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.
Like our previous albums – AMT Jubilee, Sports Day, Holiday, Love and Christmas – AMT Home Entertainment is an hourish of all-new AMT material that has never been on the podcast.
All the questions are about how you might homelily entertain yourself, with telly, music, films, food and some YouTube deep cuts. We discover:
🌴 What IS a wonderwall?
🎥 What was the first movie to have a director’s cut?
🐘 What’s with the big wooden elephants in Les Miserables and Moulin Rouge?
🅾️ What’s with blood groups in The Simpsons?
📺 Are TED speakers allowed teleprompters?
🍔 When did Justin Timberlake stop singing ‘I’m Lovin’ It’ at the end of the McDonald’s ads?
🍳 Why doesn’t Cathy eat breakfast in this, er, thought-provoking educational film/Dairy Council propaganda from the 1970s??
AND MORE!
AMT Home Entertainment is out now at the Answer Me This! Store or (but we make less money this way – just saying) from iTunes (UK / USA )
The album art is by the excellent Joe List, whom you can find at joelist.co.uk and on Instagram and Twitter @joelist. (You may recall that, way back when, Joe illustrated the AMT book after his magnificent entry to our 2009 Photoshop Challenge!)
Does a place make a man, or in this case a Mann? If today’s questioneer decides to move his young family to Stanmore, will he find himself raising his own curly-haired cat-obsessed musicals lover? Or will he just benefit from convenient Jubilee Line access and a nice Lebanese restaurant? We consider the benefits of the burb that birthed Olly in Answer Me This! Episode 251:
Today we ponder upon:
morning sickness
Pimms
poisonous plaster
flirting
the Wiki Wiki Shuttle
wiki wiki Ward Cunningham
phone sex vs. sex
carpenter-style jeans
Nupedia
Laurence Olivier
Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen
human chorionic gonadotropin
the only non-singing, non-dancing part in West Side Story
and
the sanitary iPad.
Plus: Olly needs to learn to speak Bloke; morning sickness won’t put Helen off having a baby, but everything else will; and Martin the Sound Man is a big hairy flowerpot, and no returns.
In this week’s Bit of Crap on the App (available for iDevices and Android) we continue our discussion about equine actors; it moves on to child actors, then somehow to Olly having sex with a Battenburg cake. Which is the inevitable end of any discussion if you continue it long enough.
Next week will be a Special Guest Episode, and if you haven’t listened to the episode yet to find out who it will be, here’s your SPECIAL GUEST SPOILER:
That’s right, Dobby from Peep Show/Esther from Shameless/Isy Suttie from Isy Suttie’s comedy shows will be joining us to answer your QUESTIONS. So send them to us: leave voicemails on the Question Line by calling 0208 123 5877 or Skype ID answermethis; or email answermethispodcast@googlemail.com.
Answer Me This! Podcast 