- Introduction chat between Henry and Ben before the episode proper.
- Ben is at home in Cardiff while Henry is in a Leclerc cafe in France: a mega-temple to ham and cheese. Henry's French coffee has a wonderful beige scum.
- They explain that this normally Patreon-only episode is going out on the main feed.
- New format: take a fokeloric tale and analyse it. This one is a deeper Grimm cut (wouldn't make the top 10 tales).
- Ben wonders if the Beans would be 'delighted' by the listener choosing not to join Patreon after listening, as Henry suggests. Anyone saying 'delighted' is always overstating things.
- Henry's holiday plans: lunch and then Breton dolmen (Neolithic rocks). Ben wonders if the tunnel will be a portal back to our Neolithic past but Henry would prefer to just come back to the supermarket cafe.
- Ben suggests the name for the new format where one Bean reads the others some sort of tale: And Then Sparrows Took His Eyes.
- All tales end this way. They may have been Disneyfied but a lairy academic in Northumberland will then re-introduce the eye-gouging element to come after the 'they lived happily ever after'. Last scene of Cinderella: 'twas like a soup of eyes (like a floor covered in marbles).
- The tales are warnings, they're instructional and also your heritage. The warnings come from your grandfathers' grandfathers – they skip a generation because of people dying young in the old days.
- In the original Snow White, the dwarves were mining for eyes, sticking their axes into the faces of the proletariat (face means both rocky outcrop and front of head). The dwarves give Snow White a necklace of eyes held together by tendons. Ben asks Mike about the eye tendon stalk and Henry is offended he didn't get asked, as the illustrator, but Ben wanted a history of medicine knowledge, not acting knowledge. For example, a badger might see a fox with boobs (drawn by Henry) and his eyes come out (wahooga), attached on stalks (optic nerve) – would a person's eyes actually dangle off? Mike: yes. Always a bit of slack in there to allow this to happen (spooling like a garden hose).
- When Ben visited Düsseldorf this year, there was a pub with a mascot covering every surface that was a fox with human boobs. Henry would be thinking about this from the illustrator angle: would the fox also need pantyhose, an underwear co-ord? The fox was a fraülein, wearing a leather and cotton outfit. As an illustrator, Henry will not do any sexual anthropomorphism (sexy fox? fine. sexy human? fine. but no combo). Mike had a formative crush on the collie queen from Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds – beautiful, elegant but not sexy. Henry thought Dogtanian was the original and the Three Musketeers was based on it. Henry agrees the Lassie-style collie is beautiful. The podcast is in danger of becoming an 'If you had to...'. Mike describes the queen dog as elegant, calm... in the way a Tory MP would describe a woman. She had a lovely, full, v-shaped beard. Border collies aren't sexy collies.
- A collie bred with a pig, once in a generation = Miss Piggy. This is after many monstrous canine pigs and porcine dogs are born (they go straight to the basement) who will only eat the pre-macerated innards of supermarket frankfurters (also what they will become). Ben remembers a scene in a Muppets film where Miss Piggy imagines her and Kermit's progeny and they are pink frogs and green pigs. Henry worries about the people who tried to make that happen after seeing the film (those monstrosities will now be 10 years old).
- Henry's tale is apposite as it also involves an animal/human mix. Why never udders on a human? Six squirrel tits all in a row (straight udder line)?
- Henry reads Grimm fairy tales in bed to revert to a child state before sleep which is what gave Ben the idea for this episode format. The tales are soothing in their logic where one thing follows another but two things ago is forgotten. They wouldn't pass a scriptwriting course. Often the tales end up nowhere near where they started. Impossible to pick up the thread.
- The Brothers Grimm (Steve and Brian) would wander, talk to the area's storyteller, and write things down that hadn't been written down before. You'd have to Google to find out the credits though, hence they invented the internet. The tales are categorised as e.g., Type 4B2, tales where hands turn into fish. A united identity in the tales to help define Germany.
- Hans the Hedgehog: why hasn't it been Disneyfied? Henry's backup choice would have been Donkey Cabbages. Henry credits the book's source after Ben reminds him. Crime doesn't get any sexier than making an illegal audiobook.
- Imagine you're in a cosy cabin with a warm draught (from a volcano? carbon monoxide poisoning?) on a Bavarian hillside, perhaps invited in by an old man after passing his riddles three (but he's fine, no inappropriate nuzzles, deep DBS checked, only wearing tiny pants so you can see he's not wearing a wire, makes 'whoo, whoo' noises because of his chronic pain since getting his penis pecked off by sparrows – shouldn't have said 'anything but my eyes'). Imagine wagon wheels... sheep... from digireads.com (so magical).
- Henry struggles to find the place. Is he reading through the Preface by Michhael Palinn? That guy takes a lot of Michael Palin's work. Mike booked him for his 40th. Henry is distracted by the names of the other tales (The Three Spinning Women, The Valiant Little Tailor, The Singing Bone – great names for pubs) or is he using the showbiz trick of Playing for Time?
- Saying stuff like "I will have a child, even if it be a hedgehog" is never a good idea (just keep it to yourself).
- Would it be a tricky labour if your baby was a hedgehog on the top half? Need to make sure the spikes face the right way.
- Is not being able to get a godfather the main problem for Hans' family? Who's going to usually forget to get him a present? Henry and Mike are both bad godfathers as it's "bloody hard work". Henry's brother's life hack: direct debit time – money in an account, no need to think, purely BACS-based.
- The mum calls him Hans the Hedgehog even though he's just a hemi-hedgehog.
- The parson sticks his neck in, but what is a parson? Too many similar jobs: priest, vicar, monk, dean, curate, preacher, bishop, pastor, chaplain, megapope. Like one of the minority who love giving advice on parenting ("Our Barry's spikes fell off when he was only 2. He's very special.").
- Mike takes issue with the mum not being able to suckle Hans because its spikes don't go forward from the snout, but Ben reminds him she might just have been viscerally disgusted.
- Mike wonders if Hans was clothed on the bottom half but Henry gives this as an example of these tales leaving out a lot, especially anything that doesn't push the story forward. The box set would go into what happened during the 8 years the tale skips over.
- The peasant's wife would like 'a little meat and a couple of white rolls' from the market (tales are quite fibre-light) and the servant would like 'stockings with clocks' (weird details that somehow make it through). Henry offers Mike and Ben £5,000 if they can guess what Hans asks his dad to bring back from the market (Ben: 17 geese; Mike: a flute made of the finest silks). The answer is bagpipes, so Mike was very close. This case will be in the courts for years, it's time to ring Johnnie Cochran.
- What's the 'cock shod'? It's nailing some shoes onto a chicken. This should really have a bit of back-and-forth about how they'll get the chicken shod. They need to fill the evenings with something other than their glacial turds from the fibre-free diet. The glacier turd cleaving a path.
- Henry offers £20,000 to the Bean that can guess what 2 things Hans took with him (Ben: his father's hat and his mother's dress; Mike: the candle's wick and the spoon). Answer: swine and asses. Why isn't Hans using these to ride on, rather than a chicken? The ass is the car of history.
- Hans and the cock sat in a high tree for years watching the asses and swine create a horrible hybrid: the swass, with its lollopping. Henry finds Hans making beautiful music on his bagpipes to be the most unbelievable part, but then admits bagpipes are 'rousing'.
- Only kings and peasants, no middle class. Lots of castles because lots of fiefdoms (Henry almost knew something then).
- Hans will show the king the way if he promised Hans whatever he met first in the royal court, in a written bond. The tales are full of these weird wagers. The king assumes Hans won't be able to read the bond and writes that he should NOT have what first greets him (his daughter as it turns out).
- Another king comes by. Similar things happening, like if Grant and Phil Mitchell came in one after the other to ask for diesel in the garage (while riding on a chicken as if it were a horse) in Eastenders. Or if at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a group of archaeologists from the Sorbonne came along to find the object.
- Getting lost was a big deal back then, in thick, high, forests. No maps. No way for the king to call his daughter and ask her to throw out a red onion or Sir Farathworn The Twat to meet him.
- The bit with the second king is exactly the same as the first – this won't wash in the era of Netflix, no matter how much Jesse Plemons is in it. Except this king and his daughter respect the bond (central theme of the tale). The bond was the precursor to the 3 digits on the back of your credit card. Daughters as the traditional financial security.
- Hans lets his father (who thought he'd died long ago) know he's coming back with a massive herd of pigs, ready for a mass slaughter, Supermarket Sweep-style; "It's Raining Men" but a porcine flood. Why is he not just Hans now? Are all of the pigs also called Hans?
- A killing and a chopping that might have been heard 2 miles off! Mike could give voice to all those slaughtered pigs. FOMOOAMPS: fear of missing out on a massive pig slaughtering.
- Hans goes to the first kingdom where there's an order to shoot anyone mounted on a cock with bagpipes: shoot, cut down, or stab (bad luck to the people who wanted to strangle him). No one's very nice, like Succession, but you find yourself rooting for Hans.
- The mob with pikes attack but Hans and his cock fly (like cocks can't, so maybe at waist level) to the window where the wager was paid by the king's daughter seating herself with Hans and the cock (bit of a gooseberry at this point) in a carriage with horses and attendants. At this point Ben asks if Hans is the size of a hedgehog or the size of a man? Henry then wonders if he's man-size on the legs and hedgehog-size on top, so need a really sharp taper in the middle. Mike wonders what the orientation of the top half is (L-shaped or looking up at the sky all the time).
- Hans pierces the daughter all over till she bleeds and is disgraced (not her fault) but the sexual politics of these tales are not great.
- The second king's daughter found Hans too strange-looking, cos all his Tinder photos were from the waist down. On their wedding night he would take off his skin, leaving him a degloved hedgehog, ready for some lovemaking ("just don't touch any part of my body"). No salt and please wash hands after eating onion rings. Definitely no salt play or role-playing explosions in a vinegar factory. Soothing balm play is fine, as is sterile cling-film in a temperature-controlled environment. When Hans had turned into a man, the marriage was properly solemnised. Hans would still insist on eating slugs throughout, while being riddled with parasites.
- At the end, for clarity, the sparrows do take all 8 eyes: Hans', Mrs Hedgehog's, the cock's and thousand of dead hogs. Eyemageddon. Coda: My tale is done/and away it has run/to little Augusta's house. No one sure what this means.
- Ben calls for a fokelore expert to clarify what we have learned over and above 'word is bond' because anyone could say anything back then (I'm the pope/god/a donkey from the knees down). Is it: respect your dad even if he's a pillock?
- Henry describes The Goose Girl with its horrible punishment of being dragged through the streets in a spiked barrel. Verrily, she has chosen her own punishment.
- If you train your face muscles enough, you can Wahooga them.
- A fully aquatic pig is one of the Ministry of Defence's top priorities.
- The waves are roiling with pigs.
- We don't need to trouble the audience with the ISBN numbers do we, Ben?
- Wind your neck in, parson. It's not your remit. It's got fuck all to do with you.
- Get the cock shod.
- What else are you going to do but a glacial-paced turd?
- But Hans reads with his bottom half.
- If I met a half-hedgehog child, I'd be thinking about him all the way home, I'm pretty sure.
- What does it take to meet a red onion? To truly meet it on its level?
- Take his World's Best Dad mug off him and kill a pig with it.
- He'll have two waists. That's the only thing we can be certain of.
- Belt and below is boy. Higher than the hips is hog.