Triforce! - Triforce! #217: Brainwash Your Kids

Episode Date: April 27, 2022

Triforce! Episode 217! We're hammering down on TV intro skippers (and TV intro makers), looking at some weird reality shows and remembering The Little Red Hen who may or may not be indoctrinating our ...kids! Support your favourite podcast on Patreon: https://bit.ly/2SMnzk6 Music courtesy of Epidemic Sound. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:01:11 promotional interest rate for the first six months, the new TD Low Rate Visa Card can help find some balance. Learn more at td.com slash low rate card. Conditions apply. Limited time offer. Hello and welcome back to the Triforce podcast. Hello and welcome back to the Triforce podcast. Oh man. That'll be the future, by the way. Yes. Either when we're old men. Robotised.
Starting point is 00:01:46 We'll get robots to do it. We'll have robot assistants to speak for us. Podcast bot, podcast bot, take over for me today. I'm feeling old. I will fill for you. I'm sure we've spoken about this before. Consulting databanks. Yep.
Starting point is 00:02:04 We do. about this bit, Bob? Consulting databanks? Yep. What do you think about baked beans on toast? It's going to be some terrible, like, fucking, yeah, like, crappy conversation topic. I think it's fascinating, that machine learning stuff. Loadingicebreakers.exe. Have you seen that new television show? The Apprentice. Let's have a catch up. No, let's not. That's my kind of robot.
Starting point is 00:02:33 Jeez. Override. I like the three bots have a different algorithm on them. Yeah, they don't want certain things. That does not fulfill my criteria for discussion. That fulfills mine. They become like Daleks. I subscribe to a few of those machine learning bots on Twitter.
Starting point is 00:02:52 The neural sort of image prediction and stuff like that. The fuck? They're so far off. Like, it's really... Yeah, it's like the computer's best guess is almost always just hilariously wrong. There's one account where it just gives meme images to the bot, the image recognition bot, and it's like a turtle, and it's like a guy with a weird hat.
Starting point is 00:03:15 It just can't tell. It's just not there yet, but it's all time. It'll just take time. Well, yeah. We're perfected. Lads, I did something cool. I went to a gig yesterday my first gig hey i saw the i saw the picture that you posted on twitter and it looked fantastic holy crap like yeah i mean
Starting point is 00:03:32 the last gig i went to did not look like that the roundhouse is a great venue um it really is it's like it is like a big circular uh arena with the stage in the middle yeah um we were in the seats it was babbylex's first gig. It was Everything Everything is the band. We're both big fans of the band and they were superb. They were absolutely superb. Nice. But you know what's funny?
Starting point is 00:03:56 You know when bands do an encore and I think traditionally the encore, the idea of it is they say, thank you and good night. God bless everybody. Have a safe travels home and make sure that you haven't left anything in the arena and all that kind of stuff. And then they go and you think they ain't coming back. But the moment they're off the stage, the sound technicians are back and they're tweaking the bass and the guitar and getting everything ready. And I'm like, so they know they're coming back out. My daughter was like, so are they coming back out? I said, yes. And from where we were
Starting point is 00:04:24 sat, you could see around the back of the stage so we see them leave the stage go into the backstage area have a little drink of water and they're having a chat there and stuff do a little do a little bit of cocaine right i assume go to the toilet but it's like why call it an encore yeah like why why do we do this and i was trying to explain it to her it's yeah it's weird it's weird but i mean they could have just said right we'll be back in a minute we all know they're coming back man you could have so just think like if you could go in a time machine you could you could have gone back in time okay like i know that sounds crazy but okay you go back in time with your daughter to the 90s and you go to a nirvana show man they used to just smash up all their shit at the end of that 45 minute set no encores like they weren't
Starting point is 00:05:05 coming back you know they were just like we cannot come back we are not and cannot come i've trashed my guitar it doesn't work anymore the drum kit has holes in it like you know we're done we're out yeah what are the other ways that you could announce that you're done in such a kind of like serious way i guess you could like take a shit on the stage like i mean there's like this weird shit you could do that like ruins it there is yeah i mean generally what you see is if there is genuinely no encore which happens a bunch yeah they play all their music the house lights come up and everybody starts packing up and you go okay they're done oh my god when the house lights come up everybody just looks like shit don't that's right it's like it's like when you're out clubbing and
Starting point is 00:05:46 you know it's all dark and they got the smoke machine and the lasers and stuff last time i went clubbing was like in the 90s but right um i'm sure it's the same i'm sure it's kind of the same still but you know like 2 2 a.m rolls around and it's like all right everybody time to go home the lights come up and you're just like oh oh, my God, I've actually spent an entire evening with lepers. Like, it just looks, everybody looks like fucking shit. They're all sweaty. Makeup is all fucking smeared everywhere from all the sweating. It's exactly like one of those sci-fi shows
Starting point is 00:06:19 where someone lives in this beautiful house and then, like, they realize that it's all, like, in their head. It's a prison. They're just living in, like, a concrete basement. Yeah, it they realize that it's all like in their head they're actually just living in like a concrete basement yeah it's like it's just like shit it's all like oh it's all been artificially like projected yeah around or onto their retina or whatever so they see this weird um this is machine learning so by the way um i know you're a big fan of stanley parable sips yeah um They've been following it a bit over the last couple of years and they're doing the Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe. Right. Which is basically
Starting point is 00:06:50 Stanley Parable 2. It's kind of got basically, but the thing is it's not really 2 because it's in the same place. It's got more script than the entire first game and the whole point of the Stanley Parable is to kind of surprise you and be a bit weird and throw you off. And so they've been making these little articles,
Starting point is 00:07:07 talking and joking and writing about it. And they're so funny. But they've done this little one about using machine learning. Because it's all a rage. The thing is, Stanley Parable has got his finger on the pulse of what is circle jerky, right, in a sense. So this idea of machine learning and algorithmic automation and stuff, everyone's taking advantage of it
Starting point is 00:07:30 and like, oh, I use machine learning to do an ice cream really badly. It's just really, it's the whole thing. So yeah, they've done a few little scripts that they've rewritten. Do you want to read do you want to read any love to yeah go okay so i'll post it you gotta do it in the narrator's voice though okay well you can do you could who can do it the best right here's you probably or no
Starting point is 00:07:56 flax probably can right is this in the stanley parable voice yeah do it yeah hold on hold on let me just uh stanley's office building is not where it is yeah you gotta do it like so he goes okay so is this so read the one from the original game all of stanley's co-workers were becoming stanley stanley did not know how to do this so he tried he could not this made him sad stanley returns to his office eating ice cream he is not happy stanley soon discovered that the office was in his own mind. The ice cream was in his own mind. The co-workers were in his own mind.
Starting point is 00:08:29 Stanley was in his own mind. This made him sad. Stanley thought himself out of thinking and then became everyone. Nobody works in the office anymore. Stanley finishes eating his ice cream. So that's the original. So that's the machine learning AI one. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:08:46 So a machine learning AI came up with that? Well, no, I think it's a joke, though. I think that's written by the guy, the Davey Readon, who wrote this. He's writing the Stanley Parable. Do you know what I mean? I think he...
Starting point is 00:08:59 I get the impression this is like a kind of slightly satirical look at it. So yeah, he's written this whole article. You can find it if you look for Stanley Parable. So this is like a kind of um slightly satirical look at it so yeah he's written this article you can find it if you look for stanley parable so this is this is another one stanley could do anything and he knew it he could conquer space he could swallow germany nothing was impossible the day would be his stanley exits his office with confidence stanley left his offices and perambulated through space and time until he arrived at a set of two open doors.
Starting point is 00:09:26 Weird Gary appears. Hello. That's Weird Gary. Stanley and Weird Gary became close friends over the course of many years. They died as they lived, side by side, facing the world together. That's so strange. It's weird, isn't it? Man, on the subject of Stanley Parable, I've been watching that show Severance, which, man, does have some Stanley Parable vibes to it for sure, right? Oh, man.
Starting point is 00:09:55 What a show. Everybody being fucking weirdly cut off at work and just all the sequences where they're at work are all insane though, right? But like it makes me think about all of the times I've been at work. And you kind of think like, yeah, okay, I wasn't severed to go to work. But sometimes I felt like I was, you know what I mean? Like it's this other world and it's so fucking weird sometimes isn't it like if you actually stop to think about it it's a it's a great show important to you at work yeah who cares like as soon as you're out of work you really switch into a different person and
Starting point is 00:10:36 i mean if you ever if you've worked some for a while and you've only ever seen those people at work yeah when you go out like for a party or you go out with some people from work and stuff, and they're completely different, you realize how, I think in a way, we all sever ourselves from office work and jobs and stuff. You kind of do have even a different personality at work sometimes. You're just not yourself mostly. You're more guarded, right? You are, yeah, of course.
Starting point is 00:11:03 But you also are ultra socially well most people are ultra socially aware right you you kind of have to be some people are just completely unfiltered and you wonder how the fuck are they still here yeah exactly but uh i mean it's uh it's it there's there's lots of yeah if you think about it there's just lots of funny sort of um things that you can relate back to the to the real world where it's not so extreme but there's still lots of that right like like the work that they're doing is just so fucking weird and seems so useless but yeah yeah there's a lot of jobs out there like that too, right? Where you just go in and you're just pushing around paper or whatever, and there's no point to it.
Starting point is 00:11:49 It's true. I think the really interesting thing to me is, and I'm going to try not to do any spoilers here for Severance. This is just more of an overall concept. I'm sure if you haven't watched it by now, you maybe read an article about it or something explaining that basically everybody that works in the severed offices of this place, Lumen, has had a voluntary operation on their brain that has an implant that when they pass through a certain part of the office, like a field, it switches their memory so that they cannot remember anything outside of work. They don't know what they do. They don't know if they're married, who their friends are. They know nothing. And equally, when they leave work, they remember nothing about what happened. So as the innie and the outie, the outie is the
Starting point is 00:12:34 regular person who lives on the outside and the innie is the person that exists in the office. Obviously, you're the same person, but you don't know each other. No. And you refer to your innie like when you're not so much it's more it's more the innies that refer to the outies right like the outies don't really think about the innies that much like because the the choice for them to um be severed comes from their outside yeah yeah right so they they know what these are always wondering what yeah but the the innies are the ones that what am I like? What do I do? The innies are the ones that are like a loose
Starting point is 00:13:08 thread, right? They're like, what the hell? I don't even remember my name. What you're calling me might not even be my name. They're aware that they're somewhere weird that they can't really escape from because the minute they leave the floor of the office
Starting point is 00:13:24 that they're working at um that their sort of work brain shuts off and then their personal brain kicks in so for them then their next um their next like bit of reality like might be the last thing that they see is the door closed to the elevator for them leaving for the day and then the next thing they know the door is just opening again immediately and they're leaving yeah and they're and they're coming back to work and they have no concept that they've had any time off any rest any sleep nothing so they don't know what their outside persona could be doing like they could just be doing hard drugs all night long not sleeping and then you're you're just at work the next day thinking holy crap i feel like shit
Starting point is 00:14:04 what the hell is going on out there you know like it's just yeah and vice versa too because sometimes like they can get injured at work and then they'll they'll leave and they'll have a note that says like oh you know you banged into a cupboard yeah yeah it's man it's such a fascinating it's such a good concept for a show and it works it asks loads of questions i think the biggest one is is your innie cannot quit work unless your outie agrees yeah so there's no way to communicate that your outie would need to say i want to quit and your innie would then also need to say it so you would need to coordinate it's like almost like one of those prisoner's dilemma things yeah you
Starting point is 00:14:40 need to coordinate with the other person uh And sometimes that's not going to happen. Yeah. And you've got to remember that the Audi put you there for a reason. Because the Audi needs that eight hours a day of cutoff or whatever. But they might also just be unbelievably fucking lazy. Yes. It's very appealing to say, I know I need to work, but I really hate it. So what I'll do is I'll just turn up to work and whatever happens in there, as far as I'm
Starting point is 00:15:08 concerned, for the rest of my life, I've never worked a day. I just lose some hours. I turn up at work and instantly I'm leaving work. Yes. And I still get paid and I'm still doing my job and I might get promoted or whatever. So from the outies perspective, this is the best job ever because it doesn't matter how dull it is, but you're essentially creating a slave version of yourself who is forced to toil in this place and might be the most miserable person and hate their job and desperate to quit and you have perpetuated that
Starting point is 00:15:36 so it asks you some really really fucking deep questions so interesting it really is like it it starts what starts off as quite a simple like kind of almost like a metaphor of all that have a why don't you just divide your work-life balance you know everyone should have you know make sure you turn off when you go home kind of thing yeah right but then it kind of very quickly becomes like you what happens when you because because it's almost like some sort of animosity, like you might start hating your other self. Yeah. Which is kind of another metaphor for, you know, those of you out there who struggle to, you know, just love yourself if you can.
Starting point is 00:16:14 I love myself as often as I can. Well, I know. That's why my eyesight is so poor. Oh, my God. But yeah, a really, really interesting show show with a lot of big questions too. And well presented too. Just the sort of... Oh, it's beautiful.
Starting point is 00:16:33 Yeah, it's just really nicely shot, just really well acted. It's a really great show. I love these moral and ethical questions, you know? I feel like there's this thing around dead people, where you can't speak ill of the dead, but some of them were cunts, you know? And also like, some of them I didn't like anyway at the time. There is this idea though that they can't fight back, right, the dead. They can't defend themselves.
Starting point is 00:17:01 And so in a sense, people often take advantage of that. I mean, it's happened throughout history, history you know in terms of historians and kings and and or people rewriting history to suit them you know depicting the last king as bad or immoral or whatever in order to suit their own prop up their own empire or life and and vice versa too like depicting somebody was terribly immoral as perfect, you know, and unfailing. And even today we see that with people having these reimagined histories, certainly in terms of people like Mao and some of these people who were not, I'm sure, perfect people.
Starting point is 00:17:36 Are people reinventing Mao? Chairman Mao, you know. Are people actually doing that? Like, I think we need to look at him again. You know, I think I could imagine to look at him again you know it just i think i could imagine someone who's like you know the dead can't defend themselves as you said someone's screaming debate me at a dead guy it's pretty pretty internet i think i want it is pretty much debate me why is he running away just fuck he's dead he's dead yeah now hasn't posted how he feels about you know he hasn't updated his
Starting point is 00:18:06 war in ukraine sometime he does so maybe he's uh maybe he's for the war in ukraine he might he's not saying he's not saying speaking of uh history it's the anniversary of the sinking of the titanic holy crap is it yeah 100 years 100 years you know You know, I saw a bit on the news, I think, recently, and they are completely and utterly 3D mapping the shit out of this thing. Out of the Titanic? Like the, yeah, well, the wreckage of the Titanic, because it's been under there so long, everything is just rapidly now disintegrating.
Starting point is 00:18:47 They will just lose the wreckage. And it's so hard to get down there and properly explore it and stuff. So they think that if they can do a lot of imaging on it, they can sort of recreate fully in 3D, probably likeorable vr or something like that but we know what they because there were two more built because there was obviously olympic and the britannic britannic sank in world war ii is when it got hit by a naval mine didn't it and then olympic carried on for a long long time i think all the way up until around the war second world war when i think it was scrapped eventually. I can't remember what it's... It obviously had a fairly sad end, as most ships do.
Starting point is 00:19:29 There's quite a lot of steel there, and it's usually in large plates, and it's usually quite good to recycle that into some other stuff. I mean, those other ships that you just mentioned did not have a movie made after them, so that's why... Yeah, I didn't know anything about that. I think that's why probably people aren't as interested in preserving those wreckages, you know?
Starting point is 00:19:48 Yeah, it's quite a sort of interesting story, because they were obviously... Most ships aren't made in a vacuum, they're made in multiples, you know, as a class. And so yeah, it did have other ships that were going before it, and after it, I think Titanic was just slightly larger. do you want to hear a little bit about the the rms olympic go on then read it off the wikipedia it was a british ocean liner and the lead ship of the white star lines trio of olympic class liners unlike the other ships in the there's one phrase here i really like i hope you like it too unlike the other ships in the class olympic had a career spanning 24
Starting point is 00:20:25 years from 1911 to 1935 this included service as a troop ship during the first world war which gained her the nickname old reliable she returned to civilian service after the war and served successfully as an ocean liner throughout the 1920s and blah blah blah blah blah uh but uh the great depression made her operation increasingly unprofitable, so they had to scrap it. Listen to this. Olympic was the largest ocean liner in the world for two periods during 1910 to 1913, interrupted only by the brief tenure of the slightly larger Titanic. The brief tenure of the Titanic is one way to put it.
Starting point is 00:20:57 It was brief. It was really nice. The brief tenure of the Titanic. Yeah. And then it sank and a bunch of people died. So it's kind of sad to put it as the brief tenure of the titanic uh yeah and then it sank a bunch of people died so it's kind of sad to put it as the brief tenure of the slightly larger titanic it's a really delicate way of putting it yeah but yeah it was um but she was obviously like uh this looked the same was the same had almost the same layout i think although i think titanic had a few different things they
Starting point is 00:21:23 i think titanic had like they'd remodeled some stairways inside and they put that grand stairwell in that you see in the movie that was quite an iconic bit that was added do you think that the other ship had a guy named jake on it who drew his french ladies like in uh or maybe they were like german ladies instead just like slightly different you know just like some some slight differences it's all just like they just missed an iceberg. Yeah, yeah. It's like the Seinfeld episode where they have like the other group. The other friends.
Starting point is 00:21:51 Yeah, the other friends that are all kind of the same, but like there's little differences. It's like that. I think so. It was a lavish grand staircase with three lifts, a Georgian-style smoking room, a veranda cafe with palm trees, a swimming pool, Turkish baths, gymnasium, and several different places for meals and entertainment. That was pretty interesting. Luxury was really the focus of these ships as well. It was a way for- it was like the Concorde of the day, you know, for upper-class folks
Starting point is 00:22:23 to travel slowly back and forth between America and Brazil. I feel like nowadays people just buy their own boats, right? Like if you're looking for, if you're rich and you're looking for luxury, like you're not really going to go on a cruise liner, are you? Like you're just going to get, you're going to get your own yacht or you're going to borrow your friend's yacht or something like that, right? Like if you're friends
Starting point is 00:22:45 with jay-z or like that the guy from microsoft or whatever and you you can just borrow their super yacht or use it for the weekend or i wonder if that happened back in the day you know did these mega rich men you know these oil oil barons and the rothschilds and these sort of people did they have their own private like ships that they just with private pilots and they drove them across for them like maybe i i'd assume so yeah but um yeah it must be yeah it's just it wasn't it wasn't quick was it like traveling like no i'm sure no i mean i guess like it's a little bit different for like flying um because you're you have to be very rich i suppose to own like a a plane but um back then maybe back then probably especially i'd say but i think they'd be more
Starting point is 00:23:34 scared of the dangers of flying though it was it was certainly a not not until you know like this thing in this time period is when that started happening wasn't it when you know there was um people flying around campaigning for president. Remember there was that guy who was quite famously, I can't remember his name. Really interesting story though. Oh, good. I'll remember it later.
Starting point is 00:23:54 He died in a plane crash. No, I just don't think he, I don't think he won. He just didn't win. Fuck you and your planes. No vote. Oh, man. fuck you and your planes no vote oh man oh so uh here's something i was thinking about the other day it's speaking of uh severance i i think severance's credit sequence the the intro i should say is really interesting yeah it's really good yeah i skip it every time after watching it one time but right i did like it there's an article uh about um the uh tv. There's an article about the TV theme tune composers
Starting point is 00:24:28 complaining about the skip intro button. Netflix has had that feature. This is on the Guardian website. Five years after the Netflix nuked title sequences, its infamous button is now pressed 136 million times a day. That's how many people skip well i mean there's certain intros though that i would not skip as much for example like the game of thrones intro i used to kind of watch yeah i just thought it was fucking great man like i couldn't get enough of it yeah it was a real belter yeah um certain certain seasons of the wire as well i would never skip the intro like especially the first like depending on uh like would never skip the intro. Right. Especially the first season. Like, depending on, like, some of the renditions of the song were not as great as others.
Starting point is 00:25:10 Minn-mo-minn-ped-o. Yeah, yeah. The first season, though, is a classic. It just got you so pumped for the episode. It did. But also, a lot of them, it was like a little bit of the show. Then it sort of, you hear the music swell for the opening credits and a character looks shocked and you know what's coming in the episode and it's like a bookend before the show moves to the next scene yeah um so this guy's saying uh they're skipping it i'm very against it
Starting point is 00:25:38 tv theme music is incredibly important it's almost a show's dna dna identifier it serves as an overture to bring you in and sets the tone. Fair. If it's the first episode of a show, fair. Because sometimes you're giving us some hints about what's coming and setting the scene with the opening credits, not just the music, but also the opening credits. I don't need to see it every time. No.
Starting point is 00:25:57 I'm not that forgetful. No. I can watch it once and be like, okay, I get some idea of what this show's going to be. And now if I'm on season three, I don't need to watch it. Remind me of the show's DNA identifier again, please. I'm a little confused. No, you don't need to watch it.
Starting point is 00:26:12 I'm skipping that shit every time. Give me the show. I wait a week for this. Give me the show. I sometimes, I skip the previously on as well, if there's the option. As I get more forgetful.ful yeah i don't mind it if i'm watching an episode a week or whatever sometimes i'll watch it but if i'm watching back-to-back episodes i find the previously on serves as a good opportunity to
Starting point is 00:26:38 quickly turn the light off or on or draw the curtains or you know do all the stuff because you've set the thing going right and then you realize you realise that you've like, oh, shit, I've got to get a drink or I've got to get this thing. And so the previously on, all the title sequence serves as this kind of buffer. You know, it's like before it's like, are you ready? Okay, yeah, we're all ready. Let's go.
Starting point is 00:26:56 And then you're like, oh, shit, I've got to do this thing. And then, you know. You know what else it does? It's kind of a big spoiler for the episode, the previously, because they don't just show you a summary of the previous episode. I agree. They quite often show you some scene from episode one.
Starting point is 00:27:10 You're like, oh, so they're going to, that's what that guy is. I bet, I bet that he is the guy that took the suitcase in episode one and now he's brought it back and he's the guy driving the great car. There's moments like that though that i the thing is i haven't watched all of severance yet i only watched the first episode
Starting point is 00:27:30 and there's a bit the thing is it's my detective brain i don't know whether this is relevant thing is it could completely be relevant but there's a bit where like someone just casually mentions that you know one of the characters has an allergy to certain certain yeah and i'm like that'll come back well yeah you get to that point with tv shows right because there's very few shows that are going to mention something for no reason right like like if you're if you're really listening to like all the dialogue and stuff somebody says something you're like what's the point of even writing that in like that's got to come back or mean something later right like like well that's checkoff's gun right why why even
Starting point is 00:28:05 bother putting a putting a gun on stage if you're not gonna shoot it you know but but but and if it's not that it's a red herring but but it does help to just enhance the the the mood of or the feel of something with small details you know it's it's that's the that's the way to get authenticity is to have little details that are hard to fake, or hard to make up, or you wouldn't think of if you were just imagining it in your head, and you didn't have real experience to draw on. That's how you can tell that these people's... Or at least it's one of the ways that we look at trying to tell who's lying and tell who's
Starting point is 00:28:39 telling the truth, because of these small little things they know or can draw upon that give it realistic. One thing that I do when I'm watching my favorite show, The Apprentice, is the intro sequence for that has, it's like a super cut, like montage of clips of them doing tasks and stuff, right? But not just from the week or or previous weeks it's from the whole thing so sometimes you're watching that and you'll see them you know two of them screaming on a roller coaster but they haven't done the roller coaster task yet right that's not coming for another four weeks or whatever oh wow yeah yeah but you'll see them doing that and and you'll be like okay hang on like that's not that task
Starting point is 00:29:25 so you kind of know immediately that two people aren't getting fired today oh that's true you know what i mean like you can kind of just from watching it like week after week after week you can kind of guess who's gonna he's starting to decipher yeah yeah you can figure out who because like i remember at one point somebody fucked up really bad or something and my wife is like he's out for sure i was like no he can't be he's in the fucking roller coaster clip and she's like oh shit yeah he must not be and sure enough he didn't go because he survived to the roller coaster task you know there's a couple of little couple of little clips in there that you can there's an there's an even more extreme version of that which is the original mission impossible tv series for anyone that hasn't seen it it's a banger it version of that, which is the original Mission Impossible TV series.
Starting point is 00:30:06 For anyone that hasn't seen it, it's a banger. It's very dated, but it is really, really good. In the credit, the opening credits for the episode would show you hype moments from the episode you were about to watch. Right. So you would see like a little montage of what was coming. And it's like a massive spoiler for the episode. But I guess back then they were like, we've got to keep people watching the TV.
Starting point is 00:30:29 Otherwise, they're going to miss the adverts for Lucky Strikes. You know, they sort of tried to tease you into the episode. But it always meant that you kind of knew how they were going to solve the problem they've been presented with. At the very start, it was kind of funny. You don't see that these days. No, uh it's a bit weird nowadays isn't it there's like there's a lot of um man there's so much reality tv like i didn't realize just how much there is and the problem is people can't get enough of it now um from reality tv that's produced in their own country and i'm i'm guilty of this as well they actually
Starting point is 00:31:05 seek out reality tv from other countries as well like it's just this insatiable appetite for reality tv it's insane like you look on netflix now the the category for reality tv holy crap there's so many shows and it's all like the bachelor usa the bachelor you know fucking madagascar like all these places what it's it's it's pretty funny but like it's kind of it's crazy these relationship shows where because i'm sure i'm sure that when when i was a a young man we had that what was that cilla black show uh the dating one blind date oh blind date yeah and I'm sure that's still around it's still in some form and then that was it there there might have been like the what was there was an old game show called the newlywed game yeah where they would say
Starting point is 00:31:56 your husband asks for anal sex what is your response you know and they sort of gave some some some uh twee answer or sometimes they just said uh you know some something really smutty uh but there weren't shows about like people meeting in that way yeah it's so strange now that these relationship shows yeah they're fucking everywhere like love at first sight or whatever there's also there's a first date there's a first date first dates there's first date. First dates. There's like, yeah, there's like a restaurant, right? That they go to. They just do all the filming there.
Starting point is 00:32:31 And then you have married at first sight. You've got the bachelor. Naked attraction. Have you seen naked attraction? Naked attraction. All of these. Yeah. So when did that shift come where now we just want to see relationships?
Starting point is 00:32:42 Do you think it's because it's harder to meet people so we're doing it vicariously or because we like laughing at other people's dreadful i mean there should be one where you just see people going on tinder dates i think the first one that i remember like really sort of reality show was probably like survivor in in um in north america i never watched that and then i don ever watched that. I don't know if it became popular over here or not. Because I think, like, the UK is funny, right? Like, it exports a lot of formats, but it doesn't import a lot of formats. Like, they're usually quite good at it.
Starting point is 00:33:15 I don't know if that's true. I don't know if that's true. I'd say it exports far more than it imports. I think we do export quite a lot, but I think a lot of the stuff that we think is original is actually an imported format. I mean, like The Masked Singer is a prime example. Sure, yeah. That's quite a popular show.
Starting point is 00:33:32 That's a Korean show. There's plenty of shows that start here and then make their way. I know the BBC sells a lot of formats to America and Canada. I don't even know if The Apprentice is an original show. No, I think The Apprentice was originally devised in the US as well. like to america i don't even know if the apprentice uh is an original no i think the apprentice i think the apprentice was originally devised in uh in the u.s as well i think that's one like one of the few that's come over from from the u.s specifically so that was the american original with with old fucking with donald trump face himself yeah and then and then that format
Starting point is 00:34:01 was uh who wants to be a millionaire was... Is it Endemol? Yeah, it was UK. So that was their big one, I think. Because that went everywhere. I'm pretty sure Big Brother was UK as well, I think. Or maybe it was... Actually, no. It was in the Netherlands, right?
Starting point is 00:34:18 That was the first Big Brother was made in the Netherlands. Yeah, that was Dutch. It was Endemol as well, yeah. That was Endemol. I think they might be a Dutch company. Endemol make a ton of shit made in the Netherlands. Yeah, that was Dutch. It was Endemol as well, yeah. That was Endemol. I think they might be a Dutch company. Endemol make a ton of shit, by the way. Like, they, like, pointless. They make, like, fucking...
Starting point is 00:34:33 It's just, they've got... Like, most of the TV game shows... A crew of mindless idiots just coming up with dumb stuff for dumb people. So Endemol BV was a Dutch-based company. Yeah. And then they were merged into endemol shine group a joint venture between disney and someone yeah yeah yeah so now it's just a name name only but these are
Starting point is 00:34:52 their shows these are their franchises strictly come dancing like the voice all these shows like dragon's den i'm pretty sure all of these like and concepts are exported. Dude, listen to these shows that they came up with. Big Brother, Deal or No Deal, Fear Factory, Wipeout, The Money Drop, Your Face Sounds Familiar, which I've never heard of. What the hell is Your Face Sounds Familiar? That's a Spanish interactive reality television franchise where celebrity contestants impersonate singers. Right.
Starting point is 00:35:23 And that's very similar to the Dutch TV series Soundmixer, which was first used in Spain, apparently. Nice. What on earth? God, this is everywhere. There's an Angolan version of this show. I know. The formats just go out to all these other countries
Starting point is 00:35:42 and they just make their own version. But then you can watch all of those versions on netflix like if you've exhausted your supply of local ones you could just go out and watch all the other ones too some of them are pretty good like like married at first sight i don't even watch the uk one i only watch the australian one because it's so juicy this is such channel surfing crap so there's this thing right called my retro tvs.com right which i can link to you now basically it's like this website where you can just type in any year so like 77 like you can get like 77 and it'll bring up like a tv and it'll just play um seven
Starting point is 00:36:18 tv shows and music and movies and commercials came out in that year commercials yeah and like shopping channels and all this crap and you could just channel hop your way through that era um and it's so fucking weird i was playing with it yesterday and it's just like it's you could just you know enjoy this this bygone era of crap and even like 20 years ago like even like the 2000s tv it's fucking dated it's not aged well early 2000s was jivey as fuck man like if you look back and you see like i was watching i think it was mariah carey at the bbc like they did you know they do this every once in a while like some big you know performer whatever gets like a you know hour and a half slot where they show all of the top of the pops appearances all of like the big collabs
Starting point is 00:37:11 all their big number ones the videos and everything and she did that phil collins song um with i think it was like boyzone or westlife or something in like 2001 man it just like the clothes everything was so bad like worse than the 90s like like far worse than the 90s like you look back to the 80s and 90s and you look at the fashion and the clothing and stuff it's pretty bad but early 2000s was the worst like i don't know what the hell people were thinking it's just awful like i can't even explain some of the decisions the fact like i'm i'm not a big fashion person like i know i just wear shorts every day and stuff but like i don't know like i feel like that's just tried tested and true you know like i like you you're always just gonna kind of look
Starting point is 00:37:56 like shit but these people were making some sort of effort and still just looked like shit you know like it's crazy i don't know like lots of fucking chains and like frosted tip hairdos and like oh man it was just it's depressing kind of looking back on some of that the 90s looks so cheap compared to now honestly when you look at even tv shows and movies and like the things that people were wearing i don't remember uh 90s fashion just seems to be like pretty hilariously it's it's post 80s 80s fashion was so iconic in the 90s we we didn't really know what we were doing we hadn't found a a vibe yet i guess i mean a lot of it was a lot of colorful stuff yeah there was it was like colorful yeah colorful early 90s there was like a lot of like uh like
Starting point is 00:38:45 like the dance scene was developing a lot more right that was a big part of it yeah so you had like neon and stuff lots of neons but i don't know if you remember those they were button-up shirts that were like checkered but big checkers so like oh yeah lumberjack shirts was a big thing like that style well like yeah like going into like grunge and stuff plaid but i'm talking about like big checkered shirts like you have like two black squares and two white squares on the front of a buttoned up shirt you know what i mean that's very saved by the bell yeah that was very much it was just coming out of the coming out of the 80s going into the 90s and i remember those being all the rage right you'd wear you'd wear that and you would go to like a discotheque and go go dancing or whatever like yeah we go dancing
Starting point is 00:39:32 at the discotheque i have my uh big chick but then it felt like the 90s started like that and then became very very grimy like or at least for me anyway because i i listened to like a lot of grunge and metal and then transitioned into listening to a lot of hip-hop from the 90s and like fashion was a huge thing for hip-hop in the 90s i'm sure it still it is huge coat yeah big pants big coats like timberlands like like tommy hill figure like all all like the big the big brands right that everybody was wearing so it was like i don't know i mean yeah you look back and it probably feels a bit jivey now but at the time it was pretty cool like and you were cool at the time you were aware pretty much the way it is though yeah i suppose but i mean now i i like i i I think I spoke about this the other week about the bland colors
Starting point is 00:40:25 available, especially to men. It's black, blue, brown, gray. That's it. There's very little variation. I tweeted, I went to a clothes shop, I was looking for some t-shirts and shirts and things, and those were the colors on offer. Various hues of those four colors. Not even primary colors we could get interested, nothing, just bland.
Starting point is 00:40:50 It's like we're trying to camouflage ourselves from the world. And I really hope that there is a move towards color in men's clothing. I can't speak about women's clothing. Mrs. F seems to get some nice stuff. The kids wear some nice stuff. I'm genuinely jealous of the amount of color and vibrancy that there is in women's clothing i mrs f seems to get some nice stuff the kids wear some nice stuff like i'm genuinely jealous of the amount of color and vibrancy that there is in women's clothes yeah because in men's it's fucking miserable i've got a couple of red t-shirts i got a bright yellow t-shirt i'm wearing a green one now you try finding a green beautiful uh shade of blue t-shirt a
Starting point is 00:41:19 couple of them i got some grays and blacks and whites right of course but i i i haven't struggled too much to find colorful clothes in your own uh by your own admission you just wear shorts and any t-shirt yeah like i'm talking about go to go to a shop especially a high street fashion shop and try to find something not in those four colors yeah well you don't want to be the fucking guy in the red suit with the fucking bow tie and the fucking top hat. Do you know what I mean? I'm just saying, like,
Starting point is 00:41:51 you'd also, if you're the only beacon of colour, you know, that's not going to attract other people who are colourful. The problem is going to be, you'll have to look at everyone else. Do you know what I mean? I don't have to look at my own ugly face unless I see a mirror or accidentally, you know, look into a shop window or my switch turns off you know and i see i'm confronted by the grim reality of aging but um you know i it's mostly other people who i
Starting point is 00:42:16 want need color this reminds me of a book that i read to my kids sometimes called uh elmer the elephant and he's like uh he's an elephant that's not grey like the other ones. All the other elephants are grey and kind of boring, but Elmer is patchwork, like all the colours of the rainbow. Sounds to me like one of them gay conspiracy books. They're trying to get that idea into our kids' minds and turn them gay. Yeah, well, anyway, so what Elmer decides to do... I'm sorry! This is interesting. Jesus. I guarantee you someone wants that book banned.
Starting point is 00:42:46 This is clearly an allegory for homosexuality. Get this book off my kids' shelves. That's such a Republican viewpoint, people. Dude, that's happening right now. Okay, but listen to this. I know. Going through books looking for any hint of gayness and trying to burn them. That's disgusting.
Starting point is 00:42:54 Well, Elmer tries to hide his gayness in the story, in the original story. He finds some berries that are grey and he smothers himself in these berries to camouflage his patchwork or to hide his patchwork. So he becomes grey just like all the other elephants. Right. He rejoins the herd and all the other elephants are just like sleeping and stuff, you know, they're not paying any attention or whatever. And Elmer just can't fucking contain himself. And he scares all of them and then they wash them
Starting point is 00:43:35 off and the patchwork. And then he realizes that everybody likes him for who he is because of his personality and not because of the color of his skin and see at that point the lesson falls apart because telling people be comfortable in your own skin and be who you are is a great message yeah but then also telling them people will accept you for that is a lie well listen they will not fight against assholes the rest of your life i'm very sorry we can be hopeful though it's a hopeful message. They go a step further with Elmer because then they decide from that day
Starting point is 00:44:10 forward, because he scared them and gave them all such a good chuckle through doing that. It was a really good prank. That day annually is celebrated and all of the grey elephants dress up like a patchwork kind
Starting point is 00:44:26 of a pride march kind of for elmer yeah but then elmer does the opposite he dresses up like a gray elephant oh okay yeah weird so how does that i'm not sure i understand that message yeah it's a complex thing to unpack it is it is at the end of the day so here's why i think here's why i think republicans are so determined that that book is clearly trying to turn kids gay i remember when my kids were younger i'm not saying by the way we don't know if this is the case no i'm just saying i can imagine we just assume that there's some cunt in america it's making our kids so gay. That we actually believe what we're saying.
Starting point is 00:45:08 We don't. It's just a funny notion. It's for the purposes of this discussion, all right? Yeah. There is a book called The Little Red Hen. It's like a children's classic. And my dad sent it to the girls. It's the only book he's ever sent them when they were younger.
Starting point is 00:45:23 And was like, oh, you should read this to them. It's a classic. Now, I remember this book when I was a kid. If you don't remember this story, here's the only book he's ever sent them when they were younger and was like, oh, you should read this to them. It's a classic. Now, I remember this book when I was a kid. If you don't remember this story, here's the rundown. The Little Red Hen. Okay, just to brief you, it's from 1874. Well, a lot of these old stories are, though. They're all old fairy tales.
Starting point is 00:45:38 That does mean it could be dangerous, though. No, no, no, it's not racist or anything like that. Okay, thank God. Okay, don't worry. So the Little Red Hen works industriously hard, and she gets all this food ready, and she's very industrious and hardworking, and all the other lazy animals are trying to take her stuff.
Starting point is 00:45:58 Can they say, can you share some of that? Because you've got loads. And she's like, no, I worked really hard for this. You don't get any of it. My dad loves this book because it fulfills his libertarian idea. Yeah, it sounds very anti-communist. Very. But it's like it was written pre-communism.
Starting point is 00:46:14 Like communism did not exist. Just the idea of sharing was so bad that they had to write a children's book about it. So the extremely successful entrepreneurial red hen makes all this bank and god forbid anybody wants to share of course all the animals that say we should really share this around so it can help other people they're just lazy and they literally are in the story they're all just lying around going ah the red hen will do all the work for us it's it's like that super conservative vision it's hilarious they're just lazy greedy selfish bastards yeah yeah yeah and most of these people have inherited wealth in the first place like none of them have actually
Starting point is 00:46:51 gone out and fucking generated wealth themselves they're fucking so stupid a thousand eggs from her father and she managed to start a chicken farm it's just a small load why aren't you doing it mr fox so it's like i'm like this is a not a totally unsubtle message to prepare kids that that this is the way to do things that anybody who wants a handout is a lazy bastard that message is a core part of conservative sort of thinking in to my view of of that kind of social contract if you like so my dad sent this book over clearly trying to indoctrinate my kids. And I caught this because I recognised it straight away.
Starting point is 00:47:29 To educate your children on the importance of hard work, personal initiative, and the fact that you're better than the rest of them. And that the poor people deserve to be poor because they're lazy. Because they're lazy. So as soon as I unwrapped this, I called my dad. I was like, I know what you're trying to do. And he was just laughing.
Starting point is 00:47:45 He was like, straight away. He knew that I would know. So I binned it off straight away. Really? Yeah, I binned it, of course. It's quite funny because you'd think the red hen would be something like a warning for children. You know, warning, this red hen is one that shares with other communists.
Starting point is 00:48:04 You don't want to do that. You know, they're lazy and they'll take your eggs. The stupid red hen and all the other reds trying to come into our country and take it for themselves like they deserve it. Their father had owned that country for hundreds of years. And we weren't going to take it away and give it to someone who just, you know, didn't inherit it.
Starting point is 00:48:24 Exactly. It's the whole thing didn't inherit it. Exactly. It's the whole thing. That's it. But so maybe they always see indoctrination in books because they've been doing it since the 19th century. Well, I think there's a very thin line between indoctrination and education, right? Like, you know, you've got to teach your kids about, you know, in many ways you could say that Elmerma the elephant is indoctrinating kids to be tolerant right and you know understand that the people are diverse and worth your respect regardless of the color of their skin in many ways you could use that the the you know these these words are not you know we choose to educate our kids a certain way nowadays
Starting point is 00:49:03 i think indoctrination is obviously when is's considered bad. I think that as the times change, that line changes and changes. Certainly, I think that even in modern times, I don't think that a lot of people would have a lot of criticism with that idea. What do you think about it resonates, though? Thinking about it right now if i was read elmer the elephant when i was a kid i mean i wouldn't be sitting here right now at 41 years old looking back and thinking yeah there's a lesson there or whatever you know like my day-to-day life i think it all goes it's got to be some sort of like, you get read something like that and you can just, I don't know, in your mind, find another way or something. It's kind of hard to explain, but I don't feel like specifically that book would have a huge impact.
Starting point is 00:49:57 I don't think the book would specifically. But I think what happens when kids read this stuff, for a start, it all goes in. Yeah, absolutely. And it all goes in. Yeah, absolutely. And it's all in their subconscious. Sure, they don't understand the heavy-handed metaphor that, you know, is to represent, you know, people who are, you know, have a different skin colour and aren't being, you know, treated properly today.
Starting point is 00:50:21 But I think that it does, it all it all stacks up you know honestly i i think more than just it going in i think in a way it primes their brain then when they have an interaction in real life that sort of solidifies this view or counters this view or whatever but it's it's all just like until you've had a real life experience. I don't think that reading a book as a kid is going to genuinely change who you are. No, I think that. But it might help to inform and shape how you view a real life experience. Absolutely. That turns into a personality.
Starting point is 00:50:58 Even from a very simple way. Like, you know, they're different to me. That's OK. You know, it's not they're different to me. We should okay. You know, it's not they're different to me. We should expel them from the country. But I don't think like, do kids really even think that way, though? Maybe I'm just being naive here, but I can't imagine that kids have preloaded that much hatred in them. You know what I mean?
Starting point is 00:51:22 No, they don't. But you'd be surprised how much culture and education and things that we've got like if i was a priest god forbid right now um and i was teaching podcast very different and i was teaching you know people or kids um lines from the bible and i didn't know the i i think i'd be constantly confronted by messages that are wrong or out of date or just just like completely counter to what we consider modern you know and i think i would have to be constantly being like oh god i don't really even want to teach people so much i'd have to be so selective over which passages i taught people right i you know i think
Starting point is 00:52:06 i think that i think the problem is that these cultural things these stories these these books that your parents read they give them to their kids they give them to their grandkids they still teach them and these messages still get through right because yeah because those people didn't necessarily there's anything wrong with that or they didn't quite understand what they were doing or they didn't understand that these metaphors can lead to more problems i think this is a classic thing where you could see that you know these these the diversity is still problematic in society because you ask i remember this from a while ago but yeah you ask sort of little little kids you know which of the dolls is the good doll and which of the dolls is the bad doll yeah and they'll point to the black doll as being the bad doll because we still perceive that there's something you know
Starting point is 00:52:49 something naughty or bad about about you know there's still this this cultural insensitivity that's built in and scared and people are scared of people who are different right because you know the minority minority people are always going to be feared. I don't know whether it's in our genetics, but we do have to fight it. And it's small ways like these books, I guess, that help do that from an early age. Yeah, you're right, it primes kids to be- Do you guys remember being read to as a child? I don't really-
Starting point is 00:53:22 A couple of times. Only a couple of times. I don't really remember being read to all that much at all. Like I remember being read to at school, like, like,
Starting point is 00:53:29 like at a very young age, but I don't remember having regular like bedtime stories and stuff as a kid. I don't, I don't remember being read to at school,
Starting point is 00:53:37 but there are a few books. There's one called Dogger, which was about a kid that he lived in North London and he, he lost his toy dog. Again, this would not be okay. No.
Starting point is 00:53:50 What? Dogger? Dogger. That's the name of the dog. Oh, you mean like doggy? Yeah. Right, but I don't think anybody would call themselves a dogger. Well, maybe. You never know. I don't think they would. What the hell else are you going to call yourself? A doggy? Someone who is dog? One who is dog? i don't think they were also you're gonna call yourself a doggy someone
Starting point is 00:54:05 who is one who is dog i don't know but either way it's called dogger is the name of the book and the kid loses his his toy dog and he sees it uh for sale at a jumble sale right another girl buys it and he's in tears and she wants to keep it and they manage to find something else to give her in trade to get dogger back and he's very happy i love this book as a kid and i i distinctly remember my mom reading me those right and richard scary books yeah i had richard scary books but i don't remember anybody reading them to me like i remember my mom reading them to me and we would always look for certain characters uh the gold bug who would appear on every page it was like a little gold bug yeah who would be driving something and the worm whose name i'd forgotten um but i remember all of these characters and just i remember particular pages that oddly enough one of the
Starting point is 00:54:56 books i remember my parents are both atheists was noah's ark the book and i loved it because it had all these animals and you like there was this one page where you'd open up like the double spread in the middle and you could see the ark with all the animals on and I would be on that page for like five minutes just looking at all the animals and pointing them out oh for kids that shit is great right but it's weird because I do all this shit with my kids I read them every day, like every night, like without fail. We read books to them before they go to bed or we play like a board game or there's something like we do something.
Starting point is 00:55:31 But I don't remember having any of that like growing up, like me or my brother. We watched some telly. Yeah, we watched TV basically until we fell asleep. It felt like. Right. I don't know if like, I don't know if that's the same for anybody else. I remember The Muppet Show was, youet Show was what I watched when that was on. I got to stay up extra late to watch that.
Starting point is 00:55:50 Oh, can I just say, I found something really funny. This is a little more Red Hen, just very quickly. There have been some revisions and different versions of The Red Hen. So politically themed versions of the story include a conservative version, ultra conservative version, I'd say based on a 1976 monologue from Ronald Reagan. This version features a farmer who claims that the hen is being unfair by refusing to share the bread and forces her to do so, removing the hen's incentive
Starting point is 00:56:21 to work and causing poverty to the farm. That's incredible. Yeah. Another version. That just assumes that, you know, that that's how it works. It assumes that there is but one worker and they're the industrious red hen
Starting point is 00:56:37 and everyone else is just a lazy bastard. That's Ronald Reagan's version. If you tax people, you remove their incentive to work. Well, fuck off. Another version satirizes capitalism by depicting the hen promising the animals slices of bread if they make it
Starting point is 00:56:50 but keeping the largest slice for herself despite not doing any work. I like that one. That's more like it. Right. And a version by Malvina Reynolds adapts the story into a pro-work socialist anthem as the hen retains the fruits of her labor saying
Starting point is 00:57:06 and that's why they called her red so you're right they made a version where the little red hen is like the little communist hen uh that's just just hilarious but see that's that's the thing it is clearly there's a hidden message in the little i like i like the capitalist version where you know she becomes the sort of the overlord of the farm gets the biggest slice of the pie keeps all the other animals in a slum and still ends up doing nothing
Starting point is 00:57:33 right so ultimately she is the lazy one who gets the most and all her chicks inherit the bread making factory and keep the other animals and they can be lazy cunts their whole life oh my god man just do cocaine in the penthouse while all the zoom around in their sports cars running over the other animals and then the the farmer aka the system lets them off because they're rich that
Starting point is 00:57:57 would be a good version of the red that would be great let's write that down oh so what what do you think makes a good children's book? Apart from... I feel like any messages that go in there, I feel like should be... I think a lot of them just rely on repeat formulas, right? What age are we talking here? In a sense, I don't really want any politics in in children's
Starting point is 00:58:25 books in a sense right i don't feel like we should have any of these controversial things right might just be fun stuff my kids really like mr men books which now have become a little bit like there's some discussion about how they're a little bit like problematic at times or whatever but i can imagine mr tickle jesus mr men books follow the same formula more or less right and it's just like a it's like a way it's like a way to teach people how to behave nicely or whatever right because like there's always i i'd say for the most part um i'd say seven times out of 10 in a Mr. Men book, one of the characters, the lead characters, the Mr. Men or the Little Miss will meet some sort of fairy or goblin or something in their garden. And then after misbehaving, and then the fairy or goblin or
Starting point is 00:59:19 whatever will do something to them to punish them for misbehaving and say to them, next time you misbehave, this is going to happen to you again, basically until you start behaving properly. Right? So do you think the Mr. Men books are about conformity? I guess so, yeah. Many of the Mr. Men are actually deformed. They've got serious problems.
Starting point is 00:59:40 For example, Mr. Epony. It's very judgy. It's very judgy, the books. You're right. Mr. Nosey, he's got a mr it's very judgy it's very judgy the book like mr nosy he's got a big nose very judgy yeah how can how can he get his comeuppance yeah you know what i mean stuff like that yeah i guess just saying it's impossible not to put some sort of message mr nosy right for for being so nosy he's he's being so nosy that he annoys everybody in the town that
Starting point is 01:00:03 he lives in right for from being so nosy so all of the residents of the town get together there's no goblin or fairy in this one this is just the residents of the town getting together they all get together to um sort of teach him a lesson right so mr nosey's walking down the road he hears something in a backyard uh he he pokes his nose into the backyard and then he gets like a clothes pin on his nose and it hurts um but the woman has done it on purpose right she's made the noise on purpose so that he will be nosy and then she could put the clothes pin on his nose um to like startle him and so like and this goes on right he's he's walking past like uh he's like the the the
Starting point is 01:00:43 furniture maker of the town or whatever he hears some noise he pokes his nose in and he gets a hammer on the nose and this like three or four times this happens and then in the end he's less nosy because he knows he's gonna his nose is gonna get splashed with paint or run over by a car or some shit uh if he's too nosy right and then everybody's like hooray we love mr nosy like he's not being as nosy anymore and that's it that's the whole story like like mr men books are like five pages long like they're okay like they're do you find that there's lots of text there is a lot of text in mr men books like if you look one up and have a look there's
Starting point is 01:01:22 it's a lot more than a lot of modern books which have like one sentence yeah um oh so i'm just looking at mr tickle yeah and these are there it's obviously it's in a bunch of different languages uh some of them so it's monsieur chatouille in french and in spanish it's don koskias i feel like mr tickle is i i don't know maybe he's not the most problematic one but i would imagine that that it's Don Koskias. I feel like Mr. Tickle is, I don't know, maybe he's not the most problematic one, but I would imagine that that was certainly
Starting point is 01:01:49 the message of Mr. Tickle is a dangerous one. Mr. Tickle gets owned by Little Miss Magic at one point because Mr. Tickle goes on a tickling rampage, tickles the whole town.
Starting point is 01:02:01 Everybody gets super mad and you know there's problems when Mr. Happy turns up at your front door and he's not happy, right? rampage tickles the whole town everybody gets super mad and you know there's problems when mr happy turns up at your front door and he's not happy right so little miss magic teaches him a lesson she puts a magical spell on him to shrink his arms so that he can't tickle anymore and this makes mr tickle miserable right like just no fucking water not fucking tickle anymore just been yeah just been mutilated so he spends a couple of pages of the book not being able to tickle and then he goes back to little miss magic's house one day and says please can i just have my tickling arms back and
Starting point is 01:02:36 she says okay but you can only do one tickle a day otherwise your arms go back to being short again he says i promise and then so she makes his arms long again. He leaves the house and he decides to use his one tickle of the day on Little Miss Magic. And that's how the book ends. Revenge. This is not a good message. In German, he's Unser Herr Killekillek. I don't know if Killekillek is how you say tickle in German, but it's also in Swedish and Danish.
Starting point is 01:03:07 In Sweden, it's guben kili-kili. I don't know if they go kili-kili-kili. That's how you do tickling. But listen, this is fascinating. Another thing that Mr. Men books love to do, another format that they rely on is if it's not bad behavior, it's an incompatibility or inability to work. That's another very popular theme in Mr. Men. So like Mr. Greedy gets a job at the supermarket, but then he gets fired because he can't stop eating everything.
Starting point is 01:03:35 And then Mr. Greedy gets a job at a restaurant and he gets fired because he can't stop eating like all the food that he's serving. And this goes on and on and on until somehow- until finally he finds a job that is not in the food industry or mr happy or somebody with the clue uh figures hang on a second i got the perfect job for mr greedy and he becomes like a hot dog taste tester or some shit, right? Mr. Quiet gets a job at the library. That's perfect. Why didn't he just become like a librarian or something? Or any other job? Little Miss Late gets a job being a housemaid for Mr. Lazy
Starting point is 01:04:16 because she's so late. She turns up at like 4 p.m., but that's when Mr. Lazy wakes up every day. So it works out. You know what I mean? Amazing. But she's been fired from every other job because she can't get there on time like this is another huge that's her defining
Starting point is 01:04:31 character this is another huge sort of format for mr men books as well they oh man the i i'm not compatible with this job but they'll find me the perfect one eventually it's it's like it goes there's like there's like two or three possible ways for a mr men or little miss book to go and those i've i feel like i've done a really good job of outlining them as well well done so no i think no if you don't want to ever read any of those books just know that they're only going to go one of those three ways and you pretty much read them all yeah i think that's that's all it needs to be yeah right yeah um but man god damn if my kids don't fucking love them like even my i love my 10 year old still every day we we read like we read them he just he loves them like
Starting point is 01:05:17 they're just i don't know there's something about them they're they're they're just kind of um like endearing books you know i get that maybe they're not super politically correct, or maybe some of the characters... You've just got to couch it a little. You've just got to tell the kids, look... You've just got to be careful, yeah, I think. Just don't tickle people unless they're cool with it. Just scan it before you read it,
Starting point is 01:05:39 especially if it's older than, you know, 20 years. Yeah. All right, well, there you go that's uh some top advice from dads there you go if you ever needed some top advice you now have there you go yeah what a brilliant podcast uh we'll be back next week thanks everybody see you then

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