¶ Opening Chat
- Ben is 'at large', using a handheld mic that looks like a small member of Kiss. Perhaps he is going to cover a primary school in gunge. Very John Simpson 'Freeing Baghdad'. Also helped by the room being completely featureless. Ben and the Press Corps are pounding JD & coke after hours. The party scene is lit.
- The 'major hotel chain' is on a ring road and on the side there is a skip and a pile of mattresses, being filled daily. Hotel allows you to test the limits of its matresses and its breakfasts. Ben was a 'mattress ghoul' who went to have a look, like following a delightful Italian man into his workshop. Able to do a true 'Princess and the Pea'-style test.
- Ben assumes a bedbug infestation (perhaps he brought them). Henry has encountered them before but Ben and Mike have not. He felt he had been violated. They hide in crevasses so where would they hide in a zero-crevasses bed, such as one with hospital corners. Henry tells the others how bedbugs like to hide in the structure of the bed, not the sheets. Crevasses are key. Henry checks with Ben as he has the microphone so can do a vox pop to find out.
- How to deal with the infestation: either heat up (chinos in the oven) or cool down (in the freezer) all your clothes. Braise a jacket, flambee some socks, fricasee a y-front, julienne a tank top and beef Wellington a boob tube. Ben advises freezing anything you buy from Vinted.
- When Ben checked in, the receptionist said there would be no room cleaner because they're 'giving the money to children'. You can always choose the bastard package and ignore this or ask for a cleaner and have them assume you're a shit-smearer/shit-flinger (fling then smear).
- It's a reset of reality to come back from a day out to a hotel room with everything cleaned and steamed, with a stack of towels, one of which is a mat.
- Ben is talking from the semi-desk, from whence you can do your correspondence in the 19th century. There is no fridge in the room though (the children have it) as it's a work hotel from a business chain (no twiddles) so no swan towels (unless it's a swan with a towel thrown over it).
- Hotel art guesses: Henry – a field with a dandelion clock / Mike – the bedug matriarch with thousands of teats but a single blood-red eye, eminating a pheromone when the sun hits it. Never get to see the art ('It's a big....' [WiFi issues])
- Ben's bad WiFi cuts out and so Mike and Henry gaze upon his beatific face and muse about why he's gone on a trip overseas before waiting for the sanctions Beans hiatus (very revealing). Ben could only hear a fourteenth of what Mike and Henry said and that's about right for Ben or any listener (pod app should have the 'one-in-fourteen' setting). Ben pasted on a smile as all went wrong, like a chimp responding to threat in the PG Tips adverts or being offered a deal with Cadbury, including a gig in Indonesia decapitating orangutans for the king (King Charles, as it feels a bit more Windsor).
- Gareth Southgate beheaded in a quiet ceremony with the King, Ed Sheeran, James Corden and David Beckham with different dagger-based roles: a moment of national unity. Henry was 'just the normal amount' sad about England's Euros Final loss. Re the sweepstake, it was an internecine final in Mike's house, between him and Pam (all owe Pam a quid). Pam has her eye on a dried yak's bollock – a premium one from a north-hemisphere yak, left bollock (the one facing the wind, to magnetic north). Such a bollock picks up the micro minerals on the wind: quartz, silica, selenium, dick magnesium, zinc dodecaoxide, thyme, oregano (blown by the herdsmen). Hangover cure: two bottles of beetroot juice washed down with a south hemisphere right bollock (yes, wash down the liquid with the testicle). Pam's £4 yak bollock is from King Charles' crown (kept for tossing as 'alms' to the peasants)
¶ Topic Chat
- Ben's stock answer as a kid was 'archaeologist' when grown-ups asked what he wanted to be. Same for Mike, plus also 'Egyptologist' (because of Tintin books and Indiana Jones).
- Tony Robinson looms large. One of his main problems in life is femmes fatales.
- Ben imagined more a future gently wiping ceramic with a brush (toilet cleaner to the ancients). Or wiping away one floor to find another floor.
- Tony Robinson is a runic anagram of Indiana Jones. He is a much-beloved comic actor turned TV archaeology expert. Palin = journeyed through lands / Robinson = journeyed through time itself.
- Henry has watched 45 seconds of Time Team, so Ben explains it to him and Mike remembers Tony getting a telling off from a hoary old bastard with massive sideburns (he's the highlight, Robinson's the eye candy).
- Henry misremembers The Sky at Night as Patrick Moore being the expert, but he was also the presenter.
- Other people in Time Team: a pair of nice women (scandalous Cleopatra outfits – it was the 90s) – wholesome academics, not Lara Croft.
- You have to sex it up as it's intrinsically boring (Robinson on a jet ski), just digging trenches.
- It's all about the bants, where the fall-back position is: you're an alcoholic (on radio and TV). This is deep in British culture.
- Henry saw a horse pissing in Finsbury Park (surprising amount of fauna there, see the 'snout to tail' rat in haircuts) but forgot the word for it was 'jumentous'. Missed the opportunity for a 1940s-style musical number: "tremendous, stupendous, jumentous, jumentous".
- Ben's strawberry update: probably crows. A German fairy tale where on the first day, it's rats, on the second, it's crows, and on the third, it's a giant crab. Ben's partner (a goblin with golden tresses who's an all-night clog-maker (Ben has to flog the clogs on Facebook Marketplace)) witnessed a gang/murder of 6 crows (other collective noun crimes, e.g., a white-collar fraud of sardines, a death by misadventure of badgers) going hammer-and-tongs at the apple tree. Is an enchanted forest always a good thing? Sometimes a centaur will use your downstairs toilet (only half jumentous (but only if deer piss has a different word (spewmentous?))), there are curses, the crows are taking the apples for now – soon it will be Ben's eyes. He could wear apple glasses, but might accidentally wander into the cursed troll swamp.
- Henry thinks if it were doves, they wouldn't be a 'gang', it would be the end of the world (from Revelations: "and lo, the doves destroyed the perfect apple tree and the strawberries / and the baby bites the nurse's tit / and the crabs write short fiction (crabortage)").
Kelly Vivanco's Show Art
¶ Emails
- Charlotte confirms that Fanjambo-ing a hairdresser is not a viable option (she tried it and it was awful: confusion/hurt/pin-drop silence).
- Jess's dad has a hairdresser-specifc fanjambo alternative: he replies 'in silence' when asked how he wants his hair cut (barber can do anything with the style).
- Blake emails regarding the Beans' discussion of the M&S chocolate-covered custard creams that has been causing a lot of chatter online (too expensive mainly). Blake shared a chocolate fountain while at uni, dipping custard creams in, but got food poisoning. Mike finds it a 'mystery' how he could have caught something from that shared fountain whereas Ben figured the constant movement would stop the bacteria, which 'abhor motion'. Henry has never taken part in a chocolate fountain (a pattern of not being invited to things: what is RSVP?).
- Rhys/Reece emails: as an employee of the Marks and Spencer Bureau de Change, he and his UAE dirhams are often swamped in luxurious Ecuadorian dark chocolate. Ben gets his currency from there because of the obsequious but not too much level of service. Mike prefers the transactional Post Office experience where you take what they have left no matter whether it's what you need. Henry can't believe anyone still uses bureaux de change at all; it's like observational standup from the 70s to him. Ben and Mike remind him you need cash for the muggers and buying street food/tat. Ben had to buy a rhubarb turnover (their most UK-centric pastry that a union jack-waving royal parade goer might eat) that he didn't want. Henry puts it down to people outside London filling 'the gaping void' by finding things to do. Henry asks what floor they're on (really strange question).
- Chris: the time I briefly wore a slug moustache (end of email).
¶ Jingles
- Bean Emergency (16:23)
- The Regal Zones (20:25)
- Bean Machine (25:41)
- Crab Bell (38:18)
- Emails (42:55)
- Listener Bollocking of the Week (45:07)
- Reflecto-bollock (47:07)
- Patreon (54:47)
¶ Bollockings
- Charles in Warwick emails about Henry's 'Prime Minister of Scotland' flub from haircuts, which Ben caught in real time and Henry and Mike say is fine because prime/first are interchangeable. Charles is ready for this: "I'll get back to drinking a bottle of First with my prime-born daughter on my lap as I watch Rambo: Prime Blood on Amazon First". Henry 'touchés' this and calls Charles a 'first cock' for the effort he's put in. Henry offers a bollock truce, which is basically a reflecto-bollock.
¶ Notable Quotes
- Yesterday I went up to have a closer look at the soiled mattresses.
- It's safer for you just not to come home, Ben, and become a digital nomad.
- Your crevasses or the bed's crevasses?
- Crevasse creation is a by-product of all kinds of engineering and architecture.
- I've done these things at the behest of moths.
- Yes, you can choose our Bastard Package, of course.
- We've all dried our face with the mat, of course we have.
- In the name of the yak eunuch, turn it on.
- I don't mean NICE WOMEN.
- You think you've seen builders' bum, wait till you've seen me digging up an Etruscan fort, naked.
- It's the basic bit of building block of a little bit of banter.
- Oh, jumentous day!
- Later that night, I reverse chocolate custard fountained those biscuits.
- Four litres of chocolate sauce being recirculated for 17 hours.
- Enspuffulated in the most disgustingly decadent pan-Ecuadorian choco-filth.
¶ Sean Bean Lounge
- The Boiled Buffet (a buffet where everything is boiled) (68 patrons!)
¶ Listener Theme Tune
- Ben forgets it's the end of the series (whyyyy? because they've decided not to carry on, quite arbitrary in a way).
- Dav from Ireland's version (Smiths-style).