The Stand-Up Theologian
James Cary, BBC comedy writer, author and touring stand-up theologian is on a never-ending quest to understand comedy, the Bible, culture and the church.
The Stand-Up Theologian
Why do we keep mentioning The War?
In this solo episode, I connect my long-running fascinations with comedy, World War II, and Indiana Jones — exploring why one scene in my favourite Indy film falls flat, why Armstrong and Miller’s RAF sketches are so funny (and a bit sad) and how The Producers got away with being in such poor taste. Timed around Remembrance Sunday and Armistice Day, it’s a reflection on humour, history, and why we’re so captivated by the wars that shaped the modern world - and that man at the heart of it. Am I talking about Jesus? Or that other guy?
The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It
HUT 33 on Audible (affiliate link)
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Welcome to the Stand Up Theologian Podcast with me, James Carey. I am the Stand-Up Theologian in question, and this is another one of my solo episodes that may be joyful to some and sad for others. But I've got a few thoughts running round my head, and I just wanted to get them out here on the podcast because this is smack in the middle of a whole load of things that I'm really interested in and stuff that I've been thinking about because it relates to comedy, to World War II. I've even written a sitcom set during World War II called Hut 33, the movies of Indiana Jones, which I absolutely adore, at least two of them anyway, and it explains why that one of my favourite Indiana Jones films has a bit that was is really weak, and I've always known that it's weak, but I've never known why.
SPEAKER_12:No way. They ain't uniform or something. I can only wear uniform. This is me. There's awesome trousers, man. This is them. You've got to wear uniform. That's so unfair. That's like massively disrespecting of your trousers. Because they're like restricting me as a person, they're removing my rights. We're supposed to be fighting for freedom and they're taking away my trousers. You just want to be you, isn't it? Isn't it, though? Isn't it? I'm always myself, and I don't care what anyone says, because this is me, I'm myself, and I'm always me, yeah, and that's what I am. Anyway, I'd better catch you later. I've got to go and talk to the group captain. Why? Something about me painting my Spitfire yellow. He says I'm not allowed.
SPEAKER_01:Hush. I've always found Armstrong and Miller's RAF Pilots sketches so funny too, but also quite troubling in other ways. So I think I managed to get to the bottom of that. That's all to come. And we also talk about one of my favourite movies, the producers.
unknown:That's Ori Hitler!
SPEAKER_01:Which then became a stage musical, which I went to see live many years ago and was the funniest thing I've ever seen on stage, uh, either before or since. I absolutely adored it. And it's all timely, and we're doing this now because this episode drops on the 10th of November, the day after Remembrance Sunday, and the day before, the 11th of November, which is Armistice Day. Of course, if you're a loyal lollard, if you're a paid subscriber to the Wycliffe Papers and uh you uh support the show via that, then you've already had this episode by those dates. These dates are interesting to me. Remembrance in the UK at least always feels poignant because we seem to be remembering primarily the first world war, which to us seems so pointless and futile. Because the first world war is the date that gives us the 11th of November, even though we also remember all the other wars too, but well, we don't really. It's mainly World War One. Why is that?
SPEAKER_13:The guns have stopped because we're about to attack. Not even our generals are mad enough to shell their own men. They think it's far more sporting to let the Germans do it.
SPEAKER_01:But also, we are obsessed with World War II, or at least I am. I listened to the We Have Ways podcast with Al Murray and James Holland. I must have listened to almost every episode. That's hundreds of episodes and hours of listening to people talk about all the minutiae of World War II, which to me is endlessly fascinating. Why is that? Let's start with Dining Car Wagon 2419D. And I'm writing about this on my Almanac blog, uh, which is where this episode really began life. I was writing my almanac and thinking about how to start, but the almanac is about Christian calendars and the days of the year, and I was writing about armistice and it kind of ballooned into this thing, which is also a solar podcast episode. So let's talk about Dining Car Wagon 2419D, which was built in Saint-Denis in France in May 1914, and they had no idea that they were constructing a piece of history that would mark two momentous occasions. These events speak volumes about the seismic cultural shift that took place in the 20th century, which has come up on a podcast or two that I've listened to, and it's just really interesting. But let's just talk about that dining car wagon, or also known as the Compaigne wagon, which was named after the place where the dining car was stationed for the signing of the armistice of the 11th of November 1918, which signaled the end of the First World War, although technically it didn't end until 1919. It was an armistice in 1918. The war ended with the Treaty of Versailles, which possibly explains why my grandfather, a late arrival to the battlefield in 1918, did not arrive back in England until 1919. It was technically possible that the war, I suppose, could have resumed. That's an incredible thought to think about. But anyway, after this dining car wagon had served its purpose, it was shunted around and eventually ended up in a shed in a siding. But 22 years later, at the personal insistence of a certain Adolf Hitler, it was taken back to the same spot in Compaigne or Compène to host the signing of another surrender, the French surrender, on the 22nd of June 1940. Because Hitler understood the importance of symbolism. He really grasped that instinctively, he just knew. Although, in his mistaken view, the German people had been stabbed in the back in that railway carriage in 1918. Of course, Hitler had served as a corporal in the German army, and sometimes he was disparagingly referred to as the corporal, even though he was the head of all German armed forces in the Second World War. And that didn't make him any good at strategy or even tactics. But he insisted on getting stuck in and meddling. Now, the army was not stabbed in the back in 1918. It was, in fact, on the point of total collapse. And the armistice saved hundreds of thousands of completely needless casualties. But nonetheless, the Fuhrer was demonstrated was determined to humiliate his enemies who had humiliated his fellow soldiers who had lost friends in the trenches over the previous four years of bitter struggle. And I believe that the people in Germany themselves, who believed that they hadn't started the war, that it had been foisted upon them, and thought that the war was going well, were astonished to reveal that they were about to surrender and it landed incredibly shockingly and badly. And so that's why you get this resentment in the 1920s and 30s in Germany that they were stabbed in the back because it was their experience in the sum, anyway, but it wasn't the military reality. Um so here's the thing about when I was typing that up for my almanac. Um I was thinking about the romance of trains and who doesn't love a dining carriage and the clever use of symbolism by that guy with the toothbrush moustache, and that's just the problem. Just typing those six letters and putting it on the internet causes me concern. It makes me wonder if this article is going to be flagged somewhere, or that maybe a light will come on on a dashboard in the home office, causing bots to start searching my blog for signs of radicalism, and they will find signs of radicalism, it will just be about Christianity rather than anything else. So those six letters of that Austrian man's name means something deadly serious, and the man has become a symbol in his own right, and we we dare not speak his name, partly because it means that you've lost an argument, but also it's just so loaded, isn't it? We we don't like we don't say Voldemort in Hogwarts, or at least the uh Harry Potter doesn't, and it's like the very word itself, that very name has a meaning that is deathly serious. Now, it used to be funny. Now, this is why I'm particularly interested in it because it's like what is funny, what can you do jokes about and what can't you? And what you can and can't do tells you an awful lot about the culture and the sacred cows of that culture. Now, brilliant movie, The Producers, 1967, Mel Brooks, it's an absolute riot, supremely ludicrously funny. I just watched it a few uh months ago with my kids who are 15 and 17, and it is in very poor taste, but that is the point. You've got two Broadway producers, or one producer, played by Zero Mostel, and his accountant, played by Gene Wilder, who are trying to get rich by committing a financial fraud by staging a musical that is a surefire flop.
SPEAKER_04:Step one, we find the worst play in the world, a surefire flop. Step two, I raise a million bucks. A lot of little old ladies in the world. Step three, you go back to work on the books. Only list of packers, one for the government, one for us. You can do it, Bloom. You're a wizard. Step four, we open on Broadway. And before you can stay, step five, we close on Broadway. Step six, we take a million bucks, we fly to Rio de Janeiro.
SPEAKER_05:Rio Rio, Miss Man, you don't understand. No, no, you don't understand. This is fake, this is destiny, this is kissman, there's no according. Mr. Five minutes ago, I tucked at your books. That's the ultimate extent of my criminal life. I want that money! Oh, I found my keys.
SPEAKER_01:So they raise a fortune to put on a camp musical.
SPEAKER_03:You found a flop. A flop? That's putting it mildly. We found a disaster catastrophe, an outrage, a guaranteed to close on one night beauty. That's it. This is freedom for one forever. This is a house in the country. This is her old Royce in the Bentley. This is wine, women, and song, and women.
SPEAKER_00:Springtime for Hitler. A gay ramp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtisgarden. Wow.
SPEAKER_01:That they hoped would close after one night. And so that nobody would come after them for the profits, because there obviously weren't any profits. Now the plan to fail failed. The audience are silent and open-mouthed at this display that they've just witnessed in the opening number. But as the as it kind of gets going, they decide it's so bad, it's good. It's in such poor taste, it's hilarious. And the scam is exposed, it's going to run and run, and the producers go to jail. Now, this is 1967, and it's you know that it's a camp musical about Hitler, it's a it's a movie about a musical, and it's making light of an awful lot of things, and there are some very funny rhymes in the songs, which I'm not gonna put onto this podcast because it might ding something for copyright violation, uh, because music is regulated in a way that speech isn't, I don't think, in terms of quoting stuff. You would think, though, that the producers would be extremely controversial in 1967, only 22 years after the discovery of the atrocities committed by the Third Reich. Like, too soon? Well, no. And it could be argued that the sheer scale of the extermination of entire categories of people and races, as it were, was not fully examined and comprehended until later on in the century. And besides, after the war, people were trying to move on and rebuild their lives. They didn't want to be defined by what had happened. It was time to look forward and not to look back. Oh, and everyone was much more concerned about the Soviet Union and communism and the possible possibility of a nuclear Armageddon. So, not long after the producers in 1967, was the famous Germans episode of Faulty Towers first broadcast in October 1975. Again, very funny, very, very funny classic comedy. Comically limbed John Cleese goose stepped around his hotel in front of a German family whilst the audience fall about laughers.
SPEAKER_14:It's all forgotten now, and let's get to know more about it. So that's two eggmen and a's a problem gumbles, a hub and goring, and wait a moment, I got a bit confused here. I got a bit confused because everyone keeps mentioning the walls. Is it something wrong? We just stop talking about the two. We did not start it. And then the husband's gonna follow.
SPEAKER_01:And then you just have these war movies as mainstream entertainment, like The Guns of Navarone, 1961, The Great Escape, 63, The Dirty Dozen, 67, Where Eagles Dare, 68, Kelly's Heroes, 1970. These movies are kind of light-hearted mainstream entertainment and tales of daring do rather than the gritty dramas about the horrors of war, like the later Saving Private Ryan in 1998, and the scale of the evil perpetrated by the Nazis. In the 1970s, war movies, I think, start to fade or become more serious, like A Bridge Too Far is a more serious movie. And the Cold War is starting to take over, and you get movies about that and about the Cold War and spying, and you get all the John LeCarey novels and um Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy and lots of movies later, like the Ipcrest Files and those sorts of things. It's a lot more about spying and intrigue rather than war. So, and and Bond films, I guess, are much more Cold War informed than World War II informed. Now, my sense is that during the 1990s, and you've got to be careful how you judge culture based on when you're a kid, but I think it was during the 1990s that the Holocaust memorials became much more common, much more mainstream. Because it was a decade known as the end of history, uh, in which liberal democratic capitalism had defeated totalitarianism, both communism and fascism, once and for all, as far as the West were concerned. So we could all kick back and enjoy life and reflect on how we've arrived at this wonderful time of peace, as long as you ignore the war in Yugoslavia, which disintegrated in the 1990s. Anyway, we could look back on a century of conflict, and there in the middle, we found something truly, truly, truly awful. Um, Shinder's List won every award going in 1993, and that paved the way for Life is Beautiful in 1997. And by the noughties, these stories were being told all the time. 2001, it saw the movie Conspiracy about the uh meeting which set forth and enacted the final solution. 2004, we have the movie Downfall, which is Hitler's bunker, which then became endlessly memed on YouTube.
SPEAKER_09:That's what I prefer!
SPEAKER_01:2005, we have the Lawrence Reese landmark BBC Two documentary, Auschwitz, the Nazis and the Final Solution. We get The Boy in the Striped Pajamas in 2006, and there was a movie of that book two years uh later. And these stories are being told and aimed at children now, uh, including movies like The Bizarre Jojo Rabbit from 2019, which is impressive. I actually really enjoyed it, if if that's the right word, about a Hitler youth who has the Fuhrer as an imaginary friend. It's very strange, but it's part of a pattern. This is a story that we've just not tired of after decades, and it's good to remember it. And you know, one reason we can't keep telling this story, though, and teach it to children is because it's more than just history, it has become a religious story. And at the center of these books and movies of hate and mass murder is the man himself, a devil incarnate Adolf Hitler. Now, the reason I'm thinking about this is because I've just come across a new book and a lecture and some people talking about it on the internet. Again, my friend uh Paul Van der Clay, who just keeps turning over interesting things. Uh, this is a Tudor historian and a religious historian, but he's written a book about the 20th century. Um, and he makes a very shrewd observation, which once seen is so obvious, but it is therefore the best kind of observation. He says at the beginning of the 20th century, the biggest figure in the culture and the moral imagination of the West was still Jesus, whether you believed in him or not. Even atheists would applaud his exemplary life and his moral teaching. Normal Christians would go a bit further, but overall, Jesus was this was still the apogee of the mainstream moral conscience. By the end of the century, there was a photo negative of that, and it was Hitler. So as religion declined and our society gave up trying to emulate Jesus, it settled for trying to avoid the embodiment of intolerance and violence and hatred, which is Hitler. And this is an awful lot easier to do. It's a lot easier to not be like Hitler than to be like Jesus, um, because Hitler's accomplishments in the 20th century were so stunningly terrible that none of us are in danger of ever coming close to this man and his evil minions. This is where Indiana Jones comes in, because it highlights this kind of moment. I always try to bring in Indiana Jones wherever possible, because I absolutely adore my favourite is Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, where he's after the Holy Grail. And now, the weakest bit of the film, it's not the moment in which Indy is at a book burning in Berlin and ends up being face to face with Hitler himself, played by Mr. Bronson from Grange Hill. Now that's a funny moment, and it's funny because and so Indy is carrying a book containing the location of the Holy Grail and all the clues as to how to get through all these tests and that kind of stuff. He's gone to Berlin to get it, and Hitler looks at the book and he takes the book and then he takes a pencil and then he signs the book, he autographs it and hands it back to him and moves on. He assumes that this person in a German uniform, who is Indiana Jones in disguise, um, is uh is a German wanting an autograph, and it's like the location of the sacred object, the cup of Christ, has been signed by Satan's representative on earth, which is Hitler, which is kind of funny. That's not the weak bit. The weak bit is when Indy has to face the tests that have been passed by the Christian knights centuries earlier. So these three knights went off to find the Holy Grail and they find it, and they get long life. And on their way, they encounter these tests inside this cave, and they write about it, and Indy has it in his book. And he the the third one is a test of faith. There he's standing at a chasm which can only be bridged by faith.
SPEAKER_10:What is your name? So Galahad of Camelot. What is your quest? I seek the grail. What is your favourite colour?
unknown:Blue!
SPEAKER_01:No obviously that's for Monty Python and the Holy Grail, not Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, but there's music under the Indiana Jones clip, and the bots might find the music and get it all taken down. So anyway, I just went with that one. Sorry about that, but it is really funny. So Indy suddenly needs faith. Now he's kind of a sceptic, he's a classic kind of Gen Xer type character who is a well, I don't, you know, he's he's basically a hand solo. Well, I don't know about that, but all I know is what I can see, and I'll I'll take the money now and all that kind of stuff. He's there's no romance to it, even though he's an archaeologist and he says it always belongs in a museum. He's not motivated by religious faith at all. But now, Indiana Jones suddenly needs faith to cross this bridge or to bridge this lack of bridge. But faith in in what? In who? What is the content of the faith? Indiana Jones is against Hitler and all of those nasty Nazis, and he kills them, loads of them, because we don't mind, because they're basically like demons doing his evil doing the evil bidding of their master. Indy, like us, is against Hitler. Great. Nazis, I hate these guys. But what is he for? What is his faith in? So what does he do? He closes his eyes, puts his hand on his heart, and steps out in faith. And I've always just thought that's weak. I think even when I was like 14 or whenever I first saw this film, I just thought that doesn't, that seems a bit off. That just feels like a weak moment. Anyway, his foot lands on a hitherto unseen bridge that had been there all along, and it's a very clever optical illusion that distracts us from the gigantic theological chasm at the heart of the movie and at the heart of our culture. So we're we're against Hitler, his name is evoked all the time in online debates, that's fine, Hitler is bad, really, really bad, that's fine, but what are we for? What do we admire? What is praiseworthy and honourable? What is virtue? Now, our own ancestors spent a lot of time considering these issues. When we were in Florence a few weeks ago, um we were at uh there was a huge mural in one of the churches, um, Santa Maria something, and there was a great big mural about wisdom, and all of these characters were on this wall, and they were all the personifications of different virtues, you know, like wisdom and those sorts of things. And though I think there were beasts as well used to describe the different virtues as well, and some of them are classical, some of them are Christian and whatever. But they thought about virtue, and the supreme embodiment at the centre of it is Christ. He is beautiful, he is good, he is true, he is the embodiment of virtue. We should gaze on him, read his word, pray to become like him, but we don't, and we won't, because that would make it inconvenient. He makes inconvenient moral demands on our lives, and we would have to admit that we fall short, and that we would have to change, and we need help to change, and for that we need God's help offered to us in the form of the Holy Spirit who dwells in our hearts. In short, we need a Trinitarian God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but we've settled for not Hitler, that is the God of our age, and that is a very strange situation to be in because now we don't know what we're for. I remember a few years ago, uh Theresa May, when she was Prime Minister, was talking about we need Britishness, or maybe she was Home Secretary, about Britishness, and at one point I think even school, Sunday schools, uh church Sunday schools were going to be offsteaded or whatever, and there was stuff about British values, to which I would say I'd be really interested to know what you think is a British value. I've got my own ideas, particularly about Englishness, but what do you think should be taught in Sunday schools and if you think it's British or Britishness or a Christian form of Britishness? And none of this stuff passes muster, and so you know, even John Major, the uh 90s uh prime minister, he couldn't really, I think he was ended up quoting Orwell or something about Englishness. And Orwell's stuff was always very bittersweet. And I recently, on holiday, I read The Lion and the Unicorn by George Orwell. He was very, very sour, he was very accurate about Englishness, but he didn't seem to have a particularly positive vision of what it is to be English. That's all been rattling around my head, but it does kind of come out in four different things. There are four things to say here, and uh this is the first. It answers the question why World War One seems pointless, tragic, poignant. Because remembrance is dominated by memories of World War One, which to us seems tragic because we don't understand it. It wasn't. The Christ-centred mindset of 1900 is a world away from the way we now think in 2025, and so going to war in 1914 seemed like the right thing to do for a variety of moral, strategic, and diplomatic reasons. Dominic Sandbrick explains a lot of this stuff on the Rest's History podcast. In fact, both of them have got this huge kind of preamble to the causes of the First World War. But they're operating on completely different vectors, and we find that very hard to relate to. And so at the end of the war, we think, well, what was the point of that? Lots of people are dead, and nothing's really changed.
SPEAKER_13:A war that would be a damn sight simpler if we just stayed in England and shot 50,000 of our men a week.
SPEAKER_01:And so Black Alley Goes Forth has this huge footprint on the memory of the First World War, and it's sort of put into neat half-hour comedies what we'd always suspected about the war, which was that it was pointless. It just so happens to be not quite true, or at least not the whole story, but it's really hard to explain why we went to war because there were a variety of principles that were in play, as well as you know, diplomacy and a whole load of other things too. But we can't get our heads around it, we don't really understand it, so it seems really poignant and tragic. So that's the first thing why World War II seems so pointless. The second thing why we're obsessed with World War II is because it doesn't seem pointless. World War II is going great guns, if you'll excuse the pun, which was obviously intended, because it provides clear goodies and baddies, because the baddies are masterminded by the toothbrush mustachioed Austrian painter. Now, I've written a sitcom for BBC Radio 4 called Hut 33. We did three series. It was set in Bletchy Park in World War II. Quite often it's on BBC Sounds if you want to go and look it up. And I've also written a unsuccessful pilot, pun less intended, about the crew of a bomber. And the show was called Dead Reckoning, but BBC Radio didn't want to make that. I've also written a failed novel about D-Day called Crossword Ends in Violence 5, which I hope to reprint and relaunch sometime in the next year. But the Second World War is a great world to write about because it gives the writer and the audience moral clarity because of the good versus evil nature of the war. It makes Tales of Daring Do much more straightforward and enjoyable. So Indiana Jones can shoot as many Nazis as you like, nobody minds, because they're all doing the evil bidding of Satan himself, uh, the baddie of the 20th century Adolf Hitler. Now the war makes sense to us retrospectively with the revelation of the death camps and the labour camps and the slave camps and all the atrocities on an industrial scale, which were only really revealed in 1945.
unknown:So
SPEAKER_01:We went to war in 1939 for various principles, but we we then discovered that we were fighting for a slightly different reason. But that makes a lot of sense to us. So we just think, oh, we were always going to war against uh the Nazis because we understood them. Well, we didn't really, uh, we just didn't like what they were doing, and that again it's always it's much more complicated. But those revelations of 1945, we didn't then really process or think about very much because there was a cold war on, and we were trying to move on with our lives. So we've got the tragedy of the first world war, which seems pointless, we don't understand it, and then we've got the obsession with World War II, because we think we do understand it, because it has that moral clarity, and this sort of not demonization of Hitler, but this promotion of Hitler as the ultimate singularity of evil that must be avoided, which is kind of the united story of the West since World War II, also explains why everyone feels so disenfranchised. The widespread discontent is because the political projects in the West have sought to do nothing but prevent another Hitler. We cannot have that again, and therefore we have to disenfranchise people because they have this terrible habit of voting for crowd-pleasing demagogues, which also explains why various characters in in England and in the UK are also similarly treated uh with disdain and tried to be kind of minimized uh by the media. But it's why we had the Treaty of Rome, the EEC, and then the European Union, along with NATO, the International War Crimes Tribunal, the European Court of Human Rights, and the UN, and the World Health Organization, and the World Economic Forum that meets in plain sight at Davos. And there are international banks and the IMF and the transnational corporations that all have a globalizing effect on the internet, which is also fighting a global good versus evil war against the possibility of there being another Hitler. And in that war, that internationalist war, you feel disenfranchised because you have been. Because you're the worst, and you vote for devils and demagogues, so you have to be stopped. Which is why the elites have kind of been, I mean, they've the elites have always been in charge, because that's why elites exist and that's who they are. And what do you know? I've just found a favourite clip of that from my favourite sitcom of all time. Yes, Prime Minister. Here it is.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I don't know whether I really want power. Bernard. If the right people don't have power, do you know what happens? The wrong people get it. Politicians, counselors, ordinary voters. But aren't they supposed to in a democracy? This is a British democracy, baby. What do you mean? British democracy recognizes that you need a system to protect the important things of life and keep them out of the hands of the barbarians. Things like the opera, Radio 3, the countryside, the law, the universities. Both of them.
SPEAKER_01:There's been this kind of project going on, which has always been that terror of having another demagogue, which explains a lot of German politics and European politics in particular. Anything that's suddenly transnational, it means you can say to your uh people uh in your country, well, we can't really do anything about it because there's an international law at play. So the European Court of Human Rights is invoked to say, well, we can't do various things in this country because we're members of this thing. So our hands are tight. I know you voted for us to do this thing, but we can't even do it. And that's why we left the European Union because just enough people didn't like that arrangement, but it which had been put in place to stop totalitarianism and the specter of Hitler. So it's kind of it is a conspiracy theory in one sense, but it's not a terribly clever one, but it's a fairly obvious one, uh, in order to stop um Hitler from coming back in some form or another. So very much every government seems the same, new boss, same as the old boss, and that's why people are very disenchanted with politics, because it has been intentionally neutered, as it were, to prevent the rise of another Third Reich, or a fourth Reich, I presume you would call it. Finally, we get to the bit that I'm super interested in, which is why Armstrong and Miller's RAF pilots characters are really funny and what's going on there. And you know what? I've just found one of those sketches that makes exactly the point of the last point about international rights, as well as giving us a window on the RAF pilots. Here we go.
SPEAKER_11:Welcome to Germany, gentlemen. It looks funny, isn't it? Like on a film or something.
SPEAKER_12:He's German, like that guy we're fighting, Hitler or whatever. He's German as well, or something. Cigarette, gentlemen? No, duh. Like disgusting and really bad for you. Can you actually put that out because I'm like breathing in your smoke and stuff, and that's against my human rights?
SPEAKER_11:It's like a sort of murder. When you were shut down, you were on a reconnaissance mission over the suburbs of Munich. What were you looking for? You know, places to bomb and stuff.
SPEAKER_12:I shouldn't actually have been in the plane. I only came along because I'm getting out with his sister. She's well up for it. Boy, that's my sister, man. I know, but she's well up for it, though.
SPEAKER_11:I can and will use force if necessary to extract information from you. You actually come up because that's against the Geneva Convention and shit?
SPEAKER_12:You can get like taken to court and fined or something. I won't legal aid in a telephone call, that's actually my rights.
SPEAKER_11:Don't talk to me about your rights! You have no rights in this room.
SPEAKER_06:Uh actually, said do. It's like the law. He did it as a modulate Berlin Union, and I didn't believe his electorate at first. And this is me to the geezer. Are you sure, mate? And he's all like, yeah. You know what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_07:Silence!
SPEAKER_06:Well, he needs to take a chill, Bill. You know what I mean? Isn't it? Isn't it? Isn't it?
SPEAKER_01:Isn't it?
SPEAKER_06:Isn't it? Isn't it? Standard.
SPEAKER_01:Now, I think they're invented by a comedy writer called Simon Blackwell, who was an absolutely delightful man who I used to know many years ago when we were writing comedy for BBC Radio. He has subsequently gone on to be wildly more successful than I have as a comedy writer, and good luck to him, he's a really nice guy. So he's written this thing, and he probably wouldn't even agree with my assessment of it, but I think that's what's going on here. So we've got these RAF pilots who talk like teenagers from the 21st century, except they're obviously in a Battle of Britain style situation. And the reason that's so funny and jarring is because these 21st century sort of young, young people who were pilots, which is exactly what they were in the 1940s, they were just young 19-year-olds, 20-year-olds uh who were flying and defending. They've got no sense of virtue according to the conceptions of the 20th century's idea of duty and honour and sacrifice, heavily informed by Christianity, that was still at play in the 40s, because remember, we didn't know why we were going to war, and Hitler hadn't become the grand narrative of the West for the following 75 years. And so the kids who have been produced by that culture, who are only against Hitler but aren't really in favour of anything, are placed in that stiff upper lip atmosphere. But these pilots are kind of self-obsessed, risk-averse, they know their human rights, they're quite woke, and they have that way of talking, which is extremely funny. They are entirely the products of their times, just like the original World War II pilots were. There's war all the way through the Bible, and we seem to think that we are we should be exempt from it in some way, and we're totally not. Anyway, I hope you found that interesting. We remember all of this tragedy and insanity, as well as those who fought with courage and honour on Remembrance Sunday, which this year falls on the 9th of November, and Armistice Day on the 11th. That's what I've got for you this time. I hope you found that interesting. Did you know that you can actually listen to my Radioforce it com called Hub33? It's on Audible. There's a link in the show notes. You can go and download it. You might find it interesting, and I'm quite proud of it. That said, I haven't listened to it for at least 10-15 years. In fact, some of them I've not listened to since they were recorded on the night. But anyway, you can go and have a listen. I think you can get all three series for one credit on Audible. Why not give it a go? There's an affiliate link in the show notes if you want to go and have a look. Clicking that link means that I might actually get some money, even if we're all helping Jeff Bezos build an even bigger yacht. And if you want to support this podcast, get extra content and access and lots of other bonuses besides, go over to the Wycliffe Papers and upgrade to Paid and become a loyal lollard, and that will really help keep this show on the road. Is this how it ends? This time, yeah.
SPEAKER_13:I have a plan, sir. Really Borick. A cunning and subtle one, yes, sir. As cunning as a fox who's just been appointed professor of cunning at Oxford University. Yes, sir.
SPEAKER_05:On the signal, company will advance!
SPEAKER_13:Well, I'm afraid it'll have to wait. Whatever it was, I'm sure it was better than my plan to get out of this by pretending to be mad. I mean, who would have noticed another madman around here? Good luck, everyone.