¶ Opening Chat
Henry has the wrong headphones. Mike has electric sawing noise from neighbour. Electric saw is a suburban noise. Mike didn't put the flag up; didn't "hoist The Jolly Beans" even though Ben spent £100s on the flags. Mike using them as dog towels. Different dog towelling needs. Towel heirarchy in Henry's house: good towels = Amy uses; medium = Henry uses; worst = complex DIY/cleaning shoes/towel down a handyman - "wanna see you glisten".
Ben went to Mike's house and used a fresh "premium guest hand-towel" – a mirage experience. Mike's tricks to fool Ben: Magnums after lunch from special garage mini-fridge (daughters confused and surprised by Guest Magnums before digging for carrots). Decoy wife (Patricia Routledge) brought out, have to pretend to be frosty (for Covid reasons). She falls back on an Alan Bennett monologue. Mike forgot to send the Hyundai i10 dialogue through. Ben put it down to West Country rituals ("I was out of my comfort zone; I was in Devon"), but pieced it together when driving home.
The dog only does 2 movements: head lifts off body on telescopic pole/quadropedic moonwalk while Santana riff plays out of hind-quarters. Ben and Henry mustn't give away to Mike that they know the truth of his life.
¶ Topic Chat
The Beans sing variously 'A Kind of Magic', 'Could It Be Magic', 'Magic Bus'.
Mike had brief phase as a small child of giving magic a go; Henry has a disdain for the craft of the illusionist but can do the French Drop (learnt whilst working in Hamleys demonstrating toys). Henry fell in with the magic guys, not the remote-control car guys as they were high-end Monoco/Paris... Can reel-off city names. Etch-A-Sketch whizz-kids: Mensa-types, mix of creativity and mathematical thinking. Guys who throw model airplanes. Ben defines Hamleys but says it's quite crap (because of the small concession shops). Mike loved it as a child. Henry defines Hamleys in terms of gentle puppet maker being crushed by plastic robot toy leg and fleet of film franchise toys pouring on top of his corpse. Henry told not to enter the door through the small plastic castle on the 4th floor to learn the true story of Hamley.
Henry names US toy store names (Herschel's / Goebbel's/ Grimble's / Macey's).
Tom Hanks dancing on a piano, Henry's experience of Hamleys' lone flying ace plane-chucking guy ("should be a non-customer-killing role").
The catchphrase: "there's three in a pack, they all fly back". Has to be catchy enough for customers to hear in the less-than-a-second-and-a-half timeframe of passing through the entrance. That man is now in a care home shouting his catchphrase to a nurse while a dogged detective works out what it means ("there's three in a pack... what does it mean" / "there were three murders..." / "we always end up going to the British Museum vaults").
Plane guy's other mantra: "there's a red, there's a yellow, there's even a blue", "you throw them away, they come back to you". Dogged detective: "okay, so there's three murders, there's a red...").
Magic guys in Hamleys were Henry's crew; basic kid-friendly magic sets, e.g. pound-coin trick (screwed by resizing of the pound coin: "just got to go to the Royal Mint").
Mike's swimming baths still use the old pounds in the lockers).
Magic guys taught Henry the French Drop: drop a baguette into the Seine and out comes Emmanuel Macron. Taking their Eurostar ticket out of back pocket, replacing arm with tailor's arm. French Drop allows you to get back to the UK if stuck in France ("before they know it, you're sipping sparkling wine on the Eurostar"), or take Eurostar to Kent from London while your mark is in hospital wondering if their arm will be okay.
Henry explains the actual French Drop trick a bit, but then shoves hand into the face of a child, knee in the chest, plane zips round and takes skin off end of nose, "do your parents really love you" to emotionally throw them.
Henry's magic guy colleagues spent their nights on the streets of Soho bamboozling people.
David Blaine: not really magic, just he "can be arsed".
Derren Brown: a 'mentalist' controlling your mind, or is it magic. Henry would get very angry about Derren Brown as he's pretending to get inside your favourite buffet but just the same bullshit that magicians do. It's telescopic legs, it's a rubber assistant... His ultimate trick is making people think he's not a magician. Uber driver turns round: "5 stars?" but it's Derren Brown. Ben describes a DB special where some poor sap who now has PTSD believed he killed a man. Henry: The Stamford Prison Experiments – how is this what magic is now?
Mike doesn't like the high-status nature of "A-ha! I got the better of you!". Makes it the ultimate dweeb-magnet.
David Copperfield makes big things disappear (the same big mirror/sheet). Court case against him: woman injured and sued him; in court they had to de-mystify the magic. Running so fast she injured herself. Copperfield pulling tricks in court: he's a bowl of bananas and the jury is 12 David Copperfields.
James Randi documentary: wizard-looking guy who made it his life's work to expose "magic" nonsense/take them down/use powers for good. Real ball-ache if medium found him. Randi's now in the mountain of sherbert afterlife; rough on the throat and bloody thirsty.
Kelly Vivanco's Show Art
¶ Emails
Ben invokes Pompidou based on The Pompidou Accord (potential triple Pompidou).
Agenda Point 1: should the Beans have a website? threebeansalad.org.uk is fine, threebeansalad.gov is but a worthy ambition. The RSPB have a website so The Beans should too. Ben hoped the pod would get a royal charter. Henry would get an MBE, Ben would get an OBE, Mike would become A Knight of the Realm. Mike knows an actual MBE (Dr Rashmi Becker); if she can get one, why can't the Beans?
Agenda Point 2: emails from listeners who are confused as to what Pompidou means. Henry's idea to make a jingle explaining the concept of Pompidou, record it at the pace of reading Ts&Cs, or normal speed and Ben will speed it up. Acid jazz and funk (acid jazz's bastard cousin).
Agenda Point 3: lots of messages saying The Beans sound like one man having a breakdown. Need to keep the slurping and crunching in (that would be Henry), give Mike a deep reverb and/or a Santana guitar solo background motif, Ben 3 octaves higher. Henry speaks in Habsburg voice. Mike could do voiceover artist voice ("creamy, leathery, firmer, smoother, faster, 10% off"). Henry did a BMW ad for his showreel. Director said he should sound like he doesn't care about the product. Mike needs to flap his arms to show enthusiasm for the missile systems/electric batons etc he does VOs for ("faster, deadlier, sharper, right in your face, with zero collateral damage"). What the person says is a useful guide: sexist = Mike; royalist = Ben; funny and agreeable = Henry; Guitar chat = Mike, but a lot is deleted (reams). Waste material backlog of deleted guitar chat can be something The Beans monetise or make into a neural network app to de-bore your own podcast, a zero-tedium algorithm. Some interest in hearing the guitar tapes: blame it on the pandemic's effect on people's mental health.
Juliet emails after a poor night's sleep and speaks about it to a colleague around the water cooler. She spots a potential beanist in the wild and confirms with a tentative 'Pompidou?'. Henry wonders whether the colleague was just humouring her, like if someone in a garage went up to Henry and said 'Taj Mahal?'
Selena, life-long resident of Cullompton and daughter of the mayor, hearing her town mentioned engenders joy akin to appearing on Spotlight (TV local news, not the Apple search function). Mike should really have known about Spotlight. Cullompton is a pleasing name; Henry thinks if he saw that name on a railway station sign, it would make him think the UK was a "wonderful, silly, funny, sweet, punching above our weight" sort of place. Henry's list of little towns: Little Plimpton, Wibbly Wobbly, Little Nobbington, Porbwyl, but "shame the toilets don't work and there's no fucking trolley", evidence of Henry's metropolitan elite status, "where's my latte" to whoever's next to Henry on the train.
Rebecca from Chipping Norton annoyed that she had also put Musical Instruments into the Bean Machine. That will happen from time to time. Henry says they will always go for the location they'd rather visit on holiday and/or the person who sounds most like they would be burned at the stake (Anna of Bremen. There are 3 listeners from Bremen according to Twitter; they could hang out around the water cooler. Rebecca asks for a version of Paul Hardcastle's "19" but with HP saying "17" so Ben creates it and hopes the lawyers will leave them alone.
'Anonymous' emails. Biologist who works on life in the deep past (this job title impresses The Beans). Those who say cephalopods came from space are wrong. Emailer doesn't want to put name to this though as it's "dog eat dog" in biologist brutal scene. Octopuses could have come from a wizard's arse. Octopuses have arms and are bashful about their tentacle penis arm, which can dissolve into sperm once inserted into female's head.
John emails about quails for Flightless Bird Zone. Male quails are ferocious and need at least 3 other females to satisfy their needs. John's quail would attack him and his dog. Alpha male in the house above John and dog. The quail would "have it away with" a cuddly toy otter. Henry asks if you could get eggs from the male quail... "You might try, but that might be why the quail's so angry, cos this guy's trying to get eggs off him". Henry wants to hear tales of dominating pets ruling the household. Henry Googles quails and gets former VP Dan Quayle. Mike: "You wouldn't want to be the otter in his cage".
Henry realises they never said "magic beans".
¶ Jingles
- 39:21 - Pompidou
- 41:58 - Pompidou (faster)
- 43:51 - Pompidou (even faster)
- 56:06 - Ben's "19"/"17"
- 59:37 - Flightless Bird Zone
¶ Notable Quotes
- "You don’t hoist the Jolly Beans?"
- "I want to see you glisten"
- "The Etch-A-Sketch-ers they’ve got that beautiful mixture of creativity and mathematical thinking that really makes quite ethereal to be around"
- "There’s three in a pack, they all fly back"
- "There’s a red, there’s a yellow, there’s even a blue. You throw them away, they come back to you"
- "Madam, perhaps a bamboozling is in the air"
- "David Blaine CAN be arsed, basically"
- "He’s French dropping people’s BRAINS!"
- "He’s had himself fitted with telescopic legs years ago."
- "Creamy, leathery, firmer, smoother, faster, take the lid off!"
- "Hey guys! Faster! Deadlier! Sharper! Right in your face! With zero collateral damage!"
- "If you’re not dispensing hot latte into my open hands within seconds, I’m gonna kick off, yeah?"