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:
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.
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!
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.
It’s Answer Me This Episode 399 which means next episode will be Answer Me This Episode 400, so we not only want your QUESTIONS, we want you to send us your AMT memories. Did our answers to your questions helped or hurt your life? Did you made any friends through the podcast? Did you start your own podcast? What’s the weirdest place or oddest thing you were doing while listening to the show. Tell us all! Record yourself or write it down and deliver it to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com.
Today we learn about:
ball pits
pickled onion pits
the quantum mechanical reading of The Famous Five
secret filming when cameras were still enormous
learning to knit
tuning a church bell
knobbing
being lost in SeaWorld
cheetahs’ pet dogs
and lashings of ginger beer.
In today’s Bonus Bit of Crap on the App – available for Apple and Android – we check in on the latest in celebrity ballpits, courtesy of Cara Delevingne (check out the video below).
Hear our other work:
• Olly hosts several podcasts, and you can find them all at ollymann.com. Subscribe to his all new daily show The Retrospectors!
• Helen makes The Allusionist, an entertainment show about language, and Veronica Mars Investigations, recapping every episode of Veronica Mars from the beginning – now halfway through season 4 hurtling towards completion.
• Martin makes music – including a new EP – which you can hear palebirdmusic.com, on the Pale Bird podcast, and on Spotify etc. His brand new podcast Neutrino Watch is different every time you download it. You can also join him in contemplating the work of every song by Tom Waits Tom Waits in Song By Song, and he produced and composed the kids’ science podcast Maddie’s Sound Explorers, hosted by Maddie Moate.
Buy AMT episodes 1-200, our six special albums including AMT Holiday for your summer staycation and Sports Day for these ballsporty times, and our Best Of compilations from 2007-2015 at answermethisstore.com.
One last time: send us your QUESTIONS, in writing or as voice recordings, to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com for us to answer in our final episode. And don’t forget to send us your AMT memories. Deadline for both is the end of July 2021.
We’ll be back with a retro AMT in your feed (except for if you listen on Google Podcasts for some unfathomable reason) on 22 July and then AMT400 lands on 5 August 2021. Hankies ready, for crying, waving, or cleaning up after yourself.
Helen & Olly
••• AMT399 Child-Friendly Rating: 73%. A handful of swears. Discussion of balls, Dicks, Fannies and bells, but NOT LIKE THAT! •••
Please do check out our albums: the new AMT Love, and the eternal classics Sports Day, Jubilee, Holiday and Christmas (’tis the season! The completely wrong season).
All the albums are new material that has not appeared on the podcast; and they are for sale on iTunes, Amazon and answermethisstore.com.
You can also buy our first 200 episodes on iTunes and at the AMT store; and exclusive to our store are our previous Best Of episodes from each year.
Any purchases help to support the show!
Catch up on the 131 most recent AMT episodes right here, and on your podlisteningservice of choice.
Here’s what you can expect from the AMT Love album:
The album features a whole hour of love, sex, dating and genitals, and it’s all completely new AMT material that has never appeared on the podcast. Such as:
♥ Is it appropriate to buy sexy clothes for your mum? ♥ How do you make putting on a condom fun? ♥ Just what is in that liquid squirting out of your girlfriend? ♥ When you’ve lost your engagement ring, how best to style it out? ♥ Is your partner’s schoolgirl fetish something you should worry about? It’s not like he’s a teacher – oh, he is? Oh. ♥ How do you set up a blind date when you’re a blind dater? ♥ How can anyone feel horny at the prospect of a vagina bristling with sharp, spiky horns? ♥ What’s the best point of a wedding ceremony to call it off? ♥ How do they come up with all those lines on Take Me Out? ♥ What is your exhibitionist housemate really trying to show you? ♥ How many holes should there be in a penis?
Here’s a little preview:
Any further questions?
♥ Is this album suitable for me if I’m not at all in the mood for love, sex, or interacting with humanity at all? YES. If all these people were having such a great time, they wouldn’t be writing to us, would they?
♥ Is this album child-friendly? HELL NO.
♥ Will this album teach me what it’s like to have the Olly Mann Valentine’s Experience? YES.
♥ Will Helen say the word ‘urethra’ so many times, I will feel a bit sick? MAYBE.
You can get it from iTunes and Amazon, but if you want all of your money to go to us and none to Megacorp, buy it directly from the AMT Store.
Today’s questioneers face ruin: browser history ruining a surprise; other people ruining the choice of baby names; and ruining your own chances of shagging a houseguest. Don’t ruin your own life by failing to listen to Answer Me This! Episode 325, in which we also discuss:
In today’s Bonus Bit of Crap on the App – available for iThings, Android and Windows devices – we reveal the moral cesspit at the heart of that classic Martin Clunes film Staggered.
My new show will be all about those precious moments of AMT that we know as “Why is [a thing] called [a thing]?” ie odd phrases and etymology and all sorts of linguistic fun. I’ve been wanting to make it for years, and now is my chance, if…
For my show – along with The Heart and the brilliant Criminal – is what is known as a ‘stretch goal’. They’ve already reached their target to keep the current Radiotopians afloat for another year, but need to raise more in order to greenlight further projects: because making podcasts costs, and to read me wanging on about that particular matter, click here.
So, if you like podcasts and you want to support independent audio creators so they can keep making them, please do chip in. Even $1 (£0.62) is good! $5 (£3.10) is even more good. I could go on.
(And if you spaffed money donating to that that bloody potato salad Kickstarter, you have no excuse not to give a little to something that will result in a year’s worth of top-notch audio entertainment, rather than a forkful of a prosaic foodstuff that goes rancid after two days.)
NOTE 1: This show is not instead of AMT; I’ll be making both! But I’ll be able to be a FULL-TIME PODCASTER, after eight years of trying to fit it around enough paid work to survive. Joe Richman of Radiotopia’s Radio Diaries puts it: “Most people work to get paid, we get paid to work.”
NOTE 2: If you donate, you’ll be funding me making a new show; you’re not funding Answer Me This!. If you feel particularly stirred to contribute to the AMT coffers, then buy some of our albums and classic episodes from answermethisstore.com, or pay a pal through PayPal.
As a stereotypical Brit, I find directly addressing money matters to be excruciating; therefore I will now wrap up the cashchat so I can curl up into a ball and rock back and forth in a dark room.
– HZ
PS Here’s an interview I did with Roman earlier this year, shortly after he launched Radiotopia, in which he talks about the ethos of the enterprise and why podcasting is so super:
1. Next Wednesday, 25th June, we’ll be discussing podcasting on a Radio Academy panel at the Apple store on Regent Street, along with Football Rambler Pete Donaldson and Bugle producer ‘Fuck you’ Chris Skinner. If you’re interested in podcasting, do come along! The event is free, but you need to register for a place. All information can be found here. Sure, you’ll miss Bosnia & Herzegovina vs Iran, but you’d be home in time for Honduras vs Switzerland.
2. I’m starting a new free podcasting advisory service, and the first fixture is TODAY. Details here.
3. I posted last week about Olly’s new gig on The Media Podcast. There’s a Kickstarter campaign to keep the show going for a year. It is Olly’s dream job, so make him happy by chipping in here.
No new podcast today because I’ve lost my voice! You: “That’s no disadvantage, Helen.” Me: “Hey, go fuc-cough cough cough cough cough cough coughcoughcoughcoughcough… sigh.”
In AMT272, Beth of Leighton Buzzard told us she had prepared for the birth of her child by downloading the AMT Holiday to accompany the agonies of labour. Surprisingly, the sound of our voices didn’t compel the baby to stay in the womb forever, because Beth writes:
I just wanted to say thank you. Not only did I enjoy your holiday album during early labour, but I also listened to your 19 September podcast whilst in the delivery room, 40 hours into (induced) labour and just 2 hours before my baby girl was born.
I didn’t have an epidural so the distraction was very welcome. No bad reviews from me!
As a doting new mum, I couldn’t resist including a picture of your youngest fan, Jennifer, who was born at 3.22am on Friday 20 September:
All together now: awwwwwwwwwwwww. And, in sympathy with Beth’s 42-hour labour, owwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.
Answer Me This! Podcast 