Baddiel & Skinner's Absolute Radio Podcasts transcripts
Episode sixteen - Part one
David Baddiel: The fourth German goal has just gone in against Argentina. Pathetically, I was really pleased. I sort of saw it as a result for England. We didn’t lose quite so badly.
Frank Skinner: No, I think according to simple mathematics, it means that we are a better team than Argentina.
DB: Yes.
FS: It seems that all is not lost after all.
DB: Yes.
FS: I believe it’s chapter 73 of the England post mortem.
DB: There have been a lot of rumours knocking around about the England team. We thought we couldn’t talk about these, because we thought when these rumours start, then you're not really allowed to speak about them, but The Sun has printed what these rumours are. The rumour was that Steven Gerrard has got Alex Curran’s sister pregnant. That was the rumour.
FS: Oh God, that’s a horrible story.
DB: It then turns out that Alex Curran hasn’t got a sister.
FS: Oh. What, so he killed her?
DB: Yes, he’s killer her and buried her body somewhere in Brookside Close, I believe.
FS: Oh no. Somewhere in the left side of midfield. He wanted to bury it in central midfield, but Fabio Capello told him not to.
DB: Yes. I should say this isn’t true, shouldn’t I? There’ll be a lawyer somewhere.
FS: Frank Lampard has buried someone in central midfield, they just got in each other’s way.
DB: They all worked apparently as gravediggers together. I will have to say now, won’t I, that this isn’t true. There’ll be lawyers somewhere otherwise.
FS: If you’ve said she hasn’t got a sister then clearly it isn’t true.
DB: You said he’s killed her. Now people might be-,
FS: I don’t really think that. If you're going to start a rumour-, I’ve never really started a rumour.
DB: I was wondering, how do these rumours start? This rumour, in one day, everyone in England knew about this rumour. We’re in South Africa, we heard about this rumour.
FS: We had emails from our listeners telling us about it.
DB: Telling us this was the real reason that England went out of the World Cup. All of this by the way, the rumours, they’re all because we can’t quite accept that England were rubbish, the players weren’t good enough, and thus they went out. It’s all people trying to find other reasons. If I wanted to start a rumour, say I’m going to say now, on this podcast, you're having sex with Susan Boyle, how quickly would that spread, do you think?
FS: Would what spread? Shingles? I imagine there’d be a shingles threat if that was my activity.
DB: Really?
FS: Yes. Rickets maybe.
DB: I don’t think you can catch Rickets. I think you’d have to be fed by Susan Boyle for quite a long time, to get Rickets.
FS: See that one I think you might be pushing it a bit.
DB: People wouldn’t believe it?
FS: I think because footballers have a reputation for having a lot of sex, that’s an area to pursue. I’m not saying that I haven’t had in the past had a reputation like that, but I think Susan Boyle is seen as a very-, I think she might actually be a virgin. I think she’s said that.
DB: Well that would be the rumour, that’s why it would spread like wildfire. Frank Skinner takes Susan Boyle’s virginity.
FS: Oh, I’m with you now.
DB: Texted all over the country.
FS: Well, as they used to say on Pringles, once you pop you can’t stop.
DB: Indeed.
FS: She’s not my type. People say that fame’s turned her head, which has obviously been an improvement. I’d have thought this. I never started a rumour as such, but if I was going to start a rumour, I mean you take that rumour that Paul McCartney was dead. Do you remember that rumour?
DB: Yes.
FS: It was based on certain things, like on the cover of Abbey Road he’s the one member of the Beatles crossing the zebra crossing who isn’t wearing shoes and socks, as like you’d see on a corpse. Then on Sgt. Pepper they’re all holding brass instruments, but he’s holding a black instrument. So there were hints. If I was going to start this rumour about Steven Gerrard, I’d probably Wikipedia Alex Curran to see if she’d got a sister. It’s terrible.
DB: Poor rumour mongering.
FS: It is.
DB: It’s really poor.
FS: You need to research.
DB: You do.
FS: I heard a rumour that Peter Crouch actually lays eggs.
DB: Did you?
FS: Like a reptile style.
DB: What sort of eggs are these? Are they like ostrich eggs, very big?
FS: Yes, I believe he’s self fertilising. I don’t think he even needs the girlfriend.
DB: Really?
FS: Like a worm, you know those worms?
DB: Yes, I know what you mean.
FS: Also if you cut him in half, you get two stocky midfielders.
DB: If he lays eggs, Peter Crouch, are you suggesting that soon the world is going to be populated by these mutant Crouch figures?
FS: Can I just say, when you said Peter Crouch then, for the first time it struck me. You know when you get a female dog, a bitch? She has to crouch to pee.
DB: To wee, yes.
FS: Which is an anagram of Peter Crouch.
DB: Crouch to wee?
FS: Crouch to pee.
DB: Crouch to pee, yes. It is, that’s absolutely true.
FS: This is how deep I am into the surface of the World Cup comedy barrel, that I am scratching at the bottom of. Peter Crouch, crouch to pee. There you have it, ladies and gentlemen.
Episode sixteen - Part two
FS: So the FA have spoken.
DB: Have they?
FS: Fabio Capello is the England manager for the next two years.
DB: Have the FA made a snap decision?
FS: Well, it’s more snap than they said it was going to be. They said they were going to take two weeks to think it over.
DB: I remember.
FS: On Friday just gone, we had a conversation about exactly that, the FA’s two week decision about Fabio Capello.
DB: About their decision making process, about what they could talk about for two weeks.
FS: Yes. I wish we had a flashback facility on these podcasts. Then we could go back and think about what we said.
DB: We have got a flashback facility.
FS: Have we?
DB: Yes, all you have to do is make a kind of wobbly noise, you know the kind of wobbly noise?
FS: Like on TV shows?
DB: Yes, we can do that. I don’t know if we’ve got a sound effect, because it’s very low, cheap rent, these podcasts. We can probably make do with some kind of wobbly noise ourselves.
FS: Then we’ll know what me and you said on Friday about the FA’s meandering two-week decision about Fabio Capello?
DB: Can I paint a small visual picture that might help with the wobbly noise?
FS: Okay.
DB: There was a program on recently called Michael Winner’s Star Dinners or something. You may have seen it.
FS: I didn’t see it.
DB: It’s on ITV. Michael Winner used to go to people’s houses and be fed by them. Then afterwards he would give them a star. On one of them, the only one I saw, Michael Winner was very moved by one of the children at these families and he started to cry.
FS: He really cried?
DB: He cried as he was handing out his star to this family.
FS: Crikey.
DB: His face, it turned into what I can only describe as a sort of old Jewish jelly. His cheeks started to shudder, his whole face started to move in ways I’ve never really seen before.
FS: You know you're making my mouth water.
DB: Oh dear. So if you could imagine that, and make the noise that would go with it.
FS: Okay.
(Frank and David make wobbly noise)
FS: So I think it’s three days since the FA said they were going to spend two weeks discussing whether or not to keep Fabio Capello.
DB: Have they been locked in a room, sweatily going through all the options?
FS: What on earth are they finding to talk about that particular quandary?
DB: I imagine they come in, they talk about what they always talk about, which is what kind of sandwiches they’re having today, and what kind of tie you can get to match an FA blazer.
FS: Yes, and what death will be like. I imagine they talk about that a lot at the FA.
DB: No, I think they don’t talk about that. You know with old people, that’s the one thing you sort of have to avoid. I don’t think they even talk about the next World Cup.
FS: They talk about the next world. The next World Cup is a cup that will be held in the next world. They hope to not take part in, but they hope to at least have access to the hospitality area.
DB: Yes. They’re not sure if they’re going to qualify at this stage.
FS: It’s what Derek Acorah calls the world of spirits. I love it when he says that. It’s like World Of Leather. Instead of coats you get ghouls. Anyway, they are supposed to be discussing. They asked for two weeks.
DB: I know. There’s someone called Sheepshanks. Have you read this, a bloke?
FS: David Sheepshanks?
DB: There are all these people coming out of the woodwork. This bloke Dave Richards and I don’t know who else.
FS: Sir Dave Richards.
DB: Adrian Bevington. All these people that you vaguely know about who run the FA. One of them now, is it David again? Sheepshanks.
FS: I believe it is David. Wasn’t he chairman of Ipswich once?
DB: I don’t know.
FS: He might still be. I don’t know where they all come from.
DB: I’m not sure if you can be chairman of Ipswich with a name like Sheepshanks, to be honest, without a terrible ribbing from the agricultural community.
FS: I think he was also King of West Murcia in 1908.
DB: Oh yes, you're right, he was. So he’s quite well qualified to be honest.
FS: He’s one of the younger members of the FA. What are they talking about? What is the two-week discussion about whether you keep Fabio on or not?
DB: Well I assume there is no two-week discussion.
FS: So why two weeks?
DB: They’re basically sitting there thinking, ‘If we wait two weeks, people will have finished the England post mortem. So when we just announce, as we’re obviously going to do, that he’s still the manager, there won’t be an enormous outcry.’
FS: Are they just waiting till the end of these podcasts?
DB: Yes, they listen every day. David Sheepshanks and Adrian Bevington. They think, ‘Well they’re clearly running out of material. So if we give it a little bit longer, then I think we can just announce it.’
David Baddiel: So here we are at Germany Argentina. Just as a point of information for anyone listening, a lot of England fans are here dressed in Argentina kit. Which I presume is based on the idea that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. (TC: 00:10:00) It’s a complicated thing in football that, my enemy’s enemy is my friend. You may be familiar with the modern concept of the frenemy. Which is a friend who is yet an enemy. Which is kind of what I would have thought Argentina was.
Frank Skinner: Then of course there’s also Lawrie McMenemy. Another variation on that.
DB: Actually, Lawrie McMenemy is my frenemy.
FS: Is he really?
DB: Yes, he is. We used to be close friends, then we fell out. Now I see him as my frenemy.
FS: He’s actually my arch enemy. Or is that arch McMenemy?
Episode sixteen - Part three
FS: What is the two-week discussion about whether you keep Fabio on or not? I bet they’re mainly saying, ‘Well we’ll say two weeks, but we’ll spend the first thirteen days talking about the bid and how great it will be when we’re running the whole thing,’ and what they’ll have on the sandwiches.
DB: Yes, the sandwiches will be great and the bid will be marvellous.
FS: Cigars, nice cigar each. Little glass of brandy, me and David Sheepshanks. That’s what it’ll be like. Then I suppose they’ll say, ‘Well, we better keep him on or it’ll cost us £12 million.’
DB: Yes. It might be they’re just looking at the contract.
FS: What they’re actually doing is looking at the tabloids, isn’t it? If they decide that the papers think they’re on Fabio’s side, then they’ll keep him on.
DB: That was my thing with the two weeks, I think they’re waiting, they’ll hope that things will turn. They might just be having a whip round, I suppose. To see if they can buy Fabio out.
FS: We should probably say, we met someone from the FA, didn’t we?
DB: We did.
FS: At England Algeria.
DB: England Algeria, yes.
FS: Let’s just say he’s a member of the FA, and he used to be at a Premier League club. We were talking to him, and he suddenly looked off, didn’t he?
DB: Yes.
FS: I don’t mean he looked off, as in-,
DB: He looked a bit off.
FS: He looked like he could have been out the fridge a couple of days too long. No, he looked off with some concern back to where he’d been with the other FA members.
DB: Yes, there was a group of them in their blazers. It’s a grey blazer, for anybody who doesn’t know.
FS: I’m sure they’ve seen Fabio in the blazer. He said, ‘Sorry, I’m just checking my coat is still there.’ Which is fair enough, you leave a coat on the back of a seat, it can go missing.
DB: He made clear that this was not any ordinary coat.
FS: No.
DB: He spoke as much as if Joseph might speak about his coat of many colours. It was an Umbro coat.
FS: That’s what he said. It was a sort of shorty rain coat type of thing.
DB: Was it shorty?
FS: It was quite shorty.
DB: Kind of skimpy?
FS: It was mid length.
DB: It was a car coat?
FS: No, no. It wasn’t a car coat.
DB: I never really know what a car coat is, by the way.
FS: I think they’re normally quilted.
DB: Okay.
FS: It was a sort of mid length dark raincoat, which I’ve seen lots of. In fact the West Brom directors all wear them.
DB: I’m sure they do.
FS: Umbro I think dish them out to those kinds of people.
DB: He did what I’d call a eulogy about this coat.
FS: Indeed.
DB: He spoke movingly, and at length, about what a great coat it was.
FS: He said one of the great things about it, he said you can just throw it in the back of the car. I thought, ‘What, like a coat?’
DB: Yes, like almost any object, it can be thrown in the back of a car.
FS: Also, what is the coat that cannot be thrown into the back of a car?
DB: Yes.
FS: That is what we want emails about.
DB: It’s a good question, there must be one.
FS: There must be a coat so bulky.
DB: I reckon you couldn’t throw one of Maradona’s coats into the boot of a Citroen 2CV, because it’s just too wide.
FS: Maybe you're right.
DB: I think you’d be throwing it over it. You know you sometimes see a Citroen 2CV covered by some bit of plastic?
FS: How do you know it’s a Citroen 2CV if it’s covered?
DB: You're right, it could be anything. It could be a Sinclair C5.
FS: It could be a hoax.
DB: He said all this, and then there was a pause, almost as if we might talk more about it, but we didn’t really know what to say. So he just went, ‘You know, it’s a football coat.’ So that’s maybe what they’re talking about at the FA.
FS: What, their Umbro coats?
DB: Yes, they’re just talking about what a great coat it is.
FS: I think he told us it was an Umbro coat, he made a point, because that’s the official sponsor of the England football team.
DB: Yes, and it’s about time, as we’ve noted before, that they change it to Adidas. Then we’d have had the ball, rather than the coats. Really we’d have been much better off with the ball than the coat.
FS: What if it had been the coat that came and the Adidas was badly designed, and caused him to swerve?
DB: Couldn’t get it in the back of his car.
FS: He threw it into his backseat, he swerved up, went over the roof.
DB: We might have won the World Cup, but he would have had terrible trouble in driving to the middle of the country.
FS: He might have thrown the coat into the back, it might have hit the upper frame of the door, bounced down and bounced out again. People would have said it was never in the car at all. Truly it is a Jabulani coat.
Episode sixteen - Part four
DB: A number of people, I think a man asked you today on an airport bus, what you would do to solve the crisis in English football. He was a strange man, he also quoted Shakespeare.
FS: He was a school teacher, he was no fool.
DB: No, God.
FS: He said to me, ‘Frank,’ he said, as if he knew me. ‘Frank’, he said, ‘If you could do one thing, which would get us into a World Cup semi-final in four years’ time, what would it be?’ That’s what he said to me.
DB: Did you say, ‘Bribe the refs’?
FS: No. He asked Lord Triesman, I think he said that. I said what I’d introduce, when I was a young man there was a good deal of consternation in the football world when they banned the maximum wage. There was a time when there was a ceiling on what a footballer could earn. Jimmy Hill, the well known pundit, and I’d say football national treasure, he led a revolt to get that removed. There was a strike.
DB: I know this. Yes, Jimmy Hill removed the maximum wage in I believe 1961, and the maximum wage at that time was £20 a week. Can you believe it?
FS: Yes. I’m not suggesting we go back to that, but I said to this man, ‘If I could do one thing, I’d reinstate the maximum wage.’ I said, ‘For a start off, as a by-product, it would save a lot of teams who have recently very nearly gone to the wall.’ You know, liquidation, fifteen point penalty etc. More importantly, foreign players, who as much as a lot of them are marvellous, they are swamping the game and making it hard for young English talent to come through. They would go, if the money in the Premier League was-,
DB: Are you suggesting that some of these players are only here for the money, not for the love of the game? Are you suggesting that Cesc Fabregas and other people are just here-, surely they like England, they like playing in England, it’s the best league in the world, they say. Not the richest league in the world, which it so happens to be.
FS: Some of them obviously are here for the cuisine.
DB: What about the easy women? They might be here for that.
FS: I think they are, to some extent. I think they’re everywhere. I don’t think you have to leave Eastern Europe.
DB: No, that’s true.
FS: It might be you get them complimentary here. Some of them obviously like the climate. I think in the main, yes, a lot of foreign players-,
DB: They would, they’d be off. Although what struck me is perhaps they wouldn’t be off. What would be really marvellous, if Jimmy Hill-like, they organised a strike. Would it be the least popular industrial action of all time?
FS: It would make the BA strike look like the Tolpuddle Martyrs.
DB: If Didier Drogba and Wayne Rooney and all the best paid players went on strike and tried to corral student action, like the miners’ strike or something to try and get people behind them to earn £130,000 a week, that would be totally brilliant.
FS: Anyway, I said that would be my one thing. Obviously I admire a lot of these foreign players, but they’re so good that young English players don’t get a chance to come through and learn on the job.
DB: I agree, I think it would be a very good idea. I don’t know if it would ever be implemented. Is there anyone that could sort this out for us, do you think? We don’t really know about this kind of stuff.
FS: I know, but I was-,
(Knocking)
DB: Who’s that? Come in. Hello, yes?
George Formby: Hello lads, are you alright?
DB: Oh, it’s George Formby! Hello George, how are you?
GF: I’m very well, thanks. Well I’m dead, but apart from that, I’m quite well.
DB: Ah right. Why have you come to see us, George?
GF: Well look, I’ll be honest with you. I were earwigging at the door, and I did like what you said about maximum wage.
DB: So what, you’ve got a little point to make about the maximum wage issue?
GF: Well I have really, because I think that footballers, certainly when I was alive, they were simple, working class chaps like I were. I mean there were George Best, you know, but he were alcoholic.
DB: Yes. Have you put this thought in the form perhaps of a song?
GF: Well, I have actually.
DB: Frank, do you think we should let him sing it?
FS: Well I don’t know. I’m trying to have a serious discussion here about-,
GF: No, no, come on, give us a break.
FS: Well, okay.
DB: I think we should, we should let George do his song. Frank, come on, don’t be such a curmudgeon.
FS: Okay then, it’s fine. I know you're going to be talking about foreign players, but say (TC: 00:20:00) no to racism.
GF: Don’t worry, I’m well aware of FIFA regulations.
FS: Okay then, well go for it, George.
GF: (Singing) There’s too many foreign players in the Premier League. It’s cut supplies to the national side so this is what we need, hee hee. This coalition government says cuts are all the rage. Bring back, bring back our football’s maximum wage. If a player’s passion for the Premier League you would really like to gauge, bring back, bring back our football’s maximum wage. Goodbye Didier Drogba, goodbye Adebayor. Hello to those young English players who had no chance before. Fabio Capello would also disengage, bring back, bring back our football’s maximum wage. The foreign players would exit and there’s more great news to tell, the golden generation would bugger off as well. We’d have a proper clearout, and start a brand new page, bring back, bring back our football’s maximum wage. Bring back, bring back our football’s maximum wage. Hee, hee! Well it’s turned out nice again, isn’t it?
