The World of Karl Pilkington (7 page)

Steve:
But you’re being allowed to choose the superpower. You don’t have to get it forced upon you, like the Hulk.

Ricky:
Hulk. He wasn’t happy. It’s true. He’s got a point. There’s not many happy superheroes are there?

Steve:
Leaving aside the superheroes you’re already aware of, what superpower would you want? You don’t have to fight crime with it, Karl.

Ricky:
Everyone around the world now is thinking, ‘What will Karl choose?’

Steve:
Let me just remind you of some of the other things available. Invisibility …

Karl:
All the time, though, or could I turn that on and off?

Steve:
Let’s say you could turn that on and off. Would that interest you?

Karl:
Yeah. I’ll have that.

Steve:
Right, okay, and what would you do with this power of invisibility?

Karl:
Just sort of wander about, and that, and just not get seen.

Ricky:
Brilliant choice, and put to such great use. Well done.

Steve:
And why would you want to wander around and not be seen? What would you gain from that?

Karl:
Errr … You could sort of go in shops when they’re shut, so you don’t have to go with the crowds.

Ricky:
How would you get in?

Karl:
Just get in, just before they lock up.

Ricky:
Okay. How would you get out?

Karl:
Wait till the morning.

Ricky:
Brilliant.

Steve:
So hang on, that’s your use of invisibility? You’re given the power of invisibility and you want to sneak into a shop, wait for twelve hours, and then buy something?

Ricky:
Oh I love it.

Steve:
Just so that you don’t have to be there with other people?

Karl:
D’you know what, I don’t want it. I don’t want a power.

Steve:
Why not?

Karl:
’Cos I just don’t think it’ll do me any good. I think it’s more of a hindrance.

Ricky:
But I thought you were talking about this from an evolutionary standpoint …

Steve:
Do you think that’s likely?

Ricky laughs
.

Karl:
No, but leave it for them to make sure we are getting safe food. I mean to be honest, it annoys me the way people worry about food now and how there’s so much to choose from. I think it’s got out of hand.

Steve:
Any form of choice really worries you doesn’t it? You don’t like choice.

Karl:
No. Choice is good, but not too much. It’s like with anything now. If you go into a toffee shop, there’s loads of …

Ricky:
Sorry, where are you going to find a toffee shop?

Steve:
So, you’re in a fairy tale …

Ricky:
Yeah, you’re in a Dickens story in the nineteenth century …

Steve:
You’re in
Shrek
…

Ricky:
… And you go into a toffee shop.

Steve:
What’s your point?

Karl:
What I’m saying is you go into a shop full of toffees …

Steve:
You’ve just come from the candlestick maker…

Karl:
Right, you go in there and there’s just too much choice. I can stand there for up to, like, four minutes sort of going …

Steve:
‘Up to four minutes’?

Ricky:
So he’s in a toffee shop … in a top hat …

Steve:
But he’s only got four minutes because he has to go down to the pea green boat that he’s sailing off in …

Karl:
Well forget the toffee …

Steve:
So you’d prefer it was just one selection of toffee?

Karl:
Well maybe two. What I’m saying is, right, there is now too much choice. Whenever you get a menu in a restaurant, it’s not like you just go, ‘Oh right, what is there? Yeah I’ll have that.’ There’s too much. The menu is like a book now, innit? And you’ve got to that point now that people are even taking a risk when they’re eating.

Ricky:
What do you mean?

Karl:
Erm … you know in Japan or China or something they are eating that fish that if it’s not cooked right, it can kill you. Not worth the risk, when there’s so many other fish. Like mackerel! Or have a bit of cod or whatever. As soon as there’s a risk, take it off the menu.

Ricky:
Yes I totally agree.

Karl:
Not worth it.

Steve:
So in your mind he’s singing a song and running off …

Karl:
But anyway, something else I learned, right. It’s mainly about animals and that ’cos that’s normally quite interesting. There’s a chicken somewhere …

Ricky:
Oh yeah, specific.

Karl:
… And the owner of it was getting fed up because he had to feed it and that but it wasn’t giving anything back.

Steve:
No eggs?

Karl:
No eggs, right. So he was like, ‘Oh I am sick of this.’ Anyway, someone told him to pop a little axe next to its little house, right, so when it comes out in the morning thinking ‘Oh, I’ll have another lazy day doing nothing’, he’d see this axe and suddenly think, ‘Oh, aye.’

Steve:
‘I’m for the chop’, it thought?

Karl:
Next day it laid about six eggs.

Ricky:
It’s rubbish! The chicken wouldn’t recognise the axe as a threat. It wouldn’t be able to reason, ‘Oh I’d better start working or I’ll be meat.’ It’s absolute rubbish. Once again it’s this ridiculous thing where you personify animals and give them reasoning powers that are better than yours. I mean you make chickens and monkeys cleverer than you in your stories, which is weird. It didn’t happen and wouldn’t work. Next. What else haven’t you learned today?

Karl:
Well, as always, things like that always get me thinking …

Steve:
His mind’s working now. This apparently has got his mind working.

Karl:
Well d’you think, then, that it’s worth looking after animals if there isn’t any memory? If they don’t know what’s happening anyway? You’re always going on about don’t be cruel to things.

Ricky:
Why would you be cruel? Why would you ever want to be cruel to an animal, whether it can reason or not?

Karl:
No, no, I don’t mean really cruel. But there’s an advert that’s on in Britain advertising some supermarket and it’s saying, ‘Before we kill our chickens, they have a great life.’ They have this voice-over and you see a happy chicken, and they’re going, ‘We give it a good little house to live in. It’s got straw. It eats good, and then we kill it.’ 

Ricky:
Well that’s better, isn’t it?

Karl:
I don’t think it is though is it, because at the end of the day, if I was that chicken, right, I am that chicken loving me life. I can’t believe me luck, right. I’ve got a nice little field, nice food and everything, but I’m gonna die.

Ricky:
Yeah, we’re all gonna die.

Karl:
But then, if you were a rubbish chicken, that had a rubbish life, you’d be going, ‘Oh kill me.’

Ricky:
Karl, they’re not thinking about what’s going to happen tomorrow. A chicken’s not going, ‘I’m fed up with this. I can’t wait for that axe to be used on my neck.’

Karl:
Well now that you’ve mentioned the cutting off of an ’ead, right, on a chicken, that’s something else I have learned right …

Ricky:
His mind is like a pin ball, isn’t it? Ding, dong, bong, ‘chicken’, ding, dong, ‘head off’, bink, doink.

Karl:
No, this was in a proper science magazine, so you can’t have a go. This wasn’t something on the internet, this was printed in a magazine.

Steve:
Okay and what was it?

Ricky:
Here comes the filter. It’s going to come out nonsense. You could have Professor Stephen Hawking sitting there, whispering stuff in your ear, but when you said it – gobbledegook.

Karl:
Well let’s see then. What they’ve done is they’ve done another experiment, right. They’ve cut somebody’s head off. And you know how they used to do it in the olden days, where they’d put your head in a stock, cut it off for whatever reason, right? You’ve done something wrong, right, and the question that everybody used to talk about in the village was, you know, ‘Oh I made eye contact with it and it was a bit worrying because he was looking at me and he looked fed up and that.’

Ricky:
Right, he’s dead.

Karl:
So they’ve put a bit of work into this and they’ve done it again somewhere and they have worked out that when the head comes off the body, it stays alive for thirty seconds.

Ricky:
No, they don’t know that. They can never know that.

Karl:
No, they did this experiment…

Ricky:
No. There are loads of issues here. No one’s experimenting with human beings by cutting their head off. No, no, no, no!

Steve:
You read this in what?
Executioners’ Monthly
?

Karl:
No, but this is where it gets weird, right. So the head’s off, right, and what they did was they chucked a load of questions at it.