¶ Opening Chat
- January is a time for taking up new things. Proper gymsters like Henry get annoyed by the newcomers on their weight machines.
- Ben has signed up for a 7-year-old girl sport. It's not horseback backgammon or playing in an under-8s brass band; it's ice skating, aiming for the Torvill and Dean end/appearing on Dancing on Ice. Henry wonders if Bonjo just wants to slice off fingers at the busiest time of year (the law of spoils decrees he can keep the fingers). Mike wonders if Ben just wants to show off his backless/frontless vest collection, which wasn't wanted in curling, where they eschew the plunge (and nipple tassels), being a Presbyterian, Scottish world. Curling isn't ready for the Dance of the Seven Soleros.
- Henry may have misread the cultural moment, but ice skating feels like nothing to do with it. Mike sees it as an annual thing, as in the provinces he goes ice skating most winters (twice this year) in a barn that's half ice rink and half fairground near home or Somerset House in London (classy).
- Can any human ice skate? People can hold onto a contraption these days, like the one in the bowling alley that rolls the ball for you. The biggest problems are (i) groups of lagered up young men and (ii) taller men of a certain age with confidence but no ability. Mike describes Henry as being representative of the latter, with legs like matchsticks and a torso like a spinnaker. Henry feels swirling tempests of anger at this description because he thinks of himself as having long, willowy legs, like Joanna Lumley (Mike reckons he's more like Kato from Batfink). Mike favours the 'clomp about' method.
- The show pony 14-year-old girls will be skating rings around people in their own skates. No athlete's foot ridden, hard plastic skates for them, cutting into your foot to get that athlete's foot into your bloodstream. After a while the athlete's foot hardens into a skate, or hooves.
- Mike used to be asked 'when will the other two do some stand up' and now he can tell people about the Bonjo Banjo Icetacular (bluegrass and ice dancing fusion). By the second show, it will be Ben, in traction, using animatronics and plasticisation and the back of the Zamboni to move him back and forth. The upfront costs to turn the Albert Hall into a 3-layer rink are so huge that part of the show will just be showing the audience the budget and going through the costs on a big screen. Ben's plasticised body will have a speaker within, playing episodes of Fawlty Towers because he's gone in with the Dining Experience show. No one wanted the chicken chasseur the first night though, because of what they'd seen on the ice.
- Henry sees going skating as only happening in rom-coms. So romantic to take off your partner's finger with the blade, then present it back to them with an engagement ring on. Make sure you don't take your date to Somerset House in the summer, scraping around the paving stones while the outdoor cinema audience tries to watch La La Land.
- Henry is surprised that it's a year-round activity, as he had forgotten about ice rinks and was perhaps imagining frozen-over ponds. The pain point idea in this case is ice rinks, which have been invented already. Henry often presents these pain point ideas (that already exist) to the other Beans (e.g. cheese, the mug).
¶ Topic Chat
- Ben sings 'Memory' from Cats.
- Mike's first memory is kicking through leaves in a park while living in Herongate, near Walthamstow in the East End of London. Henry hasn't heard of Herongate so assumes this is an implanted, spliced AI memory. The proof: Mike and his sister were eating Lion bars (corporate sponsorship). Wholesome? Or proof that Mike is a Mike Unit 31294X Bot? The bladerunner wouldn't even need to do the test, it would just pull Mike's trousers straight down and see that he had a little mirror thing instead of a knob. Henry has been working on his accent to embody the technician who is creating the Mikebot while watching a Lion bar advert.
- The less wholesome parts of Mike's first memory have been forgotten, like kicking through the leaves into a turd that lands on his mother's ermine coat and backheeling another onto his dad's chinos. The memory is easily transportable on a 2005 USB stick, taking up so little data for Mike to easily move it during e.g. a house move. Mike's twin sister does not have the same first memory, but Mike admits to having a dreadful memory in general.
- Mike can see deep red leaves in the memory, which Ben wonders may symbolise giving Communism a kicking at the height of the Cold War when Mike was a boy, in East London, which is towards Russia from places that are further away from Russia in that direction. Near the ports, at a time when Gorbachev had a port wine birthmark. It's all coming together. A nest of spies. Perhaps Mike is a failed prototype superspy.
- Henry tries to make Mike remember an earlier memory than his first memory. Perhaps getting his head screwed on from a conveyor belt, shortly before the release of Snakes on a Plane in 2006. The engineers were interns who were excited about The Strokes and wearing tight jeans.
- Henry's first memory is of looking up through the top of a cot at a hovering teddy bear. Though Henry was born in London (obviously – the doctor who looked at the pulsar pic/sonar/Pixar sketch/ultrasound saw that he was holding a ticket for the LSO at the Barbican and was wearing the latest britches), he then lived in France from age 1 so his earliest memories are there.
- One of those early memories is Henry standing in his house in France, shouting loudly to try to make the windows smash. Is this disturbing? Like something from The Tin Drum or a megavillain origin story or a bit Stephen Hendry/Stephen King. The same house had an infestation of ants that needed to be hoovered up. Supervillan stuff, but sheer laziness means Henry hasn't yet designed a giant laser or freeze-o-ray.
- Was Henry a prison baby, perhaps in The Bastille? Was he trying to break out by screaming? Was he convicted in utero, perhaps spotted doing the crime on the ultrasound, as irrefutable CCTV.
- Henry also remembers a brilliant Fisher Price toy castle that is still played with by his nieces today. It had a flag on a metal spring that went ba-doinnggg and was so good he wanted to take the huge castle into bed at night so as to never have to stop playing with it. He wanted to embrace his lair and has a photo of himself as a boy clinging on to the castle in bed.
- Ben had a recurring aural nightmare throughout his childhood. Did this predict his future as podcast supremo? As a premature baby, was the sound of the nightmare the sound of the incubator he was in? Mike makes the machine-y sound, to Ben's distress. Henry makes a similar sound, punctuated by an air traffic controller giving instructions for a plane to land.
- Ben's first non-aural memory is either his first day at school or his mum's tricycle with a cage/basket that Ben was put in, which is a bit Childcatcher but also ahead of its time, as Mike sees a lot of bike 'megabuckets' with kids in around Exeter.
- Real memories don't bear thinking about, so best to just get yours cleaned up in the lab and put some autumnal leaves in there. This episode was brought to you by Fisher Price, Lion bars, and muesli.
- Ben has a particular memory of being at his happiest. Mike's would be the birth of his children (snore!) when a wise owl came in and gave him a hug and a lifetime supply of Lion bars. Ben's moment is after Henry's stag do in Berlin: Ben had a post-stag mini solo holiday and cycled to a beer garden next to a lake and had a beer alone (not that time he shared a room with Mike and would wake in the night and look at his face as he slept). Henry and Mike getting out of Ben's hair enabled that utopia. Mike was jealous when Ben sent him a pic of the beer. Is it depressing that the moment was solo and chemically imbued? Shouldn't it involve the birth of Mike's children in some way?
- Mike has some big rose-tinters and justifiers on. We've all done some boo-boos (like those hikers Mike and Henry murdered last summer and shoved in a (98% sure) disused quarry). All justice is based on asking people for their memories but all scientific study into how much we can trust our memories tells us we can't trust them at all. People are so suggestible, e.g. the baboon in a tutu experiment (but enough about how Henry lost his virginity (a key memory that hopefully Ben will have some day)).
- When Henry and Ben were in the all-you-can-eat babuffet, they tried to get them to fill up on the babooganush and baboon head rolls. Henry asks Ben to remember a lunch they had at The Chop House, when a baboon in a tutu walked past their table. Like doing a podcast with Derren Brown! Mike tries to access his first memory again, turns out it was Terry Waite in a tutu who gave him his first Lion bar.
- Pam and her friend Wesley give pushback to the 'baboon in a tutu' idea by barking. Wesley is a Border Collie who is NOT studding Pam – they have a platonic relationship and Wesley is appalled at what Ben has suggested. Platonic in the sense that breeding aparatus has been removed such as Pam's four-poster bed, her heart-shaped mirrors, Prosecco fridge, oyster bar, Luther Vandross CD, and 'Just Did It' T-shirt.
Kelly Vivanco's Show Art
¶ Emails
- Elaine from Market Deeping once worked with an epic liar called Eric who would claim to have mates in the RAF who picked him up for weekends away in their Harrier jump jet because of his small garden. Extraordinary lie to tell as a grown-up. One time they had to rescue someone from the top of a glacier by hanging from the bottom of the jet and scooping the person up. He also told lies about Timmy, his Jack Russell, who he had been teaching judo. Playground-level lies.
- Call out for more liar emails.
- Henry's lie about going to the North Pole resulted in more lies such as using his dad's "special plane" to get there. A Harrier jet will get you out of all sorts of corners, narratively speaking.
- John had a friend at school who said Michael Jackson was his uncle and could get him a signed cassette, which never materialised. The uncle space is so hard to disprove (blood? non-blood?) and these spaces of ambiguity allow their fantasies to roam free.
- Philip emails about the end theme in OrganisedCrime from the King's Singers. Philip is deep in the choral world and was perplexed that the Beans didn't know the singers. He compares it to not knowing The Beatles, which Mike thinks isn't so and is more like being upset that people haven't heard of Johan Thistlethwaite when you're really into fly-fishing. A lot of emails on this subject because people who love choral singing really love it. Henry is confused by a cappella, barbershop and choral and the differences (or not) and feels that there is maybe a problem. The problem is that the Beans did not give due deference to a world-class, Grammy winning group. Henry tries to remember the types of singer: tenors, bass (pronounced like the fish), Fiat Punto. He loves the sound of a castrato on Christmas Day, encased in tiramisu. Ben made a tiramisu on Christmas Day and Mike is planning one for New Year's Eve. Ben only wants to eat layered foods from now on: moussaka, double-decker shepherd's pie, club sandwich, Big Mac, soup (if layers of different viscosities).
- Anna emails about Ben's penknife tale from Laundry. Ben picked it up from the Lost Property place in Newport on Christmas Eve. Anna was in an airport check-in when her brother produced a Nerf gun from a bag, which her dad grabbed and accidentally shot the security staff member in the head.
- Andy's friend from Hong Kong put pomelo into a fish ceviche starter and rammed half a one into the cloaca of the Christmas goose. Andy loved both courses. Ben wonders why there is a gaping maw instead of a cloaca – what are they doing with all the removed cloacas? The cloaca mountain! Are they building a portal to a place where chickens can speak (in the voice of Mel Gibson)?
¶ Sean Bean Lounge
- The big "Eat a Huge Bowl of Cream" event (64 patrons)
¶ Listener Theme Tune
- Jack from Bristol offers a rendition in the style of Django Reinhardt's Minor Swing and also a switcheroo.
¶ Jingles
- Bean Machine (14:04)
- Canada (14:36)
- London (24:28)
- Emails (43:47)
- Patreon (57:53)
¶ Notable Quotes
- It's all plunge with you.
- I'd also have the Pembrokeshire crown if it wasn't for that little bitch, Sally Ronson!
- Wait a minute, that's not a Lion bar!
- Generally speaking, in London, you face out from the centre. You keep Nelson behind you.
- What do you call that first photo of a baby where it looks like a disturbing alien?
- You can't take a castle to bed.
- Even today, he is more machine than man!
- Crisp, sunny, blue skies... a ticket to Hitler's bunker in your pocket!
- A liquid lasagne? It can't be done!
- We are going to do the meat dance. Not that one!
- Chicken run wasn't a fiction. It was a warning!