EPISODE 58: Gratitude, Painted Nails, and The Irish Lottery
Strangers on a Bench
Tom Rosenthal
4.8 • 3.5K Ratings
🗓️ 20 October 2025
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ 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 : 'Reasons to Smile' by Rhys Lewis
Stream it here : https://ffm.to/reasonstosmile
Listen to all the end songs featured on the podcast (so far) on one handy playlist :
https://ffm.to/soabendsongs
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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? What's your favourite day of the week? |
| 0:47.0 | To Friday. |
| 0:49.7 | But perfect day. What happens on a Friday? |
| 0:52.7 | Pay day, isn't it? That's why Friday is always a good day. |
| 0:56.6 | Everyone works out, money to Friday, get paid Friday, and then that's it. |
| 1:00.6 | And then tell me what, oh my God, actually, what I'm just, I think what we should do now? |
| 1:07.9 | You know what? I think let's just be honest about this. |
| 1:10.3 | So I say what's happened. |
| 1:29.2 | I've asked you about four or five questions which you can't have lots of gold. Yeah. I then have realized I haven't got the record on properly. And so now we're trying to regurgitate four or five questions. Life's painful, isn't it? Don't worry. We're still here. We're still here. We still got hope. The dream is alive. |
| 1:31.1 | We're living it, aren't we? We're here, aren't it? Don't worry, we're still here. We're still here, we still got a hope. |
| 1:28.4 | The dream is alive. |
| 1:29.3 | We're living it, aren't we? |
| 1:30.4 | We're here, aren't we? |
| 1:31.1 | Blessed. |
| 1:31.7 | Exactly. We're very lucky to be alive. Right. So first, I asked you what your favourite day of week is. You said Friday. You said Friday, because it was your payday. Payday, yeah. payday. And then I said, well, what, do you remember getting your first paycheck? Oh, yeah, |
| 1:43.9 | pay check. Yeah. That was like, plastering. No, no, that was on a YTS when I was like 16. What's a YTS? It's a young trainee something. So you go on a course, you're getting paid to do like IT skills, retail, mechanics. It's a way to get yourself into a job back in the day. But then plastering came in? Yeah, plastering came in about 10 years later or so. Me and my friend, Paul, we were training, doing plastering, and we thought we were to be his knees, but was we fuck. We priced a job up, we thought we were smashing in four days. It took us nearly two weeks. We were working for like 30, 40 pounds a day, looking at each other like, what have we done? |
| 2:19.0 | Our name was quality plasterers. |
| 2:21.6 | But we agree with the client, so we just got the job done. |
... |
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