Alan Davies: As Yet Untitled (2014–…): Season 3, Episode 5 - That's a Lie - full transcript
ALAN DAVIES AS YET UNTITLED 05
CTO M915H/82
BF000000
All right?
Hello. I'm Steve Pemberton
and I'm ready to have a nice chat
with some new friends.
A bit nervous about this blazer,
because I normally go for a 44,
and I've gone for a 46
and I feel like it's too roomy.
Come on!
Whoa! Jesus Christ!
APPLAUSE
Hello. I'm Alan Davies
and this is As Yet Untitled -
a television programme
that we make here,
where people just sit
about chatting and drinking.
No, it's not just that.
They have to come up with a title.
They are delightfully funny
and hilarious throughout
and at the end, we come up with
something fit for the TV Times.
Other listings magazines
are of course available.
In order to come up with a title,
I need my guests,
so please will you welcome them.
APPLAUSE
Here they are. Here they are.
Hello.
Welcome.
Romesh Ranganathan is here.
Romesh will never again mix
Indian cuisine and freestyle rap.
Romesh Ranganathan is here.
APPLAUSE
Bill Bailey is here.
Bill Bailey, who recently triggered
a conflict in the Balkans
and had his difficulties
with latex. Bill Bailey is here.
APPLAUSE
Steve Pemberton. Welcome.
Steve, who has witnessed one of
Peter O'Toole's finest performances.
APPLAUSE
Welcome, Steve. And Diane Morgan.
Welcome, Diane. Diane Morgan,
who wonders if flashing
has gone out of fashion.
APPLAUSE
Is that because you've seen less
flashing than you used to?
Yes, it's definitely gone down,
yeah.
I think it's cos of the internet,
isn't it? Yeah.
Were you flashed a lot as a child?
Well, not...
Three times. Oh, three. Were you?
Yeah.
Three different perpetrators?
Perps.
Yeah. One... Not like that?
Well, actually, yeah.
I imagine diminishing returns.
On the third time,
you're like, "All right, mate,
I've seen the act. Move it on."
Well, to be honest,
one of them was on a bicycle.
A drive-by flashing?
Yeah. Wow!
Yeah a flash and dash.
Well, a ride-by. Yeah.
And so he would... I was walking
through a park
and he was on a bicycle and then he
rode passed me, stopped,
dropped his trousers, and then I
just stopped and watched him.
What about the bike? Did he prop
it up against something?
He held it. He held the bike?
That's quite tricky to take your
trousers off and hold a bike.
You don't want to be wearing
a long shirt.
Cos if you pull your trousers down,
then the business area
is just covered by the shirt.
You've got to wear a crop-top.
You've just got the little tip
of your penis on show.
It was a T-shirt.
He'd thought it through.
Yeah, but you've got to have
a short T-shirt. Yeah, exactly.
Or a massive cock. Yeah.
Congratulations.
I wore a night-dress.
It wasn't a problem at all.
One of them, I was at a bus stop
in Manchester,
and this bloke came up to me
and he had the classic trench mac.
You know, old school. Yeah.
He came up to me, opened the mac,
and I just stood there.
And he said "Well, say something."
Really? Yeah.
He wanted a review?
What are you supposed to say?
One star. Yeah.
I was tempted to ask him
what time the number 8 turns up.
But I didn't bother.
And were they in a state
of arousal, these men?
This is really weird.
This is like I'm in a police station
or something.
Answer the question!
One was. One was.
The bicycle man wasn't. Happy now?
What about the third one?
Tell me about the third one.
Oh, the third one,
that was at school.
He used to just stand.
He was well-known.
He would just stand in the bushes
every lunch time.
And the girls would, on their lunch,
would throw hot chips
at his genitals.
So you had a spate of
these incidents... Mmm.
..when you were younger,
but in recent years, less flashing.
Yeah, it stopped in the last few
years. I've had nothing.
Well, I think you're probably right.
About what?
I've heard of less flashing reports.
I think it was a thing
that was very, very popular
in the post-war years. Oh, good.
I thought it might be just me.
No, I think in the 21st century,
I think you're quite right.
Previously, people were out and about
behaving oddly
and now they just do it in
front of their computers. Yeah.
It's a weird thing
to get nostalgic about.
I've heard people say Wagon Wheels
aren't as big as they used to be,
but people aren't flashing
as much as they used to?!
Modern times - it's a nightmare!
I think it's social networking.
What a shame!
Now, your days at freestyle rap,
are they ongoing?
I mean, you do like a rap, don't you?
Love a rap, mate. Who doesn't?
So what happened when you mixed
Indian cuisine with the rap?
What could possibly go wrong?
So basically, what happened was
I entered this...
There's this big nationwide
rap battle competition
called Battle Scars, and I'd been
getting some heat in Horsham
for some of the mix tapes
I'd been putting out.
And I sort of fancied my chances
at doing this competition,
so what you have to do...
Is heat a good thing?
Yeah, just sort of heat, buzz.
People saying, "Have you seen
this guy Ranga?"
That was my rap name.
"Apparently he's spitting some
bare bars and that."
So I ended up doing this
big battle thing
at the Scala in King's Cross.
It was terrifying, like, really
frightening. It's a big venue.
Big venue, yeah.
I mean, it wasn't just me.
It was like a big battle,
like 8 Mile. It was like that.
I love 8 Mile.
Yeah, it's good isn't it?
So the first round, you just go up
and do your best bar-spitting,
and they knock out
half the people based on that.
They just go, "No, mate."
The next round was just like
8 Mile, where there's two of you.
This guy has a go at you.
You have two turns.
And you're improvising your...?
Yeah, but I got through.
Now, the final was three people
on stage at the same time,
and I'd sort of... The other
two guys could actually do it
and I'd fluked my way to the final.
I was starting to have a bit of a
panic attack.
I was thinking,
"This is not going to go well."
And I'd run out of...
My brain had...
I was so nervous, I'd run out of
stuff and then I said...
Basically the line I said got
me kicked out the competition.
Immediately the crowd went,
"Noooo! Booooo! Get him off!"
I said, "Here I am,
rocking the King's Cross Scala
"You can't deal with the heat
of my chicken tikka masala."
Now, there's a number of issues
with that.
First of all, why am I
a chicken tikka masala?
That's the first thing.
Second, chicken tikka masala -
the weakest of all curries.
In the world. Jalfrezi. Madras, even.
A phaal? If I'd have said phaal...
Mate, he would have been merked,
bruv.
But I said "chicken tikka masala".
As soon as I said that, the crowd
started throwing stuff at the stage
and that was it.
That was the last time I ever
did it. It was horrible.
And you've never rapped since?
No, this is how bad it was.
I destroyed the recordings.
I didn't even want to keep them
for posterity.
I don't want anybody
ever listening to them.
You didn't even post them online?
No, absolutely not.
I've got children.
I don't want them hearing this
and then not loving me any more.
Do you ever do sort of rap songs
on karaoke?
Well, they do...
It flashes by so quickly.
I haven't done it, but I know they
do have hip-hop karaoke events.
I've heard it's good fun.
Karaoke. Do you like karaoke?
Uh, no. I, uh... No.
I've tried. I mean, I've been in
that situation, but like you,
I find that the words go past
too fast. Most of the time,
doing that, just peering at
a screen and...
"Stop! Slow down!"
It's just not a very good look,
and I tend not to.
If I know the song, maybe.
But often you think you know a song,
but you get up there...
Cos we do a lot of it in Benidorm,
obviously filming out there, every
single bar's got a karaoke machine.
Of course. And I've had so
many disasters over the years,
trying to do,
"Where do you go to my, lovely?"
Which is about an 18-minute song and
I know the first three words of it.
But I love a bit of karaoke.
I think if everyone's on board
and everyone's enjoying it. And in
fact, the most boring karaoke
is people who are good singers.
Then you may as well
be on a cruise ship.
The best ones are when it's some
old geezer who's well out of tune,
his false teeth fall out,
which I did see once in Benidorm.
You're on to a winner there.
It is when people think
they've nailed the song.
I saw someone I knew get up and he
did What's Going On?
by Marvin Gaye, with his eyes closed.
Really seriously, and out of tune
and you thought
it's never going to end and you
couldn't even signal to him,
"Get off!" It's a joy to watch.
There's this fantastic one,
which has become a kind
of theme in our family.
There's this clip of a woman,
and she's from, I don't know,
Eastern Europe somewhere, and she's
trying to sing Mariah Carey...
# I can't live
If living is without you... #
And she hasn't learnt the words,
but she's just mimicked phonetically
what she thinks
that Mariah Carey's singing,
so what she ends up singing is
# I can't leeee
Eee libby dibby dout you
# I can't leeee
Eee lee be dee boo... #
And it's just gibberish.
It's fantastic!
# I CAN'T LEEEE... #
She goes for it! It's fantastic.
That sounds all right.
It's all right, yeah.
He's more scared of
going to the dentist
than using a soldering iron
on his face.
I'm quite interested in people who
did jobs before they did comedy.
You have a colourful employment
record.
I had so many jobs,
it's unbelievable.
Quite a good one was a dental nurse.
I was a dental nurse.
This is back in the day
when you didn't have to train
to be a dental nurse.
You learnt on the job.
So I got this job,
but I was terrible,
cos I wasn't interested in teeth,
obviously.
And I would just get bored and
start looking out the window.
And my job was just to sit there
with the aspirator -
you know...
SUCKING NOISES
I didn't know what it was called.
That's great. Aspirator.
Thank you. There you go.
I thought it was just the
dribble-sucker or something.
So I was staring out the window
one day with the thing
and the dentist shouted,
"Aspirator! Aspirator!"
So I came to, shoved it
in this patient's mouth
and knocked their front tooth out.
They'd got a cap,
and I knocked it off
and it was lying in
the middle of their tongue,
and the dentist looked at me
like to say, "You...!"
Was that the tooth that
was being worked on?
No, it was a different tooth.
But he got it and glued it back on
without him even knowing.
Well, it sounds like it wasn't
fitted properly in the first place.
Well, exactly. You know, an
aspirator's just a little thing.
He's just insecure
he's done it in a crap way.
There was one guy who came in so
scared that he'd done his own teeth
using a soldering iron
and copper sulphate.
And they'd gone green...
Is it verdigris?
Yeah, green. Verdigris.
Yeah, they'd gone green.
He's what? Put a filling in?
He was more scared
of going to the dentist
than using a soldering iron
on his face.
That's quite difficult. You should
have one of those masks on. Yeah.
Just keep flipping it up and down,
"Oh, bloody hell,
this is a nightmare!"
In the mirror as well,
cos you can never know where you're
going in the mirror as well.
Oh, that's tricky, isn't it? Yeah.
I knocked my two front teeth out
when I was 11.
You know tuck-shop dinner?
When you spend all your dinner money
going into the tuck-shop.
And I fell over this girder -
smack! -
and these two teeth were out.
Cos you're 11 and your teeth
are still growing,
they wouldn't sort of fully...
One of them was alive
and one of them was dead.
So I had a dentist who was about 98
and he had very, very old-fashioned,
sort of mediaeval methods
and he used to get
this little cocktail stick
and just push it up
into the live nerve.
With no... What's it called
when you deaden it?
Anaesthetic. Thank you.
You should have known that.
I should have. I'm surprised
you lasted that long.
And so I had to go... Was he
laughing while he was doing this,
in a sort of slightly maniacal way?
German accent. "Is it safe?"
Every two weeks, I had to get...
You're bringing it back now!
I had to go...
My grandma lived two doors down,
and she used to be ready with...
She could hear me screaming
two doors down.
So this cocktail stick going in and,
"I'm just releasing the pressure."
What was he doing?
It was releasing the pressure
that built up in my gum,
cos it was alive... I don't know!
He didn't know what he was doing.
And then his daughter took over
and she was new-fangled and modern.
She got this big corkscrew
contraption and said,
"Steven, I'm going to do this only
once. It's going to hurt like hell,
"but it'll be just a one-time
thing."
And she started going...
Like I was a bottle of red,
and then uncorked it
and then this stink...
You must have experienced that.
Yeah. But then that did sort it out.
So it was infected in there
and all rotten and pus-y?
Yeah. That's going to make
the cut, isn't it?
Looked a bit like this, actually.
Brilliant! I can't drink those now,
can I?
It's so haphazard.
I remember getting this treatment
and it was some sort
of special teeth cleansing,
and the dentist was quite a cool...
He was very laid-back,
from South Africa.
And he goes, "I'm going to
try this new treatment.
"Just put your face into the clamp."
And he clamped my mouth open,
like this.
So I had this sort of slightly
kind of manic smile
and I couldn't move my mouth -
it was held in a clamp.
And I was lying back like this
and he goes,
"Right, I'm just going
to see how that's worked out."
And he looked in and went, "Oh."
And then he got his dental assistant
over, and he goes,
"Look at this." She looked over
and the two of them were going,
"Oh. Uh..."
And he went off and
faffed around with something,
and I'm thinking,
"He's going to sort this out."
And he came back with a camera.
And he went, "Oh!"
And then I was going...
And he goes, "No, it's not done that
before. This is new."
My gums had gone white.
That's what happened -
my whole teeth had gone white,
then my gums had gone white.
I looked like Skeletor.
It was just terrifying.
How long did that last for?
I don't know.
It lasted a couple of days.
You know, I stayed indoors.
Didn't smile at anyone.
"How are you, Bill?" "Yeah, fine."
Does this tie in
with your latex issues?
No, and nothing to do with that...
at all. Promise?
No, it doesn't.
The latex issue is...
I was doing a gig, and it was
a rock festival, Knebworth.
It's a big rock arena and
I was headlining a metal festival
and it's called Sonisphere,
and the metal acts are on.
So there's like Megadeth
and Metallica and all that.
You love a metal act.
I love a metal act. Oh, God, yeah!
I was on before Slipknot, right?
Now, I don't know if you're familiar
with Slipknot,
but they all wear masks.
They wear these masks, and that's
their thing and it always has been
and they all subsume their
personalities within the costume.
That's their rationale, anyway.
They all wear boiler suits
with numbers on them.
And they all wear these outlandish
rubber masks.
So I thought, you know,
as a tribute to Slipknot,
I'd get a mask made, but of myself.
So I come out as me, but it's
actually a latex mask of me
and then I sort of go,
"Wahey! You see - it's me!"
And so having one of these things
done.
You've probably
had these things done.
When you get a full latex
cast on your face,
it's quite a sort
of scary, claustrophobic thing,
because they put two little straws
up your nose, so you don't die,
and then you breathe
through these things
and they just pack your face
with plaster of Paris,
so you get this cast and then from
the cast, they make a mask.
And they put some hair on it.
I had an earring at the time...
It must be nice to get
your hair back.
It was. It was lovely, yeah.
I said, "Could you put a
little bit more on there'?"
A really wavy coiffure,
like Cary Grant.
Like you were 19. Yeah, like when
I was 19. Still got it!
And so I had this thing made,
and the idea was
that I'd come on
stage with a cape on
with my own face done in latex,
with a guitar.
But when we got down to it,
the cape went on
and then the guitar went on
and I was going, "No, no!"
Cos I've got to take the cape off.
But all this was done
with a mask on my face.
And the thing was,
what I didn't realise was,
they hadn't planned for me to be
able to talk with this mask on.
So it's really tight against my
mouth, like this. I couldn't speak.
So I was behind the Marshall amps,
the music was playing...
I had this intro music which was...
"Unleash the dogs of rock!
There was all these dogs...
HE HOWLS
..like this.
And it was deafening, and there
was lots of smoke and dry ice
behind this thing,
and I was stuck there going,
MUFFLED: "I can't... The guitar has
to go on under the cape!"
And eventually he went,
"Oh, the guitar! Oh, right."
So we went and fixed it like that.
I opened, I came out, then big roar,
all the crowd going...
I came up to the microphone...
MUFFLED: "Good evening!"
It was mortifying!
But I have got a present for you.
I have got the very mask here
to show you. Wow!
Right, I'll just bring it...
I'll reveal it.
Right, there we go.
Oh, God!
Oh, it's like Michael Myers.
Oh, that is weird.
It's pretty scary.
Is it easy to get on?
Can you get it on?
I'll try, yes, cos there's
a bit of Velcro at the back.
Hang on a minute.
I've just got to take this...
I don't know whose head that it.
Hang on, I'll show you the problem.
Right.
Wow! Oh! Oh, that's too weird
for words!
That's horrible!
MUFFLED: The problem is, you see...
Good evening!
Good evening, Sonisphere!
60,000 people going, "What?!
"What is he saying?"
Anyway, so...
Let's have a go with it.
You wanna have a go? I think...
It's the creepiest imaginable thing.
It is quite creepy, yeah.
Well, after the gig, my son put it
on, and he was eight at the time,
and he was running around backstage
and all these metalheads
were absolutely terrified.
Hold on, hold on!
No, wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold on!
A quiff of hair. No, no. That's it,
there we go. That's better.
Hang on.
Oh, God!
LAUGHTER
Right. That's it.
It's like Lord of The Rings
gone bad. Where's the eyes?
Oh, there we go, that's it.
No.
That is awful.
Is it like looking in a mirror
for you?
It is, yeah. It is, exactly.
Do you feel like
you're looking at yourself?
Yeah, well, uh, not right now.
No. It is quite terrifying, yeah.
Quite closely fitting.
It is very closely fitting, yeah.
It's loosened up a bit now,
cos the back's pulled out,
but when it's all tight in
like that you can't...
Yeah.
Yeah, I think it's time
we had an interval.
Do you want to thank my guests?
God, I heard straining,
I heard barking. I heard...
Barking?! ..air escaping.
Now, I want to know
about Peter O'Toole.
Aw, Peter O'Toole. God bless him.
You saw one of his finest
performances.
Well, I was in a film of Lassie
with him. I played the lead.
Wahey! OK, OK.
The lead!
No. Very good.
I was playing his... He was the duke
who buys the dog.
You know, faithful to the book,
and I was his evil dog groomer,
who sort of beats Lassie
with a belt.
Anyway, we got on great.
He was an absolutely lovely man.
You can imagine on your first day
filming, seeing him walk towards you
and I was quaking in my boots.
He's just such a legend.
But he was lovely. He just put
everyone at their ease.
But one day we were filming on
a railway station, on a platform.
There was nowhere for us to sit
other than chairs on the platform,
which was fine, but he had
a bit of a sort of Hollywood moment
and he said,
"This is totally ridiculous!
"We've got actors here. Steve is
here sitting on a platform
"and I demand a trailer!"
So he got his trailer moved.
Took about two hours to move it
adjacent to the station,
and he disappeared into his trailer.
It was just like a little caravan,
essentially.
I was quite happy sat on the
platform and then his PA came over
and said, "Peter said do go
and join him in his trailer."
I said, 'No, it's OK.
I'm all right."
He said, "No, no. Do go."
I think he'd made such a big deal
about bringing this trailer down,
so I thought,
"Oh, God, I may as well."
So I went in and opened the door.
There was nobody there.
So I sat down and I realised
he was on the toilet.
Now, these trailers have walls
about this...
Well, as thin as my hand.
So imagine you were Peter O'Toole
and I'm me,
and it wasn't one
of those nice easy evacuations.
God! That comes out without trouble,
that slips out
and no wiping is necessary.
He didn't know I was there,
of course, so he was...
It's a strainer. Was he straining?
God, I heard straining,
I heard barking. I heard...
Barking?! ..air escaping.
Solids hit solids. So I kind of sat
there and thought, "Oh, shit!"
I'm literally...
I'm literally about 18 inches away
from Peter O'Toole
doing a massive poo.
Peter O'Stoole!
Peter O'Stoole - there you go.
And so I thought, I'll just tiptoe
out so he never knows,
so we don't have that embarrassment.
So I was kind of tiptoeing through
and I just sort of opened the door
and then his agent arrived and said,
"Oh, hello! Are you his PA?"
And I kind of went, "Yeah."
I don't know why - I just lied.
I was so embarrassed.
And the two of us sat there
making sort of chit-chat
and then Peter came out and he
absolutely didn't give a toss.
He didn't give a shit,
I was going to say.
But that's what I really admired
about him.
He knew eventually we'd been there
and heard that,
but there are some things
that should be private.
Maybe he quite liked
being overheard.
Maybe it's the equivalent
of flashing.
Maybe it helped him.
"I'm going to have a shit -
get that boy Pemberton to come in."
"I'm going to make it a real...
OK, few minutes.
"Here we go. Right, has he
sat down now? Here we go!"
Barking? He was barking?
I didn't know whether this
was particular to the film Lassie
or he did it all the time,
but you know some actors
like to psych themselves up.
He shits in character.
He would... Was he shitting as
Lassie? Wiping his feet afterwards.
Dragging his bum along the floor.
He would kind of...
When he was getting himself ready
for a scene would...
HE BARKS
And I didn't know if he took that on
and did that in
The Lion In Winter or...
Florence Of Arabia,
I was going to say.
But no, he was, and I don't want
to besmirch the man,
he was absolutely lovely
and a real legend.
Did he tell you
any good sharable anecdotes?
What was amazing was Jemma Redgrave
was in the film as well,
so of course you had that huge
dynasty of the Redgraves
and so I was just like a sort of...
It was like my little Jackanory.
You had all these great actors
with such a long history.
I'm just a lad from Chorley.
No-one else in my family's
ever done this,
so I kind of sat there quite meekly.
But, yeah, there were amazing
stories, amazing stories.
But he was genuinely inclusive.
He brought everyone into his story
and I think that's the great skill.
He was a bit too
inclusive in the end.
He shared it all.
He's giving you costumes.
But Reece had a similar thing
with Mystic Meg.
I'll tell you what... I'll
tell you something about her.
She can squeeze out a shit, mate,
don't you worry about that.
Oh, my God! Mystic Meg?
Yeah, they were in an hotel.
They were filming something
and they had to share a hotel room.
I don't know!
But he was sitting on a bed
listening to Mystic Meg
force one out, and, you know...
"I sense something!"
"This is going to be a big one."
"I can sense something
big's coming. I can sense it.
"Yes. There's a great disturbance
in the force."
"I believe no-one should go in the
room for 45 minutes after."
"I predict a time when this room
will be intolerable."
Have you never pooed or weed
next to someone famous, guys?
Um... There's got to be.
Let's have a think.
Well, um, no, I can't.
No, I had one of those trailers
when I was working
and I pooed in it
and it wouldn't flush.
And the thing was up to the brim.
Oh, no.
And what had happened was,
it's a removable thing, you know,
and they'd put it back in wrongly.
Oh, no!
And it was blocked up.
They weren't channelling other
people's up into your one? No!
It was blocked up.
I did everything I could.
I mean, I was in with my hands in it.
Because I didn't want... I knew that
somebody else at the end of the day
was going in to clean up
this trailer
for whoever was
going to be in it the next day.
I can't remember if it was me or not.
Romesh looks really pained.
And I came out,
and I had to say to them,
cos all the unit drivers who
get all the vehicles around,
they're there ridiculous hours.
They're there all the time.
You get to know them all.
"Sorry, lads, I've absolutely
filled that bog.
"I've tried everything I can,
"but I now absolutely stink
and I've got to go on set."
So what happened? Did you manage
to do anything with it?
Well, one of them went in
and then he came out and said,
"Don't worry about it, Alan,
it's not your fault.
"He's installed it incorrectly.
We're very sorry."
And I was,
"Is there anything I can do?"
"No, no, no, we'll sort it out."
He almost said, "Don't worry your
pretty little head about it."
What I find in a male toilet,
in the urinals, people lining up...
I always feel slightly
self-conscious in those situations.
It's always slightly awkward.
I remember when I was in the BBC
in one of the toilets.
I walked in and there was a bloke
standing at the urinal,
but he was standing
with both his hands on his hips.
LAUGHTER
That's confidence. Like that.
It really, really unnerved me,
you know, cos I was thinking...how?
You know, that's a skill.
How is he...? What's going on?
He was there for ages.
No hands. Hands-free.
Hands on hips, confident,
looking around like this.
Is it going to go everywhere?
Surely there's a risk.
Well, it turned out
he was maintenance
and he was just checking something.
Like that, on the wall. Well,
I couldn't go. Oh, no, I can't.
Can't compete with that.
No, you can't, no.
Every now and then, you do catch
a glimpse of someone
with an absolutely massive member.
Yep. Do you? Really?
And you can't really... We're not
going to agree with that one.
No, no, no.
What, like in the mirror?
Sometimes people undo their belt
and do all the buttons undone,
just to do a wee.
They don't poke it
through their fly.
Do you poke it through?
Yes!
Oh, shit! I have genuinely
never poked through.
You undo the whole lot?
Yeah, I like to sort of make it
an occasion. Give it an airing.
Sort of, here we go,
undoing the buttons.
Anyway, one of my favourite
Peter O'Toole stories
is the story him and Richard Harris
doing a play and they got drunk.
And Richard Harris went on first
and he went on to the stage
and then he nearly fell off
the front of the stage,
and a woman in the stalls said,
"Harris is drunk!"
And he said "If you think I'm drunk,
wait till you see O'Toole."
But there's another story about
he went to see...
He was out drinking with a friend
and then he said,
"Let's go to the theatre."
So they go to the theatre and they
sit in the stalls for a matinee
and they're watching the play
and then he says to his friend,
"Watch this. This is a good bit.
This is where I come in."
"Oh, shit!"
And he'd taken him into the show
that he was in.
He got himself muddled up.
He went to the theatre -
he just went in the auditorium.
Yeah, that's genius.
Yeah, that's a pretty good effort.
So, Bill, how have you managed to
trigger a conflict in the Balkans?
Right. Well...these things
get out of hand.
I was doing a tour of Europe,
last year, actually.
And Europe has now opened up
to comedy, British comedy.
You're doing your regular show?
My show on tour.
In the English language?
In the English language and,
you know, hitherto parts of Europe
would be off-limits
to English-speaking comedy.
But now there's an enormous
appetite for it,
and I guess what it is,
it's a lot of people watching it
on YouTube.
YouTube's been around ten years,
so comedy's available,
people are watching it.
And now there's a younger generation
grown up and now they've become...
They've got jobs,
they've got disposable incomes
and they want to see
the real thing.
They don't want to see it subtitled
or they don't want
to see the home-grown comedy,
which isn't quite as developed
as British comedy is.
They want to see the real deal
in English.
Anyway, so I was doing a tour
of the Baltic states.
I did a gig in Latvia, in Lithuania
and all these kind of places,
and I did a gig in Estonia.
So when it says on my card here
that you triggered a conflict
in the Balkans...
It was actually in the Baltics?
In the Baltics, yes.
So Bill, tell me about this conflict
you triggered recently
in the Baltics.
The Balkans.
Oh, yes, I will do it now.
So it's kind of a place
of great energy, you know -
new business and things
and thoughts,
and people really
want to see new things.
And I did a gig in Tartu,
which is of course, as you know,
Estonia's second city.
Of course you knew that.
Yeah, I knew that.
Course you knew that.
It's Tallinn -
who doesn't know that?
What sort of idiot
doesn't know that?
God. What sort of mug
do you take me for? Yeah, yeah.
So there's the main one, Tallinn,
the capital,
and there's Tartu,
which is the Eastern capital.
Anyway, I do this gig
and it was in a relatively
old theatre-cum-concert hall.
Anyway, thing is,
I started out doing my show
and they had not had any British
comedy there much there at all,
and so they didn't really know
what to expect,
so there was a lot of people
with their arms crossed
and their coats on as well, cos it
was a bit chilly in this venue.
And I was trying everything
to get them warm up a bit,
asking them questions. In fact,
every time I ask them a question,
the temperature would sort of drop
in the room even more like,
"Grrr! Don't ask me that question!"
And of course after the fact,
I realised what this was about.
Up until 1991, cultural
conversations...
If you said to somebody,
"I was listening to Rolling Stones
on the radio",
you could be carted off
by the secret police.
And so people were not really
forthcoming at all in any way.
Like, they didn't want
to tell me anything.
"What kind of music do you like?"
"Um...what is music?"
Like, "I don't know.
I don't listen to music.
"Just don't look at me!"
It was really unnerving,
and then I thought
this gig is going to
just be a nightmare.
I'm not going to get anywhere.
And then I just said... It was
a random kind of question.
I talked a bit about reality shows,
and I was talking about...
I said, "Oh, there's this reality
TV show star we have in Britain
"and she said..."
It's Chantelle Houghton.
I used it as an example. I said,
"She said she thought the sun and
the moon were the same thing.
"And then she goes,
'Turns out they're not.' " And...
Really?
Yeah, that's right. Apparently so.
I said, "That's the kind of
thing that reality shows...
"You know, the people
on Big Brother or whatever."
I said,
"Do you have any reality shows?"
And then somebody down the front
bravely put their hand up
and he said,
"Yes, we have Choir Wars."
I went, "What?! Choir Wars?"
"Yes, there are two teams.
They're choirs and they battle."
You know, bit like a rap battle,
but probably singing Carl Orff's
Carmina Burana or something.
So I say, "Oh, Choir Wars -
who's the start of that?"
And then it was like, "Kimi Kniepi"
or something.
And then a voice from the back of
the room went, "That is a lie!"
And that was it.
It turned into a riot.
And then somebody stood up and
spoke back to him in Estonian,
just shouting at him...
And there was like a big row
and then somebody got up and walked,
and then I thought
there was going to be a fight.
And then it really kicked off.
And so then I had this brilliant
meme then for the whole gig.
When anyone shouted anything out,
I would just go, "That is a lie!"
The whole place...
It broke the ice for the whole gig
and by the end of the gig,
I was playing the guitar and banging
a bass drum with my foot like this,
and the whole place was going,
"That is a lie!
That is a lie! That is a lie!"
It was just...it was glorious.
Turnaround out of a defeat.
Good save.
It was a good save, yeah.
"Look at his eyes. He's definitely
dead, isn't he? Look at him!
"Look at him! His ghost will
visit you when you're asleep."
Now, Diane, your tortoise?
Yeah, Pork Pie.
Pork Pie. I'm led to believe...
How long's it been hibernating?
I don't know. I can't remember.
I was little and it was time for
Pork Pie to go into hibernation,
cos that's what Blue Peter told us
that's what we had to do.
But since then, I found out that
that's bollocks.
So it comes to getting Pork Pie
out of hibernation
and my dad gets it out of the box
and he goes,
"Oh, God! Oh, no!" and I'm like,
"What's wrong, Daddy?"
And he says, "Oh, Pork Pie's dead."
And I was like,
"He's not, is he?" "He is."
"He doesn't look... He looks like
he normally looks."
"No, he's dead. Believe me."
"I don't believe you, Daddy!
"Look, he's got no eyes!"
His eyes had rotted away
during hibernation.
That's not a good look.
My own father told me that.
How long was he in hibernation for?
Ten years or something?
I don't know. It seemed like a
long time. Maybe it was months.
Does your dad know that normally
people try and break that to
kids gently?
"Look at his eyes! He's definitely
dead, isn't he? Look at him.
"His ghost will probably visit you
when you're asleep!"
He scarred me. He did, yeah.
Bu what do you mean it's bollocks
about the hibernation?
Apparently, it's bollocks.
It's true, actually, yeah.
Are you meant to Tippex the names on
the back of the shells, though?
Is that true or is that a lie?
That's another lie.
That is a lie!
My childhood is crashing down
around me.
So people were just killing their
tortoises in the '80s?
But you put a bit of food
in the box with them, don't you?
Don't you put a cabbage in there?
Yeah, we put something in
there, I remember.
Straw, a bit of lettuce.
A wheel to run round in.
Yeah, our tortoise had a very...
Well, it sounds very tragic,
and it was, but it had a
very bad leg and we were told...
Yeah, only cos your dog bit it.
Yeah, no the dog didn't...
No, it didn't.
He had a generic problem with it.
Arthritis or something.
I thought the dog bit it. Anyway...
The dog was nowhere near it.
One of the dogs claimed it
as his own.
The dog wouldn't let the
other dogs go near it.
Like its own pet.
And it used to...
Well, I won't tell you what it did,
but anyway, it very much
claimed it as its own.
I knew there was something about the
dog and the tortoise, I remember.
But anyway, and the dog...
This is a horrible story.
It's not! No, it's not. It's fine.
One of its legs was arthritic,
so took it to the vet
and it and they genuinely said -
I'm not making this up -
"We can amputate it
and put a wheel on."
Right. And a small motor.
Well, that's it.
That's the next stage is,
how many wheels?
Could you take all the legs off?
The old remote control.
Put a little jug of peanuts
on its back at parties.
"Thanks very much!"
So needless to say, we put it out of
its misery. It was ill.
For years and years and years,
people didn't know about
keeping pets in Britain
and hence we have
a lot of captive animals -
birds, and the things that
live a long life, like parrots.
So parrots live to 90 and at
first people thought,
"Ah, you just put them in a cage
with cuttlefish."
They don't get cuttlefish. They're
in the jungle! What the hell?!
Who thought that was a good idea?
When all these people
were putting their tortoises in to
hibernate and then they were dead,
didn't they think, "I should
probably tell someone about this"?
Everyone's just doing it,
thinking...
There were a lot more tortoises
around in those days, like flashers.
That's right. There were loads of
them, weren't there?
There's a correlation between...
No, I think that just genuinely
there was a very poor amount of
information about tortoises.
Tortoise intel. Tortoise intel.
And none of the Google.
You couldn't have a Google then.
And a lot of people got tortoises
cos they thought it was a cool pet,
but actually,
they didn't really know...
For one thing, the diet.
They were mostly just given
mashed-up bread and butter
and sugar and God knows...
Spam. These tortoises were...
Getting fat! ..getting fat. Stuffed.
In the shell. In the shell.
"Whoa! I'm going to blow!"
"Oh, my eyes have rotted! Oh, God!"
Full of doughnuts. "Help me!"
Did you get a replacement pet
afterwards?
No, we couldn't.
He was irreplaceable, Pork Pie.
They use him as a doorstop now.
Now, listen, we've got more than
enough for our tiny programme.
We need a title for the show, and
if anything has occurred to you...
I'm quite fixated on
"That is a lie!" Yeah.
But I wonder if there was anything
from your rap story
that might be preserverable.
Well, I sort of want
that whole thing forgotten about,
to be honest with you.
"There aren't enough flashers
any more" is nice.
Yeah, that is good.
Pork Pie.
"Pork Pie. That's a lie!"
Yeah! There you go. That's it.
"I've got no eyes." Yeah, yeah.
What would you do with that?
Would you like some fries?
BILL BEATBOXES
Or pilau rice. Oh, lovely.
That's really good.
Booooo! Boooo!
Is this bringing anything back?
Booooo! Ranga is shit!
Boooo! No, not the tortoise.
Jesus Christ, I thought we were
coming up with a title,
not making me want to kill myself.
I still quite like
"Rotten and pus-y". What was that?
Why have I got that in my head?
It's cos of the drink.
Oh, the drink.
It came out of Steve's mouth.
Quite literally.
Yeah, she's not touched it, though.
You surprised?
Well, listen, ladies and gentlemen,
please will you thank all my guests.
Romesh Ranganathan.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Bill Bailey.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Steve Pemberton.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Diane Morgan.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
I'm Alan Davies and you
have been watching That Is A Lie!
Subtitles by Ericsson
CTO M915H/82
BF000000
All right?
Hello. I'm Steve Pemberton
and I'm ready to have a nice chat
with some new friends.
A bit nervous about this blazer,
because I normally go for a 44,
and I've gone for a 46
and I feel like it's too roomy.
Come on!
Whoa! Jesus Christ!
APPLAUSE
Hello. I'm Alan Davies
and this is As Yet Untitled -
a television programme
that we make here,
where people just sit
about chatting and drinking.
No, it's not just that.
They have to come up with a title.
They are delightfully funny
and hilarious throughout
and at the end, we come up with
something fit for the TV Times.
Other listings magazines
are of course available.
In order to come up with a title,
I need my guests,
so please will you welcome them.
APPLAUSE
Here they are. Here they are.
Hello.
Welcome.
Romesh Ranganathan is here.
Romesh will never again mix
Indian cuisine and freestyle rap.
Romesh Ranganathan is here.
APPLAUSE
Bill Bailey is here.
Bill Bailey, who recently triggered
a conflict in the Balkans
and had his difficulties
with latex. Bill Bailey is here.
APPLAUSE
Steve Pemberton. Welcome.
Steve, who has witnessed one of
Peter O'Toole's finest performances.
APPLAUSE
Welcome, Steve. And Diane Morgan.
Welcome, Diane. Diane Morgan,
who wonders if flashing
has gone out of fashion.
APPLAUSE
Is that because you've seen less
flashing than you used to?
Yes, it's definitely gone down,
yeah.
I think it's cos of the internet,
isn't it? Yeah.
Were you flashed a lot as a child?
Well, not...
Three times. Oh, three. Were you?
Yeah.
Three different perpetrators?
Perps.
Yeah. One... Not like that?
Well, actually, yeah.
I imagine diminishing returns.
On the third time,
you're like, "All right, mate,
I've seen the act. Move it on."
Well, to be honest,
one of them was on a bicycle.
A drive-by flashing?
Yeah. Wow!
Yeah a flash and dash.
Well, a ride-by. Yeah.
And so he would... I was walking
through a park
and he was on a bicycle and then he
rode passed me, stopped,
dropped his trousers, and then I
just stopped and watched him.
What about the bike? Did he prop
it up against something?
He held it. He held the bike?
That's quite tricky to take your
trousers off and hold a bike.
You don't want to be wearing
a long shirt.
Cos if you pull your trousers down,
then the business area
is just covered by the shirt.
You've got to wear a crop-top.
You've just got the little tip
of your penis on show.
It was a T-shirt.
He'd thought it through.
Yeah, but you've got to have
a short T-shirt. Yeah, exactly.
Or a massive cock. Yeah.
Congratulations.
I wore a night-dress.
It wasn't a problem at all.
One of them, I was at a bus stop
in Manchester,
and this bloke came up to me
and he had the classic trench mac.
You know, old school. Yeah.
He came up to me, opened the mac,
and I just stood there.
And he said "Well, say something."
Really? Yeah.
He wanted a review?
What are you supposed to say?
One star. Yeah.
I was tempted to ask him
what time the number 8 turns up.
But I didn't bother.
And were they in a state
of arousal, these men?
This is really weird.
This is like I'm in a police station
or something.
Answer the question!
One was. One was.
The bicycle man wasn't. Happy now?
What about the third one?
Tell me about the third one.
Oh, the third one,
that was at school.
He used to just stand.
He was well-known.
He would just stand in the bushes
every lunch time.
And the girls would, on their lunch,
would throw hot chips
at his genitals.
So you had a spate of
these incidents... Mmm.
..when you were younger,
but in recent years, less flashing.
Yeah, it stopped in the last few
years. I've had nothing.
Well, I think you're probably right.
About what?
I've heard of less flashing reports.
I think it was a thing
that was very, very popular
in the post-war years. Oh, good.
I thought it might be just me.
No, I think in the 21st century,
I think you're quite right.
Previously, people were out and about
behaving oddly
and now they just do it in
front of their computers. Yeah.
It's a weird thing
to get nostalgic about.
I've heard people say Wagon Wheels
aren't as big as they used to be,
but people aren't flashing
as much as they used to?!
Modern times - it's a nightmare!
I think it's social networking.
What a shame!
Now, your days at freestyle rap,
are they ongoing?
I mean, you do like a rap, don't you?
Love a rap, mate. Who doesn't?
So what happened when you mixed
Indian cuisine with the rap?
What could possibly go wrong?
So basically, what happened was
I entered this...
There's this big nationwide
rap battle competition
called Battle Scars, and I'd been
getting some heat in Horsham
for some of the mix tapes
I'd been putting out.
And I sort of fancied my chances
at doing this competition,
so what you have to do...
Is heat a good thing?
Yeah, just sort of heat, buzz.
People saying, "Have you seen
this guy Ranga?"
That was my rap name.
"Apparently he's spitting some
bare bars and that."
So I ended up doing this
big battle thing
at the Scala in King's Cross.
It was terrifying, like, really
frightening. It's a big venue.
Big venue, yeah.
I mean, it wasn't just me.
It was like a big battle,
like 8 Mile. It was like that.
I love 8 Mile.
Yeah, it's good isn't it?
So the first round, you just go up
and do your best bar-spitting,
and they knock out
half the people based on that.
They just go, "No, mate."
The next round was just like
8 Mile, where there's two of you.
This guy has a go at you.
You have two turns.
And you're improvising your...?
Yeah, but I got through.
Now, the final was three people
on stage at the same time,
and I'd sort of... The other
two guys could actually do it
and I'd fluked my way to the final.
I was starting to have a bit of a
panic attack.
I was thinking,
"This is not going to go well."
And I'd run out of...
My brain had...
I was so nervous, I'd run out of
stuff and then I said...
Basically the line I said got
me kicked out the competition.
Immediately the crowd went,
"Noooo! Booooo! Get him off!"
I said, "Here I am,
rocking the King's Cross Scala
"You can't deal with the heat
of my chicken tikka masala."
Now, there's a number of issues
with that.
First of all, why am I
a chicken tikka masala?
That's the first thing.
Second, chicken tikka masala -
the weakest of all curries.
In the world. Jalfrezi. Madras, even.
A phaal? If I'd have said phaal...
Mate, he would have been merked,
bruv.
But I said "chicken tikka masala".
As soon as I said that, the crowd
started throwing stuff at the stage
and that was it.
That was the last time I ever
did it. It was horrible.
And you've never rapped since?
No, this is how bad it was.
I destroyed the recordings.
I didn't even want to keep them
for posterity.
I don't want anybody
ever listening to them.
You didn't even post them online?
No, absolutely not.
I've got children.
I don't want them hearing this
and then not loving me any more.
Do you ever do sort of rap songs
on karaoke?
Well, they do...
It flashes by so quickly.
I haven't done it, but I know they
do have hip-hop karaoke events.
I've heard it's good fun.
Karaoke. Do you like karaoke?
Uh, no. I, uh... No.
I've tried. I mean, I've been in
that situation, but like you,
I find that the words go past
too fast. Most of the time,
doing that, just peering at
a screen and...
"Stop! Slow down!"
It's just not a very good look,
and I tend not to.
If I know the song, maybe.
But often you think you know a song,
but you get up there...
Cos we do a lot of it in Benidorm,
obviously filming out there, every
single bar's got a karaoke machine.
Of course. And I've had so
many disasters over the years,
trying to do,
"Where do you go to my, lovely?"
Which is about an 18-minute song and
I know the first three words of it.
But I love a bit of karaoke.
I think if everyone's on board
and everyone's enjoying it. And in
fact, the most boring karaoke
is people who are good singers.
Then you may as well
be on a cruise ship.
The best ones are when it's some
old geezer who's well out of tune,
his false teeth fall out,
which I did see once in Benidorm.
You're on to a winner there.
It is when people think
they've nailed the song.
I saw someone I knew get up and he
did What's Going On?
by Marvin Gaye, with his eyes closed.
Really seriously, and out of tune
and you thought
it's never going to end and you
couldn't even signal to him,
"Get off!" It's a joy to watch.
There's this fantastic one,
which has become a kind
of theme in our family.
There's this clip of a woman,
and she's from, I don't know,
Eastern Europe somewhere, and she's
trying to sing Mariah Carey...
# I can't live
If living is without you... #
And she hasn't learnt the words,
but she's just mimicked phonetically
what she thinks
that Mariah Carey's singing,
so what she ends up singing is
# I can't leeee
Eee libby dibby dout you
# I can't leeee
Eee lee be dee boo... #
And it's just gibberish.
It's fantastic!
# I CAN'T LEEEE... #
She goes for it! It's fantastic.
That sounds all right.
It's all right, yeah.
He's more scared of
going to the dentist
than using a soldering iron
on his face.
I'm quite interested in people who
did jobs before they did comedy.
You have a colourful employment
record.
I had so many jobs,
it's unbelievable.
Quite a good one was a dental nurse.
I was a dental nurse.
This is back in the day
when you didn't have to train
to be a dental nurse.
You learnt on the job.
So I got this job,
but I was terrible,
cos I wasn't interested in teeth,
obviously.
And I would just get bored and
start looking out the window.
And my job was just to sit there
with the aspirator -
you know...
SUCKING NOISES
I didn't know what it was called.
That's great. Aspirator.
Thank you. There you go.
I thought it was just the
dribble-sucker or something.
So I was staring out the window
one day with the thing
and the dentist shouted,
"Aspirator! Aspirator!"
So I came to, shoved it
in this patient's mouth
and knocked their front tooth out.
They'd got a cap,
and I knocked it off
and it was lying in
the middle of their tongue,
and the dentist looked at me
like to say, "You...!"
Was that the tooth that
was being worked on?
No, it was a different tooth.
But he got it and glued it back on
without him even knowing.
Well, it sounds like it wasn't
fitted properly in the first place.
Well, exactly. You know, an
aspirator's just a little thing.
He's just insecure
he's done it in a crap way.
There was one guy who came in so
scared that he'd done his own teeth
using a soldering iron
and copper sulphate.
And they'd gone green...
Is it verdigris?
Yeah, green. Verdigris.
Yeah, they'd gone green.
He's what? Put a filling in?
He was more scared
of going to the dentist
than using a soldering iron
on his face.
That's quite difficult. You should
have one of those masks on. Yeah.
Just keep flipping it up and down,
"Oh, bloody hell,
this is a nightmare!"
In the mirror as well,
cos you can never know where you're
going in the mirror as well.
Oh, that's tricky, isn't it? Yeah.
I knocked my two front teeth out
when I was 11.
You know tuck-shop dinner?
When you spend all your dinner money
going into the tuck-shop.
And I fell over this girder -
smack! -
and these two teeth were out.
Cos you're 11 and your teeth
are still growing,
they wouldn't sort of fully...
One of them was alive
and one of them was dead.
So I had a dentist who was about 98
and he had very, very old-fashioned,
sort of mediaeval methods
and he used to get
this little cocktail stick
and just push it up
into the live nerve.
With no... What's it called
when you deaden it?
Anaesthetic. Thank you.
You should have known that.
I should have. I'm surprised
you lasted that long.
And so I had to go... Was he
laughing while he was doing this,
in a sort of slightly maniacal way?
German accent. "Is it safe?"
Every two weeks, I had to get...
You're bringing it back now!
I had to go...
My grandma lived two doors down,
and she used to be ready with...
She could hear me screaming
two doors down.
So this cocktail stick going in and,
"I'm just releasing the pressure."
What was he doing?
It was releasing the pressure
that built up in my gum,
cos it was alive... I don't know!
He didn't know what he was doing.
And then his daughter took over
and she was new-fangled and modern.
She got this big corkscrew
contraption and said,
"Steven, I'm going to do this only
once. It's going to hurt like hell,
"but it'll be just a one-time
thing."
And she started going...
Like I was a bottle of red,
and then uncorked it
and then this stink...
You must have experienced that.
Yeah. But then that did sort it out.
So it was infected in there
and all rotten and pus-y?
Yeah. That's going to make
the cut, isn't it?
Looked a bit like this, actually.
Brilliant! I can't drink those now,
can I?
It's so haphazard.
I remember getting this treatment
and it was some sort
of special teeth cleansing,
and the dentist was quite a cool...
He was very laid-back,
from South Africa.
And he goes, "I'm going to
try this new treatment.
"Just put your face into the clamp."
And he clamped my mouth open,
like this.
So I had this sort of slightly
kind of manic smile
and I couldn't move my mouth -
it was held in a clamp.
And I was lying back like this
and he goes,
"Right, I'm just going
to see how that's worked out."
And he looked in and went, "Oh."
And then he got his dental assistant
over, and he goes,
"Look at this." She looked over
and the two of them were going,
"Oh. Uh..."
And he went off and
faffed around with something,
and I'm thinking,
"He's going to sort this out."
And he came back with a camera.
And he went, "Oh!"
And then I was going...
And he goes, "No, it's not done that
before. This is new."
My gums had gone white.
That's what happened -
my whole teeth had gone white,
then my gums had gone white.
I looked like Skeletor.
It was just terrifying.
How long did that last for?
I don't know.
It lasted a couple of days.
You know, I stayed indoors.
Didn't smile at anyone.
"How are you, Bill?" "Yeah, fine."
Does this tie in
with your latex issues?
No, and nothing to do with that...
at all. Promise?
No, it doesn't.
The latex issue is...
I was doing a gig, and it was
a rock festival, Knebworth.
It's a big rock arena and
I was headlining a metal festival
and it's called Sonisphere,
and the metal acts are on.
So there's like Megadeth
and Metallica and all that.
You love a metal act.
I love a metal act. Oh, God, yeah!
I was on before Slipknot, right?
Now, I don't know if you're familiar
with Slipknot,
but they all wear masks.
They wear these masks, and that's
their thing and it always has been
and they all subsume their
personalities within the costume.
That's their rationale, anyway.
They all wear boiler suits
with numbers on them.
And they all wear these outlandish
rubber masks.
So I thought, you know,
as a tribute to Slipknot,
I'd get a mask made, but of myself.
So I come out as me, but it's
actually a latex mask of me
and then I sort of go,
"Wahey! You see - it's me!"
And so having one of these things
done.
You've probably
had these things done.
When you get a full latex
cast on your face,
it's quite a sort
of scary, claustrophobic thing,
because they put two little straws
up your nose, so you don't die,
and then you breathe
through these things
and they just pack your face
with plaster of Paris,
so you get this cast and then from
the cast, they make a mask.
And they put some hair on it.
I had an earring at the time...
It must be nice to get
your hair back.
It was. It was lovely, yeah.
I said, "Could you put a
little bit more on there'?"
A really wavy coiffure,
like Cary Grant.
Like you were 19. Yeah, like when
I was 19. Still got it!
And so I had this thing made,
and the idea was
that I'd come on
stage with a cape on
with my own face done in latex,
with a guitar.
But when we got down to it,
the cape went on
and then the guitar went on
and I was going, "No, no!"
Cos I've got to take the cape off.
But all this was done
with a mask on my face.
And the thing was,
what I didn't realise was,
they hadn't planned for me to be
able to talk with this mask on.
So it's really tight against my
mouth, like this. I couldn't speak.
So I was behind the Marshall amps,
the music was playing...
I had this intro music which was...
"Unleash the dogs of rock!
There was all these dogs...
HE HOWLS
..like this.
And it was deafening, and there
was lots of smoke and dry ice
behind this thing,
and I was stuck there going,
MUFFLED: "I can't... The guitar has
to go on under the cape!"
And eventually he went,
"Oh, the guitar! Oh, right."
So we went and fixed it like that.
I opened, I came out, then big roar,
all the crowd going...
I came up to the microphone...
MUFFLED: "Good evening!"
It was mortifying!
But I have got a present for you.
I have got the very mask here
to show you. Wow!
Right, I'll just bring it...
I'll reveal it.
Right, there we go.
Oh, God!
Oh, it's like Michael Myers.
Oh, that is weird.
It's pretty scary.
Is it easy to get on?
Can you get it on?
I'll try, yes, cos there's
a bit of Velcro at the back.
Hang on a minute.
I've just got to take this...
I don't know whose head that it.
Hang on, I'll show you the problem.
Right.
Wow! Oh! Oh, that's too weird
for words!
That's horrible!
MUFFLED: The problem is, you see...
Good evening!
Good evening, Sonisphere!
60,000 people going, "What?!
"What is he saying?"
Anyway, so...
Let's have a go with it.
You wanna have a go? I think...
It's the creepiest imaginable thing.
It is quite creepy, yeah.
Well, after the gig, my son put it
on, and he was eight at the time,
and he was running around backstage
and all these metalheads
were absolutely terrified.
Hold on, hold on!
No, wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold on!
A quiff of hair. No, no. That's it,
there we go. That's better.
Hang on.
Oh, God!
LAUGHTER
Right. That's it.
It's like Lord of The Rings
gone bad. Where's the eyes?
Oh, there we go, that's it.
No.
That is awful.
Is it like looking in a mirror
for you?
It is, yeah. It is, exactly.
Do you feel like
you're looking at yourself?
Yeah, well, uh, not right now.
No. It is quite terrifying, yeah.
Quite closely fitting.
It is very closely fitting, yeah.
It's loosened up a bit now,
cos the back's pulled out,
but when it's all tight in
like that you can't...
Yeah.
Yeah, I think it's time
we had an interval.
Do you want to thank my guests?
God, I heard straining,
I heard barking. I heard...
Barking?! ..air escaping.
Now, I want to know
about Peter O'Toole.
Aw, Peter O'Toole. God bless him.
You saw one of his finest
performances.
Well, I was in a film of Lassie
with him. I played the lead.
Wahey! OK, OK.
The lead!
No. Very good.
I was playing his... He was the duke
who buys the dog.
You know, faithful to the book,
and I was his evil dog groomer,
who sort of beats Lassie
with a belt.
Anyway, we got on great.
He was an absolutely lovely man.
You can imagine on your first day
filming, seeing him walk towards you
and I was quaking in my boots.
He's just such a legend.
But he was lovely. He just put
everyone at their ease.
But one day we were filming on
a railway station, on a platform.
There was nowhere for us to sit
other than chairs on the platform,
which was fine, but he had
a bit of a sort of Hollywood moment
and he said,
"This is totally ridiculous!
"We've got actors here. Steve is
here sitting on a platform
"and I demand a trailer!"
So he got his trailer moved.
Took about two hours to move it
adjacent to the station,
and he disappeared into his trailer.
It was just like a little caravan,
essentially.
I was quite happy sat on the
platform and then his PA came over
and said, "Peter said do go
and join him in his trailer."
I said, 'No, it's OK.
I'm all right."
He said, "No, no. Do go."
I think he'd made such a big deal
about bringing this trailer down,
so I thought,
"Oh, God, I may as well."
So I went in and opened the door.
There was nobody there.
So I sat down and I realised
he was on the toilet.
Now, these trailers have walls
about this...
Well, as thin as my hand.
So imagine you were Peter O'Toole
and I'm me,
and it wasn't one
of those nice easy evacuations.
God! That comes out without trouble,
that slips out
and no wiping is necessary.
He didn't know I was there,
of course, so he was...
It's a strainer. Was he straining?
God, I heard straining,
I heard barking. I heard...
Barking?! ..air escaping.
Solids hit solids. So I kind of sat
there and thought, "Oh, shit!"
I'm literally...
I'm literally about 18 inches away
from Peter O'Toole
doing a massive poo.
Peter O'Stoole!
Peter O'Stoole - there you go.
And so I thought, I'll just tiptoe
out so he never knows,
so we don't have that embarrassment.
So I was kind of tiptoeing through
and I just sort of opened the door
and then his agent arrived and said,
"Oh, hello! Are you his PA?"
And I kind of went, "Yeah."
I don't know why - I just lied.
I was so embarrassed.
And the two of us sat there
making sort of chit-chat
and then Peter came out and he
absolutely didn't give a toss.
He didn't give a shit,
I was going to say.
But that's what I really admired
about him.
He knew eventually we'd been there
and heard that,
but there are some things
that should be private.
Maybe he quite liked
being overheard.
Maybe it's the equivalent
of flashing.
Maybe it helped him.
"I'm going to have a shit -
get that boy Pemberton to come in."
"I'm going to make it a real...
OK, few minutes.
"Here we go. Right, has he
sat down now? Here we go!"
Barking? He was barking?
I didn't know whether this
was particular to the film Lassie
or he did it all the time,
but you know some actors
like to psych themselves up.
He shits in character.
He would... Was he shitting as
Lassie? Wiping his feet afterwards.
Dragging his bum along the floor.
He would kind of...
When he was getting himself ready
for a scene would...
HE BARKS
And I didn't know if he took that on
and did that in
The Lion In Winter or...
Florence Of Arabia,
I was going to say.
But no, he was, and I don't want
to besmirch the man,
he was absolutely lovely
and a real legend.
Did he tell you
any good sharable anecdotes?
What was amazing was Jemma Redgrave
was in the film as well,
so of course you had that huge
dynasty of the Redgraves
and so I was just like a sort of...
It was like my little Jackanory.
You had all these great actors
with such a long history.
I'm just a lad from Chorley.
No-one else in my family's
ever done this,
so I kind of sat there quite meekly.
But, yeah, there were amazing
stories, amazing stories.
But he was genuinely inclusive.
He brought everyone into his story
and I think that's the great skill.
He was a bit too
inclusive in the end.
He shared it all.
He's giving you costumes.
But Reece had a similar thing
with Mystic Meg.
I'll tell you what... I'll
tell you something about her.
She can squeeze out a shit, mate,
don't you worry about that.
Oh, my God! Mystic Meg?
Yeah, they were in an hotel.
They were filming something
and they had to share a hotel room.
I don't know!
But he was sitting on a bed
listening to Mystic Meg
force one out, and, you know...
"I sense something!"
"This is going to be a big one."
"I can sense something
big's coming. I can sense it.
"Yes. There's a great disturbance
in the force."
"I believe no-one should go in the
room for 45 minutes after."
"I predict a time when this room
will be intolerable."
Have you never pooed or weed
next to someone famous, guys?
Um... There's got to be.
Let's have a think.
Well, um, no, I can't.
No, I had one of those trailers
when I was working
and I pooed in it
and it wouldn't flush.
And the thing was up to the brim.
Oh, no.
And what had happened was,
it's a removable thing, you know,
and they'd put it back in wrongly.
Oh, no!
And it was blocked up.
They weren't channelling other
people's up into your one? No!
It was blocked up.
I did everything I could.
I mean, I was in with my hands in it.
Because I didn't want... I knew that
somebody else at the end of the day
was going in to clean up
this trailer
for whoever was
going to be in it the next day.
I can't remember if it was me or not.
Romesh looks really pained.
And I came out,
and I had to say to them,
cos all the unit drivers who
get all the vehicles around,
they're there ridiculous hours.
They're there all the time.
You get to know them all.
"Sorry, lads, I've absolutely
filled that bog.
"I've tried everything I can,
"but I now absolutely stink
and I've got to go on set."
So what happened? Did you manage
to do anything with it?
Well, one of them went in
and then he came out and said,
"Don't worry about it, Alan,
it's not your fault.
"He's installed it incorrectly.
We're very sorry."
And I was,
"Is there anything I can do?"
"No, no, no, we'll sort it out."
He almost said, "Don't worry your
pretty little head about it."
What I find in a male toilet,
in the urinals, people lining up...
I always feel slightly
self-conscious in those situations.
It's always slightly awkward.
I remember when I was in the BBC
in one of the toilets.
I walked in and there was a bloke
standing at the urinal,
but he was standing
with both his hands on his hips.
LAUGHTER
That's confidence. Like that.
It really, really unnerved me,
you know, cos I was thinking...how?
You know, that's a skill.
How is he...? What's going on?
He was there for ages.
No hands. Hands-free.
Hands on hips, confident,
looking around like this.
Is it going to go everywhere?
Surely there's a risk.
Well, it turned out
he was maintenance
and he was just checking something.
Like that, on the wall. Well,
I couldn't go. Oh, no, I can't.
Can't compete with that.
No, you can't, no.
Every now and then, you do catch
a glimpse of someone
with an absolutely massive member.
Yep. Do you? Really?
And you can't really... We're not
going to agree with that one.
No, no, no.
What, like in the mirror?
Sometimes people undo their belt
and do all the buttons undone,
just to do a wee.
They don't poke it
through their fly.
Do you poke it through?
Yes!
Oh, shit! I have genuinely
never poked through.
You undo the whole lot?
Yeah, I like to sort of make it
an occasion. Give it an airing.
Sort of, here we go,
undoing the buttons.
Anyway, one of my favourite
Peter O'Toole stories
is the story him and Richard Harris
doing a play and they got drunk.
And Richard Harris went on first
and he went on to the stage
and then he nearly fell off
the front of the stage,
and a woman in the stalls said,
"Harris is drunk!"
And he said "If you think I'm drunk,
wait till you see O'Toole."
But there's another story about
he went to see...
He was out drinking with a friend
and then he said,
"Let's go to the theatre."
So they go to the theatre and they
sit in the stalls for a matinee
and they're watching the play
and then he says to his friend,
"Watch this. This is a good bit.
This is where I come in."
"Oh, shit!"
And he'd taken him into the show
that he was in.
He got himself muddled up.
He went to the theatre -
he just went in the auditorium.
Yeah, that's genius.
Yeah, that's a pretty good effort.
So, Bill, how have you managed to
trigger a conflict in the Balkans?
Right. Well...these things
get out of hand.
I was doing a tour of Europe,
last year, actually.
And Europe has now opened up
to comedy, British comedy.
You're doing your regular show?
My show on tour.
In the English language?
In the English language and,
you know, hitherto parts of Europe
would be off-limits
to English-speaking comedy.
But now there's an enormous
appetite for it,
and I guess what it is,
it's a lot of people watching it
on YouTube.
YouTube's been around ten years,
so comedy's available,
people are watching it.
And now there's a younger generation
grown up and now they've become...
They've got jobs,
they've got disposable incomes
and they want to see
the real thing.
They don't want to see it subtitled
or they don't want
to see the home-grown comedy,
which isn't quite as developed
as British comedy is.
They want to see the real deal
in English.
Anyway, so I was doing a tour
of the Baltic states.
I did a gig in Latvia, in Lithuania
and all these kind of places,
and I did a gig in Estonia.
So when it says on my card here
that you triggered a conflict
in the Balkans...
It was actually in the Baltics?
In the Baltics, yes.
So Bill, tell me about this conflict
you triggered recently
in the Baltics.
The Balkans.
Oh, yes, I will do it now.
So it's kind of a place
of great energy, you know -
new business and things
and thoughts,
and people really
want to see new things.
And I did a gig in Tartu,
which is of course, as you know,
Estonia's second city.
Of course you knew that.
Yeah, I knew that.
Course you knew that.
It's Tallinn -
who doesn't know that?
What sort of idiot
doesn't know that?
God. What sort of mug
do you take me for? Yeah, yeah.
So there's the main one, Tallinn,
the capital,
and there's Tartu,
which is the Eastern capital.
Anyway, I do this gig
and it was in a relatively
old theatre-cum-concert hall.
Anyway, thing is,
I started out doing my show
and they had not had any British
comedy there much there at all,
and so they didn't really know
what to expect,
so there was a lot of people
with their arms crossed
and their coats on as well, cos it
was a bit chilly in this venue.
And I was trying everything
to get them warm up a bit,
asking them questions. In fact,
every time I ask them a question,
the temperature would sort of drop
in the room even more like,
"Grrr! Don't ask me that question!"
And of course after the fact,
I realised what this was about.
Up until 1991, cultural
conversations...
If you said to somebody,
"I was listening to Rolling Stones
on the radio",
you could be carted off
by the secret police.
And so people were not really
forthcoming at all in any way.
Like, they didn't want
to tell me anything.
"What kind of music do you like?"
"Um...what is music?"
Like, "I don't know.
I don't listen to music.
"Just don't look at me!"
It was really unnerving,
and then I thought
this gig is going to
just be a nightmare.
I'm not going to get anywhere.
And then I just said... It was
a random kind of question.
I talked a bit about reality shows,
and I was talking about...
I said, "Oh, there's this reality
TV show star we have in Britain
"and she said..."
It's Chantelle Houghton.
I used it as an example. I said,
"She said she thought the sun and
the moon were the same thing.
"And then she goes,
'Turns out they're not.' " And...
Really?
Yeah, that's right. Apparently so.
I said, "That's the kind of
thing that reality shows...
"You know, the people
on Big Brother or whatever."
I said,
"Do you have any reality shows?"
And then somebody down the front
bravely put their hand up
and he said,
"Yes, we have Choir Wars."
I went, "What?! Choir Wars?"
"Yes, there are two teams.
They're choirs and they battle."
You know, bit like a rap battle,
but probably singing Carl Orff's
Carmina Burana or something.
So I say, "Oh, Choir Wars -
who's the start of that?"
And then it was like, "Kimi Kniepi"
or something.
And then a voice from the back of
the room went, "That is a lie!"
And that was it.
It turned into a riot.
And then somebody stood up and
spoke back to him in Estonian,
just shouting at him...
And there was like a big row
and then somebody got up and walked,
and then I thought
there was going to be a fight.
And then it really kicked off.
And so then I had this brilliant
meme then for the whole gig.
When anyone shouted anything out,
I would just go, "That is a lie!"
The whole place...
It broke the ice for the whole gig
and by the end of the gig,
I was playing the guitar and banging
a bass drum with my foot like this,
and the whole place was going,
"That is a lie!
That is a lie! That is a lie!"
It was just...it was glorious.
Turnaround out of a defeat.
Good save.
It was a good save, yeah.
"Look at his eyes. He's definitely
dead, isn't he? Look at him!
"Look at him! His ghost will
visit you when you're asleep."
Now, Diane, your tortoise?
Yeah, Pork Pie.
Pork Pie. I'm led to believe...
How long's it been hibernating?
I don't know. I can't remember.
I was little and it was time for
Pork Pie to go into hibernation,
cos that's what Blue Peter told us
that's what we had to do.
But since then, I found out that
that's bollocks.
So it comes to getting Pork Pie
out of hibernation
and my dad gets it out of the box
and he goes,
"Oh, God! Oh, no!" and I'm like,
"What's wrong, Daddy?"
And he says, "Oh, Pork Pie's dead."
And I was like,
"He's not, is he?" "He is."
"He doesn't look... He looks like
he normally looks."
"No, he's dead. Believe me."
"I don't believe you, Daddy!
"Look, he's got no eyes!"
His eyes had rotted away
during hibernation.
That's not a good look.
My own father told me that.
How long was he in hibernation for?
Ten years or something?
I don't know. It seemed like a
long time. Maybe it was months.
Does your dad know that normally
people try and break that to
kids gently?
"Look at his eyes! He's definitely
dead, isn't he? Look at him.
"His ghost will probably visit you
when you're asleep!"
He scarred me. He did, yeah.
Bu what do you mean it's bollocks
about the hibernation?
Apparently, it's bollocks.
It's true, actually, yeah.
Are you meant to Tippex the names on
the back of the shells, though?
Is that true or is that a lie?
That's another lie.
That is a lie!
My childhood is crashing down
around me.
So people were just killing their
tortoises in the '80s?
But you put a bit of food
in the box with them, don't you?
Don't you put a cabbage in there?
Yeah, we put something in
there, I remember.
Straw, a bit of lettuce.
A wheel to run round in.
Yeah, our tortoise had a very...
Well, it sounds very tragic,
and it was, but it had a
very bad leg and we were told...
Yeah, only cos your dog bit it.
Yeah, no the dog didn't...
No, it didn't.
He had a generic problem with it.
Arthritis or something.
I thought the dog bit it. Anyway...
The dog was nowhere near it.
One of the dogs claimed it
as his own.
The dog wouldn't let the
other dogs go near it.
Like its own pet.
And it used to...
Well, I won't tell you what it did,
but anyway, it very much
claimed it as its own.
I knew there was something about the
dog and the tortoise, I remember.
But anyway, and the dog...
This is a horrible story.
It's not! No, it's not. It's fine.
One of its legs was arthritic,
so took it to the vet
and it and they genuinely said -
I'm not making this up -
"We can amputate it
and put a wheel on."
Right. And a small motor.
Well, that's it.
That's the next stage is,
how many wheels?
Could you take all the legs off?
The old remote control.
Put a little jug of peanuts
on its back at parties.
"Thanks very much!"
So needless to say, we put it out of
its misery. It was ill.
For years and years and years,
people didn't know about
keeping pets in Britain
and hence we have
a lot of captive animals -
birds, and the things that
live a long life, like parrots.
So parrots live to 90 and at
first people thought,
"Ah, you just put them in a cage
with cuttlefish."
They don't get cuttlefish. They're
in the jungle! What the hell?!
Who thought that was a good idea?
When all these people
were putting their tortoises in to
hibernate and then they were dead,
didn't they think, "I should
probably tell someone about this"?
Everyone's just doing it,
thinking...
There were a lot more tortoises
around in those days, like flashers.
That's right. There were loads of
them, weren't there?
There's a correlation between...
No, I think that just genuinely
there was a very poor amount of
information about tortoises.
Tortoise intel. Tortoise intel.
And none of the Google.
You couldn't have a Google then.
And a lot of people got tortoises
cos they thought it was a cool pet,
but actually,
they didn't really know...
For one thing, the diet.
They were mostly just given
mashed-up bread and butter
and sugar and God knows...
Spam. These tortoises were...
Getting fat! ..getting fat. Stuffed.
In the shell. In the shell.
"Whoa! I'm going to blow!"
"Oh, my eyes have rotted! Oh, God!"
Full of doughnuts. "Help me!"
Did you get a replacement pet
afterwards?
No, we couldn't.
He was irreplaceable, Pork Pie.
They use him as a doorstop now.
Now, listen, we've got more than
enough for our tiny programme.
We need a title for the show, and
if anything has occurred to you...
I'm quite fixated on
"That is a lie!" Yeah.
But I wonder if there was anything
from your rap story
that might be preserverable.
Well, I sort of want
that whole thing forgotten about,
to be honest with you.
"There aren't enough flashers
any more" is nice.
Yeah, that is good.
Pork Pie.
"Pork Pie. That's a lie!"
Yeah! There you go. That's it.
"I've got no eyes." Yeah, yeah.
What would you do with that?
Would you like some fries?
BILL BEATBOXES
Or pilau rice. Oh, lovely.
That's really good.
Booooo! Boooo!
Is this bringing anything back?
Booooo! Ranga is shit!
Boooo! No, not the tortoise.
Jesus Christ, I thought we were
coming up with a title,
not making me want to kill myself.
I still quite like
"Rotten and pus-y". What was that?
Why have I got that in my head?
It's cos of the drink.
Oh, the drink.
It came out of Steve's mouth.
Quite literally.
Yeah, she's not touched it, though.
You surprised?
Well, listen, ladies and gentlemen,
please will you thank all my guests.
Romesh Ranganathan.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Bill Bailey.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Steve Pemberton.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Diane Morgan.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
I'm Alan Davies and you
have been watching That Is A Lie!
Subtitles by Ericsson