Hello, and welcome to That's Life, Spectator Life's Sideways Look at the World Today.

I'm Benedict Spence, and I'm Andy Shaw.

And on this new podcast, we'll be sitting down every few weeks to enjoy a bottle of wine with

comedians, politicos, prostitutes, clergymen,

misanthropes, odd balls, endangered species, unwanted children, and anything else we can scrape

up off the street to try to get a laugh out of. We may even have some of your favourite

spectator writers joining us every couple of weeks to ponder the amusing events, individuals and

words that have cropped up in the news recently.

To kick off, we're joined by the comedian Simon Evans,

and for those of you who don't know Simon,

he's performed stand-up everywhere from the Edinburgh fringe to live at the Apollo.

And the Scotsman recently gave Simon's latest show the tag of genius

and awarded five of their golden stars to it.

That's correct, yes. Although that wasn't my most recent show. In fact, that was the last show.

And I called it genius in order to lure that kind of review out of them.

To trick the Scotsman out of calling O'Donies. And they said, genius, question mark. And that was the point of

those of you who are also still clinging to Radio 4 will the Scotsman. Yeah, yeah. And they said, genius question mark, and that was the quote. Thank you.

Those of you who are also still clinging to Radio 4 will also have heard Simon Evans

goes to market, a series of lighthearted lectures on economics.

And we're delighted to welcome Simon to be our inaugural guest.

Simon, thanks for joining us today.

I wasn't aware I was inaugural.

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