Speaker 1the telegraph it's
Speaker 2been a week of russian meddling in brexit trump wrestling tigers and gordon brown allegedly turning to exorcism to sign a footballer just another
Speaker 1week in the knees welcome to the weekend tea with me poppy coburn and
Speaker 2me michael deacon what i would say to him look if as you claim these russians are so effective influencing our elections is that why labor won the last general election was putin sitting there thinking right i want to destroy britain what what can i do i know i'll give them a labor government that's it that'll ruin them but we're going to start with donald trump because he has just hired a very exciting and very blonde new spokesperson it was
Speaker 1a bit offended i didn't get the phone call you know i've been auditioning for maga leading lady for several years i can
Speaker 2see that yes you're exactly his type i don't think my teeth are
Speaker 1white enough but i'm working on it seriously that's the problem zing like i'd be completely made of porcelain yes i sketched the first running of katie zakaria who is the new trump press secretary she is replacing caroline lever who if you can believe it is under the age of 30 she was the very very impressive gem zed press secretary actually this is
Speaker 2trump so i can very well believe it yes maybe young and blonde okay yeah i found that actually very believable yeah she was
Speaker 1really fantastic i mean she was a tough lady she had to defend trump turn two apparently they were very close not in that way get your mind out the gutter two young children also a much older man and she was a very good person but it wasn't the president i promise she was out of the job she said she wanted to pay attention to her family now she was apparently so irreplaceable the job lay vacant for about 42 days they could not find someone to do this role and then suddenly we got the news that this lady katie zakaria was going to fill in for the position there were quite a few names that were bandied around about who potentially take the job she was not one of them and i think we got a little insight into why that was she kind of wobbled out onto the podium and smiled at the assembled journalists in the room and it became quite a bit of a big problem for her because she was not one of them and i think we got a little insight into why that was she kind of wobbled out onto the podium and smiled at the assembled journalists in the room and it became quite a bit of a big problem for her because and it became quite obvious that she couldn't actually speak right which i do kind of think is quite important if you're going to be a
Speaker 2press secretary in a spokesperson yeah you feel that's kind of part of the job description of the whole
Speaker 1speaking thing she did look the part um so it was a very awkward affair so she starts off by um reading some notes
Speaker 3i have wanted to work for him for a very long time i'm looking forward to working with each of you as well especially as we are in the middle of the midterm blitz with energy and excitement again
Speaker 1you're not really supposed to do that if you're a spokesperson imagine if we did this podcast and i was just
Speaker 2well to be honest
Speaker 1michael deacon i'm often tempted so she just she just starts out saying about how much she loves the president she didn't have to check her notes for that one so that's sincere um and starts listing off all the things that trump has been very good at she sounds quite a lot like a pageant queen very flat affect nervously hiding behind a big main room and she's like i'm not going to do that and then she turns to the assembled press corps and she starts asking questions she is given the most softball questions you can imagine the first question is literally why are you so brilliant and can we get more breitbart reporters in the room and she still somehow is very awkward she accidentally calls donald trump her husband which is kind of the worst thing that can possibly happen if you are the conventionally attractive young blonde new press secretary but if you're
Speaker 2donald trump i mean on the other hand he's delighted there you are i'm very happy with my
Speaker 1new hire maybe not so much maybe didn't love it and the entire affair went on for about 14 minutes which is not very long really no not very long you compare you
Speaker 2know vladimir putin does one press conference a year but it's four hours long so this is 14 minutes i mean i guess it's not that
Speaker 1nervous if you're vladimir putin because who the hell is going to ask you a dangerous question why are you so great vladimir why is the war in ukraine the sketch writers are really generous yeah i bet i bet um so i have to say i wasn't very nice to her um paul katie zaccaria but just i love caroline levo so i'm not a disgusting woman hater which would be quite difficult when i look in the mirror every morning but i think the best part about her introduction as being the new press secretary didn't come from her actual performance it came from an interview afterwards right so donald trump is there and say look she's a great woman she's a fantastic woman she's an attorney and one of the journalists outside goes oh she's an attorney could you tell us katie where you pass the bar exam which is obviously the legal requirement if you want to become an attorney in america you have to pass this exam she smiles and she gets this vacant look in her eyes and she went when i was in china
Speaker 3which is not a state in america from when i last checked not
Speaker 1yet i mean i know trump
Speaker 2has big plans he wants canada he wants greenland maybe he wants china yeah
Speaker 1so i mean i mean that was great i think the trump administration is doing fantastically at the moment i'm sure the midterms are going to
Speaker 2go over like a child fantastic well i know one of the things you're saying in your column about it you were saying she's incredibly gushing all this i am so honored to work for president trump i was thinking well i mean if you're going to work for donald trump this is probably how you have to talk but i just cannot imagine a press secretary for let's say andy burnham talk about i am so honored to work for prime minister burnham i just love buses and talking about my favorite oasis b-sides my favorite oasis b-side is talk tonight prime minister burnham is going to talk about the in his guitar let's give it
Speaker 1up for number 10 north everybody
Speaker 2exactly that you don't you don't get that in this country
Speaker 1no i'm quite happy about that i mean it would be very very difficult i mean what if he'd even worse for kirsten though you know tom baldwin having to walk out there and just talk about how much
Speaker 2he loves him he is so charismatic he really makes me laugh he is very anyway that's not the only thing trump's been doing this week
Speaker 1no no unfortunately not um his social media posts i do love him on two socials i have to admit he's my guilty
Speaker 2pleasure sorry this one
Speaker 1though this one is maybe slightly going too far so there was obviously the tragic news of the man who was killed in yorkshire who climbed into a tiger's enclosure and died at the
Speaker 2zoo right yeah um
Speaker 1but donald trump decided to take this really horrific video of a man having lost his life and turn it into a way to talk about how brilliant he is so he posts an ai video of himself wrestling this tiger and it ends with the tiger kind of smiling and he's got his arm around it and you know
Speaker 2always posing for respect you're you're you're a great fighter no one else could have wrestled me
Speaker 1like that you brought me down to the ground but at the end of the day we can shake hands and understand that we're both we respect each
Speaker 2other as equals yeah when it comes to wrestling
Speaker 1i quite like donald trump's ar videos he posted one where um he took caitlin collins who is a cnn reporter he runs into a room he picks her up and he lifts her to a dumpster opens the lid chucks her in closes it job done that's how you deal with journalists
Speaker 2well yes apparently so i mean i mean obviously uh the trump tiger video is phenomenally crass but i just think for goodness sake there's no point complaining about donald trump doing something offensive and insensitive because he does that every single day it is it is just i feel like we are all just desensitized to it now this is this is it there's no point complaining about it i just can't believe there's anyone out there who's seen that video going well i have to say up till now i really respected donald trump i thought he was a really compassionate sensitive caring kind of guy but now i've seen this whole other side i've never seen this before no i find him quite
Speaker 1offensive yeah this is the man he um said when he was debating with john mccain years and years ago when he was first running for president that he preferred pilots that didn't get shot down this is john mccain he was fighting in the vietnam war and donald trump he obviously dodged the draft yeah so uh he was a prisoner of war for several years john mccain um and obviously was being tortured by the vietcong and donald trump was attacking him for getting his plane
Speaker 2shot down there you go he himself has recognized in one of moments of clarity he himself has openly said you know i could say anything and they would still
Speaker 1happen he's the funniest man so he's i mean he is right i mean that he's proven that he can just get
Speaker 2away with it he is why bother complaining right i'm going to
Speaker 1get myself into trouble if i keep defending donald trump we're going to have to move on to well you did say you wanted to be his new
Speaker 2press secretary i think this i think this katie woman's not got long to go i think donald donald
Speaker 1she hasn't got it in her okay get me in and you are actually you're
Speaker 2actually flying to america next week aren't you there you go you you claim you're going to cover the midterms but i i know your game i know what you really want that'd
Speaker 1be amazing if i just turned up at the podium and you're like is that jesus christ is that poppy she had a facelift and
Speaker 2meanwhile here's katie sitting opposite me on the podcast she's just joining you got any topical satirical gags on the weekend with
Speaker 1you michael deacon i think i prefer that actually right let's move on to safer territory let's talk about russia and vladimir putin right yes good good our wonderful prime minister our dear leader has decided to he's kind of got a track record of doing this stuff now he'll come out and do an interview and he'll say something that's quite shocking and almost unbelievable and then he'll have to walk it back because it turns out he hasn't actually read his brief or he's just decided to go right and he did this this week with um who else but our favorite podcasters alistair campbell and rory stewart love them and decided to say that uh he knew that there had been russian interference in the brexit referendum and started making these like slightly oblique claims you know putin was darkly trying to now look we all know that they were trying to it's the russians you know there hasn't been an election that they haven't tried to interfere with but i think what he was trying to do by this is kind of create doubts that the brexit referendum is actually legitimate which then opens up a question of how come well if it was illegitimate then we just got
Speaker 4to join the eu but i asked the question coming to downing street was there interference in the 2016 referendum from russia and i've had the clear answer that yes there was i think you're giving
Speaker 2him too much credit it makes it sound like it's planned like it's thought through i think he's guilty of what what bridget jones calls auto-witter he just goes into full auto-witter and words just tumble out of his mouth without any thought at all he does this a lot i mean can be made up pointed you know he's always putting his foot in his mouth i think that's what this was it just you know he's not thought it through at
Speaker 1all he just got overly excited
Speaker 2he does because we've seen quite a few examples of this now and i think this is just typical of his character but what i would say to him look if as you claim these russians are so effective influencing our elections is that why labor won the last general election was putin sitting there thinking right i want to destroy britain what what can i do i know i'll give them a labor government that's it that will ruin them and then this year he thought well britain's very close to being destroyed but i just need to push it over the edge so what i'm gonna do i'm gonna make andy burnham prime minister i'm gonna rig the labor leadership contest and then that's it that's it for britain britain's done i quite like
Speaker 1this idea is there's gonna be like a number 10 siberia office that's opening up you know it's just staffed by these like slightly dodgy looking russian apparatchiks that apparently uh you know delivering a source with the civil service maybe we've cracked the case open maybe but anyway the
Speaker 2point is that burnham had absolutely no evidence for he was saying in fact his colleagues had to that's not quite what he meant or they may have tried to influence elections but they haven't succeeded and this sort of thing so actually what he said wasn't true at all i have to say having
Speaker 1watched the clip even roy stewart himself looked as if he didn't quite believe it he was scrunching his face up unbelievably or maybe this is just the latest one of his uh interesting experiments with uh pushing the frontier of what the human body can do of course we spoke before about has amazing extendable neck maybe he just he couldn't help himself yeah leaning over more political news are they slightly supernatural this one hmm apparently gordon brown attended an exorcism to help wraith rovers sign a player while he was the
Speaker 2chancellor yes gordon brown's a lifelong fan of wraith rovers 13.5 where he's originally from and suppose this is this happened 20 20 years ago now i guess that makes it okay this this uh player center half called marvin andrews uh very very christian very very religious man supposedly he was uh going to be taking part in some kind of a service where an exorcism would take place and gordon brown was wanted to meet the guy to persuade him to sign for wraith rovers and in a way gordon brown spokesman has since denied that gordon brown has ever attended an exorcism in his life and i'd say i'm inclined to believe that because i feel that if gordon brown ever had attended an exorcism while he was chancellor it wouldn't have been so he could persuade some center half to sign for lower league scottish team you know it'd be so he could go up the exorcist and say i know a man who is possessed by evil spirits he's called tony you need
Speaker 1to see him could
Speaker 2you possibly drive the evil spirits out or or just just drive tony out that would be fine
Speaker 1christ compels you there you are is there anything you can do to
Speaker 2read me of this evil man there is you know
Speaker 1there's a whiff of sulfur about some of these new labor types you know maybe he had the right idea all along
Speaker 2there you are you see new labor new danger the tories were
Speaker 1right i do really enjoy uh when politicians get quite wee wee i mean everyone knows about sherry blair and sherry bless sister and all the kind of slightly bizarre spiritual stuff that she's been getting into but my favorite is ronald reagan one of america's most beloved women and she's been getting into a lot of the beloved presidents his wife nancy reagan apparently got really into astrology you know at the peak of nuclear tensions between them and the soviet union there was an astrologer just wandering around the white house apparently giving the president advice although it must have been good advice two terms very
Speaker 2successful clearly wasn't written
Speaker 1in the stars that we were going to get blown up so you know maybe we shouldn't turn our noses up at the same time
Speaker 2you anyway that's enough politics because i want to talk about something much more interesting yes which is uh women wearing skin tight clothing of course that's what i want to talk about because there's a big row in america comedian called shane gillis who he recently broke the world record for the largest ever comedy audience for a stand-up gig almost 75 000 people anyway he was on the american comedy show saturday night live and he uh told a joke which i think we better not quote from because it's a little bit rude a little bit graphic uh for a family-friendly podcast but in any case i will paraphrase that and i'll see you next time on the american comedy show saturday by saying that he essentially made fun of uh women going to the gym wearing uh excessively revealing shorts i'll put it like that and a lot of women have been very offended by this calling him sexist and misogynist uh and all the rest of it personally i've got to say i don't know what the guy's problem is because i for one have absolutely no problem with fit women wearing skin tight clothing as a staunch male feminist i will always defend a woman's inalienable right if i can say that um to wear as little as possible whether that's in a gym or anywhere else i happen to be that's fine so i'm gonna have to i'm gonna have to stand up for him here i'm gonna defend
Speaker 1them you know what shane gillis not only is he a fantastic comedian and obviously very successful comedian given how much money you would have pulled in from this last live show i also just think he is smarter than everyone else do you not just think he had a plan here i'm gonna make a skit that's gonna make women really really offended and angry and the way they're gonna push back against me is by posting photos of themselves wearing sexy skimpy clothing and tagging me in it yeah he would have been tagged in a skit and i would have been in a skit and i would have been tagged in hundreds of thousands of photos of attractive women who are fit from working out in the gym maybe a little sweaty he's scrolling
Speaker 2through his phone going oh no i've not been punished enough yet ladies keep it keep it coming
Speaker 1i i think this is all planned i mean i have to say i completely agree with him sorry i'm really attacking the sisterhood today first i'm attacking katie and now i'm about to attack women who are going to the gym if you ever see me working out in the gym which i
Speaker 2haven't which you haven't no one in this
Speaker 1office has seen me working at the gym you probably wouldn't even recognize me i wear literally a big old man's t-shirt i've got my disgusting old trainers on my hair's pushed back i'm sweating i'm gross probably stressed out because i'm not strong as i want to be and yet i see women all the time not just wearing the skin tight like your clothing which is one thing but they're posing with a camera in the gym which freaks me out as a woman because i look disgusting i'm in the photo filming
Speaker 2themselves working out filming them why are they doing that
Speaker 1well there's a slightly dark reason for this which i i have also asked this question i remember speaking to a female friend of mine about it she said you know they're all promoting their only fans accounts
Speaker 2pornography basically yeah their own porn homemade porn they are actually promoting
Speaker 1homo photography on their accounts so what they'll do is they will deliberately film themselves wearing very very skimpy clothing we are talking about clothing where you know the pants that they're wearing are like making their butt look bigger really tight small bras right your face is very very solid you're trying not to make eye contact when i'm talking about this um and they'll and they'll be doing stuff like you know they're squatting and they've set their camera up right like next to the mirror so you can see them working out for one they try and make content where a man will come up to them and say like oh you're dressed inappropriately in the gym and then they'll post it and say aren't men disgusting and then it gets them more attention online and they use it to promote their accounts for others it's literally they're just selling these images of themselves working out i had to complain to my local gym because there were women in the changing room where you are getting changed after you've had a shower filming themselves and even though it's a public space and you're not allowed to do that it's to make you a sex offender so solidarity with shane gillis well i've got to say
Speaker 2obviously a problem this this is the reason i don't go to the gym anymore okay mostly because you're scared you're gonna see mostly it's because i'm a fat and lazy middle-aged man who'd rather just you know slop about on the sofa but also in part i'm worried that there's going to be women filming themselves in the gym and i'll end up in the back of the shot now i'll be looking even sort of fatter and redder and sweaty than i normally do and i i don't really want that particularly if they're like if they're really popular sort of social media influencers and then you know 17 million complete strangers around the world are going to have a good laugh at you know my jiggling moobs or whatever i'm doing you know i'm running on the treadmill no so i i dare not set foot in a gym anymore look
Speaker 1there's a happy medium like no one wants women to have to wear a burka i mean actually they probably do maybe a couple of the independent mps there are some
Speaker 2people who want there are definitely
Speaker 1some people in the uk that but we don't not here at the daily telegraph we do not want women to have to wear a burka but you know if you are a woman if you're wearing a tiny bra and very tight shorts people are going to look at you not necessarily because they're perving on you but because you're just like oh wow okay i can see everything you've just woken me up this morning so yeah solidarity with shane gillis he said nothing
Speaker 2wrong well anyway i've got a question for you poppy and i promise you this is not about women's skin tight clothing tom cruise just put out a new film it's called digger and he's done a lot of promotion for it but people are saying this is on course to being one of the biggest box office casters of all time nobody is going to see it but i find that there is an exception one person in britain at least has seen it and it's you you've actually seen
Speaker 1this film i have seen digger say um my partner very kindly decided to book tickets to the cinema oh two of you then yes there were two of us in the cinema two tickets um and i said oh digger i haven't really heard of this it's a tom cruise film okay what are the reviews like oh they're quite bad right so we're going to the cinema we're going to it's a very long film all films now have to be at least three or five minutes three hours long and your butt goes completely numb when you're sat in the seats there was nobody there it was just us i really enjoyed the film really i actually really it's quite strange the critics are wrong i mean no the critics aren't wrong because they shouldn't have spent so much money on it it's like an art house film that randomly has tom cruise in it for some reason it really reminds me of there was a film that came out last year that was a sydney sweeney film the first massive sydney yeah exactly you're making a face when they stopped smiling because it was sydney sweeney who was completely covered up and dressed as a sydney sweeney like a middle-aged female boxer and funnily enough lots of men didn't actually want to see sydney sweeney dressed like that was a
Speaker 2bomb wasn't it well she certainly learned her lesson from that episode now she knows who her audience is yes
Speaker 1now now she's uh dressing like a shane gillis jim bunny um and
Speaker 2i think perhaps this
Speaker 1was a bit of the problem with the tom cruise film it's supposed to be a lesson about climate change but it's not too unbearably woke i mean if you can believe that it is quite an interesting film but why on earth did they spend so much money on it and also why did they spend so much money on it and also why did they spend so much money on it
Speaker 2why is tom cruise not looking like tom cruise he's covered in prosthetics you can't even recognize him and the truth is tom people go to see off films because they want to see you in them they like the way you look tom you're probably aware of this but or apparently he isn't he wants to be taken seriously as an actor so he thinks well that means i must not be judged on my appearance i'm going to look as ugly as possible sorry tom
Speaker 1people don't want that from you i'm pretty sure that after he had the massive box office smash of top gun he just assumed that he could be the only man to bring back cinema i think he was like i'm gonna bring back the blockbuster so he signed up for this quite strange art house film and they put so much money into the development of it and now it's been like the biggest flop of all time i wonder if tom cruise is going to be feeling quite small even without his shoes on he must be feeling very small at the moment but anyway i try i try to make it success tom don't blame me blame michael blame everyone else it's
Speaker 2my fault look i've got an excuse okay i'm the father of a 12 year old child so the past decade all of the films i've seen in the cinema are children's animations okay i don't get to see i'm going to see films for grown-ups so no i have not seen the new tom cruise film but i certainly have seen the new sean the sheep which is very good it was much better than digger i'm going to guess here's a weird one poppy explain this uh staff at oxford university have been told not to use the phrase learn the ropes now at first i saw this i thought oh this is another of these woke language guide things someone has decided that that phrase is offensive possibly racist they think it's a reference to lynching in the deep south or something like that but no apparently this is because they think international students who come to study oxford their english isn't good enough to understand uh old-fashioned idioms like
Speaker 1that i think oxford university is slightly telling on itself it's basically just admitted that their international students can't speak english properly i mean it's not like we're asking them to pronounce like a very difficult to pronounce word and anyone who's been to university in the last 10 years would be able to tell you this the international students that are brought into universities regardless of their elite universities or their relatively low tier they are there because they spend lots of money unlike us domestic students they're not allowed to speak english they're not allowed to they're not allowed to speak english they're just there for a bit of fun you know and can only give them nine thousand pounds a year which apparently isn't enough for for these institutions they're not really that fast if you actually turn up to your classes or indeed speak the language i remember one time when i was sitting in the library which was a rare occurrence for me this is why it stuck in my mind and i did see an international student put the essay question into google translate then write the essay in their native language and then put it back into google translate i imagine at the time it wasn't a fail-safe solution they probably wrote something better than i did which tells you how much of a fantastic student i am but you know learn the ropes is that really so incomprehensible yeah i guess if you only speak mandarin it is
Speaker 2well maybe yeah there is there is some sort of woke stuff in this language guide as well um i'll just read this one to you um yeah the star guide advises staff to use terms that are current and respectful so for example don't say homosexual you've got to say gay so presumably then you could say uh this a new language guide is totally gay that would be fine but if you said it was totally homosexual that would be offensive so note that down anyway uh speaking of wokery uh one more story here now this is about a new book a new history book for children yes and unlike virtually every history book for children that's been published in the last 20 years it tells children that it's all right to be proud of british history this is brave it is indeed now this is by uh the great don nigel bigger yes
Speaker 1the non-woke historian there
Speaker 2you are he is a frequent contributor to us yes a fantastic and i am i am delighted to see that someone has finally written a non-woke uh children's book about british history because there's been so many yeah well i hope so i'm going to give it to him because there's so many dreadful books i mean do you remember this is a couple of years ago um there was a children's history book that told children that stonehenge was um built by black people now i i can tell you i i was really angry about that because i had been planning to write a history book telling children that stonehenge was built by trans people i thought oh i can't believe someone else has got that book i can't believe that stonehenge was built by trans people i thought oh i can't believe someone else has got that book i can't believe someone else has got that book i thought oh i can't believe someone else has got that first
Speaker 1someone's already got it black and
Speaker 2trans there you are so now i'm having to write a children's history book uh saying henry gates was gay um that's why he kept beheading his wife it's like oh no i can't believe another of my wives turns out to be a woman i can't believe i've got no luck at all what's going on here there you go right off she goes get me another i i
Speaker 1remember the um slightly infamous pete woke book that was called anti-racist baby and the front cover of it was really great it's um yeah a small child in one of those what's it called the kind of baby grow that you attach to
Speaker 2yourself the sling yes
Speaker 1yeah the papoose perfect don't get an oxford university shouldn't try and pronounce that one and and the baby is holding their hand up in a fist a la the black panthers yes which i thought was really really great i don't know if they maybe got a dummy inside of the fist and that's why
Speaker 2they're doing it i see anti-racist baby well oh my goodness that makes such a change for all those racist babies you get as
Speaker 1opposed to have you got any racist baby books still in stock racist baby
Speaker 2you don't want to hear their first word tell you that what happened to the baby book
Speaker 1very hungry caterpillar i mean that's probably fat fairy book you probably can't touch that one anymore i
Speaker 2dread to think that's
Speaker 1all for now we'll see you again next week Thank you.
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