EPISODE 79: Cormorants and Lewis Hamilton
Strangers on a Bench
Tom Rosenthal
4.8 • 3.5K Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2026
⏱️ 44 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 : 'World's Best Kiss' by Toby Sebastian
Stream it here : https://ffm.to/worldsbestkiss
Listen to all the end songs featured on the podcast (so far) on one handy playlist :
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello, sorry to bother you. Can I ask you a slightly odd question? |
| 0:09.0 | I'm making a podcast called Strangers on a Bench, 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? |
| 0:52.3 | Oh, I'd have to be, yeah. |
| 0:55.0 | I was going to say Friday or Saturday. |
| 0:58.0 | Friday because it's like Christmas Eve. |
| 1:00.0 | I've grown to love Christmas Eve |
| 1:02.0 | because Christmas Eve is the day before Christmas. |
| 1:05.0 | So Friday is like that because it's the day before Saturday. |
| 1:08.0 | So I think Friday is a favourite day. |
| 1:10.0 | But also Sunday's become a |
| 1:11.9 | favourite day. From being as a child, my least favourite day by far because obvious reasons of |
| 1:19.4 | school and whatnot. School next day. Hated school. Why do you hate school? Well, I wasn't |
| 1:25.6 | very good at it. I wasn't very good at it. I wasn't very good at learning. |
| 1:28.2 | I wasn't very good at concentrating. |
| 1:30.9 | Doesn't sound like the place for you. |
| 1:32.4 | No. |
| 1:33.1 | Where should you have gone? |
| 1:35.2 | Well, I suppose school would have been fine if it was more kind of designed towards the arts, you know, |
| 1:42.0 | and smaller classes and less strict and more books and more |
| 1:47.7 | painting and more playing and more sports rather than all the shit that we had to learn. |
| 1:55.1 | I learnt more when I left school than I did before because I left school, I could hardly read. |
... |
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