Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4

00:02 Hello, I'm Lucy Porter and this is Current-ish. I'm here for the next two weeks to chat through the big news as well as highlighting some stories you might have missed because you heard the ice cream van pull up outside. 00:18 In terms of my vibe, think Sarah Montagu in a caftan sipping warm prosecco out of a sports bottle. 00:25 I'm joined by a fabulous panel. Please welcome Christopher McArthur-Boyd, Finley Christie and Amy Annette. APPLAUSE So, my lovely panel, this week, The Odyssey is out in cinemas, as you must have noticed. Obviously, it's named after its hero, Odysseus. So, if a genre or trend or anything, really, was going to be named after you, what would it be? Christopher, have you got some... The MacArthur Boyd or the Christopher thing? Oh, wow. 00:55 What's the Christopher MacArthur Boyd? Yesterday, I took a pizza out of the oven and it landed face first. 01:02 LAUGHTER 01:03 On the ground. And I don't sweep my kitchen regularly. 01:09 So it was a pretty hairy take on the salami pizza. 01:13 I mean, we're all wondering, was the pizza eaten? 01:17 Yeah. Yeah. 01:20 I gave it a wipe. Waste not, want not, you know? 01:22 Because there's the five-second rule, but you're not getting a pizza up off a floor within five seconds, are you? 01:28 Watch me. 01:31 Finley, what would you embody as a concept? I'm having a Finley. I'm doing a Finley. I'm Finley. 01:37 Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's in there having... Oh, he's been a while. He's in there having a Finley, probably. 01:44 He had a dodgy pizza he ate off the floor. Yeah. 01:48 I mean, maybe if there was an Odyssey-type situation... Maybe, like, because as a teenager, I was really anxious and I had IBS. So maybe diarrhoea of a wimpy kid, you know, and then... 02:00 Another question for you. Chris Philp, the Shadow Home Secretary, has kind of been cosplaying the Napoleonic Wars, essentially. So my question to you is, which era would you like to go back to? 02:13 Well, I mean, this is pure aesthetics, but I wouldn't mind going back to a sort of John le Carre era Cold War, you know, sort of going to cafes in Highgate. I'm wearing a trench coat, basically. Yeah. It feels like at that time, like, spies were so chic. Everyone was wearing, and sure, they were sad and cheating on their wives, but they looked so cool. 02:36 Is it just that you wish you could go to a climate where a trench coat felt like a good idea? 02:41 It's not impossible that because of the current heat wave, I am just only imagining a cold and wet London. LAUGHTER Get me to a squalid mansion block and with a Russian spy, as long as it's damp, I'm happy. If there's a war, make it cold. Yes. 02:54 That's what I want. But no, I think you would look gorgeous in a trench coat. Thank you. Not like a flasher, because that was always the thing. You would have to wear something underneath. Not in this weather, I would not. 03:06 But you can also wear a trench coat if you're going to a man's house to surprise him on his birthday. 03:10 Yeah. Yeah. But it's always that way around, isn't it? Because no woman wants to be surprised. 03:19 LAUGHTER Finlay, which era do you think you would enjoy? 03:24 I'd love to have been around airports, like, pre-9-11. 03:28 LAUGHTER Yeah. 03:32 See, I know, yeah. 03:35 I'd never got to experience that. So I was two when it happened. So I imagine people walking through, you know, lit cigar, machete, I don't know... 03:46 I don't know what was going on, but yeah, so I'd probably go back to September 11th, 2001. You know, I would know where I was, because that's the thing, I was around, but that thing that Americans are like never forget, I forgot it. 03:59 I just wasn't fully conscious, so yeah. And I have, I will acknowledge, in that answer, I haven't said that I would stop it from happening. 04:07 Well, I'll come back with you and I'll stop it from happening, thus ruining your dream at the same time. 04:12 How would you stop it, though? 04:14 Um... LAUGHTER It's not a shooting baby Hitler situation, is it? It's a lot more complicated than that. 04:21 Are you on the plane? 04:23 Yeah, well, maybe I'm going further back. Go further back. I'm becoming an instructor. I'm a flying instructor who's not very good at their job. 04:32 They didn't have to be good at their job to do what they did. I love that you gave them credit for being good pilots. 04:37 LAUGHTER 04:39 Shall we crack on with the news now? The last fortnight has seen wildfires raging through France, Spain and parts of the UK, including the Cairngorms in Scotland and the Rynagith in Wales. Obviously, I do apologise for having any Welsh speakers in. I am not confident with my Welsh pronunciation, as I was saying the other day to my friend from Clanfair, poor Cringic, Gilgwydig, windraubry Clanstiliogogogoch. 05:06 The Environment Agency has officially declared a drought across over half of England, as the Met Office has confirmed there was so little rainfall this month, July was drier than Prince Andrew's armpits after a 10k... 05:21 It just could have ended at Prince Andrew's armpits there, guys. This week's Gardener's Question Time is just the sound of Cathy Clugston sitting silently in a deck chair, thoughtfully patting a dusty turnip. 05:33 We've also seen devastating earthquakes in Japan, civilians being killed in Ukraine, and a continuation of the conflict in Iran. Closer to home, Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp had a close encounter with the French Navy. He's best known for talking about stopping boats, so it must have been a confusing day when he became the boat that everyone wanted to be stopped. Journalist Michael Kean explains what happened. 05:56 Strange moment in the channel just a few minutes ago when we were interviewing the Shadow Home Secretary right out here in the middle of the channel when a French patrol ship went around 300 metres from our boat and unloaded around 17 shots in close proximity. 06:11 The thing I love about this is that Chris Philp really thinks that they were out to get him. He believes that the French Navy fired shots to try and intimidate him, which is a bit dramatic, really, considering the traditional way to intimidate Chris Philp is to simply invite him onto a live broadcast of Question Time. 06:27 But Chris was a stoic figure, standing on a boat under fire from the French, making him a latter-day Horatio Nelson. Both men's careers nearly destroyed by a scandal involving a femme fatale. Although in Chris's case, that wasn't an affair with Lady Hamilton, simply the shame of having appeared in Liz Truss's cabinet. 06:48 But the wildfires raging in France, Spain, and even now some parts of the UK, exacerbated by climate change, have of course been at the forefront of our minds this week. French wildfires are now threatening the Bordeaux region, meaning that you should be very cautious if anyone offers you a great deal on some bottles of freshly mulled claret. 07:06 LAUGHTER 07:08 We can perhaps take some comfort in the fact that climate change may be taken more seriously now that Bordeaux is suffering. I'm fairly sure that the Venn diagram of climate change deniers and red wine buffs has a pretty big intersection. 07:23 I think there might be more chance of meaningful action when people in this country with pink trousers, Panama hats and a casual disregard for modern science lose access to their holiday homes. 07:34 With half of Europe on fire and flights being delayed, millions of Brits are facing a terrifying reality that's far more sinister than climate change. We have to spend our summer holiday in the UK. 07:45 The Met Office has already issued a severe disappointment warning for Bognor Regis. 07:52 I'm kidding, of course. The UK has some beautiful holiday spots, but our cultural entertainment does lack flair. Spain gives you flamenco dancing, Greece offers the bouzouki and plate smashing. In Blackpool, you get a Michael Jackson impersonator from Burnley moonwalking in a fleece because it's 12 degrees and drizzling. Christopher, will you tell us more about this boost to British tourism? 08:15 Yeah, it's been huge, man. People are having to go on holiday in the UK. There's been a big holiday park operator, Lovett Park, says summer bookings are up 35%, while Waitrose says it is preparing for what it expects to be the biggest staycation summer on record. Waitrose, is? Waitrose, yeah. Supermarket, I think it is. LAUGHTER You would know better than me, brother. 08:42 Yeah, yeah. 08:44 But there's no Waitrose Hotel, is there? No, but for the picky bits. It's going to be like the most, the pickiest bits of all time ever. 08:52 The people who usually eat olives here go away. Oh, yeah. So now there's going to be domestic olive eating taking place. 09:00 Waitrose Essentials, I always love the fact that Waitrose Essentials includes tinned artichokes. 09:06 Essentials. 09:08 Yeah, I can't go a day without my $10 jokes. I quite like the idea of a resurgence in English seaside towns. Because it used to be such a big thing, right? And then it became cheaper to go abroad. But can you imagine a time where we're all old and we're like, oh, there used to be this place called Las Vegas. It was like the Blackpool of America. Yeah. 09:32 and maybe we could get going down to Skegness. 09:35 Skeggy butlins. 09:36 Have a little Skeggy done. 09:38 Skegness is wild. I done a gig in Skegness last year and sometimes if you do a wee gig you'll maybe Google the name of the town and then news so you can maybe make a wee reference to a local local news and there was a story in Skegness a guy's body got discovered in his home by someone who was trying to burgle him. 10:01 No! 10:03 Oh my God. We are sponsored by Visit Britain. 10:12 I am not gloomy about... I love a British seaside holiday. So we used to go, when I was a kid, it was Pevensey Bay down on the south coast, or we'd go to Filey in Yorkshire. And I loved them when I was a kid. But I do have a little... Now that I'm a grown-up with my own children, the idea... Like, self-catering, for a start. Essentially, you're just doing all the chores you normally have to do, except in a tiny tin box, aren't you? Because in the day, we used to go to the holiday park and then my sister and I would just run off to... 10:45 I mean, basically, there was no safeguarding in those days. Your parents would send you in the woods with anyone if they had a whistle and a clipboard, basically. 10:54 See, ma'am, growing up, working class, you know, I never got taken camping or anything. But then there was a kind of aspirational social mobility thing where you started going on foreign holidays and stuff. But then, as I've became more middle class as somebody who works in the arts... I have went on camping holidays and I really don't get it. I think if you're working class, your life is already bad enough. Like, you know, let's rough it for a couple of days. If your life's class, you're like, yeah, it may be fun to not have plumbing. 11:29 As someone who grew up very middle class, the idea of camping being, like, aspirational to you... 11:37 There obviously are attempts to zhuzh up the British holiday. And one of the things that I love are the names for British seaside towns to make them sound more glamorous. You may know some of these. Torquay, Torbados. 11:54 It's lovely, isn't it? Scarbados as well for Scarborough. And Bogner Regis' Bogbados. 12:02 Anything worse, isn't it? The Costa del Solent. 12:08 Par in Cornwall is the Parhamas, and Falmouth is Falifornia. But my favourite one is Ponte Carlo. 12:18 Ponte Fract has never sounded so good, has it? Give me a little hands up, anyone in the audience who lives in somewhere that people come to on holiday. Does anyone have a... 12:28 Here we go. Lovely. Whereabouts do you live, my lovely lady in the front row? 12:32 Very near Whitstable. 12:34 Very near Whitstable. That is delightful, isn't it? The beaches, the seafood. I don't know, can we do a named... The sewage. The sewage. 12:46 That is the aspect of British holiday making that we sort of all try and sweep under the carpet. You just think everywhere you go now, there's just effluent being pumped. If the doorbell rings, I open the front door and I think it's going to be someone from Thames Water standing there with a little Tupperware full of faeces saying, can you pop these in your garden pond? Yes. 13:09 It's ridiculous, but Whitstable is a gorgeous little spot. Can we think of a more exciting name for Whitstable? The problem is, Shitstable is easier, isn't it? 13:18 Yeah, we're not, as British people, we're not used to making jokes where it makes it sound better. 13:22 Someone says something in the back. 13:27 That is good. 13:28 Round of applause for Beer Wicks. 13:31 That's so annoyingly good. 13:33 Isn't it fun? 13:34 It's quite funny to hear somebody say, oh, I live next to the seaside and it smells like sewage, because I live next to a sewage treatment plant. And I'm always like, smells like the coast. 13:48 Some genuine articles from the BBC on this subject include how to swap the Maldives for Northumberland... 13:55 Within it, the actual advice is pack a big coat. 14:00 So I'm sure that's what everyone remembers from their honeymoon in the Maldives, isn't it? Just frostbite and angry Geordies. 14:07 I would say a little tip for you. If you want to recreate the experience of a UK break in a delightful Airbnb cottage, all you have to do is simply stay at home, throw away your stock of toilet paper, scatter a handful of dead wasps on your bedspread and charge yourself 500 quid for breaking a wine glass. LAUGHTER That's a true staycation. Okay, moving on. One of the main politics stories this week has been Zach Polanski, who faced fierce criticism for sharing a photo of a man wearing a T-shirt featuring the XTC song title, Making Plans for Nigel, and a photo of a guillotine. 14:41 It should be pointed out that the likelihood of Zach Polanski actually killing anyone with a guillotine is fairly low. He is, after all, a failed hypnotist, not a failed magician. 14:51 Elsewhere in politics, Kemi Badenock has said that to solve the problem of prison overcrowding, people will have to accept that prisons would have to be built in their communities. With plenty of competition for limited places, prisons aren't really that different from schools. You'll start seeing it in state agents' listings in no time. There aren't any good schools in the area, but there's a very up-and-coming young offenders institution, so do get your kids' names down early. LAUGHTER But obviously the main politics story this week has been Burnham's announcements on technical training and social care. Social care reform is a notoriously complicated issue that Prime Ministers usually deal with by using a time-tested three-step strategy. 15:29 One, promise to fix it. Two, realise it's hard. And three, pretend to drop something on the floor and start talking about immigration. 15:35 LAUGHTER 15:37 Andy Burnham has promised that his government will value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap from now on. If future policy announcements focus on a traffic cop's helmet, a leather biker's cap and a Native American headdress, I think we'll have worked out where he's getting his ideas from. 15:52 So, Finlay, you've been looking into this. Yeah. Give us the deets on the neets. 15:57 What hasn't he done, Burnham? Frankly, it's outrageous. I think we need a new PM. 16:03 He's had a chance, but listen, no, I think, well, he needs some better fun facts, and then I'll listen to his policies. Because every time he says, here's something you may not know about me, it's always something I know about him. 16:17 It's never like, oh, I'm into feet. LAUGHTER I'm actually southern, I've been lying. 16:25 Neats. 16:26 Oh, that was it, neats. 16:28 LAUGHTER I mean, I hate to bring you back to it, but... 16:32 I must have something on that. 16:33 There's a reason why young people aren't working. 16:40 I mean, they say young people lack focus, but Finlay's proving them all around. Yes, you may know, there's over a million, isn't it, of young people not working. 16:51 Let me tell you about NEATS. 16:54 It is over a million 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK who are neither working nor learning in January to March this year, which, I mean, it is heartbreaking, although somebody does have to watch Homes Under the Hammer. 17:07 Don't worry, I've got that covered. 17:10 Do you not think it's so clearly, like, there's less jobs? 17:13 Yeah. Yeah. 17:15 That's why less people have them? 17:16 Yeah, you cut straight to the heart of things, Christopher. Do you know what I mean? 17:21 Like, I was in the airport at Glasgow Airport a while ago, and there was a robot cleaning the carpet. 17:29 It's a job. 17:30 No robots doing it. 17:32 All the jobs have been taken by robots. 17:34 Burnham took a robot's job. 17:36 Yeah. 17:41 Well, he has the other thing that Burnham has been talking about this week. And I think, so he's been talking about social care. You just think with Andy Burnham, yes, he might prize the rings off your frail mother's fingers. But at least he'll look you in the eye and ask you if you're going anywhere nice on holiday this year. 18:01 And you won't be. LAUGHTER 18:03 I think it is insightful to point out that whilst you're looking at the NHS, as he has said, he thinks we should look at social care reform first, because the NHS has become the first place people go to for care in a way that it was not designed to be. I think it's definitely insightful. I think it was sad to see Kemi Baden-Ock, the way that she talked about it, was saying that she was okay with the reforms as long as it was also fair to those who had made provisions and had saved up over the course of their lives. which just seems so short-sighted to me. Like, if we have a good and strong social care network, that's going to benefit everyone. And if you've been one of the amazing people who've been saving for a good retirement, instead of having a live-in nurse, you can have something much more fun and frivolous, right? 18:41 You're going to get a live-in nurse. That's on Burnham. Well, you could have a live-in magician. 18:46 And you earned that magician. 18:47 He has been trying to give hope to people. 18:51 Shall we hear a little clip? 18:53 AI might be able to write an essay, draft a contract or make a slide deck, but it can't make a train. 19:01 I mean, to be honest, Andy, look at what happened to HS2, neither can we. 19:05 AI, in his accents, just sounds like a Yorkshire waste out in a sentence. 19:12 AI, we can make body train... 19:17 So, now, let's move on to a very different subject. Finally, there is bad news for those who thought that the end of the World Cup might mean an end to shirtless men in beer gardens. British Man at the Hint of a Gap in the Clouds is a lovely shade from Farrah and Ball, if anyone is redecorating, and has a teenage daughter who loves fuchsia. 19:38 Because the sport isn't over yet. We thought it was all over. It's not now. Amy, you've been looking at that, right? Yes, I have. 19:45 Guys, did you know that the Commonwealth Games were on? 19:48 Right now. OK, well, you love your sport. Because I feel like it was maybe, with so much love in my heart, not ideal timing to have the Commonwealth Games start seconds after the World Cup and have it in Glasgow the year that Scotland had qualified for the World Cup. It's a bit like the mayoral election right now in Manchester. Did you know there was a Manchester mayoral election going on? I just feel sorry people have spent so much time and energy training for the Commonwealth Games, which, as you know, is a competition without those pesky Americans, you know? Which means people might actually be able to win a medal. 20:19 You know, it's a good one. The Commonwealth Games, if you don't know, is where 74 nations and territories from across the Commonwealth, which is such a fun and modern way to say empire. LAUGHTER We love a rebrand. Is anyone following them? They sort of feel like they've been sort of overshadowed by the World Cup. And Infantino, who is the FIFA president this week, has continued the World Cup drama into this one... They had one week on their own, and we've still got FIFA ruining it all. I don't know if you've seen this. The European UEFA... Oh, gosh. 20:51 You know what? I was doing so well. LAUGHTER In my head, I was like, woman talking confidently about football. 20:59 And then I was being too self-congratulatory, and I lost my train of thought. Here's the thing, OK? When you talk about FIFA, you start real confident, right? And then you start saying things like, they want to give 20% of FIFA, of the tournament, out to private investors. And I can't be alone in thinking, didn't they already have them? This has been a social enterprise the whole time? LAUGHTER This? So, the World Cup, and what they want to do is have a thing called FFE, which is the FIFA Forward Enterprise, and Gianni Infantino, who doesn't want to just be famous for being the guy who turned over that red card for the American team, he wants to give 20% of FFE to private investors, but even literally seconds before the show started to record, the European teams, UEFA, said that they would boycott any World Cup if this went ahead, which, huge for Russia. 21:50 Huge! 21:52 America could finally win the thing. It would be very exciting for them. But we are in this situation where he's trying to really sell it. So he keeps saying he did an Instagram post. I don't know if you saw it. It's always a good sign when you have to take to social media to explain why you're doing what you're doing. Very much like when my aunt took to social media to explain why she was seen with that man in that supermarket. Okay? And he said that it's just an opportunity, not an obligation. Oh, wow, I love it. That's very much like when my boss said we all had to go paintballing. It's an opportunity, not an obligation. And then he shot me in the bum. 22:24 So much sport. I mean, it is so much sport. Christopher is a proud Glaswegian. 22:31 Aye, aye. 22:31 LAUGHTER I mean, there was a moment's hesitation. 22:39 What have you? I mean, for the rest of us, if you were living anywhere southern, just it was lovely seeing rain, wasn't it? 22:46 Oh, I mean, I got the train to London today. I was in Glasgow this morning. I do think having a summer athletics tournament in Glasgow is kind of a sick joke. 22:57 I've seen a lot of people in tracksuits with different countries on their chests walking just through puddles being like, we could have been in Australia. 23:08 Let's move on. We don't want to do just the big hitters. We are literally sweating the small stuff as well as sweating from every other possible place as well. So I've asked my panellists to bring with them a smaller story that caught their eye. Amy, what have you brought for us? 23:22 I want to talk about The Odyssey, the smash hit film. It's really interesting because the responses to this adaptation of a fictional story have been quite revealing. I don't know if you saw that Elon Musk got very angry and said it wasn't historically accurate, which is a crazy thing to say about a fictional piece of work. But I kind of respect it, you know, because he's a professional troll, right? He has all this money, what's he going to do with it? Be happy? 23:45 No. No. He's particularly angry that Lupita Nyong'o is playing Helen of Troy, you know, famously the most beautiful woman, the face that launched a thousand ships, and she is not white in his mind. That cannot be true, right? And it's so crazy because I did some research into the way in which the translations have occurred, and one of the reasons he's angry is that he believes that her whiteness is implied within the text, but the ancient Greeks also said that the sky was bronze. 24:09 LAUGHTER 24:11 These are really stupid ancient Greeks. OK, so we should not be taking them seriously. 24:15 I am very much looking forward to seeing The Odyssey, just because it's three hours long and in an air-conditioned cinema. I'm going to pop my earplugs in and just sleep for longer than I have been with. 24:23 Can I just quickly... My girlfriend wanted me to do a joke about it. Yes. Because they were annoyed that obviously Helen of Troy was cast and she's supposed to be the most beautiful woman in the world, so it should have been my girlfriend. LAUGHTER Typical white woman. No, I'm joking. No, my girlfriend's black. LAUGHTER 24:41 But moving on to Christopher, your story is... Oh, aye, aye. 24:46 Tokyo urges men to wear shorts to work, but women say it is leg hair harassment. LAUGHTER And I took this to mean when I read that headline, oh, we're all wearing shorts, well, we're going to have to shave our legs. But that isn't it at all. It's that they're upset that they're having to see men's hairy legs. LAUGHTER Wild stuff, man. 25:13 I've been to Tokyo on holiday. 25:17 You love Japan stuff, right? We just had dinner. 25:19 We had sushi, yeah. 25:21 Which is like a famous food in Japan. They have this thing called chicken katsu, which is fried chicken, but you feel, like, cultured while you eat it. 25:39 And it's got curry sauce on it, but they've made it into like a... You're like, yeah, you're cool for eating fried chicken with curry sauce. 25:46 Yeah. Do you know what? Chicken katsu curry is actually invented because Japan had an isolationist policy for hundreds and hundreds of years. Then it got broken up. And some of the first people to come in were British people who came through India... And they brought in the curry sauce from there. But then also, because Japan had teamed up, well, teamed up's a strange word to put it, but they teamed up with Germany during World War II. 26:16 Remember that team up? 26:18 And they brought in... They collabed. They collabed on Insta. And they brought in the chicken schnitzel. So it was a curry sauce from India, a chicken schnitzel, and it was a restaurant called the Swiss Bar in Tokyo. That's the history of the... And what is a neat? 26:35 What? LAUGHTER We'll simply never know. So, Finlay, very quickly, let's hear your story because it is a fascinating bathtub influencer. 26:44 Influencers who took a bathtub up a mountain and left it there. Sorry for honest mistake. Is that quick enough? 26:48 Yeah, that's great. 26:50 There was an influencer who took a bathtub up a mountain and he left it there and he's sorry for his honest mistake. 27:01 And, listen, we've all done it. 27:05 It's one of the easiest things to get down a mountain as well. Just kick off the legs and slide down. 27:09 Have they not seen Last of the Summer Wine? 27:14 The legacy is lost. Well, on that bombshell, that's everything you need to know to stay current-ish this week. Thanks to our excellent panel and our sensational studio audience and to you listening at home. Goodbye. 27:27 Current-ish was hosted by Lucy Porter with guest comics Finley Christie, Christopher McArthur-Boyd and Amy Annette. It was written by Lucy Porter, Ruth Husko and Katie Sayer with additional material by Molly Punchen and Mike Sheppard. The producer was Katie Sayer and it was a Mighty Bunny production for BBC Radio 4. 27:48 Hi, I'm Phil Wang, and this is a podcast to podcast trailer for a different podcast than this podcast that you've listened to or are going to listen to. But nonetheless, I'm talking about another podcast that you should also definitely listen to. The podcast I'm talking about is Comedy of the Week, which takes choice episodes from BBC sitcoms, sketch shows, podcasts, and panel shows, including my own show, Unspeakable, and puts them all into one podcast. Maybe I'll trail this podcast on that podcast. Who's to say? I'll do what I like. Listen to Comedy of the Week now on BBC Sounds. 28:22 Podcast.