Mark King insured thumbs for £1M
Mark King, bassist of Level from the Isle of Wight, had his thumbs insured for a million pounds due to his distinctive slap bass technique.
Snapshot · Parenting Hell with Rob Beckett and Josh Widdicombe
S12 EP48: Stop me if you've heard this one before
Explore episode
Jun 19, 2026
Where this was said
Kids Intro & Notable People: Builth Wells, Haytor Vale, and Mottingham
At 7:43 · chapter starts 2:01
The episode proper opens with a kids' intro from Molly Ruth, aged four, from Builth Wells in Mid Wales, whose grandmother is a devoted Parenting Hell superfan. This innocent submission sends Rob down a Wikipedia rabbit hole, reading out the most obscure notable residents of Builth Wells with increasingly mystified reactions from Josh. The only person Josh recognises is Kevin Sheedy, the Everton and Republic of Ireland midfielder — notable, but hardly a Welshman. Josh's own village, Haytor Vale in Devon, barely registers a Wikipedia page, let alone a famous resident. Rob's Mottingham fares somewhat better — W.G. Grace, Dennis Healey, and Rob Beckett himself appear, though Rob's photo is him visibly drunk on the television show Drunk History. Producer Michael, born on the Isle of Wight, offers Anthony Minghella and Mark King of Level 42 — including the detail that King insured his thumbs for a million pounds — before the segment is mercifully declared the most boring four minutes the podcast has ever produced.
Notable People from Nowhere: Hometown Trivia Chaos
No one from Haytor Vale has ever been famous. Rob Beckett pulls up Wikipedia notable residents for Builth Wells, Haytor Vale, and Mottingham and the results are a masterclass in British obscurity. The only common thread: most of them nobody has heard of.
The School WhatsApp Dungarees Incident
Rob Beckett cracked a joke on his school's WhatsApp group suggesting he'd send his daughter to swimming survival lessons in dungarees and a turtleneck. One brave soul replied 'exceptional buoyancy' and then silence fell. The whole exchange spirals into a meditation on the tragicomedy of being a comedian in a civilian group chat.
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