¶ Opening Chat
- "Good now" to the podcast generation. Creating boundaries is huge for kids today. Turn in your knives to the police, but maybe not the tomato knives, which Mike uses for 'all sorts' (he's off the rails), including tiny cheese and tomato sandwiches for a small mouse named Mr Patagonia. He's Mike's best friend, so it's weird he hasn't been mentioned in the pod before.
- He is very private though, named after the shopping brand, and also involved in a collab with Henry's religion, Pakadonia. Henry is working on a breathable, outdoor cassock for all-weather parades. The collab is also working on a chorister's outfit with a sewn-in satchel for trail mix and hooked up to a bungee to stop the choristers running away, e.g. if they're 24 now. They will cry 'Pakadnooooo' as they try to escape, falling down an optical illusion crevasse (a revasse, that puts them back where they started).
- Before recording, Mike let Ben know that he'd had a 'major setback', not in his acting job but in matters of health. A very middle-aged man thing happened, but it wasn't the fabled omni-haemorrhoid as Mike has had definitive work done in that region: an extension, knocked it all through, added value and found some old WWII letters in the chimney.
- Mike woke at 5am, away from home in Liverpool, to a pronounced crunching sound and the sensation of something giving way inside his skull. It was the inside layer of an incisor (Hollywood teeth) sloughing off. Perhaps Putin has got to Mike with some sort of radioactive poison, negating the work he has done with milk drinking and taking his teeth swimming regularly. He left a 5am voicemail with his dentist (mafia horse dentist?) to get ahead of the queue.
- Henry's explainer about teeth: a vestigial bone left over from when we were beaked fish. A mix of ceramic display and crucial function. Henry seems unsure about what an incisor is. Not a molar or 'one of the fang ones'. Mike bares his teeth to show Henry, which unnerves him, like when a chimp is 'smiling' but not really (your arms will be pulled off any second).
- Ben wonders if this whole thing with Mike's teeth is a cock and bull story to cover up his altercation with some 'toughs' on Liverpool's streets. Neither Mike nor Ben has heard of a whole sheet of tooth falling off, so perhaps it was just a bit of cheese.
- Henry needs Mike to explain it again because too many things are fighting for Henry's attention, including a mug with a picture of Theresa May on it which has a story behind it that he won't tell just yet. Even Netflix dramas will call out to Henry to remind him to pay attention to the White House being attacked at dawn, as well as constantly topping up the plot and character names.
- The bit that came off Mike's tooth has been preserved in a dog poo bag with UHT milk and Mike's spit: the Dentists' Trifle. Mike is seeing the dentist tomorrow so that trifle will be 2 days' old. They didn't drop everything and get in the Chinook to see him.
- Mike's last meal before it happened was a car picnic: 1. sandwich on an old tea towel over his lap to avoid dropping chutney on the groin; 2. apple; 3. veg pot; 4. 20 WWII ball bearings encased in rock-solid toffee.
¶ Topic Chat
- Electric guitars herald extreme sports, never a bright, sharp cornet.
- In the past, windsurfing was regarded as extreme, but now it's BASE jumping and wingsuiting. Waterskiing feels old fashioned, like something from Baywatch with a high carbon footprint (huge speedboat to pull along a 50-year-old accountant). Mike has done wakeboarding, which is the snowboarding equivalent of waterskiing. A pathetic spectacle. Hitting that water like plunging head-first into a concrete car park. Mike was totally NCPed. Was Mike seared onto the board using hot meat tongs?
- A faddy extreme sport is something not extreme that has been made extreme, like ping pong on the edge of a volcano or biking in a favela or finding a policeman on the streets of London.
- Is taking up an extreme sport a reaction to/distraction from a meaningless existence, to holiday prawns that are barely Wagamama standard? Holiday brochures are just an email these days (take that, holiday industry!) and the pic of the sea in them is not true to the horrible dark kelp reality, with scum and feet-scouring rocks. But then Henry does return year after year to Shetland.
- Ben went to Corfu and saw a kid flying with a water jet-pack on his feet, which looked like military tech. Probably a Dutch billionaire's son who all the other beachgoers hated.
- People on jet skis may as well have a tannoy with Jeffrey Archer's voice saying "I'm a dickhead" on repeat.
- Henry could be parachuting in 45 minutes, but also would be brûléed mid-air by the RAF because he's in central London. Mike wanted to parachute as a young man but now has no desire to try it. He did bungee as a young man in a group of 4 friends in New Zealand. Matt, Mike's ultra-quizzer friend, was lashed up (not rat-arsed) at the end of a gantry and tripped over his own legs while having second thoughts, falling the wrong way up. No Goldeneye, Pierce Brosnan dive there (he would have been shaken, not stirred).
- If Henry understands physics correctly, which he doesn't, what goes up must come down, depending on which way round you're looking at it, but this is the other way around. The winding back up, like a hosepipe, while you're at the end of the rope is actually quite nice.
- Henry is put off bungeeing by his fear and distrust of harnesses, buckles, and flat ropes (straps). In the future, Henry might end up a strapmeister himself, so watch out if you see him atop a crane, heavily jaded and back on the fags. If you only notice it's Henry at the top as you're falling, get your phone out to sort your life insurance. Or, enjoy the last 45 seconds of your life plunging into a massive tiramisu. You can talk about what layer you reached with your friends after the jump. Early tests with crème brûlée didn't work because the hardest layer was first. Cottage pie is nice at first, going through the soft potato, but then there's the boiling hot mince layer, where you might get snagged on a carrot.
- Ben once did gorge walking (walking down the road looking bloody gorgeous with outward bound instructors saying "Ooh, look at you!" – a real tonic) on a Groupon deal, early in the season when it was freezing and the river level was high. Henry worries that Ben was experiencing what people go through during a tsunami. What's the sport element when you're being tossed hither and thither? The instructor did a tricky bit first and then signalled to Ben and the others, but his signal was not clear: stop or go on? The water nymphs might be in the river, calling "Ooh Bonjamin, you look really lovely today. You've perfectly judged your shorts length." to sing him to his doom. Perhaps the instructor was hoping for a quick kill on Ben, sending him over the drop when he's not strong enough to pick up a Grisham without both hands. The body language/signals for do it/don't do it are so similar, e.g. swishing hand back and forth across the throat. Ben was dragged out and shouted at in the end. Henry wonders if the guy was legit, but he did have a Land Rover.
Kelly Vivanco's Show Art
¶ Emails
- Andy from Kenilworth emails in reference to the chat in Australia about the people on a Pride march who met a provincial dad who knew what semaphore is. Andy went to a workshop in Woodbridge, Suffolk, where a group of leathery old men were constructing a Viking longship using historically accurate methods. While trying on helmets there, a helmet slipped over Andy's friend's face so he made a quip about Harold being shot in the eye. A funny joke that you might be too close to the epicentre of to laugh at (as Henry was). A provincial dad appeared and told Andy and his friend that they must be thinking of the Normans. Andy has been seething. He was incorrectly corrected. Mike is worried that the provincial dad was overheard by his brethren and will be torn to pieces. Perhaps he's doing handbrake turns all night in his Hyundai in an Asda car park.
- Emily from Gravesend emails about sideburns and duffel coats, a look she recognises as "pseudo-intellectual indie music soft boi" as she was the gal equivalent herself. Emily completes the 2004 look with a cardigan borrowed from a grandparent and a wrist full of Reading bands. The MP3 player will be playing Franz Ferdinand, who they liked before they were cool, the satchel wil have a copy of the guardian, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and a hip flask. Henry would add a bag from Fopp and is surprised to learn Fopp still exists (though bought by HMV). Henry does not have a strong sense of the 00s, as this was the period when his family were anxious to find out when he would 'get on with it'. A lost decade when he was experimenting with open-bin policies and watching a lot of The Sopranos. Henry saw Franz Ferdinand live at Brixton Academy: posturing nonsense which drove Henry to leave halfway and play a Trivial Pursuit arcade game in the bar. Henry lived in Glasgow when Scottish bands were hot. He is still a mega fan of Belle and Sebastian and got Mike into them and is seeing them live in Paris in February. Henry could never be a soft boi as his dark charisma is laced with danger, suggesting industrial metal, Berlin, vacant warehouses, dead crow in the middle with a speaker inside. What is the science of different types? Uncomfortable to realise you are a type. Looking back, we can see: Tory mod, goth, cybergoths (which Henry saw a teenage gathering of in a park in Edinburgh: steampunk, mad hair, lots of commitment, respect for Henry's green flat-fronted chinos).
¶ Jingles
- Bean Machine (15:01)
- Satire (20:34)
- Emails (37:46)
- Patreon (47:45)
¶ Sean Bean Lounge
- Weaving of the great tea towel hot air balloon (40 patrons).
¶ Listener Theme Tune
- Sheldon from Melbourne submits a doo wop version inspired by the sixties episode. Sheldon insults Henry's singing and knowledge of doo wop. Must be another Henry: Miller? Kissinger? The latter with a hard 'g' per Rory Stewart, which the Beans agree is going too far, though they will allow him to say Asia/Indonesia as Azheea/Indonezheea, but just wait till he tries ordering a Big Mac (with extra freeas) and "tha nuggatt ov tha rooster" (Mike's Middle English is really good because he dreams in it). Mike thinks the tune could be a US TV theme tune, Ben thinks it would be a Call My Bluff-style, UK 90s daytime show theme, presented by Bob Holness. Henry got more vibes of being strapped to a metal table being tortured. Ben plays it again, much like Kenny Everett did when he first heard Bohemian Rhapsody.
¶ Notable Quotes
- Well, one does put these things off, doesn't one, but actually when one does get around to it, one feels that one shouldveoneshould've done it a long time ago, actually.
- We live in an atomised society in terms of attention. We live in an attention economy.
- Your tooth story is a pickled onion thrown into the Albert Hall.
- Even if it was going well I'd clock you as a tosser if I were a seabird passing over.
- This guy's not a certified extreme sports maestro, he's a bloke who lives near a river and needs twenty quid.
- I feel like I'm just ready to remember Fopp, or have people been remembering Fopp for a while?
- Franz Ferdinand, though. Are we ready to say that they were completely shit?
- I couldn't pull off 'soft boi' because I just had too much dark charisma.
- They doffed their be-goggled metal berets.