Episode 15 was recorded on the same evening as episode 14 (as indeed was episode 16). I don’t think we even paused for breath between finishing one episode and starting the next.

Previous times we’ve done multiple recordings on the same day, I’ve always been able to detect a theme or trend that has pervaded all of the recordings, but I genuinely felt, as I was editing it, that episode 15 sounded very different to 14.

It’s not a huge surprise in some respects. The opening for episode 15 was the opening I’d planned to use for 14, but somehow we did our usual thing of talking about snacks at the start of the former, which then led into the bizarre but weirdly funny bit where Ben tries to imagine the TV adaptation of my life.

While that was pretty funny, I’m acutely aware that a lot of our episodes have featured conversations about high-calorie snacks and supermarkets and I felt a bit more preparation would be good to try and take back control of the narrative. Ben’s not a fan of scripts, but anecdotes from our lives seem to generally work well. And the Jack Wild story I open with is absolutely true. As in there is no story beyond the fact that my dad knew his brother, Arthur, a little bit and did meet Jack a few times when they were children, but he definitely wasn’t there when Jack and Arthur Wild were discovered by the talent agent.

Nonetheless, my sister did, for many years, tell the story as if my dad was there and was, essentially, discovered at the same time as the Wild brothers. Furthermore, but for fate, he would himself have enjoyed a stellar calling in the world of performing arts. Rather than an (admittedly fairly successful) career as a civil servant. I knew this would bring a response from Ben regarding his own performing arts background, but even I was unprepared for a story about Harry Secombe, which was perfect given that both Jack Wild and Sir Harry featured in the movie Oliver!.

I’d also managed to come equipped with a list planning school trips which managed to make us both laugh out loud. Listening back, I definitely think episode 15 ranks as one of our strongest.

It also managed to come in a bit shorter than the last few episodes, which I think is a good thing. I found it hard to get any of those episodes down to less than 48 minutes, and I think they are good enough to merit that length, but the plan is always to make shorter episodes and it’s generally a lack of discipline (which is attributable to both of us, but which I always blame Ben for) that we can’t rein ourselves in.

We did on this one and the raw unedited footage is a good twenty minutes shorter than anything else we’ve recorded since episode 6. Which made it much easier to edit too, so I’ll definitely be advocating this approach as we move forwards. Ben is broadly in agreement, but seemingly can’t help throwing in additional anecdotes when none are required. Indeed even on this, there are superfluous Benecdotes which I had to cut, but far fewer than normal.

Even the argument about the postcard, which seems to be the same one we always have, is slightly more restrained in this and what makes the recording is pretty much unedited.

This is probably because we both found ‘The Anatomy of a Goose’ a bit weird, truth be told. I can’t actually find an explanation for it online beyond clear proof that this image exists in a world outside of my weird postcard collection and seems to be something people genuinely want to own. Apparently it has something to do with a game that was popular at some point.

But I’ve never heard of it.

Although in fairness it probably was more popular than our podcast.