or is this a scientific experiment?
Ricky: What I like is, he said to you then, ‘Look if you don’t want to do it, we don’t need to do it.’ As though, if you were up for it, we’ll sort it out.
Steve: We’ll have a whip round and do the research.
Karl: I just think at the end of the day we’ve got to do something. Is anyone keeping an eye on this and looking at what we can do next to control the population thing? It does my head in that I’ve got to live in London for work and there’s loads of people here and you know, forget going out on a Saturday night – it’s too busy.
Steve: So your solution is that seventy-eight-year-old women have little babies inside them and as they slip away into death, the little babies are born?
Ricky: And who looks after the baby, because it is a pretty good system having a baby while you are young enough to look after that baby and make sure it lives to reproductive age itself.
Steve: I mean that system has been working for years. But wait a minute Nature, put that on hold, ’cos Karl Pilkington’s got an idea.
Karl: That’s what it was. Just an idea.
Steve: Yeah, it was nonsense, but thank you for it.
Ricky: It was the ramblings of someone you’d find by themselves, in a hospital, eating flies.
Steve: Yeah, this is the sort of thing you’d find in the diary of a psychopath who went on a rampage and then turned the gun on themselves. They’d go through his possessions and find he’s drawn weird drawings, women with knives in their face, and written this kind of gobbledegook.
Ricky: I saw a similar sort of theory written out on a wall, but it was written in shit.
Karl: No, all I’m saying is, when people die normally, everyone’s fed up about it, aren’t they, and a bit down, but if when you pass away, you go, ‘Oh we’re going to miss Gladys’ or whatever, but then there’s this new life brought in. It’s almost like a bad news/good news.
Ricky: But you’re talking about it like someone could pick this idea up and run with it; like you’ve given them enough information to do it. How is this possible? Where does she get the baby from? How does it grow? Why grow it in Gladys’s belly? Why not have it in a drawer? Just add water.
Steve: Who looks after ‘Son of Gladys’?
Ricky: There is no theory here. It’s the ramblings of a madman.
Karl: What I’m saying is the body is always changing innit – from caveman to now, or whatever, and they’re always finding out more and more. Like d’you know how they say people have six senses?
Ricky: Yes.
Karl: Well there’s loads more than that.
Ricky and Steve laugh.
Ricky: Okay, show me that you’ve got just one.
Karl: No, right, there’s this one that’s knocking about and what it is – say if I’m in a pub, right, and I’m just doing a crossword or whatever …
Steve: … Unlikely, but go on …
Karl: And there’s some woman who’s walked in, right, and she’s staring at me. I know she’s looking at me and I look up and she’s looking at me. They’re saying that’s a new sense that they’ve found out from doing tests and what have you.
Ricky: Yeah, it’s rubbish.
Karl: And they are saying that’s been around since like man and dinosaurs was knocking about.
Ricky: But it could be peripheral vision.
Karl: No they’ve explained it.
Steve: I think it’s safe to assume that, with your perfectly round head, people are always stopping and looking at you.
Karl: No, but they explained it. They said it’s from the time when caveman was wandering about and he would go, ‘Hang on a minute’ and he would look round and there’s a dinosaur there or whatever, and he’d leg it.
Ricky: Right, this is nonsense. ‘When caveman was wandering round’. Cavemen and dinosaurs, oh they used to live together, yeah sure. Oh that’s the same era. What have you been watching, Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC?
Karl: What d’you mean?
Ricky: What do you mean, ‘caveman wandering about, knocking around with a dinosaur?’
Steve: You do know The Flintstones is only partly based on fact?
Ricky laughs.
Steve: Dinosaurs and man did not co-exist. Dinosaurs had long gone before man arrived. Extinct, kaput.
Karl: Hmm.
Steve: What, you don’t believe us because you saw that film where they took pictures of lizards and magnified them and put them next to men so they looked like they were fighting each other?
Karl: No but why couldn’t that have happened? Why wasn’t there dinosaurs back then? Just like we have dogs now.
Ricky: He has been watching The Flintstones. You know cavemen didn’t mix concrete in a pelican?
Karl: I just think that there must have been a crossover point.
Ricky Why do you think there must have been a crossover point?
Karl: Because if nothing was knocking about at any point, how did anything carry on?
Ricky: I know, exactly. Why didn’t Hitler meet Nero? It’s weird, there must have been a crossover, they must have met at a party somewhere. I mean are you telling me that Ken Dodd has never met Genghis Khan? They must have bumped into each other, I can’t believe it!
Karl: Oh forget it.
‘D’you know what, I’m sure summit’s died in here.’
Karl: D’you know how you don’t believe in scary stuff, like ghosts?
Ricky: I believe in scary stuff. I don’t believe in anything totally illogical.
Karl: Vampires?
Ricky: No. Anything made up by man.
Karl: Well there was summit in the paper the other day about a vampire, how they found one. They dug summit up, found a body in a coffin with a bit of wood through its heart and a knife in its mouth.
Ricky: It was a vampire pirate?
Steve: That’s definitely proof of a vampire, of course, and not just some grotesque murder. That’s
