Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you are on the planet. This is Bill Nye at Ill-Advised by Bill Nye. And I'm here to answer your questions, or at least pretend to, without actually making things worse. It's a refuge here for the clumsy and the awkward. And if you're socially adept and enjoy healthy relationships, there's nothing for you here.
This is a podcast for people who shave on tiptoe to avoid looking in their eyes. I actually have a mirror at home, which it never occurred to me. I placed it on the wall where I thought it would look good. But when people come around, you'd have to be six foot seven to use it as a mirror. But it never, ever occurred to me.
It's only when people come around, they say, why do you put a mirror so high? You can't look into it. And I didn't think of it as a mirror. It was just like an object that looked, it was oval-shaped, it was dark brown, and it looked kind of good. It just makes me laugh that, you know. But if you jump, you can see. If you jump up for a billionth of a second, you can just about see.
You don't look very good because you've just jumped, but you can actually use it. Thank you for all of your questions. Here goes.
Hi Bill, this is Max here from Essex. I'm getting in touch because I'm currently struggling to ask a girl out or tell if a girl likes me who works in the same office as me. We have a similar group of friends but I'm a bit of a scaredy cat about approaching people in the office so we don't get to hang out a lot.
I don't know if you have many cases of office romance or anything like that but I don't have much luck in any walk of life so how do you manage to ask a girl out? Any advice would be Positively useful. Thank you so much. I'm loving the pod.
Max, this is the hardest question in the history of questions. And the idea that I would know the answer is you should ask any of the girls who I tried to ask out how they feel about me doing that. But now, of course, when it's too late, I have all kinds of ideas. I think you should probably say something like, do you want to get a soya frappuccino? Trust me, it works every time.
I don't know why. Maybe it's the soya thing. No, I'm kidding. It probably doesn't work at all. You could say, I wondered if you would like to have, you know, breakfast with me in Paris. If you've got any money, I don't know how much money you've got max, or you could say, uh, I feel really, really stupid, but I'm going to do it anyway. Can I take you out?
I think the thing is not to pretend you're not nervous unless you want to turn what they call pro and you really don't want to turn pro max. Cause that's a deeply unattractive status. Um, so.
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Chapter 2: How can I effectively ask someone out?
And when I'm working, I hate to work in excessive heat. You know, I made a film not that long ago in Rome in August. I mean, are they out of their minds? And it was brutally hot. And we were outside in the street most of the time. And I was in a suit and tie, obviously, standards. And it was very unpleasant.
Your makeup artist has to keep nipping and to clean you up in between takes because you're melting. And it's just unpleasant. I'd rather be cold. I have acted in places so cold. In fact, recently I was on the coast outside Liverpool in the nighttime wearing four sets of thermals. That's tops and bottoms. Four sets. Three silk and one wool.
I mean, I don't know about silk, but some kind of thin thing. And I was still cold. And it became quite difficult to speak because your jaw and your mouth kind of starts to freeze up. So it's quite difficult to speak like that. And when we were in Canada one time, 30 miles south of the Arctic Circle, one man's jaw actually did freeze up. We had to stop filming because I couldn't talk at all.
And I don't know why I'm laughing. It's not funny. But then once in New York, when I went to New York to do a play in the wintertime and the New Yorkers would say, it gets cold here. And I'd think, yeah, I'm from London. Do you know what I'm saying? and then it got cold, and it got seriously cold.
And I was walking along the street with my mouth open at one point, and somebody waved to me from a cafe, and I went, and I had to go in the cafe and sit there for a while because my jaw had frozen up. So there you go. Hey, hey, New York.
Hello, Bill. I'm Sue, and I live in North Yorkshire. I recently came upon an appearance of yours in the vintage sitcom Agony, in which you sported an unfortunate bleach blonde hairdo. I'm sure this was not by choice. I'm left wondering what advice you would give the mature man about coping with hair in later life.
Sue, that was a deep dive to find me in agony. You're quite right. It wasn't my choice. I have to say, you know, I'm slightly sad to hear you say that you considered it unfortunate. But it's a long time ago. Yeah, I know. Well, thank you. My producer, Alice Williams, has just done the same deep dive and she thinks it looks gorgeous. So I'm going to stick with her.
Yeah, no, I took the job and it was when the police, the band, the police were very big and they were all, you know, they had chemically enhanced hair, at least I believe they did, and they were all blonded. And so the producers of the show thought that I should have blonde hair like them.
And I went to the hairdresser and the man, the young man who was doing it had white hair, you know, peroxide, white straw, like not even straw, white hair. And I said to him, with all due respect, I don't want it as white as your hair. And he said, no, no, no, no, no. And then he made it just as white as his hair. And I had this kind of white haystack. I had quite a lot of hair on my head.
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Chapter 3: What challenges do people face in office romances?
That's also now eradicated from the English language forever. I'd never heard of either of those things until I started asking people for banned words. Also, an expression that should be on the banned list probably, which I've been guilty of using many, many times, is baby doll. I do mitigate the use of it by calling men baby doll as well as women baby doll.
I did actually say to a female friend of mine once, baby doll, in a postmodern ironic way, and she said, I can't believe you've called me baby doll on International Women's Day. I, of course, was unaware that it was International Women's Day. But every time International Women's Day comes around now, I text her, hey, baby doll, how's it hanging?
which is obviously inappropriate and wrong, and it should be a private affair, but now I've just exploded it into the public sphere. It's now time for this episode's playlist and this episode's playlist was originally called Adultery Soul 2 because we had a playlist called Adultery Soul a while back which was all R&B songs concerning themselves with adultery, obviously.
But this one is not called Adultery Soul 2. It's called Adultery Gets Lonely because I thought that was a more telling title. And it starts with a song by Ray Charles called I've Got News For You, which starts with, you said before we met that your life was awful tame. Well, I took you to a nightclub and the whole band knew your name. You wore a diamond watch, claimed it was from Uncle Joe.
When I looked at the inscription, it said love from Daddy-O. So you get the vibe. Did I actually just use the word vibe? Yes, I did. So that's I've Got News for You by Ray Charles. And then we have another song from Womack and Womack who are quite good on acronyms. They had a song called APB, All Points Bulletin, which was about adultery. But I had that on another playlist.
And this one is also by Womack and Womack. It's from the same album, Love Wars. And it's called TKO, which stands for, I'll spare you younger people Googling, it stands for technical knockout. As in, I think I better let it go. It looks like another love, TKO. And that's a very cool slice of sweet soul music. And then you've got Angie Stone with Could Have Been You.
Could Have Been You, Laying Next To Me, which is another song about the aftermath of adulterous activities. And then you've got Van Morrison singing another Ray Charles song called I Believe To My Soul, You're Trying To Make A Fool Out Of Me. And then there's an odd country song from Shelby Lynn, one of my favorite country singers, and it's called Breakfast in Bed.
It's an unusual premise for a song because it's somebody welcoming an ex-lover who now lives with somebody else. into their home knowing they've had a big fight with the person they currently live with. So they've come around to see their ex. It's that song. And they get breakfast in bed. So that's the whole of it. And that's called Adultery Gets Lonely.
This week's book is called The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and it's written by Philip K. Dick. And I think, you know, I have to include a book by Philip K. Dick, of which there are hundreds. He was one of the most prolific writers in the history of writers, not least because I think he took huge amounts of various forms of speed.
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Chapter 4: What led to Bill's minimalist lifestyle?
Dr. Smile said, this girl in the bed is Miss Rondinella Fugate, Ronnie, as she asked you to call her. It sounded vaguely familiar and oddly in some manner tied up with his job. Listen, he said to the suitcase, but then in the bedroom, the girl began to stir. At once he shut off Dr. Smile and stood up feeling humble and awkward in only his underpants. Are you up? the girl asked sleepily.
She thrashed about and sat facing him. Quite pretty, he decided, with lovely large eyes. What time is it? And did you put on the coffee pot? He tramped into the kitchen and punched the stove into life. It began to heat water for coffee. Meanwhile, he heard the shutting of a door. She had gone into the bathroom. Water ran. Ronnie was taking a shower.
Again in the living room, he switched Dr. Smile back on. What's she got to do with pee-pee layouts, he asked. Miss Fugate is your new assistant. She arrived yesterday from People's China, where she worked for PP Layouts as their pre-fash consultant for that region.
However, Miss Fugate, although talented, is highly inexperienced, and Mr. Bolero decided that a short period as your assistant, I would say under you, but that might be misconstrued considering. Great, Barney said.
he entered the bedroom found his clothes they had been deposited no doubt by him in a heap on the floor and began with care to dress he still felt terrible and it remained an effort not to give up and be violently sick That's right, he said to Dr Smile as he came back into the living room buttoning his shirt. I remember the memo from Friday about Miss Fugate.
She's erratic in her talent, picked wrong on the US Civil War picture window item, if you can imagine it. She thought it'd be a smash hit in People's China. He laughed. The bathroom door opened a crack. He caught a glimpse of Ronnie, pink and rubbery and clean, drying herself. Did you call me, dear? she asked. No, he said. I was talking to my doctor. in the meantime, stay loose.
Bye.
Ill-Advised by Bill Nighy is produced by Alice Williams and Kiera Gregory with assistant production by Angelique Somers, pronounced Somers, and Charlotte Ross, pronounced Ross. And it's an iPod Studios production.
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