To tide you over until we have some new content for you, here's our most recent bonus episode, originally released 28th September for Patreon backers only. Becoming a patron of Daniel or Jack brings access to all other bonus episodes. At least one new Patreon exclusive bonus episode every month (that's the plan anyway). Eiynah's GoFundMe: Fundraiser by Eiynah Nicemangos : Donate to help Eiynah (gofundme.com) Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month. IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
I'm Jack Graham, he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he him, who spent years tracking the far right in their safe In In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
Okay.
I mean, what?
Welcome to I Don't Speak German.
It's a podcast.
And this is one of the bonus episodes, which is one of the... This is one of the ones you only hear if you give us money, if you pay for it, right?
So that means that this is one of the finely honed, well-crafted, We've brilliantly researched down to the last detail episodes that just really, the quality is here.
The free ones we give away to the plebs that don't give us money, that's kind of just throwaway stuff that we just piss out because we don't put any effort into it.
But these ones, this is where the real shit happens.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's bonus episode number.
And I think some notes, really, firstly, we kind of have to apologize for kind of what we did was we came roaring back with kind of a relaunch, a reboot, you know, in a mission statement at the end of that one where we go, we're going to do this and we're going to do that.
And we're back and we're going to and people are kind of the crowds are waving, you know, they're doing the wave in the stands and they're kind of cheering.
They're saying, wow, IDSG's back is amazing.
Listen, this new episode is amazing.
And then fuck all for weeks.
So, yeah, sorry about that.
Personally, I've just been paralysed with grief because, of course, of the death of Her Resplendent Majesty, Queen Eternal Elizabeth II of England, of Great Britain, of glorious memory forever.
And I'm really only just getting over it, to be honest with you.
I think I shall be scarred for life.
Yeah, no, I'm sure.
I'm sure that's the case.
If there's one thing I know about Jack Graham, it's royalists to the core.
Monarchists, above all.
Yeah.
Hardcore monarchist.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's right.
Yeah.
I'm like a mincius mold bug in that respect.
I'm a real monarchist.
The problem with King Charles is kind of a cuck compared to Queen Elizabeth, you know?
Well, a cook, but also a cook-maker.
Well, I think we'll get into that here shortly.
Before we get into it, we are going to talk about the Queen and Wyrickism, etc., and just kind of have a little chat about the recent news.
But I do think we had another... Before we go running off into our topic, I think we did have a couple of things just to note.
Um, which is, uh, our friend, friend of the show, a great friend of the show, Ina, Ina Mohamed has, um, had some personal.
And friend of us.
Yes, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Like part of the family for sure has had some, um, Personal issues.
Her father, if you listen to her show polite conversations, I mean, that is actually her father's voice at the beginning of every episode.
Her father was assaulted in his home by what appears to be just a random attack.
Terrible, terrible thing that is that You know, he will never be the same, and I don't think that Ina's life will ever be the same.
And she is running a fundraiser at GoFundMe to try to, you know, sort of take care of some expenses related to that.
And I donated $100 to it personally, and I have upped my monthly Patreon subscription to her until, you know, until that need is met.
So I would definitely appreciate anyone who Can't afford it.
Please, if you have a dollar or two to spend, please go donate to INA's fund there.
I know she had kind of a nice opening and then it kind of trailed off as these things do after a couple of days.
So we do hope that people will support that if you care about us and you care about INA's work at all.
Yeah, I totally second all of that.
Ina is amazing, and her show is amazing.
It's one of the best podcasts on the internet, I think.
The work she does is stunning.
The forensic detail with which she picks over the crap that comes from her chosen... And it's important that somebody does that, that somebody's there constantly watching the guy she covers and assorted other things.
And she's always there, and she's always covering it, pointing out why he's full of shit, and she's doing it amusingly.
The mind boggles, but of course she has... I mean, she's a great person as well on top of all that, and it's just a horrible tragedy for the whole family, and she's got... the family have got to raise this money to try to get what Ina's dad needs to have a, you know, a reasonable life now that his life has changed because of this horrible thing, unfair thing that has happened to him.
And of course, you know, we don't live in a world that prioritizes the needs of people to have a safe and healthy and dignified life.
We don't live in a world that says, well, obviously we need to prioritise that.
I mean, that's a given, isn't it?
That people need to have what they need in order to be able to get up and down stairs if they've been injured horribly.
So Aina has to, with no actual joke or cynicism here at all, there's her GoFundMe.
I've donated to it too.
If you haven't, please do go and donate to it and spread the word about it because this needs to be done.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
So, all right.
All right.
And we will have more commentary on various things in future episodes.
But for now, I think the Queen died, and that means that your society is a wreck.
I'm always terrible.
I can spell the word and then can never say it because I am the barefoot barbarian from Alabama, ultimately.
For me, I think I was just thinking about the fact that how do you One of the things that you and I have kind of talked about over the years and sort of chatted is sort of like the different cultural expectations of being a person that lives in the UK versus a person that lives in the US, you know?
And I often try to find a metaphor that fits what Queen Elizabeth would mean.
And the thing that I sort of came to was, imagine if... Yeah, I know.
It's like when Dumbledore died.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm kind of imagining, like, what if JFK not only wasn't assassinated, but had continued to be the President of the United States since 1960?
It's sort of my, you know, comparison point, because I think there is a sort of similar, like, cultural value, you know, to, you know, like, the Queen's coronation and, like, JFK's, you know, presidency.
I think there's, like, it's not an exact metaphor, and obviously we don't live in our monarchy here, and so we don't have the expectation that these things are even possible.
But that's sort of like imagining if JFK had lived for another like 60 years and had, you know, just kind of aged like Ted Kennedy did and had, you know, kind of had ups and downs and, you know, all sorts of things, but it did kind of become like America's grandpa.
And then like in his doddering old age, he just kind of like, you know, passed away.
And obviously JFK had all kinds of illnesses and would not have lived that long anyway.
But at least that's sort of like, that's sort of my starting point in terms of trying to understand, you know, what the death of Queen Elizabeth That's cute.
Kennedy did have several diseases, as you say.
Addison's disease, and he also had the disease of having several large pieces of lead in his head that were put there by a rather confused ex-Marine.
I mean, obviously it's an imperfect metaphor, but I think if, because Kennedy has that kind of like, well, like star, like star quality.
Right.
You know, I think that's why I point down as like, yeah.
Well, no analogy is perfect.
If it was, it wouldn't be an analogy.
It would just be the thing.
So, yeah, I think that's pretty good because I think both of them kind of represented like the... It's like they both represented the Second World War ending at last, you know?
In terms of the Queen's coronation, which was...
Fifty-five?
Something like that.
Fifty-three, I think?
Fifty-two?
Fifty-three?
I mean, 70 years.
It's like 60 or 70 years, so it's got to be 52, 53, something like that.
Yeah, that's right.
Bring maths into it.
So yeah, early 50s, anyway.
I mean, rationing and stuff like that persisted for a few years after that.
I think it kind of felt like, oh, the Second World War is finally actually over, and we can kind of restart things a bit.
At the time, they talked a lot about the new Elizabethans, the new Elizabethan age, when she was crowned, coronated, I don't know.
And it was like, I don't know, looking back on it now, because of course all I can do is look back on the way it's represented to me.
So I'm looking at a hall of mirror of representations, and of course it accretes bullshit, and no bit of history accretes bullshit more aggressively than royal history.
But yeah, I think that's kind of how people felt about it at the time, because it was a big thing in Britain at the time.
There were street parties to celebrate the coronation, and it was the first public event that loads of people had seen on television and things like that.
And yeah, I think with Kennedy also, Kennedy's later than that, as well as it was 60 he was elected, and loads of the stuff that we think of as the 60s or post-war America was already Was already underway by then.
Vietnam was already underway by then, etc.
But the president before him was Eisenhower, I think?
Eisenhower, yeah.
So, obviously, that's still Second World... Eisenhower's still Second World War.
And I... I mean, obviously, Kennedy, I mean, but he was lower end, right?
He was on a PT boat, you know?
But, yeah, but... Yeah, Eisenhower was very, like, clearly, you know, elected as, you know, the World War II guy, you know?
Like, that was a big part of his appeal.
And it's interesting because kind of the ways in which the Second World War affected America and Britain are kind of inverse from each other, because the Second World War left Britain economically ruined, and with an empire that was in the process of coming apart.
And America, and it physically shattered, you know, a massive toll of human beings, and even more.
We had a much more massive toll in money and resources, and even just physical infrastructure, because we were bombed.
We didn't have it as bad as many European countries.
We weren't actually invaded and occupied, but we were pretty aggressively bombed, etc., etc.
Whereas America wasn't bombed.
You got away with that.
You came out really in the other direction.
You came out with a booming economy and the beginning of becoming the global hegemon, the global empire.
So really, the processes are kind of reversed.
And yet, it's weird.
It's like we kind of relaunched earlier than you did.
Maybe because we just had to get the bullshit started nice and early to cover up the fact that we were still lying in rubble.
Economic rubble, metaphorical and literal.
But yeah, similarly legendary figures, both of them keyed into that feeling of, oh, the Second World War's finally over, what do we do now, I think.
So yeah, I think that's a pretty good analogy, yeah.
Right, and both Elizabeth and Kennedy were, you know, very young when they achieved their positions.
I mean, Kennedy was older than Elizabeth, and obviously it was a few years later.
But, you know, certainly, you know, JFK is still our youngest elected president, and Elizabeth, obviously not the youngest queen, but at least she was 27 or something like that when she ascended to the throne.
And so, I mean, there is this, again, there's a star power element to it.
There's this, you know, the kind of the, you know, the beautiful young new leader is going to come and bring us into the new age.
And I think that's a lot of what the Camelot myth is about ultimately.
And again, I'm just trying to imagine if If Kennedy had lived and if he had continued to be, through some mechanism, in some position of authority in the government, and had aged the way his younger brother Teddy did, we suddenly had decades of bullshit.
The Jack Kennedy, you know, was at the head of, you know, and then when he died, there would be this, you know, like period of like mourning of like, oh, the great king of Camelot is now gone.
But also then a bunch of like, you know.
Bitter, bitter lefty people going like, well, yeah, but do you remember all those juntas he did back in the 80s?
You remember he was in charge of like the US military apparatus during like the greatest period of like coups and world history, you know, like all that stuff.
Yeah.
Again, it is a weird counterfactual to kind of think about that, but yeah.
It's interesting that you bring up Camelot, you know, the extent to which it was kind of constructed, even at the time, as almost this kind of shining, glamorous and royalty-inflected myth.
And what's interesting, I think, is that, I mean, the Kennedys are kind of like the closest thing America has to a royal family, I suppose, with the scandals and the deaths and the accidents and the never-ending tragic soap opera of it all.
What's interesting in what you just said is you talked about the bitter lefties.
And of course, there's plenty of them in In Britain, you know, muttering on the sidelines about, oh, she wasn't that good, for various reasons.
But one of the interesting things about Kennedy, particularly John F. Kennedy in America, is how far the lefties, or at least a section of them, have gone to try to convince themselves that actually he was kind of a great guy, you know, from a left-wing perspective.
Right.
Which he wasn't.
Right, you know, I mean... Although he was better than the alternative, as ever, you know, because nothing ever changes.
I mean, if you had the choice of, like, Nixon in 1960, if we go back and, like, turn that turnkey and go, okay, Nixon wins the 1960 election, I mean, God, can you imagine Nixon being in charge of Vietnam from the beginning?
Like, we don't even get the McNamara era, we just run right into Kissinger right away.
Like, you know... Straight into it, yeah.
Just imagine like 20 years of Vietnam, you know, I mean, yeah, more than, I mean, yeah, sorry.
Again, you know, just imagine, you know, what, what that would have been like if, if we had run into that situation, because Nixon was, of course, you know, running, running some of those death squads, you know, through in the vice president's office under Eisenhower, you know, for, for years.
Yeah.
He was involved in track two and all that stuff.
Yeah.
This is all Oliver Stone stuff, of course, but.
I mean, Oliver Stone says some true things in amidst all the insane rubbish.
He sort of salts the insane rubbish with a little sprinkle of facts.
It's nice the way he does it.
But yeah, it's one of my favourite things about the Oliver Stone movie, Nixon, is about how it sort of constructs this gigantic mythology about how the whole thing, the entire Nixon presidency, tracks back to the Kennedy assassination, which of course in this world is this vast conspiracy, which appears to have been run from within the CIA by demons in the film.
And then the worst thing Nixon ever did is him and Kissinger sabotaging the Paris peace talks under Lyndon Johnson, before he was elected president, in order to get himself elected president, thus getting the job at the expense of God knows how many more hundreds of thousands of people dying because he elongated the war past the point where it could have been drastically scaled back or even shut down under Johnson.
And that is in the film.
It's in the director's cut, in one scene, in a whisper.
Yeah, exactly!
Yeah, no, it is.
It is kind of like, yeah, no, no, it's amazing stuff.
I mean, God, we're not here to talk about the Nixon film, although I think we could just do the Nixon film every month and just keep finding new things.
It's such a powerful, it's a powerfully fucked up movie, but also just a powerful movie.
It's amazing.
I love that movie so much.
It's insane crap.
But yeah, you know, talking about, you know, getting back to the Queen, just, you know, to kind of keep it at least kind of vaguely on.
I mean, we don't really have a topic.
We're just sitting and chatting because we wanted to put out a bonus episode.
And I just wanted to kind of sit and chat about this for a while.
For me, it's like, you know, And I've said this to you before in DMs, we fought a whole fucking war over this, so I don't have to care about this crap.
That's sort of my opinion of the Royal Family.
Americans in general have no understanding of the history of the monarchy in Britain, really.
Unless they do some kind of special...
I mean, it's kind of in the tabloids.
It's like, you know, it's just it's around.
But like, you know, I had to look up like, OK, so who is next on the throne?
Right.
Oh, Charles.
Right.
The tampon guy.
Like that's always how I think about Prince Charles.
That's purely because of, like, an SNL sketch from, like, the 80s, you know?
Like, that's literally, like, the one thing that I think about when I think about Prince Charles is, I want to be her tampon, you know?
And I was, like, looking at that and going, is that even true or is that just something I got off of television, you know, when I was a child, you know?
And it is one of those things that, like, you know.
That's true.
That's our king.
Although, you know, I really don't have a problem with that.
That to me is a human thing.
Fine.
Good for you guys.
If that's the sort of thing that you like talking about with each other, no skin off my nose.
Talk about being each other's tampons.
Knock yourselves out.
On the list of sins.
He's done much worse things.
He's said much worse things.
Yeah, no.
So yeah, that was kind of the one thing that I think I knew about Prince Charles other than like, you know, the Diana stuff, which was when I was a teenager and when she died.
And, you know, she was, you know, more respectable than most, et cetera, et cetera.
But like, we just don't like, unless you care about it in particular and you pay attention to it in this country, We have kind of a vague knowledge of, like, the Tudors were a thing in the 16th century, and, like, Henry VIII, I Am, I Am, you know, is kind of, you know, a thing.
Jonathan Rhys-Meyers married Natalie Dormer, yeah.
Yeah, you read a little Shakespeare, and it's just all kind of, like, It's guys with funny hats walking around and being guys with funny hats, and there's some art around it.
This may be just my personal provincialism as opposed to something, but I don't see a great knowledge of the last 500 years of the British monarchy being something that anybody in this country has any kind of real cognizance over.
Why would anybody?
Right.
But I find that, you know, at least chatting, at least chatting in our group chat, you know, I found, you know, like, yeah, you, you all have a much fuller, you know, kind of knowledge of this stuff.
Like it, it kind of comes across and maybe that's, maybe that's like the people I hang out with.
There might be some sample bias at work there.
Yeah, yeah.
But yeah, no, I mean, that's kind of what I wanted to just chat about, is what is sort of the cultural role, as you see it, from the monarchy in general?
How are people responding to Charles as opposed to Elizabeth?
What changes, ultimately, with this kind of passing of the torch?
This is interesting, right?
Because I really think there is an opportunity here.
I don't know if it's necessarily an opportunity for anybody to do anything, like the left or Republicans, because there are a lot of people in Britain who are either ideologically and politically Republican, obviously in the American sense of being Republican, but in the sense of not wanting a monarchy, or in wanting to limit or reduce or, in some way, Minimize the role of the monarch or the royal family in general.
There's a big spectrum of it, but there is a lot of republicanism in Britain, and it's kind of Oh God, there's so many directions to go in with this.
Yeah, what was I talking about?
I was talking about the opportunity, and it's not necessarily an opportunity for anybody to do anything, like the left to launch a campaign or the Republicans to start their campaign to get rid of the royals or anything like that.
Because again, one of the problems is you'd have to unify as a particular party or faction or whatever to try to bring that kind of pressure to bear, and that's just not going to happen.
So I don't know if it's an opportunity for anything like that.
But I think there is an opportunity here for the royal family, the monarchy, as an institution, to drastically lose a lot of the power and influence that it has.
Maybe not so much the money and property and political power that it has.
I see that as being a lot safer.
But in terms of its public hegemony or kudos or whatever you want to say, its influence with the public ideologically.
I see that as possibly, I see this as maybe a possible hinge point where that could begin to seriously decline because people in Britain, broadly speaking, like to the Queen.
Do not ask me why.
I have no fucking idea.
I think it's just because she was there.
And we in Britain have this kind of thing where if something's been there for a while, we kind of think it must be good, mustn't it?
It's been there that whole time?
It must be right that it's there.
It must be good.
It's been there.
It's always been there.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's good.
Yeah, I like that.
Yeah, it's good.
I like that.
It's always been there.
I remember that.
And I think that was what it was with the Queen.
And also, the Queen...
Did have this ability, I think, to play the game.
I mean, you can see it illustrated, ironically enough, in the moments where she kind of fails at it, which is the most drastic of those probably is when Diana dies, and she completely misreads the public mood, and she's too aloof, and et cetera, et cetera, and the public, again, for whatever bizarre reason the British public just lost their fucking shit about that when Diana was killed in a car accident.
And the Queen badly misplayed it at points in terms of PR.
And the reaction of the British public was surprisingly quick and surprisingly savage against this institution and this person that up until then, it was just a given.
It was just a common knowledge.
The British public love the Queen.
They respect the Queen.
The Queen doesn't lower the flag of Buckingham Palace quickly enough because Diana's dead?
Ah, get the pikes!
But she manages to play that, she manages to get round it, and that kind of illustrates to me how well she played the game most of the time, where she was very aloof and very sort of up on high and not seen and not really heard or understood as a person, just kind of this figure, albeit a figure that usually managed to present herself in a way that people found Kind of relatable and likable.
I think that's just because she was a woman and she had this load of kids that... Somehow, I think people could relate to the idea of just a woman in the middle of a family who keep causing her problems and stuff like that, and yet she just smiles and keeps going.
And I think she managed to convince, she managed to sort of hypnotize everybody into thinking that she was really nice and really relatable, despite... And she did it by kind of just not By just being black, you know, just being this blank space with a smile and a wave and a nice hat for years.
So she was actually... I think it's true to say that Elizabeth Windsor was a fairly... was a very well-skilled public politician.
She was very good at PR.
She was very good at branding.
Because that's another thing, parenthetically.
What the Royal Family actually is now is a corporation.
It's a business.
And it sells hospitality and PR and stuff like that to the British government.
It's a whole new company, effectively.
And she was the CEO and the sort of leading brand.
And with a lot of help, obviously, from the British state and the British establishment and the media, etc., she played it pretty well.
She's gone now.
And Charles is now in the role that she's been playing for all this time.
Now, you have two things against Prince Charles making a huge success of this.
Firstly, he's taking over a job that has been somebody else's and has belonged to a, for various reasons, generally well-liked figure for a very, very long time, 70 years or whatever it is.
And the other thing is that nobody likes Prince Charles in Britain.
Nobody respects Prince Charles.
Well, King Charles now.
He's just not liked.
This is one of the things.
As far as I'm concerned, his name is Prince Charles, and that's what I'm going to call him forever.
Because if this is about continuity and tradition and how things have always been and respecting the past, well, you can't have it both ways.
This guy has been Prince Charles in my entire life.
He's 70 years old.
He's been Prince Charles the entire time.
You can't just change that now.
He's Prince Charles, as far as I'm concerned.
Nobody likes him.
People in Britain kind of try to like him, or they try to convince themselves that they like him, but they don't!
Nobody likes this man.
He's charmless.
He's a goofy, charmless, selfish, arrogant, criggish idiot.
Nobody likes him.
So, it's going to be very, very difficult for him to make a success of this.
And I don't think he will.
I really don't think he will.
And there's lots of people sort of speculating, oh, he'll abdicate in favor of... He'll never abdicate!
He's been waiting for this his entire life!
Imagine if he lives for like another 20 years and like, you know, in 2045 or whatever.
He's going to be clinging on to it.
He's never going to indicate.
Imagine if he lives for like another 20 years and like, you know, in 2045 or whatever.
Which he will.
Yeah.
Which he will.
Yeah.
Because he's one of them and he's got the best medical care, et cetera, that my money can buy.
So he's going to live to be 90 something or other.
So that's another 20, 25 years.
Philip was his dad, right?
Yeah.
And that man lived to... I mean, that man was a skeleton, like, walking around.
I mean, he literally looked, like, ghastly in the most literal possible terms, you know, by the time he died.
I'm just imagining Charles looking like that in 20 years.
He was a corpse that was walking around.
Yeah.
No, at the end, Prince Philip was this perambulatory corpse.
You could have taken him to King's Landing to convince Cersei that the White Walkers were real.
And he just kept on going and kept on going and kept on going.
And I think Charles is going to do that too.
And he's going to cling to the crown and the throne the entire time.
Because this is not a man who's ever had any other horizon.
His entire... And this gets into another thing.
In a sort of theoretical way, I kind of feel sorry for him.
I kind of feel sorry for all of them.
Can you imagine what it must be like to be born into that life?
Just from the moment you're born, there's no option, no choice about this whatsoever.
You're going to be the king.
That's the only job you can ever have.
Everything you do your entire life is going to be done in public.
The world public, by the way, the entire world is going to be watching everything you do.
Your marriage, your children, everything.
And you can't have political opinions.
Of course he does.
You know, you can't do this, you can't do that.
And your horizon has to be that one day you'll be the king.
As an individual human being, fuck the guy.
I hate him.
I'm just, I'm just imagining like if my mom, you know, like, you know, and I'm just waiting around for 70 years for her to finally take the bucket and then I get to be the guy at 70.
Like it just feels.
You get to be your mom.
Yeah.
Yeah, I get to be my mom.
I get to fill my mom's shoes.
That's the only thing I've ever been allowed to be for my entire life.
Of course, this is a system that just breeds the most narcissistic assholes imaginable.
Like, and I think, you know, like, I mean, arguably you could say part of the reason that Elizabeth was beloved is because she came in so young and after a period of, like, there were several, like, kind of switch outs in the, in the, you know, the early 20th century before she kind of comes in.
Her father was very well respected because he was the king during the Second World War and he did it quite well despite being a very... he was a very visibly vulnerable person, her father, who I think was George VI?
Yeah, I think his kingly title was... It's the King's Speech Guy for Americans.
It's the guy in the King's Speech.
The King's Speech Guy.
That's right.
That's right.
Colin Firth in the movie.
That's the guy.
And he was quite a... I can't help feeling sorry for him as well, because he was never supposed to be the king.
He didn't want to be the king.
He was shy.
He was withdrawn.
He was private.
He had a stutter.
Yeah.
And he was forced to become the king.
Again, no option, just one day, oh, you've got to be the king now.
And by the way, here comes the Second World War, and you've got to make public addresses as a stutterer.
Was it the thing that his brother advocated?
Because his brother decided that he wanted to fuck off and marry a...
Yes.
That happened because the guy that reigned as George VI, his name was actually Albert.
He was Bertie to the family.
He was Elizabeth's father.
And one of the reasons that people liked Elizabeth at the start was because she was a young woman who had become the queen because her father had died young.
He died in his 50s.
And it was widely understood, I think even at the time, that he died young because of stress and unhappiness because he didn't really want the job.
And he found it extremely stressful.
And within the terms of these things, he had done a good job during the Second World War.
He had done the thing he was supposed to do quite well.
And he'd only become the king, as you say, because his brother, David, who reigned as Edward VIII, Abdicated to marry Wallace Simpson.
Now, this is actually something that really interests me because this is an incredible example of the historical legend and the historical reality.
The historical legend about Edward VIII is that he was this romantic figure who fell in love with this woman who was... She was just Beyond the pale to the British establishment and the royal family, she was this American, she was twice divorced, she was cosmopolitan in her tastes and modern in her attitudes, etc.
And the entire British establishment said, no, you cannot marry her.
And Edward, through sincere love and affection for this woman, he battled the aristocracy and the government and the British establishment, and he couldn't win.
Even though the public were on his side, the public wanted him to be the king because he was this great public communicator and he loved the common man.
And they liked this idea of him marrying for love, etc, etc.
But in the end, he had to give it up because he could not give up his love for... The whole thing is complete crap!
The whole thing is... The British establishment basically conspired to get him to the point where he had to abdicate, and they used the Wallace-Simpson relationship as an excuse.
And they wanted rid of him because they knew, at the top levels of government, that this guy was a security risk, because he was a Nazi sympathiser!
He was a fifth columnist!
He would blab stuff from his red box that would end up on von Ribbentrop's desk!
And Wallace Simpson had links with Mussolini, I think, through one of her previous husbands.
This wasn't about... I mean, there's plenty of snobbery and hatred of Americans and so on in the British establishment then and now, but that really wasn't what it was about.
It was about security risks in the face of... They had a Nazi sympathizer!
As the king, who was going to be king when he was the king.
And after he abdicated during the war, he was going around with Nazi billionaires.
He had a back channel to Berlin.
He was involved in Nazi currency scams.
The guy was advising the Germans to keep on bombing London to force the British government to surrender and make peace with the Führer.
The guy was a bloody Nazi!
Anyway, the way it was understood by the public was that Elizabeth's father had been forced to be the king, and he'd done a good job, and then he died young, having sacrificed his health to his country, and there's this young woman.
So yeah, the public got this sentimental narrative, and I think, to a huge extent, that set the public's attitude towards her.
Charles has got nothing like that.
Charles has got nothing like that behind him.
There's no back story.
There's no sympathetic back story for Charles.
He's just a spoiled brat.
Yeah, the only backstory is, like, you know, he once described wanting to be in Princess Diana's vagina as a tampon.
And then... No, he wasn't talking about Diana.
He wasn't talking about Diana.
He was talking about the woman who was then his mistress, Camilla Parker-Boltz, who is now his wife.
Oh, yes, that's right.
When he was having an affair with her behind Diana's back.
So that's his backstory.
He cheated on the woman, the British...
The British public decided for some bizarre reason they absolutely adored as a living saint, and then she died tragically.
This guy's got no chance.
He's got no chance of commanding.
I mean, maybe I'll be wrong.
You shouldn't underestimate the ability of the British to fool themselves into genuflecting before the aristocracy.
They're very, very good at convincing themselves to do it.
Maybe somehow the British public will think themselves round into the headspace where they, yeah, I like Prince Charles, don't I?
Yeah, I do.
I do.
I do like Charles.
You know, they'll do that sort of Tinkerbell wish fulfilment thing.
I do.
I do.
I do believe in King Charles.
Maybe they'll do it.
Maybe they'll do it.
I just don't see it happening.
And I think that could actually destabilise the entire institution.
I think the extent to which he is charmless and unlikable could actually destabilize the entire institution.
Yeah, especially if he sticks around for 20 years and he's just this kind of like disliked figure for decades and just kind of like takes the whole sheen off the thing.
Yeah, no, I think kind of like dies a slow withering death is, you know, kind of the ultimate, you know, kind of the best possible fate for the British monarchy.
It's like, you know, I know there was there was some I saw I did see some chats, you know, like because Elizabeth has been old for a while and I have seen some some people kind of commenting on like, well, maybe Elizabeth is just kind of like we just go out at a high point.
Right.
You know, you just kind of like when she dies, you just kind of go, oh, this shit is over now.
You know, you just you just kind of make it happen.
Didn't actually work out because, you know, for cause reasons.
But I think I think an even better and It's like, you know, The Crown gets to season 9 and season 10 and season 11 and everybody's just like, give it up already.
It's over.
The story's over.
I actually do.
My one hope is that by some mechanism, Meghan Markle ends up as King's consort at some point.
Because I just want to see the Daily Mail headlines, you know?
I want to see the seething rage that all these people would have if an African American woman, an actress, is, you know, sitting next to the throne one day.
Few things would make me happy.
Like, that's the only thing I care about in this entire saga is I want to see them have to deal with Meghan Markle as, you know, A person they have to respect.
I hope so.
I think that would be great.
Meghan Markle's actually a fascinating figure, not really in so far as herself.
In herself, she strikes... Her and Harry just kind of strike me as the, I suppose, Liberal, in very loose terms, the liberal version of Jared and Ivanka, you know?
They're kind of neoliberal corporate inspirational figures, you know, that want to do TV shows and write books and, you know, lean in feminism written by her.
The Duchess of Sussex or whatever her name is and stuff like that.
I have no particular interest or time for them as people at all.
Although I do kind of grudgingly respect Harry's desire to say, I don't want to do this.
I want to do something else.
So I'm going to go and do it.
Fair enough.
Fair enough.
If you're fourth in line, he's like fourth in line for the throne or something like that.
So if you're fourth in line, it's like...
Fuck that shit.
I don't blame him in the bit.
Yeah, I'm never going to be king, so who cares?
But Meghan Markle is fascinating as a cultural touchstone, I think, because she's a conventionally attractive young woman, right?
Who is a member of the royal family.
Now, you would think that the British tabloids and the British media would be like, I don't know, They'd be like Scrooge McDuck in the money bin or whatever.
You'd think she'd be on all the papers and all the TV shows constantly.
Megan, shots of her in this dress and that dress, look at her legs, etc.
Exactly the way they did with Diana.
The fact that they've all pretty much collectively decided that they hate her guts proves to me, as a very significant social experiment I think, proves to me that racism is considerably stronger a force in British culture than misogyny.
Which is interesting.
It's interesting that we finally, I think, settled that one.
So do you think that it's because she's black or do you think it's because she's American?
No, it's because she's black.
Okay.
Well, yeah.
I have seen so many.
I've seen so many.
If Harry had married Gwyneth Paltrow, there wouldn't be a problem.
There wouldn't be a problem.
I am not in any way non-cognizant of terrible things that racists say, in case this is your first episode.
I am very aware of the depths of anti-black racism, you know?
It turns out that I have some experience with this.
Things that are just openly said about Meghan Markle are just like... I mean, I even get surprised just how terrible it gets, you know?
Yeah, me too.
There was some quite startling footage actually arose during the funeral, the wall-to-wall constant television coverage of the memorial service.
Most of it was just like static shots of cars very, very slowly moving up streets, followed by people in strange outfits and silly hats, very, very slowly walking behind the cars, and crowds of Quite small crowds, actually, when you compare them.
Quite small crowds of people lining the roads, all of them filming it on their phones, on their camera phones.
That was basically the entire thing, apart from a few actual services that we got to see.
But there was some footage that came out from There are two things that I know about the Q and the funeral service, and that is that Channel 5 ran the Emoji movie instead, and apparently was just chastised.
Just chastised completely.
Oh yeah.
And that the Queen's funeral was literally played in like the gay bathhouses.
You know, where they'd normally be playing just, like, gay porn.
Like, believe me, no problem with gay porn.
Please enjoy your bathhouses.
No question.
I'm just imagining, like, showing up at a bathhouse where I'm going to have, like, hot, sweaty sex with, you know, another man and then, like, having to watch, like, the Queen's funeral.
And, you know, I'm going to buttfuck this man solemnly for the Queen.
Respectfully.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Respectfully.
Knowing British gay male culture as I do, which is barely at all, it doesn't surprise me at all.
In fact, I think that's probably the place where you would most expect to see the Queen's funeral reverently watched.
I would imagine that in the homosexualist establishments across the United Kingdom, that the British gay gentlemen were kind of, everybody, shush, stop!
What are you doing?
It's time for the Queen's funeral.
We must all respectfully... That would be my guess.
That would be my guess.
Probably more than elsewhere.
Flags at half-mast has a whole other meaning in this context.
I'm sorry.
I am completely respectful of gay people.
We're having a juvenile laugh because we are ultimately teenage boys sitting here and having a conversation.
You were talking about the funeral service, I mean the queue, and Meghan Markle.
I think I saw some of this as well.
Please continue.
It ended up on social media, just these clips of Meghan Markle walking down the aisles and talking to people lining the streets, as they were basically all of them doing.
And British people pulling faces behind her back and sniggering at her and whispering behind their hands and just treating her with absolute contempt.
That wasn't happening to the others, despite the fact... Whatever you want to say about Meghan Markle, right?
This is a person who made a successful career as a television actor in American network television, right?
Yeah, no.
She had a lead role on The Suits.
Yeah.
Without the benefit of hereditary mega-wealth and institutionalized corporate power and state power and media, which is... All these people have had this.
Andrew, Charles, all these people from day one, they've had every support that you could possibly imagine.
As I say, admittedly, it's a grotesque institution.
Monarchy is a grotesque institution.
They're born into grotesque, weird, circumscribed lives, but they're also born into lives of immense privilege and luxury and support and patronage, etc., etc.
None of them have achieved anything Like that.
Like actually getting out there and becoming a success on your own back, without those sorts of advantages, as a working artist in American television.
And she is the one that the British public choose to treat with pretty much open disrespect and contempt.
And if you ask those people, I dare say if you said, aren't you being a bit racist?
They'd probably all be, how dare you?
But that's what it is.
Come on.
Come on.
Yeah.
It's very obviously racism.
I just saw screenshots of her.
It's always a screenshot of a video, and so it's a frame of footage.
And people going, like, look at her smirk.
She's happy.
She's happy about this.
Look at the smile in her eyes.
She's just looking contemptuously at the queen.
And it's like, hey, Black woman, black American woman in particular, has a reason to look contemptuously at the fucking queen, beyond the fact that she has been treated so terribly by that fucking family.
Beyond the specific ways in which she's been treated by that specific woman.
Right, yeah, I know.
That specific person treated me like shit.
Yeah, I think.
But also, like, it's a freeze frame from a video where she appeared and gave her respects.
There's a cottage industry of this.
There's a cottage industry.
During the Depp Heard trial, I became kind of fascinated by these body language expert people on YouTube.
There's loads of these people that present themselves as experts on body language.
And you had channel after channel after channel where these people who were the body language expert or whatever, they've all got names like this.
To massive audiences!
They're going over frame by frame Amber Heard's testimony on the stand and saying, ah, well, in that slight twitch of the upper left eyebrow, you can see that she's lying.
And in that slight twitch of her left nostril, you can see contempt for law and Christianity and human emotions.
And in the way she sort of slightly touched under her chin there when she said, yes, you can tell that she meant, no, and I'm going to kill you all because I'm an evil witch.
And they do the same thing with Meghan Markle.
It's like she's a secondary obsession with these people.
They comb over the slightest inference of her most casual remarks and her facial expressions.
There was this thing where they were sort of zooming in on a slight bump in one of the tunics she was wearing or one of the dresses she was wearing or something.
And they were saying, she's smuggled a microphone into the family's grief, into the family's private grief.
Look, we can see she's got a microphone.
They're insane.
Believe me, we have our own issues with body language experts, particularly with a particular Bernie Sanders over here in which pointing was a sign of misogyny towards Elizabeth Warren because he used his finger too aggressively. particularly with a particular Bernie Sanders over here in which And that's true.
Trauma response, you know, clearly.
It's just a big old fucking misogynist there, Bernie Sanders, because he pointed in a debate.
Yeah, that's how I feel about body language experts, you know, ultimately.
I'm kind of fascinated with them, though.
I've toyed with the idea of writing something about it, or maybe even doing a podcast one-off where I look at them, because they are fascinating, these bullshit body language people.
Not so much in what they say, but in the things they choose to talk about and what they say about them.
You know what I mean?
Right.
That's a possible future.
And for me, it's also like, you know, well, and then pick a frame, you know, 12 frames later, and then you can do alternate.
I mean, this was actually one of the...
Sorry, very different thing, but this is one of the things that Sacha Baron Cohen did in his, on the Ali G Show, where he had like fashion experts come in and do a, so in his, not the, the Bruno, in the Bruno character, right?
I don't know how well you know Ali G. I never saw any of it.
So, you know, it was fine.
It has its high points and low points.
Let's just put it that way.
But he had this like very flamboyantly gay character called Bruno who had his own movie like years after Borat.
And the idea was that Bruno would kind of come in and be doing like fashion things.
And so he has He has two, like, very famous, like, kind of American fashion critics kind of come in, and then he records them, like, he shows them, like, pictures of people at, like, the recent Oscars or whatever, and asks them, you know, like, three of them and goes, like, oh, yeah, so tell me, what do you think of this character?
What do you think of this character?
What do you think of this outfit?
Whatever.
And they would say, oh, this is the most fabulous thing I can imagine.
And then it's like, OK, no, no, hold on.
Yeah, we're not looking for that answer here.
And it's like, oh, you want us to trash them?
Yeah, no, no, that's not what we're looking for.
And then they were just completely 180, like with no critic.
And suddenly it's like, oh, this is horrifying.
The same yellow that they thought was bold and inventive is now like garish and gaudy and all that sort of thing.
I just think... I mean, what is the royal family?
What is the monarchy?
As I say, they call it a firm themselves.
They refer to it as the firm.
And it is.
It's a corporation.
It's a corporation with a very specific place in history, and therefore very unusual features.
But that is essentially what it is now.
It is a private corporation.
composed of people who have their seats on the board, so to speak, most of them through just birth, which is truer than a lot of people would realize of a lot of more normal corporations.
I mean, we've all seen succession, and we know about the Trump family, et cetera.
And what they sell, they don't sell directly to us.
They sell it to the British government.
And they sell hospitality and PR and brand image and national identity and stuff like that.
And it's still an arm of British imperialism because it's still, to a huge extent, it's still about – and this is one of the queen's main jobs, this woman that everybody's mourning at the moment, and they're, you know, oh, she was so wonderful.
She embodied the nation.
She was an island of stability for us all.
She embodied our values, all this inane, sentimental drivel That the entire British media has now just been pumping out, like, piss for weeks now.
That's not what she did.
What she did, to a huge extent, was welcome and meet and greet and sweet talk dictators and despots and people like that, that the British government wanted to sell arms to.
This is one of their major roles, to help the British government negotiate arms sales for weapons of death and mass destruction and torture to regimes all over the world, many of them outright dictatorships from British firms.
The British armaments and The arms industry has always been massively subsidised by the British state, by the British taxpayer.
It wouldn't survive on its own for all the nonsense that you hear about, or we can't subsidise businesses that aren't, you know, we have to destroy the British coal mining industry because it's not profitable in its own terms.
And you can't expect the British taxpayer to subsidise, so we've got to lay waste to countless British communities and destroy countless generations of lives and futures across the British working class, Midlands and North.
There's loads of industries, the nuclear industry, the arms industry in Britain.
They just wouldn't survive on their own without enormous government subsidy.
It's the same with all the nationalised industries since they were privatised, the formerly nationalised industries.
They don't survive on their own.
they have to have public money pumped into them now that they're publicly run.
Because, of course, public companies don't want to have to actually invest what's needed for heavy investment stuff like running railways safely.
What they want is to cream off the profits.
So they just run them at a profit, they fall apart, and then the British state has to step in to keep them running because the British state literally needs that infrastructure in order to function.
So the British armaments industry is not like that, but it is one of those enormous industries that has been chosen to survive in the post-industrial neoliberal Britain.
And it's been done through enormous subsidies and And one of the ways in which that has been done with that industry, and other industries as well, has been via the royal family as a kind of middle person.
Unelected, not responsive to the voters in any sense, and so can do what they want.
Yeah.
In this country, we just rely on middlemen.
We just rely on government liaisons to do that same work.
But obviously, despite the fact that we never had a nationalized rail industry, et cetera, God, we could definitely talk about the railroad strike here.
No, no, absolutely.
The pattern remains the same, despite the fact that the specifics are different.
And of course, what does an arms industry actually do?
But yeah, no, no, absolutely.
The pattern remains the same, despite the fact that specifics are different.
And of course, what does an arms industry actually do?
What does it mean to be a capitalist enterprise selling weapons of war?
What you're doing is you're selling it to the governments.
You're selling it to the governments that can afford to pay for it.
You need agents of state who are willing to get their hands dirty and do that work and who are not Ultimately, responsible to the citizens who may, you know, oppose it.
Or you have to, quote unquote, manufacture consent, which, you know, there might be, you know, a book built around that, built around that concept, you know.
But yeah, no, no, I mean, I agree.
Like, of course, you know, the Queen used, Queen Elizabeth used her A substantive charm and used her PR strategy to launder all this stuff for decades.
I mean, and I think that's what- They did very well out of it in the process.
The whole lot of them do very well out of it in the process.
They're not passive participants in this either.
They're active agents.
People like Charles and Andrew and all these people, They're actively engaged in this consciously and actively, to their very, very great personal profit.
One of the perks of the job that they're allowed by the British state is in this role of kind of corporate, completely unaccountable, and sentimentally sanctioned corporate middle person in all these dirty deals, is the ability to stand in the middle, scraping profits off as the money flows in one side and the guns and attack helicopters flow in the other.
They do very well out of it, whether in manila envelopes or not.
And that's added to their immense personal wealth in terms of... Charles, until recently, basically owned Cornwall, and the Duchy of Cornwall.
And That's a staggeringly valuable property in itself, but then you add the rents to it, and he's notoriously a swinging landlord.
That's what these people are.
That is ultimately what all these people are.
They have hereditarily inherited the role of landlords, landowners, property owners, and corporate middlemen to British neo-imperialism.
So, you sweep away all the sentimental drivel platitudes about how, you know, Green, she told us who we were, she was an island of stability through the years of... Fuck off with that shit.
You know, it's just some childish drivel.
You know?
Grown men.
Burbling that sort of crap in public with no shame whatsoever, and BBC pundits listening to them and going, hmm, that's a very interesting point you've made there.
It's shameful.
I don't have any national feeling at all.
I don't consider myself represented by or representative of something that people choose to call Britain.
As far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing.
Or say, oh, we're all joined in mourning.
There's no us.
There's no we.
There is no we that contains me and Prince Charles, OK?
There just isn't.
But even so, I can't help feeling ashamed of the absolute ridiculous, pathetic spectacle this country has made of itself this month.
I really do.
It's embarrassing.
It is embarrassing to see.
And it doesn't represent millions of British people.
One of the things, one of the dirty secrets Is that public interest in all this royal stuff has been pretty steadily dwindling.
If you look at 77, the Silver Jubilee, that was the Queen's 25th anniversary of becoming Queen.
The public, I wasn't, I was one year old then, but you know, so I wasn't, I wasn't following the politics quite yet.
I think, I think even then in the cradle, you were like reeling against the royalty there, you know, that's my opinion of what Jack Brad was doing.
The whole country went absolutely fucking nuts about the Silver Jubilee.
It was genuinely... And then you have Charles and Diana's wedding.
I just about remember that.
I was taken out of school.
I was a little kid, but I remember being taken out of school.
I lost a day's school because a unilateral decision had been made by somebody that all us kids, we weren't going to learn anything that day.
We were going to go to a party and we were going to watch somebody get married on television.
And then you have through the 80s, it's still a big thing when Andrew marries Sarah Ferguson and so on, with the tabloids increasingly whipping it up for their own purposes.
But it's declining.
Every time she's had a jubilee since then, I've seen it.
I've seen it.
People sort of making this desperate effort to whip up, oh, we've got to do the Jubilee celebrations.
You don't have people clamoring in the streets and having massive street parties now for the Queen's Diamond or Platinum or Zircon or, I don't know, Telluride anniversary or whatever it is this time.
And the death, it's probably the biggest surge of public interest in the royals since Since the beginning of the 90s, I would say, from the 90s onwards.
It's peaked again because, of course, it's a big thing.
People think of it as history.
That's another thing you hear constantly on the TV.
We're watching history.
Here's the proclamation of the new king.
We're watching history.
And I'm thinking, how the fuck is that history?
Nothing's happening.
Some people in silly clothes are blowing trumpets and talking in old-fashioned language about a man's job slightly changing.
That's not history.
It's got nothing to do with history.
But people perceive it that way.
It's a Wikipedia entry.
It's the Wikipedia list changes, and therefore that's a thing.
I mean, you talk about kind of US presidential politics, which is kind of where we started, but at least that's like you're switching from the administration changes.
You're talking about kind of broad changes in politics.
That's an electoral position that changes every four to eight years.
I mean, this is I mean, I actually agree that Elizabeth dying, that's a hard stop, right?
There's a very distinct changeover, but that's because she was there for 70 years, and that makes a difference.
very distinct changeover, but that's because she was there for 70 years, you know, and that makes a difference.
I kind of, and this is kind of my philosophy on it, is like, this is kind of like the attention given to the funeral is like an extinction burst kind of event, right?
Where it's a recognition that this thing is actually done and that it was only this sort of like attention to her on a personal basis or on a, you know, we like her for whatever reason.
So however silly you and I might find those, you know, Elizabeth dying is a real sea change here.
Obviously, I don't live in your country, but I would be very much like, yeah, this should be the end.
Let's just de-emphasize all of this from here forward and just end this whole process.
I kind of get it.
It's not a priority for me, republicanism or anti-monarchism politically.
It's not something I think about very much.
But I'm, as you might have gathered listening, I'm pretty staunchly anti-monarchist, anti-royal family.
I don't think we should have that stuff anymore.
You can't help Reflecting at a time like this, when you see the old footage of this girl, the 16, 17-year-old girl in her uniform, very, very young.
They're in the Second World War, or a little bit older, waving on the balcony.
When people who've been around that long go, you do feel that sense of... I remember when my My maternal grandfather died.
This was a man who fought in the Second World War.
He was one of the people that went into Bergen-Belsen after the liberation.
He was at Cannes.
He was all over the Second World War.
He came up through Italy in the Allied invasion of Europe.
This guy was a real, in the thick of it, soldier.
And he was a working class guy.
He was a milkman after the war.
He was just a milkman, but he was connected to this stuff.
And young as I was when it happened, I suppose I was 16 when he died at the age of 70, having spent years on an NHS waiting list, waiting for the operation that he needed because he was on a nebulizer, et cetera, et cetera.
Aside from the personal grief, this wasn't a perfect man, but I felt grief when he went.
And there was also this feeling of historical vertigo.
There was this link with the past that's gone.
And I felt a little bit of that about the Queen dying, watching the old newsreels and thinking there's another little connection to that distant past and it's gone again.
But I also think I think rather than wallowing in the sentimentality of that, or this insistence upon continuity, right now to the next one, you know, the King Charles, et cetera, there is a feeling, there is a sense of an ending about this.
There really is, I think.
There's still this feeling like we have a King now, we have King Charles now.
It's kind of unreal.
And I think part of that is just because it's new, but I really do think part of it is just because of the person that we're talking about.
Because the British public know this man very well, and there's not much there to like or respect, really.
One of the things that's said about him is that he's an environmentalist.
Yeah, right.
He's not an environmentalist, but you know, he's kind of, he's an environmentalist in kind of the old-fashioned sort of homeopathic medicine, grow your own leeks sort of way.
That was the one thing I saw Rebecca Watson put out a video, like talking about like how he's been a homeopathic bullshit artist for like the last 30 years.
It's like, oh great, can't wait for this.
That's one of his main... Yeah, yeah.
That's one of his main achievements in life, I have to say, to the extent that he himself can never be said to have achieved anything, has been to heavily promote homeopathic medicine in Britain.
So thanks for that, Charles.
That's great.
Yeah.
But as I say, there is this sense of an ending about it, and maybe they'll pull it around.
The British monarchy is very, very good at that.
They're very, very good at pulling the public around, getting them to think what they want.
So that their grift can continue.
But I do think there's an opportunity for it to fly apart now.
Yeah, maybe that'll happen.
I mean, I would not put it to the thing of like, you and I are going to live to see the end of the British monarchy.
But I think to the degree that even the monarchy is still I think it's already happening.
know, and especially in the outlying colonies, you know, and just think about like Canada, you know, how, you know, the queen is the head of state in Canada.
But like, I think, I think you're going to see a lot more, you know, kind of quiet, like resolutions of like, yeah, no, actually, we actually don't guess at ourselves that anymore.
And we're just a republic now, you know, I think it's already happening.
I think several Commonwealth countries have already sort of mooted the idea.
Maybe, maybe this is the time in which we can kind of draw a line under this and stop It's done.
We don't need to... Now that Elizabeth's gone, who wants to change the currency again?
I'm down for that.
So, yeah, no.
So, yeah.
Are you looking forward... Not just the same old neo-imperialism with a different face on it.
Are you looking forward to the new banknotes?
Are you excited to see Charles I'm kind of interested to see how they'll do it, to be honest.
Far be it from me to criticize anybody on the grounds of their appearance.
Firstly, because you just shouldn't do that.
And secondly, because I'm no oil painting myself, trust me.
But Charles is not a pre-possessing chap.
He doesn't really have regal features, let's say.
So it's going to be interesting watching them spin this.
You know that thing in Marvel movies where they've got the character, whatever this character is from a comic strip that started in 1959 or 62 or something, and they're thinking, right, we can make a whole new multi-billion dollar movie out of this.
So we're making the movie about, I don't know, Snail Man or whatever it is.
And the concept is so inherently ridiculous.
But in order to make it work as a modern movie, they have to change this, and they have to change that, and they have to leave this bit out, and they have to tweak and adjust, and so on and so forth.
But there's certain things that you can't not have, otherwise it's just not the character.
So they have to be there.
So what they do through the magic of modern filmmaking is they just kind of change them to the point where they don't look silly.
They just look sensible enough that modern audiences will accept them without going, They're going to have to do something like that with Charles on the money.
They really are.
And it's going to be interesting to see how they pull it off.
I saw him in the big suit with all the medals and everything.
He must have been really brave in the many wars he's fought in to win all those medals.
I looked at that and I thought, this is a child in his father's suit, ultimately.
That's what it looked like to me.
This looks like a vastly overgrown man-child, clearly.
I think that is how many British people perceive him, as kind of this piffling figure, this kind of eternal mummy's boy.
Whose reputation is largely comprised of... Whether you blame him for a lot of the stuff that went wrong in his private life, it's pretty sordid and kind of embarrassing, really.
So I don't see him achieving regal stature in the minds of the British public easily.
Let's put it that way.
We're very, very good at being mindlessly servile.
It's one of our great super talents, I have to say, the British.
Well, maybe what's going to happen is you're just going to start a war again, because that's how American presidents get to be presidential, is when they order a bombing somewhere.
It's so weird now, because we kind of have a twitch of an upsurge in industrial action in Britain now.
We have post strikes, we have rail strikes and stuff like this going on.
And now we have this Prime Minister, Liz Truss, who is kind of like, Openly a Thatcher trivia act, like she openly models herself on Thatcher to the point of wearing the same clothes and shit like this, and riding around on a tank in exactly the same way that Thatcher did.
So I can see her doing a Falklands.
I really can.
So which islands are going to be bombed under King Charles is kind of the question.
I don't know.
I tell you one thing I do know, it won't be the Cayman Islands, that's for sure.
No, no, for sure, yeah.
You gotta keep the bombs well away from all those banks, no question.
No question.
Yeah.
No, maybe, maybe they'll try to take over.
Maybe they'll try to take over America again.
Maybe that's the, that's the key is the way it's going over there.
I don't know.
We might be with shot because you guys, you're, you're in a bit of a shambles.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, Donald Trump is very likely going to win the 2024 election.
So, you know, yeah, so, yeah, I think I think I think that's enough.
I mean, we could keep going, we could keep riffing on this forever, but no, it's been great getting to chat with you again.
Again, apologies to the audience for us not producing as much content, but believe me, we have both had, you know, some pretty severe personal, you know, kind of health issues and none of it COVID related, ironically enough, you know, but yeah.
But we are going to get back into the content producing game.
And even if it's just doing a fun little cute bonus episodes like this one, we're going to keep it.
It's funny that like for us, like, oh, yeah, the cute easy one is like, let's examine the legacy of British imperialism and the monarchy.
You know, that's the that's the quick and easy, you know, podcast that you and I do.
So but yeah.
Yeah, thanks for listening.
Well, I told you, the ones you pay for, they're the good ones.
They're the ones that are actually, you know, we put the effort in.
So, yeah.
Okay.
Well, there you go.
I hope you enjoyed listening to that and take the hair shirt and the sackcloth and ashes off, you know, because I think it's time to put Elizabeth Windsor aside and just get on with your life.
That's what I'd say.
If you can, if you can raise yourself from your stupor of grief, do that thing.
I'm trying, and I think you can too.
And this episode is, of course, respectfully dedicated to Louise Fletcher, who recently died, who was brilliant on Star Trek.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
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