Liars' League

Fight & Flight

Your pulse is suddenly racing, your ears pricked, your breathing much, much faster - it can only mean that your body is alert and ready for... another packed evening at the Wheatsheaf in Central London for April's Liar's League: Fight & Flight.

And if you weren't there, our podcasts are sitting there waiting for you. A perfect antidote to the tedium of the tube, a long-haul to Laos or queueing at Queens Park Rangers. And what's more, by copying the following link into iTunes you will receive future Liars' League podcasts without lifting a finger, breaking sweat, let alone pumping so much as an iota of adrenaline.

I can't believe this is so easy - a link (hint, hint)

Red by Peter Lachaise

Read by Ben Crystal

May 29th '85

The phone is ringing. Footsteps on the stairs. Mum whispering. Silence. Footsteps on the stairs. My bedroom door opening and Mum’s on top of me, tears on her face and in her curls and on me. Holding me too tight.

When I catch my breath, I ask “What was the score?” She pulls back, looks at me, looks at Kenny Dalglish above my bed, the scarves and the rosettes, all red.

“Dad’s safe. The rest doesn’t matter.”

Tries to Cook and Eat Gordon Ramsay by Francois Castile

Read by Paul Clarke

First off, I have to make one thing clear: I’m not a chef. I’d like to be, of course; who wouldn’t these days? The industry’s come a long way since the years of Fanny Craddock and the Muppet Show’s Swede, to the point where now, the kind of guy who might once have been accused of being tied to his mother’s apron-strings can reasonably look forward to his own TV series by the time he’s thirty, to say nothing of the book deals, the rave reviews and the international jet-set lifestyle. Look at Jamie Oliver, for example. Well, you look at him; I can’t, really, without imagining a pig shitting on his head. A pig in a clown costume. Which is laughing while it’s doing it.

Touchdown by Sam Carter

Read by Camila Fiori

I was born in a storm, somewhere several miles above the Atlantic Ocean. This was unexpected, to say the least, as my mother was only six months pregnant at the time, but so it was. She went into short, sharp labour in the aeroplane toilet during the in-flight movie (Heaven’s Gate – she didn’t miss much) and by the time the nuts and Bloody Marys were being handed around, I was squealing and squalling tinily in the washbasin.

The Summer My Mother Made Me Pretend I Was a Lesbian by Hedy Zimra

Now that she is straight again, she would not even come to my play. If I were the vengeful type, I could easily just call her church and out her. She is a piece of clay, firmly in the grip of her born-again husband. The one that won’t look me in the eye.

The Rage by Brindley Hallam Dennis

Read by Martin Lamb

Richard Meinhertzhagen, the famous soldier naturalist, said that if men do not hunt and kill animals frequently, a rage will build up inside them that will lead, inevitably, to the desire to hunt and kill other men.

The Cowboy Hat by Barry Walsh

Read by Marc Forde

London, 1963

I’m playing knockout with my younger brother James. It involves one of us kicking the plastic football at a goal on the school wall and the other, with his first touch, knocking the ball back on target – a sort of football squash. The rules are enforced as much by what we hear as what we see. The goal is an oblong of biscuit-like rendering. Hitting its crumbling surface is the sound of a ‘goal’; striking both rendering and glazed brick, is ‘post’, and if you hear the metallic ping of ball on brick only, you’ve missed. Today, we’re not trying to win but to keep the game going in regular, satisfying thuds that bring Mrs Johnson, who lives opposite, to the front door of her prefab.