Jack joined friend of the show Sinan Kose's epic "chaos stream" in the wake of last month's Labour conference to discuss the ways that Starmer used it as an opportunity to railroad the left - this recording covers the stream from the point at which he joined the conversation. It treads similar thematic ground to our recent episode with Tom Blackburn, which you should check out, along with Sinan's Twitch stream at twitch.tv/skthecrusader, and his Twitter account @TheSinanKose.

Subscribe over at patreon.com/reelpolitik to hear this full episode - located here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/57324327 - and much, much more exclusive content!

This episode is about stoner movies. Lowest common denominator stuff. Movies that are just about weed. Movies where weed solves everything. What more do we need to say? How High. Half Baked. Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, the single most searing satire of Bush-era America. They're all here. Tune in, toke up, drop out. Part one of two.

Jack and Geraint are joined by guru of Reel Politik Thought Tom Blackburn (@malaiseforever on Twitter), a writer and editor for New Socialist and contributor to Tribune and the Guardian. Tom breaks down the labyrinthine political developments that took place over the week or so surrounding Labour's annual conference, in which Kieth Starmer delivered an endless speech written by the *politically* bald Phil Collins and rigged the party rules to shut the left out of the leadership indefinitely. Tom is an informed and erudite voice on any number of political matters, and especially the (arduous) struggle for socialism within the Labour Party, so those who want a clear-eyed take on Starmer's right-wing ideological project should check this episode out: along the way we read ridiculous pieces by Robert Peston, by Tanya Gold for the-other-cow-site (alongside mikegapes.co.uk) Unherd, and some stuff from the now-buried leaked Labour report into how the party's right purposefully threw elections while Corbyn was leader.

Jack and Geraint are joined by Toronto's preeminent man of letters Will Sloan, co-host of the Michael & Us - @michael-and-us - and Important Cinema Club - @the-important-cinema-club - podcasts*, who tweets @WillSloanEsq.

The topic of the day is the late period work of six of comedy's grandest old lions in winter - well, five really, as Graham Chapman died in 1989 at the age of only 48; yes, the old men whose turn it is to cop that trademark RP smoke today are the Monty Python team, and the work they've made both together and apart since their final feature film as a team, 1983's The Meaning of Life. We look at their varying approaches to coasting on past glories and - inspired by John Cleese and Terry Gilliam's sad decline into "you can't say anything these days" reactionary grumbling - the politics of Python.

Their various reunions and semi-reunions are addressed, in addition to Eric Idle's appointment of himself as unofficial custodian of the group's legacy, steering them in an extremely lucrative kind of "Elvis in Vegas", Python-in-a-sparkly-suit, light entertainment type direction. We also relive the time Will bullied Idle off Twitter in argument over Jeremy Corbyn.

*those @s are for our fellow soundcloud users.

Writer, Red Pepper co-editor, and repeat RP guest Rhian E Jones - author of the new book Paint The Town Red and co-host of the Handbags & Gladrags podcast - joins Jack for a long-promised Dylanological summit, inspired in particular by his recent "livestream" performance Shadow Kingdom and the new, 16th, edition of his Bootleg Series, Springtime In New York (which features rare tracks from 1980-5.) We talk about the enormously creatively vibrant Infidels era, the lyrical peaks of 2001's "Love & Theft", how 2020's Rough & Rowdy Ways (reviewed previously on this show) proved that he's still got it, and his truly career-spanning setlist on the - final to date - 2019 leg of the Never Ending Tour.

Check out Rhian's two podcasts for Repeater Radio: the Raymond Williams-inspired, Welsh-centric Border Country - https://www.repeater-radio.com/bordercountry - and her collaboration with Eli Davies about women and pop culture, Handbags and Gladrags - https://www.repeater-radio.com/handbagsandgladrags - and pick up a copy of Paint The Town Red at the Repeater site: https://repeaterbooks.com/product/paint-your-town-red-how-preston-took-back-control-and-your-town-can-too/

After a short hiatus for most of August, RP is back on the hype. Yair is back from paternity leave, and joins Jack and Geraint to discuss a trifecta of pivotal political matters: firstly, we celebrate the delicious defeat of the dastardly Gerard Coyne in the Unite General Secretary election. Then - taking up the bulk of the episode - we discuss the insidious political persecution and cruel vilification of legendary socialist, Britain's greatest filmmaker, Ken Loach. Finally, we yuk it up about Geronimo the Alpaca (RIP) and then do about 5 unplanned minutes on Netflix's shitty Woodstock '99 doc.

Go to patreon.com/reelpolitik to hear the full movie commentary and bonus half hour or so of chatter at the following link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/54719661

Despite being a huge fan of Danny McBride's work with his writing partner and director Jody Hill, I'd never seen the low-budget McBride/Hill debut flick The Foot Fist Way (2006), about a loser martial arts instructor with broadly the standard Danny McBride persona, with all that entails. My own GapeCast writing partner (season two is coming!) Farages Fucked Face insisted on showing it to me, and he asked if we could stream our hangout on Twitch. This, of course, meant I had no choice but to get my own bootlegging rig going (a free program called "mp3 skype recorder") to record it in far better quality than any of the ten viewers on FFF's Twitch would've got at the time (we forgot to advertise it). I liked the film a lot, and once it was finished we kept talking for a while about our comedy inspirations and some of the shit they've got themselves into over time, like Matt Damon and DaBaby have recently, in a segment I like to call 'Casters On Couches Doing Cannabis.

Peace & love,

Jack

NOTE ON LISTENABILITY: Early on in the recording, I cease the hilarious observations and bon mots in order to eat a sandwich, and then eat lots of crisps and sweets. This is mostly within a fairly short space of time, so, as I advise in the recording, just skip ahead if that's not your idea of ASMR. This is also not a great commentary to watch the film along with, as mine and FFF's copies of the film go out of sync at times (as much as I tried to remedy this live in the minute), and the link we were streaming from kept freezing (I tried to cut out as much "for fuck's sake it's frozen" and talk about what link to go on as possible, but it means that the commentary won't run concurrently with the film after a certain point.

We promised that our epic dive into Ruth and Martin's Album Club - episode 217: the RP RAM Album Club Club - was only a taste of what we'd recorded with tom disso on the subject. True to our word, here's another full episode (not some skimpy 20 min "Bonus RP" type shit) in which we address two of the worst RAM Album Club reviews of all: Chris Addison's spectacularly ignorant lukewarm 6/10 review of Marvin Gaye's seminal What's Going On, and Euan McColm (guitarist for the band Fat Cops, alongside bandmates Al Murray the Pub Landlord, JK Rowling's husband and a guy who calls himself "Bobby Bluebell") completely failing to appreciate Joni Mitchell's masterful Blue album.

Follow tom disso on Twitter @nailheadparty

Special thanks to our guy Rob @aboynamedposh for inspiring our deep RAM dive with this increasingly agitated thread; https://twitter.com/aboynamedposh/status/1415100149605572608?s=20

To hear more content like this - including bonus RAM material with tom disso - go to patreon.com/reelpolitik and subscribe!

bonus RP on RAM Album Club, 70s cinema and - in this exclusive clip - FRAUD MP

Subscribe @ patreon.com/reelpolitik and hear the full thing here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/54718965

In the mid 2010s, there existed an uneasy peace between Britain's Twitter-using centre-left and elements of the hard left and centre right. One of the era's quintessential venues for comrades of different political affiliations, but perhaps similar social and professional milieus, to find common ground was RUTH AND MARTIN'S (RAM) ALBUM CLUB, a tumblr blog in which a hand-picked selection of individuals drawn primarily from the worlds of light entertainment and political journalism would take it in turns to review an album they'd never heard before.

In this exclusive RP investigation, RP crew affiliate and producer of smoking beats tom disso (@nailheadparty) joins Jack and Geraint to peek inside this capsule of a whole other time. We choose to focus on four reviews in particular, each of which are in their own way quintessentially RAM: Tim Farron on NWA's STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON, Matt Forde on David Bowie's HUNKY DORY, David Aaronovitch on the Wu-Tang Clan's ENTER THE WU-TANG: 36 CHAMBERS and, finally, Tom Watson on Bob Dylan's SLOW TRAIN COMING.

To hear the next instalment of the RP RAM Album Club Club, in which we focus on Chris Addison's truly shocking review of Marvin Gaye's WHAT'S GOING ON, and Euan McColm's equally repellent take on Joni Mitchell's BLUE, subscribe over at patreon.com/reelpolitik