Cat Noir Comedy Podcast · Kevin Chilvers and Matt Sanders

Compilation: It's wonderfully poor timing to release a Christmas special Rick

October 28, 2024·46 min·3 clips

The fire crackles, the tree sits there looking important, and Kev tries to make the room sound like Christmas. He reaches for ASMR, which Matt immediately mishears as something much less useful, and the whole thing starts wobbling before it has properly begun. Matt then takes a swing at soothing audio and offers summer grass, blue skies, and a clumsy man with a lawnmower. The mower almost becomes the main event when someone yelps, gets their moan broken, and asks for the greenhouse to be left alone. Kev keeps nudging the conversation back toward festive cheer, but the special never stays in one lane when it can drift into another one. A seasonal ghost story gets floated, then a Christmas mood, then a sudden stretch of radio-business nonsense that leaves the room feeling permanently half-open. From there the piece pivots into a Santa interview with Dale, who treats the man in red like a bloke on an overbooked shift. Santa insists he is the real thing, ho-ho-hoing through the suspicion like it is weather. Dale asks what patch he covers and whether creeping into children's rooms is actually offensive, which is exactly the sort of question this show asks with a straight face. The cynicism keeps piling up until even the guest-insurance logistics become part of the joke. Santa pushes back, says Christmas still has some magic in it, and hands Dale a gift of simple seasonal goodwill. That goodwill lasts only until Rick Allenman arrives with a message and a grievance, announcing that Christmas is cancelled because his demands have not been met. The special immediately jumps to West London at night, where Kev explains the scene to the audience while Matt wants an update as if he has been left out of a very important disaster briefing. A platform wall, suspicious men, and a building called Tachycardic Plaza become the next targets for the episode's ongoing nonsense. Then a stranger hands over a book of poetry like it is an emergency miracle delivered on a deadline. The poem lands with absurd sincerity, and suddenly the whole thing has enough grace to limp toward a finish. Someone reads it as though it has opened the universe and rearranged their internal plumbing. The piece closes with one last unlikely happenstance, a final bit of festive magic, and a ho-ho-ho from Cap Noir.

As heard by us

A festive derailment that keeps turning nonsense into sharper nonsense.

Cat Noir turns a Christmas recording into a quick chain of bad timing: ASMR slips into asthma, summer grass gets dragged into the festive zone, and Matt keeps correcting the mood by making it stranger.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a Christmas special where the calm keeps getting interrupted by stranger and stranger bad luck.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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