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As we prepare for the excitement of Bonfire Night, an apology. Sometimes the momentum of these things runs away with us, we cue into something, and then forget to play it.

Such was the case in this pod. Having prepared you for a huge clump of the Piss Poor Podcast of blessed memory, we then got distracted, and when we finished couldn’t be arsed going…

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Well probably not.

Big new podcast coming soon for Kelner Prime customers. Meanwhile here’s a bit of free stuff to keep you going until the world ends, not with a bang but an awful lot of whimpering, as my good friend, the poet and fascist T.S.Eliot almost said.

As previously mentioned I write a monthly column for the excellent rugby league magazine Forty 20, which has little to do with the sport (my column, that is, not the publication as a whole which has an awful lot to do with it), and as the Venn diagram of rugby league aficionados and Kelner subscribers is not going to overlap that much, I’m giving you the chance once more for an advance squint at my meanderings….

Here it is…

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If you are reading this, that’s rather good news. It means the impending apocalypse is at the very least postponed.

Used to be there was just one ill-shaven chap in a frayed-collared shirt hauling his placards up and down Oxford Street warning that the end of the world is nigh, now it’s everybody. And the warnings are disturbingly non-specific. Climate change, artificial intelligence turning on us, and Vladimir Putin are front runners at present. But wherever it comes from, sensible men and women in proper suits and polished shoes are unanimous, it’s out there.

Out there, like in a 1950s drive-in movie, and we need to take action quickly, specifically spending more money on defence and, er, baked beans apparently.

Apocalypse stories have become de rigueur (whatever that means) now the Russell Brand trial is over, in the newspapers (and in those places where people actually get their news these days), and my favourite is the one about supermarkets running out of tins of baked beans, after the Government urged us to stock up on groceries in the face of the coming Thing, whatever it is.

Yes, as we face the end of days - and you only have to switch on the TV to watch Strictly Come Dancing dying before your eyes to get that fin de siecle (whatever that means) feeling - it’s interesting that all we can think of to do is rush down to Sainsbury’s and denude the shelves of Heinz’s most successful variety.

I’m not sure how much good we think those beans are going to do is should the direst of the predictions come true, but a casual reading of dystopian fiction, possibly Cormack McCarthy’s fun novel The Road, might convince you that we need to gather around us something more than haricot beans in a rich tomato sauce, however comforting, as we face perdition.

Yes, perdition. It’s not a word you hear much these days. I got it out of Roget’s Thesaurus.

Just to navel-gaze for a moment, you’ll recall I used the word ‘apocalypse’ in the first and fourth paragraph of this piece so, looking for an alternative, I put it into my supposedly smart ‘phone and got nothing back but scores of ways I could buy, rent, stream or somehow acquire Francis Ford Coppola’s admittedly fine 1979 film Apocalypse Now.

Luckily, I have a battered old Thesaurus on my desk so I am able to continue to guide you into the coming ruination, catastrophe, etc. without too much repetition, recurrence, duplication, reprise, you get the picture.

But it was tinned foods I really wanted to address. Why just baked beans? Having grown up in the 1950s, parented by a wartime generation, we had cupboards - some of us called it a larder - full of all sorts of tinned food today’s stocker-uppers could only dream of. When my mum died and we were clearing out her cupboards, my sister reckoned she found a tin of corned beef with a Utility Samp on it, something of which only keen students of the Second World War would be aware.

But there was other stuff too, which I reckon supermarkets, in these difficult times, should maybe collect in one specific aisle, called maybe the Seniors’ Section offering tins of pilchards, cling peaches, peas and carrots in an unlikely combo, spam, condensed milk, and why not throw in a Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie, the great survivor, on top of that.

In the face of the approaching finality (come on Roget, you can do better than that) people are allegedly looking more closely at these kind of products, and as evidence I have a feature in The Times recently, headlined Stockpile Gourmet, including recipes for butter bean shakshuka and spaghetti with tinned sardines.

The previous day, as it happened, the main feature had been ‘Eleven easy ways to strengthen your bones,’ illustrated by a picture of a lovely big piece of salmon, following the usual upmarket newspaper routine of trying to keep the aging readership alive long enough to take out a subscription.

It took them just 24 hours, then, to segue from fresh salmon to tinned butter beans. As it happens I absolutely love butter beans. Hugely underrated in my view. But, having read the Cormack McCarthy work referred to earlier, I feel it might be wiser to just buy a gun.

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As we reveal in my latest sixty minute magnum opus, you can get a whole year’s worth of this stuff for the price of a bowl of pasta and a couple of glasses of borderline palatable red wine in a Glasgow trattoria.

Tell your friends - if you have any - like, restack, give it some retweeting and stuff, or just enjoy. But Martin’s money-saving tip is subscribe one way or another. You won’t regret it. Much

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Apologies for absence. Had a few days break, followed by a weekend on the graveyard shift at TalkSport - nine hours of speech radio in all, what with the hour going back. So while we wait for the next podcast, allow me to share with you one of the many TalkSport highlights, a look back at a more or less forgotten era in British sport.

The BBC has to cut its coat according to its cloth, we understand that, but surely economies could have been made elsewhere.

How, the nation will be asking itself, is Naga Munchetty still in a job when the innocent pleasures afforded by a 70-year-old edition of The Navy Lark is denied to us?

Only joking. Munchetty is personal prejudice and The Navy Lark is bollocks basically. But vintage bollocks.

And be honest, does anyone derive any amusement, education, or intellectual satisfaction from BBC Breakfast. What’s the point of it when we have Sky News?

But 4 Extra! I listen to 4 Extra like some people listen to Capital Radio or Greatest Hits. Half-hour documentaries about the history of rice pudding or some such, old episodes of Just A Minute from when Nicholas Parsons was still alive, Jake Yapp on the Comedy Club, my old chum Wes Butters whinging on about Kenneth Williams.

It’s a miscellany that’s probably livened up many a car journey for some of us old geezers, who are not entirely conversant with what to do with BBC Sounds.

Are we to be disregarded? Well yes. Of course we are. I understand. We’ve probably contributed as much as we’re going to. What chance do we have with our triple locks and our tinned sardines in tomato sauce pitched against a world of Munchetty and matcha coffee?

So farewell, I’m afraid, 4 Extra and BBC Scotland, which I have personal reasons to lament. 4 Extra, under its original name of BBC7 and its first commissioning editor Mary Kalemkerian signed up for a series and a Christmas special of Pleased To Meet You - after hearing the pilot, no less, god bless them - with myself and Jake Yapp, and later gave it numerous re-runs on 4 Extra (for no extra money). It’s posted here after one of the re-runs. I have loads more which I will disinter from time to time on my Prime Kelner Substack podcasts.

Also, around the time we were making Pleased To Meet You I came the closest I have to success in this business, making regular appearances on Fred Macaulay’s morning show on BBC Scotland alongside a fantastic cast of comedy talent.

BBC Scotland, for a nugatory fee of 35 quid or whatever it was, seemed to attract far funnier folk, mostly from the Glasgow comedy clubs and folk cellars, than Radio Four managed in it’s more structured comedy output.

So let’s give these radio outposts some recognition at least before they disappear for ever. I don’t think there’s much we can do to stop it. I’m too old to march.

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Bit of admin: On TalkSport graveyard shift this weekend - so no Prime Kelner podcast till early next week. Incidentally we’ve lost a paying customer, which ain’t bad after a whole week of inactivity, but can I just remind you of the nugatory monthly fee of just £3.50 & the even more nugatory yearly subscription of £35. It’s not a subscription trap. You can obviously cancel when you want, because somebody has this week!

Meanwhile, couple of recommendations: Jake Yapp’s Cornershop Showdown. Check Internet for details. It’s live in various places. I saw it at Buxton Festival and it’s joyous.

On TV - the BBC’s Aberfan documentary, heart-stoppingly moving. And with real villains, Lord Robens and Lord Tonypandy. Two of the many who’ve subverted the title Lord.

And on Sky - Ania Magliano and Paddy Young with the Weekend Update on SNL UK. They’ve inherited the mantle of the late great Norm Macdonald from the US version. I love the way they laugh at their own and each other’s jokes. They seem to be enjoying themselves and that’s half the battle. Incidentally the Norm documentary on Netflix is superb. Long but riveting

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It’s the one we discovered in the archives of a Sixties band from the North of England who floundered in the wake of The Beatles - and Gerry and the Pacemakers and the Fourmost to be brutally frank - but remarkably 50-odd years before Substack was even invented not only predicted the platform but that a young ginger-haired kid from Manchester would become one of its leading practitioners.

Not only that but it enables me to continue my paean to bananas which, owing to time constraints, I was unable to complete on Fighting Talk yesterday. As I exclusively recealed, I bought a bunch of five in Waitrose for 85 pence, 17p each, and wondered what else you could buy in Waitrose for 17p. Answer: nothing.

So why have bananas remained so cheap when everything else has risen in price exponentially? And for that reason isn’t it time we put whoever’s in charge of bananas in charge of everything else in the supermarket?

And what a magnificent product the banana is. It comes in its own naturally biodegradable packaging - no netting or plastic box required - and is full of vitamins, minerals, and potassium, loads of potassium, which apparently we all need and is more or less absent from the normal things we eat, like Big Macs and Thai Fishcakes.

My conclusion was that the banana is like The Beatles of the food world. Underrated. Like the Fabs, however good you think they are, they’re even better.

New subscribers, there’s loads of free stuff on here, but if you want the full experience it’s a derisory, nugatory fee of just £3.50 a month.

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I’m sure most of you will be familiar with the story of Sisyphus who was condemned by the gods of the underworld to push an immense boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down every time it neared the top. And even if you’re not, you’ll have seen a version of it in the 1932 Laurel and Hardy film, The Music Box, when the boys try to deliver a piano up several flights of stairs.

It’s where we get the expression ‘Sisyphean task’ from, covering anything from painting the Forth Bridge to keeping the freezer lid free of frost, or in my case finding a pub in London where they’ll put rugby league on the TV.

Forget the Internet. It’ll give you all sorts of pointers, from Hoxton to Hammersmith, but when you actually approach the bar, order your pint (how much?!?), and begin negotiations you’ll be lucky if you get much more than a desultory spool through the channels.

It’s not as bad as it used to be. Those of you collecting these columns in the souvenir cut-out-’n-keep leather binders will know I have previously referred to a brief period in the 1980s when British Aerospace, keen to dip a toe into satellite broadcasting, televised what was then Second Division rugby league. I covered a few matches for them in a mercifully short-lived foray into commentary.

My own team, Swinton, featured occasionally, and finding myself in London on radio duty one weekend my smarter brother and I sought out a pub that might be showing our match. Our misfortune was that the only other sport British Aerospace had rights to was boxing, so the pubs with their service tended to be mostly no more than a punch and a spit away from Bethnall Green, and preferred Sunday lunchtime entertainment came from up-and-coming young pugilists at York Hall.

We tried a couple of these venues in the as yet determinedly ungentrified East End, before Simon, a man of decision, said, ‘....or should we just go for a Chinese?’

Which brings me to the Saturday of the Wigan-Wakefield semi-final when again I was in London, trying to breathe a little life into the dying embers of what I laughingly call a career, and coincidentally in a boxing pub, this time The Ring, opposite Southwark tube station, with photos of the cauliflower-eared and squashed-nosed multitudes crowding all the walls, and some nondescript fighting (at least I didn’t recognise any of the combatants) playing noiselessly on the TV.

Times have changed. They serve Thai food in there now (small plates if you don’t mind - you could fit two in the average middleweight’s fist) and were very obliging in changing channels, maybe in the hope of a bit of biff. But without sound.

My friend, the journalist Will Buckley, said: ‘You’ll have to help me out, I haven’t seen a rugby league match for 30 years,’ but it wasn’t easy. The subtitles descended into gobbledygook whenever the action got particularly frantic. For all I know, the commentary may have started like that, but I tend to take a tolerant view of commentators remembering my own wet Tuesday evenings at Barrow calling matches for the aerospace crowd.

Elsewhere in this fine journal Trinity’s achievements will be duly lauded, but for me they came with a tinge of regret.

I advertise myself on my Substack page (martinkelner.substack.com) as the third most famous resident of Wakefield, behind Jane McDonald and Chris Kamara, but the frequent shots of Trinity’s cheerfully corpulent owner, kitchen magnate Matt Ellis, its coach Darryl Powell, and the scorers of the tries that secured the team’s unexpected progress to the Grand Final means I risk being sanctioned by the Advertising Standards Authority should I fail to rewrite my profile.

‘I doubt you’re in the top ten now,’ Will said gleefully. All right, I’ve slipped in the fame game, it might cost me a Substack follower or two, but as we minor showbiz personalities like to say, this is a level of fame I am comfortable with.

I can walk down the street without being pestered for autographs or selfies, and I can go to a restaurant with my wife or kids and know that I can enjoy my meal in peace, without being interrupted. Not that I couldn’t before.

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