I recorded two episodes of Banter today back to back. Given we tend to do about an hour and a half of chat for each half hour show it was a bit of a gruelling marathon of top threes, but there was plenty of good stuff and some great guest turns from Su Perkins, Chris Addison, Dave Gorman and Lynn Ferguson.
As usual about fifty per cent of the stuff I came up with will be too rude for broadcast (both the
McCartney and
the rat Jesus jokes have hit the cutting room floor already). By the second show I reached a level of cabin fever that led me to doing about five minutes about websites that was never going to make it on air. The producer was so exasperated when I then spoilt a useable joke by using the word "twat" that I could clearly hear him shouting in Andrew Collings' secret ear piece. I was enjoying being slightly theatrically petulant and trying to get the audience on my side after they'd made me re-take my list of favourite monarchs "King John, King Kong and King Dong" because they weren't sure that I could say Dong. I think that if you know who King Dong is then you morally culpable and cannot complain about him being mentioned on the radio. If you don't know who is then you would surely just assume he was a funny named king. In fact a quick search of google for a picture of the King Dong I was thinking of has actually brought me to a picture of the Vietnamese King Dong Khanh, who rather wonderfully you'll see is holding a massive phallic scroll or something at about groin level (there is also a picture of King Dong, but I will leave you to work out which is which. I credit you with some intelligence) If only I had know this at the time I could have successfully argued that that was who I was talking about. Alternatively I wish I had tried to make out that King Dong was just the king of the Dongs, a proud race of people, who I would guess live somewhere around Indonesia. On the island of the Dongs, dong is of course not a rude word. There "ding" is the most offensive word there is, which led to the films of Leslie Phillips being banned there because of his constant use of the terribly offensive phrase "Ding Dong".
I was not so imaginative at the time and just tried to politely describe what it was that made the actual King Dong so remarkable. I illustrated this with the memory of how we had talked one of my friends had informed me that if King Dong ever became aroused it took so much blood from his body that he passed out. To which Dave Gorman wittily chipped in, "That's why there was no Prince Dong."
So it's a shame that that will probably never make it to air, nor will my discussion of the real and disturbing website that used to exist in which the creator claimed to have sex with dolphins, but not in a perverse way, he was a Zoophile which meant he only indulged in loving sex with dolphins that consented. If it was a parody site it went into such detail about the mechanics of dolphin sex that I would argue the parodist must have had sex with a dolphin at least once which for me takes the art of parody too far. I told the audience that according to the pages you should be careful if you give a male dolphin oral sex as the force of the ejaculation can break your neck. Amazingly this information has also been deemed too controversial for the Radio 4 pussies, so you won't hear it on the radio, nor this further pearl from the incomparable Dave Gorman, "If you were into dolphin sex you could save a lot of money on dolphin phone sex lines by just ringing up a fax machine."
If we do an extended CD release of this show then there are going to be some great extras.
However I feel I went a bit too far in this show and even I left the studio feeling dirty and offended, so it's just as well we have a fabulous producer to save my blushes and just put in the bits where I don't come across as a sex obsessed pervert. Which means I might just get to say hello at the beginning of this show and nothing else. And to be honest I said "hello" in a bit of a sleazy way so that might have to go too. The expurgated fun finds its way to a radio near you on Thursday week at 6.30pm on Radio 4, so do tune in because it really is a fantastic series, even without the jokes about dolphin sex.
