Would you report a neighbour for breaking a hosepipe ban?

20:28Paddy O'Connell:Now, I'm going to talk more about it, but do you know who that is in a jumper? I do. It's Giles Brandreth, who's here to review our news. Giles, you've agreed to give us the plot of present laughter in just a minute. So I'm going to point out... Good luck. Yes. Right, ready? Go. I'm going to try to rise to this challenge, giving you my Noel Card voice a bit early on a Sunday for this. The play was written in 1939, first performed in 1942 because of the outbreak of war. Present Laughter, the title is taken from the play Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare, is a comedy about an actor called Gary Essendine who's on the brink of a midlife crisis because he's 39 and can't bear the idea of being 40.

21:04He doesn't believe his fans would believe that he could possibly be that age. Anyway, he is confronting, during this drama, multiple challenges. A mistress, two mistresses. Oh, and a wife. Yes, is he still on good terms with the wife? Yes, he is. And then he has a secretary who really is, well, she's wonderful, but she's also somewhat overbearing. And then who should turn up but a young playwright called Roland Maul. A part, actually, I saw beautifully played by Richard Pryor's back in 1972. But that is by the by. The play is a great comedy and challenges to play the actor. Well, what is he? Is he an actor or is he just an extraordinary human being?

21:36And why I'm so excited about what Tracy Oberman is doing with this play, which is more than a comedy. There's deep, deep lines about friendship within this drama. We are experiencing something that is both comedic and also romantic. Is that the time?

21:50Paddy O'Connell:It's time. We caught two mistresses and two deeps. Oh, yes, there was a lot of repetition. But we enjoyed it. I'm so sorry. Tracey Ann, this is the Noel Coward. They said it was autobiographical. It was really about him. So does it strike you as being a sort of hark to him? Are you trying to show him? I wanted to know, the experiment for me was, having been in a particularly bad production of this, so I know it very well and I've seen many, many productions of it, I wanted to know what would happen if a female Jerry Essendime would be loved, forgiven and adored in the same way that Gary is with all his flaws.

22:31And then I thought, well, I was reading the Liza Minnelli autobiography and I'd been writing a play about Mae West. And I was looking at sort of Joan Collins, who'd moved to America and still kept her absolute Englishness. And I thought, well, what happens? What's the nearest to Noel Coward's sort of 1930s, very cliquey, celebrity driven world? And I thought, well, actually, maybe Studio 54, 1977, New York, where it was all about VIPs and being in the right place and with the right people. and I thought well if I turn Gary into Jerry and Jerry has the glamour and the charm and the brilliance of a sort of Liza Minnelli creator but she's getting older and we know that the industry you know the first sign of a wrinkle as a woman they practically take you out and shoot you so it's sort of like her ageing and her relevance becomes very important and then I gender flipped more than that I created her 1977 world as an expat with her expat group her ex-husband Len her gay secretary is now Monty and Morris, her old lawyer, who's now her producer.

23:36So the expats are in America, living in New York on Broadway. It's hugely glamorous, it's hugely fabulous and she's appallingly behaved because she's clinging on for dear life to still be as relevant and as gorgeous and as sexually alluring as she ever thought she could be.

23:50Paddy O'Connell:I wonder as well, is it a way of sort of outing Noel Coward? Because I think it was Peter Hall who said of this play that Noel Carr would have been much happier if the people who were in love with him on the stage were men, Giles. Did you ever hear that? I heard that, but I don't necessarily believe it. Judy Campbell, who was in the original production, definitely felt that wasn't the case. He played it as this extraordinary character. He was remarkable, Noel Carr. He played it in London, he played it in America, and he played it in France, in French. He was amazing. He was an amazing human being.

24:18So I think he would have liked the play as he had written it. But I did see it a few years ago with Andrew Scott, who made the character an openly gay character, which is possible, with a great play like this. Sort of bisexual, didn't he? He did, yes. He sort of played it. With a great play like this, actually, you can do what you like. Well, I think that's exactly the thing. I think why Noel Coward, and particularly this play, is a classic is because as long as you stay true to its origins, this is my feeling, but you can stretch it and you can look at it through a slightly different prism, it still honours the play and everything that Coward was trying to say about loneliness, sexuality, who we are, our creativity, who are we really love for ourselves.

24:58But you can stretch it through a different prism and it's still enormously fun and glamorous.

25:02Paddy O'Connell:Thank you very much indeed. When does it start? We open in Bath. We open in Venice. We open in Venice, yes. No, when do you open? We open in Bath. We open where? We open in Bath on the 27th of March. No, no, gosh, on the 27th of August. OK, break everything. And we travel the country. We travel the country. Come and see it. It's great. And, Giles, do you want to give us your favourite Noel Coward clip, pithy word? I would tell you that in this production, Judy Campbell, who was in it, thought that maybe Noel Coward had become suddenly straight because during a performance during the war, she was sitting on stage and she found his hands underneath her breasts.

25:38He put his hands inside the dress and under her breasts and she thought afterwards, she said to him in the wings, oh, Noel, I didn't realise that you had those feelings. No, it's just terribly cold. I'm going to suggest that to my young actor playing David Stillington.

25:52Paddy O'Connell:Giles, you can slip behind the screens now and we'll welcome you back for the news review in just a moment. I'll take off my smoking jacket now. Bravo. Labour held the mail to Manchester as one in four registered voters managed to make it into the booths. Andy Burnham's plucked the British premiership from the incumbent in an historic heist and was famously mocked for his shape-shifting backing of three Labour leaders before he ditched one. The joke is so old, even we don't often repeat it. A Blairite, a Brownite and a Corbynite walk into a bar. The barman says, hello, Andy. Prime Minister Andy Burnham addressed this joke in his first speech as Labour Party leader.

26:27In future, when a Burnhamite walks into a bar... LAUGHTER ..as many Burnhamites are known to do... ..talking about you, Kevin. In future, when a Burnhamite walks into a bar... I want the barman to say, great to see you. We don't like factional politics in here.

26:54Paddy O'Connell:Well, the editor sent me to one of Keir Starmer's favourite pubs, The Pineapple, in Kentish Town in North London, with John McTurnan, a former advisor to Tony Blair, Andrew Fisher, who was Labour's Director of Policy under Jeremy Corbyn, and Dame Emily Thornberry, who backed Gordon Brown's beleaguered premiership on PM. But in a blow to the item, all three said they did not like these days to be labelled as supporting one tribe or another. Oh, I think we know each other very well, actually. We're in the Labour Party together. Yeah, we've known each other for decades, I think, in panels and discussions.

27:25And being, you know, working closely together under Jeremy Corbyn in some cases, and against at times. Yes, for and against Jeremy Corbyn. We have.

27:35Paddy O'Connell:John, you're sitting next to Andrew. How rude were you about people who were Corbynistas? I was never rude about Andrew, and I was never rude about Corbynistas. You weren't rude about me either. I wasn't. Not that I remember, anyway. I took an ideological view about the way the Labour Party was taken over, and I fought my side of it. That's what you do in the party. The MPs who nominated Corbyn were moronic. Who said that? I said they were morons, yeah, because the job of nominating a leader is given to MPs because they're meant to nominate somebody who they think is fit to be the leader of the Labour Party.

28:13Those who lent their nominations because they thought it was fair weren't nominating somebody they thought could be or should be a leader.

28:21Paddy O'Connell:You had a leadership election with no fight of ideas. Shouldn't we all be very surprised by how ruthless the Labour Party's been? It's a coup by Andy Byrne. It's so surprising. It's not really a coup. It's sort of like everybody just went, actually, he's the best candidate because people on the right of the party thought that, people in the centre sort of soft-lefted, and people on the left. Why not stick with Keir Starmer? It is a system, a parliamentary system, isn't it? Aren't they meant to get a long time? Otherwise it's short-term politics, Emily thought. Yeah, no, I agree, but I think he was so far behind in the polls.

28:53I mean, when you get to minus 40, you can't recover.

28:56Paddy O'Connell:How bad did it feel? It felt really bad. It felt really bad. He'd halved the Labour Party's support. 34 % is a very large support in the country. here in two years halved it by doing serious things which were utterly alien to the Labour Party. What did he do wrong? I think the first thing and the main thing that really set the tone was the cut to winter fuel payments, which wasn't in the manifesto either, so he had no mandate for it. Then he went on to attack people on disability benefits, which was wrong. Digital ID stuff, not in the manifesto. Cutting jury trials, not in the manifesto. A whole load of stuff that he had no mandate to do, and just wasn't coherent, wasn't addressing the big issues in the country either.

29:33Paddy O'Connell:John Healy's in the Times saying we've got to cut the benefits bill. One million people under 25 haven't worked. Some of them haven't ever worked. Do you think Labour gets the message that the bill's too big? I think the way I would approach it is it's an absolute tragedy that we have so many people who are unemployed at that age. And actually, I think we have to change the attitude of employers. I think there are jobs out there and they complain they can't employ people and yet we have all these people who are unemployed. And I think you need to employ people who might take a bit of managing to get them used to a job.

30:02A bit of what? A bit of managing. They need to have a bit of direction. They need to kind of understand what the job is. You're not going to get somebody fully formed, step into a job. That is not the way it works. The fetishisation by the legacy media of making poor people poorer is one of the greatest degradations of our political discourse. If the benefits bill is rising, it's because the triple lock. Make an argument about that, whether that's right or wrong, but that's what's driving the increase in benefits. But the benefits bill isn't rising, and this is the thing. If you look at the spending on Social Security as a whole, as a proportion of GDP, it hasn't changed in 15, 20 years and isn't forecast to change in the next five.

30:40This myth of a rising benefits bill is just not there. It's inefficient that we've got a million young people not in work. That needs to change.

30:49Paddy O'Connell:Well, I mean, the other way to look at that is more people are going to get older, more people have a triple lock. But what can I ask you about Andy Burnham? Is he a new-ism? We asked you here because we wanted you to be a Blairite, a Brownite and a Corbynite, and you've all refused to play the idea. So is Burnham an ism or an ite? So I think that the thing about Andy Burnham is that he is comfortable in his skin. I think that he is comfortable in being, you know, from the heart of the Labour Party and that's what we all recognise and that's what we want. It is an ism. Burnhamism is an ism, it's an ideology, it's a repudiation of the 40 years of neoliberal governance.

31:25People in this country want the end of the extension of the market into every sphere of life, social life, economic life, public services. That has to come to an end, and it has to have an active government that's willing to take control, public control, of essential services to reduce the costs of them, whether it's housing or energy. I think it's reassuring. He's come into government and said, look, here are the big things that need fixing. Public control of water, social care, the housing crisis, youth unemployment. All of those things are things that have been ducked by politicians for 40 years.

31:56Paddy O'Connell:Because of the bill and the budget's coming in October, are you sure the money's there? There are going to have to be tax rises. He's not said that. No, but I think he's basically trying to make the argument of what this pays for. Look, if you want to tackle the housing crisis, if you want to tackle social care, if you want to do a lot of the things that he has said he wants to do, yes, there are going to have to be some tax rises, who they fall on, and has he got the metal to drive it through? It's very well saying he's more ideological. I think he is. But actually to get these things done is really difficult.

32:25but the fact he's come in with an ambitious agenda and said things that have clearly resonated with the public as well, I think is a good start. I think also he has to use this majority, and I'm so encouraged to hear that he's talking about social care. So many leaders talk about social care, but I know that he feels really passionately about it, and I believe that politicians fall into two groups. Those that know about social care, either because they've had it as a shadow job, as I have, or because they've had a relative who's needed to have social care, and those who've yet to learn. that social care needs fixing.

32:57And to use this majority now, and we've got the Liberals as well, we could fix social care.

33:02Paddy O'Connell:So finally, I wish we could go on into the Desert Island Discs or whatever's coming up at 10, but do you accept what I was trying to limp towards? Something very big has changed in our politics since you all grew up, when we had, was it 10 years of Tony Blair? Was it 13 years of Margaret Thatcher? This is multi-party politics, it's short-term politics, and Labour's fingerprints are on changing the Prime Minister. You've done that to us. The country's had unstable politics for the last 20 years because the country's not had a pay rise for the last 20 years. If Labour can bring back growth, then Labour brings back stable government.

33:37Yeah, I mean, I agree with that. I think the last 20 years, politicians of all queues have failed since the banking crash. And actually, we've been in a state of almost stasis politically since then, where numerous prime ministers have failed consecutively. And hopefully, Andy Burnham will be a break with that. The country certainly needs it. You see, so you may claim that we're from different bits of the Labour Party, but effectively we are all Labour.

33:58Paddy O'Connell:With thanks to Dame-Erid Thornberry, John McTernan and Andrew Fisher. And yes, other political parties are available and we are asking them to appear on BH before the end of the year. So we'll have more of this. It's 22.10. It's actually 18 minutes to 10. The Ludwig puzzle setter Alan Conner is back to give us the answer to the conundrum he set earlier. Now, Alan, here's what listeners are saying. Kate says, one clue. How did the butler know that the letters were cut out of the Radio Times? Patrick says, well, of course the butler did it. They always do. And John says, the butler knew the person kidnapped was a female.

34:36Paddy O'Connell:The butler knew the Bitcoin account details. Is that correct? I think that noise was Alan dropping off the line. John adds, who wrote to us, please post Thomas Schaffernacker to Cornwall and tell him to bring some rain for the farmers. Alan, I think you're back. Did you hear John's explanation? Most of it. They're all good. They could all be weaved into whodunit plots, I think. So what is the correct answer? Well, the correct answer... So we had a message made from letters from the Radio Times. That's letters as in characters, not viewers writing in to complain about what female newsreaders are wearing these days.

35:16And we had the butler offering to convert the money to Bitcoin saying, we'll get her back, sir. But how would the butler know that the supposed kidnapped victim was a granddaughter rather than a grandson? And more importantly, why would the victim, rather than the perpetrator of a supposed kidnap, use letters from any publication to disguise their identity?

35:37Paddy O'Connell:It was all lies. It's classic for viewers who enjoyed your series, Ludwig. It's classic of how each episode unfurls. So with the new series, Alan, basically does the conundrum come first and then the plot is written around it? Well, the credit for the conundrums is Mark Brotherhood, who writes the amazing episodes. It's a mixture of things. But what I love about it is that all the puzzles that you see, even if you only see them in the frame for a quarter of a second, they're all real puzzles, real solvable puzzles. and I hope that one day we might gather them all together, all these sudokus that you see sitting on Ludwig's floor, and let people solve them.

36:25Paddy O'Connell:Yes, I know. Well, I didn't get the Butler one myself, but many of our listeners did. Giles, you're back here. Did you get it? No, I was lost and gripped by the story, but I'm afraid I got totally lost. I was befuddled. The great Giles didn't get it. No, I didn't, and I made notes too. Look, Alan, that's it for now, but thank you very much for cheering us up on a Sunday morning. Lovely to be here. Off he goes. Goodbye. And well done if you got it right. Here we go now. Giles is back. He's taking his hit podcast to the Edinburgh Fringe this month with Up Memory Lane, Rosebud with a Twist. It's appearing in August at the Gordon Aikman Theatre from the 5th.

37:00Paddy O'Connell:Up Memory Lane, is it like Up Pompeii? Well, it depends on which way you want to view it. My wife, who doesn't approve of the title, says, oh, Giles, oh, no, no, Mrs, no, no, no, Up Memory Lane. But I say no, it's more like Wordsworth. Up Memory Lane, we wandered on that day. It's an exploration of memory, how it works, what we remember, how memories are important for making us happy and also how we cope with memories that may be rather troubling. So it's inspired by my Rosebud podcast. Dame Mary Beard has appeared on said podcast, I think. She's launching Instant Classics with Charlotte Higgins, connecting the classical with the current.

37:36Paddy O'Connell:Dame Mary, this is your life connecting the classical with the current. I don't think you've ever been on Radio 4 without saying, this reminds me very much of Odysseus. Yeah, and particularly in the last few weeks, it's been a kind of pretty high spot for people like me who want to say, aha, look back 3 ,000 years. Well, we look forward to what you're going to say for us today. And Martha Newsome, we meet the Professor and Human Behaviour Consultant, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Greenwich and leader of the Changing Lives Lab Group at the University of Oxford. Welcome to you, Professor Martha.

38:12Hello, it's lovely to be with you.

38:13Paddy O'Connell:Well, we look forward to getting to meet you. So let's get underway. Let's start with you, Dame Mary. We have Bev Craig, Queen of the North from the Sunday Mirror. Yeah, let me start by saying, OK, great congratulations to Bev Craig, who has become mayor of Manchester. But both today in the Mirror and, you know, since she was elected, there have been kind of over the top reports about how fantastic this is, etc., etc., how they've beaten back reform, etc., etc. And, you know, I'm very much with that in a way. But the big story for me, which tends not to get mentioned every time Beth is congratulated, is that this was a 25 % turnout.

39:06And I'm afraid if we want Manchesterism to be successful and if we want, in a sense, regional government to be successful, we need a bigger turnout of the electorate than 25%. That's a worry.

39:25Paddy O'Connell:And, Giles, does it suggest there's a lot of hunger for Andy Burnham if three out of four registered voters can't be bothered to eat supper at the table? You may correct me, but I have a feeling that when Andy Burnham was elected, it wasn't much more than 30 % of the turnout. The turnouts are usually low, except at general elections. And even then, they're not massive. People are not totally engaged in politics. But indeed, sadly, congratulations to Bev. It's rather fun. Him having been king of the north, she can now be queen of the north. But, Dame Mary, back to your point. Do you think the fact that the Conservatives changed their leaders so many times and now Labour's done it as well, is the British voter feeling a bit that their head is spinning?

40:05Paddy O'Connell:It's hard to embrace a system where the system seems to change so frequently. That might be one reason, but I think there's a more general disengagement with politics. And Charles is right to say that we regularly have very low turnouts. 25 % is getting down to the very lowest. Because it wasn't low in Makerfield, it was very high in Makerfield. No, no. 58 % in Makerfield. Hang on, Mary. Martha, you study human behaviour, so what do you think has gone on? I mean, the first point for me is that it's a woman, and that's still exciting in politics. the fact that very few people are voting just shows how despondent we are young people not turning out to vote is nothing new at all to have this idea that you have some kind of will and agency to happen in these abstract politics is understandable that people don't feel they've got much chance Would you like compulsory voting anyone here?

41:08Compulsory anything turns me off

41:09Paddy O'Connell:Giles? No Mary compulsory voting? As long as you can put none of the above thank you I don't mind. That's very, that's subversive. Right, we will turn the page in every sense. Giles, the Sunday Express front page. Louis has the last laugh at the Commonwealth Games. Yeah, well, he's actually on several front pages, and it's a marvellous picture of young Prince Louis showing off his Welsh credentials because he is wearing a Welsh cycling hat, I think given to him by Sir Chris Hoy himself, who was there at the Chris Hoy Velodrome. coming to the end of the 2026 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. It was a slightly shrunken Commonwealth Games, but it still worked.

41:53It was still hugely enjoyable. All three of the royal children, the senior royal children, I think it was their first official engagement in Scotland. And they were on parade and they looked very happy. And so you see Laura Kenny, you see Chris Hoy. What's great about the royal family, one of the advantages is they are the people who do still go on beating the drum for the Commonwealth, which is an extraordinary organisation, representing 56 countries, billions of people around the world, and it's wonderful that the Games still goes on. Mary, do I hear you imminent when you listen? I mean, come on, Giles.

42:27There were some great pictures of Louis looking cheerful, but what I noticed in the papers was a line-up of all three of these young royals looking deeply bored, and what were they watching? They were watching the netball, and I thought, this is really unfair on netball, isn't it? Netball is a great sport, but it's always treated as if it's somehow just a little bit silly. Why is it treated as if it's silly? I think it's because it's a girls' game.

43:03Paddy O'Connell:I saw people in the park as I was walking my dog yesterday, men and women playing netball. Really? Yes. Well, I'm absolutely delighted. I used to play netball at school and I can vouch for it being an absolutely damn good game. But it doesn't get, you know, it hasn't had its comeback moment like snooker, has it? Netball's hardly played in school at all anymore. My daughter would love to play netball and there's no opportunity whatsoever. Is it the same rules as baseball and softball, netball? Mary? Look, I've got no idea what the rules of baseball and softball are. So I wouldn't have the voggiest clue.

43:39Very different game. I'm with Mary and the Royal Children about being bored at a sporting event. I was lucky enough to be invited to the Paris Olympics, and we found ourselves locked in the major stadium for a whole day of pole vaulting. I mean, honestly, we had to get there early to get the best seats, which we did. We were there at 8am. At 8pm, they were still eliminating people. Just running up, jumping over this thing. I mean, it was unbearable, unendurable. But the edited highlights of the Commonwealth Games have been fun.

44:10Paddy O'Connell:OK, I'm just going to move on because, Martha, we want to hear you take us to a link story from The Observer, page three. The Bountiful Game, I have a feeling this is going to be about FIFA. Well, it is, but I'm taking it. It's somewhat about FIFA, but they've managed to put a lovely Albert Camus quote in here. All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football. I thought it was nice they managed to slip that in. they critique Burnham for being sort of romantic about football that it belongs to the fans, always has, always will and then go on to say that that's not true because financially football is so lucrative and there's these huge organisations that make money out of it but it does still belong to the fans of course it does, not just emotionally but the European Super League for instance got shunted down by fans and I think what this article is really missing are the huge well-being effects of football.

45:07It ends by saying that when the price of going to a football match could be your life, I mean, I suppose it can, and there are tragic deaths in football, but there are in every part of life.

45:20Paddy O'Connell:So this is Infantino's plan, the president of FIFA, which was unveiled and dropped within days to allow private investors to buy stakes in the World Cup. I'll ask everyone to comment on that, but it's worth saying to listeners who don't know your work that you have studied the effect of football on inspiring inmates to turn their life around in prison. So you have done years of studying the allure of football. So do you know what it is? Can you tell us? I've worked on football for well over 15 years and as someone who was never into sport, it's saying something. I don't really watch the ball at all.

45:55Giles can probably empathise. I watch the fans. I'm like the high-risk fans. I just like to watch the fans.

46:01Paddy O'Connell:And would you describe it as like a religious feeling for fans? Yes, there are big analogies there. People go on pilgrimage, there are relics. It's a ritual without doubt, a secular ritual. There's about five billion fans in the world, so it's higher numbers than any singular religion. When we see it in prisons, my work with The Twinning Project, a charity that's now in many countries around the world to deliver coaching and stewarding programmes, the prisoners come together through this shared interest and skills-based learning around football, but it's more than that because it's not just about a qualification, it's becoming part of the football family.

46:36Paddy O'Connell:It's a language. It's a common language for people who... A common language, but it's a tribal instinct. So this then takes us to the reaction to trying to flog it, which is apparently what he's trying to do. What did you make of the story Giles and Mary? In fairness to Infantino, not a phrase that many people are using, he was actually trying to generate money, he would say, for FIFA by putting 20 % only of the game up for sale. He has backing from people in Africa who do feel that he's done some good work for the game. Certainly the World Cup was the biggest ever. It involved, you know, multi-continents.

47:11So that was all exciting stuff. But he's clearly blotted his copybook. He's withdrawn it and he's probably not going to survive. Either in September or next March, he will be gone. I mean, some of FIFA's money has funded the prison programmes that we're working on in countries around the world. so I personally have seen the benefits from the research we're running.

47:31Paddy O'Connell:Mary? Well I think in Fantino's days are kind of about as numbered as a British Prime Minister's days were. OK, all right. Well look, we'll leave it there because there's so much more I want to hear you talk about, Mary. So we'll turn to the Sunday Times, the travel section, page 10. The Odyssey unpacked. They're following the locations of the film. Absolutely. I mean you'd have thought that everything a newspaper could manage to publish about the Odyssey had been published, but no. The Sunday Times is letting you have a glimpse of how you might follow the locations of the movie. Now, I think at first sight you might think, this means a Greek holiday, doesn't it?

48:12Let's follow the locations of Homer's Odyssey. But no, what you discover is that the movie was partly shot in Greece, but actually a lot of it It was shot in Scotland and in Iceland. And if you were to follow the locations of this film, you would be travelling a long way into very cold climates, not the blissful Aegean. Have you seen it yet, Mary? Oh, I have seen it. I've reviewed it. I've spoken about it on a podcast.

48:47Paddy O'Connell:What do you think of it? Good in parts. OK, that's right. That's a curate's egg approach. Will you be watching it, Martha? I'll be watching it. I've heard quite scathing reviews from Greek people who feel that the Greeks are not represented enough in it. You are not represented Greeks. And what about you, Giles? Is this going to be on your vision? Very much so. My wife will be coming with me. She now always wears earplugs in the cinema because she finds it too noisy. And she's taken also to taking an eye mask. So she may neither hear it nor see it, but I'll be sitting next to her and I'll tell her all about it afterwards.

49:19I did like that The Odyssey is now twice in the top ten book sales list. So if it's doing something in that regard to get literature out, I mean, that's quite exciting.

49:29Paddy O'Connell:Mary Beard isn't here, but around the land, listeners are imagining the smile spread on the face of the dame. Yeah, the dame has got a very big smile because I just hope, you know, it's a bit like Emily Bronte in Wuthering Heights. You know, that awful movie got Emily Bronte into the bestseller list. The trouble was, I don't think there was a follow through. I don't think that there's been a real Bronte bounce. A Bronte bounce? I've only just got to grips with the other bounce. But we hope that there is going to be a sustained bounce for Homer. OK. I've only got 15 seconds to hear about banter, Giles.

50:09The point is, this is a story from the Mail on Sunday, banter or bullying? Do you enjoy banter? A research from the Nottingham Trent University is saying that banter can be good if it's done with a smile, but it can be menacing if it's done harshly. So I like a bit of merry banter, Paddy. Right, and we always have a smile, perhaps. Well, a smile is very aggressive in chimpanzees, so it's interesting that the smile might have other means.

50:36Paddy O'Connell:Thank you all very much indeed. I'm learning so much. Thank you to you all, Martha, Mary and Giles, and mostly to you for listening. The editor was Joe Cowell, the producer Sam McLaren and Natasha Mayo, studio direction from Ben Andrews. Goodbye.