S3 EP15: Chris McCausland

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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?

Hello and welcome to today's episode of What Did You Do Yesterday.

I'm Max Rush and David O'Doherty sitting opposite me.

And David, important to say that for the tape, we've just finished recording with the brilliant Chris McCausland.

It's not about me.

It's not about me, but I got off a plane not 24 hours ago.

Yeah.

And I'm not saying you would notice in the app, but I just...

You might notice in the app.

I mean, I feel I take more of a leadership role maybe in this one.

Yeah.

Something maybe about the jet lag Rushton mind is more prone to tangents, whereas I'm keeping us

on the straight and narrow.

I was very interruption-heavy.

I was like, interruption.

I didn't say interruption.

You've patented that.

You've told me in the meetings I'm not allowed to say interruption, but you were very much like, come on, Chris has got a hard out.

Let's get around.

Chris, you will know him.

Well, you'll know him from comedy.

Chris has done so many things.

Most people will know him from Strictly last year.

He was the visually impaired guy who who stole the hearts of the nation.

Shall we say that?

He won.

He's a very funny comedian and he's on tour at the moment.

Blimey, he's on tour.

Let's be real.

He's done like 144.

Yeah.

Unbelievable.

And especially when he has as many other things going at the same time.

He's got an autobiography out that he somehow wrote in the back of cars.

What's that called?

You've got the information because I'm JetLow.

It's called Keep Laughing.

Yes.

Keep laughing.

Yes.

And we do, most importantly, it's our first delve into football games on the Amiga and the spectrum in the late 80s, early 90s.

And I've got a rich scene.

If people like that bit, I can go deep on that bit.

And yeah.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is what Chris McCausland did yesterday.

Chris McCausland, welcome to What Did You Do Yesterday?

How are you doing?

Yeah, very good.

Excited to have you.

Hoping that your day yesterday.

Well, actually, the boring days are better than the spectacular days.

So we'll get into it.

Oh, that's good.

You've made this day now because yesterday was one of those days that you said makes the better days.

Great.

When does it begin, Chris?

What time?

My alarm yesterday went off at 8.25 a.m.

I'm in a hotel, you see.

So that is

a lay-in, really, isn't it?

A lay-in.

8.25 and 8.30 because I don't trust one alarm.

But are you sleeping through to 8.25?

I have young kids at 5 a.m.

is

what's happening to me.

I'm sorry, David.

It does come up quite a lot, Chris.

But like, even if I was alone, my body clock or my bladder would get me up well before 8.25.

Right.

Okay.

So I'm on tour at the minute.

So what day was it yesterday?

This would help, wouldn't it, with this podcast?

I hope you know.

I hope you know, Chris.

yesterday was tuesday so the night before was monday i don't know what you do david when you're on tour but i have this new strategy when i'm on tour i'm in scotland at the minute i'm doing a run of eight nights and rather than traveling around like a hobo i pick a place yeah yeah yeah i'm staying in a place called kokaldi which is near dunfermalin on the monday i was in aberdeen so i did the two hours up to aberdeen the two hours back down to the hotel and it just makes you feel like when you're not checking out and checking in all the time and you haven't got those windows where you're like, What do I do for two hours?

Why I have to wait to check in?

It just makes you feel like you're a human being.

Wow.

So, I didn't get home until about half past 12 the night before.

So, what I also did when I started coming up, when I came back out on tour for this leg, is I thought I need to do something to do with my health, right?

So, I looked up what are the most effective supplements for a guy my age,

a 48-year-old man, probably suffering in ways that a 48-year-old man shouldn't suffer.

I've got a good multivitamin, which, you know, the benefits of which are kind of, you know, dubious, but, you know, it was, it was the cheapest of the ones that I've selected.

I got a vitamin D supplement, yeah, because that's the one that everybody says you don't get enough of.

Sunshine.

I certainly don't.

Yeah.

A good omega-3 fish oil, right?

And then I thought, I've got me three main things there.

They're the three that everybody says you should have.

I'm just going to add an extra thing, right?

Just like an extra little kind of crazy thing that's a bit more specialist, right?

And I looked it up, and apparently, the one that would be most beneficial was a magnesium supplement, right?

Right, magnesium helps with your sleep, apparently.

And I bought this magnesium complex.

Is this quite possibly the most boring start to one of these episodes you've ever done?

Oh, no, this is actually thrilling for us.

It's like Formula One.

So I bought this magnesium supplement.

And honestly, my sleep-like, I would wake up five or six times during the night.

Seriously, I am sleeping through at the most.

I'll wake up once in the night.

Like, I don't know whether it's coincidental, I don't know whether there's a correlation, but I have started taking this magnesium supplement that said it helps you sleep.

I am sleeping, Max McCausland's doing SpawnCon.

That's what this sounds like to me.

Do you think so?

Yeah, I think you're right.

The only time we've had this before was when Ama Jalili advocated for a brand of tea that completely evacuates your insights.

And can I just say, not all magnesium supplements are equal.

You need to get yours from WWW doss.

Chris McCall's La Magnesium supplement.

I was going to say, unless you got it from RFK Jr., do you think it would work for a 46-year-old?

I know you've specifically gone 48-year-old.

And I hate this to become like, you know, a bluffer's health podcast where the people just chatting and pull you in.

I never had the vaccine.

I had terminal illness.

And all I did was go for a walk and blink twice and I'm fine.

I also sleep with a colander on my head, and it's helping immensely.

Chris, let me just jump in there.

Is magnesium the one that tastes like a battery, though?

Does it taste all right?

Does it give you burps?

You see, I'm not just snorting it raw.

You're shelving it, are you, Chris?

It's in this little capsule form, so you don't really get any of that.

And when you're taking it with the fish oil, if anything, you get the fishy burps, don't you?

Oh, they're so sad.

The fishy burps.

So bad.

That's what they say about fishy burps: the fishy burps override the battery taste.

In top trumps of awful kind of side effect tastes.

I like the way that David thought the way you eat magnesium is like the way he eats any metal.

Like, just biting a girder.

He's an iron girder.

That's how you get your iron.

Half a teaspoon, David.

Half a teaspoon.

Just sprinkle it on your Weetabix.

8.25.

You've slept like a kid.

I'm sleeping, Max.

I am sleeping.

I always set two alarms.

I always set them five minutes apart because I find that with the crazy nine-minute time delay of the automatic snooze function of an iPhone alarm, that gives me a really good kind of staggered, continuous interruption until I choose to get out of bed.

Oh, I see.

So you have two snoozes.

You have

to get it.

So I'm getting 25, then I'm getting 30, then I'm getting the snooze from the first one, which is going to come in at around about 34

before the second one hits me at 39.

They're tandeming.

Chris, tag teaming.

You're on tour in Scotland.

You're in the beautiful town of Kirkoldie.

Why are you getting up at 8.25, though?

Because unless your gig is at 9.30 a.m., in which case, can I say that's a huge mistake from a touring point of view?

I'm getting up at 8.25 because I've paid for the breakfast, David.

Here we go.

This is Max's favourite conversation of all.

Yeah, I've paid for the breakfast.

And if I've paid for the breakfast, no one is going to take away my right to go and complain about the condition of some eggs.

We're in the buffet.

Okay, so is it straight down?

What time do we get down to breakfast?

I'd arranged to go down a quarter to, so I set my alarm at the times I've already stated to give me the time to adjust to the idea of life.

I jump out of bed with seven minutes to go.

Right, that's exciting.

Seven minutes to go.

So that would make it about 38 minutes past.

Wash my face, go to the toilet, throw my clothes on.

I don't brush my teeth.

I'm going to go and eat breakfast all day.

That's fine.

Kind of try and just flatten my hair just flatten with my hands still with the residue of yesterday's show gel i'll call it because i don't wear hair gel on a normal day i only wear it on a show day just so it doesn't look quite so fluffy on stage so i let's call this show gel and then my driver who drives me around and does all my tour stuff with me graham he gives me a knock a quarter two Great.

He's learned to give me a knock a quarter two.

He's got a problem in the, he's always early, right?

And I get it.

Like, if I'm at home and I say to him, we're driving to Nottingham today and we're going to leave at 22, he'll get there at half past because he doesn't know what the traffic's like.

But when your room is three down the corridor, why are you getting there five minutes early?

Do you know what I mean?

What traffic are you expecting in the corridor between room 38 and 41 or whatever?

He could get caught behind one of those little trolleys with the little soaps on it.

He would always knock like five minutes early.

I said, mate, we said quarter to.

He says, yeah, but like, you know, I just thought I'd set off early.

Well, look, mate, I'm like, I haven't got my pants on.

Okay, so it's Graham, you and Graham, and we're now heading, I presume, down to the buffet.

Yeah, heading down.

Okay.

So, you know what?

I mean, yesterday,

second day on the run, I've avoided the sausage.

Wow.

I just love the sausage.

Last year, before I did Strictly,

I was doing four sausages a day on my breakfast.

Every day?

On tour, or just every day?

Just on tour.

And that was the thing.

I'd only have a sausage on tour.

But when I was on tour, I'd have four a day.

Would that be, you know, four chipolatas, very different to four, no, four

sausages?

Yeah, four breakfast, chunky sausages.

But I would sacrifice the bacon because I just think that the bacon sometimes in a hotel buffet, it's so inconsistent.

You know, the variation in standard of sausage is smaller than the variation in the condition of the bacon, especially when it's been left out under a lamp or whatever it is.

I was doing four sausages a day.

I did strictly, I ate like a pig throughout strictly, and then you've kind of got to, you know, rein it in, haven't you?

Because you stopped doing the dancing.

And so I went back out on tour in January and I reduced it down to three sausages.

Wow.

But I wasn't doing any exercise.

I was on tour.

I did a lot of tour shows because I did four months of dates.

I've moved to do strictly and dumped on top of the five months of shows that were already in the diary.

So there was a lot of dates and I didn't do any exercise.

So the reduction in sausages was necessary.

I had the summer.

I went back out on tour now.

After not exercising all year, new start with the supplements, I thought, I can't just start with these new supplements.

I'm going to reduce down to two sausages.

So I'm now just functioning on two sausages a day.

After two and a half weeks of being on tour, I was like, I need to have some dark sausage days.

You know, I need to go dark.

A sausage amnesty.

You have to hand them in.

They have them like a sort of knife box you know and sausages from all over the world have been put into these boxes is this your first non-sausage day on tour this is my second zero sausage day on the tour

and on the run i did it on monday as well and um so no sausages which meant i just had scrambled egg on i'd like to say toast yeah But you know, it was bread that had been shown some form of feet.

Graham went and got me breakfast.

For he claims was four passes through.

Four Four passes through, four passes through, and it was like someone had tried to blow dry it.

Listen, I don't want to get in the way of you and Graham, but I think Graham is bullshitting you because

we know with these toasters, once through is that is a kitten that's blown on it, twice through is it's been through a nuclear incinerator.

Yeah, there's the choice.

Well, he claimed four for taking advantage of the less able, I think, maybe.

Chris, riddle me this: Would Graham ever take a pass at the whole buffet and report back to you and be like, eggs not looking good.

Don't do it, Chris.

Don't hit that button.

This is the problem.

I mean, this is one of the biggest problems with not being able to see.

You'd think it'd be like, you know, being able to see your loved ones or driving a car.

But I think it's being able to investigate the quality of eggs in a hotel buffet.

Even if other people can see them and report back on them, you are entirely putting your future in their

basically in their judgment.

It's not, would you eat it?

It's would they eat it?

And you don't know what they would eat.

But do you say, look, I want a full description of every egg.

The scrambled looks watery.

The fried look like they've been there for three weeks.

Or do you just say, tell me what looks best, Graham?

If you spoon out some eggs and there's liquid following that, it's not for me.

I want my eggs cooked.

Okay.

I don't want them sitting in a pool of uncooked egg.

Do you think being visually impaired lends to less spontaneity from a breakfast buffet point of view?

As in, would you ever be drawn to, like, here's what I want, something deranged, like, put a fucking sausage in a pano chocolate and give that to me?

I'm not pregnant,

but no, it does.

Like, I think there's two things when it comes to food: is that yes, I am less tempted.

You go for the convenient option.

Sometimes you can't be bothered.

So, you're less tempted by the things you see because you can't just go, oh, God, that looks good.

Oh, I'll go and get that.

And you haven't got the autonomy.

You have to get somebody else to go and get it often.

It probably saves me a lot of calories in the long run.

That's probably one of the lesser-sung benefits of blindness.

It's calorie-saving benefits over a long-term period.

But also, you do find yourself being sometimes, if you have to get somebody to read things and describe like the amount of times you'll be in a restaurant and there's a menu there, and like you've got the option of somebody telling you what's on it.

This is what will happen, right?

Whether it's somebody you're with, or even whoever, like you're asking somebody in a a waiter or whatever, to read you the menu.

Yeah, they start off.

They read you every single starter.

Oh, their enthusiasm knows no bounds, right?

Every single starter.

And you're like, oh, do you know what?

I think I'll have the chicken wings.

That sounds really good with the end of whatever the little kind of nutty dip or whatever the fuck it is.

And then the mains, and they go,

we got some Italian things, pasta.

There's a couple of pizzas, there's some burgers.

And then there's some grills.

Any of them kind of grab your fancy?

You have to then push for extra information, yeah?

By the time it gets to the desserts, they just go, I mean, is there some of your fancy?

They've lost the will to live by the time they get to the desserts.

You know what I mean?

So you do feel that you are heaping your own kind of requirements and demands onto people sometimes.

And often you'll find yourself just going, Do you know what?

I'll just have the burger.

Give me a cheeseburger.

That's the easy option.

Yeah, but if they're really not at it, you're just surely tempted to go, you couldn't run that, buy me one more.

Yeah, could you read that all again from top to bottom, please?

Yeah, all right.

So, Graham is so.

Has Graham delivered on the eggs?

And that's day two.

Yeah, yeah.

I have my scrambled eggs, too.

Yeah, but has Graham done well?

Yeah, no, they're not what I would consider unedible, but they're not the best eggs.

You know, they're a little bit, do you know when you get scrambled eggs?

You can either get them, they're really runny and you're like, this hasn't been cooked properly, or they're quite gelatinous.

What's the word?

Gelatinous, yeah.

Is that the right word?

I think so.

It's just the texture of them is like there's more other stuff than egg in this yeah there's something else going on like this would not go off quicker than the fresh scrambled eggs this would last longer but it was it was edible i had it on the on my hair dried toast what drinks anything else beans no i didn't mate no i didn't i didn't have any anything else with it i was trying to keep it simple and just get some protein into me really and uh coffee coffee a glass of water and and two black coffees.

Again, do you know why I drink black coffee?

I drink black coffee because years ago I was unable to see what the date on the milk was in the fridge,

and then you open it.

And when you think that milk might be past its cell by date, there's no point in sniffing it because if you sniff it and it's off, you can tell it's off, right?

Yeah, but even if it's not off and you think it might be past its cell by date, you open it and you sniff it and you go,

oh, it could be.

Yeah,

there's never a moment where you sniff it and you go 100% fresh.

And so, I hated not knowing of whether the milk I had in the fridge was past the cellway date.

And so, in the end, I just stopped drinking milk because I found it less stressful.

And I've been drinking black coffee ever since.

Yeah.

There was one talksport show where me and Barry Glenn Denning, you know, we just said, I can have a cup of tea.

I'm a man of the people.

I'd normally make my own tea, but sometimes you're busy, like on air.

And the teenagers don't make tea, right?

They don't make tea at home, but it's normally a teenager that makes you the tea, such as the order of the pecking order behind the glass.

And we both took a swig of tea at the same time, and the milk was off.

And honestly, it was like the grim.

It's like I've never seen two men trying harder not to vomit during a radio program.

We probably got an hour's content out of it, so I'd say on balance, it was worth it.

There you go.

A farmer gives my parents eggs, and they come in three like previously used egg boxes, and written on them with a big pen is is very fresh, fresh, and fresh-ish.

Did you start that sentence off with the words, my farmer?

No, a farmer gives my parents.

David's doing very well.

I'm doing

very well.

I thought you said like the way you were saying, my hairdresser, or my farmer.

Like, my farmer.

On sale by dates, I was back at my parents' recently, and we just said, have you got any oats so we can make young Ian some porridge?

And my mum bought out three boxes of oats, of which one was best before 2015.

This is some solid stuff.

Wow.

We might avoid this one, mum.

Is your kid called Ian?

Ian Rushton.

Well, officially, yes.

Unofficially, in real life, no, but I like to stick with Ian.

And you're right to pick it up because keeping it in the middle of the day.

No one

keeping it in.

Exactly.

Oh, there'll be a time in the future.

Do you know what?

There'll be a time in 80 years from now when he's the only Ian on the planet.

Yeah, you're absolutely right.

Okay, so we've had our breakfast.

We've had our coffees.

Where are we heading now?

We've got the whole day is ahead of us.

See, this is the problem, in my experience, with the staying in the same hotel.

I like the way you're Churchill's war room this tour, Chris, where you've picked a spot in the mathematical center of Scotland and you're linking in and out of there.

But the problem is, particularly the pre-lunchtime period, what the hell do you do with the next few hours?

I mean, I've always got things to do.

That's the thing i mean when i did the tour from january to um may earlier this year believe it or not i did 144 tour dates in less than 160 days oh my gosh and then on top of that as well as like filming and things like that that we squeezed in i wrote a book which we're probably going to plug at some point but i it literally consumed me and i bought a beanbag tray i had to write it in the car on the way to theaters and hotels i had to write it in between shows and matinees.

I had to write it in the hotel every day.

And I had no downtime for the whole of that first leg.

That it was, it was just a constant presence.

And so I don't have that hanging over me.

And I don't have such an insane schedule this time.

So

any levels of amounts of downtime are a little bit of a novelty for me at the minute.

But saying that, there's still things that I have to get due.

And I try and keep work that needs doing for when I'm away because when you're on tour you want your home time to be home time i don't really want to be sitting on my laptop and having to do zooms and things like that so i i try and get things done when i'm away and so with that in mind what did i do i made a little list here let me just see 920 i spoke to my wife and daughter on the phone yeah how long for 30 seconds 30 seconds that's all macaulay does

you alive you alive i've written 10 minutes here but i don't think it was 10 minutes Do you know what?

I think it's them that gets bored of me rather than the other way around.

You know, I'm away.

I'm phoning in.

I'm checking in.

I'm doing my bit.

I'm trying to really make myself feel better about my own life choices.

That's what I'm doing.

You know, when I'm away,

I send my daughter.

She's 12.

I send her videos and I send her...

videos of the venues.

What I realized as well is that when you're on tour and when you are, you know, away, like I was away for five weeks last year filming as well, something that was going to be for Christmas.

I made a thing for Sky and you're saying to your daughter, I'm away filming a thing.

What are you filming?

Oh, it's for Christmas, but it's April.

And you go, yeah, but it'll be on at Christmas and you'll see it then.

And it's all quite abstract.

And then what I realized from doing Strictly is that it's really, really intensive.

But because it's all in the moment, of a weekend, I could say to my daughter, I'm going away to film the show.

Are you going to watch?

And she'd go, yeah.

And she'd watch the telly and she'd see me away doing the thing that I'd said I'd gone to do.

She'd follow it in the moment.

It made her feel like she was a part of it more.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, it was, it's happening in real time.

So I've tried to.

you know, send her videos and things of like the venues and show her where I'm playing and kind of like bring her into that world a little more.

But, you know, two weeks in, and I think already she's getting these videos and she's like, I mean, it's just another video of seats.

What do I say to him?

Just, yes, daddy, wow, that's a big venue.

So when you're away, we try and, you know, we check in, don't we, David?

You know, I'm sure you do when you're over at your max.

But a lot of it is to make us feel like we're checking in.

And a lot of the time, we're just getting in the way of routine.

Yeah, Mrs.

Rushon really, she cares about fairness in a lot of ways.

So if I'm away, and when Ian was very young, I was in Sydney quite a lot in the Champions League, and I was getting up at like 4 a.m.

to do the show.

I just pray the WhatsApp had nothing on it because if it was like Ian's been up now, now, now, now it would just be like she's just racking up the debts that I am yet to repay.

You know, like at some point, she's like, I'm off to New York, I'll be back in 2032, and like, sort of justifiably so.

So, I don't know if Mrs.

McCausaland is saying, You owe me 144 days.

Sounds like Ian might need some kind of a magnesium complex to prevent it.

Oh, yeah, he's getting it tomorrow, Chris.

Don't you worry.

My dad is

86.

He's a piano player and he would have played a lot on Irish television.

You know, when I feel there used to be more variety shows where there'd be a singer or there'd be whoever and dad would always be in the band in the background.

But dad told us, the kids, that he could see us through the television.

So if we were like wouldn't go to sleep or whatever, if he was a babysitter, he would be watching.

He'd sort of glance up from the piano and see into our living room.

And so, I do remember my brother and sister used to hide behind the couch when he was on the TV,

and I would just sit there, just thumbs up.

It's going well, dad.

My dad told me once when a wall had been plastered in the bedroom, and my dad told me once that whatever you do, don't touch the wall because it'll burn the skin off your fingers.

That was one way of keeping kids' fingerprints out of a freshly plastered wall, wasn't it?

Unless you said it about the wall just every day.

He just didn't want you to ever touch any wall.

Okay, so you've done a 10-minute, 9.20 phone call with family.

Done.

And then, I mean, I don't really want to be

talking about your competition here, but I, okay, 9.40, let's build to it.

I arranged a table in front of the window.

Oh,

no.

What's happening here?

Bit of natural light.

My table in the hotel was in the corner.

I'm in front of the window still, so I've set this up in front of the window.

But yesterday, I was scheduled to.

You didn't do our direct enemies, the rest is politics.

We're both in the same

in our time with Melbourne Bragg.

You better not have done that.

The overlap is staggering.

I did parent in hell at 10 o'clock.

Fuck you, Chris!

Those guys are so much fun.

They're so much fun to talk to.

No, but the thing is, Chris, the thing is, Chris, we know this.

In 30 years, they'll be screwed because their kids will be accountants.

And then we can't be like, well, you know, Dave went to work.

He didn't care why I called.

In 30 years, we'll be absolutely flying.

Everybody will always have a yesterday, won't they?

Everybody will always have a yesterday.

There mightn't be too many tomorrows left.

Yeah, exactly.

You're absolutely right.

Well, he's an actuary now, and I don't really hasn't spoken to me.

I'm estranged from my third child.

I don't know what he did yesterday, Josh.

He came out, he had to wipe my ass,

changed my pan and put a new nappy on me.

Oh, he's a good lad.

It'll have a lull for about 40 years when the kids just go off to have careers.

But then when the lads get really old, then...

What soup did you have yesterday, Josh?

Well, you know, I like a chicken soup.

So you did them?

You did those bastards?

Yep.

That's literally what I wrote in my diary as well in my calendar.

10 p.m.

Podcast with those bastards.

Lasted about an hour.

Then I had to upload my local record.

That's what you have to do on these things.

Something's as technical.

It's behind the curtain shit.

No one needs to know innit.

But we record locally as a higher quality bit rate file.

I allow my Dropbox to update and then I pass on the Dropbox link.

That took approximately three minutes, guys.

Is this the level of nuance?

This is too much, Dean.

We've actually never said this before.

I was going to say, you're playing to the crowd.

The listeners might.

Okay, but me and David are laughing this shit up.

At 11.03 p.m., my Dropbox said it had four minutes left to upload.

No, so I'd sorted all that out.

So about 11.20 a.m., I basically had a little chat on WhatsApp with a producer of a documentary that I've made about some extra VO that they want.

What's the documentary?

It's a tech documentary.

So I pitched this back in 2019 about AI and tech.

And everybody went, what's AI?

And then we had COVID.

And then I did

some other stuff instead.

I did like a travel show with the same production company and all that.

And then, obviously, the last couple of years, chat GPT's taken off, and all of a sudden, we've blown the dust off this and gone, Do you want to make this now?

And everyone's gone, Oh, yeah, that's quite topical, isn't it?

So, there's a lot of negative coverage about AI.

From my point of view, AI is the biggest game changer in 15 years in accessibility.

Whereas in the past, somebody blind would have had to have a hideously expensive, niche, ugly piece of equipment that was only for them.

Now, the future of accessibility is mainstream technology.

In what sort of a way, Chris, give an example of that.

Well, like the iPhone is the most accessible tool I've ever had in my life.

It's got no buttons on it, and it is remarkably the most

useful accessible tool I've ever owned.

And that was the biggest game changer in accessibility 15 years ago.

So now it's what is the future of tech?

Self-driving cars, wearable tech, like smart glasses with AI built in.

And we went to MIT in Boston and things.

Went into Meta.

Meta invited us in.

Open AI invited us in and make ChatGPT.

So it's the future of tech for everybody, but also a little spin on what am I, what's it going to do for me?

We had a little chat about that really because, I mean, just to let you know, like AI, you hear a lot of people going, I used AI to make an image.

I used AI to make a video of whatever, Taylor Swift riding a penguin.

Barack Obama saying, stop the boats.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I use AI the opposite way.

So I use AI to describe videos, to describe images to me.

I can feed photographs into it and it will describe what is in the photo to a level of detail that no human can ever be bothered to do.

And I can ask it a hundred questions and it never runs out of patience with me.

I can use it for telling me, you know, what is

what kind of drink this is to describe in a picture my daughter's drawn or describe this pair of trainers on a website.

How big's the soul?

What colour of laces has it got?

And it'll do it.

It never runs out of patience.

And it's the beginning of it.

And it's already nuts.

We're making a documentary about that.

But they want more voiceover.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we had a little chat about that.

How watery are these eggs?

A self-driving car, and how water are these eggs?

You know, Graham's on the scrap heap.

Yeah, Graham's the one who's going straight to matter and setting it on fire.

He knows he's going to be out of a gig.

The thing is, is that the AI isn't at the point where I can go and get me eggs.

Still need him, don't I?

All right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

They can tell you what the eggs are like, but you still need Graham to fetch them.

Go and get my eggs, and then the AI will judge your work.

That's so interesting, actually.

I'd never even, because Dave and I have sort of occasionally talked about AI.

And as David said, you know, I thought it was a brilliant line that you said that because we're so technologically sort of inadequate, AI just sounds brilliant.

But obviously there are lots of terrifying things.

But like many things about accessibility, when I've done podcasts about this, we did one on Football Weekly about sport and disability and sport.

It doesn't really get a lot of coverage because it's not a culture war.

I think, like, nobody is going actually less stuff for blind people, right?

So, it's not a rascal, it's never top of the news agenda.

I've never even considered what AI would do for you know, people with any sort of disability.

The deaf, they're the ones, aren't they?

They're the ones that go less stuff for blind people.

That's

a lot of rivalry, you know, these sensory deprivations.

Well, yeah, yeah.

is this a voiceover you can do on this mic like are they like we want you to say this stuff for us do it now or are you gonna have to book it a time and go to a studio so here's the thing is they were saying we need you to do this over the next couple of weeks we'll try and get you into a studio and i said to them listen i'm in a hotel here i've got my mic get on zoom i'll do a local record when you put this on with background music and you've got the atmos of the thing no one's gonna tell tell that these four lines were recorded on a slightly different microphone i mean if anybody's noticing that then there's something implicitly wrong with the documentary if anyone's if anyone's listening and going did them three lines sound at a slightly lower book rate

i said so why don't we just do it from here and if it works it works and if it ruins the whole thing i'll come in and do it that's what we're going to do okay so well hang on i am just i know we need to crack on here, but I am always amazed, not so much with voice.

Oh my god, can I just say, mate, don't worry about cracking on.

We've got two hours sat in a car coming up soon, and then two hours on stage that we can breeze through.

Do you take your time, mate?

There's a thing called ADR, which a lot of people don't know about, which is when people look at a cut of a film or a series and the plot needs to be explained a little bit more, very often they'll get a character whose back is to camera at the time come in and record an additional explanatory line who'll be like, I must get vengeance because he killed my father.

You know what I mean?

They get them to do that.

But so often, if you know that this exists as a thing, a character with their back to camera will say a line in a completely different tone to the previous thing that they've just said because they've obviously just chucked it in afterwards.

Don't do that, Chris.

That's what I'm saying.

Yeah, and that's why, I mean, like when you, um, it's one of the benefits that, you know, you're filming something as simple as a doorstep scene and you film over both characters' shoulders, you know, you'd think that the camera is going to be on the face of the person talking all the time.

And that's why they do it like that.

But also, they are covering themselves so that they have the back of everybody who's talking at any one time.

So they can just drop in.

You mean in 1996?

Yes.

You do wonder that if the TV show, they have to get someone in and say, I need vengeance for you killing my father.

If they haven't got that bit in the original, they really should have thought through the writing.

In Championship Manager 2, I believe, they added commentary.

And when the man recorded Fulham, he recorded it so deep that it went, it's a goal for Fulham.

It was all so exciting.

Whenever Fulham scored, that was a moment.

So when I was a kid in Liverpool, the first game that ever had crowd noise on it.

Do you know what that was, Max?

The first game that ever had like the crowd kind of creating the simulated sensation of singing a song, kickoff two, maybe Emilyn Hughes's international Emilyn Hughes.

What a game that was!

Yeah, pull back to kick it in the air.

Yes, right.

I remember like a grown man that we didn't know who lived in one of the roads where we used to play out on the street, saying to us, Hey,

kids, come in here and have a look at this.

And we just went into this grown man's house and sat in his bedroom and played on this computer with him.

Ah,

that was a great game.

But when we got the games of the commentary, I remember first FIFA on the PC, one of the FIFA 95 or whatever, but Actua Socket on the PlayStation, right?

And this was the last console that I was able to kind of remotely play games on when my eyesight was deteriorating.

But it had the same signs, and it had some of them.

They go, he read that so early, he was on the next page, right?

But if there was one that'd say like eight times a game, and they'd go, oh, I bet you he's got shares in a paint company

every time you kind of did a sliding tackle anywhere near the edge of the pitch oh i bet you he's got shares of the pen company

if one commentator said that once you'd be like that's weird but to say it six times a match then yeah

oh yeah anyway

the huge was a good game sorry do carry on do need to keep this moving i could do about a week on all the football games on the amiga like we could just carry on striker do you remember Striker?

You could slide tackle up the pitch quicker than you could run.

That's complete insanity, just sliding up there.

I remember them all from match day on the spectrum, where you could make the ball yellow and the pitch purple, right?

I tell you what, the one that really caused me a lot of problems was

when my eyesight was deteriorating, was sensible soccer because they just made it so fucking tiny.

All of a sudden, there was like this football game where like everyone was like a lemming on the

just these tiny little players.

Chris, what are we?

So came back from breakfast, did an hour of off-menu or whatever that podcast's called, and then did that meeting.

So we're up around midday now, are we?

Half 12?

I've got written at 11.35.

I tried to sort out what I'm doing.

I'm so kind of behind with my plans, but what am I doing for me?

Island travel, David.

What am I doing with me?

Oh, yeah.

Getting to Ireland.

How am I getting around when I'm over there?

Are we able to take the car on the ferry?

Apparently not, because it's been planned in such a way that it makes it actually scientifically impossible for me to get over to Ireland through any other means that isn't an air and a plane.

So I'm going to have to hire a car when we're over there for the island bit.

And so I did a little bit of legwork on seeing what was possible with that.

You can borrow my car.

Well, most people, Chris, stay at David's.

You know, and as a close friend of David's now, I'd say if you want to stay at David's, you're very welcome.

You're so welcome, Chris.

Well, you know, I only ever accept invitations from people who have their own personal pharma.

And David, it just so happens that you fall into that category.

He actually normally says, like my PT, he says my PF.

He calls him his PF.

My PF.

I have to come down every morning, wake you from your magnesium slumber.

I know what the full job would be.

how would you like your eggs fresh or freshish

right so you do some admin what are you on rentacar.com what are we doing here no so i was um communicating with uh one of the producers my tour producers about um how the hell i am meant to get from brighton on one night to be on stage in Cork the following night, whether that is remotely possible in the old automobile.

And apparently it's not, because it's only possible if I have a team of three drivers who take turns.

Like Le Monde, it's like Le Monde.

Yeah.

Yeah, it'll have to be done without any sleep.

Yeah, so we're going to have to fly into Cork, but then out of Belfast.

And I need to get a car hired in Cork that I can drop off in Belfast.

Yeah.

People think it's a rock and roll lifestyle, don't they, David?

But some of it's just logistics.

There's probably extra complications because technically you're hiring the car in the EU, Cork, Cork, and then dropping it off.

Oh, don't do this to me, David.

Don't do this to me.

No one's mentioning this.

Oh, God.

I'm not going to be able to take the car or sausages across the border.

But you do have your country back, so it's fine.

My farmer has a big combine harvester, and you can just sit on this and you can drive straight up the centre of Ireland.

Yeah, no, I'm going to Cork and Galway and Dublin and

Belfast for a few.

It just needs sorting out, but I operate so close to the dates.

I only rarely ever usually I operate about two weeks in advance, and but this is about three weeks away, I think.

Thank you for coming to our island, Chris.

Thank you.

We're approaching lunchtime.

I don't do lunch.

Oh,

ever?

I mean, I've never really felt the need for three meals a day.

Wow.

I'm happy with two meals a day and then a little bit of something sprinkled around the edges, you know?

Yeah.

As I said.

Don't know if I've mentioned, trying to be healthy.

I've travelled with a big pot of nuts in my bag.

Yeah.

Absolute classic sign.

It's such a sign, nuts.

It's such a midlife crisis.

I'm going to be healthy.

So what you do is you buy the nuts, you eat them, and then you eat the Tony's chocolate's after the nuts.

What happens?

And then you read the nutrition on nuts and it says like a healthy person should eat one Brazil nut a month and you've just eaten 35 of them covered in chocolate.

Yeah, well these are raw, unflavored, almost like the bits of chip wood you'd find on the floor of a children's playground.

And I'm trying to train myself to enjoy chewing on these pieces of wood.

And so I've got a jar of them.

And you know what?

Last night, because I'm trying to avoid eating sweet things and I'm trying to avoid all the desserts and I'm eating wood.

So when me and Di did strictly, we used to do these social videos.

We did it just as this one-off thing.

We just spontaneously did this thing, guess the flavor of the Kit Kat.

And I'd give her a bizarre-flavored Kit Kat from Japan, and I'd cover her eyes in such an uncomfortable way that she had a pain in her neck for about three days afterwards.

And she'd have to guess the flavor of the Kit Kat, and she could never do it.

And people loved it that we'd do it over and over again with different flavours.

And it was exactly the same joke every time in that I'd come up with three shit prizes that she could win.

She'd never get it.

I'd show her what flavor it was.

She'd take a bite and she'd go, oh my God, that's the most mango thing I've ever tasted in my life.

Right?

It was the same format and the same joke repeated.

And last night I was outside the venue at the end and there was a couple of Scottish girls there.

They brought me a flavored Kit Kat.

All I've been eating was wood and avoiding chocolate and they made me eat a four-finger lemon Kit Kat outside the venue.

And oh,

do you know what?

It's allowed when you've been forced to.

You have to.

But here's the question: it's like, if you don't eat chocolate for ages, when you do eat it, you don't want a lemon Kit Kat.

Do you know what I mean?

You want a Kit Kat.

It's good, man.

How many Kit Kat flavors are there?

Oh, there's like 280 or something.

Yeah.

Japan has got them all.

You can get everything.

You can get wasabi, chili, birthday cake, everything.

There's hundreds of them.

Chicken tikka.

Mate, there's flavors you wouldn't even imagine.

It's a combination of two things.

Kit Kat roughly translates into Japanese as you will surely succeed or something along them lines.

They're very popular over there.

They're given as gifts and they package them up in different ways.

But then there's also a thing, which is a tradition in Japan, whereas if you go away for business, you are meant to bring something back that is specific to that region.

And so Kit Kat capitalized on this by producing multiple flavors that were only available in specific regions so that Kit Kats became the things that people would bring back.

And as a result,

Japan is awash with Kit Kats.

Whiskers Kit Kat.

They must be really struggling at some point.

Lenoir.

Lenore Kit Kat.

Do we have to have this one?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Anyway, so I don't have lunch.

I have a little pot of nuts in my bag.

I have some nuts.

I had an apple.

Is this all in the room still?

All in the room.

Yeah.

So I had an apple.

I've got a fridge in my room.

Usually the hotel fridges are a little bit underperforming, you know?

And this one, oh, do you know when you're buying an apple?

And it literally shatters your front teeth with the coldness.

I kept my apple in the fridge.

I bit into this apple.

I had to leave it on the table for five minutes to warm up.

I love a high-performance fridge.

This is the Jake Humphrey fridge.

It's been reading self-help books, and it's just now it's as cold as it could ever be just by believing in itself.

It has now the coldest fridge that has ever been.

Yeah, because that's the thing with normal fridges, isn't it?

Like, now fridges are digital, but before they were digital, they had a little dial in them.

Yeah.

And they had a little dial, and you could set your fridge from one to five.

And if you've ever read the instructions, it said, put it on three, don't put it on anything else.

Whatever you do, if you put it on five, you'll destroy your lettuce.

And if you put it on one, your milk will go off too early.

So whatever you do, don't put it.

And you just wonder, why did they give you the option?

I once toured with a guy who had a very long straw.

And we were touring, staying in hotels.

It was the era of the device where when you remove the product from the fridge, it automatically charges you at reception for having taken it.

So his thing was he would open the bottle of beer still inside the fridge and put the straw into it and kneel in front of the fridge and suck it out and then place the lid loosely back on it again.

And that is called a perfect crime.

That's what that is.

Wow.

That's amazing.

Wow.

We're on the road soon.

Graham's knocking on the door again soon, I'm predicting.

Okay, so I did some work on

I've got a radio show I'm recording a new series of at the end of November.

And it is all the work, there's no work involved for the guests who come on, for the comedians to come on.

It's improv, but I have to do all the work in preparing the materials.

And it's basically an audio-based panel show in that I get them to inter figure out what's happening in audio with the visuals removed.

And that takes a lot of time to source the materials.

So I spent a good couple of hours going through audio for that, compiling stuff into a folder that can be used for that at the end of November.

So what's that?

Give us an example of something that would be on that, then, Chris.

What I I will do is: there's two teams of two.

I'll play them an obscure advert, just the audio alone.

First of all, they'll have to tell me what they think is being advertised in the advert, and then I will give them a choice and say, Well, do you think this is for one of the nation's leading brands of deodorant?

Do you think it's for travel insurance?

Or do you think it's for the new Toyota minivan?

Yeah, and they will have to try and figure out what they think it's for.

And then the other team, I will give them a

cable TV shopping infomercial and do pretty much the same thing.

And then I make different games up for every episode.

So I've been through the BBC Sound Effects Library and pulled out recordings of cats' meows that have been labeled with how the cat was feeling when it was recorded.

Then we play a game of guess what this cat's feeling.

Guess what this cat's feeling?

It's absolute nonsense, but it takes a lot of time to get the audio together for all the different

radio four.

4, yeah.

It's called You Head It Here First.

We've done two series, but we're doing the new one at the end of November.

If you're over this way, David, and you fancy.

You've so many pots on the boil here.

This is amazing.

On Radio Cambridgeshire, you may not remember this, in the early 2000s, I did a quiz called Cat Phrase, where I recorded my cat.

meowing and then the producer would go out the studio and just pretend to be three people.

It was obvious that he was the three people, weren't pretending they were recorders, and he would guess the catchphrases and he would say, you know is it a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush and he'd come up with three guesses and then it would just be i just need a week and i go outside but it didn't catch i didn't make tv didn't get to radio four chris i'll be honest i'll tell you why it didn't go anywhere max because you didn't have this sound effect

phrase neither did who wants to win a chocolate a claire which i thought was quite of the nation's pastry based quiz shows.

You worked your way up the pastry.

Okay, Chris.

Anyway.

Okay.

Do you know what?

I never thought, just coming into this,

I never knew David would be the one trying to get it back on track all the time.

I just assumed it would be the other way around.

I've forgotten going for bold, where you would get the chance to win

a year's supply of washing powder.

Going for bold.

Going for bold is really...

It's a rogue.

David's like, guys, guys, can I remind you we're trying to do a podcast?

Yeah, sorry.

My apologies.

What's happening now?

Mid-afternoon.

Okay, listen.

Get on with it, Chris.

Before I went and had my tea.

Who am I?

Who am I?

Sorry, that's my main memory from going for a gold.

Play tectonics for four points.

Will you play or part?

Who created the theme tune for going for gold?

Hans Zimmer.

Hans Zimmer, internationally famous cinematic composer, Hans Zimmerman.

And that's his best work, let's be real.

He did gladiator when going for goals.

He is on, the time is right.

What am I?

I was created in 1624 and made a pottery.

Are you a vas?

Yes, I am.

But the joy on that Norwegian guy when he won with the big hair.

It was the most unfair quiz in the world, wasn't it?

Here we go, foreign people.

I'm going to ask you a series of questions in fast Irish English.

About the counties.

But you know, which county is south of Rutland?

What?

Juan, you don't know that?

You more.

Yeah.

So sorry, we got sidetracked again.

Okay, listen.

I had to lie down on the bed.

Focus.

I had to lie down on the bed.

I opened eBay and I had a little browse to see what latest vinyl releases were out.

I'm a bit of a vinyl head.

This was me time.

I had a little look, what was out.

There was nothing out.

You know that you buy too much vinyl when you look down the list of the new releases and you get to the bottom and there's nothing you want and you go, yes.

Right?

What genre are we looking at here?

Basically rock and metal, really.

You know, that's me go-to.

of the 90s grunge scene whose tastes got yet heavier and heavier as he got older and older.

And now I'll take it, I'll take anything from some kind of Hawaiian kind of laid-back folk to Cradle of Filth, mate.

So that's the spectrum.

That's the hell out there.

Wow, Cradle of Filth sounds

a great name for a band, an absolutely terrible

finest, mate.

Suffix finest

Britain's second biggest, I think they are their second biggest heavy metal export at the minute behind Iron Maiden, maybe.

Cradle of Phil.

No, they're huge.

They've been gone since the 90s, but it's black metal.

Do they sound quite suffoc?

Like,

you know, like armory.

It's very, well, black metal's quite kind of screechy and it's quite vampiric, I would say, in the kind of vocals.

It's all kind of myth and legend.

It's quite theatrical.

It's if West End Musical did really dark gothic,

that's what kind of black metal is.

It's very symphonic and theatrical and performative, a story in a way.

It's not for everyone.

If it was, they'd be bigger than Ed Sheeran.

Well, yeah, I think the only way to describe it to Max is it'll never be on Sounds of the 90s, your favorite radio show.

Cradle of Filth.

Have yet to be on the show.

Now that's what I call music 2071.

It's unlikely.

No one's ever going to say, tonight, Matthew, I'm going to be Danny Filth.

Okay, nothing on eBay.

Sorry, how many bits of vinyl do you think you own?

How many records?

It's difficult to say, and I don't know whether my wife will listen to this.

So let's say 24.

Okay.

But there are quite a lot of zeros after that.

If she is listening to this, they're presumably in the house, right?

They're somewhere.

Well, no, because we need to move out.

And so for quite a while.

I've been pitching up vinyl and slyly shipping it off into my storage locker and replenishing the empty space with new vinyl as it comes in.

And so when we move and I finally pull it all out of storage, she's going to go, what the fuck is that?

Right.

Had a shave, had a shower.

Graham knocked for me and we went down for.

You see, I didn't have any lunch, but we had an early tea, 3.45.

This is the thing on tour, when I tour solo, Pizza Express is my chosen chain restaurant.

And it's the exact point where the staff are like, well, no one's going to be coming in for the next couple of hours because the lunch rush is finished and dinner hasn't started.

And that's when O'Doherty appears.

And Odity says, I want a meal, main thing that lasts two hours up to the sound check.

And it's this very specific show bizit clock, I think, to eat food.

Why is your go-to Pizza Express?

Because, like, their menu outside of the pizzas is very, very limited.

And surely you can't be hammering a pizza every day, mate.

No, they have a salad and a Buddha bowl that's healthy.

Something about the blue light in it and the little cycling hats that they make the chefs wear.

I like all of this as well.

Graham has never ever described the shade of light and he's never ever told me about any headwear.

AI, Graham, Will.

That's the truth.

AI, Graham, Will.

I'll just say for our live show, David, you arrived with wine says about six metric tons of the hottest chips that have ever existed.

And that was our pre 10 minutes before we went on stage.

Eat as much of this as you can.

And we did.

Chris, for our live show, Max knows so little of the world of showbiz.

So it's about 7.30.

Gig starts in the Hackney Empire at 8.

And Max goes, I'm going to meet me mates for a pint now.

And he just heads off.

Reappears two minutes before we begin.

And I respect that a lot.

Well, it would have been fine had some of the technicals worked in the first half hour.

But maybe we should have focused on that.

I don't know.

Anyway, where are we?

In the car.

so we've had dinner i had fish and chips um in the hotel downstairs great we were in the um the restaurant there was a lot of people i think there was people come in to have their dinner rather than because it's felt very quiet here to be honest in this hotel out on the sticks but i think people come in for their lunch in the afternoon there was a lot of elderly people in the restaurant when we went in and we sat down and i had a guns n'roses t-shirt on and a baseball cap we were sat at the table and the guy comes in and he goes hi guys just i'm wondering would you like to come and sit in this other area?

There's a lot of space in there.

And we went, I said, Is it cooler in there?

And he went, Oh, yes, it is.

And I went and sat in.

I was like, Did he just think, just get the scruff out of the

all these lovely people come for their high afternoon tea, high tea in the afternoon, and then just get the ladder and their baseball cap out.

Jump in the car, drive to Glasgow.

Right.

An hour 20 minutes, it said on Google Maps, an hour 50.

It took him reality.

Yeah.

Do you and Graham talk or do you listen to something?

We had a riveting conversation about how the spray nozzle on his windex didn't work and he had to unscrew it and pour the liquid out onto a cloth to clean the window because the windscreen wipers on modern cars aren't as good as they used to be.

It was a riveting conversation.

That's Chobers.

Yeah, I mean, that was about 10 minutes.

Then we had a conversation for quite a while, resisted looking it up so we could really milk the time out of it about

whether swang is an acceptable past tense of swing.

Oh, that was was a good 20 minutes.

And what did you decide?

Oh, well, we then we went on AI to find out.

And swang is dated, it was in kind of parlance a while ago.

Certainly swung is to be used in all contexts.

Sure.

Whether you're talking about actual swings or, you know, maybe your sexual preferences moving from one side to the other.

Right.

And can I just ask, what is minute two of that conversation?

Minute two of that conversation is trying to say sentences that really should have the word swing in them, but with the word swang in them.

If I'm honest, minute four, eight, twelve, seventeen is really just more of that.

AI Graham is not giving you the.

This is why Graham needs his place.

Because this is what it can't be.

Oh, yeah, no.

AI Graham would have knocked this on the audience.

So what do you think I am?

Some kind of pathetic human.

I played a lot of swing ball when I was a kid.

Swang balled.

Swang balled.

That's what I did.

It's the only usage of it.

That's the one exception to the rule.

We listen to music.

Our musical tastes overlap.

They're not the same, but they overlap.

He doesn't go heavy as I go, but he likes some heavy stuff and some rock and bitter.

You know, we listen to Chili Peppers.

We listen to them on this bit of the tour.

I introduced him to the massively underrated One Hot Minute, which was the successor to Blood Sugar Sex Magic and the predecessor to Californication.

An album that fell off the radar, really, but was very good.

But probably because it's got no singy-songy choruses in it, it's all kind of weird, extroverted, funky hip-hop.

We've listened to a lot of chili peppers on this bit.

We usually have an audiobook on the go.

What audiobook?

Well, we're listening to a Scottish one at the minute, just to acclimatise ourselves to the accents.

The other day, we've spent like eight hours listening to this book.

It's quite funny, but the story's real.

The funniness is in how the character talks, really.

But it's kind of like a cop who's a shopping center in Inverness got taken over by terrorists, like as it would.

I spent eight hours listening to this of him being the John McLean in this situation.

And then the next minute I realized that he was in a room with some police officers.

I said to Graham, how did he get out of the shopping center?

It turns out I shouldn't have taken in magnesium before I left the gig.

Graham is listening without you.

That's what's happening.

Well, not enough.

Missed the whole climax of the escape from the shopping Gopinson.

And they're the rules of the car, aren't they?

Snooze you lose.

If either one of you falls asleep, probably worse if it's Graham.

You don't get to listen.

Yeah.

I mean, if he falls asleep, we neither of us get to see how the book ends.

Okay, so we arrive in Glasgow.

What venue?

The Glasgow Theatre Royal.

Ooh, I know that's literally, I think, possibly my favorite venue so far.

1800 nod in terms of the year it was built.

Just these theaters that are built before microphones were a thing yeah and you've got four levels and it's stacked in front 1500 people stacked in front of you and even better because it's in a city like glasgow which is just a proper

you know i like i loved going to these cities that are just like liverpool but in a different place

so i arrived and i did the sound check i've got a really easy sound check it's just me doing the show i just do two halves what sort of mic you using you going with the britney spears or are you holding the ice cream i go wired and i i even if they have a wireless, I ask them if I can have a wire.

I like having the wire, me too.

Yeah, and I so there's nothing really that I do apart from the sound check.

I bring a stool in the car, I have my own stool, and I just ask them for a table, put a glass of water on it, and speak for about two minutes till the guy finishes twiddling with his knobs.

Yeah, and it's done.

But yesterday, I actually had a lady in who was live captioning.

Oh, great!

So we had a little bit of content to go through with her while she asked me how she wants me to write these things on the

you know, because um, not all stand-up translates massively well into written words, and sometimes the joke can be given away before you've said it if it's written down.

Yeah, so um, we went through a bit of that, really.

But the live captioning was great, it didn't affect

I mentioned it off stage before introducing myself.

I got, you know, I just did the whole thing of getting a joke out of it and saying tonight's show is going to be live captions for deaf and harder hearing audience members.

The lady at the back will be writing out everything that I say in real time.

And I believe she's very good at it.

I'd cleared it with her before I said some nonsense words and she got them right and the audience cheered.

And I said, well, that seems to be working, ladies.

Because people can be stupid.

You know that there'll be people sat in the audience for 10 minutes going, why is his words coming?

Why is it being written on the stage?

So I thought, before I even get on the stage, tell everybody what it is.

Does she keep up with you, or is there a slight delay that deaf people will get at slightly afterwards you know what i mean either she kept up with me or there was no deaf people in

or there was plenty of deaf people in and they didn't find any of it for

because

there was no out-of-time laughter based on and this was my concern as well is that i chose live captioning because There is a thing with signing where it is visually mesmerizing.

And there's a certain amount of improv involved in

getting across things that you don't have the signing for, and it's visually funny in its own way, really, when you are trying to sign stand-up.

I was very concerned that I would be the only person that wouldn't be privy to that, if you know what I mean.

Yeah, which it feels even though it's an accessibility feature, it's incompatible with my own disability.

In that, you know, I should not be the only person that doesn't know why people are laughing five seconds later.

But the live captioning was fantastic.

Oh, that's great.

So, sorry, just after the sound check, have you got, what, an hour or two?

Do you just, is there anything that happens?

Always coffee.

Always have a coffee.

I make one of them boring videos for my daughter forever to pretend that she likes.

Yesterday, actually,

there was a lady who works in the theater

who I haven't seen since 2006.

And she was one of the characters in a kid's show that I made for C Beebies.

Yeah, we made this kids' show for CBeebies when I'd been doing comedy for three years, and we made 150 episodes in 2006.

And it was on the telly for quite some time afterwards.

And she was one of the characters in it, and she works in the theater, so we had a good old chat in the dressing room beforehand.

Was she Peppa Pig?

Do you know what?

How old are your kids, Max?

Three and a half and eight months.

Oh, my God.

Sort of, we're pushing Peppa Pig.

We're not, he's not, Ian's not Pepper Pig.

Do you know what annoys me?

Do you you know what gets on my nerves when Daddy Pig's in work and he answers the phone?

He goes, Hello, Daddy Pig speaking.

You're in work.

It's Mr.

Pig.

Yeah.

Have some professionalism about yourself.

All right, so the gig is good.

We're happy with the gig.

Gig was wonderful to the point where I need to record somewhere on this tour.

And I walked out of there going, Do we try and add another one in the end of the tour?

Do you know what I mean?

Beautiful, yeah.

Don't try and sell it again and just go back there and film at the end of the tour because it was such a lovely venue to be on stage in.

Great.

And we know as soon as you walk out, you're forced fed a lemon kit cat.

Nightmare.

An absolute nightmare.

I don't know what you do, David, but like I come off in the interval.

I literally just go in the dress.

I literally just sit there.

I just

don't do anything.

I might have a throat sweeper.

Chris, I can never tell them what I've been doing at halftime because it would ruin the illusion of showbiz.

Like, I'm another eBay man, so sometimes at half-time, I'm looking at at obscure Italian rear deraillers for racing bikes from the 90s, and then

like I get a bid in, and I'm like, yes, and then back out to the game.

Well, that beats me, I sit there and stare at a wall I can't see.

So you're out, you're forced by a lemon Kit Kat.

We're straight back in with great.

The GIF-flavoured Kit Kat, the least popular flavor of all.

We just drive back and it was a lot quicker on the way back.

It was about an hour.

Did you not have?

No, no, no.

I don't think I did last night.

I mean, you only find out tonight when the book starts.

Who's Daphne?

No, I didn't.

I can't remember what I did.

I had a little look.

I've been trying to do social media videos on this tour, and I've never been into social media.

And I had a little potter around trying to figure out how you've the back end of Instagram a bit more and how you actually find information out on it about things you've posted because I'm so clueless with it.

i i don't read it i don't watch other people's things i i've been posting my own things and i have no idea whether anyone likes them whether everyone replies to them

so i had a little putter around on that and um didn't really figure much out if i'm honest with you I sometimes wonder if I should make it like part of your day, like you have 20 minutes where you, I'm doing social media now, like you actually do it like a job rather than just idly going, I've got to post that I'm doing this show then, or I've done this, or I've got to Photoshop, like I'll have to Photoshop a picture of you onto the picture of us.

And I'm so much worse than David.

His is like a silhouette, and mine's just like a big block.

And I don't know how to, it really annoys me that his is so much better than mine, but I don't know how to do it.

And I never get around to it until the Sunday one.

Chris, it's so basic what I do.

Oh, mate, you want to see mine, mate?

I can't even see what it looks like.

I'm just,

sometimes I don't even know if I've got the right camera on.

I'm going, oh, look at this, look at this, this is where we are in Glasgow.

And it's just a video on my nose.

Such a shot of Graham's ear.

I'll tell you what I did on the way back last night as well: I had a little think over because you are not my first rodeo this morning.

Me and Diane, who I did strictly with, we've been doing a

hookup every week, like a podcast, just having a chat.

And we did it this morning at eight before she goes into her training.

So I had a little think over what I'm going to talk to her about, really.

Causeland is a machine.

That's it, mate.

That's it.

So many things going on.

And then home.

Yeah, back to the hotel.

Little drink.

Little drink or straight to bed.

Don't drink anymore, mate.

I can't do the drinking with

this because I don't have the moderation gene.

Yeah.

So

for me, it's either nothing or blackout.

Yeah.

So,

you know, for the sake of my career, I've opted for nothing.

But no, I was straight in last night, got back just before midnight, literally in, brushed my teeth, did the bloke's face wash, which is splash of water on your face.

Yeah.

Rub it with a towel.

Bit a big chunk of magnesium off a girder,

and there you go.

That is my relatively boring day with a lot of tangents.

I think people are gonna love this one because it's just there's so many elements to it.

I realize a lot of it was sat in a hotel room, but this is how a man can be out there in the world doing 56 things without lifting his arse off a chair, and I respect that a lot, Chris.

If people would like to learn more about my life, I have an autobiography out of October the 9th.

Keep laughing, available for more bookstores.

Oh, by the way, as well, if people are into it, so the book is out on October the 9th, but I also recorded the audio book as well.

And I have to say that because a lot of people assume that I wouldn't be doing the audiobook because how does a blind man read a book out loud?

And I did.

And considerable numbers of people in Penguin are going to be in therapy for quite some time, but we got there.

And it exists.

So, yeah, it'll be my voice reading the book as well.

Sorry, how did you do that?

Braille or with

Braille, mate.

I don't read Braille.

So when I'm doing things like that radio show, for example, when I have the outline of my script on the computer, I'll have an earphone in and I can just cursor through it and it the computer will be reading it into me ear as I'm saying it out loud and I can you can't tell I'm doing it when I'm hosting on the radio show and things like that.

But that's small bite-sized chunks of text.

To do 122,000 words like that, we got to the point where we thought it might just be quicker to sit there and wait wait and see if my sight comes back

chris mccausland thank you very much for coming i watched you do yesterday thank you chris yeah nice one guys what a pleasure cheers man

so chris mccausland there i enjoyed it david i enjoyed the discussion of eggs yeah and as he said you know i'd never considered the having to trust trust another person's view of the breakfast buffet.

Yeah.

Graham has a lot of responsibility there.

I'll be honest with you, Max.

We do this podcast, what, twice a week, midweek mayhem and this.

And to me, I'll be like, I've got a lot on at the moment.

I'm doing a podcast twice a week.

Chris has done two podcasts on this day.

And that is one of the six other things he has going on as well.

Yeah.

Clearly, I was just like, and then you got in the car.

He's like, and then I produced entire radio series for radio four.

Like just in that, when did that bit happen?

That I solved some theorems that had never been solved before.

And I really don't, you know, it's a risky path to go down the, you should take this and you'll live forever.

But I mean, if I can find some magnesium in the next hour, wow, who knew?

I'm going to work my way through the entire periodic table of elements.

Polonium, look out.

I'll be trying you as well.

I say the lead day is going to be a bad one.

I would suggest Mercury.

Oh, how was your day?

If it's your yesterday, don't go drinking.

I know I had a shot of Mercury.

Didn't have the greatest day.

I'll be honest.

I had a diggy tummy all day after that.

And then I bathed in Argon.

It's a good idea.

The question is, do you go by, oh no, we've reached the limit of my knowledge.

You'll know this.

What's the name of the columns?

Have a different name to the rows.

There's the halogens, the halogens are over on the right, aren't they?

Then you've got your inert gases, of course.

Your xenon, your argon.

Not sure what the other ones are.

I don't know, right?

Because I'm not a chemist and I stopped at GCSE.

I think you want to avoid uranium.

There are ones you want to avoid, aren't they?

Like, there are reasons why uranium is kept quite enclosed, isn't it?

If you have ever eaten anything on the periodic table of elements?

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

Hey, thanks, David.

What?

Did we stop talking?

Sorry?

That was the end.

Suddenly, our relationship broke down.

That was it.

Who knew?

We said in it for life.

Actually, we were in it until just after the email address was read out on the Chris McCauley episode.

And then we lost the ability to talk to each other.

We looked at each other like we were two foreigners.

Had in that small moment, did you have a big bite of lead?

Was that what happened?

My question to you is: is this one of those episodes that we record and you are going to be asleep inside three minutes after this?

Oh, I don't.

It's only seven minutes past eight in the evening.

Okay.

Obviously, I'm jet lagged.

So like I'm still probably on your time, which is what?

It's seven minutes past 11 in the morning.

Yeah.

God, that's a big difference.

Oh, it is a big difference.

You're right.

It's a big difference.

It's like the whole world.

It's a big difference.

But I'll let you know.

I'll let you know.

I feel, I mean, yesterday.

And this isn't my yesterday.

I'm allowed to talk about it.

I was absolutely meant to talk about it.

It might have been like one in the morning or something.

And

Ian was still awake and like really awake.

And he'd just obviously just come back to his house with all his toys.

He was like literally getting every toy going, oh my God, look at this.

Ah, wow.

And I really hit her.

I just can't do it anymore.

I've just got to, it's got to stop.

This has to stop.

Jeremy called it getting desperado.

I was like, and she said, listen, well, no, as we've established, she can really just keep on.

trucking through all of this shit.

And I just really had a moment.

I had two moments yesterday.

One was there.

One was in the airport lounge at Perth where I was just like, I think actually I fell asleep when I was looking after Ian and she'd gone off with Willie.

And then I just,

I woke up to someone yelling, dadda, in my face, whereas like four people who'd just come off the oil rigs in Perth were just having some beers on the table behind us.

And they were looking at me not being a great father as I was slumped in a chair with someone going, and it must have been like his 100th dada getting progressively louder.

Oh shit.

Yeah.

Anyway, we're all still awake and we're all still alive and we're all still in love.

And that includes you, David.

I'm delighted.

Yes, I am in love with this podcast and everyone who works on it.

The three of us.

Well, four.

Let's give Will his juice.

He's producing this episode.

Everything his show is in it for life.

Thank you, David.

See you soon.