Answer Me This! Podcast

Why, it’s Thursday! Also known as ‘New Episode of Answer Me This! Day’! Right?

Wrong! according to our Esteemed Friends at our mp3-handling company. Not content with bumming everything up earlier this week, they’re continuing their Reign Of Mischief and not letting us upload all-new fun-packed Episode 26.

Humph.

We’re hoping to get Episode 26 out as soon as possible, because it’s a good’un. Here are some of the things the technologists don’t want you to hear in it:

Fiddy Cent’s tax return
bird foetus
Brave New World Facebook
and
Milkybar.

The technologists have got a bit of previous, unfortunately, but let’s hope they stop being capricious bastards soon and we can all get on with enjoying Episode 26 in peace.

Meanwhile CLICK HERE if you want to console yourselves with some old episodes; and, of course, please get busy sending questions to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com or reciting them on 0208 123 5877. Together we can beat this thing! Or, at least, wait until it all goes away.

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**To listen to Episode 25, click HERE **

Friends,

Some of you may have noticed that, in the past few days, this “website” hasn’t really been working “properly”.

This is due to our “friends” at the company who handle our mp3 files going a bit “renegade” and changing all the filenames of all the podcasts we’ve ever done, so none of our links are working.

We’ve been trying to fix it, and you should now be able to listen to our most recent episodes through this site by clicking on the players in the posts below. Everything should be back to “normal” soon.

Sorry.

p.s. If you subscribe to us on iTunes, you’ll see that it has also reacted to these changes in its own delightful manner, and in a fit of confusion will try to offer you ‘new’ versions of episodes you’ve already listened to. No need to panic – when episode 26 comes out it’ll automatically land in your iTunes as usual.

To sum up roughly how we feel about this situation, here is a picture of a horse having a piss:

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Hello, chums!

Answer Me This! is back next Thursday. Hallelujah! Wickitty-wickitty-wah! There’ll be new jingles! New songs! New costumes! And a whole lot of the same old shit, so don’t think we’re ditching our roots and not keeping it real.

If you’re restless in anticipation of the new episodes, or just not very busy this weekend, you can entertain yourself with one of these pursuits:

1) Check out this shit-hot video from tomorrow night’s Culture Show of Tony Blair’s final speech as Prime Minister, as voiced by premium impressionist Rory Bremner, animated by cartoon badboys Triffic and ghostwritten by John Oliver off The Daily Show and Helen’s big brother Andy Zaltzman. Yep, it’s a nepotistic plug!

2) Bone up on how Olly and Helen met and fell in like all those years ago in the new edition of the stupendous magazine All The Rage. And even if you couldn’t give a rat’s handbag about how we met, you should read the magazine anyway because it’s very good.

3) Send us all the questions you’ve been brewing while we’ve been away! We’ve missed you and your lovely inquisitive brains. Pop them in an email to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com – it’s a much better way to while away your time than watching Big Brother 8, that’s for sure.

Until Thursday 7th, bye! Xoxo! Lol! etc

Helen and Olly

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Of course, we know that many of you subscribe to us on iTunes, thereby helping us move up the podcast chart and reach new listeners.

And that many more of you still have added us to your MySpace friends to help share your love for us with all your Murdoch-loving comrades who like the same sort of songs and films, or something.

But now, friends, is the time to show you REALLY care about our podcast, and are quite literally MAD for some interactive fun on our behalf…

You can now JOIN THE ANSWER ME THIS! PODCAST FANCLUB ON FACEBOOK!

This club has only been active for a few days and already has 45 members. Think what we could achieve in a few weeks! SHARED PHOTOS! BULLETINS! INTERLINKED FRIENDSHIP GROUPS! REGRETTABLE BUT IRREVERSIBLE DIGITIZATIONS OF OUR ENTIRE LIVES!

It’s all to play for, people.

Seriously – if you like our podcast, and you’re on Facebook, please do join the fanclub– and help spread the word.

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* Click HERE to listen to EPISODE 10 of Answer Me This! *

I never thought I’d see the day when we were in the Financial Times.

Yet, HERE we are!

Thanks, rubbish pudding! I promise not to badmouth you ever again. (as long as I don’t have to eat you, either)

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* click HERE to listen to EPISODE 8 *

After only a couple of days on ebay, our Sainsbury’s Basics Christmas Pudding has already attracted an incredible FOURTEEN BIDS! Thankyou ever so much to everyone who has put in bids already; and everyone else, get bidding. All proceeds of the auction (including the £2 postage fee) go to Comic Relief, and if helping out disadvantaged people in Africa and the UK wasn’t enough to lure out your altruistic monies, you of course get 454g of Christmas pudding all of your very own.

Which, according to some rogue factions, would make it a win-win situation. We’ve had an email from listener Dave, mounting a strident defence of the pudding:

I was mildly disgruntled to hear your bashing of Christmas pudding. I love Christmas Pudding and would argue that Christmas Cake is the real villain. It has disgusting layers of marzipan and icing on top of what is essentially a very dry, cake-shaped, Christmas Pudding. Is Helen aware that Christmas Pudding can be fried as an excellent Boxing Day breakfast?

I was not aware of that; when confronted with a foodstuff that manages to render innocent fruit heavier than lead, my natural instinct is not to fry it. Or eat it for breakfast and condemning myself to a Boxing Day spent having a lie-down, clutching my heart. But, whilst the Zaltzman pudding remnants moulder away unloved and unfried, my brother can habitually be found chomping on Christmas CAKE as his Boxing Day breakfast. Perhaps he and Dave can settle which is the true villain of Christmas with a festive gut-barging contest?

However, I concur with Dave’s point that Christmas Pudding and Christmas Cake are natural enemies; and let’s not forget the Scrappy Doo of sweet Christmas stomach-busters, the mince pie. All three are cut from the same cloth: fruit, sugar, flour and extreme stodginess. And yet, on the day of the year when you’re least likely to suffer hunger pangs, all three awake from their 364-day-long hibernation (because the last person to eat a mince pie in June was sent to the Priory) and mount a three-pronged endurance test for the digestive system. It’s baffling. But perhaps it’s just what Jesus wanted for his birthday.

Anyway, sorry, Dave, to have caused you disgruntlement. Rest assured: as far as I’m concerned, Christmas Pudding AND Christmas Cake can go fuck themselves.

Except for when they’re being used to raise money for good causes, people! Bid like the clappers in our charity auction! Hey, maybe Christmas Pudding will be rehabilitated as a fashionable spring/summer snack, and I’ll look even stupider than I do on the average day.

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* Click here for Episode 5 of Answer Me This! *

To most of you, Martin the Sound Man is nothing but a distant booming voice, interjecting when things get A Bit Much on Answer Me This.

Well, he’s all that and MORE! He’s the frontman of a band called The Ladies, and as such is playing a gig on Valentine’s Day at the Slaughtered Lamb in Clerkenwell, which is here. Why not go and check out his troubadour stylings? The Sunday Times certainly thinks you should!

He’s on at 8.30, so there’ll be plenty of time afterwards to whisk your Valentine off to share a combo platter for two at the nearest Harvester. And if you’re single, you could cop off with another Ladies fan. They are a good-looking bunch. If that is not inducement enough, Martin’s also giving away one-off free CDs, and what is more, the Slaughtered Lamb does very nice fish finger sandwiches.

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Hello, pals. You’re probably thinking: “By this time of the week, I’ve usually received the new episode of Answer Me This!, seeing how it comes out on Thursdays and is supposed to be weekly. But where the crivens is Episode Four? Huh?”

Well, you’d be right to wonder. Episode Four is indeed all ready and champing at the bit to be released. However, as in Terminator, technology is the enemy; unfortunately it is the very enemy to which the medium of podcasting is inextricably wedded. And currently, it’s a marriage in which our web hosting company is out somewhere on a three-day booze bender, having left poor old Episode Four back at home chained to the kitchen radiator.

Hopefully our hosting company will come back from the saloon with a contrite expression and a posy from the all-night garage, promising Episode Four he didn’t know what came over him and it won’t happen again. Episode Four is sick of being blamed for all the problems in the marriage, and just wants Technology to start behaving itself again. But Episode Four can’t even think of leaving Technology and going it alone. All Episode Four wants is love…

Meanwhile, if you can’t wait for an Answer Me This! hit until our technological problems are resolved, why not have a listen to Episode Three, Episode Four’s pretty cousin who never seems to have any problems? Alternatively, you could make your own personal Answer Me This! with a couple of sock puppets and a funny voice.

Also, while we’re on the subject of Bad News: our MySpace account just got hacked and some naughty swine sent all our Imaginary Friends lots of bulletins about penis enlargement. So, if you’re one of our Imaginary Friends and got thusly spammed, we apologise. Honestly, we have no interest at all in enlarging your penises.

It’s not all doom and gloom at Answer Me This!, however: last Saturday we were shocked and delighted to discover that after only three episodes, we were already in the iTunes top 100 comedy podcasts, at number 63!

This mightn’t sound particularly glorious to you, but our expectations were LOW. And number 63 was only a few places below the Reduced Shakespeare Company and famous-off-the-telly David Walliams talking about swimming!

Even more excitingly, later that evening we went up to number 55. Calloo callay! Since then, we’ve hovered somewhere between 55 and 70, snapping at the podcasting heels of David Walliams. But this morning we found that not only was Answer Me This! back up to 55, it was also a whopping TEN PLACES ABOVE WALLIAMS! And neither of us has even swum the Channel! If we had, we’d probably be top 20 for sure.

So, thankyou ever so much to all of you who have subscribed to Answer Me This! on iTunes. If you haven’t, you can do so by clicking here, and as soon as you’ve done that, please subscribe to one of the really popular comedy podcasts (eg Gervais, Brand, Moyles, Best of YouTube, that sort of thing) because we’ve found that helps shunt us up the chart a bit. We can get into the top 50, people! Let’s all reach for the skies!

And in the meantime, let’s hope that Episode Four and the Hosting Company patch up their differences and give it another shot.

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