"This programme contains some strong language." "I like to think of myself of someone who can take pleasure out of life." "In fact, I like to think that it's a sin not to, that if you're eating it should be an enjoyable meal, and if you're doing anything, you should be getting fulfilment and pleasure out of it." "But there are pleasures that one might consider," "I suppose if it was a type of chocolate, you would call them something twee like Indulgences, and I have a few of those, which a lot of my friends find incomprehensible." "# Shame, shame You could be right I sunk pretty low this time" "# Shame, shame, shame, shame, shame Shame... #" "The most important purpose of pleasure is..." "Well, perhaps I'm putting it the wrong way round." "It's really you have to find a reason to explain why what you're doing is not pleasurable." "Pleasure, in other words, is actually a duty." "The South Downs." "Ovaltine." "Cream." "Heaps of cream." "Cream and lawnmowers." "Summer holidays in creamy Cromer." "But, like all duties, it's a tough one to live up to." "It's not easy to live a life of pleasure." "England and cream." "Creamy old England." "Custard creams." "Strawberries and cream." "Strawberries." "English creaml" "Creamy England." "Englandl Creamsl The most cream of old Englandl" "Oh!" "Ohl" "The kind of pleasures that I'm talking about are things that fly in the face of the Protestant work ethic, things that fly in the face of bourgeois convention, and things that even fly in the face of one's own self-image," "that one is supposed to be a sophisticated example of modern Westernism, and you find yourself liking something that a girl of ten would shrug at." "# Tonight the super trouper Lights are gonna find me" "# Shining like the sun" "# Smiling, having fun" "# Feeling like a number one... #" "Abba are very different and very special," "Abba are very different and very special, and the thing about them is, one of the things you enjoy most in anything is, is when something is better than it needs to be." "In order to be good pop it could be like A-ha." "If it was going to be like good Swedish pop it could be like A-ha." "And that would be fine, you'd be very happy." "Perfectly acceptable." "Instead of which they've written songs like Waterloo..." "# My, my, I tried to hold you back But you were stronger... # ...SOS..." "# So when you're near me, darling Can't you hear me, SOS... # ...Fernando..." "# There was something In the air that night" "# The stars so bright Fernando... # ...Dancing Queen..." "# Ooh, see that girl" "# Watch that scene" "# Digging the Dancing Queen... # ...which have a quality that is far beyond what is needed to make good pop." "And I don't quite know what it is, it's somewhere in the arrangement, those fabulous signature percussive piano figures, whether it's the..." "To the exultant joy of the choruses when they happen." "It is just they've found a way of writing songs that has never been equalled, matched or imitated with any success by anybody that I know." "And, yes, they're camp, and ridiculous, and their Swedish accents sound a bit silly, and the sentiments behind them are hardly profound, but it doesn't matter, there is just something fabulous about them." "# Mama mia, even if I say" "# Bye-bye Leave me now or never... #" "Abba are just something else." "They're really great." "MUSIC: "Theme Music to Howards' Way"" "Howards' Way, to me, symbolised a certain kind of British drama which now, perhaps sadly, but probably thankfully, doesn't exist any more, in which the idea of BUSINESS was a very hard, tough thing," "and it was full of people shouting about business." "You manufacture the boats, I'll sell them." "All I need is my office space, and we're back in business." "After I've checked what the company lawyers have to say, not before!" ""Those stock options are mine!" And drinking a huge amount on screen." "Usually with Kate O'Mara in the background doing something or other." "I'm willing to accept some shares in Leisure Cruise instead." "Forget it!" "Hugh and I did, not exactly a parody, cos we never really did parodies, except on very, very rare occasions, but a sort of world a bit like it with a couple of businessmen who shouted a lot at each other." "It's pretty much as we feared, John!" "Yeah?" "Only a whole heap worsel" "Suppose you start from the beginning." "Not much to say!" "Seems that..." "Marjorie, who was always dogging their footsteps, and they were always splashing huge amounts of Scotch down themselves." "I gave her shares in D-tech." "And you think..." "Think!" "I don't think anything!" "There isn't time to think, there's only time to act!" "But is Marjorie really capable...?" "And there's this thing about their divorce." "I suppose I must have flipped, I emptied a bowl of trifle all over her." "So she got custody?" "Very." "I just remember thinking how we could have dared do a custardy joke." "CHEERING 180!" "Darts." "Darts, how shall I praise thee?" "My mistress, my lover, my one-night stand all rolled into one, darts." "COMMENTATOR:" "Yesl What a shock to win a world championshipl" "It's not the most attractive game in the world to look at." "You can smell the stale beer, and feel the crunch of peanuts beneath your feet as you walk." "And the darts players themselves for years have been famed for their less than slim and athletic forms, we have to be honest about that." "Andy "the Viking" Fordham - world champion a couple of years ago." "He almost throws the planet out of orbit every time he goes for a run." "But, underneath it all, they are - you're going to laugh at me, but it's true - they are supremely talented at what they do." "And what they do, you may say, is pointless, but like all games, yes, it is quite literally ludicrous, from the Latin, ludus, meaning, a game." "It is gamesome, if not childish." "And the thing about darts is it just has very simple scoring that makes it fantastically exciting." "Fantastically exciting." "COMMENTATOR:" "Tops!" "Goes in!" "Double eight." "Yes!" "That's the second..." "He's had the match in the palm of his hand but Martin Adams this time moves through...!" "This business of high-scoring, and then having to go for the double, it's so simple." "Going down from 501." "And yet you can have these great events - the nine dart finish that we all dream of." "180!" "You can literally have nine darts and go from 501 to owt." "180!" "How can you ever excuse a minority sport, like darts?" "The only way you can excuse it is by saying it is just a cracking game." "It's thrilling!" "I've rarely been off the edge of my seat more than at a great darts match." "Yes!" "Yes!" "Double 12...!" "Yes!" "It's there!" "What does "responsibility television" mean?" "Well, it means that we're immensely concerned that nothing we do has a bad influence on our viewers." "Thus when I hit Hugh like so..." "LAUGHTER ...erm, we have to consider what the effect on the viewer might be." "It's a strange thing that over the years I must have hit" "Hugh Laurie more often than Muhammad Ali ever got hit in his career." "It is very pleasurable to hit someone for purely artistic and comic purposes, but it turns out, of course, that Hugh is brilliant at being hit." "Do you know, it's funny, from some angles it looks like 22..." "SOUND OF TAPDANCING ...King's Lynn." "So, you know, I can just straighten my arm, and Hugh's body will fly across a room." "And that's nothing to do with me, cos I'm not actually connecting... most of the time." "You really are cruising for a bruising." "Though I did do a sketch where he played a Formula One driver, and I got so tired of his moaning - that was sort of the subject of the sketch..." "There were many, many problems, and it was very hard and difficult and I eventually lose patience, you know." "You're paid millions of pounds a race, you can have sex with anybod you choose, and all you do is moan." "Are you arsing well happy, you dismal, moaning, French twat?" "And so I eventually just punch him." "Pathetic sketch, really." "And unfortunately on this occasion, I actually hit him." "I hit him really quite hard." "Right on the point of the chin." "And it was one of the most hilarious things I've ever seen - the shock in Hugh's face, it was fantastic." "I'm standing here, and this guy..." "Arrgggh!" "LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE" "The pleasures, I suppose, that are most obvious to me are things that I know other people will not enjoy." "If we're not talking self-abuse here, which is an entirely different ball of wax, not that I've ever used a ball of wax, but you know what I mean." "It's to do with things like Wagner." "MUSIC: "Ride of the Valkyries" by Richard Wagner" "I'm fully aware that for most people Wagner is almost an offence." "It's so huge, so monumental..." "That's one side of it." "He himself was such a son of a bitch." "Hitler liked the music." "He wrote anti-Semitic tracts, Wagner." "Almost everything about him, really, militates against one finding him, as I do, one of the greatest joys in my life, one of the more significant and important pleasures I have." "But such is the nature of the music, that I almost always have to play it alone because I don't really have many friends who share my enthusiasm." "# Hojotoho!" "Hojotoho!" "# Heiaha!" "Heiaha... #" "We know who we are, we meet each other at drinks parties or give secret signs in the street, or quote the odd line in a shop queue in order to prove our existence." "Others miss the reference, and our eyes meet, and we tap the sides of our nose, and we know." "HE SINGS WAGNERIAN ARIA" "Wagner is everything in life." "He's the key to understanding art, and he is all arts." "He is everything." "I don't..." "I sound ridiculous if I'm exaggerating, but every time I think," ""Oh, it's been a week or so since I've listened to some Wagner", and I do," "I think, why do anything else?" "Why don't I devote my life to studying this man's music and this man's works?" "Hello and welcome to Don't Be Dirty." "A show that shows you don't have to be dirty." "Swearing is a really important part of one's life." "It would be impossible to imagine going through life without swearing, and without enjoying swearing." "20 cock-grip shafting sleeves..." "LAUGHTER" "There used to be mad, silly, prissy people who used to say swearing was a sign of a poor vocabulary." "It is such utter nonsense." "The people I know who swear the most tend to have the widest vocabularies, and the kind of person who says swearing is a sign of a poor vocabulary usually have a poor vocabulary themselves." "Did your children actually see the programme?" "No, no, no." "They didn't." "They didn't see it, no." "But only thanks to the purest good fortune that they don't actually happen to have been born yet." "The sort of twee person who thinks swearing is in any way a sign of a lack of education or a lack of verbal interest is just fucking lunatic." "May I consult my notes, m'Lord?" "Certainly, certainly, certainly, by all means, yes." "I, erm..." "I apprehended the accused, and advised him of his rights." "He replied, "Why don't you ram it up your pimhole, you fusking clothprunker?"" "I haven't met anybody who's truly shocked at swearing... really." "They're only shocked on behalf of other people." "Well, you know, that's..." "preposterous." "Perhaps it might help if I explained that I don't give a flying toss about Mrs Banks." "Well, erm..." "I beg your pardon?" "Or they say, "It's not necessary,"" "as if that should stop one doing it." "It's not necessary to have coloured socks, it's not necessary for this cushion to be here, but is anyone going to write in and say," ""I was shocked to see that cushion there, it really wasn't necessary."" "No." "Things not being necessary is what makes life interesting." "The little extras in life." "He said, "Skank off, you clothing cuck, you're all a load of shoatbag fuskers," ""so prunk that up your prime-ministering pimhole!"" "ALL GASP" "And what did you say to that?" "Erm..." "I told him to mind his BLEEP-ing language, m'Lud." "Bloody well think so!" "Delia Smith's recipes have become so popular, she has achieved the honour of being an entry in the new edition of the Collins English Dictionary." "She's the first person to be listed under first name only." "Oh, Delia, Delia..." "DELIA!" "You could almost write a poem, "Delia, Delia, oh please let me feel-ya."" "You almost want to say, don't you, "Delia, Delia, I love the meal-ya cook." ""Delia, Delia, let me peel-ya potatoes for you."" ""Delia, Delia, let me peel-ya potatoes for you."" "So there we are." "Creamy-white sauce made with milk and no-lump flour..." "She's everything to the British, Delia, because she combines the, erm... straight-lacedness and slightly Laura Ashley-frocked nature of a pure, young but slightly severe assistant matron at a boys' school." "Not the big battle-axe of a matron, but the slightly cheeky one who might get out a guitar and sing you a folksong." "I can assure you that all these lovely bits and pieces do in fact taste delicious." "But you also know that there is something behind her that is quite, sort of... saucy, in every sense." "Now, would you agree that that is very quick, very easy and very delicious?" "Especially if you're doing it." "Yes." "Which was revealed, of course, famously on the field of battle at Carrow Road, when we were playing..." "I say "we", I mean Norwich City, were playing Manchester City one famous afternoon." "And in the excitement to get the fans going," "Delia committed a piece of YouTubery which will forever haunt her." "We need a 12th man here..." "Where are you?" "Where are you?" "MUFFLED ROAR Let's be 'aving youl" "I think that's good." "We British are often slightly baffled when people don't turn out to be who we think they were." "I've always known that she's not the goody-good, smarmy-marmy sort of Julie Andrews creature that some people have taken her for." "And let's be honest, the reason she's in the English dictionary, and people love her, is cos she's damned good at her job, and there's something very pleasing about that." "I owe a lot of Christmases to her, her Christmas book is a masterpiece." "I..." "HE BLITHERS GOBBLEDEGOOK" "Now that's a lot of nonsense and you know it." "Gibberish is important to me, I suppose, because it's like the scat singing of language." "It's the real dance you can take words for." "And there are the famous exhibitors of it and practitioners of it." "There's Stanley Unwin." "Man and wife share the bath-loader there." "Ah, some of you do!" "Well, those of you the first time, be prudent, gallant, wear the dark shady glass." "Don't you upset the female, ah, there's a deep folly." "And for her part, don't grab it and grab at the soap and slollop around the water low." "The thing about Stanley Unwin was that it so closely resembled real English that you thought it was your mistake." "And that you'd just slightly misheard." "It's like seeing something in a distorted glass or something, and you think, you know..." "It works, it's English, but it just isn't." "Get it just right, and then, when the resurge and all the water come back, be rather like the Red Seal and thlollop Niagara Fall like the Evies escaped from the Egypsies, the Israelites and Luigi, wouldn't it, eh?" "I remember when we were doing this programme, Alfresco, for ITV." "We'd stay at the Old Midland Hotel in Manchester, and it had an all-night bar." "And we would play games of forfeits." "And the forfeit I invented which I still occasionally do, which is absolutely fantastic, is that you have to go to, say, the night porter, and ask to lick him out." "But do so in such a way that he doesn't hear you, but everybody else does." "So the way you do that is, you say, "Oh, I'm so sorry," ""can I lick you but what I want to know what the time is exactly."" "And they all think, he didn't say," ""I'm so sorry, but can I lick you out, but can you tell me what the time is exactly?"" "He'll think he just completely misheard it." "So that's what you do." "And you can do that an extraordinary number of times, and people will not hear you." "And everyone else does." "Well, you know the thrush plate?" "Yeah?" "Well, you can use the throttling pencil, route to the lookout valve on the thump spoke." "Cut out the felching altogether." "Provided you rim the satchel arm properly first." "Yeah." "Nonsense is great." "I sometimes wonder when people come round to my house - or, if I say "houses" it sounds rather absurd but I have one in London and one in the country." "On the bookshelves of both, there are if you look closely, quite a lot of a novelist" "On the bookshelves of both, there are if you look closely, quite a lot of a novelist now not exactly forgotten but not as celebrated as she was in her day, called Georgette Heyer." "And people must look at them because their covers are pretty excruciating." "They look like the most appalling kind of female romance fiction." "But actually I stand by her." "I think she's a fabulous writer." ""As he broke the wafer and spread open the crossed sheet," ""an aroma of ambergris assailed his fastidious nostrils." ""An expression of distaste came into his face." ""He held the letter at arm's length and groped for his quizzing-glass."" "She captures the language of late 18th, early 19th century England superbly." "People are not drunk, they're foxed or disguised, or they've shot the cat." "Fabulous language." "There's one called The Reluctant Widow." "I think it was in the sick room at school - "the san", short for sanatorium - that was the first one I read." "And then I became hooked." "Completely hooked." ""Underneath the bellied skies where dust and rain find space to fall," ""To fall and lie and change again without a care or mind at all," ""For art and life and things above, in that there, look, just there " ""no right, left, up, down, past or future," ""We have but ourselves to fear."" "Hugh, you chose that poem... and for God's sake, why?" "I get pleasure out of writing poetry." "It's quite hard to explain why because it's not for public display." "And part of the pleasure of it is that it is private for me." "It's not even about the quality of the poetry, although a small area of making poems can occasionally be technical." "There's a poem by Richard Maddox called Institutions which I can read if you like." "Please." "Right." ""Le..."" "That IS short." "It's very short, yes." "If you are given an endless wasteland, it's very hard to make a garden out of it." "But if you're given a small plot, a tiny little plot, and you're forced to think about where to put things, you can make a gorgeous garden." "And if you look at a poet like Philip Larkin or someone who's a complete master of form," "I think there's a real pleasure simply in their technical expertise." ""Don't read much now." ""The dude who lets the girl down before the hero arrives." ""The chap who's yellow and keeps the store seem far too familiar." ""Get stewed." ""Books are a load of crap."" "Most of the poets these days are what Clive James calls, splodge poets." "They really are." "They're just like dull, wet farts of poets." "And it's embarrassing, really, most of them." "And when you get a good one it's so exciting." ""Inked Ravens Of Despair Claw Holes In The Arse Of The World's Mind."" "I mean, what kind of a title for a poem is that?" "# I'm gonna give you my love I'm gonna give you my love" "# Oh!" "Wanna whole lot of love Wanna whole lot of love" "# Wanna whole lot of love... #" "I love Led Zeppelin." "It's very hard if you like music at all not to admire Led Zeppelin, they really were extraordinary." "And their class leaps out at you above other imitators or other pretenders to their throne." "HE PLAYS A HEAVY METAL GUITAR RIFF" "So, yeah, I do listen to a bit of Zep from time to time." "I know it doesn't seem to suit my image but I'm afraid it's true." "# Oh!" "Oh!" "Oh!" "Oh!" "# Oh!" "Oh, my!" "# Keep it cooling', baby Keep it cooling', baby... #" "THEME MUSIC PLAYS" "Hi." "Right." "It's your choice, I think." "Consonant please, Carol." "Right, that's a B." "Vowel." "O." "Another consonant please, Carol." "That's an L." "Countdown is, I suppose, one of those things a bit like, oh, Rich Tea or Lincoln biscuits, in that, you go away, as it were, from that area of life for about ten years, and then you come back and you find out they still exist." "You think, "Surely that must have gone out of business years ago!"" "And off we go." "METRONOME JINGLE PLAYS" "I do remember a friend of mine, the American novelist Jay Mclnerney, who wrote, Bright Lights, Big City, the ultimate eighties coke novel - he's quite a hip guy, therefore - and he was staying in my house in London" "and he came in one afternoon to find me watching Countdown." "And he stood and stared at the television for about ten minutes." "And said, "OK, like, what's..." "Seriously, what's..." ""No, this is like, what, a gag thing?"" "And I said, "No, this is a programme that's on every day."" "He said, "You're shitting me." I said, "No."" "He said, "Jesus."" "But then, he sat down and then he started joining in." "He said, "Erm, uh, needles, can you get needles out of that?" "No?" ""Damn, there's only two E's." "OK." ""Hang on." "Dents." "Dents." ""Is there a word, lensed?"" "And suddenly he was playing, it was fantastic." "And I said, "You see, you see?"" "It's a K." "Right." "So, erm..." "Simon?" "How did you get on?" "Just four, I'm afraid." "Four?" "Just four." "There's no excuse." "It IS an indulgence." "Really it's a bit like Georgette Heyer." "In theory, you could be excused if you'd broken your leg." "And it had to be in plaster and in traction for about a month, and then you could have the television at the end of your bed and you could have calf's foot jelly and chocolates and strange things to eat, and you could have a Georgette Heyer novel" "by your bed, and you could have Countdown at the end of the bed, and no-one would think it was that odd." "But when you are actually supposedly a grown-up, it's a bit..." "A bit bad to do it." "When people talk about guilty pleasures, erm, they really mean things that they're perfectly proud of." "So, are there any pleasures I have that I am simply too embarrassed to talk about?" "Can't seem to find a flush or a handle." "LAUGHTER" "People might look askance at me if they knew I was particularly fond of Farley's Rusks." "And that, of an evening when I am hungry," "I put a couple of Farley's Rusks in a bowl and add ice-cold milk, bash them with the back of a spoon, and then eat them with incredible pleasure." "That is..." "It's a bit weird, isn't it?" "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd" "E-mail Subtitling@bbc.co.uk"