¶ Opening Chat
- Mike has received an envelope with artwork from Kelly Vivanco (shameless callout for treats from listeners, e.g. dead lambs?)
- Talking of receiving nice post (a lost art like that of conversation, erotic ice sculpture, dogtopiary, wattle and daub gazebos) reminds Henry of something he did yesterday. Strap in...
- Henry had to send a simple 6th birthday card to a niece (at 6, every birthday is a landmark birthday). A Fibonacci birthday (don't bollock Ben, he knows that's wrong).
- Henry thought the process of sending a card was straightforward until yesterday: card, greeting, envelope, stamp, address, postbox, deliver.
- The various moves involved are like chess: horse doing gammy dressage, castles rotating infinitely (big psychological move), queen going bananas, king doing naff all. Nobody understands 'en passant', it's Chess 2.0.
- National Trust tearooms: mainly just condoms. Spermicidal jelly in the lemon drizzle.
- Playing chess and getting distracted by how good Red Dwarf was (it's all on iPlayer). Henry has fallen into a Red Dwarf black hole: very comforting 90s watch.
- Measuring things in terms of the size of Wales/whales. Lemons being shat out of a blowhole.
- Making love is simple, like eating a raw carrot ("Do you want hummus? No thanks"). Using Nigel Farage as a way to stop eating the carrot too fast.
- Henry left a Santander bike outside his parents' house last week for 2 hours and now he'll be fined £300.
- Henry is very busy with deadlines but makes time to post his niece's card, leaving on a Santander bike in search of a WH Smith (retro choice). Ben prefers a John Lewis card.
- The phenomenon of greetings cards with horrible, emotional assault messages.
- US people can't understand UK people being self-effacing: "Silly old me, I've made a thing", Sir Norman Foster on his bridge from Scotland to Land's End.
- Henry in London City (Financial District), a place where you can buy on a global scale but can't buy anything useful like a Twix (unless made of pure cocaine).
- Testing out the Santander bikes for a good one, like feeling fruit or the legs on a horse. A bad omen: Henry had to take a slightly gammy bike & the weather changed. A doomed mission. A clusterdoom.
- Took a while to find a WH Smith in the City because Google Maps wasn't working (because the moral compass is pointing the wrong way) and the businesses there are ye olde tannermen and cheese lanes, along with glass and steel. Is there space in this world for greetings, space for nieces?
- Who does London belong to? Henry is a little red blood cell on his bike. So many Prets (starting to freak Henry out) like the film Don't Look Now (followed by a Pret in a red coat).
- Henry in the smallest WH Smith he's ever been in. Like a phone box or a pair of trunks. Increasing doom-mentum. Twelve-inches of card space filled with cards like: You Old Bastard, You Never Expressed Yourself To Me Growing Up, So Why The Fuck Have I Got To Get You This Card?
- In this anecdote, Henry is just at the end of Film 1 of the Peter Jackson trilogy.
- Pass the dragon's threshold on the way to the West End.
- Mike clears his throat, as people do out of sheer tension.
- WH Smith is a weird choice as Britain's most ailing business (like Woolworth's or Our Price). Henry was trying to buy a card from the past along with Nigel Mansel's autobiography. Damon Hill's done it again.
- Mike wonders why Henry didn't just make the card, as a professional illustrator, but Henry decided he would never ("because where's it going to stop?"), but does do a little pic on the inside.
- Henry goes into a Future Sainsbury's (Ben wonders if it's the HQ and if Henry had a duel). Turns out he goes there next. Like when Henry worked at the HQ of B&Q that isn't a B&Q.
- Henry tells us that Mike's really struggling with this anecdote.
- Ben knows the area and knows Henry's in Holborn with a lot of card shop options. He buys a crab + octopus card from a Waterstones.
- Next problem: where do you get a stamp? From a great-aunt's handbag/Mike's wallet/a Post Office. Mike's local Post Office is within a WH Smith, within a shopping centre. Turns out, Waterstones has stamps, but not First Class.
- Henry walks to a Post Office, their stamps are only available from a machine in a tranche (floating around).
- Henry goes to a Pret for a Korean chicken wrap. Mike wonders if he could have swerved past that part, but Ben reminds him, "The art of the storyteller...". Could be Chekov's chicken wrap.
- He writes the card in the Pret but now needs to find a posting box (highly visible). Last collection: 9a.m. ("who's that for?")
- Henry's niece lives a 15-min cycle away.
¶ Topic Chat
- What about Rural Legends? Sheep with two pig faces.
- A tale told as fact until someone says they must be friends with the same person.
- Scatalogical ones: throwing a poo out of the window/leaving in a handbag/on a kitchen counter on a first date.
- Henry realises he has stopped recording.
- Poo tale has variations and 99% of listeners will have heard it.
- The tales are lore, the collective unconscious bubbles them up.
- A British thing to worry about non-flushing toilets; it's the energy that powers our nation.
- International ones: Walt Disney's head being frozen.
- Dead celebrity sub-genre: Catherine the Great shagging a horse.
- Greek legends: the Minotaur came about because of someone wanting to shag a prize bull – Icarus as the Dyson of Ancient Greece trying to design a contraption for a woman to dress as a sexy cow to attract a bull. Created the Minotaur though so it shows: do you really want to dabble in these things? Henry hoover as Aphrodite dressed as a miniature car hoover. Monstrous hoover monster lurking under the Mendips – Dyson sends 16 tonnes of virgins (to the nearest tonne) for the beast to hoover up.
- A kid at school tells you that in the underpass under the A379, a boy was strangled in the 70s and you can still hear him scream, and every year on this date a kid disappears.
- Beast of Bodmin, El Chupacrabra (not papacabra), Slenderman (spooky photobomber).
- Ben's unsavoury one: Prince/Marilyn Manson had a rib removed to enable self-fellation.
- Henry finds it extraordinary that Prince had a lift in his house. The world was weeping and Henry was like "He's got a lift? In his house???"
- Elvis dying on the toilet with 500 burgers in his colon, forcing him up through the ceiling into a swimming pool, where he drowned.
- Henry's story about boys falling asleep in a paper factory and the next day's paper being a cross-section of each of them. Diagnosis: Broadsheet. Less blood on his hands than Murdoch.
- Urban legends are how you teach basic rules like 'never go to sleep in a machine'.
- Genre of urban legend: friend went on holiday and came back... eye replaced with a tarantula egg (devouring an optician).
- Henry looks up Wikipedia for famous ones, e.g. Ben Drowned, The Legend of Zelda (a haunted Nintendo), the one in the car with the dead dog's head in it.
- Ben calls for listeners to submit their own local legends.
- Henry's found some pet-based ones: The Cat-Man of Greenock, The Choking Doberman.
Kelly Vivanco's Show Art
¶ Emails
- Cassandra emails to say she visited Derby from the rural western US in 2011 to do some genealogy with her grandmother (Henry: "sounds like a fun trip"). Ate at a Nando's and a Chinese buffet. Impressions from abroad. Mike goes to answer the door to a carpet fitter who has arrived early. Henry: "don't know why he's getting a carpet fitter, I think his moustache looks fine at the moment, heh heh heh heh". Mike told the man he was "on a work call" and continues with "Jakarta, probably", "Five mill, minimum", "Mine's an Itsu" type interjections throughout the Patreon intro.
¶ Jingles
- 44:00 Bean Machine
- 49:50 & 52:48 Lewd Content
- 55:52 Satire
- 1:02:02 Ben throws the gauntlet to the listener to submit other themes than just the emails one. Jack from Bristol's email jingle: acapella Ewan MacColl folk-style (with 3-year-old doing a door slam). Perhaps the email jingle will become a folk standard?
- 1:03:52 Bollocking of the Week
- 1:05:36 Bollocking Accepted
- 1:10:10 Patreon
¶ Bollockings
- Paul emails as a proud Derby-ian, upset at the Beans' slagging off his town. He tries to sell the Beans on the town with a fact about them having the second-highest perpendicular church tower in the UK. Also, Robert Lindsay was born there AND lived there till age 17. Henry accepts the bollock, apologises and retracts it (but will continue to slag off Derby). Then Ben is bollocked about his owl murder (was he a time traveller?). Henry does his 'owl bar' gag to zero response.
¶ Notable Quotes
- Great Springsteen song, isn't it: Bollocking in the Dark.
- It’s time for 4D chess!
- Eventually drilling down into the board itself and opening up the 'ünderboard'.
- Every whale comes with nine lemons inside: self-basting.
- Also, making love, for me: simple steps, simple experience.
- I’m living my best London Life.
- Have some Prosecco on your birthday you fat slag!
- This is going to be a cluster-doom.
- I’m a little red blood cell, pulsing through its veins, that’s how I feel, on my little red Santander bike.
- Doom-mentum
- There’s quite a few stages to this story, sorry.
- Good luck with your latest batch of haemorrhoids, you disgusting old fuck!
- Does this story end with you having a duel in Sainsbury’s HQ with the CEO?
- Mike's struggling with this anecdote.
- Unless this is Chekhov’s chicken panini.
- Icarus: the James Dyson of Ancient Greece.
- He flew too close to the skirting board.
- Never go to sleep in a machine.
- Last night, I was out on the town, and … I was out and about trying to meet some chicks last night, went down the owl bar … turned a few heads.
- Now Mike's going to have to do his humiliating job in front of the carpet fitter.
- Yes, I'm all over that account.
¶ Sean Bean Lounge
- Reptile Buffet (26 patrons)
¶ Listener Theme Tune
- Andrew in Leeds: 12-bar blues on acoustic guitar recorded in a breezy garden with a blackbird accompaniment.