At last, the AMT animal nipples special! How many do bears have? How long are an opossum’s? Where do solenodons keep theirs? Did you already learn all this from David Attenborough?? If not, you will in Answer Me This! Episode 387, along with information about:
salmon vending machines
amnesia etiquette
Easy-Bake Ovens
American flapjacks
British flapjacks
Shakespearean flapjacks
blue flashing lights
how pregnancy tests work
and
the landlord’s mystery cupboard in the basement.
In today’s Bonus Bit of Crap on the App – available for Apple and Android – Olly makes his first attempts at no-bake cakes. And survives! A triumph!
Hear our other work:
• Helen makes The Allusionist, an entertainment show about language, and Veronica Mars Investigations, recapping every episode of Veronica Mars from the beginning.
• Olly hosts many podcasts, and you can find them all at ollymann.com, as well as his recent appearance on BBC Radio 4’s My Teenage Diary.
• Martin makes music 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.
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‘.
Buy AMT episodes 1-200, our six special albums including the all new Home Entertainment, and our Best Of compilations from 2007-2015 at answermethisstore.com.
Whatever happened to aerobics on morning telly, the corpse of Henry VIII, and cummerbunds? In Answer Me This! Episode 372, we crack these mysteries and more, including:
the Pete Best of the Spice Girls the Magic Castle dress code
fish death
taxi radio
Mr Motivator
‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ at the football Man of La Mancha
books as gifts
mummified monarchs
borrowing clothes from Switched On Pop
and
cummerbunds.
In this month’s Bonus Bit of Crap on the App – available for iPadPhones, Android and Windows devices – our conversation about kings’ corpses turns to a surprisingly thoughtful contemplation of burial and shivah. And then away from that to Scooby-Doo.
Prepare yourselves, New Zealand and Australia, for an influx of Helen and Martin: the Allusionist live tour is coming to you. Check theallusionist.org/events for shows in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and Adelaide; more dates will be added soon.
Also! Listen to Olly’s new series about diets and body image, Tip the Scales, and it’s ready and waiting for you if you’re an Audible subscriber in the UK and a handful of other countries (commiserations, USA). You AMT listeners in the UK can get a free trial of Audible for a month at answermethispodcast.com/audible – or, if you’ve had such a thing before, you can get a spell of half price membership! And remember: 1. for each of you that takes up the trial, Audible gives us a little bit of money, even when you cancel without paying a thing; 2. you can keep your free audiobooks forever. Hear a sample of Tip the Scales HERE, then get your free Audible trial HERE then hear the whole series HERE.
Sing along to Martin the Sound Man’s gap year diary of songs: his new 40-track mega album The Year of the Bird, complete with illustrations and diaries about each song, is being released at palebirdmusic.com.
This episode is sponsored by Squarespace, with which you can easily and quickly set up a good-looking website for your projects eg your Oscar-nominated documentary. Visit squarespace.com/answer and get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain with the discount code ‘answer‘.
After much speculation in AMT366, striding through Answer Me This! Episode 367 are the true owners of The Bill legs! Or are they? Which is to be trusted – IMDB or a school rumour?
We also speak of:
one billion IKEA meatballs Ryvita wheels Busch Gardens, Tampa “I’m walking here!”
the Jerky Boys vs the Jersey Boys
capsaicin
jelly
seed-shaming
and
the Popemobile’s max speed.
In this month’s Bonus Bit of Crap on the App – available for iPadPhones, Android and Windows devices – we discover what the Pope has in common with Tom Hanks, Batman and Graham Norton.
Check in with our other work: Olly hosts The Modern Mann; and Helen and Martin are performing the Allusionist live show on stages in the US and Canada this month – check where and when at theallusionist.org/events.
Thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring the show, and for making it so easy to set up a good-looking website for your projects. 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: any time, deliver a voice memo or a written question by emailing answermethispodcast@googlemail.com. You can still use the old ways of calling the Question Line on 0208 123 5877 or Skype ID answermethis, but a lot of those messages haven’t been reaching us lately. So emailing a voice memo is the safer bet.
It’s AMT’s 11th birthday! To celebrate, we can’t replicate how Olly spent his own 11th birthday, at Cody’s Tex-Mex restaurant in Stevenage, because it closed down. So instead we’ve made some mild-to-moderate life changes – hear all about them Answer Me This! Episode 358, in which we also consider:
Nicole Scherzinger’s rancid yoghurt-nose
chutney WHY WHY WHY
goldfish as gifts
glass coffins
dairy for ditzes
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Forty Dragons
Goldilocks and the Three Bears Scant Plot
the price of gold pens
jamnesty
kalettes
piranha ribs
hot tubs vs hot pot
and
Olly Mannhood.
Should we be flattered that some of you have named your sexy body parts after us? Is it some kind of ultra-effective contraceptive? Because if you need a libido-killer, you’ve really invented a great one.
Today’s Bonus Bit of Crap on the App – available for iPadPhones, Android and Windows devices – contains some listener suggestions for David who complained in episode 355 that strangers won’t leave him alone because his dog is too cute. David should have looked for tips in the documentary about the making of Moonwalker! It’s OBVIOUS!
You still have a couple of weeks to get our most recent Retro AMT, the Best of 2010 part 1 – a good year! For AMT japes, anyway. All our Best Of compilations, as well as episodes 1-200 and our five special albums, are available to buy from the AMT store.
Thanks to today’s sponsors: first direct, whose online banking services you can find at firstdirect.com; and those stalwarts of podcast support Squarespace. Have a go during the two-week free trial, then get 10% off Squarespace’s website-hosting and -designing services for a whole year with the discount code ‘answer‘.
Send us your QUESTIONS for AMT in 2018: send us a voice memo or a written question by emailing answermethispodcast@googlemail.com. You can still use the old ways of calling the Question Line on 0208 123 5877 or Skype ID answermethis, but a lot of those messages haven’t been reaching us lately, and we hate to think of your intriguing witty questions being lost to us.
We’ll be back with AMT359 on 1 February 2018, and with a Retro AMT episode on 18 January. And if you’re in or near San Francisco on 12 January, get a ticket HERE to see Helen and Martin at SF Sketchfest.
Helen & Olly
••• AMT358 Child-Friendly Rating: 38%. Mostly ok, but the question about naming your genitals after us might traumatise your innocent offspring forever. •••
Happy Valentine’s Day, listeners! We know how you love to celebrate the feast day of the patron saint of plague, epilepsy and bee-keeping, so we’ve got a wonderful gift for you: A FREE AUDIOBOOK FROM AUDIBLE! Gallivant to answermethispodcast.com/audible right now to get it, then as a warm-up to your many hours of free audio content, listen to half an hour of free audio content, ie Answer Me This! Episode 246:
This week we consider:
the Chinese zodiac
the longest queue ever
Lemar
premium cinema seats
stop-motion water
baby clothes
asexual koalas
Mike Leigh vs. Red Dragon Les Miserables vs. Undercover Boss Mary Poppins vs. The Sound of Music
Pete Doherty vs. Peter Brame
and
the point of kissing.
Plus: Olly’s going to build his business empire on XXX fortune teller fish, whilst Helen’s looking into a range of mouth condoms for slimmers; and Martin the Sound Man is a shrivelled little short tongue man. But at least he’s not the only one.
This week’s Bit of Crap on the App (available for iDevices and Android) is further contemplation upon the masterwork of David Sneddon, star of Fame Academy series 1 and AMT245. It’s a song which bears many hours, nay months, of interpretation. This week’s lesson: what’s up with your sleeves, Sneddon?
Instead of whatever Valentine’s love token you were planning to give us, please send your QUESTIONS: email them to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com or leave voicemails on the Question Line by calling 0208 123 5877 or Skype ID answermethis. (Although, when we say ‘instead’, we do mean ‘as well as’, if the token was heart-shaped boxes of Ferrero Rocher. Keep ’em coming.)
Plus: Olly wonders why the Black Eyed Peas are so keen to shut things down; Helen hates children who have far better business sense than she has, or ever will have; and Martin the Sound Man thinks an ornamental fence is no obstacle to ardour.
In this week’s Bit of Crap on the App (available for iDevices and Android) we go more bananas for bananas, except for bananas that are a year old.
We go bananas for your QUESTIONS, so email them to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com or leave voicemails on the Question Line by calling 0208 123 5877 or Skype ID answermethis.
Holed up in the Holiday Inn in Salford Quays, we contemplated holding a Bed-In for Peace. But then we realised that if we did, the already oversubscribed lifts would become clogged up with press and peaceniks, leaving all the other hotel guests feeling far from peaceful. So, sorry, peace; we made Answer Me This! Episode 232 instead:
Today we consider:
the Virgin Trains slow reveal
personal massagers
naughty Amazon
animal blood donation
magic oily fish
Les Rosbifs
immature students
maths vs. emotion
cottaging
Ping (who?)
and
the Holiday Inn pillow menu.
Plus: Olly would like to reverse decades of progress in gay rights just so he’s got something to read when he’s on the loo; Helen is unlikely to renew her wedding vows, unless the magazine deal is lucrative enough; and Martin the Sound Man goes off to have a rest in the rest room. He’s a very well-rested man.
Check out this week’s Bit of Crap on the App (available for iDevices and Android) if you’ve been wondering what happened next in the tale of vengeance from AMT231 and/or why your pineapple jelly won’t set.
We’re relieved to tell you that our Skype problem seems to be fixed, but if you used Skype to ask us a question in August or September, we never got it, so please ask it again by dialling up answermethis. You don’t need to worry if you sent a QUESTION via email (answermethispodcast@googlemail.com) or the Question Line (call 0208 123 5877); it’s safely swimming around with all the other questions in our question tank.
See you next Thursday!
Helen & Olly
Martin the Sound Man has a little alone time with the personal massager in the Holiday Inn.
What an eventful year 2011 has been. Earthquakes, tsunamis, nuclear terror! Sit-ins, protests, riots! So many revolutions, we can’t even choose a favourite! Charlie Sheen being a messed-up addict – but funny, so it’s fine! Osama Bin Laden’s dramatic exit! Pippa Middleton’s bottom!
Plenty has happened here at Answer Me This! too, so take a jaunt with us into the vale of the recent past: here is The Best of AMT2011, part 1.
This classic episode is available to BUY NOW for just £1.99 at the Answer Me This! Store, through a secure server, without DRM restriction. CLICK HERE to find out more and support our podcast. (This helps keep our most recent episodes free)
What a lot we learnt this year! About such things as:
space tourism
coloured bathroom suites
William’n’Dorothy Wordsworth
celebrity cock-shots
ornamental jellyfish The Apprentice
Dodgy
‘Like a G6’
Dane Bowers’n’Jordan’s sex tape
John Travolta’s face vs. Nicolas Cage’s face
glass slippers
impulse bags
fake tan
undone flies Saturday Toilet
Olly’s lost night of Chico
doll hospital
phallic salad
phallic statues
phallic celebrity waxworks
phallic phalluses
and
Adult Milkybar.
There’s plenty more to come next week; but if you want plenty more AMT next year, then send us your QUESTIONS: deliver emails to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com and leave voicemails on the Question Line (dial 0208 123 5877, Skype answermethis).
We have to say a huge thanks to everybody who has sent us something to celebrate our impending 5th birthday – we’ve already received many glorious cards, some rather exciting little presents, and enough sugary treats to push us over to the wrong side the Type 2 Diabetes fence! If you want to propel us into hyperglycaemic hyperdrive, or you want to show off your best penmanship, please dispatch a missive to:
Answer Me This!
PO Box 53587
London
SE19 9BQ
Thankyou for delighting us by post, listeners. You really are a tiptop bunch.
See you next Thursday, for the Best of AMT2011 part 2!
Since last we met, both Silvio Berlusconi and Justin Bieber’s not-babymomma have forsaken their respective meal tickets. They’ve got lots in common – dishonesty; revolting-sounding sexual encounters with minors – so maybe, now they’ve got all this free time on their hands, they should team up and make a podcast! There’s plenty room for another mixed-gender odd couple podcasting duo other than us.
But until they take the plunge, here’s Answer Me This! Episode 197 to keep you amused, although it is entirely lacking in bunga bunga and Bieber-boffing:
This classic episode is available to BUY NOW for just 79p at the Answer Me This! Store, through a secure server, without DRM restriction. CLICK HERE to find out more and support our podcast. (This helps keep our most recent episodes free)
On today’s slate are topics including:
garra rufa fish
Malcolm McLaren
the Boomtown Rats
hungover squash vs. hungover luge
Martin Scorcese vs. Caravaggio Jim Davis vs. Michelangelo
Sydney vs. Melbourne
New York City vs. Welwyn Garden City
the American Cinema Editors’ Union
chef’s chequered trousers
the Thames beach
Philip Green
existential angst in the H&M fitting rooms
and The Naughtiest Girl in the School.
Plus: Olly taps into the goldmine that is writing Garfield strips; Helen recalls the time when, for one night only, she was Oliver Reed; and Martin the Sound Man refutes the notion that the Sex Pistols were little more than four vomit-spattered Gareth Gateses.
This week’s Bonus Bit of Crap on the App concerns the Scarlet Pimpernel of fast food: that damned elusive McDonald’s McRib. They seek it here, they seek it there, but you may seek it on iDevices or Android.
Meanwhile, we seek your QUESTIONS: please deposit your inquisitive voicemails on the Question Line (dial 0208 123 5877, Skype answermethis) and email queries to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com.
…actually, not ‘not’. See what a pain in the arse that joke is? Leave it in the 90s, people! This is our plea in Answer Me This! Episode 193:
This classic episode is available to BUY NOW for just 79p at the Answer Me This! Store, through a secure server, without DRM restriction. CLICK HERE to find out more and support our podcast. (This helps keep our most recent episodes free)
Today we ponder upon:
Indian cows
Utterly Butterly
beluga whales vs. beluga caviar
holy salt
claiming sanctuary
charity shop returns policies
cloud computing
flyers milk.com
contact lenses
Teri Hatcher in Swedish
shoe mnemonics
breastfeeding men
transubstantiation
and
the irony of Google Chrome.
Plus: Olly is jealous of you people who’ve had milkmen (oo-er, missus!); Helen will be hiding in plain sight when she goes on the lam; and Martin the Sound Man is happy to be the theme of your stag/hen parties. L-plates and fake veils do look great against a tweed jacket and facial hair.
This week’s Bonus Bit of Crap on the App (available for iPhones, iPads and Android devices) is about the books that wind up in charity shops before they are even dog-eared. Not this book, though! Perish the thought.
Do NOT, however, perish thoughts of sending us your QUESTIONS. Pose them to us as voicemails on the Question Line (dial 0208 123 5877 or fire up the Skype and look for answermethis) or emails to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com. In the Age of Austerity, it’s one thing you needn’t stint upon.
Team AMT! Please line up at the assembly points and let us check you’re all present and correct. Everyone OK? Nobody hurt? Good. Here’s Answer Me This! Episode 187, which as it happens was recorded before our home country irreparably damaged its international reputation for decorous manners.
This classic episode is available to BUY NOW for just 79p at the Answer Me This! Store, through a secure server, without DRM restriction. CLICK HERE to find out more and support our podcast. (This helps keep our most recent episodes free)
Today we talk of:
fruit machines
the holy iPad
moneysupermarket.com vs. Swingers
the distinctive Requiem for a Dream soundtrack Edo in Crystal Palace
David Beckham’s pants
buttery John Lydon
Paddy McGuinness’s penile pain
scaring The Hoosiers Girl From Rio
the King James Bible
skip-diving
whale fellatio the Edinburgh festival
and
the biggest testicles in the world.
Plus: Olly finds that his musical tastes have not matured at all when it comes to classic New Kids on the Block; Helen’s love of a) free food and b) sushi is severely tested; and Martin the Sound Man will be multitasking at the Green Man Festival next weekend. Watch him transform from a nerdy scientist to a nerdy musician in the blink of an eye! We’ll also be there too, reading extracts from the AMT Book, so please come to see us all at the Solar Stage in Einstein’s Garden, if you can make time between the folk bands and the crumpet-eating.
Make more time for this week’s Bonus Bit of Crap on the App (available on iPhone and iPad, or Android), which is a question from Chrissie from Cheltenham about whether can-can dancers cover their nether regions properly. Additionally, please make time to ask us some QUESTIONS as well: leave voicemails on the Question Line (dial 0208 123 5877 or Skype answermethis), or send emails answermethispodcast@googlemail.com.
See you next week, assuming civilisation still exists by then,
It’s been a long holiday, but huzzah, we have returned intact. Since last we spoke, Olly has entered his thirties, and Helen and Martin entered the matrimonial institution (with each other, don’t worry!), so as you will hear,Answer Me This! Episode 176 is all mature and responsible right from the off:
This classic episode is available to BUY NOW for just 79p at the Answer Me This! Store, through a secure server, without DRM restriction. CLICK HERE to find out more and support our podcast. (This helps keep our most recent episodes free)
Conversation-nuggets in today’s gold-pan include:
divine disapproval of Helen’n’Martin’s legalised union
Gordon Ramsey’s Cambodian eggy treat
phallic salad
the Pringles saddle
Madonna as Cruella de Vil
Pamela Anderson as cola bottle the tragic life of Mr E Forever Plaid
freedom of the city
aldermen
grungers vs. lumberjacks
caviar vs. frogspawn
and
Peppa Pig.
Plus! If you’re looking to pull, just take Olly out on the town with you; Helen bemoans the public interest in whether her womb is available to let on a nine-month contract; and Martin the Sound Man does not want to sound Dickensian. Spoilsport! This week’s Bonus Bit of Crap on the App (available on iPhone or Android) is about the only meme to involve high-end millinery (that we know of): Princess Beatrice’s fancy hat.
It may have been a while, but you still know what to do: ask us QUESTIONS, in the form of voicemails on the Question Line (dial 0208 123 5877 or find answermethis on Skype) or emails to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com. As a reward for your diligence, you can have free audiobooks and half-price Audible membership at answermethispodcast.com/audible until June 5th. Lazy people who don’t bother asking us questions are allowed those too, as an incentive. Carrot not stick, right? And carrot sticks best of all. Blend a metaphor, get a crudite, as our great-grandmothers used to say.
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Answer Me This! Podcast 