16 Rat Tales/Tails of Terror
Tail 1 – from Henry and his Barons Court flat with the open-topped bin in the kitchen, where he was presented with a locked-door Poirot mystery one day: a loaf of bread completely hollowed out like a bread bowl/vase, making for a surreal sight, next to a massive pile of breadcrumbs (was it rats or a conceptual artist – after all, Henry was living in a boho, creative, 1910s Montmartre/1930s Berlin hub?). Ben wonders if Henry has been on TikTok (he describes it as being much better than it is and invites the listener to email in to describe it). Mike reminds Henry that bread crusts give you curls (Henry has no hair-related wisdom, hence rubbing builders’ lime into his head). Perhaps the rat/mouse moved into the bread as an edible studio apartment.
Sidebar: Egg the tortoise could be buried underground – try to probe into the ground with the handle of a broom (advice from a listener). Henry has also discussed Egg’s case with someone whose tortoise is always going missing and is also a surprisingly good climber.
Sidebar: Henry’s single-issue party soapbox rears its head again, i.e. train your kid to be a goalkeeper. Second child: get them to write a Christmas song (bank manager has a Post-It reminding them not to lend money during the fallow years to the songwriter and also to those opening pottery-painting cafes and pizza restaurants where you take the dough and toppings home to cook in the oven). Ben tries to get out of the sidebars and back to the listener rat tails, unsuccessfully, as Henry tries to remember what the pizza concept was. Was YO! Sushi the last new concept?
Tail 2 – from Mike, a recent one: Pam rolled in a dead water rat down by the floodplain, like a dog rolling pin making a hideous rat pastry crust. Pam needed the shower of a lifetime after. The flattened pancake rat would be like a 20p in the Christmas pudding, hidden in a stack of pancakes.
Tail 3 – from Ben, whose childhood next-door neighbour Frank thought he saw a beaver in Ben’s garage. This was in the days before beaver re-introduction in the UK, so must have been a Russian spy beaver or hairy Hyundai i10.
Tail 4 – from Ben’s friend Michael (preview only cos he didn’t actually write in) who went back with a girl after a date to a dirty/messy flat (was it Henry’s Barons Court flat?) and saw a rat eating his ‘issue’ from a used prophylactic.
Tail 5 – read by Ben – from Miquel (from Rat City, but with a story about Chicago) with a tale of a rat that was blocked IN, not OUT, of his wife's old house. Her housemate took the bus to work and found that the rat had stowed away in his rucksack (ratsack!) when the bag moved around on his lap during the bus journey. He threw the rat off the bus into the street, but the rat was then flattened by the same bus.
Tail 6 – read by Mike (who stumbles at first, proving it's not as easy as it looks) – from Isaac in Australia who kept a hen sitting on duck eggs ("what kind of sick place is this guy running???") but one duckling was caught by vicious Aussie rats, as evidenced by her feet being left at the entrance to the rat hole. Isaac shot many rats himself as revenge, then wore their feet as a necklace along with croc feet, ostrich feet... Henry suggests he should have planted the duck feet to grow a centiduck or duckipede but Mike reminds him about water scarcity (like 'Dune'), which Ben reminds Henry is needed to make lager.
Tail 7 – read by Henry – from Paul, a network engineer who was lowered into a chamber to find the cause of a network going down. He removed a panel at chest height to be met by 75–100 rats pouring out ("I think we've found our network problem."). Rats can pour because they are liquid, hence fitting through a pen. You can surf rats because they create waves.
Tail 8 – read by Ben – Karen from Dublin, whose job as a project manager at an engineering company had an awful boss who was "an alcoholic, sexually inappropriate heaving mound of existence" (Henry doesn't have to imagine this, as he's looking at it in the form of Ben and Mike) who was too cheap to pay someone to check out the stain in the office's ceiling. On moving the ceiling tiles himself, he was hit by a huge dead rat which then splat across the floor "like a water balloon of guts" ("Henry the Eighth style"). Cosmic justice, delivered by rat. The Beans particularly enjoy the framing device Karen uses of her sat on the train in the present, and compare this to the old lady in Titanic or the 'camera flies up its arse' scene of the dead rat in the sewer at the start of Its A Wonderful Life. Mike compares the story to Joyce's Ulysses. Henry imagines a coda where Karen is wearing a ring made of the rat's cartilage.
Tail 9 – read by Mike – from Sam with a Tortoise Rat Melange of two stories: (1) mountain biking over a rat in the Pyrenees and (2) in school Biology rat dissection, the rats were provided in a frozen block, that became rat consommé after defrosting. Henry advises chiselling them apart when fully frozen.
Tail 10 – read by Henry – from George of Lower Crouch End/Tottenham (Archway) walking by Alexandra Palace boating lake where a pug-sized rat pounced on a pigeon and went at it for a few mins before skulking back into the bushes. George's baby son watched the whole thing ("that's how serial killers are made"). His tale of a chicken, a fox, and an axe in southern France is not told (not the fable, as the axe nullifies it).
Tail 11 – read by Ben – Matt from Edgbaston in Birmingham watched as a herring gull (which Henry assumes is a flying herring) outside a restaurant tried to eat a rat but kept getting 'stuck on the back end of the rat'. They watched it try a few times (because these horrors are engrossing) and then went to Pizza Express (a happy ending and the couple's natural habitat).
Tail 12 – read by Mike – from Jukka from Helsinki with a psychologically horrific story, like a dark Scandi movie. He moved to the artsy part of town after a break-up and found a Bluebell-sized rat in the bins area of his accommodation, perched on the cardboard bin, staring Jukka down with rodential confidence. Similar formative story to Putin's. Henry compares it to staring down a snarling dog (not Pam though, cos she's lovely). Henry stared down a cockroach while on holiday in Thailand which moved between shower cubicles, following Henry along the five cubicles through the holes in the bricks. Henry gives 'a bit of blue' soaping-up detail to the listener to spice up the story.
Tail 13 – read by Henry – Gemma from Bremen's ex-boyfriend's hippie flatmate (Susan, looked like Neil from The Young Ones) from Harrogate lived near Kew station and this ex found a rat sitting in the flatmate's room with him, inhaling Susan's doobie. The same ex was raised up by the bike helmet strap at a level crossing once.
Tail 14 – read by Ben – from Ben in Tamworth whose dad was a policeman in Birmingham in the late 60s. Called to a robbery at a meat-processing plant (Britain's main industry), he noticed the rats had adapted to the sub-zero temperatures by growing thick coats, making them look like miniature dogs.
Tail 15 – read by Mike – from Andy who describes the tail as 'horrific' so Henry offers a retrospective trigger warning. When Andy was a Cub on parade, his friend had a putrid rat, riddled with maggots, fall on him from a pub roof ("I dub thee Sir Rat"). Was this a prophecy or a good luck charm? Like a lasagne falling on you, which means: left shoulder – king of Padua (unless vegetarian, whereupon you're part of the entourage); right shoulder – marry the ugliest princess in all of Piedmont; straight on head with bechamel on the nose – work in the ticket office in the London Dungeon and fall in love with the first person you see (probably an effigy of a man administering a hang/draw/quarter to Shrek).
Tail 16 – read by Henry – from Ruth in Stourbridge whose friend lived near some rural stables where a band of youths were rowdy outside as one of them had a sharpened stick upon which was impaled a dead rat which he waved in the faces of the others ("absolute legend"). The youth would dip the rat in some horse faeces and then lunge at his friends. The game was Shitty Rat, just harmless fun in the Worcestershire countryside ("what a lovely bucolic image"). Mike often hears tell at weddings of the couple meeting during a game of Shitty Rat.
Christmas songs rat-ified by the Beans (which Ben could happily do for the whole hour):
• Band Aid: “At Ratmastime, we think about rats and we cherish rats … / … in a world of rats, you can put your hands around a rat… / … squeeze a rat, tonight. It’s ratmas time…. / drive over a rat, then drive over another rat… / there’s a rat outside your window… / you can’t out-think the rats, at Ratmastime”
• Holly Jolly Ratmas
• White Christmas: “I’m dreaming of a white rat (on Ratmas)… with little pink eyes… freaky, freaky little rats.”
• I Wish It Could Be Ratmas Every Day
• Feliz Navi-rat (discussion of how this song has crept up on Britain in the last 10 years), then later Henry tries again with 'Feliz Ratidad'
• Have Yourself A Merry Little Ratmas (full of Yuletide claws)
• Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rat
• I Saw Mommy Kissing A Rat (underneath a hollowed-out loaf of bread)
• Deck the Halls With Scores of Rat-traps
• Good King RatRatlas Looked Out (on a load of rats)
• It’s the Most Wonderful Rat of the Year (Henry tries this twice over the course of the ep)
• A Spacerat Came Travelling (constantly pissing, following a star)
• It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Ratmas (there's fetid faeces in the street and people puking on their feet)
• (Mike's MacGowan voice) It was Ratmas Eve, babe...: Fairytale of New York
• Rudolf the Rat-nosed Reindeer
• Ratmas, Baby (I've been an awfully good rat)
• Baby There's Rats Outside (there's also rats inside)
The Twelve Days of Ratmas Timestamps
- First day of Ratmas: A rucksack bouncing on my knee (25:29)
- Second day of Ratmas: Two duckling feet (28:33)
- Third day of Ratmas: A hundred pouring rats (31:46)
- Fourth day of Ratmas: A large ceiling stain (37:23)
- Fifth day of Ratmas: A block of frozen rats (40:09)
- Sixth day of Ratmas: A dead pigeon (44:15)
- Seventh day of Ratmas: A herring gull (46:26)
- Eighth day of Ratmas: A rat that stared me down (51:51)
- Ninth day of Ratmas: A bifta-smoking rat (54:34)
- Tenth day of Ratmas: A sub-zero rat (56:08)
- Eleventh day of Ratmas: A rat on my shoulder (59:12)
- Twelfth day of Ratmas: A shitty rat (1:02:18)