If you take the plunge and purchase it, you’re not only funding the podcast, you also get one hour of all-new Christmas chat about such festive topics as:
✯ FOOD!✯
Audio is entirely calorie-free, so feast your ears on mince pies, trifle, Brussels sprouts, poisoned turkey, lutefisk, Sandra Lee’s Kwanzaa Cake and what Christmas pudding can teach you about atomic physics (which is better than eating it).
✯ENTERTAINMENT!✯
Christmas titans Eric’n’Ernie face off against Mike Yarwood; Olly fails to be swept away by ‘Fairytale of New York’ (and don’t even get him started on ‘Christmas Wrapping’); and the Grinch stole Dr Seuss’s doctorate.
✯CUSTOMS!✯
How the Norse deities Frigga and Baldur got you to snog people under a bunch of a poisonous parasitic plant; why Rudolph’s got a red nose; how the first ever Christmas card managed to be offensive; why Kwanzaa was invented; and Santa on waterskiis.
✯CRISIS MANAGEMENT! ✯
How to salvage the situation if your partner’s bought you a brilliant present and you got them something shit; what to do if you dread staying at your in-laws’ house; how to uninvite people from your party; and why you’re more likely to end up getting a divorce at Christmas. It really is the most wonderful time of the year.
✯DECORATIONS! ✯
Let us deck the halls of your ears with Christmas jumpers, Christmas crackers, double beards, and paper hats, even though everyone looks like a dick in the paper hats. Especially because everyone looks like a dick in the paper hats.
The Answer Me This! Christmas Album is fun for all the family – no, it really is, because we don’t even swear. So Great-Grandma Gladys and Tiny Tim can listen happily together while you sneak off and neck the cooking brandy.
As babies continue insist on being born, and the law insists those babies are given names, we receive plenty questions about baby names. Here’s one from Andy from Wimbledon:
My best friend and his lovely wife are expecting a baby boy in the new year.
However, on the issue of names, my friend has decided that the boy child is to be named “Tyrion”, after Tyrion Lannister, the dwarf from Game of Thrones.
Now I’m only halfway through the first season of GoT, but already I’m concerned that naming a child after a dwarf who has a penchant for booze and whores might not be the best option.
Furthermore, this being Game of Thrones, it’s no spoiler to presume that at some point the character in question will be involved in something hideously despicable/incestuous/immoral which could well tarnish the name (i.e. you don’t see many birth announcements in The Times for boys named ‘Adolf’ anymore).
So answer me this – how do you go about telling someone that their choice of baby name isn’t perhaps appropriate? Or should I, like everyone else, just keep quiet and coo over the baby and its ‘lovely’ name once the thing is born?
Yes. That. Regardless of whether you voice your (reasonable) objections, if your friends love that name, they’re going to bestow it upon their boy. So don’t add a black mark to your permanent record when it won’t help the baby anyway. About the furthest you can go is leaving a newspaper in their loo, casually folded open upon an article about how naming a child after a current big TV series is a bit tacky.
Anyway, the impending baby Tyrion might have got off lightly, if this tale from Sam in Langbank is to be believed:
My friend, Hannah, told me her friend Craig’s mum was working in a maternity ward at a hospital somewhere in Glasgow. She was asking a new mother to write down on a form the name of her new baby girl. The mum then wrote this: ‘La-a’. Craig’s mum then said “Oh, that’s an unusual name”. To which the woman replied, “Yeah. Ladasha.”
This is possibly the best name I’ve ever heard.
Answer me this what is the oddest name you have ever heard of?
PS my biology teacher also taught someone called Princess-Jamie-Babes Brown.
People at my school claimed to know a girl called Autumn Dawn Forecast. And a friend at university swore she had known a boy called Norman Conquest. Let’s face it: if your surname was Conquest, you’d be a fool to resist that opportunity.
Ben from Redditch needs your help to commit disobedient acts. Read his email then advise him in the comments:
I’m 31 and white, my town over the last few years has had a growth in the power of certain right wing parties. This being not the result of more people voting for them but instead the poor turnout to the polls by average voters. Due to a certain longed-haired joke teller giving out his half-baked unexplored ideas to a love-sick quiz show host, I fear this will happen once again.
As a white person I see it as my place to sabotage in whatever childish way I can the campaign car for said parties/party. People of different ethnicities run the risk of being pointed out as an example of the negative behaviour of their people. So as a wasp I do what I can in conversation to change people’s minds. Last time I explained it to a girlfriend of mine with such passion that she decided we should go out and drive-by egg the campaign float. I guess the subtext of that is that I think I’m brilliant.
However, currently boo-less and somewhat older, I would like to make more of a protest. I thought of following them round with just a massive sign that points and reads simply ‘TWAT’. Or could I do better?
So answer me this: what would be my rights if I just stood in front of their car so it couldn’t move? I’m used to confrontation and plan to have someone filming me the whole time so threats or violence would be a win. Or am I just being a show off and causing them more popularity?
Well readers, what reckon you to Ben and his Emily Davison yearnings?
It’s always pleasing to hear from you learned listeners; thanks, Josie, for getting in touch to share Knowledge:
Listening to last week’s episode, I heard you discuss the medicinal properties of Marmite, where Helen said it could repel mosquitoes.
As a mosquito biologist myself I have heard this a few times but, though I love Marmite, all evidence produced so far says that neither vitamin B nor garlic (another commonly toted ‘repellent food’) have any effect on mosquito activity.
This myth is surprisingly persistent though and even my Mum refuses to believe me on this point (apparently a PhD is mosquito biology counts for nothing here!). Just thought I’d write in to make sure that your listeners, unlike my mother, do not plan trips to malaria endemic countries with the intent of using Marmite as a protection against bites!
Other odd, evidence-less repellent ideas I’ve come across during my work include hanging bags of water in your house, as mosquitoes are “terrified my their own magnified reflections in the water surface and run away”, and writing the number “82” on a big sign above your coffee machine.
Because…mosquitoes are terrified by the atomic number of lead? Sounds scientific to me!
Marmite is famously purported to be a divisive substance, and it seems Luke in Kurdistan felt the same about our conversation regarding it:
Answer me this – how did an innocent question about the health benefits of Marmite (or lack thereof), finish with an answer to “Would it be good for the soul to wake up in bed with Peter Stringfellow, if covered in a B vitamin rich, salty spread?”?
Apologies for our absence last week; normal service resumes today with Answer Me This! Episode 278:
In which we discuss:
pissing with Clint Eastwood Annie Hall
Action Man
Kinder Eggs vs the law
ginger ale vs ginger beer
romcoms vs heartbreak
fake tan
sexy scars
GI Joe’s thumb
the golden era of Richard Curtis
and
Peter Stringfellow’s Marmitey penis.
Today’s episode was sponsored by squarespace.com, who are not only offering you 10% off their wonderful website-building services if you use the code Answer11, but also the chance to win a free YEAR of the service if you send us a link to your Squarespacetacular website – if tweeting said link, deploy the hashtag #AMTsquarespace.
In this week’s Bit of Crap on the App (available for iDevices, Android and Windows) we wonder whether Peter Stringfellow is a nice (string)fellow. If you can confirm or deny, do let us know.
And, more importantly, do send us your QUESTIONS: leave voicemails on the Question Line (call 0208 123 5877 or Skype ID answermethis) and send emails to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com.
If like this week’s questioneer Maz you want to salve your broken heart with unlimited streaming of films and TV, get yourself a month’s free LoveFilm trial at answermethispodcast.com/LoveFilm. You can also block out some white noise by listening to Helen’s other podcast Sound Women, available here.
Our final demand: join us next Thursday, please,
Helen & Olly
AMT278 Child-Friendly Rating: 88%. Celebripissing chat and mention of Peter Stringfellow’s stringfellow, but low swearage and kid-appropriate topics such as Action Man, Kinder Surprise and soft drinks.
I’m from Sweden but I’ve lived in the UK for 10 years – which is is about a third of my life.
I have adjusted well and feel like I understand the British sense of humour, culture and got to grips with you poor dental care and MRSA-ridden hospitals, your crazy ass parliament (a bunch of posh old men shouting at each other?!), binge drinking, TOWIE etc.
One thing I still haven’t got to grips with is this:
When someone greets me by saying “alright?”
Do they mean “Hi!” or do they mean “How are you?”
I never know how to respond; do I say, “I’m good thanks, how are you?” do I say “hi” back, or do I say “alright”?
Also, my boss always says “you ok?” to me, rather than saying “hi” or even “alright?”. Does this mean the same thing i.e. a greeting, or is he genuinely concerned about my wellbeing?
So, in conclusion, how do I respond to “alright?” or “you ok?”
You’re right to suspect, Alex, that these people aren’t really too interested in your health. Think of these as greetings which are slightly more elaborate than “Hi”, in that they’re inviting you to respond, even if you’re responding in kind with meaningless small talk. “Fine thanks, how are you?” is always an appropriate response, regardless of whether you’re actually fine and interested in how the other person is.
The next step in the dance is more difficult to predict. Ideally, you’ll either move on to actual conversation rather than filler, or part company, but sometimes you can be trapped in a small talk volley for several minutes or even hours. So always have an exit strategy, because you don’t want to die from a ruptured bladder after being too polite to end a week-long exchange of casual greetings.
The downside of successfully averting a crisis is that nobody believes there was going to be a crisis, therefore you don’t get the credit of averting said crisis. But maybe one day there’ll be an Armageddon-style film celebrating the efforts of IT-ists such as Adrian from Wellington, New Zealand, who says:
I listened with interest to your comments in AMT277 about the damp squib of the Y2K bug.
I’ve worked for a large telecommunications company in New Zealand since 1997, and I can definitely say that the Y2K bug was a very big deal.
You wouldn’t believe the amount of software that it takes to run a digital telephone exchange, and get the phonecalls to the streetside cabinets – and then to the customers.
Also, there are the billing systems that make sure that the correct calls get billed to the correct customers. With us, we also had a large cable TV system, with digital Pay Per View movies, as well as us being an internet service provider.
We took all of 1999 to get software patches written and installed, hardware replaced, and systems tested – because the systems would have ground to a halt at the start of January 1st, if we hadn’t.
As we are the first country to cross the International Dateline, we had manufacturers from the US dialled into our systems, so that if they still failed, they’d have about 15 hours to make changes to the identical US systems.
In the end, as midnight rolled past, the only failure we had was in ordering our Pay Per View movies. The ordering system thought the year was “19100”. It was fixed in minutes.
Incidentally, we also had to be ready for Sept 9th 1999, because there were bugs that targeted the date of 9/9/99.
So – the only reason that Y2K was a “damp squib” was that companies worldwide spent a year or more preparing, fixing and testing.
We succeeded. We succeeded so well that no-one noticed!!
They say virtue is its own reward, Adrian. But it’s not as satisfying a reward as, say, money or glory, or the key to a city. You all need to blow your own trumpets a lot louder next millennium.
Your wonderful tales of Piddling With The Stars are still trickling in; here’s one from Leon in Aberdeen:
I pissed next to Johnny Vegas backstage at ITV; he was recording QI there, I was a contestant on Tipping Point. Was going to ask for a photo, thought better of it.
I also got changed next door to Stephen Fry that day! 😮
Best day ever.
Here’s another comedian-heavy celebripiss from Jon:
I hit the men’s room after seeing The Dirty Projectors at Lincoln Center a few years ago. There were three urinals; the outside two of which were occupied by Jason Sudekis and Andy Sandburg from Saturday Night Live, chatting. I panicked for a second, then thought better and used the toilet stall.
Entrepreneurial celebripisser Phil writes:
I once stood next to Richard Branson at a urinal in a medium posh London hotel. It was some kind of Industry awards evening. I think I tried to engage him in some meta-chat about how he must have random people chatting to him all the time, he was chatty enough but finished up quickly and headed off. I do not recall seeing his cock.
And here’s a political celebripiss from Chris from Crystal Palace
I was once at a charity conference and went to the toilet, only to have the then Home Secretary David Blunkett hand me his guide dog while I was urinating. I think he confused me for his aide.
Are you dextrous enough, Chris, to control the dog and your urination at the same time? If not, this could have ended rather badly. And smellily.
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.”
I was in a cafe in Wellington, New Zealand where I went to the toilet and Billy Connolly was in there at the basin washing his hands. I said “Hi, I’m a big fan.” Billy then made a joke about the chair he had broken minutes before.
Jack has also pissed in the vicinity of a comedian:
I urinated next to Norman Lovett after he did a gig at our SU once. I texted my friend to tell him so. Mad props.
Phil from London managed a comedian/pop star double celebripiss:
A couple of years ago I was working in the O2 arena in London, in the private boxes doing bar work.
In a break I went to the toilet, and found myself having a piss between Michael McIntyre and the short one out of JLS.
I had been serving them throughout the evening, and talked to them a bit, but as the rules of the mens toilets go, no conversation happened urinal to urinal.
Oscar from Swansea has also effected a musical celebriwee:
In 2003 I was working on the second and third stages of the Guildford music festival Guilfest with a group of university crew who assisted there every year.
On the last night of the festival we usually got invited backstage of the main stage to help drink the leftover riders.
That year I was sporting a broken wrist and I bumped into Alice Cooper at the backstage portacabin type urinals. He commented on my cast and asked how I got it, as one of his roadies had a similar injury.
We chatted for a bit longer outside the toilets before we got on with our evenings. Thoroughly nice bloke – a lot more down to earth than some of the acts a fraction as famous.
Steve from Pennsylvania, however, illustrates the downside of a lavatorial encounter with a musical icon:
A number of years ago, I went to see one of my favorite bands, Nothington, at a local, rather run-down bar. I figured I’d go to the bathroom a few before the band came on, and barged right in.
Unfortunately, it was a one-person toilet facility. There in all of his glory, was the leader singer going No. 2, on full display. I apologized, and made a quick exit. However, I could not fully enjoy the show, as I could only picture the singer during the show sitting on the toilet.
And now a celebripiddle with a touch of Hollywood glamour, from Jason:
At the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond VA sometime in late 2000, I went the the bathroom and found myself taking a whizz with Anthony Hopkins. He was in town filming Hannibal with Julianne Moore, who I sadly did not meet in the bathroom, or anywhere else.
I saw him later in the restaurant of the same hotel but did not speak to him either time as I assume he must get sick of being recognized all the time.
However a friend of mine did get to speak to him as the Jefferson had a deal with the YMCA across the street that allowed guests to use the gym there. After his work out Hopkins left and my friend noticed he was still carrying the Y towel he had been given. Anyway my friend who was working the front desk at the Y let him leave and walk halfway down the block just so he could run after him and point out his mistake. He was very gracious and apologetic.
And finally, a Dame Jud-wee from Ellie from Glasgow:
During a short stop on a long drive from glasgow to the north of Scotland I peed in a public toilet next to Dame Judi Dench. I was not aware it was her until we both went to the sink and I looked in the mirror to fix my hair and saw her. I just smiled, walked out and told my mum waiting outside who proceeded to shout at the top of her lungs “OMG really!” then shouted across the car park to my dad that I had a pee next to Judi Dench!
Rules of celebripiss etiquette: play it cool. That includes you, MUM.
This week’s episode comes from AMT’s rural outpost: Olly’s new house in the countraayyyyyy. And you know who else lives there? Of course it’s Olly’s beloved cat COCO! Listen carefully for her special guest appearance in Answer Me This! Episode 277:
Plus: Olly prefers silence and privacy during lavatory-time; Helen does not endorse the Divine Right of Kings; and Martin the Sound Man destroys Olly by winning Coco’s affections (and eating all the chocolate buttons). Look at him, brazenly wooing her away from the Mann who loves her most.
Martin steals Olly’s cat’s love
In this week’s Bit of Crap on the App (available for iDevices, Android and Windows) Olly betrays his younger self by not bothering to meet Jason Donovan.
Please do bother to send us your QUESTIONS: leave voicemails on the Question Line (call 0208 123 5877 or Skype ID answermethis) and send emails to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com.
Thanks to listener Gil8ert for the jingle, to pod-colleague Roman Mars for calling in, and to squarespace.com for bringing you this episode. To get 10% off their myriad wonderful website-building services, remember to use the code Answer10.
In the words of Atomic Kitten, see ya!
Helen & Olly
AMT277 Child-Friendly Rating: 76%. A handful of swears. Reference to a blowie. Discussion of weeing adjacent to famous people. Could be a lot worse.
AMTlistener Robbie has cottoned on to the SCANDALOUS Hollywood epidemic of plagiarism and plot-recycling:
I definitely definitely definitely remember sitting up at 3 in the morning sometime between 2006 and 2010 watching a movie with the EXACT PLOT and virtually every cast member of the HBO programme Hung – but every time I’ve tried to do find out anything about this definitely existent film Google’s just come back with nothing…
The film I saw was lighter than the show – less gratuitous swearing and cock/fanny shots – and the lead character’s wife was NOT played by Anne Heche as she is is the show – she was played by Hope Davis. One or both of the lead character’s kids may have been cast differently, too…
Answer me this! Is it possible that there WAS a film of hung made before the 2009 show that was so crap that HBO had it buried – deleted from the internet?
Everyone I’ve told about this secret Hung movie thinks I’m crazy but I DEFINITELY REMEMBER WATCHING IT!!! And I think HBO are powerful enough to erase something from history, don’t you? I mean if they thought they could remake something better but didn’t want the crappy original looming o’er the project couldn’t they just sweep it under the rug so to speak???
Readers, if you have any idea what Robbie’s on about, tell him the title of this prototypical Hung thing.
Answer Me This! Podcast 