

That's the punishment biscuit.

Okay.

Get that out of the way.

Get that out of the way, right?

Yeah, that's the broccoli biscuit there.

And then a good old-fashioned chocolate chip, the good version of the former.

Oh, wonderful.

Pierre,

when you woke up in Marjorie, did you make Marjorie's famous tea or coffee just from the sachets?

I didn't, but only because I knew that I would be being given a sort of insanely large...

And I mean, I love a lot of coffee in the morning, but this particular venue was dishing out almost French bowl-style large coffees with the breakfast buffet.

So I thought, okay, great.

I'll do that when I'm down there.

Fuck myself up with one of those.

Are the biscuits in one, or do you nibble?

What's your tactic?

Let's say 50% and then the remaining half, I'd say.

I could go all in one, but even I have to put artificial limits on myself in this ridiculous scenario.

Interruption.

This isn't about me, but last night I had a bath.

I worked quite hard yesterday.

I'm trying to write this new show.

And so I was going to go to the pub for one pint.

And in the end, I said, no, I'll have a pint.

And I've never done this before, but I'll have a pint in the bath.

And also, it was nitro surge, the stupidest Guinness of all, where you clamp a plastic thing that doesn't do anything onto the top of the can and pour it into.

It was a real pandemic purchase, but something that I just, in the same way that I don't particularly like tea, but I like making tea and then I enjoy drinking it from this Japanese ceremonial aspect.

I enjoy nitro surging.

And so, I was sitting in the bath with a pint.

A helencopter was out at dinner, and I thought I heard her come in.

And I suddenly had a moment of, this looks really bad.

So

I glugged down the whole pint.

Because Helencopter would just freely walk into the bathroom.

Fine, see how I'm doing.

So then I got the glass and put it underwater, like under my leg, which is even more guilty.

David, why have you got a pint glass under your right knee?

Helen Copter wouldn't care about this.

Anyway, it wasn't her coming in.

But you sensed that you had opened a door

that was dangerous to open.

And can I ask if was it quite a cold Nitro Surge Guinness or was it room temperature?

No, it was absolutely delicious.

And

maybe it's this podcast that has ruined my brain, Pierre, but I'm imagining reading in Helen's autobiography where she's like, I knew he had a serious problem one night when I came home and he was drinking a pint of Guinness in the bath.

Or when he seemed so drunk that he smashed a load of glass into the bath

smelled enough of Guinness that I wasn't sure how many he'd had, like much worse.

Or it was strange when I realized he'd been hiding a pint glass in his distended, aging bull bag.

Sorry, we didn't need to take it there.

Okay.

So you've had a bath.

Great stuff.

Another fun fact about me, Pierre, it seems like I never learned to dry myself.

So famously, I put on clothes after any sort of bath or shower, and the clothes are all wet.

Do you dry yourself well?

I have had to, out of necessity of doing that exact problem, and also realizing that if the bath is as hot as you and I make it, then you've got a kind of post-bath sweat sometimes.

You do.

If you're not careful.

A red lobster.

So the way I get around it is I hang out in the nutty in the house sometimes post-bath just because the redness of the hot water will insulate you from whatever chills there are in the house.

To the point where sometimes in summer I'll stand in the garden.

Lucky enough, my garden isn't overlooked by anyone, and I'll just stand out there

pointing my nuts at the stars.

Yeah.

That's great.

Naked steaming garden time.

Astronomy.

Naked steaming astronomy is what it's called.

A steaming nude astronomer.

It's a great.

What a great idea.

How powerful he'd look, glistening and steaming.

It's when I make some of my greatest observations about the heavens as well.

Ursa Minor, regard.

There it is.

Steam.

naked man.

This is like a deleted scene from fucking Red Dragon.

This is incredible.

You ever seen a ball bag in the moonlight wheel?

Yeah, are you airing yourself then?

How are you?

You know, we need to know how you're going to dry yourself in this.

Rigorous toweling.

Yeah, the good towels, good soft towels you've got here.

Yeah.

In Marjorie?

A rigorous toweling followed by frantic packing.

And have you spilt out into the hotel room or are you, you know, you're putting yourself well set?

I'd gone to the hotel straight from Heathrow with my big month-long Australian Comedy Festival suitcase full of crap.

And so I was already in a chaotic packing situation.

So I thought unpacking this is actually more messy than just living out of the suitcase for Easter weekend.

And I'm always so filled with admiration with people who are, you know, two days is how long they're in the hotel room.

They've put their underpants in a drawer.

Like they fucking live there.

Oh, no.

Oh, I like that.

Those people.

I'm those people.

No, No, no, they're mad.

But they're people from the 1920s or something, you know?

It's so impressive to me to know that you're not going to be there very long and still behave as if like, well, my new home for however long.

Do you know what?

Actually, I'm better in a hotel.

When I get there and I think, right, I'm going to put my stuff in a drawer.

It makes me feel really sort of calm and good.

But in my own house, it is just shove it in the cupboard and...

I don't know where any of my pants are.

Or they're all just on the line.

So maybe it's just the liberation of being away makes me want to get organized because I know I don't have that much stuff.

I'm not sure, but I am one of those people.

Do you think, Max, it might be because, you know, with a three-year-old and a several-month-old,

there is a degree of chaos in your house that is almost, you know, with just urine and slurry just dropping through the ceiling at any moment on top of your head.

Do you think that when you then go to stay in a hotel, there's almost an opportunity to reimagine your life.

You know, who would I be if I wasn't that person?

No, because I always have done this and I'm trying to think if I've been to a hotel since having children.

I mean, I did used to go to Sydney a fair bit, I guess, to do the football.

So then I would just leave it in the bag.

But if I'm on a holiday,

I'd like to unpack.

I can't give you a reasoning.

Yeah.

It's become ritualized by now.

I think so.

Yeah.

So anyway, you frantically pack.

Yeah.

I'm throwing stuff in there.

There's no rhyme or reason to it.

It's all going to have to get washed when I get home.

There's no need to do any serious organizing of this.

Have you chosen...

I mean, sometimes at the end of a tour like this, you're down to absolute brass tacks.

So I would say it might be pretty chaotic, the look that you have chosen.

Am I right in saying you're going down to meet your family at breakfast now in a minute?

You are correct, yes.

My parents, my sisters, and brothers-in-law, and their kids.

Yeah.

Wow.

And does your fiancée left because she doesn't like them?

Great question.

Great question.

She has left to go to Florida, brackets, temporarily.

She is in Florida as we speak for a work thing.

At Mar-a-Lago.

Is she at Mar-a-Lago?

She's the new minister for defense.

Is she Andrew Tate?

Controversially, I'm marrying Andrew Tate and he's going to be the lady in this kind of pretense we've cooked up.

He's going to be your fiancé.

He's my fianc now, and he says it's something to do with visas.

So, I don't know, but I don't think he has to pretend to be a lady for the visa.

Anyway, it's up to him.

He's the one paying me.

He's paying me in all those loose Rolexes he poses with.

Just a big cool draw of clattering loose watches of unknown provenance.

What's sexier than that?

A load of jangling timepieces.

You've gone downstairs.

All you have are flip-flops, a pair of tight togs, and a t-shirt with Struth, why not relax in Cairns, mate?

With a picture of a seagull on it.

You've genuinely, in terms of the actual items you've described, you've literally described the exact

tight shorts, sandals, and a weird old t-shirt.

It's absolutely correct.

Yeah.

In this case, a Dan Muggleton, the comedian Dan Muggleton's merch shirt that he very kindly gave me.

He's wearing a Muggleton.

Yep.

So when you get down to breakfast, are your family all there sitting waiting?

Are you the last to arrive or what's the scene?

It's slightly hard to tell when I arrive because sometimes the children wander off or they've eaten already or my niece is very young.

She's sort of one in a bet.

And so she sometimes has to just go and be sort of dealt with in a different room or distracted by something.

And it's a child-friendly hotel.

So the breakfast zone is filled with these scenarios.

We're not standing out.

It's designed to be like this.

Right.

It's soft play.

It's cushions.

Everything like shoots out of like an air.

This is great.

Tony the tiger is serving

the different icons of the breakfast cereal are serving that particular breakfast cereal.

An incredibly sullen bluey is making omelets.

Watery omelets.

I used to be famous.

Do you know, I used to, yeah, I used to have my own show.

That's what he's saying.

No, you can have mushrooms and ham.

You've got to choose one filling with the cheese.

Poor blue.

It's policy mate.

It's not my decision, okay?

I know it's mad.

Honey monster is there.

I don't fit in these baths either.

I'm just too big.

And he takes so long to fucking dry, and he stinks.

It's so damp and horrible.

Matted hair of honey monster.

Honey monster's hair so matted it's become almost dreadlock-like, and then that's a whole new problem.

And now he's done for cultural appropriation.

The honey monster, he's complaining about being cancelled, and that's why he has to make the boiled eggs in the hotel.

Okay, so what's actually happening?

It's a breakfast buffet with the singular marker of high quality, in my opinion, which is extraordinarily...

crisp and deep coloured sort of bacon.

Just really...

There's no pink at all.

All the fat's fully rendered.

It's not quite crisp to the point of shattering like glass, but it's halfway to that.

You know that'll happen in 30 years' time, time though when you go to visit the specialist he or she will just look up at this scan i will say have you ever stayed in marjorie

and did you have the bacon afterwards did you have the bacon shortly after a hot bath because that's what causes this

are they in the nice round hot dishes with a big handle that you open up and you've got some good baked beans you've got sausage bacon tomatoes hash browns beans that would be my You're exactly right.

They are in the sort of submarine tank hatch

containers.

Yeah, yeah.

They're in the Red October serving style.

The Robo Klosh, as it's known.

And that would be the different film if at the end they pull into Riga

and the submarine surfaces and the top just opens and just

beans

start to volcano out.

You'll put one of ours in the hospital.

We'll put one of yours in the morgue.

Now, what I've done there is I've mixed up the wrong Sean Connery films.

Because he was the captain of Red October.

Yes.

That was in the one where he was a mafia boss in.

Yes.

He made a basic error.

The untouchables.

This is a problem where sometimes...

My brain fails to differentiate between different roles that the same actor has played, which can sometimes affect my enjoyment of a film.

And that's what happened there.

I apologise to you, Pierre.

I apologise to the listeners of what did you do yesterday.

Okay, so do you go and sully yourself with the pointless yogurt and muesli before you get on to your big fryer?

I down a yak ult immediately to prep the body for what's coming.

The specialist says, oh, you did have a yakult before.

Oh, then you're absolutely fine.

If anything, you know, please have some money.

Here's a prize

for being being so clever.

You got a pre-gestif before a big fry, and you've done that.

Great.

Yeah.

I go big on the bacon and the unusually high-quality scrambled eggs.

Normally scrambled eggs are the one thing that these places can't do.

I don't know if it comes from a packet or...

My brother used to work in a hotel and he said...

that the poached eggs, even in posh hotels, are pre-made and then thrown in for the last 30 seconds like you you sort of make them into the golf bowls and swirl them around so I always feel that with most of this stuff it's pre-makeable and that's the priority for even a hotel as high quality as the one that you're in I'm not sure how they managed it I the problem in most places is either what you get is sort of

a scrambled egg version of kind of

separate sort of blobs

of scrambled egg sort of it becomes almost like a pasta yeah you know just so that it's so separate and dry

grains of omelette i guess you could call it or you get um a sort of solid loaf of egg that you kind of carve sections out of at the spoon like a tray baked that's been sort of gently poached in this sort of one inch deep watery sludge as well.

Well, then you get the excessively wet one, yeah, because they've got, oh, the eggs always dry out.

That's the problem.

let's make these fucking sloppy revolting yeah exactly yeah so now i'd like to ask about the toast situation because i think one of the most stressful places in life is the

toasters yeah because there's a lot of stress obviously it's never right when it's gone through once no it either doesn't work once and you put it through twice and it's totally burnt or it's totally done on one side and it's like the freshest bread on the other side but also there's that fear that someone hanging around that toaster is going to get your toast.

And you don't want to look like this really matters to you, but it really matters to you.

So I'm interested in their toast.

Maybe they have an actual toaster, which is like real step above.

They had actual toaster.

I'm happy to report.

Yeah.

I'm happy to report.

Although I will say it still had the problem of, well, now that I'm waiting for this toaster pop up,

my breakfast is rapidly cooling.

I should have done this first.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You can't hope to remember that.

The Toasty Boys are an international gang based in Dubai, and they have people standing at a lot of those toasters, the sort of conveyor belt-style toasters, and they nick them and immediately pop them on the dark web.

Wow, that's understandable.

Is this a fora toaster?

An eater?

They got two foras.

What have they got here?

I suppose it's a fora, yeah.

It's pretty wide.

It's a pretty long boy that people are toasting stuff in.

And what are you going for?

Brown bread, two slice.

Brown bread, two slice.

And it's not that kind of obnoxiously brown bread.

It's actually pretty medium.

medium.

It's a classic, classic bullshit, Pierre, where

you just put the worst stuff imaginable on your plate and then think you can mitigate that.

You know, it's like having a full meal and a giant dessert in seconds and then putting like candarelle in your coffee at the end.

You're fooling no one with this.

I think what it is, is you're looking at just like incredibly rendered fat bacon and sort of very, clearly very buttery eggs and thinking, this is going to need help traveling through me.

It needs to be like a, hey, keep moving.

A fiber gondola is what you're hoping for here.

Fiber gondola is the name of the steaming astrophysicist.

I tell you, I've dropped a few fiber gondolas in my time, but we won't go into that right now.

Okay, so we sit down.

Do you get your coffee as well?

Or do you put the plate down and then go back and get the coffee?

Maybe it's because the child-friendly thing.

I don't know.

But they're like, you have to ask us for coffee.

Everything else you get yourself, but you have to ask us.

So I beg for my coffee.

I've gone a single hash brown and some mushrooms as well, but no beans.

I'm very anti-beans.

Oh, I have to say that.

Okay.

Yeah, me too.

I'm very pro-beans.

And this is a huge, like, cultural.

I mean, I don't think it's cultural.

I just think

people are both.

It's a very polarized debate.

It's probably the biggest culture war there is, I imagine.

So I hope we can continue the podcast.

It's the UK UK and Australia that is like the main market for hines-baked beans on earth.

In America, it's like weird cowboys eat it.

It's strange.

Do you eat it?

But I think it's essential.

I love it.

I don't want ketchup.

I just want beans.

And I don't mind them near the egg as well, which can really upset a lot of people.

Come on.

Yeah, I'm sorry, guys.

I'm sorry.

I've been cancelled.

Okay, right.

But good this is your breakfast.

This is that's what we need to know about.

And then I ask for my coffee and then I sit and I engage with.

I can't remember which of the various nephews and niece was around.

But, you know, my nephews are four and six, so

they're quite excitable and fun to talk to.

I'm the sort of fun uncle.

Are you?

So do you say something like top five animals, and then you dunk the hash brown in your coffee and just pop it straight into your mouth?

Go.

What I enjoy doing is speaking to them in sort of vague threats.

So I tell them to do responsible things, but for reasons that are sort of baffling and odd.

Yes.

So you'll say, like, why shouldn't they all be, you have to eat that?

And they'll say, why?

And I say, if you don't, your head will go all big and red and fall off.

And then you have to go live in the woods.

This is good.

That kind of thing.

Also, they're free to call me strange things.

Like

the four-year-old in particular enjoys calling me smelly bum eyes or stinky teeth or

poo ears.

You know, he's getting creative with the nouns and the adjectives.

Just so you know, he's obviously been on the forums because that's what everyone in the comedy industry calls you.

So you're aware of that.

He's a very influential producer.

They're trying to get the youth involved.

So they've asked him.

I keep having to stop myself calling you stinky teeth, just so you know that.

Okay, my number one.

Oh, carry on, David.

I know what you're saying.

We're less than an hour into Pierre's.

40 minutes in, and it's 9:15.

It's real time.

It's the first real-time episode.

Like 24.

Okay, fine.

Pierre, take us through the next six hours in under 30 seconds.

I can do this.

I can do this.

We eat breakfast.

We hang out a bit.

We say goodbye.

My parents gave me a lift to the train station.

I take a very boring, unavoidable.

Oh, hang on, slow down.

This is too much now.

This is too quick.

How are your parents?

Good.

Yeah, they're good.

And you spend the day with their...

I mean, we can't know this.

This isn't the first time you've seen them since

Melbourne.

Right, okay.

No.

So there's no family.

The family all get on, is what I'm saying.

There's no kind of actually everyone hates someone.

Everyone hates Dave.

And we don't talk about it.

I remember Phone Brady saying to me that the weirdest thing about me as a comedian was that I get on with my parents, and that my family is a sort of like a pretty large group of quite reasonable people

sort of very calm.

It's quite odd, yeah.

For the industry I'm in, anyway.

And would the family do this everyone meet in a hotel thing?

Or twist, do your parents run the hotel?

Is it like Faulty Towers?

Oh, imagine.

Imagine the amount of free, imagine the amount of influence I'd have over the egg situation.

Yeah, that's true.

Imagine the sort of Nepo breakfasts I'd be enjoying.

I'd get dinner for breakfast.

I'd be like, Could we do Huisin duck pancakes for breakfast, please?

Even more, you'd just walk into the kitchen, wouldn't you?

Yeah.

You'd be like, it's all right.

I'd slap Colin on the back and ask him how the scrambled eggs are doing this morning.

No, I'd be even more annoyed.

I'd walk in the out of the the doors that swing, and the waiter would have all the beans, and he'd knock them all over himself.

And I'd be like, get my parents to fix that for you.

You know what I mean?

I'd be real arsho of the hotel.

They don't run the hotel, to be clear.

But it's a nice time.

If they're nice and it's friendly, then we don't need to go down there.

Unless there was some real vitriol there, it's not interesting for us.

But it's nice for you, I guess, that you have a nice family.

That is yin and yang, isn't it?

Beautifully put, Max.

Zero content potential.

Yeah, no content, but a nice line.

Love is the content.

Thank you.

Yes.

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Okay, so we're on the well, we're on the 1034.

From what station, please?

From God, one of those stations where you think this isn't a name.

Oh, yeah.

Sadding to Nudbury.

One of those kind of branch lines.

Yeah.

It's either something like that or it's like

Plim.

Yeah.

Everything is from a PG Woodhouse novel.

There's parts of England where, yeah, this can't be real.

This train will be calling at Vicar in the Wheat.

Bishop's Rage.

Upper Bishop's Rage.

Yeah.

Presumably, then this is a little tributary into like a main station before we can get to London, or is this on the direct line?

It's the direct slow train.

So it's via Southampton.

But yes, it stops at every bullshit chocolate box town.

Wow.

Fuck Hampton.

They're all there.

Have you got a first-class ticket with a serviette behind your head and free stuff?

Are you with the people?

I'm in my shorts and sandals and my smelly t-shirt, and I'm lugging my oversized bag into the carriage.

And if there is such a thing, if we can coin a term, it's Easter Tuesday.

There's no one really around.

Oh, great.

I only understand things in terms of Easter.

It's going to be Easter October in a few months.

Yeah, on the train, it's just a bunch of Easter bunnies who've clocked off work and they've got the head under one arm.

You just see the Easter is a huge thing in the the Southampton general area.

You change in Southampton and then back into our London town.

Oh, back into London.

Oh, how I've missed London with its filth and frightening looking people loitering everywhere.

So do you change at Southampton or do you stay on the slow one?

Straight shot, straight in.

Yeah, yeah.

Straight shot.

Okay, so how long is this journey?

Hour and a half.

Devon to London on a slow train, hour and a half.

This is amazing.

It's an hour and a half, maybe two, yeah.

Max, you've been in Australia so long you don't know the upgrading to high-speed rail all over england you can get from anywhere to anywhere else in an hour and a half people have been telling me britain's become a great place since i left in the last three years that's all i've i've been hearing okay so do we listen to another three bean salad what are we listening to we do yeah we do do that we do some email admin and we listen to those guys Where do we get into?

Waterloo?

Waterloo, that's right.

Okay, okay.

Which is quite a nice one.

That's not a bad one, is it?

Yeah, it's okay.

For some reason, it still had the kind of artery open into the tube direct from the platform.

Don't have to go in and out.

So that was fun.

Do you guys know the story of Waterloo?

How ABBA were once on the train and they were composing a song.

It's similar to the Paddington backstory.

And it was just about Napoleon winning a war and stuff.

They were like, we don't have a title for this.

And then let's call it whatever the next station is called.

And they pulled it.

And that's why it's actually called waterloo would you say that'll stay in or will that get edited out i think it might if you think about what they could have called it cock fosters and they're gone they've just fallen asleep on the night train and woken up and gone south wimbledon this will never work as i saw shit yeah shit

try again thaden bois thaden bois forget it okay so you've got to lug your big bag down the stairs onto the northern line probably and then now it's time to be an obstacle for others through the tube.

Yeah, but it's London.

So you've got like eight-year-olds with a little trolley, and they're like, Can I help you, mate?

Well, their friend comes down and tries to pickpocket you.

And because you've just been in Australia for a month, you've forgotten that this is what life is like.

I'm sort of too distracted by planes and buildings over three stories high.

Yeah.

Because it's London, and these urchins are wary of me because of my deep tan and foreign ways.

Yeah, but they're modern urchins.

So they're like, all right, governor, can I get your four code for your phone, please?

And you're like, yes, it's 3764.

Thank you, mate.

The roadman.

Oh, you fell for it again, Pierre.

Great.

So an uneventful tube ride?

Uneventful tube ride.

I get into my flat, but then, see, here's the thing.

I have to start packing because we're moving house.

We're moving house.

Straight in.

I'm straight into packing.

So in a way, it's good.

You've already packed quite a lot of stuff in one suitcase.

Like, it's sort of a job's a little bit done.

Yes, all my smelliest clothes are in one place.

So is that why, as we speak on this call, I'm seeing bookshelves behind you with nothing on?

I thought it was just you hadn't won any awards yet, but you were trying to manifest the awards by just buying the bookshelves.

You haven't read any books, not one.

Actually, I haven't.

It's about showing people that I've not read any books, and I'm very ostentatious about that.

If I'm on an official meeting Zoom, people say, have you read anything good lately?

I go, what do you fucking think?

What do you think?

Take a look.

Take a look at that.

I don't even read the IKEA label on the bookshelf.

Yeah.

So hang on a second.

Your fianc has gone away.

Yes.

And you've got to pack the house alone.

Oh, sucker.

Whoa, that's tough.

Jet lagged as well.

Yeah.

Well, I don't have to, but if I don't, I will gain nothing.

Yes, true.

Okay.

Yeah.

If I wait entirely for her to return, and she will also be jet lagged, and I have just been sort of sitting around eating Chinese takeaway and wanking,

then I will still have to do inevitably all the heavy things, but in an atmosphere of resentment.

When must it all be packed away?

How long have we got?

We've got another day and a half, I'd say at least.

Maybe two days.

And so that's fine.

That's easy.

I've done a lot of it.

All the books are done.

All the books.

As in no books.

We know.

Sorry, yeah, yeah.

So, yeah.

All the porn magazines and

all the porn magazines and carpet sample books have been packed away.

Yeah.

And what car?

That's it.

Actually, this is true.

A friend of mine called Tom had to go and give a sample, I think, when him and his partner were trying to have kids.

And, you know, they say, go into this, the vestibule, and there's all these porn magazines.

There was

autocar, auto-trader.

There was like fucking car.

He tells it in a a way that he's not bullshitting.

That there was in the this is what gets me going.

Ford Orion.

2016 Ford Orion.

Now I can get this job done.

Just going through the small ads and until you find

Ford Sierra.

No, Ford Fiesta.

Ford Orion.

Hubba Splodge.

Do you think in like a really fancy clinic, it would be like country life and stuff, you know?

Yeah, yeah, horse and hound.

That'll get me going exactly

okay so you get home are you straight hang on uh you've had a big breakfast so do we eat anything on the train sorry no the breakfast powers us through the train okay and so we're in the house and now you just get in and go right i've got to start packing we're in i've already got all the kind of off amazon unassembled cardboard boxes, rolls of duct tape.

It's a real kidnapper's bounty of duct tape.

I've got interruption.

Yes.

I helped someone move last week and we went to another storage place.

She was putting stuff in storage.

And I said, can I get some boxes from you?

And they were like, how many do you need?

And we got 10 boxes, some tape.

It was 90 Euros.

Fucking fucking.

They were very high-quality boxes, but they were still just cardboard boxes.

How much are you paying for those boxes?

I got like 50 for like nine pounds.

Yeah, but

you're going to be carrying carrying your book and the bottom is going to fall out

as you're traipsing up the stairs of the new place.

As I assembled these, I was sort of duct taping the vulnerable areas.

Yeah,

very clear.

Do you have like tactics?

Are you just like, get everything, or have you like a Google Doc saying, this is what I need to put where and all that kind of stuff?

I would say my tactics extend as far as writing the word books on the boxes that contain lots of books.

Yeah, good stuff.

And my genius move of

we've still got some bottles of booze from when we got engaged, and I've still got a few bottles of whiskey from just like.

I think once you're over a certain age, it's just such an easy gift for people to get you as a man.

It's just some booze, some whiskey.

I'm doubling up on packing all my woollens and all the my booze.

There's a box of woolly booze.

Three-time U.S.

Senator Willie Boos.

Pierre, do you find anything?

And obviously you do, but I understand you may not wish to mention it, which has great sentimental value that you had lost for years, then makes you question the whole engagement, etc.

You're like, hmm, maybe I should give her a rig.

And then she's like, we never should have broken.

You know what I mean?

Like, obviously, you don't have to tell us about it, but I'd say that's definitely what happened.

Is that what happened?

The sliding doors stuff.

What I did find, I will say, it didn't make me question the engagement, but I did find a book that an ex-girlfriend got me so long ago.

And I thought, I swear I sort of gave it to charity or anything.

I've got one of those bookcases where you get to the point where you think, there's so many books, I'm going to just start kind of hiding them on top where only I'm tall enough to see.

Yeah.

Because I can't be asked to file these somewhere.

And it was there.

It was in the lost, the island of misfit toys next to a sort of ambitious cookbook.

The next thing you know, you wake up the next day with the book, you're three-quarters of the way through, it's there, opened

on your bare chest, with a chicken chow mane to one side, and I can't say what to the other.

Yeah, was it a novel?

It was a non-fiction account of Joseph Grimaldi.

It was a book about Joseph Grimaldi.

The Italian revolutionary?

The clown,

the guy who invented modern clowning and Panto.

I think Garibaldi was the revolutionary.

Italy would be a very different place if a clown

had established.

Well done, Max.

You know me well enough at this point that you saw exactly Giuseppe Garibaldi.

Pennywise, who reunified Italy.

It was a strange time, wasn't it?

Also, it would be different if the father of modern clowning was an Italian revolutionary.

Clowning itself would be much more serious.

And now we must have a conference with people from the south to discuss how I will fall off this chair.

Yeah.

The funniest thing you can do is have two pistols and shoot a load of French mercenaries.

That's the funniest thing you can do.

Yeah.

Okay, so how long are you packing for?

Is this the rest of the day?

When's lunch?

What's happening?

There's no lunch.

I get in at

2.30, and I'm just doing this till like

till 7:30 or so.

Till the books are done.

And also, I ran out of bubble wrap.

I'm getting more today.

Okay.

We've reached an interesting point here in the podcast because finally, in six months.

But the large hotel breakfast should turn your day into a two-meal day.

Yes.

Because it's not so much brunch, because I feel brunch implies a lighter.

It's rare that a brunch for me will do and create a two-meal day.

However, like a hotel stodge fest like you have had, had, you know what I mean?

That should see you right through.

Does it see you right through?

Yeah, it saw me right through till I ordered a kind of self-congratulatory Chinese.

But this is exhausting work.

Packing is exhausting.

Exhausting.

While you're doing it, you're thinking this is the right thing, or why didn't we just live here for another five years?

I think this is the right thing.

Yeah, it's time to

move on.

I'm stacking the book boxes in a kind of out-of-the-way bit as much as I can.

I'm trying to find places for things.

There's a lot of displacement of objects going on.

As soon as she wakes up in Florida, though, do you feel the need to alert her to the fact of the great work that you're doing?

Like maybe a photo of all the book boxes.

She made the rookie mistake of asking what I was up to.

Yeah.

Now it's time to get some credit for all the heavy moving I'm doing.

Yeah, exactly right.

Exactly right.

No photo, though.

I should have.

I should have done that.

I've got even more credit.

Recognize this place now, something like that as the caption.

Yeah, that's good.

That's good.

That's good.

And also, perfect excuse for not...

I've packed up all of our books, but I'm not going to touch her clothes or shoes because so much can go awry.

You have to be in charge of that.

Because if I get in trouble for like...

These are Crumpleton shoes.

You don't smoosh them in a box.

Now they're dead.

I don't know.

But you could do a kind of, yeah, understated.

I'm just so sorry I haven't had time for the teaspoons, but everything's done.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, so I've got this image of you've ordered, you've gone Uber Eats.

What's the Chinese order?

We're at 7 p.m.

Wow, what a jump.

I used to have a routine where I say, I always get the same thing from a Chinese restaurant when I order a takeaway every single time, and it is slightly too much.

That's my go-to order.

Yeah.

Okay, so let me, I mean, I'm not calling you basic, Pierre.

You know, I would never say that about you.

No.

But I'm now going to try and guess the order.

I will say, I will say there are two go-to orders in my head.

There is a basic one, and I did go basic because I felt I'd earned it.

But there is a non-basic, pretentious London one.

Okay.

We can do both.

We can do both.

You can guess both.

I'd be very impressed.

Okay, so prawn crackers, obviously.

You've then got chicken and sweet corn soup.

You've got spare ribs.

You've got chicken with cashew nuts in it, and some greeny thing with an egg-fried rice.

And then this is where you panic because you're like, I might still be hungry after that.

So you order some sort of

prawn, salty pepper, prawn.

Thank you.

Max, what do you reckon?

I'm saying that is too much.

I think you're going, you're right with the prawn crackers.

Then it's chicken and black bean sauce

and crispy pancakes.

Duck pancakes.

Between the two of you, you're close.

So the prawn crackers are just generic.

In this case, it's beef and black bean sauce and egg fried rice.

I said egg fried rice.

Yeah, okay.

Other option as well, chicken chow mein, just that kind of like, I don't know how they get the noodles brown.

How do they do that?

Is that sauce?

What is that?

That kind of fried noodle wok chicken thing.

Is it like that really the best coffee?

It passes through a cat.

And that's how they did it.

They're just flossing a cat with noodles.

Yeah,

one long noodle.

Yeah.

Yeah.

While it just sort of goes.

And you know, the more expensive, the more cats.

So it's kind of like the human centipede, but with cats and noodles just to load all of James Acaster's cats.

That's how he makes most of his money is that way with the you know that scene from the lady and the tramp with the piece of pasta that's going between the two.

All you don't see is that it goes out both of their arses then and travels through six other couples.

And then after that it's bum to bum.

Then it's mouth to mouth, bum to bum.

So So it's just two bum holes kind of

linked.

You see, that's not too much.

What you've told us there is not too much.

This place is pretty aggressive with their egg fried rice sizes.

It's a pretty big old tub of the stuff.

They really go for it.

It's rare that one egg fried rice will feed many people, won't it?

Yeah.

Interruption sidebar, just remax, really.

What I like to do here with my cooking sometimes is dramatically cross cultures that shouldn't be crossed and for good reason so last night i made the helencopter a fried rice dish where i just threw in loads of things but normally i'd put in shitty lardons with it but only had her very fancy guanciale which is like the fatty stuff you use to make a carbonara etc so effectively that just dominated the whole party yeah and it seemed like an italian

had tried to make a chinese meal Thank you.

That's what happened.

Also, it feels like you'll be visiting Pierre's specialist sooner than him with that.

For a few high fives.

Yeah.

Do you have a cold bottle of lager with this?

I think you've deserved it.

I have my favorite and even less healthier treat, genuinely a liter in a bit of Diet Coke.

Of gravy.

A least say gravy.

Of bisto.

A litre of Diet Coke.

Wow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I love Diet Coke so much.

Do you decant it or do you just swig it it from the big plastic bottle?

I was decanting it, yes, actually, into a pint glass.

So I'm not sure why.

Vanity.

No, that's fine.

What I wanted you to say there was, so you got the box that has the jumpers and the whiskey in it.

Yeah.

You shake it such that all the boxes smash.

And then you hold a glass under one corner.

It's called sweater hooch

and it just flows down into it.

You can squeeze the jumper like a bagpipe and then this 12-year-old maltz just comes out.

It's called Essence of Aaron.

The booze industry has realized it's one way around the Trump tariff on importing and exporting whiskey is to have it just like sweat inside a jumper.

So everyone's doing it now.

All these Scottish people arriving, sodden in these heavy woolly jumpers at LaGuardia.

Stinking.

I think a load of whiskey filtered through a load of jumpers is a kind of novelty, like like Geeltach, like West of Ireland drink, where it's like, these are the two things, like a big thick woolen, like fisherman's jumper, like Aaron sweater.

And then it's all the whiskey is filtered through the jumpers of all the heaviest smokers in town.

It's a lovely flavor.

All the old fellas are here.

And the whiskey is a...

Depending on which old guy you get, it's a different taste.

Now, are you eating the Chinese?

Is there still like a sofa?

Are you sitting on a cardboard box?

Is there just a hole where the telly was and just staring at muscle memory?

Means you're just staring at this

empty wall.

Like the punisher in this little empty flat before he does revenge.

Yeah, no, there's still the big hitters are there.

The couch is still there.

The TV is still there.

Are you on it?

And what are you watching?

I started watching Taboo on Netflix, where Tom Hardy sort of growls and menaces his way around 1814 London, which is quite fun.

He does that a lot, doesn't he?

Because, like, Bain,

you can't understand a word.

He's like,

obviously, very keen to get him on the podcast.

Great actor.

But, like,

I can't understand.

Honestly, it was the first time I felt so old was when I went to watch Batman, and it was just someone going,

I was like,

I can't understand what this man's saying.

I appreciate his menacing, but what's he on about?

Sometimes the scrambled eggs are too wet.

What do you mean?

Anyway, okay.

So is this good?

Is taboo good?

Just slide the bacon through the mask.

It is good.

It's Tom Hardy going around with a sort of little hat on, little top hat on, glowering at people, saying,

Yes, what do you want?

I think you'll find that I know more.

It's sort of nice costumes and it's quite spooky.

There's a a sort of ghostly aspect to it.

I'm actually going to do some live research on who plays the king because he's wearing loads of...

the king of England is wearing loads of sort of prosthetics.

It is Mark Gatus.

Yes, it's Mark Gatus.

He's wearing a massive chin and a big fat belly and they've made his face all blotchy.

And he's doing a sort of ral rubble voice.

And it's great.

He's so funny in it.

It's not supposed to be that funny, but.

This is very much the power dynamics of our house.

But I wanted to watch this.

And then Helen Copter put forward that we should watch something just lighter and more fun of an evening.

And we ended up watching a six-part documentary on the history of the Vietnam War narrated by Ethan Hawke.

And that was not lighter, I'm going to say.

I'm going to say that was a whole lot heavier.

Look, if you want to have a very slow, harrowing time over the Vietnam War, it's got to be Ken Burns or nothing.

We've got to be in Burns territory here.

But taboo, it would be lighter than that, but there would be a more of an incest theme than in the Vietnam War documentary.

Right.

Because we have a 12-week old, we just don't have any brain power for anything.

We're watching, I think it's kind of Netflix version of The Traitors.

And I haven't seen The Traitors yet, but Peter Serafinovich, bizarrely, and has presumably is hosing away absolute millions, is a kind of butler in this utterly amazing house.

I don't know where it is.

I presume in the States somewhere.

And it's called Million Dollar Mansion, and someone's the millionaire, and all the other, it's a reality show where you have to find out who the millionaire is and vote them out.

Peter Serafinowich.

Yeah, and like, it's Brian Butterfield.

Why is Brian Butterfield doing this?

I mean, he's very good at it.

And obviously, I'm like excited that Peter Serafinovich is doing it, but it sort of was a surprise.

It'll be John Wick.

He was the weapon butler in John Wick.

Ah, is that right?

Okay.

Max, is there a chance that due to extreme tiredness, you have imagined this entire

show where it's a luxury cruise, but Lou Sanders is the captain of the ship and she makes people walk the plank at the end of every episode?

And it sort of sounds like it could be a thing, but it's probably not.

You know what I mean?

Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four-litre jug.

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

Oh, come on.

They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

Whatever.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia, made to travel.

Surely, if you want to find the millionaire, you just gotta...

I don't know, start a conversation about what cars people drive or...

Oh, no, no, the point is, like, none of them are millionaires, but you're each given a box.

Sorry, I didn't explain it very well.

So then they open their box in their room, and one of them has a million dollars in it.

And then Peter Serafinovich comes in and says, Your agenda is to say the word biscuit to everyone else in the house without raising suspicion.

And then you will get an extra bonus as we enter Elimination Night.

And then presumably he walks off to like a spa for like five hours.

It's a gig.

And you know me, David, my professional jealousy kicks in going, I could be a butler in a big old house i could do that professional jealousy i could do that while i'm also hosting news night i like i could do all of these things

anyway so how many episodes of taboo do we watch three a good three-hour binge yeah yeah

i thought earlier on you were trailing maybe you were clickbaiting the fact that you'd something to do at 730 pierre 730 is when the uh it all started The packing ended by virtue of running out of bubble wrap.

Got it.

I remember, am I crazy?

Is this like one of those Facebook pages?

Like, do you remember when we had real bin men?

Like that shit.

But like, I swear bubble wrap was bigger and sort of like

more cushiony.

This stuff was like wartime rationing bubble wrap.

Like, we need your bubbles to defeat Hitler.

This is how Make America Great Again starts.

It's over bullshit like this.

Yeah, it starts with.

I swear bubble wrap was thicker and then it turns into, I don't want any more Swedes in this country.

I don't want any more Swedes.

Do you remember when you'd pop one bit of bubble wrap and all the windows would blow out in your house?

Who remembers that?

You'd be deaf for a month, but it was fine because you'd just come back from the First World War and you couldn't hear anyway.

What a great evening.

Big takeaway.

Do you have any dessert?

I think that just another pint of Diet Coke was my dessert.

Oh, great.

Great.

They don't do that at the fat duck, do they?

Would you like to see the dessert menu?

I'll have the tiramisu.

And for the lady another pint of diet coke yeah a pint of your finest diet coke

from this year

2025 a good year fine year for diet coke same recipe i once tried to nitro surge so nitro surge is a stupid device that goes on top of a can but then one night we were having hijinks pure horseplay in the house and started nitro surging other

for example cans of lager cans of coke etc and it definitely does something because they would massively froth up but then the hijinks reached its pinnacle obviously because we nitro surged some lager and then i put it in a my soda bottle and then pumped carbonated air into it

and i had to uh repaint the ceiling.

You're lucky you didn't create a kind of fucking pipe bomb effect, just like

aluminium shrapnel scything off one of your limbs and then you'd have to explain to the specialist that you'd made you'd made a kind of hijinks based

IED 273 people died in Dublin last night after an explosion in a block of flats in the west of Dublin

so this is what what are we now half 10 half is it better half 10 yeah half 10.

I was trying to

reinstall a game on my PC because I've got some spare time to do some lame video gaming while the Fiancers are not there.

Right.

What are we downloading?

Lemmings 2?

Max's reference are a little out of date.

Lemmings 2, Goldeneye, Tetris.

It's all getting downloaded.

But I spent ages downloading this game and it wouldn't launch.

It wouldn't open.

So then I had a sort of quite boring half an hour actually going on Reddit trying to see if other nerds had figured out what the problem was and they hadn't.

So I just went to bed.

What a sad end.

I know, a very sad end.

Pierre, it's funny you mentioned Tetris because while I was loading up the van, which I would subsequently drive to the place where you leave boxes, storage facility, I was thinking as I was loading it in, I said, this is a lot like Tetris.

like trying to put the gear in and then the next person to come out with the box said this is a lot like Tetris And then the third person who came in and like slid a long narrow one and I thought, you know what this is like?

This is a lot like Tetris.

So the Tetris joke is well made.

And maybe that's why you didn't truly engage with the computer game.

Because that day you had already been playing.

Tetris.

That's true, yeah.

Sort of free form flat Tetris.

That's what you never see in Tetris is the bit before the game where the Russian dancing did it

where they fill the boxes with books and various.

That's why they cascade down through space at the same speed because each one has exactly the same weight of stuff in it.

Just copies of War and Peace and other Russian things.

Yeah.

Fun fact, the guy who invented Tetris looks quite like me.

You don't see a picture of him often, but he is my doppelganger.

You do make a good point.

You don't often see pictures of him.

It is is true.

Almost never.

See, it's good observational stand-up, I think.

You know who you never see pictures of?

The inventor of Tetris.

I'd have to agree.

Pierre, that's my new opening line.

I say to the audience, I know what you're thinking.

The inventor of Tetris has let himself go.

Absolute silence.

All right, so classic, brush your teeth, have a wee, go to bed.

That's all.

Yeah, it's traditional bedtime behavior.

One last browse of different social media feeds to make sure I feel sad and stressed out.

A quick dose of horror before bed.

Horror and envy and kind of like cruelty, rudeness, generic rudeness.

There we go.

A little taste of that.

Generic rudeness.

You don't hear that as put forward as one of the big problems in the world these days, but I like it.

Yeah.

Thank you.

It's there.

The fear is, though, that you then open the door to your bedroom and you've forgotten that you have entirely packed your bed away then you have to build a bed just from books and awards and things and just pull a single blanket over sleep in a kind of fort made of my own intellectual inputs and outputs

a sort of mind fort that i've built do you go to sleep easily i presume you do you come from an you know a nice fat you're an odd comedian in the sense that you have a nice life nice family you're happy with yourself i've taught myself to go to sleep easily I never slept well ever.

And then just gradually over years of practice, like

it's really hard to explain.

I've been actually was trying to explain it to my Fianc because she sits and does that thing that people do consciously or unconsciously where they go, well, just before I go to bed, I'll just run through a quick list of all of my largest obligations.

It's such a mistake.

And you can train yourself to recognize when your brain's about to go down a little slippy slide of horror.

Oh, wow.

I picture it as like a, you know, when you see plants growing in fast forward on like documentaries?

Yeah.

They're like really sprouting out of the ground at a rate of knots.

That's happening with your thought, your bad thought, and you just nip it in the bud.

Just cut it.

Nope.

Snip.

That's clever.

Or you focus on a gibberish thing or a meaningless phrase or a meaningless mental image and focus on that.

And anything that's not that is not allowed.

And then you'll fall asleep quite easily.

Anyone struggling will just have to think of, you know, Woolly Booze, you know, who's supporting Trump now, but he doesn't really agree agree with him but he just can't go public.

And you just go, think of Willie Booze, and you're just pushed away.

If you lie down with your eyes closed and just keep thinking the phrase, three-time U.S.

Senator Woolly Booze over and over again,

Pierre, I have one question though.

So you seem to have smashed the lag pretty well.

As in, I'm pretty sure if I'd been in this situation, I mean, maybe that's where two liters of Diet Coke helps.

But from about 4 p.m.

onwards, my body would have been acting like some sort of UN negotiators, which is, we'll just lie down now.

We'll just, you know, we'll just, we won't even shut our eyes fully.

We'll just droop them down.

Yet you plowed relentlessly through it.

Yes, the caffeine helps.

And also on the multiple stage flights back from Melbourne, I made sure that I only slept according to what would be UK time.

Wow, that's very impressive.

This is high-performance stuff.

Pierre is the first person ever to bring actual good ideas ideas to this sleep hygiene

the thing is i've sort of tried that but the thing is now i'm you know i have been now flying back with one child and now next time in july flying back with two and the flight is obviously like the worst day of your life and for everyone around you but also when you get back to the uk or back to australia you're certainly are now three-year-old so i don't know what he'll be like now but as a two-year-old he really wasn't focused on getting into uk time no and so there would be sort of one till 5 a.m.

marble runs, and they are some of the absolute bleakest times.

And then it's like you've got to get them out in the morning because the UN negotiating thing, David, is perfect.

You are just like, Maybe I'll just, I'm just going to see if this lying down is fine.

My eyes are absolutely fine.

Yeah, but then Max, the big change between your last trip back to Britain and your forthcoming one is this podcast will be so big by the time you're coming back.

I will send the jet.

I'll send the what you do yesterday jet, and you guys can fly anywhere.

Like the captain literally comes in and he's like, where do we want to go today, Max?

You know what I mean?

And you're like, let's stop in Honolulu.

And your whole family cheers.

That's what it's going to be like.

That is a weight off my mind.

Thank you.

So you're asleep, Pierre.

Well, this is great.

That's all we needed from you.

It's been really nice.

Yeah, it's been great.

I was worried that

the transitory nature of the day, hotel room train moving out boxes, would make it a bit of a kind of an interstitial rather than a kind of, you know, yesterday I got married or something.

As soon as you said you ran a bath, I was like, this is going to be a great episode.

This is going to be a great episode.

Thank you, Pierre.

Thank you guys for having me.

I've really, it's such a good idea.

It's such a good concept.

It's so fun.

Yeah, I really was pleased to get on it.

Such a good concept.

It's just such a pity that you guys are not doing it justice.

That's what has been edited out of what Pierre just said there, which is a strange ending to an otherwise awesome podcast.

A real parting fart.

Pierre, thank you very much.

Thank you, guys.

So, there we are, David.

The end of Pianovelli's day.

I really enjoy it.

It had so much in it.

I had a lovely time.

In a lot of these episodes, Max, I think great, we're getting through this day.

However, that was the one more than any other where we were an hour into his day and most of the way through the podcast.

Now, I'm sure that'll be fixed in post to an extent, but luckily, I think we spent time on the right things yeah but you know it is quite useful for us if there is like a five-hour period where they're doing something menial like packing boxes or you know just lying on the sofa it is a weight off my mind because we do really it's what did you do yesterday focusing on breakfast that's sort of you know focusing on the morning what did you do yesterday morning we'll rush through dinner like he focused on the morning then he rushed through everything else but we covered everything this is why you're a great broadcaster max you you left the story just what does he want to talk about he wants to talk about putting renegade epsom salts into his bath yeah we let him do that and it's a great ad for whatever those salts were because he destroyed jet lag and had a wonderful day apart from that and i've already googled actually while he was talking about the child-friendly hotel in devon to see maybe i'll take the kids there could be good um hey thank you David.

Let's do it again.

All right, Max.

Let's do it again soon.

And of course, the next midweek mayhem, we will discuss obviously the huge fallout from the previous midweek mayhem.

Oh my God.

If you would like to get in touch with probably a lot of fury, read the cheeses, the baby cheeses, this is how you get in touch.

To get in touch with the show, you can email us at what did you do yesterday pod at gmail.com.

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And please subscribe and leave a review if you liked it on your preferred podcast platform.

And if you didn't, please don't.

Thanks, David.

Thanks, Max.

In it for life.

Everything is showbiz.

Hello, Max Max Rushton here.

You might remember me from Series 9, Episode 2 of Parenting Hell.

I'm here to tell you about Dog by the Bakery Door, the debut children's book by author Jamie Bruce.

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Here's a review from my three-year-old son.

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I have this book.

Full disclosure, the author might be his mother and my wife, but even more reason to buy it.

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Thank you, goodbye.