Answer Me This! Podcast

Happy birthday to AMT, turning 18 years old today! Which means our baby is now an adult, and we are celebrating by….

🎉 BRINGING THE PODCAST BACK! 🎉

Hear all about it (and/or there’s a transcript is at the bottom of this post):

We’re going to try it out with new monthly episodes on the last Thursday of the month, for the next three months. So the show will return with AMT402 on 30 January 2025, 403 on 27 February, 404 on 27 March…

And after that? Well, if we’re enjoying it, and you’re enjoying it, we hope to continue. We need your help, though, in the following three ways:

1. Send us your questions. This podcast depends on them! Send them in writing or as a voice note to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com – ideally including the formula “Helen and/or Olly, answer me this”, and let us know a name (pseudonyms are fine) and pronouns to use for you. As always, your questions can be about all sorts of things: pop culture, history, moral dilemmas, romance, workplace feuds, etiquette, myths, whatever is causing your brow to furrow.
   
   Also, if you want to fill us in on how you are and what’s been happening in your life in our absence, please do.
   
2. a) Tell people the show is back. Social media? Great! Old media? Fantastic. Writing it across your face and running around the supermarket? Could work. We’d love for listeners old and new to hear that AMT is returning.
   
   b) Resubscribe in your podcast app. And set to auto-download new episodes while you’re there. Nowadays a lot of the podcast-listening apps will stop updating you with new episodes if you haven’t recently listened to one. Don’t let ’em!
   
3. Fund the show at patreon.com/answermethis. Your contributions will help keep it going. And we have some sweet extra perks for you coming up just as soon as the show is up and running again.

That’s all our demands! For now. We’re excited to answer your questions again, and to witter in your ears while you commute or work out or do the gardening or nurse the baby or fall asleep.

H&O

Transcript:

Olly: Happy birthday, Helen.

Helen: Happy Birthday, Olly – or happy birthday to our child, Answer Me This, turning 18 today!

Olly: It is the 18th birthday of the show, which means the show can get married without parental permission, it can pawn its own furniture, and it can legally buy pornography.

Helen: At last! 

Olly: It may no longer be covered on family travel insurance, you have to check that out. 

Helen: But it’s a podcast, so you don’t have to worry about it.

Olly: In terms of being 18: because the show was first released on January 2nd 2007. I was only seven years older than 18 myself. And now I’m seven years away from being 50. 

Helen: Ah, the passage of time: unstoppable, and yet will we get used to it? Absolutely not.

Olly: Horrendous. I know some of you will be excited just to be seeing and hearing from us. So you’ll have one question in mind already, which is: “Is Answer Me This coming back? Oh my God, is Answer Me This coming back? Argh! It’s 2025, is Answer Me This coming back? And the answer to that is: Yes. What we’ve decided to do is three brand new episodes of Answer Me This. 

Helen: The last Thursday of the month is the new Answer Me This day.

Olly: Our 402nd canonical episode will be ready for you on Thursday 30th January.

Helen: Why are we doing this, Olly? Why now? For me, it’s because in the autumn of 2024, I was on tour with The Allusionist around Britain. And I encountered a lot of people who say, “Oh, I really miss Answer Me This, and it got me through a really difficult time in my life, and politics is scaring me, and I’ve redownloaded it.” I saw a friend called Nikesh, who I knew because he had been an Answer Me This listener, then we got to know each other in real life, and he said, “I’m still not satisfied with the answer you gave to my question.”

Olly: What was the question?

Helen: The question was: “What does Lucozade taste of?” 

Olly: Oh, right. Okay. Did we not give a firm answer? 

Helen: Just glucose with unidentified artificial fruit? Not good enough for him.

Olly: Right, okay. Yeah, it’s just sort of fizzy orange and sugar, isn’t it?

Helen: Not good enough for him, Olly. Not good enough. And I thought, we’ve got to come back and fix it.” 

Olly: That’s the quest! 

Helen: We’ve got to get our best lab technicians on this. I often think of a Disney question and think, Oh, where’s Olly Mann when I need him? Just this morning as I was brushing my teeth, I thought: where is Cruella de Vil’s wealth from?

Olly: I imagine that would be in the novel, not in the film, right?

Helen: Hmm, okay.

Olly: Like, because the book’s quite old. I reckon there were probably pages on Cruella de Vil’s inherited wealth that Disney rightfully were like, kids don’t care. Kids don’t care. Kids don’t ask questions. We did an episode of Today in History with the Retrospectors about Sesame Street, and it’s the thing of when they first piloted it, they weren’t sure whether the Muppets and the humans should interact, because kids would ask, “Why is there a giant bird but a small human? But Bert and Ernie are human, but they’re smaller than the humans?” And it’s like, no they won’t, because kids don’t think like that. It’s funny, isn’t it? Because the stereotype is that children ask questions all day long. But actually, when you think how many things they could be bamboozled by, there’s so much they simply are not curious about.

Helen: Yeah, they’re like, “No, I take for granted that humans and puppets interact at all scales, but: what is wind?” And then you’re like, what is wind? Oh no! I know nothing!

Olly: Anyway! You will recall that the format is you can ask us anything so long as your email or voice note ends with the formula “Helen and/or Olly, answer me this”. It can be a personal dilemma. It can be a matter of the heart. It can be about best practice, or etiquette….

Helen: Yeah – pop culture, history…

Olly: …Trivia, myth busting…

Helen: Logistics… 

Olly: So here’s how you submit questions, just in case you’ve forgotten, send your voice memos or your emails to answer me this podcast at 

Helen: googlemail. com. That’s the 2007 creeping in. Gmail works as well, I think. Gmail will reach us. 

Olly: It will reach us, but we’re not going to change it because we wrote the jingles in 2007. 

Helen: We love it when you send questions in your voice. So just record a voice note and attach it to an email. 

Olly: And let us know what’s happening in your lives as well.

Olly: Like, it’s not just about questions, is it? We want feedback, particularly Dave from Smethwick. If you’ll ever answer our call to return, please 

Helen: Yeah. Matthew Seymour from Colchester: what’s he doing, what’s he been thinking, in the last 15 plus years? 

Olly: But after we’ve done these three once a month episodes, will we continue after?

Helen: It’s a pilot a scheme, of sorts.

Olly: Exactly. It’s genuinely a case of whether we’re enjoying it again and whether you guys are enjoying it again.

Helen: And if all the questions have been answered – it’s possible.

Olly: Do you think we might complete all questions? It’s not happened to Question Time, so I think we’re probably okay. 

Helen: I bet they’re recycling, which we try to avoid to do, although there was that time when we did that “what’s the little pocket in jeans for?” more than once.

Olly: Yeah, we did that twice. In terms of playing your part to making sure that this continues longer than the three episodes, I mean obviously if we don’t enjoy it, then we’ll stop and there’s nothing you can do about it, but in terms of your part: what you can do is tell your friends, if you’re excited that Answer Me This is back, get on social media and tell your friends.

Helen: Tell everyone you know; tell strangers in the street; run around like you’re in It’s a Wonderful Life, “Answer Me This is back!” 

Olly: And then of course, there’s sending us some money. This is our way really of testing whether this is going to be like the Oasis reunion or like when some people who were once in Atomic Kitten reformed to play in the student union. We don’t know which is going to be –

Helen: Atomic Kitten! I’d watch Atomic Kitten.

Olly: Would you pay $5 a month? It’s the crucial question.

Helen: Er… No. But if I was in that student union, I wouldn’t pay five dollars to leave. I’d stand around and watch Atomic Kitten.

Olly: It’s just hard to know where we’ll fall between those two stools. There’s only one way to find out, and that is by you guys, if you’re excited, going to patreon.com/answermethis. There is only one tier at the moment, and it promises you nothing in return. At the moment, we just want to see if people would be prepared to support us for $5 per month, because if enough people do, then obviously we can actually justify doing this on financial grounds.

Helen: And if enough of you do chip in, then you will get some extra shit.

Olly: Yeah, there’ll be something.

Helen: Oh yeah.

Olly: patreon.com/answermethis. And another thing that’s very important that you need to do right now is follow the podcast again in your app of choice. Some of you are listening to this on the podcast feed. So you’ve done that already. Well done. Congratulations. You still need to go to your podcast app and press follow like the old days. Otherwise, you might not get our return. 

Helen: Yes, it’s quite possible that the podcast app has kicked off your subscription, even if you left it there as a relic of the good times. 

Olly: It kicked me off. I am not subscribed to our show anymore. I just checked. 

Helen: Oh, so cold.

Olly: So resubscribe.

Helen: Yes. And then meet us back at AnswerMeThisPodcast.com because if you need ways of listening, it’s always there as well as in the pod apps.

Olly: Martin the sound bag – Martin the sound bag, Martin the sound man – he’ll come back as well. 

Helen: Yeah, if the money’s right, he’ll deign to join us.

Olly: That’s why the $5 per month has been set. Minimum five grand to get Martin back on board. Good. Okay. Right. So circle that date in your Filofaxes, everybody. Thursday 30th January for more Answer Me This.

Helen: more Answer Me This, what a blessing. And it’s lovely to see you again, Olly. I’ve missed this, I’ve missed answering the questions, I’ve missed the listeners. Ahhh.

Olly: Happy new year.

Helen: Happy new year!

Tags: birthday, huge news, most important news ever, news, podcasts

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