The World of Karl Pilkington (11 page)

Ricky:
Oh right, so just in case someone in the world doesn’t know what ‘handle’ means, they are out of the loop.

Steve:
It’s not a difficult code to crack is it, if you are trying to track someone?

Ricky:
It’s hardly the head of the mafia talking to each other because the FBI are on the wire. ‘He keeps saying “What’s your handle?” and they come back with something else. I can’t work out what’s going on.’

Karl:
That’s what codes are all about, innit?

Ricky:
Go on then, tell me the code.

Steve:
Reveal at long last to the world what these codes are.

Karl:
Alright, so ‘What’s your twenty?’ – where are you?

Ricky:
This is better than the Enigma machine.

Karl:
‘How many candles are you burning?’ – how old are you?

Ricky:
How many candles are you burning – of course. So what’s the answer?

Karl:
You go … erm …

Ricky:
‘I’m fifteen.’

Karl:
fourteen.

Ricky:
Brilliant. There is no one that’s going to work that one out.

Steve:
So let’s just play through this conversation. Give us an example of how it worked, because I want to hear the fascinating conversations that Karl must have had.

Karl:
So you turn it on and you start off and it was something like, ‘Breaker breaker, do you copy’ or whatever and then you go, ‘Right. It’s Boxer Boy here.’ And they go, ‘What’s your twenty?’ and you go, ‘Well I am just in Manchester …’

Steve:
‘… In the flat …’

Karl:
And you go, ‘Right, yeah, how many candles are you burning?’ and you go ‘I’m thirteen.’

Steve:
And that’s the end, is it?

Karl:
Then you might sort of say something like, ‘What am I burning?’, right …

Ricky
So you’re ‘burning’ again?

Steve:
Confusing but go on … ‘What am I burning?’ ‘The bacon, ’cos I’m busy talking to you, you twat.’

Karl:
That’s like, ‘What’s me power? What strength am I coming in at?’ Because then you can tell if they’re quite close to you.

Ricky:
But you’ve just told them. They’ve said, ‘What’s your twenty?’ and you go, ‘I’m in Macclesfield Street.’

Karl:
But then you say, ‘Oh that’s interesting ’cos you’re burning three. I don’t normally get a three.’

Steve:
The least interesting thing you could ever say.

Ricky:
I wish you’d have kept a diary of this because this has been fascinating.

Karl:
Now and again someone will come in and go, ‘Side on.’

Ricky:
What does that mean?

Karl:
That means there is someone sat there listening in to this chat and going, ‘This sounds interesting.’

Steve:
Unlikely.

Karl:
And they want to join in, so they sort of go, ‘Side on,’ you go, ‘Side on, bring it in’ and they go, ‘Alright.’

Steve:
‘How many candles you burning? What’s your twenty …?” It seems to me that what you should have done is made a note the first time round so that when you speak to them again you don’t need to ask them those questions. Instead you could just say, ‘Can I just confirm that you’re burning fifteen?’

Karl:
What we’re doing here is, right, just giving you a bit of Monkey News that’s gone on, right. Where a monkey has been involved in it. Good little story and that. Are you familiar with the one that went into space? The first sort of thing they ever sent up there, before man did it and all that. You see this is what annoyed me with it really. Armstrong gets all the glory, but do you know who went up there before him?

Steve:
A monkey?

Karl:
Yeah.

Ricky:
A dog went up first.

Steve:
But what was the monkey called?

Karl:
Err, I don’t know.

Steve:
Right, okay. So it’s not the most informed news bulletin?

Ricky:
The dog was called Laika.

Karl:
Was it?

Ricky:
Yeah. They couldn’t get it back though. They sent it up there, did a few tests and stuff, and they couldn’t get it back. They didn’t have the technology to bring the dog back because of course it couldn’t fly the capsule back. Brilliant. We could all do that.

Karl:
Right, well this was the next one up then, right – so the dog must have gone first and they went, ‘Right we made an error there, right. Get the monkey in.’ And what happened is they taught it what buttons to hit at the time that it needed to hit ’em and the way they did it was, like, give it bananas. It was like, ‘Hit the red button’ and it hit the red button and they’d give it a banana. And they would go, ‘Right, reverse is the green one, hit the green one’ and then he would do that and they would go ‘There’s a banana.’ So it was taking commands on headphones.

Ricky:
Right, but how were they giving it the banana?

Karl:
No, this is before it went. You wouldn’t just put a monkey in it and go ‘There you go. Get on with it.’ They’d sort of put him in one of them training capsules that you get.

Ricky:
Yeah. I don’t believe this happened. I don’t think they trained it to do anything. I think they sent it up there and they put electrodes coming out of it to see how it reacted.

Karl:
No, there wasn’t any of that. They did a thing like they can with animals. If you give it something, like a treat, you can teach it how to do it. It’s just like a dog, innit. 

Ricky:
It’s called Pavlovian conditioning. However, that was to see if it would salivate or go over to a particular corner of the room, not if it could control a spacecraft.

Karl:
It’s the next step up. The monkey’s not sat there going, ‘Oh, I’m a bit under pressure here, it’s a rocket.’ All that it’s knowing is, ‘I am getting a banana if I hit that button.’ That’s all the monkey is thinking about.

Steve:
But how can they be sure that it’s going to press the button at the right moment?

Karl:
Because it’s got headphones on. They’re telling it when. It’s not willy-nilly.

Steve:
What’s to stop it just hitting the buttons at any old time because it’s a monkey and it’s not a human?

Karl:
Because it’s trained now.

Ricky:
Oh it’s trained? It’s fully trained? Yeah, go on …

Karl:
So listen, so what happens anyway, they …

Ricky:
Oh this is absolute rubbish.

Karl:
… They popped the monkey in there. It’s got its headphones on. They’re going ‘Right, hit the green one’ and I think there’s something there, a little chute, and a banana comes out…

Ricky:
No, you are making this up. There is no way that they made a spacecraft that had a banana dispenser. There is no way in this world.

Karl: So you’re saying that it’s easy to send summit up to space but you don’t believe there’s a little banana machine?

Karl:
So it comes to the launch day. Monkey is sat in there. Everyone is ready. Bananas are stocked up and all the rest of it. They go, ‘Right hit the green button’ and the rocket goes off and what have you.

Ricky:
No, they would not make the monkey launch the rocket. Karl, you are living in a cartoon world ...

Karl:
So the rocket goes off, right ...

Ricky:
This is absolute bollocks.

Karl:
… It’s all going well …

Ricky:
It’s not going well. There is no way a monkey launched a rocket, you idiot.

Karl:
So it’s all going on and so they’re going ‘Hit the left button’ and …

Ricky:
Oh, the ‘left button’? Oh, well done spacecraft command. ‘This is Houston. Hit the left button.’ Oh brilliant. This is what happened in Apollo 13, they said ‘Hit the left button’!

Steve:
So it goes left …?

Karl:
So it goes left, heads for the moon and everything, and everything is going well. They get it up there, it does whatever it does. It reverses and it comes back. So then …

Ricky:
You are brain dead! I would rather have the monkey drive me home than you.

Karl:
So the thing is, it lands back. It does a good job and everything. It gets out and …

Steve:
… It’s sick of bananas …

Karl:
… This is where it turns a bit sad because after it’s done that mission, right, because it happened and it was all safe and everything, the next one would have been to send man. But the monkey enjoyed it and it was like ‘Well I want to do it again’.

Ricky:
How did they know he wanted to do it again?

Karl:
Just the way it looked.

Ricky:
Ahh fuck off! ‘Just the way it looked!’ You are a maniac.

Karl:
So the thing is, right, after it had done that it was on such a high it could never get that high again. There was nothing that it could do and it sort of ended up killing itself because it could never get that buzz again.

Ricky:
Right. That was absolute bollocks. None of that is true, except that they sent a monkey into space. Absolute drivel.

Steve:
So in your mind it committed suicide? It went on a crazy bender – drink and drugs and women – and then it was found in a motel room?

Karl:
It does happen. You hear about it.