Alright Akhtung, Akhtung, hello there. As you'll notice, James Holland, not here, or is he that side? I don't know.

James isn't with us, and I'm here leaning against the danger keep-off barrier at the arena at Bovington Tank Museum, at the Tank Museum here in sunny, beautiful door set. What a gorgeous day.

Well, what is today? Well, it's Tiger Day Eve. That's what it is. It's the night before Tiger Day when Santa Tiger wraps up all your presents and puts them at the end of your bed.

Here's the thing about we have ways of making you talk. Regular listeners, you know this. I know this. We downplay the Tiger because there's just too much Tiger porn, basically, out there in the world of tank appreciation.

Too many of you are too hot for the Tiger. So James and I resist. Maybe we've basically got Tiger Envy. Maybe the case we've made for the Sherman and the Cromwell along the way. In the end when you stood next to that sort of dusky yellow big cat. Maybe some of it were just overcompensating because of Arz is smaller.

I don't know. Anyway, the point is we're back at the Tank Museum where if you're a regular listener, we was one of the first places we ever came. I'm going to be talking to David Willie who we spoke to last time with you here as well.

About Tiger Day. It is fantastic. The museum is here. Here's the thing. The museum at the start of the pandemic had 200 things in its gift shop online. Now I have 4,000 because there's an appetite apparently for making scale models of tanks out there.

I have no idea about any of that. I can relate to any of that at all. I've bought a load of stuff from here in the last few months. Anyway, we're going to go see David Annie's going to tell us about Tiger 1-3-1 because the focus of course is Tiger 1-3-1 which is the only running Tiger Tank in the Tiger Mark 1 in the world that they have here at the museum.

In many ways, it's sort of how the museum really laid out its case for itself as a collection in the last couple of decades. They had a running Tiger. They used lottery funding to get that going. It's an interesting piece of heritage. It's like a teaching tool. It's not exactly a piece of living history but a great deal of the museum's philosophies tied up in the tank.

I'm going to go listen to David and he'll tell us the torturous story of where was this Tiger Tank catcher because apparently there's some dispute about where it was because there were two encounters on the same day.

The reami who collected it, bringing it back, sticky in horse guards parade in order to scare the bejesus out of people. The only reason I could think they possibly did that.

It's an eventual progress via Chertcy and the Tank Factory and being an R&D exhibit basically to becoming an exhibit here and then becoming a running exhibit here.

There's lots to talk to David about. If you've ever run into David who watched him online because he's done a load of online stuff during the pandemic from here, David can talk.

That's why James isn't here because otherwise we'd enter some sort of parallel three dimensional talk off where all hind legs on all donkeys in all of Dorset would be sadly.

You'd end up with two legged donkey monstrosities dragging themselves around having had all their hind legs talked off by the three of us.

I'm here as a sort of talk firewall to prevent an outbreak of too much talk.

It's the Tank Museum, it's Tiger Day, it's Tiger's Day Eve. I'll be talking to David Willie. I hope you enjoy this. He's a fascinating guy and it's an amazing story.

It is brilliant to be back at this museum that is 100% armored fighting vehicle catnip for the likes of me and you too I expect.

Right, well I'm down now in the main display hall floor stood next to Tiger 131 and I'm delighted to say I'm joined by David Willie. Hello David.

Hi there, welcome back. It's a great pleasure to be back and of course you were one of our earliest. I think our first location trip we did with We Have Ways helped us get started.

But Tiger 131, I know I've done a thing where I say Tiger, Tiger, Tiger, Tiger, Tiger hit me like it because it's big and all that.

And I've kind of tried, I'm nervous of the sort of fetishizing this tank too much. But here we are, it's the day before Tiger Day. We'll let that go. We'll fill our boots with Tiger stuff.

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