Further Reading

Don’t worry everyone the Prime Minister is back! Oh wait, no, he was here this morning spouting something about a mugger, but where’s he gone now? Anyway it doesn’t matter because even though everything is terrible it could have been worse if the government hadn’t done the absolute bare minimum required to stop it being the absolute worst. Phew! We should all be so grateful. More chat like this on this week’s show, plus some COVODDS and COVSODDS and a chat with brilliant comedian and former care worker Pope Lonergan (@thedailybumbler) about the issues in the care home system that have led to pandemic horrors.

Links and sources of info from Pope’s interview:

• • Pope Lonergan on Twitter – https://twitter.com/thedailybumbler
• • Pope’s Twitch channel – https://www.twitch.tv/pope_lonergan
• • Pope’s Next Up LiveStream show – https://www.twitch.tv/nextupcomedy
• • Petition to stop Cressingham Gardens being demolished – https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/save-cressingham-gardens-estate/
• • Out of Time, article by Sallie Tisdale – https://harpers.org/archive/2018/03/out-of-time/
• • The Comforting Fictions of Dementia Care, article by Larissa MacFarquhar – https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/08/the-comforting-fictions-of-dementia-care
• • What Dementia Teaches Us About Love, book by Nicci Gerrard – https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/305697/what-dementia-teaches-us-about-love/9780241309650.html
• • Comedy in a care home, Guardian article about the Care Home Tour – https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/nov/21/comedy-care-home-dementia
• • Ben Targét on Twitter – https://twitter.com/BenTarget

All the usual ParPolBro stuff:

• • Twitter – twitter.com/ParPolBro and twitter.com/TiernanDouieb   
• • Facebook – www.facebook.com/groups/ParPolBro 
• • Website – www.tiernandouieb.co.uk/podcast
• • Donate to the Patreon – www.patreon.com/parpolbro
• • Buy me a coffee – ko-fi.com/parpolbro
• • Review the show on iTunes – itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/partly-political-broadcast/id1075342863?mt=2 
• • Review the show on Stitcher – www.stitcher.com/podcast/partly-political-broadcast
• • The Last Skeptik – www.thelastskeptik.com
• • Kat on Twitter – https://twitter.com/chronicleflask
• • Buy Kat a coffee (go on, spread the love) – https://ko-fi.com/katday

Transcript

EP185

Hello and welcome to the Partly Political Broadcast, the comedy politics podcast that much like the UK Coronavirus situation everyone says is going through its peak but to be honest, also like the UK coronavirus situation, I’m not sure we’ll ever peak and will just keep trundling on, upsetting people for years to come. I’m Tiernan Douieb and don’t worry everyone, the Prime Minister Boris Johnson is back, looking like someone left a bag of dead chicks in a tumble dryer, and he has already compared the virus to being like an invisible mugger, which works as a metaphor on the basis that ten years of cuts to emergency services mean its unlikely to get dealt with how it should, you’ll be told to deal with your losses by yourself and if you’re worried it’s probably best if you don’t go outside for a while. And yes, even though it’s an invisible mugger, we all know that Johnson has decided what its ethnicity is and it’s not white, otherwise he’d probably hire it as an advisor. In fact Johnson’s actual words where that ‘if this virus was an invisible mugger, then this is the moment we have begun to wrestle it to the floor.’ And there it is, despite being in ICU just over a week ago, Johnson still shows no signs of understanding how social distancing works.

Well thank goodness for that. The Prime Minister is back at Number 10 and returning to his normal schedule, which means saying some pompous bullshit, then probably avoiding five important meetings before likely announcing he’ll be furloughing himself till October. It’s so obvious that what’s been missing in the last two weeks were unnecessarily aggressive analogies that seem to say Johnson is the sort of man who’d only step in to stop an attacker once they’d already killed over 21,000 people. That does fit his personality though. Its less Spider-Man being motivated by the death of his Uncle Ben to take responsibility for his actions and powers, and more, oh look Thanos has killed a lot of people, if I pipe up about this now maybe I’ll get to have sex with someone. The figures are of course only just over 21,000, if you don’t include care home deaths which potentially double that but we have no actual idea because it seems the government have brought back the dementia tax but with much higher charges to it. It’s an odd decision when the entire Conservatives electoral strategy is focused on getting the votes of older people who can’t remember anything they did merely days beforehand. Actually, when you consider how many people’s needs have been completely ignored by the government’s non-handling of this crisis, you can’t really get more invisible mugger than that.

21,000 deaths, which it isn’t, isn’t that bad eh? As without the government’s strict measures of not closing schools till too late, or letting sports events or large concerts happen or error after error then it could’ve been much worse apparently, according to Dominic Raab, a man whose skin is pulled so tightly I’m certain in the middle of his back there’s a double knotted balloon end. Nothing says privilege like the continued assumption cabinet ministers have that because they’ve done anything at all, it’s better than them having done absolutely nothing. Hey look, you should be grateful as you’d have nothing left if I hadn’t pissed on this, Raab would protest while holding up one remaining chair from your fire consumed home. It’s that attitude that is appearing in the government more and more, where they they think we should be holding a parade every time they manage to do anything at all, no matter how inadequate. Take the Home Secretary Priti Patel, a woman who is like the myth about daddy long legs, but where her stupidity not lack of fangs, counter her high levels of poison. On Saturday’s press conference, amongst death rates from COVID-19 rising again, she announced the good news that actually crime has dropped and shoplifting was lower than the same period last year. Hmm, wonder why that could be Priti? But what a way to set yourself up for a fall next year? Or was Patel’s super tough on crime stance why the coronavirus prevention methods have been so weak in the first place because she demanded we all get put in our own personal prisons until crime is in the negative numbers? She’s going to be very upset when she hears about this invisible mugger going. Still we need positive news and I hope other ministers take note of this idea. Maybe Education Secretary and the small alien face inside the big alien face from the film alien, Gavin Williamson, can announce that less kids are truant from school than this time last year, or maybe the Business Secretary and evil Seth Rogan Alok Sharma could big up how well the funeral industry is doing? Saying that, knife crime is now at a record high across England and Wales, meaning that the only way Patel will be able to boast about dropping those stats in 12 months is by banning all knives ever, which to be fair would be the first time this cabinet were actually successful in stopping something spread.

‘We are beginning to turn the tide’ said Johnson in his return speech, a man who, had he been in King Canute’s position, would’ve insisted the sea was changing direction at his request and if you couldn’t see it’s because you weren’t optimistic enough. There’s not much evidence of this tide turning yet though. The Health Secretary and Spotty from Super Ted Matt Hancock, promised again just last week that they would get to 100,00 coronavirus tests conducted daily, but then days later Grant Shapps, a man only made transport secretary because they wheel him out when absolutely no one else is available, announced that it looked like they’d reach the government’s 100,000 testing target by the end of April. I know every day feels like one long Sunday right now, but I don’t think you can try and gaslight an entire country into thinking the past month has just been an excruciatingly long 24 hours. At the moment the capacity for tests isn’t even being filled per day, though that may be partly to do with the website set up for frontline workers to book them in, crashing on day one. Something that must’ve been even more confusing for everyone trying to use it, when it still kept defaulting to the test page. One of the main testing sites is being run by accounting firm Deloitte, who were appointed without competition, in the car park of Chessington World of Adventures theme park, which has already resulted in tests being lost or sent to the wrong person. Which is what happens in a centre in the home of ups, downs and big swings, run by a group very used to making sure they make people as unaccountable as possible. There’s every chance that right now people in the Cayman Islands are shitting themselves about these positive coronavirus results they keep getting. Either that, or like they did with Carillion, we’ll be told everyone that’s tested was at full health with no risks whatsoever, and they’ll be sent off to infect thousands more people after a quick go on Ramses’ Revenge.

Hey now, maybe we should be grateful that the government’s managed to get any tests done at all, even if it’s via a financial company who post things incorrectly because that’s the sort of thing all the work experience staff usually do, and they were all laid off ages ago. They’re just following the science, aren’t they? They’re just following the science, the science that may or may not be influenced by special advisor and original Dr Finkelstein Dominic Cummings, a man who believes in herd immunity and moon bases. The only reason you’d want his sort of advice is if you were short on ideas for a villain in a children’s film, of the kind that is both mean but mostly laughable and gets defeated by a cute animal and a two-foot-tall hero with a magic yoyo. Cummings has been attending the meetings of SAGE, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, with an acronym that says both ‘wisdom’ but also that their advice might leave you stuffed. The group is usually scientists but since February, Cummings and a data scientist from the Vote Leave campaign have been attending and actively participating, which might be why much like Brexit, the government followed advice of how to tackle coronavirus by not really doing anything at all, then trying to rush it all at once without much thought before then having to delay getting things going again. When accused of a lack of transparency, Raab said they don’t release the names of those who attend Sage meetings incase it puts them at the risk or pressure or undue influence, and of course it’s far easier to manage that if they just put the undue influence in the meetings with them.

Speaking of Brexit, the EU’s Chief Negotiator and worried father in law from a 90’s European comedy Michael Barnier has said that the progress made in post Brexit negotiations has been disappointing. Which is surprising as none of us were expecting it’d be anything more than that even before the pandemic hit, so in a way, that means they’re going well, considering. The UK government are saying they are refusing to extend the transition period beyond the end of the year, which means essentially a no deal after this coronavirus crisis, because I guess if you’re gonna recession you may as well do it properly. During his press conference last week, Grant Shapps said the government would be putting a lot of money into protecting trade routes from many EU countries during the coronavirus crisis, but as they’ll all be gone by the end of the year anyway, this is the sort of throwing a lot of cash into a leaving party that I’d usually expect from Deloitte. With Shapps also only just announcing people arriving at airports having to be quarantined for 14 days, the government may as well go all out and get us used to Brexit now. We’re currently not able to get certain foods, we can’t travel anywhere, businesses are failing and there aren’t enough essential workers or people to pick fruit and veg. Just give up on the trade routes now, tell a few fisherman to get fucked and we should slide out of the EU in December without anyone even realizing. Oh wait, maybe that’s why they’re being so slow at dealing with this?

There could be another year of social distancing which is great news if you borrowed something from a pal last year and were running out of excuses to give it back. Scotland’s lockdown lifting procedure will likely be phased though I’m not sure if that’s like Star Trek whereby some people will be killed, some stunned and others just disrupted while all trade dematerializes. There are rumours that in England people will be able to choose the 10 friends and family that they will be able to see, which just doesn’t work as a plan as what if your 10 is different their 10 and so on. More importantly, what if, like me, you don’t even have 10 friends, does this mean I now have to accept that facebook friend request from that utter prick from my school? And is it allowed to not choose any friends or family but instead 10 random strangers, who you tell to meet in a mansion before saying that they are all guilty of murder and then setting them up in an elaborate mystery?

Life assurances of £60,000 have been given to the families of NHS and frontline staff who die from the coronavirus, because that’s cheaper than buying PPE at top market prices. Meanwhile there are over 100 FTSE companies who are using the furloughing scheme also paid their CEOs an average of £3.6m a year, and they’re now using government money to cover staff wages instead. See? All along that show Benefit Street should have been set on Millionaires Row.

Prime Minister’s Questions is now fully virtual, meaning that its much like virtual porn only now from the comfort of your own home, you get to watch the entire country get fucked. Raab and Labour leader and knee pad Keir Starmer attended the actual House of Commons with an almost entirely empty gallery, and other MPs attending via Zoom which meant that for the first time ever the response to most questions and answers was the sort of cold muted apathy that they’ve always deserved. The government’s daily press conferences will now be accepting questions from members of the public, you know like they used to mock the opposition for but is now a good idea because they’ve come up with it and said it out loud. The first question was from Lynn in Skipton, which is Dominic Cumming’s online name on a Monday, and she asked about when people would be able to hug their closest family again, but the answer given was that it depended on personal situation. For example if you’re Boris Johnson’s estranged children, probably never and he’ll see you in court if you try. You can submit questions via the gov.uk website and I think if we all gang together and do this properly, we can at some point get someone to appear on screen and shout ‘a stupid incompetent bumhole says WHAT’ and at least enjoy a few seconds of what will otherwise be whichever minister drew the short straw that day, trying to tell us that clearly everyone is happy with everything they’re doing as there have been less mass outdoor protests than there were this time last year.

In other news, former newsnight editor, then head of ITV news and weathervane, Allegra Stratton has now become director of communications for the Chancellor and Lumiere from Beauty and the Beast but somewhere between candle and human form Rishi Sunak. When working at Newsnight, Stratton was accused of a culture of denial after she portrayed a single working mum as a benefits scrounger. So Stratton should be perfect for heading up Sunak’s post pandemic announcements that everyone who received money to survive the crisis is now a slave to the state and must carry rocks until the debt is paid off. Actually, furloughed workers are being told to take a second job picking fruit and veg to help the UK harvest putting new meaning to your life expectations coming a cropper. Meanwhile Sunak made an appearance on the BBC’s Big Night In, an evening where a lot of celebrities showed support for you staying at home in a lockdown by showing you just how big their houses are. The Chancellor sat in front of shelves of books, dressed in casual clothes and was praised for looking normal, the main thing most Conservatives never manage without appearing like an alien in a skin suit too small for them. But sitting in your own library isn’t normal as the closest most people get to that now is if they break into the one near them that closed down in 2012. Still, it must’ve been novel for Sunak to sit somewhere surrounded by that many spines.

Welsh health minister and man who is definitely just a child dressed up as a grown-up Vaughn Gething got in trouble after he left his microphone unmuted during a virtual Welsh Assembly meeting and he said ‘What the fuck is the matter with her’ about a colleague. There have been calls to dismiss him, but I think we should cherish any politician that finally accurately reflects public opinion about most ministers.

And in the US – a country where people think being in lockdown is an affront to their freedom, so I can’t wait to see how they feel about you know, dying – The President and what if there was a ship made of spam and it crashed into a mountain of turds Donald Trump suggested people could inject disinfectant as a treatment for coronavirus. He’s been condemned for it but I can see how he might reach that conclusion when you can get All Purpose Flash. And there were rumours about the North Korean Supreme Leader on the weekend with KIMJONGUNDEAD trending on social media, a terrifying thought that we’d have to contend with a pandemic and zombie outbreak at the same time. But it has since been reported by South Korea security advisors that the angry dumpling is alive and well, and a North Korean diplomat said that none of the rumours were based on facts, but based on how North Korean state news usually works, that probably means they believe it.

ADMIN

Yargle. What’s happening people? Nothing, nothing much is happening, I know that. I mean I say that but today on my one allowed walk per day I saw some bees, a very pissed off cat, sorry a cat. And across the road there were two older men standing only 1 foot apart from each other if that, and one said to the other ‘are you doing your best to avoid the virus then?’ and the other one said ‘nah it’s all rubbish isn’t it.’ So all I’m saying is there’ll be property available in my area soon if you’re interested. People are so baffling. It’s been all go in my flat this past week though as we’ve been trying to potty train our daughter, sorry my agent, because when things are shit outside, you may as well make them shit inside too. One highlight or perhaps lowlight depending if you’re me or anyone else, was on Sunday when she ran into the living room shouting, ‘I need a poo poo’ and I grabbed her super-quickly to whisk her to her potty and in doing so, managed to plant by bare left foot right into a massive, grown man sized cable of a turd that she’d either done super quickly as I lifted her up or seconds before I did. I mean, it was such quick poo-ing that it was almost impressive. I nearly slipped over, but luckily didn’t or explaining to an overcrowded A&E why I had had to attend in these pandemic times would’ve been ridiculously embarrassing. Instead I half sat, waving my poo foot in the air, calling for help from my wife because I was failing to hop to the bathroom and didn’t want to tread poo everywhere. She was unable to help as she was doubled over laughing so hard so almost couldn’t breathe. My daughter, sorry agent, was standing by her poo remains looking full of glee. So yes, its going well. To be fair, today she has done one poo and two wees in the actual loo, with one of those tiny seats on it, so that’s all good, but she does keep shouting about the poo on the floor, so I’m sure a therapist will have to deal with that one in 20 years-time. Especially if I make an EdFringe show about it. Yes I need a new agent, though most agents shit on their clients, so at least this is new. This does also come days after my daughter, sorry agent, told my wife that ‘Daddy’s on the telly’ and when she looked, it was a picture of Joe Exotic. Honestly, please bring back childcare soon. Please.

I’m still here though with my poo foot and you’re still there and thank you for that. I hope you’re coping ok. Some days its alright isn’t it and then other days I get this sort of glum feeling that could probably be fixed in seconds by just travelling somewhere outside of our immediate area. I’ve started reminiscing about things like driving up the A1 in traffic. How weird is that? These are strange times indeed and I thank you for continuing to listen to this, and I hope this is helping, but totally understand if you’re skipping some as you’re more in need of escapism. I’m limiting my news intake so it’s just enough that I need for this show and that’s about it as I can’t handle too much more. It’s all a bit too bleak innit? I saw that a guest I had on this show just a few weeks ago, the lovely Dean Burnett, his dad passed away due to the virus last week and he wasn’t able to see him before he died. I can’t imagine how tough that must be and my heart goes out to Dean and his family. He has had a lot of lovely support online but if you enjoyed his interview the other week or any of his books and articles then now might be a nice time to reach out and let him know.

But look, I know this is a comedy podcast and I think its important to keep yourself happy and healthy throughout this, and I think its still important to laugh about all this stuff somehow. So firstly thank you to those of you who donated this week to the ko-fi, Richard, Claire, John, Helen, Anonymous, someone and Somebody. I do like that some people choose to be anonymous and some choose to be a somebody. I respect that. But your donations and lovely messages you put with them keep making my day so thanks tons. If you can spare a few quid at either ko-fi.com/parpolbro or patreon.com/parpolbro then you are a proper lifesaver at the mo, and I do not say that lightly. Or I’d say it ‘lifesaver’. And of course if you can’t donate then please don’t feel you have to, but maybe throw a review onto Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or Castbox if you can, with a lovely 5 stars on it, and even just spread the word to other people you think might like it. You know the ones. The ones who watch one of them funny news shows on the telly that aren’t that funny anymore, and they swear its hard-hitting political comedy. You know those ones? Well send them this so they can be disappointed by a podcast as well.

So quick admins this week. Firstly, I ask this every few months and I’m just not sure what to do, but should I keep the ParPolBro Twitter and Facebook accounts? Are they useful? I set both up so I could post links to the show outside of my own personal account, but the Twitter is now just links to the show as I don’t have time to do much else with it, and the Facebook is also, well, just that as no one even has chats on it anymore. Do any of you want to do anything with them? Or is there something I should be doing that won’t add to the list of things I already don’t have time to do? Or shall I just bin them. Let me know.

Oh, and this coming weekend, Mark Watson is doing one of his marathon 24 hour shows but online, raising money for two charities, one tackling food poverty, one for hospices and another that is helping comedians like me who have no work anymore. I have previously done quite a bit in Mark’s shows but I can’t this time due to well, childcare, lack of spare rooms to do things in without waking up said child, and sheer exhaustion of childcare. But I will be doing some things as will so many excellent comedians and of course Mark will be wonderfully and at times deliriously hosting it. So tune in from 9pm on Friday May 1^st until Saturday at 9pm on twitch.tv/watsoncomedy. Also on Sat I’m hosting another live Comedy Club 4 Kids gig at 10.30am on the Next Up Comedy streams so just check my social media for that as I’ll go on about it a lot.

Right on this week I am speaking to amazing comedian, former drug addict and former care worker Pope Lonergan about care homes and why things are quite so shit there right now. It sounds glum but he manages to make an upsetting subject heartfelt and at times very funny so do have a listen. Plus, some covid Odds and sods, or as I call it COVODDS AND COVSODDS. Yes, come to this show for laughs, leave with absolutely no knowledge. I know my brand.

INTERVIEW WITH POPE

Care homes sound lovely don’t they? I mean, care and then homes, basically two of the loveliest sounding things there are. You wouldn’t want to be cared for on a bus for example, or have an uncaring home, so the combination should mean a properly good place to be. But at the moment, care homes which can mean residential, or nursing homes for the vulnerable and elderly, are pretty scary places. Scare homes if you like. Which you don’t, no one does. Deaths from COVID-19 are being ignored in the government figures but from all accounts, the rates are very high, with little way to stop infection amongst vulnerable and elderly at risk residents, and staff having inadequate PPE to keep themselves safe. A BBC journalist tweeted the other day that at his mother-in-law’s care home alone they had lost 17 people. Why is this happening? A lot of blame is being laid on the government’s reckless order that said any patients who no longer needed NHS treatment could be sent back to their care homes, even if they still had COVID-19 symptoms. That’s basically passive biological warfare of the sort of treatment most pest control companies would balk at. Many care home residents have been forced to sign do not resuscitate orders if they become seriously ill with the virus and it really feels like the government have just decided that a certain section of society don’t deserve to live through this. Which I’d be ok with if it was a different section of society, especially the ones most of those making decisions are part of. No even then I wouldn’t as it’s really grim. It’s all pretty grim and it comes down to this, just why is no one taking care of the care homes?

No, this isn’t really an easy subject for a comedy politics podcast, much like most of the areas to talk to people about at the moment. Which is why this week I spoke to Pope Lonergan, a comedian who not only used to work in care homes, but also set up the amazing Care Home Tour, taking stand-up to care homes around the country for residents with dementia. Pope talked to me all about what he did with that tour, but also what it was like working in care homes, the issues he found as a worker that have lead to this current situation and what should happen next. Despite the serious nature, Pope was so lovely to talk to and at times, there’s also some very funny lovely stories as part of this. So please do have a listen as it’s an important one. Here’s Pope:

INTERVIEW WITH POPE PART 1

And we’ll be back with Pope in a minute but first….

MIDDLE BIT –

I wasn’t entirely sure what to do for the middle bit this week what with the news still being all coronavirus. I did COVID-19 mythbusting last week, there’s not enough positive stories to do a coronaveezy, positeezy section, though there was one nice one about wild stork eggs hatching in the UK for the first time in hundreds of years. Which makes me wonder, wait, did a human have to carry them there in a knapsack in their mouth? But there are odds and sods that I thought might be worth a quick mention. So this week is a very brief:

COVODDS and COVSODS

• You’d think the government would like museums, on account of how many fossils they have within their party. But the treasury is blocking wage top ups for furloughed museum staff, meaning they can only get the agreed 80% of their salary and not use any extra cash they have to pay the further 20%. Now you might think that if no one’s getting 100% wages then it’s unfair that museum staff do, except most museum staff are on living wage or under and are in the very low wage bracket. This is because museums are often under-funded as governments don’t seem to understand that just because they display history it doesn’t mean you have to give them archaic levels of support. The thing is, its only museums and heritage organisations that have been given this order. For all other businesses, the treasury has stated that employers can top up salaries if they choose to using their own money. Museums and galleries generate up to 70% of their own income but are not being allowed. Is it concerns that at some point they’ll have to display the true horrors of the pandemic of 2020, with a walk through section where you can get an inadequate test and a large playing area where you try to find where on earth Boris is? Unions such as Prospect are challenging this so hopefully it will change, otherwise it could mean at some point very soon, we’ll have to have a museum exhibition about museum staff, but with absolutely no one around to manage it.

• France, Denmark and Poland have all made plans to block offshore tax havens from claiming government aid in their coronavirus bailout measures. Which is just amazing, I mean if you aren’t contributing towards that country, why should they contribute towards saving your business? On the down side, this does put a lot of pressure on the Cayman Islands to bail out an awful lot of people. In the UK, senior members of the clergy, including basically a wizard and former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, have all signed a letter saying the Treasury should follow suit and do the same. But weirdly the Chancellor Rishi Sunak, who happens to be married to the daughter of a billionaire who owns a company who paid quite a lot of money in tax avoidance fines in the US, isn’t keen. Who’d have thought it? Instead he’s just said that we’re all in this together and that he’s urging businesses to act responsibly. Which they are, by responsibly furloughing all their staff while keeping their taxes offshore. Stonegate, the pub chain that owns Slug and Lettuce, Yates and Walkabout, you know, all the pubs only tourists go to because they don’t realise other places have atmosphere, they’re registered in the Cayman Islands but are now using government money to pay 80% of their staff’s wages. Similarly, tax dodging NHS suing smug murrkin Richard Branson is now asking for £500m from the government to bail out his Virgin Atlantic airline, even though he could pay that out of his personal fortune of £4.7bn by accident and probably wouldn’t notice as he’d be too busy ruining healthcare so he can go to the moon. Knowing Branson he’d happily live on the moon and keep all his taxes in Mars just to be a prick about it.

• While massive faced Robert Jenrick has been totting about his several thousand houses, his department, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local government has been allowing councils to give planning authority to town hall officials meaning it can completely by-pass the usual committee and consultation process. Labour run Lambeth council are using this time to push through proposals to demolish six council estates which would leave a lot of tenants with nowhere to live and conveniently generate an awful lot of money by selling the land for private developments that no one will be able to afford to live in. The council are refusing to release any documents and the whole thing was shoved through just before Easter, which isn’t really the point of the new life bit of that celebration is it? I mean in the story Jesus wasn’t killed, then everyone celebrated as where he stood was sold off and turned into a one bed studio apartment for someone from Saudi Arabia to buy and never live in. So many laws and policies have been pushed through during this pandemic that its likely only afterwards we’ll all realise the extent of it. I don’t know all six of the estates that are due to be demolished but one of them is Cressingham Gardens and if you search for Save Cressingham Gardens you can find the campaign to stop it happening and a petition to sign and I’ll pop the link in the pod blurb too.

So just a few COVODDS and COVSODDS for now. Likely more next week. If there’s a little story or area being missed at the mo that you’d like me to mention in this bit, please do give us a shout on all them usual places. Or even some unusual ones if you fancy.

And now back to Pope…

INTERVIEW WITH POPE 2

Thanks tons to Pope for that. You can find him on Twitter @thedailybumbler, and he now has a twitch.tv channel that he’s regularly broadcasting on, which you can check out at twitch.tv/pope_lonergan. Plus his comedy night, Addiction Clinic, featuring acts talking about their addiction problems with a variety of things, will be streamed on nextupcomedy.com’s twitch stream on May 8^th. Do check that out. Of course, all the links that Pope mentions will be on the website page for this episode later in the week thanks to Kat Day who always sends me them even despite lockdown parenting issues. Proper heroic.

I’ve got next week’s guests lined up but after that I need more! I am contacting a lot of people at the mo, but despite a lot of people being stuck at home, it is not a great time to get hold of them, with childcare, work, general panicking and all that. So if you know someone that I should talk to, or a subject I should try and track someone down to talk to them about, please do get in touch and let me know. And you can do that via the @parpolbro Twitter account, the Partly Political Broadcast Facebook group, the contact page at partlypoliticalbroadcast.co.uk or email me at partlypoliticalbroadcast@gmail.com. Or why not write it on a pair of pants and fashion them into your own face mask, and then as you try to approach me so I can read it, I swerve out of the way because I have no faith in you obeying the 2m rule and ultimately you just spend the day inhaling the smell of your nether regions for no good reason. Well unless you like that sort of thing. As always, it’s probably best to email.

END

And that’s all for this week’s Partly Political Broadcast. Thanks to your and your noise receptacles for tuning in and guess what? You’ve reached the end again, which means you are entitled, once more, to some HOT POL GOSS FACTS. Yes that’s right, you there, team Konets, team Deireadah (De-rah), team veg. Veg. Veg. No wait its Hungarian, so it’s veg. Or veg. I don’t know. I really don’t. Anyway, here you are at the end of the pod and this week with parliament being virtual but sort of not even managing that, did you know that the British parliament hasn’t always been in the Palace of Westminster? No, I’m not talking about the bit between the early 13^th century until the 15^th, I mean in 1985, on March 7^th of that year, due to a temporary glitch in the space-time continuum, the entirety of Parliament was briefly transported 3 quarters across the galaxy for less than a mili-second and then returned. But no one noticed as Douglas Hurd had been talking at the time and they were all in an attention span coma. So there you go HOT POL GOSS FACTS just for you and there will be more next week. If you enjoy those, or you know, just generally being, then please do tell all what you know about this show on the social medias and send your nan a telegraph about it, review the show on the pod apps you use or in a vintage copy of a yellow pages you’ve found and why not check me a few pennies at ko-fi.com/parpolbro or join the patreon.com/parpolbro and help me out in this new world with no comedy allowed in it whatsoever.

Big danke schons to Acast, my brother The Last Skeptik for the musicness, Kat Day for all the linear liner notes and to Mushybees for artwork magic times.

This will be back next week when the Prime Minister insists he’s caught the invisble burglar and defeated him, but when police storm into number 10, we discover he’s just trapped Larry The Cat under a sheet and then says he’s too stressed to work and takes time off until August.

BYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

This week’s show was sponsored by Deloitte’s Coronavirus testing service. Worried you have the virus? Worried you’ll be self-isolating for 14 days? Come get tested by us at our centres just near what was Professor Burp’s Bubble Works and if we find out you’re full of the COVIDs we’ll tell you how to defer symptoms till the next tax year, how to give dividends of symptoms to your family so the impact is lessened on yourself and most importantly, how to make all your virus germs resident offshore until you need them again.

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