David Alorka, Gail Emms, Shane Todd, Thom Gibbs

Fighting Talk

BBC

Sports, Comedy

4.6 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 15 November 2025

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sports presenter David Alorka, former GB badminton player Gail Emms, sports journalist Thom Gibbs, and comedian Shane Todd join Rick Edwards for an hour of sporting punditry, humour and entertainment. Points are awarded for informed comment, wit and passion, but taken away for nonsense and answers lacking in conviction.

In the final round, the top two points scorers go head-to-head in 'Defend the Indefensible' where they must both defend a statement however ludicrous or distasteful for twenty seconds. There can only be one winner!

Listen to the podcast on BBC Sounds

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.
0:07.5	This winter, cricket's oldest rivalry is reignited.
0:15.0	England and Australia do battle to compete for the ashes.
0:20.8	That is extraordinary. Here live, ball by ball. do battle to compete for the Ashes.
0:22.9	That is extraordinary.
0:27.1	Hear live ball by ball commentary on Fife Sports Extra.
0:32.6	And get analysis and reaction of every day's play with the Test Match Special podcast.
0:34.3	The Stamps out of the ground.
0:37.0	Test match special at the Ashes.
0:39.6	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:42.6	Life comes when you have knowledge, wisdom and understanding.
0:44.9	I'm Rick Edwards, and this is Fighting Talk. Hello, good morning and welcome.
0:58.9	Now, when it comes to the introductions to this show,
1:01.7	as you can probably tell, I'm pretty much just left to my own devices,
1:04.7	but this week I had a caps lock note that said,
1:08.2	I actually can't say what it said,
1:09.7	but effectively, I couldn't do what I thought I was going to do, so I'm not going to do it. But I also don't want to talk about anything else, so I thought I would dip into the archive, if that's the phrase. So I've pulled out three previous introductions for the last couple of years, genuinely at random, because I was just looking through my old word files and thinking,
1:28.2	well, that one might be all right. And I'm going to get our panel to choose which one they'd
1:31.6	like to hear. So it is either episode 21 of season 21, quite early in my tenure, features a
1:37.6	solid humble brag, or it's episode nine of season 22, which was written by an AI, or it's
1:43.2	episode 31 of season 22, which is short, but does have a proper structure, which is quite unusual. So just quickly, a show of hands. Who wants to hear the early one from season 21? All that straight carried. David Gale, Shane straight in. Tom, which one would you have got? The short one, obviously. The short one, I'm lucky. You've been outvoted. So we're going for the early one.
2:02.2	So it's episode 21, season 21. Hello, good morning, and welcome to Fighting Talk, the greatest show on earth. I spoke to someone recently, and that was genuinely how they described Fighting Talk, the greatest show on earth. And I thought, there's a very bold claim, But yeah, I will have that.
	...

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