We’ve been moonlighting in the latest episode of the Dave Weekly podcast, having a lovely chat with presenter Ben Shires.
Have a listen, do: click HERE to download it from iTunes, or you can click HERE to stream it from the Dave website.
Ben Shires: easily pleased
On Saturday 8th October, something very thrilling will be happening in Oxford, even more exciting than when the Harry Potter film crew rolled into town*, or when Inspector Morse completed the crossword, or when I saw Chelsea Clinton telling a photographer to leave her alone as she walked to the library.
Oh dear, perhaps I have built it up too much. But we are nonetheless tremendously excited that at 2.30pm we will be doing a reading from the Answer Me This! book at Waterstone’s Oxford, and temporarily dragging down the tone of the august seat of learning with our juvenile bullshit.
Even more excitingly, Martin the Sound Man will be joining us, to perform a few jingles and ditties.
EVEN MORE EXCITINGLY, Waterstone’s have told us that there will be free burritos for earlycomers!
So, this post could instead have read: Come to Waterstone’s for a free burrito. Then sit back and digest, lulled by the sound of us reading to you Jackanory-wise.
*by which I don’t mean THIS. Although at the time we did cause a similar-sized stir.
** Click here for Episode 187 **
Aaah, this question from Sean takes us back over 100 episodes, to AMT86, when newlywed Kate asked us what title she should bestow upon her new lady wife. Being imaginative sorts, we suggested ‘wife’. Let’s see what we can pull out of the bag for Shaun:
I have the gay and next year I am marrying another man who also has the gay, and at this happy time in our lives we’re beginning to look forward and are on the borders of ‘thinking about a family of our own’.
Of course, being modern 21st-century types we’re less concerned with ‘how will we feed it and not let it die from our own ineptitude’, we’re much more concerned with superficial things like naming conventions.
Once we have adopted/surrogated/otherwise legally procured our children we’ve been wondering what we should encourage them to call us; it seems that calling us Dad and Dad or Daddy and Daddy would be confusing. It feels that we should each ‘own’ a term. I’m vetoing Pops, Popa and Papa. And of course we’re vetoing ‘mum’.
So, answer me this: if you had two dads, what would you call them to differentiate between one and the other?
I call both my parents ‘Sir’, of course. That’s de rigueur where I come from.
Readers, do you have – or are you one half of – a pair of paters? Please go to the comments to tell us how your own nomenclature situation shook down.
By the way, Shaun, the choice might not even be yours in the end; children tend to be fairly imaginative in this area, so whichever tasteful or humorous titles you opt for may be passed over in favour of a truly horrific bundle of infantile phonemes. But you’ll learn to love it. Or at least your defences will be so broken by the daily exertions of childcare that you won’t be able to correct it until it’s too late. Either way, you’ll be stuck with it forever, so you might as well not worry about it now.
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** Click here for Episode 183 **
If this isn’t all too Inception for you… perhaps you would like to hear a podcast about podcasting?
It’s a special edition of The Radio Academy‘s weekly podcast RadioTalk. The show is usually presented by benign Brummie overlord Trevor Dann, and is typically about Important Issues relating to the world of radio, such as, ‘DAB’s a bit of a mixed blessing, isn’t it?’ and ‘Where is Salford, anyway?’
But this episode is presented by us, and we took our opportunity at the reins to talk all about podcasting, and ignore radio almost entirely. On a show called RadioTalk! Hahahahahhaha! Hear for yourself:
You can also download it from the Radio Academy’s website here, or subscribe to it on iTunes.
We were very lucky to be joined by some awesome guests from the world of British podcasting: The Guardian‘s Francesca Panetta (producer of the Sony Award-winning Hackney Podcast); Luke Moore from the wildly popular Football Ramble; Andrew Collins out of Collings and Herrin and BBC 6 Music; and James Stirling, producer of our beloved Adam and Joe Show. We even managed to grab a few words with The Bugle’s Andy Zaltzman. How DID we manage to blag that?
P.S. If you enjoyed this, you can also hear us on the panel of the BBC’s College of Production podcast about podcasting, which you can find here.
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So, Helen and Martin got married last weekend.
I’ve been waiting to blog about it because I was waiting for the right photos. These beauties were taken by Rick, Helen’s brother, and only emailed to me today. He was lugging around a camera the size of a labrador at the wedding, so I’d suspected they would be worth waiting for.
Aw.
It was a really charming event, perhaps the loveliest wedding I’ve ever been to, and VERY Helen and Martin. They were super-relaxed – greeting guests as we arrived at the service, rather than making a grand entrance, and cracking jokes throughout – and the grub was a slap-up home-made afternoon tea, washed down with a LOT of pink champagne (they’re not drinkers). Oh, and a fish and chip van at 11pm. And a cheeseboard. Awesome.
The ceremony was al fresco, in a beautiful park in Kent (alongside a craft fair and fete – and even a meet-and-greet with celebrity porkchop PEPPA PIG!), but luckily the rain held back for the ceremony, despite hilarious and dramatic thunderclaps as the happy couple made their way down the aisle. Well, if you are going to have a resolutely secular wedding at Easter time, God will make His feelings known…
Back at the Zaltzman family pile, there were cracking tributes by various folks including friends-of-the-podcast Alex Thomas and Andy Zaltzman, but, it must be said, Helen and Martin’s dads pulled off the funniest speeches of the night.
Helen and Martin are now on honeymoon somewhere in the States, no doubt listening to discordantly intellectual audiobooks as they speed down the highway, stopping frequently to photograph funny road signs, or further snapshots of Martin sucking yet another ice lolly that looks a bit like a penis. They claim not to yet know what their new surname will be, but for me – as for all true AMT! fans – they will be Forever Zaltzwick.
Well done, chaps.
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A common entry in our mailbox is:
“Answer me this: which other podcasts do you listen to?”
Below is a semi-frequently updated alphabetical list of shows we like; do add your own favourites in the comments, too.
99% Invisible
Adam and Joe
BAFTA
Betty in the Sky With a Suitcase
Bright Club
The Bugle
Bullseye
The Business
The Daily Bacon
Desert Island Discs
The Digested Read
The Dinner Party
The Empire Podcast
The Food Programme
Geoff Lloyd’s Hometime Show
Getting Better Acquainted
Great Lives
Here’s the Thing with Alec Baldwin
Hidden Kitchens
Ian Collins Wants a Word
I Like You
Jordan, Jesse, Go!
Little Atoms
Love + Radio
Making History
Mark Kermode & Simon Mayo’s Film Reviews
Media Talk
The Media Show
The Moth
New Yorker Out Loud
On The Media
Picturehouse
Radiolab
Radio Talk
Savage Love
Shift Run Stop
Strangers
Third Coast International Audio Festival
This American Life
Witness
WTF with Mark Maron
Also, you can hear us talking about the internet every week on BBC 5 Live’s Let’s Talk About Tech podcast; Helen hosts the monthly Sound Women podcast; and don’t forget, Martin the Sound Man moonlights on several other podcasts, including The Sound of the Ladies, Brain Train and The Global Lab.
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And lo, we have made our own advert for it:
Answer Me This! The Book is now available from allsome good bookshops, as well as online emporiae – click HERE for links to those, and to read a few sample pages.
if you have accrued any affection for us at all over the past almost-four years of podcast, pleeeeeeeease buy a copy!
Video thanks: Ian the bar trainer, Jalin Patel.
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We’re back on October 7th. Click here to catch up!
So, as we told you at the end of Episode 150, we’ve been asked to assist in the breaking of a world record. Stop laughing, it’s true! Finally, our athleticism will be recognised…oh, leave us alone. It’s just like school sports day all over again.
We will, in fact, be lending ourselves to what is being called in some quarters the world’s biggest three-way. Raise your minds from the gutter, please, for this feat is in fact an attempt to break the world record for the longest three-way phone conversation, viz:
At 2pm on Thursday 30th September, cricket legend Phil Tufnell, comedy legend Patrick Monahan, and boobs legend Jodie Marsh will install themselves in the middle of Waterloo, Victoria and London Bridge stations; whereupon they will commence talking to each other on the phone, and they won’t stop for 24 hours.
But in case they are flagging at the final furlong, we are being dispatched on the Friday morning to perk up their chatter with some of your questions. Summon your unparalleled inquisitiveness and put the results into a comment below, or in an email to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com entitled ‘Phil/Jodie/Patrick, answer me this‘ [delete names as appropriate]. Don’t tell us you have nothing you’ve ever wanted to ask Jodie Marsh, we know you’re lying.
You can watch a live feed of the World’s Biggest Threeway, follow it on twitter.com/powwownow and Facebook, and find out a load more about it at www.upforathreewaycall.com. If you’re passing through one of the stations, you can even admire the record-attempters in action, and perhaps give them an energy drink or calf massage. And with your question-asking help, by the end of next week the three will find themselves in this illustrious company and we can all pretend they couldn’t have done it without us.
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We can’t let Great British Questions go quite yet. Here’s the last hurrah from our video-making road trip:
Here are responses to a few of the questions you asked about the series:
• “Where did you get your sunglasses from?” They were 3 for £10 from a market stall in Camden. Nothing but the best for us.
• “What’s wrong with Olly’s eyes?” Nothing! They are both entirely fine, with the full complement of pupils, irises and whites.
• “What happened to the cheese-rolling where they run down a steep hill?” Shut down because of health and safety, alas. Watching this, we simply cannot understand why…
• “Where’s Martin the Sound Man?” He has a real job, you know.
• “How funny are the YouTube closed captions?” VERY funny. Everybody, if you haven’t already, go and watch the videos again but click on the red ‘CC’ button and select ‘Transcribe Audio’.
Additional things we learnt on the road:
• In the war of the regional plum loaves, Lincolnshire plum loaf beats Lancashire plum loaf hands down.
• If there’s anything more depressing than Blackpool on a Friday night, it is Blackpool on a Thursday night when everything is shut and there’s not even a single stag-night livening the place up.
• During the trip, we sampled many Great British Breakfasts, much to the chagrin of our arteries. Standards varied wildly, and to our surprise, our favourite was to be found at the Preston Marriott. An entire roomful of self-service hot and cold breakfast buffet? We’ll take it! In fact, we will take far more than we want to eat, just on principle.
• Whereas the Bath Travelodge serves your breakfast in a bag. This feels disproportionately dehumanising.
• The hotels we liked the best were the White Hart, Moretonhampstead, Devon; Ten Hill Place, Edinburgh; and the Westmoreland Hotel, Tebay services – we defy you to tell us of a nicer motorway services hotel in the country!
• This year, all hotel toiletries smell of lemongrass. What’s your tip for the top scent for mini-shampoo in 2011?
• Top in-car entertainment: Backstreet Boys greatest hits; Fern Britton’s autobiography audiobook.
• Deep-fried Mars Bars are surprisingly nice. Deep-fried Galaxy bars are even nicer. I’m unlikely ever to submit my arteries to such an experience again, but if I did, I’d like to take a punt on deep-fried Snickers being the best of all.
So that’s it! Many thanks to Tess Longfield and Rachel Aked of VisitBritain for setting the whole up, and to you lot for watching.
Here is the fifth and final episode of Helen and Olly’s Great British Questions:
In order of splashdown, the temples of hygiene we visited are:
• The Round Room at the Portobello Hotel, London. The tub in question is known as a ‘Victorian bathing machine’, which is appropriately sexy-sounding for a room with a circular bed in it.
• Garderobe at Little Moreton Hall, Congleton, Cheshire. We can see why garderobes like this fell out of favour: 1) very drafty; 2) it’s not nice surrounding your home with a moat of shit; 3) danger of buttock-splinters.
• The Ladies’ Room at the George Hotel, Stamford, Lincolnshire. Note to all of you: if you’re planning on filming yourself monologuing in a public convenience, make sure there’s nobody else in it first.
• The sewers, Brighton. If you want to go on one of the regular sewer tours, book soon because they fill up months in advance. Especially Valentine’s Day.
• Little Chef, Popham. If more than one person is using the talking lavatories at once, the combined effect is quite hectoring, so it’s not for the faint-hearted.
• Castle Drogo, Devon, a 1920s folly with a very squirty bathtub and, downstairs, a fantastic collection of copper jelly-moulds.
• Car-park loos at the Eden Project, Cornwall. Sure, other people go there for the indoor rainforest, the world’s largest greenhouse, Sir Robert McAlpine’s iconic domes; we just go for the bogs.
• Bovine sewage-works at Rodda’s dairy farm, Cornwall. Watching a giant shit-stirrer is surprisingly relaxing – like a massive, stinky office toy.
• Hotel Missoni, Edinburgh, where even the bathwater comes out stripy.
• The Roman baths and the Thermae Bath Spa, Bath. It’s a big win for the city of Bath.
We’re also flushed with thanks to:
The nice gentlemen at the Hotel Missoni and Rodda’s, for patiently agreeing to our various ridiculous requests.
Rachel Bowers at the Thermae Bath Spa, for kindly filming us in our bathers – how did her eyes survive?
And the rubber duckie of gratitude goes to Tess Longfield and Rachel Aked of VisitBritain.
Put your slippers on, sit in your comfiest chair and make a nice brew, because it’s time for Episode Four of Helen and Olly’s Great British Questions:
In which you will find us visiting:
• Brighton seafront, where the rain poured, and so did the tea.
• Twinings on the Strand in London, a veritable embassy of tea.
• Braunston in Rutland, England’s smallest county. A big paper plate of cakes and two cups of tea for £1.50? That, friends, is why Britain is still great.
• Emma Bridgewater, Stoke-on-Trent, where we were instructed that tea can get you laid. If only it were that simple.
• Tregothnan tea plantation, Cornwall, where they are considering building a tea theme park. Please, Tregothnan. MAKE THIS HAPPEN.
• Grasmere in the Lake District, home of Sarah Nelson’s Gingerbread, a legendary snack with a secret recipe. I guess Sarah Nelson is the English equivalent of Colonel Sanders.
• The Balmoral hotel, Edinburgh. Apparently having tea here features in one of those ‘1000 things to do before you die’ lists, so we’re now one step closer to the End.
Let’s raise a cup of char to the people who helped us along the way:
Stephen Twining and Matthew Rice – we’d like to see them face off against other in a duel to determine who is the quintessential English gent;
Marion, who showed us around the Emma Bridgewater factory and taught us the full birthing cycle of their beautiful ceramics – almost as demanding as the human one;
Neil Bennett, head gardener at the Tregothnan estate, who had a heavy cold and should probably have been safely tucked up indoors rather than traipsing around the huge estate with us;
Joanne Wilson from Sarah Nelson’s Gingerbread, a woman who can wrap a stack of gingerbread in paper at the speed of light. You might not think this exciting, but, like the teapot-knobbing, when you see it live you could watch it for hours;
Harry Fernandes at the Balmoral hotel, for letting us have a big fancy tea, climb up onto the roof, and pretending that we weren’t just a pair of overgrown five-year-olds;
and an extra portion of Jammy Dodgers goes to Tess Longfield and Rachel Aked of VisitBritain.
Please return next Tuesday for the final installment of Great British Questions, which is all about Great British Bathrooms; and below are some photos from our tea tour.
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After the showbiz glitz of last week’s episode, this week’s installment of Helen and Olly’s Great British Questions has a more intimate agenda:
In order of appearance, here’s where we go during our Great British love-in (in which we play a couple FOR DEMONSTRATION PURPOSES ONLY):
• the Cerne Abbas giant, Dorset – the earliest known NSFW field in Britain!
• Brighton, to hang out with drunkards. It’s a pretty sexy place – after all, George IV built his amazing personal shag-palace there.
• The Assembly Rooms in Stamford, Lincolnshire. Didn’t score ourselves any husbands, though; the only man there was the old chap superintending the Saturday afternoon book sale.
• The Heartwood School of Woodcarving in Port Talbot, Wales. If you want to carve your own spoon of love, or get someone else to do it for you, you can email spoon-carver extraordinaire Sharon Littley HERE, or find out more about the traditional Welsh lovespoons in her book.
• Boat trip up the River Thames, a very pleasant way to travel through central London if you’re not in a hurry.
• Picnic at Penrith Castle, Cumbria – an unlikely thing to find in the middle of an ordinary-looking housing estate!
• The Cumberland Pencil Museum in Keswick, Cumbria. Don’t go there if your pencil collection has an inferiority complex already.
• The Museum of Surgery in Edinburgh, after which you’ll see we didn’t walk up Arthur’s Seat.
• Punting in Oxford, thanks to the Magdalen Bridge Boathouse – who also very kindly lent us hats with which to accessorise this beautiful scene.
• Grasmere in the Lake District. William Wordsworth’s signature restaurant can be found here. Apparently they only serve daffodils.
• The Jane Austen Centre in Bath, where they hold the annual Mr Darcy Wet Shirt Contest. Ok, well we maintain that they should.
• Chesil Beach, Dorset out of On Chesil Beach
• The Eden Project, Cornwall, inspiration for Nelly’s hit ‘Hot in Herre’.
• The London-Edinburgh sleeper train, which is a bit like North By Northwest only with a complimentary sponge-bag rather than Eva Marie Saint.
• Glastonbury, Somerset, where we met the marvellous Jacqui Winn of the Witchcraft Emporium, approximately a cross between a herbalist’s and a branch of Ann Summers. If you’re keen to follow Jacqui’s advice, damiana is the herb you’re after, although we have yet to try it so can’t vouch for its effectiveness. Still, it’s a lot cheaper than fake Viagra off the internet!
• And finally, we wind up in the Westmoreland Hotel, Cumbria, which is the first motorway services hotel we’ve ever been to where you could even contemplate having a romantic night.
We also need to bestow affection upon:
Chay Allen for propelling our punt, because we sure as hell couldn’t have done it ourselves without injury;
Jill Collinge, for showing us Stamford then standing politely by as Helen did stupid impressions of Beyonce;
and the loves of our lives, Tess Longfield and Rachel Aked of VisitBritain. If you love the UK as much as VisitBritain do, join the online love-in at their Facebook page at facebook.com/LoveUK.
Please return next Tuesday for Great British Questions Episode Four: Tea; and for more scenes from our romantic mini-break, peruse the photos below.
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