Title: Micky Mouse’s Unsexy Ears

acast Time: 1:21:25
Youtube Time: 1:20:54

Original Record Date: Unknown
acast Publication Date: July 22, 2020
Youtube Publication Date: July 22, 2020

Please Welcome a Man
Who has just had a shower; that’s why his hair looks like it’s been cut. It hasn’t been cut.

Acronym Modification
Richard Herring’s Lying Shitty Tories Podcast

Cool Kids
I was hanging around at the Specsavers at Barnard Castle the other day and the man who does the eye tests…

Guest Best Known
For playing an historian in Horrible Histories: The Movie – Rotten Romans.

Audience

Better or Worse than Last Week: N/A
Like or Unlike Wikipedia: N/A

Member Member Note
N/A N/A

Emergency Questions

Is it cheating on your partner to have sex with something that is fifty percent mouse? Half of it is a rodent, half of it is a human being.

I think it is cheating, yes. And I also think that’s probably illegal and wrong and also very strange. Does Mickey Mouse have a tail? *RH asks why GJ is curious about Mickey rather than Minnie Mouse.* Because I can’t visualize… I’m struggling to visualize any bipedal mouse other than Mickey. Mickey is the only one I can think of. But I can’t remember, does Mickey have a tail? And you’ve gone to the tail, the ears, and the whiskers.

Who’s the most surprising famous person you’ve been in a lift with? And which I mean, you can’t have gotten into the lift with them; they had to be in the lift you were in.

I have been in lifts with quite a lot of famous people because when you work in telly and film or whatever you tend to just, get *GJ is cut off by RH insisting that he choose the most famous person.* Well that’s a good question. Alright, well… Let me offer you some names and you can tell me who’s the most famous. Steven Spielberg, Keira Knightley, Jude Law, the cast of Horrible Histories, Stephen Fry. I mean, probably Steven Spielberg, isn’t it? *RH agrees.* But, um, I mean I once bumped – I once physically bumped into Scarlett Johansson. Like, came around a corner and hit her. Uh, that was at the BRIT Awards and I was a student. It was years ago – 2004, I think. And, um, so I came around the corner. I’d won a competition. I’d won a radio competition to go to the BRIT awards. […] And I came around a corner and I just hit this tiny, gorgeous, sort of elfin human. Very small, incredibly beautiful, but then two very large hands arrived on my shoulders and lifted me up and out of the way. And it was her bodyguards. And they physically deposited me to the side. It was really great. And I just remember thinking, Wow! That’s what celebrity is. It’s like this – you can sort of meet someone but you’re removed from their space immediately. Sort of airlifted out. And another thing. Someone once asked me, “What does celebrity sound like?” And I know what it sounds like because I once accidentally went down the red carpet at an event that I wasn’t meant to go down. I was allowed to go to the – you know, it was the children’s BAFTA’s. I was allowed to go in, you know, we’d been nominated, but I wasn’t meant to go down the red carpet because I’m not famous. I went down the red carpet by mistake and all the paparazzi were snapping – snapping the people ahead of me – and the sound of this deafening, deafening, like, *imitates sound of many photographs being taken* like, just endless machine gun fire. Flashbulbs and men shouting, “Keira, over here! Over here! Yeah, yeah! Smile!” And I got there and they just put their cameras down. Utter silence. Like, just genuine, like, we could hear the sort of muttering pf paparazzi go, “So, um, yeah, if you…” But as soon as I left again, someone behind me a TV presented came back and then *imitates sound of many photographs being taken*. And so that’s the sound of celebrity – the sound of machine gun, kind of, style paparazzi cameras, and then me turning up and ruining it.

If you could take one item from any museum or art gallery – and you’re allowed to take it home with you – in the world, what would you take?

Okay, I would take the Bayeux Tapestry. I’ll give you two reasons why. Firstly, it’s incredibly important as a work, a glorious piece of medieval embroidery. It’s not a tapestry, it’s embroidery. And as a former medievalist obviously it would be wonderful to have. Um, there you go, there’s a book there, The Bayeux Tapestry, right there. *Reaches behind him and picks up book by David M. Wilson.* I know exactly what it looks like. I’d take it. But the reason I’d want it is that it’s 75 metres long. I would unfurl it in my garden. I would then get a bucket of water and some gelatin. I would lace all the gelatin, throw down the water, and I would use it as a slip and slide. On my belly, sliding 75 metres all the way to the death of King Harold. Arrow in the eye and then I’d probably stop.

Is there an author who you would have liked to have heard read their own books on an audiobook from the past, before this technology existed?

Oh, their own book? Oh, well okay, so you’d have to go Charles Dickens because Charles Dickens famously was brilliant as a live performer of his own books. So he, during his second American tour, he owned something like 30 million pounds during that tour. He performed all the roles from his books and read them in front of a live audience and he got so emotive and exhausted he had to have a lie-down after every night’s performance. And he was sort of surviving on champagne and various sort of hardcore boozes. But he was this brilliant performer. He knackered himself to the point that he pretty much died two years later of exhaustion. Like, he absolutely burned through all his reserves of energy doing this tour where every night he was up there performing the death of, you know, Little Nell or whatever. So he would be brilliant. He’d be a very good audiobook reader. *RH asks whether there was any form of recording during Dickens’s life that could have captured his voice.* Not in his life, no. We have Florence Nightingale’s voice. Um, so right at the end of the century, the 19th century we have Thomas Edison’s voice. No, so he died mid-century, really. So we’ve got the voice of Florence Nightingale, which is quite, um – it’s quite scratchy and high-pitched, but she’s like *in high-pitched voice*, “Hello, I’m Florence Nightingale. I hope this voice is nice.” Um, and we have some sort of pretty interesting early kind of, like, early sort of stars of, like, vaudeville and obviously Hollywood and whatever. It’s quite exciting, actually, to hear actual songs from the 1910’s and ’20’s. You kind of hear, Oh yeah, it’s alright. It’s quite good. But no, Victorians are relatively thin on the ground when it comes to audio.

Notes

This episode was live-streamed via Twitch, with RH and guest in each of their own homes due to COVID-19/coronavirus.

This is GJ’s second appearance.