Ricky: That’s the first thing they thought of, was it? A monkey?
Steve: So it was quicker for them to go and get a monkey than to go back and get the long ladders?
Ricky: Why didn’t they get Spiderman?
Karl: So anyway, they got a monkey down there, and they said, ‘Right …’
Ricky: Where did they get it from?
Karl: We don’t know. From the local zoo or somewhere. So they said, ‘Look, we’ve got to remember, there could be someone up there and it’ll shock ’em a bit if a monkey comes in, right,’ so they said, ‘We’ll just get it a little small uniform and that.’
Ricky: Whoa, whoa, hold on. ‘Where are you going to get the uniform?’ ‘I’m going back to the station.’ ‘Well get the long ladders while you’re there.’ Ahh, you’re an idiot.
Karl: So anyway, it goes up there. It’s got all the kit on, its little hard hat on and all that. There was a little person up there and it manages to grab them …
Steve: Who was up there then? Someone that was just the right size for a monkey to be able to rescue, which is handy because if it had been anyone else, like a larger person or a family …
Karl: I don’t know about the size of it, but the story is saying how, like, it was quite a big monkey and that. It was good at breaking down doors.
Ricky: Oh yeah.
Karl: It was good at climbing into small spaces and stuff like that.
Ricky: Oh yeah.
Karl: Anyway …
Ricky: So it’s big enough to carry a fully grown man but small enough to climb through a cat-flap?
Karl: Yeah.
Ricky: Which is handy.
Karl: So anyway, it got the person and everything and now it’s on call if they ever need it again.
Steve: Sure, if they ever get anywhere again and they’ve forgotten the long ladders but there is plenty of ‘grippage’, they just call for Coco.
Karl: That’s this week’s Monkey News.
Ricky: Bollocks.
‘Do we need ’em?’
Karl: More animal stuff, right. When I was round your house the other night, your girlfriend Jane was talking about how they’re getting closer to doing the mammoth.
Ricky: Yes, they’re genetically engineering it. They are a few million bits and pieces away but they reckon they’re going to be able to build a living mammoth within two years.
Steve: Really. What, sort of Jurassic Park type stuff?
Ricky: Sort of, yeah. What do you think of that Karl?
Karl: Do we need ’em?
Steve: What do you mean?
Karl: Well is it worth messing about? Because I always think, whoever’s knocking one of these together, right, they must be pretty bright, right. So whilst they’re messing about with an ’airy elephant, could they be doing more useful stuff that the world needs?
Ricky: Even if, on the face of it, it looks pointless, it’s about conquering nature isn’t it? I mean that’s amazing, isn’t it, that you could bring a mammoth back. What are the implications of bringing a mammoth back? Could they aid the workload? Could they feed the starving? There are applications.
Karl: What, so you’re saying bring it back to kill it to eat it?
Ricky: Well I’m not saying anything. I’m saying that rarely is scientific discovery pointless and a waste of time in the greater scheme of things. We learn from this, the fact that we can map the DNA of a mammoth. What are the implications there? Could we bring back – I don’t know – Churchill? Could we bring back Nelson? Would we want to? Is it moral? That’s another question, but the feat alone … I don’t mean its feet. I don’t mean we can bring back a mammoth’s feet.
Steve: I could see that was the way he was thinking by the way his eyes moved.
Ricky laughs.
Ricky: Yeah. I mean the achievement alone is remarkable. Putting a man on the moon, pointless, but, what a feat …
Karl: Don’t you think …
Ricky: Not impressed by putting a man on the moon?
Karl: No, we’ve chatted about the man on the moon, you know, some people like it, some don’t. I’m not gonna argue about it. If you were behind it, good on you, but I’m not that fussed. I don’t think we’ve learned that much from it. They went all that way, popped a flag up, came back. What have we learned about that journey since? We haven’t really been back.
Ricky: We conquered space. That’s what we do. We see what we can do. Why climb a mountain? Because it’s there. What’s at the bottom of the ocean?
Karl: Yeah but I don’t agree with people who climb mountains for the sake of it. It’s all right if you’ve got to get over it but don’t go up and then go down again. Just go for a good walk.
Ricky: I don’t mind as long as they don’t strain the emergency services. If you’re a posh bloke going up the mountain in a blizzard and you get stuck, you’re an idiot. And then people have to risk their lives going to rescue you because you wanted a laugh. I agree with that.
Karl: But don’t you think the world’s busy enough? It’s like you can hardly move. And mammoths are taking up quite a bit of room if a load of them come back. We’ve already got elephants, which in my eyes are good enough. They’ll do. They carry stuff about, and that. What’s going to be better, a mammoth or an elephant, ’cos I can see that one of them is going to have to go at some point. If we start running out of elephants, would they say, ‘Oh it doesn’t matter, we’ve got mammoths’ and stuff?
Ricky: You don’t need anyone else in the room for a conversation, do you?
Karl: No no, but …
Steve: He’s arguing with himself.
Ricky: He’s arguing with his own head.
Steve: Amazing.
Karl: Where would you put the mammoth? If they get it going, right, give it the old electric shock and that, wake it up and it’s …
Ricky: He’s been watching Frankenstein. All his information about science and history is from The Flintstones, Planet of the Apes and Frankenstein.
Steve: In his head they’ve got an elephant, they’ve put some carpet tiles over it and they’re trying to bring that back to life as a mammoth.
Karl: Oh forget it then.
‘Well it did happen. It was in a
science magazine.’
Steve: Question here: ‘Karl, what would you change if you were in charge of what kids are taught in school?’
Karl: What I’d do right, instead of sort of teaching kids about two and two and that – which is four, right.
Ricky: Show off.
Karl: I think they should be asked more questions that make ’em think rather than something that has just got an answer.
Ricky: I totally agree. Teach them a desire for a quest for knowledge, inflaming their imagination.
Karl: But just freaking them out a bit as well.
Steve: I knew where that was going. As soon as you started talking, Rick, I was thinking, you’re thinking of some of the big existential or philosophical questions. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to interact with other people? Whereas …
Ricky: He was thinking, ‘freak ’em out a bit.’
Karl: Just like, you know, I read the other day that a dishwasher has been found on Mars.
Ricky: Rubbish.
Karl: So tell ’em that and say …
Steve: But it’s not true!
Karl: … Go home and write about it. ‘How did that happen?’
Ricky: But it didn’t happen.
Karl: Well it did happen. It was in a science magazine.
Ricky: No, it didn’t happen. There was not a dishwasher on Mars.
Karl: Why not?
Ricky: I’ll tell you why not. How did it get there?
Karl: But we’re always sending rubbish out there and that.
Ricky: Not dishwashers! What do you think, the council take it away and they think, ‘Where can we put it?’ ‘Well, the tip’s full, where’s the nearest thing we can dump this?’ ‘Mars, I imagine.’
Karl: No, but the same way that fella who – I don’t know, was it two Christmases ago? When he was messing about saying, ‘I can get stuff to Mars’ and all that. He did it wrong ’cos he did it on Boxing Day and I just think nobody’s concentrating. No one wants to work on that day, they are gonna do stuff sort of half arsed, aren’t they, on Boxing Day? So it didn’t really get there I don’t think, but it crash landed.
Steve: A probe, do you mean?
Karl: Yeah. But the thing is, it got there, didn’t open properly. No one’s been back to pick it up. And what I’m saying is, we’re saying about going to Mars as our next planet. It’s a tip! There’s loads of stuff that’s been fired up there.
Ricky: No, no it’s not.
Karl: It has. Like that probe thing is still there, rotting away.
Ricky: So, ipso facto, there is a dishwasher on Mars? We’ve settled that. Why would they have a dishwasher on Mars? Would they take the dishwasher up in the space shuttle in case they had dinner parties?
Karl: I just think they would have a little dishwasher in there. There’s a lot of them. Tight space. You don’t want arguments, ‘Whose gonna do the washing up?’
Ricky: Do you know how much fuel it takes to move a kilogram out of the earth’s atmosphere? They’re going to take up a dishwasher, are they?
Karl: How many people does it take to fly a rocket? Tell me, how many people?
Steve: Well it’s either one monkey, with a banana chute that feeds it, or probably two or three humans.
Karl: Right, say it’s three humans. Now there’s three humans because they need one to steer it, one to be going, ‘Yeah, we’re alright.’
Steve: And one to make some hors d’oeuvres?
Karl: No, what I’m saying is, if you’re gonna start having a sink, then whoever’s washing up …
Ricky: They haven’t got a sink!
Karl: I know, ’cos they’ve got a dishwasher!
Steve: Ahh, he’s got you there.
Karl: But anyway, I’m not gonna go into that. All I’m saying is, teach kids things, say to ’em, ‘Right, when you go home tonight, there was dinosaurs knocking about ages ago, how would you have lived with them? Get on with it. See you later.’
Ricky: Well, they didn’t. I’ve told you this before.
Karl: All right then, here’s a different question. Would it be better to have dinosaurs knocking about now, whilst we’re here? I put that in my diary the other day, that when you think about it, there’s a population problem. There’s too many of us.
Steve: Yeah.
Karl: We’re saving people all the time. No-one’s allowed to get injured anymore. You’ve got to wear a helmet when you’re on a bike. There’s speed bumps to slow people down. Zebra crossings. Cures for illnesses. No one’s dying anymore.
Ricky: I think they are.
Karl: Not as many as there should be, because the world’s crowded.
Ricky: I think there are still people dying.
Karl: Not that many though.
Ricky: Yeah I think there are still millions of people dying.
Karl: Loads of people are living longer, and that’s the problem. So what I’m saying is …
Steve: You think you should introduce tyrannosaurus rex into London?
Karl: Wandering around.
Steve: Just have them wandering around, just picking people off?
Karl: Just sort of random and that. I mean I’m not wishing that anyone I know dies and that, but all I’m saying is, I don’t know anyone who’s died for ages. Whereas if a dinosaur was knocking about, you’d go, ‘Oh, Neil’s gone missing …’
Ricky laughs.
Karl: Whatever. I just think then it is survival of the fittest. We have lost all that now. You don’t even have to be fit to survive. They just keep sticking a new lung on you.
‘I’ll start a diary’
Ricky: But Karl’s been on holiday again hasn’t he?
Steve: Oh yeah, that’s right. Karl, you don’t do anything…
Ricky: You get weekends off, you take at least five or six weeks holiday a year – even though you haven’t got a job now.
Steve: You spend your whole life on holiday basically.
Ricky: I don’t know why you need a holiday. You just potter around. Your big day last week was going to the cobblers so why did you need a break this week?
Karl: It’s just good for your brain and that innit? It opens it up a bit.
Steve: You’re not evidence of that.
Ricky: Where did you go?
Karl: Gran Canaria.
Ricky: For a week, just sitting around?
Karl: Well there isn’t much else to do on Gran Canaria. I mean I don’t want to go slaggging the place off ’cos every time I talk about somewhere I seem to get into trouble for it.
Ricky: Yeah.
Karl: But, it’s just like a big rock. It’s volcanic, innit?
Ricky: You must have looked like a little barnacle on it.
Steve: Have you been there before?
Karl: I’ve been near it before – to another rock which was the same sort of thing.
Steve: If you’ve had your fingers burnt before, why did you go back?
Karl: Because you think they can’t have loads of these islands that are the same – just a big rock with hotels on. They can’t get away with it.
Steve: They obviously are getting away with it. Why do you keep going to these places that are just rocks? Why don’t you investigate first? Ask your travel agent ‘Is this a big rock?’
Karl: Because that’s what you do, innit? You go and find out yourself. You take a risk and make up your own mind.
Ricky: What did you do?
Karl: It was just like one of them big hotels. That’s where I made a mistake. It was one of those massive places where there’s loads of people and you go for your dinner …
Ricky: That describes a hotel. You’ve nailed that.
Steve: I’ve been to a few hotels myself – and that sounds like one.
Karl: D’you know what I mean though? There’s the nice small ones where there’s just enough people but this one’s, like, mental. And it was full of old people really.
Steve: Sure.
Karl: That’s probably why it’s called Gran Canaria – ’cos there’s …
Steve: Grannies everywhere?
Karl: Yeah alright. But what what I thought I’d start doing is start a diary.
Steve: Okay. Why?
Karl: Just ’cos I sort of had a bit of time on my hands and that. I just thought ‘write stuff down’ and that.
Steve: Do you hope that this will one day become one the great literary works, like Samuel Pepys’ diary?
Karl: I haven’t heard of that. Is it any good?
Steve: You’ve never heard of Samuel Pepys’ diary? The most famous diary in the world other than, perhaps, Anne Franks’.
Karl: I’ve heard of Anne Franks and that, and I thought if she’s sat in a loft knocking stuff up with not much going on in her life at that point, yet she was still writing it down …
Steve: Whereas you’ve been to Gran Canria, yeah.
Karl: Well I’m on holiday so I thought there is stuff going on that I can chat about so I’ll start a diary.
Steve: Sure.
Ricky: You started a diary.
Karl: Yeah.
Ricky: And what are you going to do? Did you keep it up every day?
Karl: Yeah.
Ricky: Oh, can I read it please.
Karl: Well a diary’s meant to be …
Ricky: Please can I read it?
Karl: But some of it’s only relevant to me it’s sort of …
Ricky: Oh Karl, please give me it.
Karl goes to get the diary. Ricky gets excited.
Ricky: Oh my god.
Karl returns with the diary
Ricky: Look how big it is!
Ricky and Steve laugh.
Ricky: It’s huge.
Steve: It’s one of those desk diaries.
Ricky: It’s about a foot long. That is amazing. Imagine if Anne Franks’ had been like that as she got it out. ‘Doof!’ Everyone would have heard it clank down on the desk.
Karl: Yeah, but me writing’s quite big, innit?
Ricky: Oh look. Give us that.
Ricky takes the diary.
Ricky: This is amazing.
Steve: Do you know about joined-up writing?
Karl: There’s no point ’cos sometimes you can’t read it can you?
Ricky: Oh my god. Look! It starts on the first day. This is wonderful.
Ricky reads from the diary …
Ricky: Going on ’oliday to Gran Canaria today. Woke up
to the news that Tony Banks had died. There was a
piece on the news about how everyone was shocked.
Got me thinking about an invention that’d be good;
a watch that counted down your life. If it says
you’ve got three days left, go to the doctor’s.
Ricky and Steve laugh.
Ricky: Told Suzanne about invention. She said she wouldn’t buy one. But she said that about the iPod.
Steve: How would this device work, this watch? How would you know when you are about to die? Is that a consideration? Or not something for you to worry about? Presumably the boffins would take of that.
Karl: No, all I was thinking was about that Tony Banks fella who died and everyone was shocked by it. But if you had a little watch on …
Ricky: You can’t just say ‘wouldn’t it be good’. How would this work? I imagine you’re in the patent office going ‘I’ve got an idea.’ ‘Certainly Mr Pilkington, what’s your idea?’ ‘A watch that counts down your life.’ ‘Oohh, how does that work …?’
The World of Karl Pilkington Page 11