Behold! Rob the Balloon Artiste, who featured in AMT405, has only gone and done a balloon portrait of us after Marc Chagall’s painting The Promenade! A very impressive technical and artistic feat, as well as a pretty accurate likeness (Martin the Sound Man appears in the form of headphones).
So that’s exciting. As are AMT407‘s topics of inquiry:
lobster mating rituals the lies of Phoebe from Friends cartoon anvils suncream smell malepolish Judi Dench at Disney World refusing to be recruited to your coworker’s MLM the inverse relationship at coffee shops between nice coffee and comfortable seating stock cube variety packs and the AMT cut of Friends.
Plus: Olly delivers expert voiceover tips; Helen delivers dating advice from Andrea Silenzi of Why Oh Why podcast; and Martin delivers a charming song about animals that mate for life. MICE?!
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 episode will land in your podfeed 31 July 2025.
Become a patron at patreon.com/answermethis to help with the continuing existence of AMT, and to get an ad-free version of the episode, plus bonus materialculled from the show, and our live video question-answering session Petty Problems.
This episode is sponsored by Squarespace, the all in one platform for creating and running your online empire. Go to squarespace.com/answer, have a play around during the two-week free trial, and when you’re ready to launch, get a 10% discount on your first purchase of a website or domain with the code ANSWER.
Check out our other work:
Olly is hosting a four-part BBC Sounds series about the building of a new Universal Studios theme park in Bedfordshire! Listen here. He also has his daily podcast Today in History with the Retrospectors, and a monthly magazine show The Modern Mann, both of which you can find along with his other work at OllyMann.com.
Helen‘s entertainment podcast about language, The Allusionist, is BACK with a season about four-letter words; she and Martin are also doing a live show next week with Material Girls podcast (FKA Witch, Please) so get tickets at theallusionist.org/events. And their exquisite composition Souvenirs will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 4 at 16:00 on 22 July 2025, and be available online via the BBC thereafter.
Pack your flippers, sunblock and emergency stomach medicine, because our new album The Answer Me This! Holiday is ready to depart!
It’s 58 minutes 3 seconds of all-new material – right down to the jingles – all about holidays, vacations, minibreaks, staycations, jaunts, sojourns, escapes; whatever you like to call them. In the usual AMT style, we tackle questions about such holidayish topics as:
things to do in New York City
summer reading lists
artificial insemination for pandas
dads’ embarrassing holiday-wear
what lies behind – or, more accurately, beneath – the scenes at Disney
Legoland sculptors
why the Spanish Steps in Rome aren’t Spanish
what to expect from a Chinese breakfast
stag parties abroad
and
why the Brits are lagging behind in competitive eating contests.
• A full range of holidaywear: clip-on sunglasses, short shorts, convertible trousers, Speedos, gilets, electroejaculators; • Classic tourist attractions: the Staten Island Ferry, Downton Abbey, Disney’s utilidors, Burghley House, the Winchester Mystery House, Flambards and A Day at the Wells; • Delicious holiday grub: satirical breakfasts, ‘world famous’ foods, congee, Sex on the Beach, the Heart Attack Grill, pork and its tasty friends, Economy Candy; • Delightful holiday companions: Cara Delevingne, Eugene Levy, Nancy Mitford, Adam Richman, naked mole rats, Spagna; • Fun holiday activities: the ‘bollocks’ game at festivals, drinking games, humiliating your fellow diners, being assaulted by Mexican shots girls, trying to remember your one-night-stand’s name.
Big thanks to Amy Smith and Sam Pay for the jingles and Jenny Robertshaw for the cover – and speculatively to you for buying it, because your outlay helps fund Answer Me This! (and our actual holidays).
• Princes Street, Edinburgh, where in 1995 the iconic opening sequence to Trainspotting was filmed, and in 2010 our iconic looking-like-total-dicks sequence was filmed. • Crystal Palace Park – come for the Victorian dinosaurs and the biggest maze in London; stay for the swimming pool which is 20cm too short to be used in the Olympics. • Stonehenge, where the banshees live and they do live well. • Dyrham Park, Gloucestershire, where Sir Anthony Hopkins lived in Remains of the Day – before he got into chewing off human faces. • Antony House, Cornwall. Too bad that, blinded by giant plastic mushrooms, we missed its ‘national collection of daylilies’. • Burghley House, Lincolnshire – home to a herd of deer, the horse trials, and Queen Victoria’s marital bed. • The Cars of the Stars Museum, Keswick – not the average Lake District attraction. • Carnforth station, Lancashire. They play Brief Encounter on a loop in the waiting room, which would be a pleasant distraction when your train is running 40 minutes late because there’s a cow on the tracks. • Oxford, including Christ Church College and the Bodleian Library. Not including kebab vans or getting run over by drunk students on bikes. • London, playing multiple roles:
• Platform 9 3/4 at King’s Cross;
• Postman’s Park out of Closer. The Julia Roberts’n’Jude Law film, not the telly thing starring Kyra Sedgwick.
• The church of St Bartholomew the Great – oy, no need to brag, Bartholomew!
• Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, which star on the BBC Parliament channel all day, every day.
• also, nominated for the award for best supporting location: St Paul’s Cathedral, the O2 Arena, the London Underground, Notting Hill, County Hall, and Tower Bridge (out of that Fergie video about a different bridge entirely).
But let’s not forget all the behind-the-scenes crew: the cinematographer, the craft services, the key grip…OK, it was just me and Olly with two camcorders. But we couldn’t have made this film without the invaluable assistance of: Jill Collinge – if ever you want to spend a very entertaining and interesting afternoon looking around the beautiful historic town of Stamford in Lincolnshire, Jill is your woman. Philip Gompertz, for showing us around Burghley House. It’s really not too shabby. Chay Allen, for allowing Olly to nestle his head in his crotch. Shalini Jadeja, for risking life and limb running backwards with a camera through Edinburgh – and before breakfast, too!
And the Weinsteins of this operation: Tess Longfield and Rachel Aked at VisitBritain.
Please return next Tuesday for Great British Questions Episode Three: Romance.
For more VisitBritain finery, join their Facebook page; and for more of our tomfoolery, peruse the photos below.
Answer Me This! Podcast 