Baddiel & Skinner's Absolute Radio Podcasts transcripts

Episode thirteen - Part two

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FS:  Now, you may recall that Franz Beckenbauer-, the Kaiser, they call him. The Khyber, I call him. He really laid into England earlier in the week. I have it here, actually. He said we were stupid to finish runners up in our group, etcetera. Now today I read a long quote from Franz Beckenbauer. He’s full of remorse. 

DB:  Is he? 

FS:  Yes. He says, ‘Before the World Cup, I thought England would play a major role in the tournament, maybe win the title.’ Nice. ‘They have a great team and a great coach.’ Even I don’t think we’ve got a great team. We’ll stick with him. ‘Then after the first two games, I was so disappointed. Not angry, but very, very disappointed.’ 

DB:  God. 

FS:  Only footballers get truly disappointed. Ronnie Wallwork, who did play in midfield for West Bromwich Albion, got stabbed eight times in a Manchester nightclub. 

DB:  It wasn’t Paul, was it? Paul didn’t go at him? 

FS:  Yes, simultaneously. Anyway, we shouldn’t laugh at poor Ronnie. It was a horrible thing. But he got stabbed eight times in a Manchester nightclub. They asked Ronnie, when he came out of hospital-, honestly, this is his quote. He said, ‘Obviously I was very disappointed.’ 

DB:  You’re right. Footballers are always disappointed. 

FS:  Anyway, the Kaiser continues, ‘Maybe this attack on England was the reaction of my disappointment, but I apologise.’ Big moment. Beckenbauer continued, ‘Because I like England, and English football, I’m really a big, big fan of the English style.’ He’s going too much. ‘Maybe it was a reaction because I was disappointed.’ 

DB:  We already know you were disappointed, Franz. 

FS:  ‘Maybe I was in a bad mood. In other words, I apologised already.’

DB:  Just leave it.  

FS:  He’s getting Jewish now. ‘In other words, I apologised already.’

DB:  Why do you call him the Khyber? Is it because he was very good at passing, thus the Khyber Pass?   

FS:  No, because the Khyber is another word for an anus. 

DB:  Oh, I see. Is it? I didn’t know that. (TC: 00:10:00) 

FS:  What did you think was the joke in the film title ‘Carry On Up the Khyber’? Did it never occur to you that in a Carry On film-, 

DB:  It’s a pathetic eureka moment, is what it is. It has never occurred to me before that that meant that. Well, ‘up the’ anything in a Carry On film can refer to the anus, so I don’t think Khyber specifically refers to it. 

FS:  Don’t say that word again, because I think we’re only allowed two (inaudible 10.24) Absolute broadcast. Christian O’Connell had three once and was suspended for three months. 

DB:  The British press have been chocker, as ever, with World War II references and have already been criticised for it. Can I read you something, which foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said about Germany before this World Cup? He said, ‘Germany is saddled with stereotypes, which have very little to do with reality,’ he told a panel of international journalists. ‘The land of the sausage now has falafel and doner kebabs too, and these days we can laugh, sometimes even at ourselves.’ I hear him chuckling as he said that, although unfortunately it’s a sort of German chuckle, which renders it completely unfunny. ‘Sometimes even at ourselves.’ 

FS:  It’s sort of on the verge of being a sneer. 

DB:  Exactly. It doesn’t feel like a light-hearted chuckle to me. 

FS:  You feel at the end of it he’s saying to one of his henchmen, ‘Kill them.’ To be fair, I mean this thing about the World War, they do bring it on themselves. One of them, I think it was Lamb (ph 11.25), referred to Rooney as being like a Sturm Tank (ph 11.28), which I presume is a tank from World War II. 

DB:  Apparently Lamb, before the game, was put into a pen with two blades of glass, with a Germany flag and an England flag. 

FS:  What did he choose? 

DB:  He chose the German one. 

Episode thirteen - Part three

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DB:  In the ‘write the future’ Nike advert-, 

FS:  Oh, the epic? 

DB:  Yes. Well, you said that there was possibly a hidden meaning. 

FS:  I thought there was a reference to Rooney being a grabby granner, if I may use that phrase. 

DB:  Isn’t that a granny grabber, rather than grabby granner? 

FS:  Is that what I said? 

DB:  You said grabby granner. 

FS:  Did I? 

DB:  Yes, which is some kind of industrial machinery, I think. 

FS:  I don’t think he’s one of them. 

DB:  No. But yes, you’re right, being a grabby granner. 

FS:  You said it then. 

DB:  I said it, yes. Grabby granner is what I meant. After you said that, I noticed something else about it. When Ronaldo turns up at Homer Simpson’s house and nutmegs him, and Homer goes, ‘Ronal d’oh,’ Ronaldo turns to the camera and winks, and I thought, ‘Wait a minute, is this a reference to when he got Rooney sent off and then winked to the bench?’ 

FS:  I like the idea that there seems to be a further layer of that suggestion that there is something about Wayne Rooney that is quite like Homer Simpson, which is sort of true. 

DB:  Absolutely true. 

FS:  A bit balding, and you can imagine him at home eating burgers. 

DB:  Yes, and I can imagine as he went off against Portugal that time, him going, ‘Ronal d’oh.’ 

FS:  Exactly. 

DB:  It suggests that the ‘write the future’ Nike advert may be littered with kind of runic football in-jokes. 

FS:  It might just be saying that Ronaldo is a bit of a winker. 

DB:  It might be. 

FS:  Anyway, what we’d like is, any of our listeners, if you’ve spotted any hidden football messages in that Nike ad, do let us know, because I’m getting to feel now it might really be true. 

DB:  Yes. 

FS:  I was very relieved to read that Posh and Becks have released a statement to say rumours of their split are not-, 

DB:  Were you? I wasn’t that relieved, because normally when someone releases a statement like that, that means they’re going to split up. 

FS:  Oh well, maybe you’re right. 

DB:  It’s a bit like the vote of confidence that you used to have for managers. 

FS:  There was a rumour that they were going to announce it this weekend. 

DB:  That’s a bad time.  

FS:  Now surely they wouldn’t announce it just before a big World Cup game. 

DB:  There was a thing I noticed. Did you notice this? At the Algeria game, not the Algeria game, the Slovenia game, David Beckham had his sleeves rolled up. 

FS:  On his jacket? 

DB:  On his jacket, yes. At the start of the game he had his sleeves rolled up. 

FS:  What, Miami Vice, Don Johnson style? 

DB:  Well, I think the implication was meant to be, ‘Right, sleeves rolled up. We’re getting down to work,’ but of course it could just have been showing off his new forearm tattoo. 

FS:  Someone once told me that-, he was an air steward that I knew. 

DB:  Really? What are you saying? 

FS:  He’s just a friend. He said to me that he’d been on a plane with Posh and Becks and they’d asked if he’d got a pen and paper they could use. So he gave them a pen and paper. He said that after they’d got off the plane, they’d left all this paper, and one of the things they’d sat doing was designing tattoos. 

DB:  Really? 

FS:  Yes, on the plane. 

DB:  Surely they didn’t need paper for that. They could have just written on each other’s skin. 

FS:  Remember, they’re just trying it out. It’s a rough draft. 

DB:  That’s true. 

FS:  The other thing he told me was what stuck in my mind particularly. A large amount of the paper was spent with them playing noughts and crosses. 

DB:  You say it was noughts and crosses. I think Victoria was teaching David to read and write. 

FS:  Maybe. Of course, he’s good at crosses. 

DB:  That’s true. 

FS:  It would have been a major blow, just to England. 

DB:  Except there’s another way of looking at it, which is when one is in a relationship that, you know, you’re keeping going just for the sake of it-, 

FS:  Well, we don’t know that that’s the case. 

DB:  No, but when one is. Let’s imagine it’s that. Finally you get through with it and you think, ‘No, we’ve got to draw a line under it.’ It might be that David would suddenly be revitalised, that in fact his Achilles’ heel would get better and he could be played. I’m not sure if that’s legally allowed by FIFA regulations. 

FS:  We couldn’t bring him into the squad at this point. 

DB:  No, probably not. 

FS: Well, it might work the other way. She might suddenly have a fabulous solo singing career. So look, as Alfred Lord Tennyson said in his poem ‘Locksley Hall’, ‘In spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love,’ and I think when you’re about to play Germany in the World Cup, a young man’s fancy turns to penalty shootouts. You can’t help but think there’s going to be a penalty shootout. 

DB:  Yes. 

FS:  The time has come for us to accept that if we are involved in a penalty shootout against Germany-, 

DB:  We’re going to lose it. 

FS:  We’ll definitely lose it. 

DB:  We should accept that. 

FS:  There’s no question about that. 

DB:  I think that when the German players take penalties, all they think about is the penalty, whereas I think when we take penalties the players are thinking about ‘write the future’, except the future is always bad. 

FS:  They’re also thinking about the past. I think the ghosts of David Batty’s miss. 

DB:  Do you think they actually appear in front of them, the ghosts of England penalties past, like Dickens? 

FS:  The point is that’s exactly what happens, because if you’re trying to get that out of the system of an England player, what you don’t do is have Stuart Pearce sitting on the bench. They can see what a broken, dejected figure one is left with after you miss a big penalty. 

DB:  If it’s penalties he’ll be on the pitch talking to them. 

FS:  I mean he’ll be there. It’s like saying, ‘We’re going on a long-haul flight. Do you mind if I dress up as Buddy Holly, just to put everyone in the right spirit?’ He’s a lovely bloke, Stuart Pearce, but he always looks like he’s just finished crying, whenever I’ve met him.  

DB:  Yes. I think they need to have everything out of their minds if they’re going to take a penalty. 

FS:  Can I also make a point? Should it get to the final, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but we’ve been to Soccer City a couple of times. There’s an area of Johannesburg right next to Soccer City called Southgate. 

DB:  Yes, I have noticed that. That’s no good at all. 

FS:  Very reassuring. There’s more chance of John Terry winning the BBC Sports Personality of the Year than there is us beating Germany in a penalty shootout. 

DB:  We did once take penalties, me and you, at what I’d like to call the highest level. 

FS:  What, at Villa Park? That I would not call the hi

Episode thirteen - Part four

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FS:  So we sat and watched Chile-Spain, didn’t we? 

DB:  Yesterday. You weren’t very well. 

FS:  No, I wasn’t very well, but from my sickbed I watched Chile-Spain. 

DB:  Did you have feverish chills? (TC: 00:20:00) 

FS:  The Chilean manager had something I’ve never seen on a football manager before. He had spectacles on, which obviously I don’t have to go far from our own manager to see, but he had those-, 

DB:  Little wires. 

FS:  It’s like a lanyard on them so that if they fall they’ll just swing on his chest, exactly as Larry Grayson had on The Generation Game. I loved that. What was particularly apt was that they had a player, who the commentator called Izla, but it was spelt Isla, as in Isla St Clair (ph 20.35). Isla St Clair was a mainstay. When I used to do a chat show, I don’t know if you remember, many years ago-, 

DB:  I remember, yes. 

FS:  I did a chat show on the telly. 

DB:  Was she always available? 

FS:  Well there was a letter which arrived from her people, which said, ‘Isla will do last minute and will drive herself.’ 

DB:  That’s fantastic. Are you suggesting that the Chilean manager and Isla could perhaps do a Generation Game tribute act if they needed to? 

FS:  Do you think that if the defence was wide open in any situation the manager might shout, ‘Shut that door?’ 

DB:  Yes. So a few teams have gone out, though. 

FS:  Yes, well it’s that stage, of course, when we start to say goodbye to some teams. 

DB:  I think we’re most upset, aren’t we, that North Korea have gone out. 

FS:  Oh, yes.  

DB:  Because we love North Korea. Just as a last hurrah for North Korea, I went and looked up some more information about North Korea. One was that there main player, Kim Jong Hun (ph 21.38), I think his name is, the people’s Rooney, he was talking at a press conference about how the team went to Austria, rather like our team, for altitude training. They had a stopover on a team trip from Switzerland to Austria, during which his teammates were stunned to discover you had to pay to use the gents in a station. ‘They turned to me,’ recalled Jong, and said, ‘This is truly what capitalist society is like.’

FS:  I often think that when I see a paid toilet in a station. 

DB:  Do you? 

FS:  I think that it is the worst excess of capitalism. 

DB:  Yes. 

FS:  Maybe I’d be happier in North Korea. 

DB:  You could be. There’s no food in North Korea, so you’d hardly need a toilet.

FS:  That’s true. I’m not going to pay to just emit air. 

DB:  Another thing is, I don’t know if you knew this, but before the tournament, they were here by then, the training ground, what they call their 1966 heroes, which is the team that beat Italy and got through to the quarterfinal, they came to the training ground to see them. 

FS:  Oh, did they? 

DB:  Yes. ‘They told us what it would be like and they gave us a lot of encouragement so we could make our dear leader proud.’ 

FS:  Oh, that’s great. That’s maybe why we identify so much with the North Koreans, because they’re still living off ’66. 

DB:  They are. 

FS:  It is great that we’re two countries both living off 1966. 

DB:  Yesterday we were flicking between the Portugal-Brazil game and the South Korea-Cote d’Ivoire game, and at the Cote d’Ivoire game there were a bunch of really obviously Cote d’Ivoire fans all dressed in orange, all doing African dancing, and you, for some reason, were convinced for ages that they were North Koreans, even though they were shaking their bottoms. 

FS:  Backs to the camera. I thought they were wearing red rather than orange. 

DB:  I thought they were stewards, which is why they had their backs to camera. 

FS:  A lot of North Koreans waggling their bums is a lovely idea. 

DB:  Yes. 

FS:  When we watched Cote d’Ivoire play their final game, I did wonder, I think we both said, ‘What’s Sven going to do next?’ You don’t feel he’d hang around. There was a period, when he went from Man City to Mexico to Notts County, I thought he might have decided to do it alphabetically for the rest of his career. I was looking at Sven, and I hadn’t really stared at Sven for a long time, and I watched him on the bench, and I thought, ‘I know now what he should be doing.’

DB:  What? 

FS:  Spanking movies. 

DB:  Do you think? 

FS:  He looks exactly like those blokes that you get in spanking movies. 

DB:  He does, yes. You’re right. We should perhaps explain, for people who have never seen a spanking movie-, 

FS:  What do you mean, people who have never seen a spanking movie? 

DB:  That they tend to involve young women, and then normally a man, who’s got the air of a sort of provincial headmaster to him, and he’s always rather annoyed with them for some minor misdemeanour, and it leads to spanking. 

FS:  He was born for that. 

DB:  He really was. 

Episode twelve - Part one

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David Baddiel:  So, Wayne Rooney’s just gone off for Joe Cole, which might be a masterstroke, but it might also be Fabio Capello’s way of telling John Terry never to tell him who to pick again.

Frank Skinner:  Yes. I was waiting to see what Wayne Rooney kicked and that, when he went off, but he just looked quite sullen and a bit upset.

DB:  How could you tell?

FS:  Well, yes.

(cuts from match to restaurant conversation 00.48)

DB:  So, we’re in a sort of deserted restaurant in Port Elizabeth, just after the England game.

FS:  It’s actually a closed restaurant.

DB:  Yes. It’s not actually deserted because we’re here. That was foolish of me, but Alan Davies is also here.

Alan Davies:  Yes. You guys know how to live. 

FS:  Yes. It’s great in here, isn’t it? It’s really good.

AD:  To celebrate England qualifying for the second round.

DB:  This is the party we’re having.

AD:  In a deserted restaurant.

FS:  Yes, exactly. ‘Hey, we’re in the last sixteen. Let’s go to a bakery.’

DB:  Sitting around.

FS:  This is actually a bakery. We’re talking it up into a restaurant.

DB:  It’s a bakery with rooms, which I've never heard of before.

AD:  It’s in a street with no streetlights. No idea at all if anything else is in the area.

DB:  Yes, and I said to you, ‘Come with us, Alan.’ You went, ‘Yes!’

AD:  ‘Oh, brilliant! Yes, what are you going to do?’

DB:  Yes. ‘We’re going to sit around in here.’

FS:  ‘We know this great deserted bakery where we can just chat.’

DB:  It’s slightly odd, because it’s actually more suitable if England have lost, isn’t it, in its atmosphere?

AD:  Yes. It’s a place to come in despair.

DB:  Yes, exactly, but we didn’t have any choice.

AD:  We could smash it up if they lost.

DB:  So, they have won. They have won at least, so we should be upbeat about that.

FS:  No, it’s tremendous news.

DB:  Can I ask you something Alan? That made it sound like I was going to ask you a personal question. I’m not.

AD:  I’m immediately off the defensive.

DB:  No, but one of the things about being here, we don’t have much of a sense of what’s really going on back home.

AD:  Do you not?

DB:  No, not really. We have a slight sense of it, but for example, we discovered the other day that Jürgen Klinsmann is a fantastic pundit, for example. Now, we had no idea about that.

AD:  Well, it has to be said that the standard of punditry is appalling.

DB:  In Britain?

AD:  Yes. Really hopeless people. In fact, they seem to have adopted this attitude that if anyone knows anything about any of the other foreign countries with lesser-known players, they’re a bit of a swot and need to be put down a bit.

FS:  Really?

AD:  Yes. 

DB:  Jürgen, he’s not a swot? He looks a bit of a swot.

AD:  He’s not embarrassed to know things about other countries or, you know, another language, for example. It’s a classic case of the foreign person speaking English better than the English pundits, and doing well.

DB:  Emmanuel Adebayor is a pundit.

AD:  Completely incomprehensible.

DB:  Really?

AD:  Yes. Completely incomprehensible, and every time he finishes a sentence we have this running joke on my own podcast.

DB:  Don’t mention that please.  

AD:  Which you can download. Who your friends used to be (ph 02.54). Every time he finishes a sentence, Lineker says, ‘Jürgen,’ and immediately-,

FS:  It’s like a reflex for Gary.

AD:  It’s become really noticeable, yes.

DB:  What has the mood been back in England?

FS:  In the camp?

DB:  No. Back in England.

AD:  The mood has been filthy.

DB:  Has it? 

AD:  Since the Algeria game was such a debacle, people have been quite angry.

DB:  Yes.

AD:  The press are trying to turn on Capello, but they don’t want to alienate all the players, because they need them next season.

DB:  Yes.

AD:  Then it came out that Capello, if they didn’t get through to the second round, was likely to resign and therefore leave the country. They were safe going for him.

DB:  Do you know that Capello was a supporter of General Franco, and still possibly is a supporter of General Franco?

FS:  Is he that old?

DB:  Well, I don’t know if he’s that old.

FS:  Is he a retrospective supporter?

DB:  He said in an interview in La Repubblica in 1995 that he admires Franco’s legacy of order.

FS:  Are you sure he wasn’t talking about Franco Baldini?

DB:  He might have been. It’s true.

FS:  Well, you’ve completely blackened his name, and for what? A misunderstanding?

AD:  Baldini. Is that Italian for bald, or baldie?

DB:  It’s for little bald man.

AD:  If you were a Baldini.

DB:  It’s tiny bald man.

AD:  Like that little fellow in Benny Hill. Is he a Baldini?

FS:  Exactly.

DB:  If you look closely when the guy in there walks, he slaps his head over and over again.

AD:  ‘Hey, Baldini.’

DB:  What did you think about Wayne Rooney being taken off?

AD:  Well, I thought he was just starting to play, because he hadn’t in the first two and a half games, but he looked quite good. Maybe he was fatigued. I think he was a little bit lucky to keep his place in the team, to be honest.

DB:  Yes.

AD:  I thought he might go for Crouch and Defoe.

DB:  Go where with Crouch and Defoe? On a daytrip?

AD:  Go out with them, yes. No, as a selection option.

FS:  Not to carry a plank, because it would be very, very lopsided indeed.

AD:  Not unless you wanted to slide down it. They could carry a banister.

DB:  You have a picture on your phone of Fabio Capello as Tommy Cooper.

AD:  Yes.

DB:  It was in the plank.

AD:  It’s quite a widely-circulated Photoshop thing that’s going around at home.

DB:  Is it? See, that’s the other thing we’re missing, is Photoshop versions of Fabio Capello.

AD:  Yes. You get those text messages that the says, ‘The Joker,’ when you open it. It’s a picture of Fabio in a fez. Joe Cole is now the sixth best wide player in the squad, because he’s behind all the recognised wide players and Gerrard.

DB:  Are you saying wide player or white player? I thought you’d gone all apartheid there for a second.

AD:  Wide player. Joe Cole. Even when he came on, he was played as a centre-forward.

FS:  Alan keeps a lot of statistics of white and black players and their separate achievements. It’s an interesting hobby. It’s really come into its own fruition over here, I find.

DB:  Yes. People are passionate.

FS:  Yes, they call it nostalgia.

DB:  So, here’s something that interested me. During the whole John Terry fiasco, John Terry and other players were saying this thing that, ‘If we don’t do well, we’ll be the first to put our hands up,’ and I’m not entirely sure what that actually serves, that idea. The idea that we’ll be alright, as long as they put their hands up.

AD:  If they put their hands up to say, ‘We’ve been knocked out.’

DB:  That that somehow-,

AD:  As we were the players, it’s largely down to us.

DB: &