Comics’ Books - S01, E09 - Transcript

GUEST: JESS FOSTEKEW

 HOST: LUCY DANSER

LUCY DANSER: Just a quick note to say that if any of this sounds a bit technically dodgy, for example like it’s perhaps been recorded remotely during lockdown, well, it has been. On with the show. 

[MUSIC] 

LD: Hello and welcome to Comics’ Books. I’m Lucy Danser and for many years I’ve worked as a producer alongside a number of excellent comedians. I’m also a book obsessive who’s always asking friends and strangers alike what they’re reading. So, I thought I’d bring my two passions together and find out, what do funny people read? Today’s guest is one of my favourite people in comedy. She’s always hilarious, has a lovely voice, is a splendid actress - you might have seen her in Motherland among many other shows - and has an excellent mind that just last week she showed off in QI. She also has her own podcast called Hoovering that’s all about eating delicious food that you should listen to immediately after this. Yup, it’s Jess Fostekew! 

JESS FOSTEKEW: Hello 

LD: How are you? 

JF: I’m good thanks, yeah I’m alright. 

LD: Are you doing any of these sort of outdoor gigs now? ‘Cos they’re starting to open. 

JF: Yeah I am.

LD: Yeah what did you do? 

JF: I did two drive-in gigs yesterday. I did two. No, I did two on Saturday in the same place and two on Thursday. I did Bath and St Albans and they’re like drive-in gigs where there’s 200 cars full of people. And um, I just, it’s such a, I don’t think I’d want my entire career to be that forever more because the honking of the cars gave me a bit of a headache but I was just so happy to be there, so excited to be doing stand up standing up again. And it was mad how quickly you start to, you know, accept a car horn as like a laugh. And honestly by the third and the fourth gigs I was going, “Well that joke normally gets at least ten honks!” It was crazy 

LD: You’ve been doing your podcast a lot haven’t you?

JF: Yeah I’ve kept that up all the way through and I’ve been really lucky in the sense that because live work’s kind of been done up until last week for a bit, but I’m really lucky since I had some writing commissioned just before lockdown and a little bit more during. So I feel a big wash of gratitude to the universe for that. And also yeah it’s meant I’ve been really busy work wise. All the way through this, so. 

LD: Have you got much reading done then? 

JF: Well, nowhere near as much as I would like. I’ve read more than I would have done in normal times. 

LD: Uh huh. 

JF: I had to read some novels as part of another podcast. So, I smashed through them at a rate I wouldn’t usually. You know, I said it to you before we started recording, but I am an incredibly slow reader. I just find it’s months and months and months on the same book And I don’t know but life is so busy. I reread an amazing book for someone i was interviewing the author, a book called the Fuck It Diet by Caroline Dooner. It’s sort of a really really amazing anti-diet book. One of the best I’ve ever read actually. 

LD: OK. 

JF: And I’m reading a book my Mum sent me at the beginning of lockdown and said, “I read this at about your age”. But it is heavy going. It’s called Germinal and it’s a Zola novel and it’s all about these incredibly poor miners who are on the brink of starvation whose bosses are greedy aristocrats and...It’s better than that, it’s visually really amazing but that’s the one I’m struggling to read before I drift off and that’s the one that appears to have been taking me the entirety of lockdown to get through. But these days I would usually stop reading a book if it was too hard going because my life’s too short and for how long it takes me. But when my Mum has sent it in the post and it’s her book, I do think I have to get through it.

LD: I think I’ve really avoided heavy books in lockdown. 

JF: Right. 

LD: I found at the beginning that any book that was a bit dark I felt like, just exacerbated my fears of what was going on at the moment and I leaned towards sort of romance and thrillers and surprises and you know. 

JF: I think that’s very sensible actually. I’ve not done that. Even with the television I’ve been watching I’ve not done that. And I’ve noticed I have been more a lot more affected by things. Because you’ve just got more time in your own head to stew on things after you’ve watched or read them. 

LD: Yeah. 

JF: Yeah. So yeah I think you’ve probably made a very wise move there whereas unfortunately my Mum sent me a book about starving miners. So! [LAUGHTER] Blame Nikki. 

LD: Thanks Mum.

JF: Blame Nikki. But yeah, as a rule I alternate fiction and non-fiction. Fiction, non-fiction. So yeah I basically I really want to read, I’ve got, well I’m sure maybe we’ll talk about it but I’ve got a guy called Will Storr’s book which is a non-fiction book about the art of storytelling or the craft of storytelling to read next and I’m so desperate to read that that it is putting a bit of fire and momentum in how often I’m making myself endure a bit of Germinal just to get it done, .

[MUSIC]

LD: So when did you, would you say, first like read a book? Or have a book read to you? The first time that you were like, “Ah this is a book”. 

JF: So there’s quite a big delay between the two types. The first time I had a book read to me was straight off the bat. I think my Mum was very good about reading me books as a baby and there was a book that I apparently loved and wanted every night called The Avocado Baby. It’s about this little baby that they, that like it was, I think, I mean I have read it more recently because [LAUGHTER], it’s a really, it was, those eighties kids books have not necessarily stood the test of time very well! Like in terms of they’re so dark like, The Avocado Baby, reading it as an adult you go, “Oh!” I mean this is a book about an underweight baby that wouldn’t eat anything and then these desperate parents eventually got it to eat avocado. But I loved that book and my parents loved it because I really loved avocados when I was a baby. And the other book that I loved and I’ve still got it even though it’s held together by sellotape and hope and I read it to my son. Well this is interesting, it’s called “There’s a Hippopotamus on my Roof” and I love it. And there’s a drip in the ceiling and this little girl is like, “There’s a hippopotamus on my roof eating cake”. And they show you in her family and she’s talking about this hippopotamus. And this hippopotamus rides a bike, he does all this stuff up there, sometimes it goes to work in the zoo making people laugh. But then there’s really, I love it and there’s a bit where she says to her Mum, her Mum’s saying, “What sort of cake is it, is it a birthday cake?” She says, “No”. “Is it chocolate cake?” “No”. “Is it a special cake? “ She goes, “YEAH!” And I love that. But there’s a bit in it where she colours on one of her dad’s books and her Dad hits her. 

LUCY GASPS

JF: I was like, “Oh dear”. And there’s another bit, it’s really clear now when you look at it, the Mum is always on a diet and that’s really heartbreaking. They’re all getting to eat really nice things and the Mum’s always having a shard of lettuce. And I was like, I just don’t think you’d get away with writing that now. And the other day, we hadn’t read it for ages, I said to my son, “Oh can we read Hippopotamus on my Roof?” and he was like, “No I think the Dad’s too scary” and I was like, “Oh wow!” Like all our sentiments have changed so dramatically. But yeah that’s what I loved when I was a kid ‘cos in the eighties we weren’t really scared, we weren’t as um, our parents weren’t as careful about what sort of messages were in the books! 

LD: So you said there was quite a big gap in between the first..?

JF: So my Mum loves to tell the story that, I’m not dyslexic and you know I’ve done pretty well academically, in the grand scheme of things. But when I first went to school I took, in my Mum’s words, an embarrassing amount of time, longer than the other kids to learn to read. And she just remembers just her heart sinking when she picked me up from school and all the other kids were starting to get their first books, like Peter and Jane and all of those like early learning reading books and I was still like just holding a couple of flashcards with basic words on. 

LD: Aw!

JF: I think I, I think I was really slow to learn to read! I remember with handwriting as well I had to have one of them special triangular rubbers on my pencil to help me hold it right until I was about twelve. 

LD: I had that! 

JF: And as a result of that perhaps I just wasn’t, my Mum was desperate for a kid who was a reader, she’s a vociferous reader and my luckily much much younger half sister is. So she got her dream in her, in someone who is constantly reading. And for me I just had no interest in reading independently until I was about eleven and then it was just, the, what broke the seal, it’s not cool and I’m not proud but it was the entire Point Horror series. 

LD: Great! Have you read every single one? 

JF: I read them all at the time. Yeah. I read every single one. Fun House was my favourite. They were all exactly the same story in slightly different settings. I didn’t care. 

LD: Good! You shouldn’t care and you should be proud! You shouldn’t belittle what you enjoy reading cos they were your gateway drug to reading. 

JF: They were my gateway drug! They were 100%! Because that led me into Point Crime

LD: Good job! 

JF: Really highbrow. Crumbs alive. Yeah, then I got into it and then if I’m honest I probably through puberty started to find, I can’t remember the name of them but Mum then was like, “Okay well read this, read this, read this”. And I must have found something on her shelf that was slightly saucy. And I do remember, I mean very mild erotica. Lots of sort of middle aged women with a very handsome nephew who needed to use the shower on their houseboat, watching their rippling muscles. And it was always a woman getting saved by a man, like dogshit books, but really you just wanted to get your rocks off didn’t you really when you were a teenager. 

LD: Yeah. 

JF: I went through lots of yeah, just reading really trashy, what I realise now is probably romance. So from Point Horror to that and then, yeah, oh God and then I don’t know when I got into reading good books. [LAUGHS] Much much later. 

[MUSIC] 

LD: When you sent your list through to me you did something that no one’s done so far. 

JF: Ooh? 

LD: Which is, you said, “These are significant but I don’t necessarily like them all”. 

JF: Yes. 

LD: “In fact I hate one of them”. 

JF: Yes. 

LD: But you didn’t tell me which one which I’m excited about. 

JF: No. I sort of, yeah I thought maybe it’s obvious but then I thought I can explain when I get onto them. 

LD: Well let’s kick off with Harry Potter then because that’s one a lot of people have read. 

JF: Yeah, I loved them. I still love it. I think obviously problematic on a number of levels, certainly in the current climate. But I thought, “I’m not not going to put them down”. I read them when I was young and you know, I think with them it was the first books I read that I felt all of my peers were reading with me, adults as well. Oh, do you know what actually? I don't’ know when they came out so this was when they came out and I was already doing A Level english. Our English Literature teacher gave us for the Summer of our first year, or maybe over Christmas, my first reading list from a teacher and what I loved about it, it was so diverse. Basically. And he said, “I don’t want you to just read one sort of book”. This is about, you know. So it had all of the Harry Potters on it, top of the list and then the next thing on it was Umberto Eco. 

LD: Wow 

JF: It was like whoa! Do you know what I mean?

LD: Yeah. 

JF: Yeah, it was amazing, amazing to sort of...and anyway I think with the Harry Potter books I loved reading something that I felt all my friends were reading too. Adults, you know, all the adults I knew were reading it, all the kids I knew were reading it. It felt lovely to be part of what felt like, certainly for kids to be like wow! Or for me as well. To get sort of really carried away and swept up. Although it’s obviously had this legacy, I was never, you know I never would have bought merch or I don’t know, identified as a Hufflepuff. Like, I’m not into that. I just loved the books. I suppose there’s a difference between liking sometimes watching Star Trek and being a Trekkie isn’t it? I never went tits deep into Potterism as a cult. But I just loved the books. I thought they were funny and really thrilling and exciting and I think the main reason I stuck it on the list for this is they gave me really vivid dreams. And I’ve always loved it when a world is so clear that I start dreaming in that world and putting my, you know, really boring hack unimaginative scenarios from my life but all set in a beautiful hall with owls up in the rafters and stuff. You know. It’s really incredible to make a world that vivid. 

LD: I think that’s why it’s spiralled off into such an empire isn’t it? It’s because so much care went into building that world. I think that it was like another real world, just an exciting crazy one and she just left everything there for it to be turned into theatre and theme parks and-

JF: Totally. 

LD: I went to a Harry Potter banquet once. It was very strange. 

JF: Amazing. Why not? 

LD: No I mean I wasn’t invited, I was a waitress. 

[LAUGHTER] 

JF: Oh I’ve been there. 

LD: So I would say that you read Harry Potter and then you also put on His Dark Materials which I would also say, I think those are books that a lot of kids read. 

JF: Yes, probably. Again that was one where again I think for me that felt sort of, I know they were written for young people, but that felt like I intellectually kind of levelled up. I do feel bad that I'm choosing these authors that have got, who have really, I do feel like this pang of sadness that so many of the most incredible minds in terms of creative writing are kind of all just falling off a cliff in terms of the wrong side of history opinions wise. But equally I think if you stop consuming the art of everybody who has a disgusting opinion, there’s not going to be much left. But yeah, I thought those books were incredible. The way across the three of them that the world gets more and more complicated but, it’s the least patronising books for young people I’ve ever read. I mean it's so complicated. The ideas, the concepts of politics and religion and power. The way those themes are dealt with. The fact that it’s a female protagonist. I just thought it was so rich, that’s the word, really rich and exciting and scary and but, entirely kind of you know fantasy that feels possible. I’m a big big fan of science fiction generally and reading scene fiction. And watching some but like, I really love it when it’s makes a fascinating comment on a potentially real situation. But also you know it is completely fantasy. I think the other thing about those, the Dark Materials trilogy was that, for the first, I already was a nerd who would happily read fantasy and sci fi. I had a lot of female mates, and still do, who would say that they’re not genres that they read.  you know, occasionally a thriller or a drama or whatever but they don’t read fantasy or sci fi, but that those books are the exception and they loved them. 

LD: But is that because they’re the sort of big famous ones and if the others ones were, or if it’s in the marketing? 

JF: Well I don’t know actually. I think they are exceptionally brilliant books actually. I don’t know. I just, I don't feel qualified to answer that. Station Eleven, I don’t know, got nowhere near as big, there’s no National Theatre play of that but you’re right yeah, I suppose maybe, and I think they are making a film of it now. The other one’s The Road isn’t it that everybody read because there was the horrible film. What a time actually to start building up all these post-apocalyptic books! 

LD: You chose John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids didn’t you? 

JF: Oh God it’s so good. 

LD: Again, not one I’ve read. 

JF: Oh it’s just so frightening. So, I mean again, unfortunately this makes me a dogshit podcast guest but I don’t remember loads of stuff from things. But at the end of the day there are very scary plants. [LAUGHTER] But I think it’s one of those things where it deals with what would happen if something happened to the whole planet which meant that almost everyone was blind apart from a few people. So actually what it’s about is how societies interact. It’s about how we treat, and there’s gender stuff in there, he’s very feminist. He’s kind of fifth wave feminist before his time John Wyndham. It’s just actually about how humans treat humans in extreme circumstances. To me, that’s what I love about great sci fi, I know it’s not books I keep talking about but Star Trek's the same. It’s about international relations as much as Klingon language or any of that nonsense. That’s what I’m into about it. The human element really. 

[MUSIC]

LD: OK, so every podcast I try and pick one of the books on someone’s list that I haven’t read and give it a whirl. And it’s quite a bumper book so I haven’t finished it but it’s genuinely completely messing with my head. 

JF: Yeah! This guy called Will Storr has written it and it’s called the Heretics and oh it’s just the most, it’s one of the most undersung book. Hardly anyone I’ve ever recommended it to has heard of it. Even huge readers like you. It was a gift to me from my friend Sara Pasoce who’s a genius and it’s fundamentally changed me. Basically. And it’s the same guy who’s written this book on storytelling which is why I’m so excited to read it. And so it starts out, I don’t want to spoil it ‘cos I want people to read it. But it starts out like a book version of a Louis Theroux series. 

LD: Yes. 

JF: He’s like an investigative journalist who’s gone to meet people with very extreme views. Perhaps Scientologists or terrible sex offender criminals. I can’t remember now the groups of people that he goes and meets. But over the course of the book it turns into something completely different. It really really turns into something a lot more introspective about the human condition and how we fear otherness and it, for me, and I’m sure there are other ways of interpreting it, it totally and utterly reconfigured how I consider myself to be empathetic or sympathetic or how I will practice in the world. Because ultimately it just, it cracked my  mind open in terms of difference of other people and difference being a good thing but also as part of this this having to accept that ultimately there’s the potential and I’ve argued with people until the cows have come home about this that everybody thinks, there are very few people in the world who think that their opinions are wrong. You know, most people think that they are good and what they’re doing is right and good, even if those people have an opinion you find morally repugnant and so someone’s, we all kind of live in this sort of state of arrogance. And it’s part of survival because if you’re genuinely thinking all the time, “Hang on what if they’re right?” I mean he makes you ask that question but he does it in such a clever way, but basically long story short it changed the way I empathise. The way I look at people with opinions. Even the opinions I find frightening or make me angry. It’s about the nature of empathy I think potentially. And off the back of having read that I found myself in a library and Trump was running to be president, or maybe had just been elected you know, and I’m a liberal Guardian reading stereotype. You know white middle class comedian. I, my opinions are obvious to anyone listening I’m sure. But I was like I want to know how this has happened. Like, how has this man got so popular? And there’s got to be reasons. How’s he got like that? How have the people voted for him come to that point? What are their lives like? And I found myself getting a book by, I would say an objectively vile woman called Ann Coulter. But she’s like a right wing pundit in America. 

LD: Oh right. 

JF: She’s kind of like, you know a kid of Katie Hopkins of America. A self confessed anti-feminist, pro-life, very far right wing lady woman. She wrote this book about Trump. Kind of, I don’t know. I think they’ve since fallen out, hasn’t everyone with him? And I found myself getting that out of the library. And I was fascinated by it, absolutely fascinated and I was like yeah I think this is it, because of reading the Heretics I was like you can’t only read things that confirm your own bias Jess. You have to sometimes read a Daily Mail or read a Telegraph or listen to LBC or read a book by Ann Coulter about Trump. Because it’s not enough to just live in a bubble with people who have all the same opinions as you. 

LD: I think I found it, I was expecting more of a sort of Louis Theroux meets Jon Ronson romp I think. 

JF: Yeah. 

LD: Because that’s how it starts with the Creationists in Australia. 

JF: Yeah. 

LD: And suddenly you’re plunged into this world where it is a bit scary because he really goes quite deep, quite, I’m only about a quarter of the way through and I’m already feeling quite shaken by it. But I found it really helpful actually for what’s going on at the moment. 

JF: Yeah. 

LD: Because I often feel quite overwhelmed by the hatred and the lack of nuance in the debate particularly online but in general now with Trump and Brexit and the Pandemic and Conspiracy theories and I thought it actually helped me understand how that happens and how we can try and combat that a bit. 

JF: Yeah, yeah. Totally. Absolutely. Just, it’s empathy isn’t it? Actual empathy which everyone’s you know says they’re an advocate of but they’ve not really thought about it fully until you’ve read that book. What really empathising entails. 

LD: So out of your last two books I’m interested to know which is the one that you hated? 

JF: I hate the books of Dan Brown. 

[LAUGHTER]

LD: Ok. 

JF: They are, it’s because, so I was travelling Central America in my mid-twenties and it’s my first time I had ever, everyone was reading it, everyone was absolutely loco for it, really into it. I’ve never felt more patronised. By a book. In my life. And it’s the first time I thought “Oh!” I think because I, and still do pride myself on not being a massive snob, I’ll read all sorts of different stuff. But it’s the first time I thought I’m lucky enough now by my early mid twenties to have read so much brilliant writing and so many different types of it, which is, why it was a significant book for me, what’s it called The Da Vinci Code, was because it was the first time ever that i’d read enough good stuff that I was reading something and I went, “Oh this is dogshit”. 

[LAUGHTER] 

JF: And it felt like a coming of age. It honestly felt like a coming of age. To be like, “Oh your brain is big enough now finally after decades of being alive to see that something’s shit”. And when I say shit I’m being cruel because I can understand that it’s not shit in the sense that you can whip through it but my God, did it, it told you what it was going to tell you. I remember a teacher giving me advice for my GCSE exams, especially sort of History and things like that. And this is GCSE, so this is where you're supposed to be when you’re fifteen and sixteen. They said, “Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them it, tell them what you’ve told them”. That's how to structure an essay and that’s how he’s written the book. But he just does it again and again and again. Actually it's sort of the worst advice you could give a novelist or even a stand up actually. So stand up, as I am a stand up is probably the best analogy. You know, one of the things you learn as a stand up, and it takes a decade normally but it’s to not do that thing of going onstage and saying, “And here’s a little something about myself”, then you say the thing about yourself and then, you don’t need, just say something about yourself. Don’t tell people you’re going to say something about yourself. You know “Oh and another thing about where I’m from” and “I know what you’re thinking I look like…” and you’re like, no! It’s so formulaic. It just felt like he had taken a GCSE essay structure and just done that again and again and again at me. There was so much telling me what he was going to tell me. Telling me it. And then telling me what he’d just told me like I wasn’t there for it. 

[LAUGHTER]

JF: Oh, dogshit! 

[MUSIC]

JF: So I spoke earlier about, I read lots of books about eating and stuff since I’ve had lots of disordered eating all of my life. I had a therapist years ago before I was ready to address the issue of disordered eating who sort of tried to tap into it but I wasn't really ready and she recommended this book. Years ago. And at the time she gave me, she leant me it actually, she gave me a very early copy of it that was all sort of black with neon writing and it was called Fat is a Feminist Issue: A Self Help Guide for Overeaters! So it was really embarrassing to read in public! Um, and it’s one of those fascinating books where ever since I first read it i took a bunch of stuff from it and I also took the very early seeds of kind of what my philosophy is now in terms of really not overthinking food very much and being quite instinctive and detaching all judgement and shame and emotion where possible from eating. Just get on with it, just enjoy it. It’s not fuel, it’s more exciting than that but it’s also not...who cares? Have what you want, when you want. You know, we are so lucky that we’re in a space abundant that, anyway and very very much in hate with the diet industry and think that it has caused so much pain and suffering and obesity ironically. Anyway. I read that book and it was my first little window into what would you say, an enlightenment really. Like out of a lifetime constantly on a failing diet followed by long patches of bingeing. But I now know. So what was really interesting was I read it, I probably spoke about it with friends. I found female friends with complicated relationships with eating reading it too. And we all took different things from it and I now realise, as much as there are the seeds of wonderful philosophy in it, it’s also, in the context of everything we know now years later, an incredibly problematic and fatphobic book. That’s got some horrible dangerous messages in it. And so on the one hand, whereas I had a life changing lightbulb moment from the book, where I was like you can, there are still bits in it that I remember where it said go out if you can afford it and buy literally everything that you’d ever not normally allow yourself in the supermarket. Do a food shop and get like all the crisps, all the chocolate, whatever your thing is where you’d be like “No I’m not having that i’m on a diet”. Get it all in. Fill your house with it, flood yourself with it. It’s there if you want it. It’s not a sin. It’s not a, it had all this amazing philosophy in it. But the takeaway message in it that I took from the whole book was if you’re fat you’re fat on purpose because you’re looking for an excuse for why you’re a failure. Which is a disgusting message and the one that I took away for years. So on the one hand it, which is why I think it’s a fascinating book and I’ve got friends that read it that took totally different messages from it. So it’s obviously really open to interpretation. It’s like a kind of Bible in a way but so flawed in the detail you know. Like the Bible's got these amazing things in it about treat people how you would like to be treated and if that was it great but unfortunately it also says that gayness is shit. You know. It’s that isn’t it? It’s like, so much good but unfortunately so much poison in there too that I can’t recommend it solidly as a book about how to eat now. But it was this beginning of something beautiful and brilliant for me in terms of enlightenment. And, yeah. So it’s complicated that one. But it’s definitely significant in my life. But it’s definitely got some awful stuff in it too. [LAUGHTER] So that’s sort of one of the ones that, I wouldn't say I hate it but Oh God, it wouldn’t be my go to book for anything now looking for a book about having a happier time when it comes to eating. 

LD: That’s quite a good, nuanced way of looking at something. Because you’re not dismissing it out of hand. 

JF: No, no. And I've spoken to other people as well who it was the beginning of their journey to happiness. So there’s greatness in it. It’s just mixed messages. It’s written by someone who wants people to be happy and well but unfortunately has a very ingrained, by society and most people still have, hatred and dislike and phobia of fat people. So you know that’s problematic. That needs shifting. 

[MUSIC]

LD: Normally I ask people for an independent bookshop and you sent me something I’d never heard of. 

JF: Yeah. Margaret Cabourn-Smith put me on to them. It’s an online book retailer. It’s a black owned bookshop and they’re, yeah, wicked. Lots of really interesting stuff especially, I would say, if anybody has looked at the black lives matter movement recently and gone I’d like to really up my game as an ally. So yeah, I think it’s a bookshop full of amazing stuff to read. 

LD: It’s just an online one yeah? 

JF: Yeah, think so. As far as I know. I’ve only ever used it online. 

LD: So it’s called No Ordinary bookshop. And it’ll be in the show notes but it’s noordinarybookshop.co.uk. So, that’s really cool. I’m gonna check that out. I’ve never heard of it. 

JF: Yay. Yeah Margaret Cabourn-Smith put me on to them. Very funny, brilliant lady. 

LD: Good. There you go. An alternative to Amazon lads. 

JF: Yeah! 

LD: Well thanks for talking to me about books today Jess. It’s been lovely.

JF: Oh my pleasure. Thanks for having me. What joy! Gimme a ring when you’ve finished Heretics. Promise? 

LD: I will if my brain’s still working. 

JF: OK. Great great. 

LD: Deal?

JF: It will be. Promise. 

LD: Thank you for listening to today’s episode of Comics’ Books. This was our final episode in our very first series and we’d like to thank all of you who’ve been downloading and listening each week. We’ll be back with more in a couple of months and in the meantime please do rate, review and share as it’s the best way to help us share the word. Have a fantastic Summer. As always we wish you the best time whether you’re reading, laughing at comedians or reading books recommended by comedians. You get the gist.