Well, good morning. Happy New Year still just about to all of our listeners. Very warm welcome to today's Four The Many podcast. I'm afraid, as Ian Dale put it himself, he's been a bit of a dick. So you might,

no news there, say our listeners. So you might not get the quality of experience from us this

morning that you usually get. Anyway, Ian, explain your dickness. Delightfully put, if I may say so.

Well, I'm in Solford because I'm doing my theatre tour thing here.

And I very stupidly forgot my very expensive microphone to bring to do the podcast.

So I'm having to cope with just doing, using the microphone on my iPhone

headphones. So apologies that I sound a bit like a robot or as if I'm in a submarine, but things will

be back to normal next week, I promise. Everything will be better.

So we're going to keep it not too long today.

How many times do we say that?

Even though we've got quite a lot of stuff to talk about.

So we will be doing, quickly, the Royals, we'll be doing the Labour leadership. And we are, of course, calling this the Whispering Barry Gardner Memorial

podcast. We will return to that. We'll touch on Iran. We'll touch on Northern Ireland. We'll talk

about actually the business of Parliament this week. We'll talk about the BBC's losing the

equal pay case. And Ian will update us on why he is in Salford and what he's been up to.

Oh, and we will preview the fact that we are this week coming, recording an episode of pointless celebrities.

Yeah, I'm quite anxious about that for this one reason that I hope I get back in time to start my LBC program because the timings,

shall we say we're a little bit tight. We were talking limo bikes on Saturday.

That is going to be our excuse if we got knocked out in the first round,

in which case you could just bugger off in.

Exactly.

I suppose I'd better watch it first, hadn't I?

...