Since AMT409 the Branaghniacs have has spoken, Ken is hot and so are the other entries on then 16-year-old Charlotte’s list of Sexy Old Men (as of 22nd January 2011)
We also consider:
who is the piggy in a piggyback fibby wedding speeches the fallibility of memory rebrands R*ss3l1 Br@nd (sorry) cherry wine in songs <Moira Rose voice> fruit wine big paperbacks at airports cancer the crab TV character crossovers cleaning swimming pools Gwyneth Paltrow’s home spa and getting a friendship tattoo removed.
Plus: Olly is spitting feathers about WH Smith TJ Jones; Helen is haunted by a terrible moment from her stage acting non-career; and Martin the Sound Man knows a surprising amount about the St Elsewhere universe for someone who has never watched it.
Got questions for us? Send them in writing or voice note to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com – remember to include the formula “Helen and/or Olly, answer me this”, and let us know a name (pseudonyms are fine) and pronouns to use for you. Next new episode will land in your podfeed Thursday 30 October 2025.
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Check out our other work:
Olly lists his work at ollymann.com, where you’ll find his several podcasts including his news show The Week Unwrapped and The Modern Mann, which is celebrating its tenth birthday!
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We’ll have even less reason to go near the Christmas cake, if Elon from Austin, Texas is reporting truth:
Your exploration of glacé cherries on the show this past week reminded me of a tale I was told growing up in Michigan. Michigan, I believe, is the world’s largest producer of what we call maraschino cherries. Traverse City, in the north of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, is fond of touting itself the Cherry Capital of the World. H
The tale I was told is that when the farmers preserve the cherries they intend to sell to the maraschino cherry producers, they first dump their crop into large pools of chemicals for the winter. And since it doesn’t really matter what happens to the fruits due to the bleaching and candying process, these pools are often outside…essentially just big holes in the ground…which of course attract deer…which sometimes fall in…and get bleached and candied themselves.
The capper of this tale is the bit about how workers are hired in the spring of each year before the thaw completely sets in to fish out the candied deer carcasses and whatnot that falls in over the winter.
So answer me this please: is any of this true? Are health regulations in the US so poorly enforced that this could happen in this day and age? Yeesh!
Readers, if you have any inside knowledge on the candied deer phenomenon, reveal in the comments.
To me, it sounds like bulldeershit. People succeed in covering backyard swimming pools to stop crap falling in. If you had an open-air pool of fruit intended for human consumption, wouldn’t you at the very least put a net over it to catch the larger debris?
And if this is indeed how cherries are stored (rather than in, say, closed tanks), wouldn’t the Michigan climate keep them frozen for several months? Now a deer skating over a frozen pool of cherries, that I’d like to see.
Although August is coming to a close, and with it the Edinburgh Fringe, there’s still just enough time to incorporate our grade-A publicity techniques into your show. Learn from the masters in Answer Me This! Episode 268:
In which we also consider:
SeaWorld
ark logistics
glacier cherries
Peter Nichols’ Passion Play
Noah’s flood vs. the great flood of Edgware
transporting whales
E number 127
aeroplane seat-reclining etiquette
endless Chorus Line
war poetry
and
Barry Scott.
Plus: Olly warns you not to sit behind him on a flight, as he provides his own, er, jet propulsion; Helen still regrets inadvertently reviving the Al Jolson look for Edinburgh Fringe punters; and Martin the Sound Man fails the ‘name the artificial colourant in the glacé cherries’ game.
In this week’s Bit of Crap on the App, which is available for iDevices and Android, Helen tells you the magic trick with which you can WOW your friends (or thoroughly disappoint them if all they wanted was a nice refreshing orange).
Don’t disappoint us: send us your nice refreshing QUESTIONS. Leave voicemails on the Question Line (call 0208 123 5877 or Skype ID answermethis) and send emails to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com. If we answer them, as Barry Scott would say: bang, and the doubt is gone.
See you next Thursday,
Helen & Olly
AMT268 Child-Friendly Rating: 75%. In the aftermath of AMT267, this episode opens with further discussion of virginity loss, with concomitant references to genitalia and sexual practices. However the rest of the episode is clean beans, aside from a couple of swears.
PS Because we’d never leave you with an endless Chorus Line:
Answer Me This! Podcast 