The World of Karl Pilkington

by Pilkington, Karl

Steve: Whoa! How does a monkey ‘try it on with the missus’?

  Karl: This is classic Monkey News.

  Steve: How does he try it on?

  Ricky: He’s a bit drunk. He stinks of smoke. He tries it on with the missus. How does he try it on with her?

  Karl: I don’t know all the details.

  Ricky: You don’t know any of the details.

  Karl: I don’t know the detail on that bit but …

  Ricky: You don’t know any of the details.

  Steve: So what happens? While the zookeeper’s away the monkey did play. What happened? Did the zookeeper’s wife reciprocate these affections?

  Karl: She probably went along with it at first. You know, she’s cooking at home, getting the tea ready, it’s walking past pinching her arse or whatever. And you know, it starts off just like it does with humans. It starts off as a bit of fun, before you know it … Anyway, the zookeeper and his wife split up in the end. I think the monkey stayed with the woman.

  Ricky: Honestly, your imagination.

  Karl: Just put in ‘monkey/chimp/Ollie’ into the Internet and it’s all there …

  ‘She was sort of mental homeless’

  Karl: I give to charity but I feel like I’m being cheated a bit.

  Ricky: You were conned by a charity weren’t you?

  Karl: I got stopped and they drag you in by saying, ‘Have you got a gran?’, and I said, ‘No they died and that.’ It’s, ‘Oh did they die of the cold?’ ‘No. Ill.’ ‘What did they have?’ ‘Just old age.’ They said, ‘Well, what happens with a lot of people’s grans is they die in the cold, right.’ So, I says ‘That’s bad innit.’ So she’s chatting and she’s showing me pictures of these old women, who look cold, saying ‘Look at her. That’s Edna. She’s got no family. She can’t pay the bills and all that.’

  Ricky: Sure.

  Karl: Anyway it goes on for about fifteen minutes and you feel bad. You give ’em your bank details, right, and what happens is, every couple of months you get a letter from Edna. Well it’s not from her, it’s typed up and what have you, but there’s a picture of Edna and it’s saying ‘Oh, this December Edna is going to be extra cold. It’s cold outside, she can’t afford to pay the heating’ and what have you. So you keep paying every month like £5 or whatever. I get another letter a few months later, right, Edna’s sat there – she’s got a tan!

  Steve: What do you mean, ‘she’s got a tan’?

  Karl: When they said she needs money because she’s cold I thought they meant for the heating – not to send her on holiday for a month. She’s sat there with a tan. I’m not joking.

  Steve: Are you sure it wasn’t just a problem in the printing process?

  Karl: No, no definitely.

  Ricky: Are you sure it wasn’t liver failure?

  Steve: This is a terrible thing to say, but when I see those people approaching now, with the clip-boards, I always get my mobile phone out and pretend I am having a conversation.

  Karl: Yeah, I’ve done that one.

  Steve: The number of fake conversations I’ve had walking past them now.

  Karl: I’ll tell you what, we’ve talked about homeless people before and that, and I walked past one the other day. Don’t you think that if you had a company, it’s worth taking them on? Because they never have a lie in.

  Ricky: Brilliant.

  Karl: When does it become, like, bad to avoid homeless people? Because some people say you shouldn’t, that they’re people like us who have just had a bit of bad luck.

  Ricky: Well of course they are.

  Karl: Yeah, I know but I remember one on our estate and she was a bit – what’s the word that you can use, because I don’t want to offend anyone? She was sort of mental homeless. Is that a term?

  Ricky: That is the official term.

  Karl: Well she lived on the estate and what have you …

  Ricky: How was she homeless if she lived on the estate?

  Karl: Well, she sort of decided to stay round there, because I think people on the estate spoke to her more than people who had money.

  Ricky: Really?

  Karl: So anyway. This mental homeless woman on the estate, what she used to do, right, she acted quite normal and she used to always push a pram around with her, right. And she was dead happy; every day she was walking up and down the road. Anyway one day she walked past me, right, and I turned round and looked in the pram – and there’s a bucket with a face on it!

  ‘I could eat a knob at night.’

  Ricky: Jilly Goolden – now she …

  Steve: What’s she been up to?

  Ricky: Well you saw her in I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here?

  Steve: I haven’t been watching it.

  Ricky: She popped a little kangaroo knob in her mouth, chewed it up.

  Steve: What, it was just lying around?

  Ricky: No, it was just one of the things she had to eat. Carol Thatcher, the daughter of one of our leaders, she popped a couple of bollocks in her mouth, chewed them up, swallowed them – and Jilly Goolden had to eat a dried kangaroo penis. It was so tough she couldn’t even get through it.

  Steve: What, it was like a Peperami?

  Ricky: Yes. What do you think of that Karl?

  Karl: What, eating that sort of stuff?

  Ricky: Yeah.

  Karl: I mean I watch it, I like those little trial bits, right, but what I don’t think people realise is, right, it is hard eating a little kangaroo knob.

  Steve: Really, how do you know?

  Karl: No, it’s just, you think about it and you go, ‘Oh I couldn’t do that,’ but what they never mention on the TV programme – which I think takes it to the next level, right – is that they’re eating that stuff at, like, half past seven in the morning – which is worse, innit? If I was there and Ant and Dec said, ‘Right Karl, eat the knob’ I’d go, ‘Hang on a minute. Give us a few hours. Let me get some rice and that in me belly and just sort of fill myself up a little bit more. I’ll pop back at about half six this evening – have it ready.’ And I’d be happier then.

  Steve: You don’t want to eat animals’ private parts on an empty stomach?

  Ricky: So what are you saying?

  Karl: I’m saying I could eat a knob at night.

  Ricky: Just cut that there. We’ll loop that. If any DJs are listening, just take that quote ‘I could eat a knob at night’ by Karl Pilkington and maybe do a dance remix.

  Steve: Yes, maybe you are a house music producer and you could maybe get some high energy beat going and then we could send that out to some of the gay clubs. I’m sure it would be really popular.

  Karl: No, but d’you know what I mean though?

  Ricky: I could not do it. I couldn’t pop a kangaroo testicle in my mouth and chew it. It was disgusting to watch. Good on them because they were doing it but then again I think, ‘Well, they wanted to go in there.’ On the one hand I think, ‘Is that admirable? Is that showing good British mettle or is it “I’ll do anything to get on telly for a week?”’ Where does it stop? I thought Rebecca Loos went too far when she gave the little pig a tug, but at least she knew where to stop.

  Steve: I think it’s obvious when you have to stop – the pig tells you that.

  Ricky: Where is there a kangaroo hopping around without a cock?

  Karl: Here’s another question right – a bit of a spin off with animals and that. Have you ever, Steve, killed a fly?

  Steve: Probably, yes.

  Karl: Right. Well I was watching David Attenborough, right. He makes his money out of flies and that, don’t he. D’you think he’s ever killed one, or does he go, ‘Well I can’t kill that fly or that spider ’cos that’s how I make my money’?

  Ricky: I don’t know what the question is.

  Karl: Right, me mam, right, she said, if a fly is knocking about the house, she never kills it. She always catches it and puts it out and that. She said she’d never kill one.

  Ricky: Who is she, Mr Miyagi? What do you mean, �
��she catches it’? How does she catch it?

  Steve: With a pair of chopsticks.

  ‘Let me just tell you the

  ending ...’

  Karl: D’you know the other week when I came up with a different idea of how we can make the world run and that.

  Steve: Can we just have a quick recap of that because I seem to remember it was a load of old arse.

  Ricky: It was ridiculous. It was saying that the world is over-populated so we should have a system whereby people live until they are seventy-eight – I don’t know how you can enforce that – but when they die they’ve got a little baby in their stomach, like a pip in an apple, and the baby carries on when they die. It wasn’t a theory, it was the ramblings of a mental case.

  Karl: Anyway listen, right, I’ve been thinking about it, right, and if we can’t do that, right, if it’s a ‘no’ to that idea …

  Ricky: It is a ‘no’.

  Karl: … Here’s another idea…

  Ricky: Ooh, you could win the Nobel prize for this one …

  Karl: There is a lot of ways in’t there, in the world, that some creatures and that go about sort of moving on, if you know what I mean …

  Ricky: Not really. Do you mean evolution?

  Karl: Yes, on that David Attenborough programme he’s always showing, yeah, little insects and what they have got to do. And there was one about a wasp, right, that had to fly about, right, for ages, looking out for a certain type of spider, right.

  Ricky: Which it lays its eggs in, correct.

  Karl: It whizzes down, it lands on its back, so it’s got to get that right. I don’t think the spider’s up for anything, the spider isn’t even aware of this. It’s not going, ‘I’ve got to look out for a wasp’, even though all this has got to be perfect timing. So this wasp dived down right, sat on the back of this spider, it injects it or something, with a maggot or something, right – and then that maggot lives off the spider for a bit. The spider knows it’s got a maggot in it.

  Ricky: No it doesn’t.

  Karl: It does.

  Ricky: No it doesn’t.

  Karl: And it’s making a web for it. It goes, ‘I’ve got something to look after here now. I’ve got responsibilities.’ It makes a web, right. It sort of reverses into it and puts the maggot on the web. The maggot sort of clings on to the web, maggot eats the spider – and then it moves on. Now if I came up with that idea you’d say, ‘That’s never gonna happen.’

  Ricky: Wake up! It’s not the fact that you came up with the idea for an old lady dying at seventy-eight with a baby growing in her – even though it’s nonsense, it’s no idea – it’s how could it be enforced. Even if scientists thought that was the best idea in the world how would they make it happen? Who’s gonna go, ‘That’s a good idea, we’ve never thought of that, get in Elsie. Elsie, we wanna try something …’

  Karl: Who told the wasp to look out for that spider? To go on its back?

  Ricky: What do you mean ‘Who told the wasp?’ – It’s evolution, it’s natural selection …

  Karl: Yeah but say, like, we have a kid at the moment. You don’t just jump on the back of a woman and go ‘There you go love’ and then a baby pops out.

  Steve: You do if you come from Bristol.

  Karl: No what I’m saying is, right, you build up to it don’t you. You have a bit of a chat and you go, ‘How’s it going?’, ‘Alright yeah,’ and you get on and that – and then a little baby will come out.

  Steve: Oh, that’s how babies are made is it? You have a chat, and you go ‘alright’ and a little baby comes out.

  Ricky: That is amazing.

  Steve: Man alive – this is incredible.

  Karl: What I’m saying is at what point is a wasp ever gonna have a chat with a spider or meet up with it?

  Steve: I don’t even understand where we are now in this conversation.

  Ricky: ‘At what point is a wasp gonna ever have a chat with a spider?’ What world do you live in? What’s in your head? I can’t believe it. ‘At what point is a wasp ever gonna have a chat with a spider …?’

  Steve: So in some kind of weird insect nightclub these wasps and these maggots are meeting and getting on. Is that how you imagine it?

  Karl: No, but that’s what I’m saying to you. What are the odds on that actually happening?

  Ricky: Listen – behaviour in lower forms of life is purely chemical. It bypasses any form of consciousness. There is a parasite that lays its egg in a stickleback, okay, and it literally has to change the stickleback’s behaviour because it has to get into a warm-blooded animal to complete its cycle. So what it does is – this parasite makes the stickleback not flee from the shadow of a heron – it makes the stickleback get eaten! So it then is in the belly of a warm-blooded animal and it can complete its life cycle. But at no point is this parasite going, ‘Slow down, there’s a heron coming. Stay here. Stay here.’ And the stickleback isn’t going, ‘Why? I don’t wanna stay here, there’s a heron.’ There’s no conversation. It’s not like they get together and go, ‘Listen I have got something that might be mutually beneficial to both of us. I need to get into a heron.’ ‘Hey, you like to be eaten by a heron but I don’t …’

  Karl: No, all I’m saying is you know the idea that I came up with – well, you’re saying that’s crazy.

  Steve: How many times have we heard ‘All I am saying is’ and then such a stream of nonsense that it’s blown our minds?

  Karl: No, but that’s all I’m saying – what you’ve just explained there with the heron having to knock about and for a flea to be sat in the shade and that …

  Ricky: Now that is incredible. That’s his translation of what I just said. That sums it up for me. He sees a headline, he reads a book, it then goes through this weird filtering system. And I imagine there is music in his head – it’s ‘boo bi boom ba eh oh bi ba’ – like a discordant piano.

  Steve: I think the noise in Karl’s head is like a fax machine at full volume. Errrrrrrrrrr!

  Ricky: I think it’s like music from a Czechoslovakian cartoon from l963. Odd noises, woks being banged, pianos being hit by elbows.

  Steve: He is the only person you can give a body of information to and he strips away the facts.

  Ricky: The way he said that. I clearly talked about some sort of parasite in a stickleback that makes its behaviour change so it doesn’t flee the heron’s shadow. He said, ‘So there’s an ’eron with a flea who doesn’t like the shade.’ How did it get to that?

  Karl: It doesn’t matter – forget that right – but anyway …

  Ricky: What’s your theory?

  Karl: What I’m saying is, I’ve come up with summit else that I wanna run by you then.

  Ricky: Go on then.

  Karl: As you have sort of boo boo’d the other idea …

  Ricky: Boo boo’d?

  Steve: We have boo boo’d it.

  Ricky: He’s chosen a completely different bear. It was originally ‘Pooh Pooh the Bear’ but now it’s ‘Boo Boo the Bear’. Brilliant!

  Karl: … You’ve said no to the old woman having a kid before she dies. What about if we do it the other way, right? Somehow, I don’t know how yet…

  Ricky: A kid has an old lady?

  Steve: That’s what it’s going to be isn’t it? A child gives birth to an old man.

  Karl: No, what I’m saying is, right, work the other way round…

  Rick: Come on then.

  Karl: So if somehow we can inject something into a body that’s just died, right…

  Rick: Listen to this. Imagine his notes. When he hands them into the Nobel people and they say ‘If there’s a way that we can inject something’. And the Nobel committee go ‘Well what?’ ‘Well I don’t know the chemical formula but something. Something HO2…’

  Karl: So anyway, you inject it in the temple.

  Steve: He’s narrowed it down to ‘the temple’.

  Karl: So you inject it in.

  Rick: Who are you injecting?

&nbs
p; Karl: This old woman who’s been ill and that and she’s died.

  Steve: So she’s dead? We’re bringing old people back to life? Okay, fine, we’ve just got to sort that out first, but fine, we’ll crack that, so go on – next.

  Karl: This is a way of controlling population remember. They can’t be having it away and having kids. This is just the way we’ve got to work now.

  Ricky: Okay, so there is an old lady. What happens?

  Karl: Right. So you get, like, an old woman …

  Steve: … Who is dead …

  Karl: Right, inject her and that …

  Steve: Inject her!

  Karl: … And then what happens is – she sort of wakes up, right, and she works the other way. So she might be seventy-seven and then she’ll have a birthday and she’s seventy-six and she’s working that way, if you know what I mean. Okay, are you with me …?

  Ricky: I’m really scared. This is the maddest thing you’ve ever said. This is madder than the old lady with the pip like an apple in her belly.

  Karl: That sort of did work.

  Ricky: No it didn’t work. It worked in your head. It’s like you had a dream and you woke up and went, ‘Oh I’ve got a great theory.’

  Karl: Let me just tell you the ending because the ending works out a bit better. What I’m saying is when you die at the age of …

  Ricky: Seventy-eight.

  Karl: Nine months.

  Ricky: What?

  Karl: At the age of nine months. ’Cos that’s when you die.

  Ricky: What do you mean when you die at the age of nine months?

  Karl: You’re not scared of dying because you’re now a baby so you don’t know what’s going on anyway.