December 2025's live Ratmas London show, shared on the main feed for all to enjoy/be disgusted by.
- Whenever you listen to the Ratmas episode, that's Ratmas Day.
- The show begins with some Ratmas lore (Coca-Cola were involved) and the Beans sharing their Ratmas traditions: for Henry, a simple rat crown from Tesco with brussels sprouts stuffed up the neck hole; for Ben, a capon full of rats; and for Mike, a rat hunt with the kids to mount their first Queen Rat and hunt the rats with a ridged spear, the goal being rat-skin iPhone holders.
- Freddie Tapner (master of the musical) will be providing piano accompaniment.
- A song: "It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Ratmas" (sample lyrics: "cloacal slime upon the gifts", "I swore I saw one swarmining in her hair").
Ratmas Story 1
- (Timestamp 7:30 / told by Mike)
- Sophie from Warwick – Rat chased around kitchen, climbs inside oven, roasted alive.
- Henry confused by whether the oven was cleaned by roasting the rat in it. Perhaps this is an Old Wives' Tale.
Ratmas Story 2
- (Timestamp 11:22 / told by Henry)
- Claire (you may know one) had two pet rats living in a cage in her absolute pit of a student flat. She pulled an attractive human man one night (we are left to imagine what happened, e.g. trains going into tunnels, a meaty sausage dog being sick/scurrying up and down a covered promenade) whose hastily removed (must've been pre-skinny jeans era) jeans (not genes) were flung near the rat cage. The rats pulled the jeans in and chewed through the crotch. The gentleman caller tied a hoodie around his waist ("nob in the hood?" – a sexy Christmas Jim Davidson-style musical).
Ratmas Story 3
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(Timestamp 18:50 / told by Ben)
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From Billy in Tooting: rat in toaster... threw away toaster... bought new toaster... week later: rat in toaster. Short and simple but Henry is still confused about the concept of throwing away a rat.
Ratmas Story 4
- (Timestamp 21:08 / first email told by Mike & second by Henry)
- Two emails received on this topic.
- First: Father-in-law as the rat bomber with a shed infested with rats. Undeterred (not deterred) FIL held a lighter to the hole where the rats were nesting and blew up the shed.
- Second: Will knows a Cornish farmer who stuck a length of drain into a rat nest, poured petrol down it, then a match, causing an explosion which blasted a flaming rat out of the rat cannon, arcing across into his hay barn, which burned to the ground.
Ratmas Story 5
- (Timestamp 25:20 / told by Ben)
- From Tennessee, whose friend was working at the Edinburgh Fringe and had a suitcase at her lodgings into which a rat gave birth (fuckaduckadooda) to at least a dozen baby rats who crawled out and got lost around her room. Rat babies are gross, unlike a mini tarantula in a beret. The friend's clothes were covered in rat placenta and she had to wear free merch and lost property for the remainder of the Fringe.
Ratmas Story 6
- (Timestamp 29:20 / told by Mike)
- Lotte from Oxfordshire's brother was walking home from a night out in Durham when he saw hot oil being poured into a bin full of rats in an alley out the back of a kebab shop (quite a visceral one). Such a beautifully efficient, if horrifically medieval, act. Henry gives a recipe for rat omelette (one person claps).
Ratmas Story 7
- (Timestamp 33:33 / told by Henry)
- When Zee was 13, they volunteered at an old people's home in Sri Lanka with their family (Henry's alarm bells are ringing). While playing dominoes, a nurse threw a brick at a rat from 7 ft away and the rat burst. No one cleaned up the bits.
Ben's Rat Poem
- (Timestamp 36:40)
- A version of "A Visit From St. Nicholas" by Clement Clarke Moore/Henry Livingston Jr, brought bang up to rat with the addition of a sweary, piss-covered St. Nick and 8 rats (Nibbler, Gnawer, Turd-Boy, Skank, Stinker, Pisser, Whiskers, and Frank) pulling his miniature sleigh full of turds.
Isy Suttie's Ratmas Story 8
- (Timestamp 40:20)
- Isy has two cats who brought in three rats and one mouse in 24 hrs. She once took a dead mouse (without realising) to see Inside Out 2 followed by a roast. Difference between a rat and a mouse: tail much more meaty on a rat, hence can make a lovely stock, whereas for mouse stock you need 100s of tails (like a bag of spinach). Her house is painted in peanut butter, which might be the problem.
- Isy's freeze-frame/tableau – when she was 23 and working on Sleaford Industrial Estate, on her way to work eating her breakfast of a bag of Wotsits and a pear, she saw a rat sitting on top of a pile of sick on a big pile of rubbish with a signet ring in its mouth. Henry wonders if pears still exist. Is Isy the Rat Queen? Was the rat Prince Andrew's other form? Henry sees the tableau as a puzzle akin to something from Jonathan Creek.
- Isy's friend's partner heard a banging coming from the toilet and then screeching. When he looked, he saw a rat with a bum big enough to fill the toilet bowl trying to get out. Henry hoped a rat climbing up the toilet couldn't happen. It reminds Isy of her mum's colleague in Bermuda who had a 'tape snake' whose head would pop out of her mouth when she coughed (what a party trick!). Isy's friend poured a bottle of bleach down the loo onto the rat, giving it frosted tips, like a boy band in the 90s (cool and angry = sexy combo) – Isy's references are outdated (Cindy Crawford as example of a fit woman). The friend's son's air gun was then fired down the toilet. A series of escalating aggravations. How to explain to Pest Control? A Swedish rat with a gunshot wound is in our toilet? Isy tries to think of a weird exhibit in a museum and Henry feels like they are peas in a pod in the dynamic against Ben and Mike (absolute squares who wouldn't air gun a rat). Isy explains about the 'rat flap' in some toilets that prevents rats climbing up. You don't know whether you've got one until you hear the knocking from inside your own arse.
- The Beans thank Isy and then welcome her back a few mins later when they realise they still have to do her verse of the song. They try to get as many important details in as possible, including a pear being a kind of 90s apple that Jayne Middlemiss might eat.
Ratmas Story 9
- (Timestamp 57:03 / told by Ben)
- The correspondent's brother brought home 2 'fancy rats' after a weekend spent at his 'every other weekend' dad's house. The first rat soon died and the other one was bereft with grief/started biting everyone in the house. The vet soon confirmed that this 'fancy rat' was actually a wild rat in a cage who probably murdered the other one. The whole family was then given heavy-duty antibiotics.
Ratmas Story 10
- (Timestamp 59:16 / told by Mike)
- Max and his wife were doing home renovation when they found in a crawlspace the mummified corpse of a rat the size of a watermelon. After throwing it away, they noticed critter-tampering signs in their home, with bags of nuts being gnawed, goldfish and a bottle of Gatorade disappearing, and dog food pouring from a hole in the wall (Satanic). A rat must have been hoarding in the space between the studs.
Ratmas Story 11
- (Timestamp 1:02:40 / told by Henry)
- Tom from Leeds-upon-Bremen gleaned (a word Henry doesn't hear every day, despite it being the sort of word he says all the time) a gorgeously gruesome ratty vignette from his hairdresser – a framing device (but can we trust the narrator – these are things Henry remembers from his degree (in engineering – never set foot on a Paker bridge)). The hairdresser was on holiday in India and had her attention piqued while on a train platform by a hoarse (not a horse, the opposite of one (but what is this? The Staten Island Ferry!)) gasps of an unkempt elderly man, defecating on the platform. No sooner had his grisly payload kissed the tarmac (normally the hairdresser would just ask about your holiday and stuff, so this is quite different) than a giant rat ate the turd with giddying gusto. Is this from Tom Stoppard (his final work)?
Ratmas Story 12
- (Timestamp 1:06:50 / told by Ben)
- Mike is worried about this one when he hears it begins with a tortoise being found by a child after a period of hibernation. When the correspondent looked through the shell, once found, like a reptilian telescope, they were consoled by a family friend by being told "the rats must have got him". Is this consoling? Mike never used that wording when consoling a family during his time as a medic.
"The 12 Days of Ratmas" song
- On the first day of Ratmas, my true love sent to me: a rat roasted at 180.
- On the second day of Ratmas, my true love sent to me: chewed denim crotch.
- On the third day of Ratmas, my true love sent to me: a rat in a toaster.
- On the fourth day of Ratmas, my true love sent to me: one rat cannon.
- On the fifth day of Ratmas, my true love sent to me: rat afterbirth.
- On the sixth day of Ratmas, my true love sent to me: bin rats a-frying.
- On the seventh day of Ratmas, my true love sent to me: Sri Lankan rats a-bursting.
- On the eighth day of Ratmas, my true love sent to me: rat in the toilet.
- On the ninth day of Ratmas, my true love sent to me: plague rat a-biting.
- On the tenth day of Ratmas, my true love sent to me: rat Llewelyn-Bowen.
- On the eleventh day of Ratmas, my true love sent to me: fresh faeces feasted.
- On the twelfth day of Ratmas, my true love sent to me: rats must have got him.