Bringing Laughter Back to Work

A brilliant live discussion from Ad Week Europe on the scientific value of laughter – and how to bring it back to work.

Featuring Professor Sophie Scott, broadcaster Geoff Lloyd and sitcom writer Paul Coleman. Hosted by Bruce Daisley and Sue Todd.

Transcript

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Bruce Daisley: This is Eat, sleep, work. Repeat a weekly podcast on happiness and work culture. Hi, this is Eat, sleep, work, repeat. I’m Bruce Daisy. It’s a podcast about making work more enjoyable, about improving our work cultures. Today’s episode is a live recording from Advertising Week Europe. This week, it’s not really about advertising, it’s about bringing laughter back to our workplaces, some incredible guests, and I’ll introduce them shortly.

If you like this, why not subscribe? Oh, that’s free. Or you can slide down the page on Apple Podcasts and give it five stars. That single act, strangely enough, moves us up the charts, gives more people the prompt to listen. Failing that, send it to a friend, leave it tucked under a neighbor’s windscreen wipers.

Anyway, here’s the show from Advertising with Europe 2018, a session called Bringing the Laughs back.

The recording was made on the power of audio stage, and I merely make mention of that ’cause there is a reference to it.

Over the next 40, 50 minutes, we’re gonna be doing a live episode of my podcast, eat, sleep, work, repeat. I’m Bruce Daisy. We’ve got a fantastic lineup for you, but just to make sure that everyone’s in the mood, I thought we’d have a bit of audience participation.

So when I shout power, you shout audio Power, power. Audio. Okay, let’s make sure they hear this on the power of smell stage. So when I say power, you say audio power. Audio power. Audio. Good, right. Okay. So we’ve got a, a fantastic lineup. I think the intention of the session really was that myself and Sue, who’s gonna be on the the panel in a moment, have, um, I’ve sort of started thinking that work’s not as much fun as it used to be.

Right. I, you’re gonna have to take this untrust. If you’re sort of a millennial, you’re gonna have to accept that there was a world that was a lot more fun than this is now. And broadly, my philosophy is that the way I judge this is I, I’ve, I know people who work at Google, right? When you Google best places to work, Google comes up.

I dunno whether they fix that result, but that’s that what happens. And I say to them. What’s work. Like they say, not much fun. And so that’s my judge. If people at Google aren’t enjoying it, then I’m guessing other people aren’t enjoying it. As people at Facebook, they didn’t seem to have much for week either.

So I’m, I’m guessing that work’s not as much fun as it used to be. And in fact, myself and Sue created, that’s the podcast, eat, sleep, work, repeat. Um, myself and Sue created this manifesto. Changes to try and improve the way we’re working. And none of these are a big deal. I mean, one of them is take a lunch for God’s sake.

People who make your iPhone get a lunch break, but the rest of us are sort of struggling. We’re not taking lunch breaks. We’re sort of, we’re working too hard. And so we’re in a situation where people are just. Not enjoying work the the way they used to. And in fact, one of the weird consequences of that is, is workplace loneliness has gone up by 30% in the last, uh, 15 years.

People are lonely at work and that’s partly people who are working from home, partly people in the office who are just so committed to doing emails and meetings, they’re not interacting with people. So one of the points we put on the manifesto, and you’ll find the manifesto@newworkmanifesto.org. One of the points we put on the manifesto was laugh.

And it’s like one of the vital things that I think when we love our jobs, that we know that our jobs create for us, but we wanted to sort of bring it back. So hence we’ve put a panel together that hopefully are gonna try and resolve that for us. And a thought to kick us off. There was no better person than the.

The first panelist, and so I’ll introduce Professor Sophie Scott. Professor Sophie Scott gave a totally bewitching, uh, BBC Christmas lecture about laughter, an extraordinary excursion into the power of laughter. Uh, Sophie Scott is a PhD in cognitive science, a senior fellow at University College London specializes in.

Speech and human communication. She’s just had a journey from hell to get here. I don’t think she’s in the most lull mood. So we’re, we are gonna try and transform that. We’re gonna try and bring a bit of laughter. Back to Sophie’s Day, please welcome Professor Sophie Scott.

Professor Sophie Scott: Thank you very much.

Bruce Daisley: So. I think when I think about it, let me change the slide.

I think when I think about it, laughter’s definitely in the top three things that people will do, right? It’s like, it’s one of the, the favorite things and, but one thing you said was that you said there’s like 5,000 papers on fear and scientific papers on fear, and there’s a hundred on laughter. Why don’t we even study laughter?

Why don’t we try and understand it?

Professor Sophie Scott: I think it’s almost invisible to us a lot of the time because I think it’s like a default behavior. It’s a, you notice it’s absence. It’s such a normal thing to do when you’re with the people round whom you would normally laugh. It’s, it’s like that you don’t remember breathing together.

You don’t remember laughing together. You might remember what you said, but you don’t remember the laughter that goes on around it, because that’s so normal. That’s such a basic aspect of that interaction, so I, I suspect it’s that. I think also. Scientifically, if you tell people I study laughter, people kind of hear you saying, I studied tinsel and Christmas decorations and, um, you know, whiskers on kittens.

So it’s, it’s. From a scientific perspective, I think people feel like you’re letting the side down a bit and you’re not studying proper science things, which are very, very serious things. They’re not trivial and silly things. I think there’s two things. I think there’s a culture where you almost don’t notice it a lot of the time, and as scientist, it just does not feel like science.

Bruce Daisley: I mean, so what, what is laughter? I saw, I saw you describing the Christmas lecturer. You, you said that laughter’s a bit like dancing. It’s more fun when we do it with other people than do it on our own. Uh, what is laughter?

Professor Sophie Scott: It’s, uh, more like a different way of breathing than it is anything else. You just start using your intercostal muscles in a very different way than you do when you are all breathing, which you’re doing right now to stay alive.

Or when you’re breathing for speech as I’m doing now, when you laugh, you start producing these large contractions of your chest wall, it just squeezes air out of you. So it’s a very primitive way of making a sound, and it’s a sound that we. Associate with humor. So if you ask people about laughter, when do you laugh?

They’ll talk about comedy and jokes and humor. If you look at people, and this is work done by Robert Provine, if you watch people and watch when they laugh, we primarily laugh simply because we are around other people. It’s primed by other people being there. You’re 30 times more likely to laugh if there’s somebody else with you than if you’re on your own.

And you’ll laugh more if you know those people and you’ll laugh more if you like those people. So it’s, it’s social and it’s, it’s a signifier of the kind of social connection you might have with somebody. And a lot of the time. It’s just straightforward communication. It’s very rarely actually normal conversations.

We laughing at jokes. I mean, we do laugh at jokes, but most of the time we laughing to show that we, we know each other and we understand each other and we like each other and we know we, we are kind of getting references and seeing illusions.

Bruce Daisley: Because I, I saw you use this quote by WH Auden among the things I, so my American colleagues would ask you to unpack this.

Yes. So should we unpack this among those I, like, I admire, I can find no common denominator, but amongst those who I love, I can all of them make me laugh. Now I think your take on that is that he’s got it right, but wrong in some ways. Right,

Professor Sophie Scott: exactly. Yeah. So that sort of sense that you, you love people because they make you laugh, I think is.

It’s describing a real thing, but it’s describing it almost in exactly the wrong direction. We laugh around people because we love them. Laughter can be a really true sign of somebody’s real feelings for you. If you can, if somebody will make you laugh, and no one else can make you laugh, that is telling you something about how you feel about that person.

And similarly, if someone never makes you laugh, um. You know, I, I had a relative who’s always going, asked really inappropriately, and I always thought she laughs really inappropriately. And I realized when I started working on laughter, she’s laughing perfectly. Normally I don’t join in ’cause I don’t like her and I’m, no, we don’t have that kind of relationship.

So, and that’s, in fact I’m attributing something to her, doing something wrong and it’s me. I’m describing my reaction. Okay. And that’s what Auden’s doing there. He’s describing how he feels about the people that he loves. He’s describing that kind of connection that he has and that what makes him want to laugh around them.

Bruce Daisley: You do this brilliant thing where I, I think you describe, in the crispr text you describe, uh, the how play, um, is this universal thing that all animals do. And in fact, you, you, you show that when dogs have their two front legs down, that’s the sig signal that no harm will happen

Professor Sophie Scott: here. Yeah. Yeah.

Bruce Daisley: And you say laughter plays a similar role, sort of signals.

No harm will pass here.

Professor Sophie Scott: I think that’s it. So play is really important to mammals. All mammals play and some mammals like us and dogs and otters carry on playing throughout their whole lives. And it can be such an ambiguous behavior. The same thing, the same behavior if it wasn’t playful, could just be violent.

So what what we do is we mark play, we show people that we’re playing. We do it with what’s called play face. It’s very, very hard to do it in human adults, but it’s a kind of. Loose, open, happy smile, right? There’s a video going viral at the moment of a baby elephant who runs over and sits on a woman, and that elephant’s got play face on.

It’s like, oh, I’m gonna get you. And, um, it’s probably slightly different for the woman, but, um, it’s so, and when there’s a, when there’s a sound associated with that, it’s laughter. And so Panke, who’s done some of the work on animal laughter, says that it is hard. It’s like an invitation to play. Let’s do this fun activity and play.

Is, it’s very hard to define play, but it’s got this notion of, I’m not gonna hurt you, I’m not gonna eat you, I’m not gonna try and mate with you. This is fun, harmless, pointless, enjoyable stuff that we might learn something from. That’s why it matters to us. But it’s, uh, it’s, it cannot overestimate how important players to mammals.

And I think from that perspective, play and laughter probably is a really important part of our day-to-day activity. You can think maybe of conversations in which we laugh being. Playful things for adult humans.

Bruce Daisley: And so back to the work of Robert Provin then that you mentioned. Robert Provin sort of goes through all the things that have triggered workplace instances of laughter, and it’s often like, it’s Jeff’s turn, it’s, it’s, you know, good luck with that.

They’re really unfunny things, right? Yes. And so in a work environment, when we are using laughter just to, to try and. I, I guess what, what try and signal that we’re bonded as a group. Is that what we’re doing?

Professor Sophie Scott: I think so. And because people won’t laugh in all situations, so you won’t laugh around people you dislike and you won’t laugh if you’re feeling a bit exposed and a bit like, I don’t quite know where we’re going with this, so I can guarantee I can take any of us.

See a common comedian that you really like, and if I sat you in the audience and then said, enjoy the show, I’m just gonna shine this light brightly on your face and watch and see when you laugh, you will stop laughing. And I know because I’ve tried this, I found that the hard way. And you get it with rats.

Rats stop laughing if they feel anxious and uh, not quite sure what’s going on. And humans do the same thing. So it’s a sign if people are laughing that they’re not. In that anxious state, it’s a sort of, you know, it’s a marker that the group’s in a good place. So I think it’s useful in that respect as well.

And also people will, if they can, and they feel they have the right kind of connection that people they’re with, people will use laughter to turn round, difficult situations, to improve mood. And it only works if everybody does it. So groups who can do that together. It can can be more cohesive. There is a literature on workplace humor for professions that have quite stressful jobs like doctors and police and nurses, and they tend to be characterized by pretty dark humor.

That’s quite exclusive. If you don’t, you’re not part of that group, you can be a bit like surprised you’re laughing at that. But for that group, it works because it’s just a reason for them to share laughter,

Bruce Daisley: right.

Professor Sophie Scott: In situations where they might need to make things better.

Bruce Daisley: What, so is it, is it a coping mechanism partly and a bonding mechanism part.

Professor Sophie Scott: Exactly. And it’s the two together. So if we can cope with this together, it actually helps us bond together. So the thing that’s interesting about laughter is that it’s never just one person emitting it and somebody else detecting it and going, oh, I see that they are feeling affiliated to me. You react to it and join in with it.

So if you are, if you are. Part of that, you feel like you’re part of that group. So you’re seeing it both as an emotional expression and as a social bonding phenomenon. That, that you sort of sets up a feedback because the more you feel part of that group, the more likely you are to laugh with it, the more likely other people are to laugh when you laugh.

So it just continues to reinforce it. Right.

Bruce Daisley: And, and to laughing, like you’ve sort of hinted at there laughing, like yawning is contagious, right?

Professor Sophie Scott: Yes.

Bruce Daisley: And so can you get. Workplaces that are more laughter orientated or

Professor Sophie Scott: I would have to assume so, because you can definitely have situations. I mean, certainly there are big cultural differences.

Um, people, there are parts of the world where it’s simply rude to laugh in public. There’s, people will laugh at home in Japan, for example, but in the workplace it would be offensively rude. Right? And people don’t do it. And anecdotally, people from the UK who’ve worked in Russia find that they’re considered to be a bit too smiley in the workplace.

Like they’re trying to get laughter going. People are like, oh, I don’t think so. You know, and it’s, that’s, that’s anecdote. That’s not data, but that’s certainly at a kind of world level, there’s something you can see variation. So it makes sense that, you know, within a country, within a city, within probably on this street, there will be places where people feel more or less comfortable sharing laughter at work.

And I think it’s. It matters because of its, it’s like a tell laughter. If you fi, the presence of laughter is a sign that people are in a particular level of comfort and intimacy with the people that they’re around. And it doesn’t mean people turning up going, oh, I’ve got my Apple watch appearing with an apples strapped to the apple’s latest timepiece.

That kind of hilarious guy at the office. It’s not that you’ll be describing, it’s just actual the presence of laughter at all.

Bruce Daisley: Right. Okay. So we’re gonna bring on the, the rest of our guests to sort of extend the panel. So let me do an intro for, for the guests. So, um, first up is Sue Todd. Sue is the CEO of Mag Magnetic and organization that markets the magazine industry and is the co-creator with me of the the New Work Manifesto, which is just a free WordPress website.

I mean, let’s not make a big deal about it. Paul Coleman is a partner at Humanize real life insight and innovation agency trained. He’s trained thousands of people how to raise creativity and solve cultural challenges in his spare time. He writes comedy and uh, not only is he a BAFTA winner, he’s a BAFTA winner for car share.

But also he got nominated this morning for, uh, the, the, uh, another BAFTA for car share. So, uh, Paul Coleman will join us. Jeff Lloyd. Jeff Lloyd is best known for his, his appearances on Virgin and Absolute radio, but he’s sort of creating his own podcast empire, a drift that he runs with Annabel, uh, Annabell Giles.

Car Share: Ports.

Bruce Daisley: Ports, uh, is a comic tragedy for anyone flailing in a sea of inadequacy. And he won the best podcast of the year award with, for his reasons to be cheerful that he creates with Ed Miller Band, and I think he’s building even more as we speak. So please welcome the panelists.

Sue Todd: Okay. So, um, a little bit of interaction before we start. ’cause this is the Bruce and I’s hypothesis may be flawed, we don’t think it is, but we’d love to hear a little bit from you. So, um, can you stick your hand up if you’ve had a job or been in a work environment for kind of eight plus years? Anybody under years?

Okay. Okay. So most people in the river had a job. No. Kick off. Keep it up. Keep it up. So keep your hand up if you think there is less humor, less laughter happening at work. Okay. Alright, so Bruce is my Keith Tewin This morning I’m gonna come over and ask some of you what you think is going on, Bruce.

There’s a lady there. I can see about eight rows back. You’ve kept your hand up. So you, what’s your, what’s your theory that’s on, what’s your theory?

Audience member: So I think there’s less laughter.

Sue Todd: Yeah. What, what’s your theory about why?

Audience member: Well, it might be because I’ve got more senior longer. I’ve been in work. Oh really?

And therefore, I. Can’t laugh as much.

Sue Todd: Okay.

Bruce Daisley: Okay. Okay. Problems of success.

Sue Todd: Okay.

Bruce Daisley: Anyone less successful? Who wants to explain why it works less fun? Here we go.

Speaker 7: I think there’s too many headphones in and people working in isolation. Okay. We just don’t talk to each other.

Sue Todd: Yeah. Yeah. No, just literally not I, I’ve B

Speaker 7: turned on, I’ve

Sue Todd: chat and I interactions

Speaker 7: and actually I think as well when people do have fun.

For those five minutes, people kind of then feel this sudden moment of guilt, oh God, people think I’m not working.

Sue Todd: Yeah.

Speaker 7: So

Sue Todd: why, why do you think that’s changed? Do you think we’ve got more obsessed with worrying about what people think of us in terms

Speaker 7: of Yeah, without a doubt.

Sue Todd: Productivity?

Speaker 7: Yeah.

Sue Todd: Yeah. Than, than even like five, 10 years ago.

Speaker 7: Without a doubt. Yeah.

Sue Todd: Wow. That’s depressing, isn’t it?

Speaker 7: And I think people are scared to say what they think sometimes as well.

Sue Todd: Okay. ‘

Speaker 7: cause obviously the PC. Kind of, oh God. If I’d said what I said where I work there now, people would just think I’d gone crazy or something.

Sue Todd: Okay, okay. But it’s like a vicious circle, isn’t it?

’cause I guess if you don’t break the mold and get a level of trust, then you can’t of humor. So. It’s really difficult, isn’t it? Again,

Bruce Daisley: actually someone, um, this week who was, who was talking about open plan offices and how he said open plan offices sort of knock the corners off things. And so like if you are in a group of four people, um, if you’re, you’re in a group of four people, then you’ll be on east and you’ll be a real verse yourself.

If you’re on this vast floor of 200 people, you sort of, you slightly more adapted version. So, so maybe that’s it. Sort of worrying that you’re gonna upset people for saying something that

Sue Todd: you are outside of your trust circle again. In a way it’s kind of too big a too big a risk. So I’m gonna give my first question, I guess for, for, for Jeff and Paul, who I know in the interest of disclosure, which I’ve absolutely always wanted to say in public, but far Sophie, who I haven’t worked with and would love to work with.

I’ve actually worked with everyone else in some capacity and we speak over my career and we still speak and occasionally lu together. So, um, yeah, my first question really is, I mean, my pickup from Sophie is that, you know, laughter’s about connection rather than about humor. Um. Do we feel less connected?

I mean, Bruce’s point about open plan was meant to increase connection. Email and digital technology is meant to increase connection. Are we, have we, what’s gone wrong? Are we less connected? Did you get that said?

Paul Colman: I think, I think we think we’re probably more connected, but I think we’re fooling ourselves because we, we never switch off and we’re on social media with our work colleagues and Facebook, you know, wishing ’em happy birthday, it comes up, it pops up and I’ve gotta wish you that.

So I think we think more connected. So I think we’re fooling ourselves. Yeah. But what we’re not doing is picking up that phone or going round the corner in that office and going. Face to face and Yeah. Have a conversation.

Sue Todd: Yeah. So all the, all the things that are meant to make us more connected have sort of done the opposite.

They, they’d make us on a shallow level connected, but on a deep level, less connected. Is that

Paul Colman: correct? Yeah, I think so. I think, and I think we, ’cause we think we’re connected with a wider group of people.

Sue Todd: Yeah.

Paul Colman: And you never let any people go. So you move from one job to the next job, or I move in terms of.

Working on one TV thing, the next TV thing, you think, oh, well, I’ll stay in touch with that runner from that. We’ll, we’ll like each other on, on, on Twitter. We’ll follow each other on Facebook. Yeah. And you think you’re more connected than you are, but you don’t really need all that noise in your life. That sounds negative about that poor runner.

He’s a really nice guy. He’s lovely book.

Sue Todd: Yeah, sure is. It helps you with

Paul Colman: a bath. Yeah, he did.

Sue Todd: Jeff, what do you think?

Geoff Lloyd: Well, there’s something interesting in what. Sophie says about laughter being this social cue. Yeah. And if I think, oh, where am I getting my laughs from these days? It’s a lot of the time it’s from memes and people being funny on Twitter.

Yeah. And um. You, you’ve talked about that thing where if you are sitting watching a sitcom with your spouse or your mate or whatever, you’re more likely to laugh out loud than you are if you’re watching it on your own. And surely that’s got to apply to the way that we’re interacting on social media as well.

You know, we’re all typing lull, but how many of us are really lolling or r la mowing or

Sue Todd: Well lolling in sand. Yeah. Internalizing. Internalizing or lolling. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, have you, have you, do you sense in terms of the jobs that you do. That there’s a change. I mean, do you feel it, do you feel like these people in the audience do that?

It’s less fun. Is that ’cause you’re more successful as well, or is

Geoff Lloyd: Well, I’m in my loft on my own most of the time doing podcasts. So it’s difficult to have a sense of,

Sue Todd: but you, I mean, and in terms of like, you know, you’ve been a, you’ve been, you know, a really successful broadcaster. Yeah. You used to go into absolutes offices and various radio stations offices, and I guess one part of what you do is there’s an element of banter with the co-presenter.

Geoff Lloyd: Yes.

Sue Todd: I mean, does there have to be an atmosphere around where the trust is high and the humor’s going for you to. Generate a great show and just,

Geoff Lloyd: I think so. Yeah. I mean, it’s a, it is a very particular thing, isn’t it? A radio show or a podcast, because that’s a workplace, but to some extent, you’re trying to create an atmosphere that then feels contagious to the people listening to it.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So it it’s, it’s quite unique Yeah. In a way, because your workplace has to feel, um, like somewhere people wanna be, like, they feel like they’re part of a club where they,

Sue Todd: but is it, is it humor that does that though? Is that what disarms people and increases that trust? And makes people relaxed, both the listener and the, I

Geoff Lloyd: think absolutely it is.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, you’ve gotta be good at that or you’ve gotta be good at faking it.

Sue Todd: Yeah.

Geoff Lloyd: Some people are. Okay.

Sue Todd: And, and, and Sophie, just to pick up back on your point about, and I’m really interested in this point about signaling and the idea that it’s kind of, you know, once you’ve laughed a couple of times, you’re pretty much saying to people, I’m okay.

It’s all right. The trust’s gone up. We can play, we can take some risks. Does, is there a correlation between if there’s less laughter, there’s probably less risk taking, which is I guess, an issue for us in all work environments. ’cause we all know we need to, you know, come up with new ideas and break. You know, change, change things all the time.

That’s the kind of mantra

Professor Sophie Scott: I’d have to point you back to the fact that there’s very little research into laughter. Full stop. Sadly, it’s entirely possible that there is, but literally nobody’s looking at it,

Sue Todd: right?

Professor Sophie Scott: So, um, it is, it’s entirely possible that the, the, the cha. There are really interesting studies on married couples showing that people can sort of negotiate stressful situations into a positive direction by how they use laughter together.

They have to both laugh. One person’s going, oh, it’s very irritating when I do that. The first person’s going. It’s a massive problem. You know, no one feels better, but if it was course, you know, and I think those studies are really interesting. And in fact those couples stay together for longer and they’re happier.

And I don’t think it’s limited to romantic relationships. I think that’s describing kind of an emotional connection you could have with someone. Possibly even transiently. Yeah. Even can kind of negotiate a better mood together. It would certainly suggest that laughter is something that you could be using.

To fundamentally regulate the emotional state of a group of people in a direction where other things might then be possible.

Sue Todd: Okay. Okay. Paul, you work one, one part of your world. We’ll come onto to the second part of your world in a second. Your BAFTA award-winning world is helping companies and working with businesses on play and creativity and ideas generation.

Can you see the correlation between this kind of humorous. Or less joyful, less laughter based environment and what you are trying to do for people.

Paul Colman: Yeah, I mean, and, and on one part, as we, if we go into these organizations over the last five, six years, you’ve kind of noticed, um, levels of fund. I want to give it the label of kind of deteriorated, but I think that goes back to the point the, they’re much more connected.

The, there’s less willingness to shut down the laptop to, to put the phone to one side and be in the room and lean into those sessions. But when we’re running those sessions, we’re. It’s, it’s kind of, even though it’s a creative session, you go, let’s have, let’s, let’s all be playful here. You start with rules on creativity.

’cause you need to get everybody. Going along in the same path, going along on the same journey. So they all have to agree to go, we’re going to be like this. So you kind of do fast track, fast track to the bonding that you talk about. So it’s kind of getting that, that group that may not know each other very well, may not work at each other every day.

But getting to fast track, to be in a good space, to be playful and to have fun, and therefore then the creativity comes. But allowing them to to fail in that room is really important. And that’s in both worlds. Whether that’s teaching creativity, whether that’s being writing comedy, you’ve got to go. This will be crap.

It doesn’t matter. We’ll get to a good point with this. If we don’t start with something, we’ll never get anywhere. And being able to laugh at that’s rubbish and not taking that to heart is really important. I think

Sue Todd: I get that when you’re on an away day, when you’re away somewhere and when you’re all together and, but Bruce’s point I think’s really valid about.

What happens when you sit at a different desk every day? You know, now we’ve got more remote working. Now we’ve got different sort of sharing of desks and we don’t all sit together. I’m you, you don’t get the day-to-day interactions in, in, in businesses and teams as much as you used to do you. So you get the kind of forced bit when you’re offsite, but you don’t get the kind of, I guess it’s just slower to build that level of trust and inject that laughter basic environment.

Bruce Daisley: Also, people like the, the average British person does 16 hours a week of meetings, right? And 140 emails. So you always feel like you’re a bit guilty. Yeah. It’s like, oh, and you blame yourself for it, right?

Sue Todd: Yeah.

Bruce Daisley: It’s like, oh my God, I’m so behind on all that stuff.

Sue Todd: Yeah.

Bruce Daisley: That messing around and laughing would feel like you’re sort of taking a piece of it.

There

Sue Todd: was a bit of judgment going on in one corner of the room. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Jeff, in terms of like, um, the craft then of time to kind of making sure you’ve kind of got something that once you transfer it to On Air, whether it’s a podcast or radio show, gonna. Gonna work and gonna have that element of banter and humor.

How do you make sure the presenter or the co-presenter, or the person you’re working with is someone you can do that with? Could do you just know because you meet with a pub or you meet,

Geoff Lloyd: I think. I think you just know. Yeah. Um, so radio stations will often, they’ll launch a new breakfast show and they’ll think, okay, we’ve gotta look for, you know, the funny person and the cynical person, and the person who’s the head teacher.

And I, I think. You know, often when they cast it like that, it, it ends up feeling really phony. Yeah. Like, it’s much better. Like everything I’ve ever done, it’s just been you find somebody you have a bit of a click with. Yeah. And you think, oh, what could we make out of this then? Yeah. Which is how the podcast with Ed Miller Band came about.

He did. He came on the radio show. Tell us

Sue Todd: how you met Ed Miller. Well,

Geoff Lloyd: he came on the radio show in the, the run up to the 2015 election. Yeah. And I’d seen him kind of speak at. Couple of events and he’d take questions from the audience and he’d be really natural and funny. Yeah. But when I saw him on News Night, you know, he wasn’t coming across like that at all.

Mm-hmm. So I thought, well, is there a way of drawing that side out of him and in Yeah. In the interview. Yeah. Which it did. And it went, um, I heard a good phrase the other day. It didn’t go viral. It’s overstating it, but it went a little bit fungal. So it’s not my phrase. Somebody, somebody said that to me. Um.

And, and then, you know, when I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, I just thought, oh, well there was, there was something in that. So when I went to Edward, the idea, yeah, it was partly because I thought it’d be a good fit for the idea. Yeah. But partly because there, there was a bit of a click and when those things don’t come along that often.

Sue Todd: Yeah. Yeah.

Geoff Lloyd: So you gotta sort of think of thinking about, but

Sue Todd: it’s really interesting that podcast, isn’t it? And I think Bruce mentioned that it won the pressed uh, writers. Best podcast award just a couple of weeks ago. Yes, Ned. And it’s called Reasons to Be Cheerful And so the subject matters, serious issues that we all face.

I listened to the one just this week on homelessness and how you can, you know how in Finland they’ve got rid of it and some ideas to do it here. So it’s really serious topics with, you know, the a, a previous, you know, very senior politician. But there’s loads of banter and humor in it. So I just wonder whether, back to that lady’s point up there about, you know, we’re in serious times.

We don’t feel we can laugh as much. Actually we need it more than we need it more than ever.

Bruce Daisley: I wonder as well, you know, that that thing that Ed obviously had work face on, right? Right. Where we’ve sort of got these sort of looked serious performative seriousness. Yeah. And like sometimes it’s impossible to escape it.

You feel like I sort of, you know, this is really earnest, I’ve gotta go into this.

Geoff Lloyd: Yeah. Well, he will talk about that. He will talk about the fact when he, when he was leader, it was almost like there was a six second delay in his head. So thinking okay, if I say that, will it be made out of a headline?

Because I mean, it just, it even now. He went on Nick Robinson’s podcast a few weeks ago and towards the end, Nick Robinson said, uh. So Arnold Schwartzenegger then in the Terminator, what was his catchphrase? And Ed quite instantly says, oh, I’ll be back. And then the BBC news website run a headline that says, I’ll be back.

Milli band plotting a return to frontline bullet Get out. No, seriously. It

Bruce Daisley: must be like once you’ve been snapped eating a bacon sandwich and it’s become a bleeding meme across the world, you must be like, I’m never gonna do anything.

Geoff Lloyd: Yeah, but he’s, you know, he is, I think something that frustrates him.

Every week we get a ton of email from new listeners who will say, God, if I’d had known you were like this, I would’ve voted for you.

Audience member: Yeah.

Geoff Lloyd: I think he feels like he was always like that. He was just never given the room to be himself. So creating environments is an important thing and, and with this podcast it is sort of quite meaty topics, but I didn’t want it to feel like something that was just for policy wonks and people who read like long reads and broad sheet newspapers.

Yeah. I wanted it to be the sort of people who. Sort of listen to TED Talks or get the news from the daily show. Yeah. So the front part of that is the first 10 minutes or eight minutes or whatever it is, is just us kind of chatting about our weeks or our reasons to be cheerful to, to create an environment.

Yeah. Which doesn’t feel intimidating to people

Sue Todd: to have a more honest debate maybe,

Geoff Lloyd: or a more

Sue Todd: useful or authentic debate.

Geoff Lloyd: Yeah.

Sue Todd: So if we could just transfer that into our daily works, but I guess we’ve got these problems with the way, haven’t we? We’ve got the problem where we sat with a different person maybe every day.

Or like you say you’re, you feel like you’re projecting to 200 people in open plan offices. Is there a case for going back to putting the walls back up, do you think?

Geoff Lloyd: Yeah.

Sue Todd: Shall we?

Geoff Lloyd: Yeah.

Sue Todd: Canvases put the walls back up. Yeah,

Paul Colman: he’d say that. ’cause he hates people.

Geoff Lloyd: I like the idea of people.

Paul Colman: Okay.

Geoff Lloyd: That’s actual people.

Sue Todd: I love that. So we promised laws, didn’t we? We’ve had a couple, but I think almost to guarantee at least one other smile. I’m gonna play the, the cheap gag of actually showing a clip of car share because, uh, and then I’m gonna talk to Paul A. Little bit about the, the craft of coming up with something, um, like this.

So if you could just run the clip.

Car Share: Well, that’s not much of an a away day, staying in work.

It’s not all day either. It’s only 11 till three.

Just like a long launch. What’s on your agenda?

Um, this one’s about team building trust strategies. And motivational role play?

Well, a load of hoopty.

Why?

Well, it is, it’s a waste of money. I’m sure it could be put to better use.

Like,

well, the vending machine’s been stuck on scotch brotts since the Olympics and the disabled toilet’s got a crack in it. I nipped me bu twice last week.

You shouldn’t even be using it.

Oh, come on. We’ve all done it.

I’ve not

jobsworth.

Sue Todd: So, Paul, you’ve got a kind of dual perspective here. I mean, congratulations on the bafta.

Um, tell outta curiosity when you, you’ve got another job. I mean, how do you make sure when it comes to the bit about trying to write comedy, you are in the right mindset and, and do you have to kind of, back to Jeff’s point, create a certain environment to be in the mood for any form of creative writing and, and creating a humor and comedy.

Paul Colman: You do? Yeah. I mean, you, you kind of, um, you try and get yourself in that, in that good place, but sometimes you sit there and you go, it’s not happening today. And then you’ve gotta just think either walk away or force something and then look at it the day after and go, what was I thinking? This is just, this is just rubbish.

Bruce Daisley: Right.

Paul Colman: Um, but yeah. So you, sometimes you, you, I mean, sometimes you’ve got a deadline, you’ve gotta force yourself to do it. Yeah. It’s hard when it’s not there. So it’s, it is kind of hard in that way when you’re on your own. Yeah. To create that environment that feels right. So if we get together with Sean and Peter get together and write, there’s some days we just end up looking at YouTube clips.

That’d be it.

Sue Todd: Right? Right. Just to get, just to change the,

Paul Colman: just to, just to change the out and fix. But we’re not, the writing’s not there, so let’s just have a laugh and look at these and enjoy our company and then we’ll talk about some plot lines and then we’ll come back to those later in the week or next week.

Sue Todd: Right. ’cause you can’t fake it.

Paul Colman: You can’t. No. And that’s, you know, but also allowing ourselves to be a bit bored in that situation’s really important. ’cause that ups our curiosity. Yeah. If we just sat there going, we’ve only written three lines. We need to write four lines. Yeah. We need to write five lines.

Yeah. And there’s some kind of measurement to, to go on with you, allowing yourself to be curious and look at other things. Um, gives you that, um, feeds that the other work, I think. Yeah. Yeah. But that doesn’t happen in a workplace. So when I go into the other world, nobody’s allowed to be bored. If you, you walk past them and they’re just looking into, looking at the window.

Sue Todd: Yeah.

Paul Colman: It’s kind of you. You’re thinking, why are we paying them? Yeah.

Sue Todd: But, but I think work used to be like that. I think that might be back to the ladies’ point earlier, I think that might be one of the problems. I think this need for productivity and to look pressurized and look like we’re constantly busy and not kind of slightly feet up reading something, taking something in that would act as stimulus in terms of both ideas, but also just a bit more of a relaxed atmosphere where a bit of chat might happen.

Paul Colman: mean’s danger. I think that’s a real, there’s a danger ’cause can have those people who just like spend the day looking at YouTube videos. Pretending that they’re actually going, they’ll be curious and I’ll getting this,

Sue Todd: but they’ll get found out. Eventually. They’ll

Paul Colman: get found, won’t

Sue Todd: they? I always just say, you’ll get found out eventually if all you do is watching YouTube videos.

I mean, I mean, I think we’ve probably lost something in creating that sort of slightly more relaxed, even if it’s for 15 minutes a day.

Bruce Daisley: Well, especially if you’re doing 140 instead of the YouTube videos, it’s 140 emails a day.

Sue Todd: It’s

Bruce Daisley: just at least, it’s a slightly better climate that you are working in, right?

Yeah,

Sue Todd: totally. Totally slightly personal question. Were you funny at work before? You were funny on

Paul Colman: school. I worked with you too, so maybe you should answer that.

Sue Todd: Jeff, what do you think? Was Paul funny at work?

Geoff Lloyd: I worked with Paul during my alcoholism, so my memories, those years are a little, uh,

Bruce Daisley: what I love is we were chatted before and both of you attribute the other one for introducing you to the internet.

Geoff Lloyd: Yeah.

Bruce Daisley: Who introduced who to the internet?

Paul Colman: So I thought it was Jeff. I tell people it’s Jeff Lloyd showed me the internet. I think it’s my go-to story, but,

Geoff Lloyd: but I think the internet was on your death. Maybe it wasn’t. It’s a bad default.

Paul Colman: I didn’t realize it was there. Yeah. You just came and said you’ve got this internet thing.

Yeah.

Bruce Daisley: There’s a way to a strange half the audience. The internet was on Paul’s desk.

Sue Todd: So, Sophie, do you, I mean, you work in an academic environment. Yeah. Uh, and obviously you are one of the, the people who’s done these a hundred pieces of research about laughter. Can you see, on a day-to-day, practical level the challenges of work and less humor and interactions, does it feel like practically speaking, it’s also an issue for you with your colleagues?

Professor Sophie Scott: Um, oh, for me it is difficult ’cause it’s, I’ve. I’ve, as I’ve got older, I’ve got more senior, so I’m a professor now, and people, it’s just, it’s got a d gotta to be humorless. Yeah. Well people have different expectations it turns out. Right, right. Um, but it’s, I’d certainly within, because all you’ve really got control over in academia is your, your lab and your students.

And I try, try to keep an atmosphere going where we make a lot of time to do things. That would be, you know, we, we go, we have our, we have a journal club. We go and do it at the zoo.

Sue Todd: Oh, okay. Okay.

Professor Sophie Scott: So then we go and look at the otters. ’cause we like otters.

Sue Todd: Yeah,

Professor Sophie Scott: like long mammals. We go and see the long mammals at the zoo near cats, mongooses.

Otters, to be fair, they look

Sue Todd: like they’re having more fun at the zoo. Oh,

Professor Sophie Scott: they’re awesome actually. And it’s quite a deliberate strategy just to sort of get people’s head out of the, sitting at their computer all the time and have a sit, have just a place where people, we can have a, I mean, I can’t, I feel slightly unwell even saying it, you know, we can have some fun.

Yeah. And we talk about some work and then we go and talk about otters and it’s just, it’s just, it’s quite a deliberate strategy on my part to try and have that. Sort of emotional tone in the lab and I won’t, I took a decision a few years ago that I wasn’t gonna work with people I didn’t like.

Paul Colman: Yeah.

Professor Sophie Scott: And that was ’cause life is just too short and it tears everything to pieces of, there’s one person in the lab, it’s not, everyone else doesn’t get on with.

Yeah. So that’s that it, it’s implicitly kind of trying to foster a situation where situations where laughter can happen and people are. Doing stuff other than work. Yeah. Are built into the work week. Yeah.

Bruce Daisley: You, you mentioned play before and like I, I worry with the word play. Anytime we think of play at work, it’s all a bit beard d no offense to beards, Jeff.

It’s all a bit sort of, it’s like let’s go to a ball pit in Huxton and now we’re

Professor Sophie Scott: having play.

Bruce Daisley: Yeah. We’re all playing around. We’re having great. And it just feels, it actually sort of turns a lot of people off. How would you bring a bit of that stupidity and and idea creation and play? Let’s use the word to an office without using the word play.

Professor Sophie Scott: Well, I suppose it’s. You’ve gotta be able to read the room and work out what would work for those people because you, as you say, you just can’t force it. Like, you know, the kind of that everyone, people frequently have quite an abreaction to somebody turning up with like red noses and, oh, let’s be hilarious.

And it’s you, you got to maybe always trick people into it by presenting it as something else. Sometimes that’s what I frankly do at work, don’t do something I assume will be a fun for people, but we don’t frame it that way initially and it’s, um. It. It’s got, the bottom line has to be. It’s something that you are reading as being appropriate, and it’s a social skill being able to do that.

Interestingly, if you look at people’s ability to identify and understand social laughter, like how people use laughter in conversations, that’s something that continues improving. Throughout your entire early adult life, performance doesn’t peak until people are in their late thirties. Wow. And the other stuff that correlates with that, the other not most stuff that we do is in place.

By the time you hit puberty or in place, by the time your brain’s fully matured at the end of your teens, and then it gracefully declines. Some things continue improving and laughter is one of them. But other, the other things that go with it are things like empathy and social skills. Yeah. So that, because you learn about them in interactions with other people, so it’s not something that works outta the box.

It’s something you learn how to do and you can get better at doing, and you learn by doing it.

Bruce Daisley: It’s interesting though, isn’t it? ’cause if people are laughing less at work and chatting less at work, then maybe that’s not evolving in the same way. Right?

Professor Sophie Scott: It’s all, they’re more

Sue Todd: senior and it’s almost wiping it out.

So kind of in theory, more senior people should be more skilled and and understand the value of creating an environment where,

Professor Sophie Scott: and they can be, I mean, you can think of examples of senior people who are very, very good at using

Sue Todd: Yeah,

Professor Sophie Scott: like Human Bill Clinton was phenomenally good at using laughter. There’s that whole bit thing where yeltsin’s.

Doing a speech and screaming at the press. And Bill, bill Clinton reacts, this is from the nineties, react as if he’s being funny and just starts laughing. Yeah. And in the end, Yeltsin starts laughing like I am. Very funny. And everyone’s laughing and it completely changes the mood. A completely deliberate act on, on, on Clinton’s part.

Yeah. And that’s so a lot of what we think of as sort of charming. Even high status behavior can involve very cleverly using laughter and play to make, make people feel comfortable, make difficult situations better. ’cause a high status person people will follow if they do that. Yeah.

Sue Todd: So Jeff, back to Ed. Do you think that’s, I mean, has he ever recognized or would you think that that’s what maybe he should have done that if he had his time again?

Showed a little bit more of his sense of humor and a little bit more of his kind of vulnerability. And he might have done all right, better at least.

Geoff Lloyd: Yeah, I think, uh, sorry I made a weird noise then I’ve got slight back pain and when I said yeah, it sort of came out, I was, yeah, I lifted my son up yesterday and it’s really dumb for me.

I’m a real soldier for being here today. Um, yeah. Yeah. Maybe. I think, you know, I think he, he has seen the value in being a bit looser, a

Bruce Daisley: bit more relaxed,

Geoff Lloyd: but it can feel weird when it comes from the top down

Bruce Daisley: Yeah.

Geoff Lloyd: As well. Like workplace, different places I’ve worked in. Yeah. When it feels like the culture of the place is just having a laugh.

Yeah. And, um, and, and, you know, being funny with your workmates. Yeah. That, that can. Feel, feel good and feel like, oh, this is a special place to work. And maybe they pay you a bit less or expect a bit more of you. Yeah. But then sometimes if it feels like the boss, you know, once a week needs to write the wacky email or whatever.

Yeah. It, it, it can be a bit cringey.

Bruce Daisley: Yeah. You worked for Chris Evanston, you in this sort of the virgin takeover days.

Geoff Lloyd: Yeah. That was an interesting one.

Bruce Daisley: He, well, he was like the definitive, wacky boss that I think every newspaper would look at.

Geoff Lloyd: Yeah.

Bruce Daisley: Was was that the experience? It was like a wacky as well.

What

Geoff Lloyd: kind of, it was a weird thing because. Even though he owned the radio station, he, he did his breakfast show and then he wasn’t that hands-on, he just had some kind of bosses to run it. Um. And he would kind of take the piss out of them as, and so he, he almost felt like, even though he is the owner, like this anti-establishment figure, so you’d be the, the famous one is, um, one day, I think it was a Tuesday, it was about 11 o’clock.

And an email goes around the whole company from Chris’s PA saying, um. Uh, uh, Chris has bought a new shirt and wants to celebrate, so everyone to the pub, and then just like the whole company, decamps to the pub next door, his credit cards behind the bar, and then no work got done for the rest of the day.

Bruce Daisley: What was the shirt like?

Geoff Lloyd: It was, uh, you know, a predictably wacky, you know,

Bruce Daisley: right.

Geoff Lloyd: Yeah. Very floral. Um, but we, we talked about this last week, didn’t we? That booze. Is so integral in British work. You, when you think of the times you’ve had a laugh at work, there’s so often booze involved and sort of the, the, uh, pros and cons of that.

Sue Todd: No, we’ve just got fuzzball, haven’t

Bruce Daisley: we? No. Well, I presume that the booze thing is we, like we’re spending time together, we’re getting to like each other, we’re laughing more and then booze helps that laughter. But actually boozy is quite exclusive as well, isn’t it? Sort of the, you often don’t. Notice the couple of people slinking off and not coming to the pub and

Geoff Lloyd: Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I’ve, I’ve had it since, so I’ve been sober for 17 years I think, and, uh, I’ve, I’ve become a terrible roope. I never go to anything, remember going to a, because you know, you feel like you have to turn up. Remember going to the works Christmas party a few years ago, and I just didn’t want to go, so I thought, I wonder if I can stay for 20 minutes, but in that 20 minutes, I’ll take so many selfies that I’ll put them up on Facebook and it’ll look like I had this really.

Wild night. So that was, I managed it and people were like, oh, great night last night. Nobody noticed you left after 20 minutes. No,

Sue Todd: they were all drunk.

Geoff Lloyd: Yeah. It’s a big benefit of social media.

It’s

Sue Todd: a tiny bit more audience interaction. Before we finish, we’re coming to the end. So Bruce, back, back up. So hands up.

Who has a table tennis table? Fuzzball, you know, one of those table footballs or table tennis in their office. Yeah, a couple of football. I think they’re

Bruce Daisley: good.

Sue Todd: Yeah,

Bruce Daisley: I think, I think table tennis. Well, I’ll ask you. Yeah. But I think they’re, they’re like the new, you don’t have to be work mad to work here, but

Sue Todd: it

Bruce Daisley: helps.

Sue Todd: Yeah, totally. My theory is that that kind of forced fun and that has replaced genuine interaction, humor. What’s, what’s your view?

Bruce Daisley: Yeah, so I, I work for Lego. Um,

Sue Todd: okay.

Bruce Daisley: Bruce, we’ve been

Sue Todd: must be mad there

Bruce Daisley: chatting a little bit there. It’s um, so it is, it is mad, but I think the play thing that is really interesting.

So the foosball table is in the middle of the office? Yeah. It’s on one of our, uh, more open plan areas.

Sue Todd: Yeah. And,

Bruce Daisley: and it’s just, you know, any of those kind of game opportunities, any of the opportunities to bring kind of play into the office, I think is where you see exactly what you’re saying. People breaking down barriers and being more empathetic with one another.

It’s, you know, ’cause so much and, you know, we reflect on this all the time, doing what we do, right? We make toys. So that’s, uh, should be hopefully part of the culture. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s. You know, play is absolutely, you know, one of the biggest reasons for, for doing it. But it shouldn’t just be about fussball tables or, you know, kind of going ab

Sue Todd: sailing without, has not be over reli on them.

That’s my worry that they’ve become the default. I mean, you know, I’m just interested if anyone’s got any other experiences of things that have come replace

Bruce Daisley: it. And I saw that Slack said that they don’t have those things, you know, slack, the sort of the message gap. Yeah. Because they said they wanted people to leave at six o’clock.

Mm-hmm. And, and almost it was sort of, they would try to make work feel like this fun environment and. I think increasingly the fact that we don’t have a separation between work and home space is what’s causing some of the strains of work. Right. Anyone else got a perspective on that?

Audience member number 2: Yeah, the whole ping pong thing.

Um, what, what it’s done in my experience is create a, a a, a kind of a culture of ping pong bullies. Oh, so you sort of go there and you want to have a go and think, oh, you know, I’ll, I’ll get involved in this. This would be great to meet some people and whatever. And then eventually you get played off the park by, by a millennial who’s been on it all day.

Sue Todd: Just another way to feeling adequate.

Audience member number 2: And now I just feel genuinely intimidated when I step out the lift and there’s people there with their tops spin, backhand, surf and all that kind of stuff. And actually it’s had the exact opposite effect, I think

Sue Todd: on

Audience member number 2: on most other people.

Sue Todd: Yeah. So what has replaced the kind of the banter that we’re observing, I think as, as reduced in the workplace?

It’s not fuz ball and table football. I mean, what’s your sense of ’cause Forced fun. In my experience never seems to work. Yeah, I think you were alluding to that earlier. Yeah. What’s replaced it, Bruce, on your, I’ll ask you guys, well, you talked about Crisp Tuesday on a podcast recently. Do you wanna just explain that?

Bruce Daisley: Yeah, yeah. But I was just, I’m interested in like these little things. Like the problem with modern work is that unless you can measure it, people think it’s got no value. And so these sort of stupid things where. You know, if you ask someone to analyze their favorite meeting of the week, o often a lot of works that seem to have a good culture seem to have these sort of irrelevant Friday afternoon meetings or Monday meetings, or Crisp Thursdays, the one I heard where people turn up and it is like there’s almost no agenda, no purpose.

Yeah.

And actually. All you end up doing. ’cause there’s no agenda. It’s quite trivial and there’s like a brief update of what’s happening in the office that week. They end up having a brief chat with people around the office who then they build like a bit of rapport. So it replaces the pub a bit. But of course if someone looks at the output of that and there’s all these rubbish status meetings that unfortunately give meetings a bad name.

But you know, so as a result someone looks at that and says, well that’s the one we’re gonna get rid of. Missing the fact that that was the one that made the magic. Yeah. That was the one that actually made you like other people.

Sue Todd: Yeah. So that’s the common thread I think from what you guys were saying.

Your observation about writing with Peter and Char and it being kind of, if it’s not working, let’s just put some YouTube, let’s just relax. Let’s take the pressure off that we’re not, it’s not happening today. And I guess the same when you’re devising a show, you know, we’ve gotta go out and do it, but if it’s not, let’s just kind of relax ourselves down a bit and create a different atmosphere.

Take the pressure away. I remember

Geoff Lloyd: interviewing a neuroscientist, I can’t remember who it was. Um, but saying that actually your best ideas come when you, you know, that mode your brain can get into where you eventually, shit, what was I thinking of there? Yeah, that’s, that’s the best, um, phase that your brain can be in for thinking up ideas and things.

Sue Todd: Right. Does that, that the neuro scientist on the panels that, I mean,

Professor Sophie Scott: I think, so one of, one of the things that’s really interesting about primate brains, and you see it if you go to like the zoo, we, we are, we’re just constantly seeking novelty. Mm-hmm. And if you give us stuff to do, we’ll do it. But if you give it a bit of space.

Where you are creating your own novelty, that’s when your brain can go off in all sorts of directions. ’cause that’s what it wants to do. It pretty much never just stops until you go to sleep or die. And that’s, um, so it, it’s like this, you can let that machine keep running and give it a bit of space to do that.

I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s actually, it’s whatever you wanna call it, but you know that kind of mood when you find yourself like, oh, hang on. All of a sudden you’ve been working things out without realizing it. And that’s not something that happens if you’re completely occupied doing something else. Yeah. It just will never occur.

Paul Colman: it’s in the workplace that novelty could be new noise. So whether that’s being dragged into a meeting or checking yourself on social media and then you’ve not got that space to then

yeah,

Professor Sophie Scott: have your

Paul Colman: produce your own novelty. Be curious. Yeah. Okay. I’m starting.

Sue Todd: So quick, quick, far. Couple of questions to finish.

So funniest, personal, funniest team you’ve ever worked in. You can’t say Peter K. Um, and biggest dickhead,

Paul Colman: it’s being recorded.

Sue Todd: You notice, sit out if it

Paul Colman: case biggest dickhead. Um. Funniest person. I’ll answer that first and then we’ll move on. Um, Leslie Douglas, when I worked at Radio two, um, she, uh, was the controller at Radio two.

Um, and she was just great fun in all meetings. I remember being interviewed by her for the job and I thought I could go for a drink with you.

Sue Todd: Yeah.

Paul Colman: And I knew if I was off for the job, I was gonna say yes because of that reason. Right. She was great. She

Sue Todd: was great. So in individuals can make a huge difference.

Yeah, a huge

Paul Colman: difference. Because I

knew

Paul Colman: that she was, she was kind of at the head of that, so everybody else was kind of

Sue Todd: Yeah. Would follow that lead.

Paul Colman: Yeah,

Sue Todd: yeah, yeah. So it is a leadership issue, is it?

Paul Colman: Yeah.

Sue Todd: Jeff, do you think?

Geoff Lloyd: No, my mine isn’t, um, mine isn’t a leader. It was, uh, one of the other DJs, Craig Cash, who went on to co-create the royal family and early doors, and he was just so funny.

And we all got fired off the radio at quite a similar time, and they were all right. They went on to. You know, create Mrs. Merton. They did gimme a job eventually, actually I was, I had a job which was just fetching Benson and Hedges and asperti for Caroline on the nights they were recording. But, um, but, so I had to go and work in a video shop and there was a fax machine there.

And the, the fax machine, when they were writing Mrs. Merton, the amount of faxes I would receive. That were just sort of drawings of either genitalia or Les.

Sue Todd: Yeah.

Geoff Lloyd: Which that was part of our process.

Sue Todd: Yeah. Yeah. Some things have rest that in the past, Sophie,

Professor Sophie Scott: um, I had a PhD student who was very, very funny.

Right. She really was extremely funny. I miss her a great deal.

Sue Todd: And did she create a certain atmosphere in the, in the office or in the.

Professor Sophie Scott: Um, yes. Yeah, and just, I mean, I was actually trying to draw it out on Facebook yesterday. I was in Sweden. I thought, oh, something’s happened. She might find funny if I put this out here about, she likes the revision song contest.

So I was like trying, trying to get her to be funny on my page specifically. ’cause I knew it would make me laugh. Stuck in the middle of Sweden as I was yesterday. Yeah. Um, and absolutely it’s, it was delightful.

Sue Todd: Okay. So my very, very, very last question. If you were running for election for the more after at work party.

What would your suggestion be? What can we do? What can people in this room do?

Bruce Daisley: Abolish meetings.

Sue Todd: Abolish meetings.

Bruce Daisley: Abolish meetings.

Sue Todd: Abolished meetings, okay. Apart from the ones that are about crisps?

Bruce Daisley: Yeah. I mean, look, just like that’s messing around, isn’t it? Yeah.

Geoff Lloyd: Yeah. Um, crisp Thursday. Crisp Thursday,

Sue Todd: you’re taking that one back from

the

Sue Todd: office?

Geoff Lloyd: Yeah, I think so. I mean, like I say, I work on my own a lot of the time, so

Bruce Daisley: you

Sue Todd: just whole package cringle the very morris, once you part you can’t stop. Paul,

Paul Colman: I think I get rid of company values and I know we’ve not touched on that massively, but it kind of, it irritates me when the senior guys in a business go, these are our values and nobody underneath them talks about them.

Sue Todd: Right.

Paul Colman: Are they too restricted? I think they’re really restrictive. Yeah. Right, right. And they might have one in there that’s have fun, but then don’t do anything to have fun. So I’d get rid of those.

Sue Todd: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sophie, what would your kind of manifesto item be?

Professor Sophie Scott: I think something similar actually. We, we tend to be, certainly in academia, there’s a move to try and make us behave, um, in a way that’s kind of in line at all times with the views of the university.

And it’s completely, completely at odds with how anybody normally works. And it stops you doing anything. Fun or interesting. Obviously you don’t try and destroy the university that that’s a given. Okay. That’s why you worked there. That wasn’t your aim values and Exactly. So you exactly. You the freedom to, to actually manage this the way you’d like to.

Sue Todd: Yeah. Take a little bit of the restrictions and the freedom and the pressure away. Cool. Okay. All good. So thank you to the panel. Thank you, Paul Pun. And Jeff, thank you, Sophie. I hope you’ve got some ideas and I mean, my takeaway is, you know, genuinely individual people can make a difference here. So if we all go back and just inject a little bit, let more humor to work, we’ll all have a, I’ll have a nicer time.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Bruce Daisley: Thank you for listening. All the previous episodes are at eat, sleep, work, repeat fm. If you are new today, there’s some AOL episodes. The damn pink one’s good. These are really good. Interview with Daniel Coyle. There’s lots of fabulous stuff there. Do send us your feedback. You can hit me up on LinkedIn. I’m Bruce Daisy, or you can tweet us by searching, eat, sleep, work, repeat.

See you next time.