New Utter Shambles episodes

Two of my favorite comedians Robin Ince and Josie Long have a podcast together. Their first season was called Show-and-Tell. The second season was called Robin Ince's Utter Shambles. And now a third season is called Robin and Josie's Utter Shambles. I'm excited that they've chosen to do a third series. Episode one just went live yesterday! You can listen to it for free on Comedy Central Online.

The premise of the show is Robin, Josie, and their guest bring in an artifact which inspires conversation. This rarely happens as they all tend to get sidetracked and don't get around to anything they planned to say. But it's funny to listen to. I still stand by that the best episode is episode 6 of Show-and-Tell.

Episode one of series three wasn't the best episode ever, maybe because I had high expectations. It guest starred Alan Moore of the comic world: V for Vendetta, Watchmen, etc. They started by talking about something I didn't understand. I generally don't know Robin's references anyway. I don't know if this was a cultural gap or a generation gap. But eventually the topic moved on to how do you define whimsy, people pretending to be you on the internet (Alan said someone online pretended to be him and said he hates children and he had an identity crisis, wondering if he was really Alan Moore at all), and parents buying you things you don't want that are loosely related to your interests (like Robin's mom knew he liked comedy, so she got him a white knitted sweater with a picture of Charlie Chaplin's face on it).

The best bit was when Alan says "When you invited me onto this show, I was worried you wanted me to be your Karl Pilkington. You two would discuss something and then go 'Alan, what do you think?' and I'd say [puts on Northern accent] 'Do you think a crocodile could evolve from a stapler?'" (I love that Karl Pilkington is a household name now.) To which Josie responds, "I'm perfectly aware of my role in this podcast." As Robin has pointed out, all she really did in the last series was occassionally say something random and eat fruit loudly.