Serious stuff before the nonsense begins….

This Sunday James is running the Hackney Half Marathon along with his brother Will in aid of Bipolar UK, in memory of their uncle George. You can sponsor them at:

www.justgiving.com/jandwramsden

The computer has crashed at TickyOff Towers and sadly for you, a vast slab of pork chop based chat has been lost forever. Awful as this is, Sam and James manage to recover from the loss with an even heftier chunk of mouth sounds. James is fed up with London, may have hair plugs and proposed to his wife while watching a somewhat saucy movie. Meanwhile, Sam is concerned about a room service order in ‘Ghostbusters’, has meddled with Ash Nute’s pork chops and steals food from his son’s plate.

Then food writer Rosie Birkett arrives. She is late, but fortunately her tardiness is more than forgiven as she comes bearing a swathe of gifts for the TickyOff Two. Then, this trio of mouths in three skulls get to delivering at a high level on such topics as the music venues of Leeds, the joy of baking sourdough, dining in Mexico and the long list of food related words which get one’s back up.

Also, find out why Rosie was known as ‘Food Perv’, learn her thoughts on Dad Fashion and begin to understand exactly what strange behaviours Sam would get up to if he was ever invited on ‘Saturday Kitchen’.

Finally there is a chilling tale of Rosie’s near demise in the jaws of a giant lizard, also called Rosie. James takes a meal to a blogger and his nan who may or may not be nude, and Sam wears a name badge. Thrilling stuff.

It’s wild, it’s the opposite of mild and it sure does go on for a while. It’s TickyOff, and it’s the very best thing human beings can experience. Clothing might be optional, but safety is always paramount.

This week’s episode is sponsored by great adventurers on both sea and land dropwine.co.uk

We know that our listeners worldwide come to TickyOff for many things, solace, James’s raw eroticism, Sam’s happy go lucky demeanor, ghost focused discussion. What few are looking for is a working knowledge of human, or animal, biology. That can only be a good thing. Especially in this week’s episode.

Somehow there are foul tear-ducts, talking sausages which may contain the ghosts of deceased pigs, the intelligence of corvids, sharks scaring whales and sheep stuck in blackberry bushes. Oh, and a mechanical spider.

Contributing to this menagerie of nonsense is author and bookshop owner Evie Wyld. She proves that she can communicate words via sounds created in her mouth not just on a page. It’s amazing. She discusses reviews, how she writes, unsuitable books for kids and treating escaped criminals like hedgehogs.

Meanwhile, Sam has stolen some erotic fiction from his mother, had a terrible experience in a highly regarded restaurant and thinks he looks like Harold from ‘Neighbours’. James has been to a theme park, is planning on test driving a Lamborghini and wants to make an Isle Of Wight based remake of ‘The Rock’.

Also, a little trigger warning for any dinner ladies listening in, James says ‘scrotum’ to one of your kind and Evie’s son punches one of your gang full in the face. Apologies in advance. We know that is no way to treat elderly slop-delivery folk but we have to keep it honest on the TickyOff and these things happened. This is real life. Wake up.

This week’s episode is sponsored by the Marty McFly and Doc Brown of wine dropwine.co.uk

Please hit us hard with a subscribe, a review, and a follow on Instagram: @tickyoff

When James won his first Oscar for his incredible turn as an aged Bane coming to terms with his saggy body and his life of crime and carnage in Richard Curtis’s wonderful ‘An Old People’s Home Near Watford’, many commented on his stirring acceptance speech. How he dedicated his win to his ‘most incredibly handsome and wise best friend Sam’. How he refused to take the credit for that scene, the one where Bane and Martine McCutcheon make (grey) love on a row boat during a delightful day trip out to Whipsnade Zoo, instead thanking ‘from the bottom of my heart, my sensei of love, Sam’. As honoured listeners to this podcast will know, this was classic James. And there’s plenty more classic James on this week’s episode of The TickyOff.

He’s been playing a weird game in his parent’s garden, delaying his pleasure and styling his hair like Abs from Five. Sam meanwhile doesn’t trust Easter, regularly dresses up like a mummy and wants people to cheer up at funerals, just not while attending his own.

Then Ben Tish arrives like many, not all, but most guests, arrive to TickyOff Towers. Via the door. Ben’s mouth opens and closes, laying eggs of sound all around. His new book ‘Moorish’, the perils of Saturday Kitchen and his early days in cooking with Oliver Peyton, Jason Atherton and Dan Lepard. Other aural oeufs crack wide open and drip sound albumen on his hometown of Skegness, how much he enjoys dressing up like Stevie Nicks and Marcus Wareing acting like a twat.
There’s a lot of these audible eggs and yet somehow there’s also time to ponder on whether or not mountains are worth the hassle, couscous and the trials and tribulations of fast expansion.

This week’s episode is sponsored by the funky jazz sax and slap bass wonders of the world of wine dropwine.co.uk

A number of etchings were recently unearthed in a system of caves many miles beneath the Andean mountain ranges just south of Carlisle, in Peru. At first these strange hieroglyphs baffled the archeologists who had dug them up, with a big digger. They were on the verge of just filling in the big hole they’d dug, with their big digger, and admitting failure. Just in time though someone realised there were two humans who would definitely be able to crack the spooky etching conundrum. Those two human ‘men’? JR and SH, the TKIOF Boyz.
Flown to the site in a very expensive hovercraft, the TickyOff legends quickly deduced that the ancient cave wall vandals had simply written: The Kitchen Is On Fire Is The Best Podcast Ever and Forever. They’d also drawn a big…..element on the wall too. Very immature.
This week’s episode yet again proves the cave-scrapers’s correct. There’s waterpolo, Michel Roux Jr rueing the day, a lot of pie chat and a journey around the entirety of Ripon town centre. James has cooked a weird wellington and may be in line to become a hornblower. Sam will not reveal what he does in his house when his kids are out but he does reveal a tale of a woman with haunted bees in her eye.
Then Owen Barratt from the mighty Monty’s Deli arrives with tales of the toll cooking professionally takes on the body, Kickstarter, beautiful tiles, the wonders of Reading and the joy of pleather.
Owen has also been playing a lot of ‘Farming Simulator’, has some concerns about Thom Yorke and is very much down on lemon thyme.

This week’s episode is sponsored by seventh wonders of the world of wine dropwine.co.uk

This week restaurant critic and food writer Tom Parker Bowles is sat in the hottest of seats upon the mighty TickyOff. Imagine an internally heated saddle on a TickyOff shaped horse, that's the vibe and that's why cowboys wear chaps. Heat dispersion.

Things get off to a Brexit-themed start as Tom talks about Brexit. That doesn’t last long however as he then tells all about tabloid stings, death metal versus bagpipes and firing guns off the back of a flatbed truck in Guadalajara.
Also this week, James has crumbs on his lip, is making kombucha and wasn’t allowed to watch the start of ‘Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves’. We learn that Sam loves grouper, Tom finds dolphins sinister and James makes an incredibly niche indie-rock circa 2003 reference.
And if this episode wasn’t stuffed full enough with fat topics like a pod-based cotechino sausage, there’s also fun at a medieval fayre, a haunted tudor mansion, William Sitwell stealing people’s lines on ‘Masterchef’ and…….Sam and James go to a Smeg showroom.

If that isn’t a mountain based Sly Stallone vehicle with a hell of an opening scene, I don’t know what is.

This week’s episode is sponsored by the incredibly gifted archers, whittlers, weavers and wine experts at dropwine.co.uk

Recently James and Sam were mildly honoured to be invited to give the commencement speech to the 2019 class at the hallowed Massachusetts Institute Of Technology or MIT as some call it. Gushes of absolutely classic TickyOff mouth sounds were sprayed from the dais directly into the ear openings on the eager students headskulls. It was then the nerdy youngsters chance to be feel truly honoured when they were given the opportunity to offer up some Quickfire questions of their own to James and Sam. Unfortunately the be-robed Ivy Leaguer’s questions were far from the incredible standard required so the TickyOff boys bailed on the entire soiree in disgust. That’s why you haven’t seen any YouTube videos of the shindig alongside other commencement speech classics like the David Foster Wallace one about the fish or the one to Grimsby Polytechnic’s woodworking class of 1976 by turkey legend Bernard Matthews.

Fortunately Sam and James are back from Boston to bring the Quickfire, the Over/Under and the world class audible mouth noises to you, the most loyal and the largest audience in podcasting history.
This week chef and restaurateur Enrique Olvera is here and he’s a stone cold big deal. Pujol in Mexico City rides high on the World’s 50 Best list, Cosme and Atla in NYC are packed and critically acclaimed, he’s got a new book out ‘Tu Casa Mi Casa’ and he knows how to drink large amounts of mezcal without embarrassing himself. Unlike the TickyOff gang.

Enrique offers up a guide to the best restaurants in Mexico City, the five year old mole at Pujol, collaboration, and the pros and cons of a culinary education. There’s also just enough time for the first ever outro to an episode of TKIOF. In this aural appendage, Sam is poor and greedy and James says ‘arena of conflict’. There’s a new chef going great guns at Pidgin and they spill a vast variety of legumes about their upcoming trip to Greece to cook in a haunted monastery.

This week’s episode is sponsored by winged and b’whiskered wine champions of the world dropwine.co.uk.

It’s another week, another journey around Jupiter, another wax and wane of Europa, our favourite moon. This intergalactic road trip also provides human beings of Earth with another incredible episode of the TickyOff podcast.
This week James has been roped into cooking bread with a bunch of children, only one of whom is related to him. Sam is ratty about a long, and to be fair somewhat dull, chat about the colour pink in restaurants.
They discuss flashing, ‘Grief Is The Thing With Feathers’, noodles and ‘Us’. Then beer expert and writer Melissa Cole shows up with a cool box full of beer and things improve no end. Melissa rains down chat-honesty like a cloud bank of verbal truth has just blown in from the West…or something.
She tells all about the grim idiocy of (some) in the craft beer world, changing demographics in beer drinking and drops more science than has ever been heard around these here TickyOff parts.
There’s also time for nursery rhymes, the difficulties of recording the sounds of a live hawk, tarot cards and mediums, and Melissa explains the benefits of Sam turning his back on his beloved Budweiser…

This week’s episode is sponsored by the entirely hairless, three fingered, web footed wine experts at Dropwine.co.uk

This week on the damn pod things get off to an appalling start. There’s yet more moaning, some wild chat about how to spell the word for a hand-rolled cigarette and Sam wants to know which trees are found in the woodlands of Thailand.
The bar is set so low in these opening exchanges that things can only improve, and they do. In a way.
James has discovered that scientists have reversed time and it somehow involves racist ‘funnyman’ Jim Davidson and also poor John Virgo, whose name it would seem has been sullied by his ‘Big Break’ association with the aforementioned massive racist bellweasel, Davidson.
All of this high minded science chat is then somewhat undercut when Sam again disputes whether black holes exist and asks what they are actually doing at CERN. Sam then offers Brian Cox a sugar cube and the wheels fall off the podcast entirely….
Then journalist, and the man Gloria Hunniford wishes she was if she wanted to be a male consumer affairs legend instead of a female consumer affairs legend, Harry Wallop shows up.
This triumvirate of facially placed mouthholes spew forth on a £15 cup of a coffee, the inefficiencies of cheese, the wonder of Cumbrian Hotpot, the inanity of Quidditch and what it’s like writing for the gawddamn Daily Mail.
Oh and they talk about moths too.

This week’s episode is sponsored by the Orion’s Belt of the galaxy of wine dropwine.co.uk

Sam begins this week’s episode with a war on science. He disproves ‘The Five Second Rule’. Yes that’s right. A towering pillar of humankind’s understanding of existence itself, is pushed over like a poor quality Jenga player might topple down those funtime wooden blocks.
James is back from Thailand, and he’s in love with the food, the vibe, a man of the woods and with his very own Mongolian donkey.
They also manage to cover people reading showy books in public and Sam gets very ratty with the Renaissance.
Then Mollie Goodfellow arrives and within actual seconds, teachers are getting their comeuppance, Joe Wicks is in Eastenders, Greggggggg Wallace is working out his back muscles and real life people are being met in real life and some people feel uncomfortable about that.
They also blabber on about pasta, private school guilt, the legend of King Arthur and The Sopranos.
And Mollie brings up ghosts. Which James loves.

This week’s episode is sponsored by myths and legends of the world of wine, dropwine.co.uk

This week Sam and James are both incredibly depressed. It’s amazing how despite this, they still open with this much world-beating chat gold to be honest. No one else could deliver chat at this level with black hounds humping at their haunches. No one. That’s why you come here and these guys just turn it on like it’s nothing. Impressive I’m sure you’ll agree.
No other human mouths could spurt kombucha updates, sleeping bag considerations, packing books for a trip in the Arctic based on weight and fake interview confessions, in this manner and at this level. No one.
After an opening like this week’s, only two people could possibly arrive and immediately match the TickyOff Boyz chat diamond for sparkling chat diamond. These two people are Sarit and Itamar from Honey & Co.
This rarely spotted quadruple of mouths go deep on how to and how not to open a restaurant, growing at the right pace, and the benefits of being your own boss. There’s also a whole bunch of truth delivered aurally concerning how to maintain a relationship under the pressures of running a business, they take a swing at French patisserie, might want their neighbour dead and Sam bites his tongue as they go big on the wonders of honey.
All this plus, a harp playing ghost in the bakery and Sarit and Itamar share both the best and worst traits they see in one another which is insanely cute. Which no one has ever, in the entire history of the mighty TickyOff, described any of the content as being.
That was a truly awful sentence to end this blurb with but…you know. The gold is on the pod yeah, it ain’t here. What do you want from me? Wake up.

This week’s podcast is sponsored by amazing wine fella-me-lads dropwine.co.uk and brilliant vodka whippersnappers ourvodka.com/ourlondon