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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm Richard Porter. I'm Johnny Smith. And this is On the Other Side of Things, the Smith & Sniff spin-off in which we answer your questions. Hello, hello. Hello. Here we are again with another Q&A show on the other side of things, as we call it. Shall I just dive in there? Go on, you're good at this, so I'm going to let you, Rich, you dirty windhound.
So I'll start with a question from a listener called Alex, who says, hello, you pair of leathery vinyales. A lovely Ford reference there. I was driving north after attending your excellent live show at the London Concourse last Tuesday and found myself getting increasingly annoyed by the amount of inane guff written on the variable message signs on the motorway, especially here in Scotland.
No, I didn't do the journey in one go. Good, I was worried. I was going to say, goodness gracious me. If you were put in charge of these signs, what would you have them display on? I know what Alex means. It's like, it's almost, they're guilty of stating the obvious. The worst one, of course, is fog. And you go, oh, that's what that cloud-like substance is all around me.
I wouldn't have known if you hadn't told me. Thank you, Cy. You just go, for fuck's sake. But it's when they're sort of bored, like they haven't got anything to say, that they'll just say something like, don't drive with your eyes closed or something really fatuously obvious like that. Remember to not use reverse on the motorway. Drug driving is bad. Yes. Is it? Oh, no.
Because I took a load of acid because I knew that I'd got 500 miles to do today. So Alex is like, what would you have them display? I mean...
The thing is... Don't drive like a twat, I think, would be a really good one. Just a huge, slowly scrolling one, so the scrolling action captures your eyes, and it just says, do not drive like a twat. And also, another one which says, if you drop litter, we will find you, we will strip you, and we will make you litter pick nude for days. LAUGHTER
I wonder if this would need some level of manual control, I think, and perhaps in fact need you and me in a control room somewhere, and this all gets quite complicated, but the very bespoke messages. So you could just flash up, you know, sort of, hey, nice Mark I Golf GTI or something like that, if you saw one go by.
Yeah, that'd be quite cool, wouldn't it?
Your 4D plate looks shit. And flash up the reg number if necessary, just to fully humiliate them. So I think, yeah, a sort of bespoke nature of it.
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Chapter 2: What are the issues with motorway message signs?
But that's obviously quite hard to do on a national scale.
Yeah, it'd be nice if it was quite conversational. If it was just like, hey, has everybody seen that lovely yellow 2CV? Yeah. Yeah, I quite like that idea. Or have you seen that stolen Land Rover on the Transporter? Might want to tell someone about that. See it, say it, sort it.
You know that thing that Holly Willoughby famously did at the start of this morning after Philip Schofield left? She went, hi, how are you? Do you want the signs to do that, though? It starts with hi, and it just scrolls over to how are you? Is that what she said? Because she just didn't know what else to say. I think so. I never quite understood it. It was very weird. How's the family?
On that side of things. Did you lock your back door? When was the last time you... Have you considered getting some tropical fish? Just thought starters would be quite good. For people in awkward silences on car journeys, like their business colleague going somewhere, they're like, oh my God, we've got another 120 miles of this and we've run out of things to say.
What about try not to poo in the hedge? There's a services in five miles.
No, I was thinking more just like conversational things. Yeah. Did you ever know anybody as a child who had a lizard or something like that? Just, just, just.
I did actually, yeah. No, his name was James Henderson. I don't know why he had a lizard. I think his dad worked at a zoo. Was the guy around the corner with the Corvette a nice guy or a bit of a wrong one in hindsight?
Oh, yeah, so car-based, again, just conversation topics.
Yeah.
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Chapter 3: What would you commission Gerry McGovern to design?
So you might go, I really want a TR6. And I know they're quick and I know they're nimble and I know they look great, but... will I actually be able to shut the door on one or with my knees? Yeah. Um, yeah, because you can eliminate this stuff quite quickly.
Um, I know. Okay. I know. There we go. I know. Some food for thought, Adam. I know. Uh, I do, uh, one more quick question.
Um,
I'm going to tread carefully with this because the other week, was it last week or the week before, we were talking about giving cars names. Yes. And we take a fairly hard line stance. We're not alone on this. Our friends at Top Dead Centre are in agreement on this one.
Yes.
You don't give cars names in general. It's just something that we personally don't enjoy. Other people do, but we shared our opinion. A bit of pushback on that from a few people. How dare you stop being such miseries and so on. So, again, this is a sort of opinion-based one that may or may not cause...
um some feedback uh it's from a listener called simon who uh entitles his email simply private plates right are they for morons looking at spending 500 pounds on something that broadly says my name can't decide if it'd make me look like a bell or not okay look I could only give you my opinion, which is yes. And I think the clue here as to the problem with it for me is the word broadly.
It won't say your name, Simon. It'll say Sir Fourteenman or something like that. And that's not your name. So it's just a waste of time. If we lived in the US or a country where you're allowed a lot more leeway with what you can write on plates and someone had offered you, yeah, the license plate that just said Simon, spelt correctly, and all letters, no number shenanigans, you'd go...
Well, I mean, if you really want. I personally don't want strangers to know my name necessarily. So that's the other objection I have to things like that.
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