When Harry Met Sally and Reform Met Bonnie Blue
The Trawl
Jemma Forte & Marina Purkiss
4.7 • 867 Ratings
🗓️ 19 December 2025
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Love, Hypocrisy and a Rob Reiner Tribute
It’s the Friday episode and Marina Purkiss and Jemma Forte are running on festive fumes so prepare for rage, tears, laughs and a post Rob Reiner tribute snotty nose. It's a rollercoaster of an episode.
The Trawl ladies start with the small lies we tell children (Father Christmas logistics remain shaky) before moving swiftly to Trump’s grotesque response to tragedy which has sparked a proper reckoning and proves that the the late, great Rob Reiner was right about him all along.
Jemma and Marina pay proper tribute to the wonderful movies he made and discuss why decency, humour and romance feel increasingly radical amidst the backdrop of modern politics.
Then it’s onto Trump’s apparent desire to lead Europe (spoiler: Europe says absolutely not), before Jemma and Marina head back to Blighty where Reform UK continue their unstoppable streak of rank associations, racist dog whistles and jaw-dropping hypocrisy — from Bonnie Blue to Nigel Farage framing multilingual children as a “cultural threat”.
They finish with a few glimmers of hope, and the usual much-needed palette cleansers, dad jokes and utter nonsense.
Side effects may include sighing, eye-rolling, despair and the sudden urge to rewatch The Princess Bride and believe in true love all over again.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We have a sexist in the White House and he is tearing away at the fabric of our democracy. |
| 0:20.5 | Hello and welcome to The Trawl. |
| 0:23.0 | Sorry, Gemma's just dancing at me with their tongue out, |
| 0:25.8 | where we wade through the news so you don't have to. |
| 0:30.1 | Side effects may include sighing, eye-rolling, laughing, cringing, like I just did, |
| 0:35.0 | crying, outrage and occasionally despair. I'm Marina Perkis. |
| 0:39.4 | You're right, Gemma. And I'm Gemma Forte. I'm hanging on by a thread. Okay, this is Friday's |
| 0:45.4 | episode. So at this point, this is just a public announcement to anybody that's listening, |
| 0:50.5 | if anybody wants me for anything, right, unless it's true business or anything get Christmas |
| 0:56.6 | Day sorted out related, then quite frankly, this is my answer. |
| 1:00.7 | Chapel House posted this on Instagram and just put when it's the final week at work before |
| 1:05.9 | Christmas. |
| 1:06.7 | Look, I haven't done it. |
| 1:08.5 | I'm not doing it end of. |
| 1:10.2 | Because I can't be asked. |
| 1:13.4 | Oh, same. I like this one from Jacob Spiegel, who wrote, it's just one of those weeks. |
| 1:20.1 | I tell myself, having picked a career that does not seem to have the other type of week. |
| 1:26.4 | I've actually got quite a lot of friends, but they just go, it's just really, it's just really crackers at the moment. And it's just really crackers at the moment. It's just a particularly busy batch. That's me. I'm the same. And now I'm like bored of saying it. And I feel like I sound like a dick. Like I'm trying to be one of those people that's like, I'm so busy all the time. I'm so important to be busy, but it's not. How's it going with lying to the kids? |
| 1:46.5 | Are you still at that in your house? Still up to the old... Yeah. I mean, think about it, all of Christmas is a lie, right? It's a massive lie. Yeah, massive, fat lie. Brown-eyed Susan actually wrote that, didn't she? she said, do not make fun of children for believing in Santa. |
| 2:02.6 | There are actually grown adults who believe that a 78-year-old man |
| 2:06.8 | sustained a two-centimeter wide gunshot room to his ear that completely healed in 19 days |
| 2:13.0 | without leaving a single mark. |
... |
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