Greetings listeners, and thanks for joining us in 2021. Here’s Answer Me This Episode 393, featuring vital questions about:
spinach and ricotta pasta
Pringles-induced sweat
cocktail, performative preparation thereof
cocktail, prawn (crisps flavour)
walking the plank
glow sticks
smelling salts
and
Ronald Raven.
Today’s Bonus Bit of Crap on the App – available for Apple and Android – is a big one, featuring the world’s most expensive advent calendar, and the World’s Strongest Man contest.
Hear our other work:
• Helen makes The Allusionist entertainment show about language – hear the festive episodes here and the swearalong quiz here – and Veronica Mars Investigations, recapping every episode of Veronica Mars from the beginning – season 3 has begun!
• Olly hosts many podcasts, and you can find them all at ollymann.com, including The Week Unwrapped and The Modern Mann – hear the festive episodes here.
• Martin makes music – including a new EP – which you can hear palebirdmusic.com, on the Pale Bird podcast, and on Spotify etc. 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.
This episode is sponsored by:
• The Great Courses Plus, the streaming library of courses on topics from yoga to mystery fiction to formal logic to dog training. AMT listeners get a free month at thegreatcoursesplus.com/answer.
• Squarespace. Visit squarespace.com/answer and get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain with the discount code ‘answer‘.
Send us your QUESTIONS, in writing or as voice recordings, to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com for us to answer in 2021! We’ll be back with AMT394 on 4 February, and there’ll be a Retro AMT episode in your feeds on 21 January.
Helen & Olly
••• AMT393 Child-Friendly Rating: 89%. Maybe only one swear? And pretty family-friendly content. •••
Happy Special Guest Episode day, listeners! For today, in Answer Me This! Episode 252, we are delighted to be joined by Isy Suttie:
With Isy we discuss:
allowable celebrity shags
A Level revision tips (caution: may not work)
buying condoms
slapping your thighs with mirth
emu pasta
Twitter by osmosis
clean-up dogs
neighbourly mysteries
the curious habits of Seann Walsh Dans le Noir
cheese vs. butter
online bingo vs. offline bingo
otters vs. bears vs. gummy bears
the ‘Roseanne Barr type’ beetle drives
and
Roald Dahl’s Magic Finger.
In this week’s Bit of Crap on the App (available for iDevices and Android) we learn more about the pitfalls of fantasy crushes – especially when they’re on Isy – then address a question from James about why girls wear school ties when adult women rarely wear ties (Diane Keaton and Janelle Monae notwithstanding).
If this episode makes you wish for more Isy, her new series Love Letters is on Radio 4 Extra and will be on Radio 4 at the end of April; the latest and last series of Shameless is airing on Channel 4; her recent Sky Living musical comedy Miss Wright is still available on your Skyboxes; and Peep Show is always worth a rewatch.
It’s always worth sending us your QUESTIONS: leave voicemails on the Question Line by calling 0208 123 5877 or Skype ID answermethis; or email answermethispodcast@googlemail.com. Furnished with those, we shall return next Thursday with AMT253.
It’s lovely to see you listeners help each other. Nicole from Santa Barbara, California has written with reassurance for Concerned from Hebden Bridge from AMT238, who was worried that he would faint at the sight of a new human being worming its way out of his wife. Nicole says:
My husband is also notoriously squeamish: when he was younger, he fainted putting eye drops in his eyes, and also nearly fainted during our first ultrasound too–it was the swing inside me and the word “yolk sac” that did it.
We went to the labour classes and he had to walk out of the room during almost all of the videos for fear of fainting. I knew it was going to be tough for him during the actual labour, so we planned ahead of time that he’d be sitting at my head, facing the computer screen that showed my heartbeat and contractions.
The doctors made him leave the room when it was time for my epidural (because a lot of fathers-to-be faint then), and walked out twice during the actual labour, but he was able to be next to me for the important part. Our arrangement worked well, he didn’t see anything except my face and a beeping line on a computer until the doctors handed him our son (all cleaned up). No fainting!
Hooray! So plan ahead, Concerned, and if you think that your wife’s pained screaming face might trigger your swooning switch, ask her to wear a mask – you can get a classic old Spitting Image one of John Major on eBay.
Happy Thanksgiving, American chums! While you bust a gut on deep-fried turkey and marshmallow-topped yams, perverts that you are, everyone else can get on with listening to Answer Me This! Episode 238:
In which we give thanks for such traditional American foods as onion loaf and Big Mac special sauce. We also talk of:
Plus: Olly’s lack of confidence (and grade D in GCSE French) held him back from pursuing his dream career at Disney; Helen’s grammatical tips encourage solipsism; and Martin the Sound Man won’t give you any of his blood because he’s a wuss when it comes to needles. But not when it comes to albums – his lovely new longplayer The City of Gold and Lead is out tomorrow, so click HERE to obtain your copy, in digital format or fancy hand-made papercut CD package.
There’s more food in this week’s Bit of Crap on the App (available for iDevices and Android), as questioneer Ollie asks whether he can gorge himself on raw biscuit batter. And survive.
We would like to gorge ourselves (and survive) on your QUESTIONS, so please email them to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com or leave voicemails on the Question Line by calling 0208 123 5877 or Skype ID answermethis.
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