EPISODE 50: The Best Man There Ever Was

Strangers on a Bench

Tom Rosenthal

Documentary, Bench, Random, Society & Culture, Park, Strangers, Conversation

4.8 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 25 August 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Tom Rosenthal approaches a stranger on a park bench and asks if he can sit down next to them and record their conversation.

This is what happened!

Produced by Tom Rosenthal

Edited by Rose De Larrabeiti

Mixed by Mike Woolley

Theme tune by Tom Rosenthal & Lucy Railton

Incidental music by Maddie Ashman

End song: 'Thursday' by Daudi Matsiko

Stream it here: https://ffm.to/thursday-soab

Listen to all the end songs featured on the podcast (so far) on one handy playlist:

https://ffm.to/soabendsongs

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Instagram: @strangersonabench

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello, sorry to bother you.
0:05.0	Can I ask you a slightly odd question?
0:09.0	I'm making a podcast called Strangers on a Bench
0:14.0	where essentially I talk to people I don't know on benches for 10 or 15 minutes.
0:19.0	Are you up for that? Do you want to give it a go? Is there a day of the week that you favour?
0:47.3	Above all the others?
0:49.3	Yes.
0:55.0	Thursdays are quite nice. There we go.
0:56.0	Not just because I was born on a Thursday, but because...
0:59.0	Oh, born on a Thursday?
1:01.0	Yeah.
1:02.0	That's one reason, I suppose.
1:04.0	But just because it just, it always seems like a nice day when I think back on it, more so than most other days. What'd you know about your birth? I was told it happened at 4 a.m. and my mum was very annoyed. Well, because it was... It was in the middle of the night, I see. Yeah. Well, she wanted just to get a normal night's sleep. Yeah, just to get through it. But besides that, I don't know much else about my birth, to be honest. Could you ask? Could you ask? No, no, actually. I've never had the urge to inquire about my birth in particular. Oh really? I suppose it's, in the back of my mind, it feels a little bit intimate as well. Yeah. I mean, you were there and you were being born, so it's kind of fair that you would ask. It's not like... Maybe later today when I see her it would be the day as well.
1:48.0	Oh you're seeing her later? Yeah yeah. That's nice. Yeah, we live together. So it's... Oh, you lived together? Have you always lived together? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, no. There was a time where her and my brothers were here in this country,
2:01.3	and I was still back home with my dad and my other family as well.
2:06.2	Other family, you've got two families?
2:08.4	As in like extended family.
2:09.6	So in my country, we have like a big communal area that we have,
2:15.6	like the extended family living together in like a
2:18.7	I don't know gated housing thing so essentially I was just living with like my dad and like
2:25.4	cousins and all that stuff and my mom and my two other brothers moved over here long before I
2:31.6	did I see yeah What is this country?
	...

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