Pod Insights British Scandal The Acid King | Meet the Undercover Officer Who Turned Against Drug Busts | 4 About this episode Former undercover drugs operative Neil Woods joins Alice and Matt to reveal what it’s really like to wage the war on drugs. After 14 years spent infiltrating gangs, earning the trust of dealers and risking his life inside the criminal underworld, Neil came to a surprising conclusion: major drug busts change less than we think.
Was Operation Julie really a success? Do crackdowns actually reduce harm?
And how did a former drugs officer end up becoming an advocate for psychedelic therapy?
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0:00 Alice Levine? Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of British Scandal ad-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app.
0:07 Matt Forde? As you've probably guessed from the title, this series is about drugs, specifically acid. So don't listen with kids around.
0:19 Matt Forde? I'm Matt Ford.
0:20 Alice Levine? And I'm Alice Levine.
0:21 Matt Forde? And this is British Scandal, an Audible original.
0:33 Matt Forde? So Alice, what did you make of the acid king?
0:37 Alice Levine? Well, that was bonkers, basically, although obviously inevitably ended badly for Mr LSD. I did love that Richard was our first ever, I think, protagonist on British Scandal after all these years, who didn't just have self-interest or money as their driving force. He had grand ideological reasoning behind his crimes, rather than, you know, just wanting to buy a super yacht.
0:58 Matt Forde? Yeah, it was a shame for him that LSD was illegal, really. But he was caught by a proper copper, Inspector Dick Lee. So what's your assessment of him and his merry band of bird watchers?
1:08 Alice Levine? Yeah, that did seem like a rogue decision to flood a very small village with dozens of undercover cops and just be like, yeah, there's just loads of ornithologists in the area today. Generally, a little bit slapdash on the 70s surveillance, wasn't it?
1:22 Matt Forde? Yeah, it was all a bit shabby and the sheep getting the better of him was not a high point for Inspector Lee. But let's not forget, according to him, they put an end to a vast criminal enterprise responsible for supplying 90% of the British LSD market and 60% of the world's.
1:40 Alice Levine? Oh, we heard it at least three times. A successful operation, then?
1:45 Matt Forde? Well, that is a good question. Was it a success? Would those same tactics still be used now? Is birdwatching as popular as it was in the 1970s, for example? And do undercover busts actually make a real dent in the drugs trade? All these questions and more will be answered by our guest today, former police officer and undercover drugs operative Neil Woods. For 14 years, Neil lived under hidden identities, earning the trust of drug dealers, gang members and organised criminals across the UK. But those years on the front line didn't just give him extraordinary stories. They convinced him that the war on drugs may be doing more harm than good. Neil Woods joins us after this.
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3:48 Matt Forde? Neil, welcome to British Scandal. How did you first get into undercover policing? And what was your first operation like?
3:55 Speaker 05 I got into undercover work by accident, really. I sort of drifted into policing because I went to university by mistake, dropped out of an incredibly boring course, much to the significant upset of my parents. And then I couldn't decide what to do and flipped a coin. It came up heads, and so I applied for the police.
4:14 Matt Forde? And what would tales have been?
4:16 Speaker 05 I would have gone backpacking around Europe with some friends.
4:19 Matt Forde? Yeah, it's not a long-term plan.
4:20 Speaker 05 No, no, it's not. But I was only 19. Yeah, I was definitely a youngster. I didn't realize how young I was until I was in the police, though, because I found myself to be really terrible at it. I was the worst uniform cock in the world. I couldn't cope with the confrontation. I just thought I could reason with everybody. But then I got an attachment to the drug squad. And then one of them said to me, "Do you fancy having a go at buying some crack cocaine?" Which wasn't a question I was expecting, but I was...
4:50 Alice Levine? And is there anything you want me to do for work?
4:54 Speaker 05 Yeah, so an an an an obs point was hastily set up, a camera, I was given a twenty pound note.
5:00 Alice Levine? Wow.
5:01 Speaker 05 Pointed towards this this this door in this house in Derby. And this huge guy opened the door and he says, what do you want? He said, you're not a student, are you? I hate students. And I thought, actually, I don't know what I am. No one told me I had to have a cover story.
5:17 Alice Levine? Oh, God.
5:18 Speaker 05 So I thought, well, that'll do. Yeah, I'm a student. And he says, are you stupid? I've just told you I hate students. Anyway, we had we had a bit of back and forth and I asked him if he had, very politely, if he had a stone of crack cocaine for me. Which he did. And I purchased my little rock. And as I was walking away, he said, hey, you take care now. Don't get yourself arrested. Which was very nice of him, I thought. But the key point of this is that at that point in time, this was an entirely new type of undercover work in the UK. Undercover work had been long term infiltrations, very high end, to the top of the tree, introduced by informants, that kind of thing.
6:00 Speaker 05 So this sort of DIY, working from the ground level up, was entirely new. So that poor drug dealer didn't have a clue that he might have a police officer on his doorstep. But of course, he then went to prison. And instantly, that work got harder. But that day changed the rest of my life, really, because the drug squad's eyes lit up, they thought we could have huge results with this. And very quickly, operations turned from a few days to a few weeks. And then, in no time at all, I was being loaned out to different drug squads all over the country, doing six or seven months at a time. And, you know, that first knock on the door would turn into very protracted and complex operations.
6:39 Matt Forde? So is it that you were particularly good at it compared to your colleagues?
6:44 Speaker 05 I mean, what I could do is think very quickly on my feet and interact with the person in front of me. But I saw the sort of maintaining a lie in a group of people in a community as an intellectual challenge. And I relished it, yeah. I still had a lot to learn because there was no training for this. But I helped develop the training after I had four years of doing the work. But the way that I learnt is I learnt on the fly, but I learnt by empathy. I learnt by understanding how to fit into that community. And I realised quite quickly that the people I needed to get to know were the people who were on the fringe of society, the people who were living in squats or homeless, because they were using the most drugs problematically and they had the best connections. So I
7:27 Speaker 05 fit in with them by using empathy. Nowadays, I look back at it and refer to it as weaponising empathy, because I wasn't using empathy for a very positive thing. I was using it to manipulate people.
7:40 Alice Levine? As you say, a big part of it is, of course, manipulation. So what makes people trust you? As you progressed through the job, were you creating more complex characters and backstories?
7:53 Speaker 05 I wasn't creating complex characters in particular. In fact, when we did have the training, we had some trainers who were doing the level one undercover work. And one of them would be very clear to us and said, look, don't think you're an actor. You're not clever enough to be an actor. An actor is somebody who maintains a role for a scene in a film or on a play, and they can repeatedly do it. If you try and be an actor, you will fail, you will get caught out. You have to be a different version of yourself. So I suppose simplicity was key. And the detail was in that the legend, and the best legend was the one that never had to be revealed, because it gave you the confidence to perform.
8:37 Speaker 05 But you didn't really have to have that scrutiny pulled apart from you.
8:42 Matt Forde? It must be incredibly risky. So there must have been times when your cover almost got blown?
8:48 Speaker 05 Yeah, many times. Unfortunately, because I became quite good at the work, it meant that I became a sort of a troubleshooter. So I could go into another operation that was struggling. So I tended to get into the more dangerous situations, and that seemed to be cumulative. I remember one time in Leicester, in, I think, 2001, my camera was found. Now, it wasn't James Bontec. When this big gangster was looking at my little metal button with a hole in it, you know, the lens that was winking up at him was definitely a lens, you know. So I had to give him a torrent of abuse so he couldn't let his friend know what he'd found. Basically escaped before he convinced his friend who I was.
9:33 Speaker 05 And then they tried to chase me in a car and tried to run me over. I've had a samurai sword to my throat. I've had someone trying to rob me at gunpoint. I've been stripped naked. Someone showed me a gun to make sure I had to do that. Yeah, it was. It became pretty dangerous, yeah.
9:49 Alice Levine? So I'm wondering, where do you draw the line in terms of what you do to keep yourself safe and keep your cover? Because we've done a series on British Scandal, Spy Cops, about undercover police officers infiltrating environmental activism organisations and the blurred moral line. So how do you decide what you will and won't do?
10:10 Speaker 05 Well, that's a really complex question. I mean, now I have two mental health conditions which I have seriously struggled with. I have complex PTSD and I have moral injury. And that moral injury is because I have stepped over the line. I have done things which contradict my moral centre and that has left me mentally injured. I formed these relationships with people in order to better manipulate them. And I would pick on the most vulnerable people in each community to develop that relationship with. And the reason I would pick the most vulnerable is because they're the easiest to manipulate. Now, if that sounds ruthless, well, of course it's ruthless. That is literally the nature of the work that I did.
10:53 Speaker 05 So you ask a really good question because I was absolutely convinced what I was doing was right at the time. But only when I realised that all of the work that I did was causing harm, it was causing harm to individuals and it was making society more dangerous. Only when I realised that, that my moral certainty was challenged, I learnt to understand where the addiction came from. And when I went into the police, I had a very prejudiced view, like most people do. You know, you were stupid enough to try the drug in the first place and you don't have the willpower to escape it, incredibly judgmental. But of course, I realised that all of the people using drugs problematically were self-medicating for childhood trauma, all of them.
11:35 Speaker 05 They were all self medicating for child sexual abuse, physical abuse or neglect. Every one of them had a story. And so we're criminalising people who are just self medicating for trauma. But one young man, um, really, I I'll never forget this. I got on with him really, really well. And his particular self medicating was because his father was abusive physically. And he would say to me quite often, he says, oh, well, my my dad only used to beat me when I deserved it. And that phrase just stays with me because he completely internalised it. Well, I I enjoyed his company, you know. Um, he was, he was very witty, had this very clever observational wit.
12:17 Speaker 05 But at the end of the operation, because he had been committing offences while on bail to dealing heroin, he was also arrested and he ended up doing three and a half years in prison. But when he was in the police cells, he ended up being on minute to minute watch, suicide watch, because he thought I was his one friend in the world, that he'd finally found somebody he could speak to. And of course, he did find somebody he could speak to because that was the skills that I brought to bear. Um, and it left him suicidal and I did that to him.
12:51 Matt Forde? Have you seen any of the people since?
12:54 Speaker 05 Well, I haven't, no. But, um, after I'd spent a few years speaking publicly on this, and obviously I do a lot of social media and talk about mental health and this kind of thing. His girlfriend got in touch with me, um, as Covid was coming to an end. And she said that, his name was Kami, and she said that he died during Covid, of Covid. He was forty nine, um, but he said, she said that he always appreciated the way that I'd publicly spoken about it, which was actually really nice for me to hear because talking about him publicly, I'd felt additionally guilty about that because I never asked his permission to do that. I was using his story to make a point and to, you know, to air these issues.
13:36 Speaker 05 So the fact that she got in contact with me and said that was really thoughtful of him.
13:40 Matt Forde? But can you reassure yourself, you know, I'm just thinking of your welfare really, that the things you did, it it are kind of, you're doing them on behalf of a system that is encouraging you to do them and gives you that effectively legal and moral flexibility in order to do it. That actually you may, there may be things that you've done that you now feel bad about, but you can reassure yourself that actually it was, it was the system really that was doing it through you.
14:04 Speaker 05 That's another great question, because I can completely rationalise this. I know that at the time, I was doing what I believed to be right. I was led to believe these things, so I can't rationally blame myself. However, mental injury isn't rational. That's the problem, that's why it's a mental illness. So my PTSD, when I have hypervigilance, is difficult. And my moral injury, when I have that profound sense of guilt, has given me at times suicidal ideation. So it's more complex than being able to rationally argue it.
14:40 Alice Levine? I'm wondering at what point undercover work becomes necessary?
14:44 Speaker 05 You're asking all the best questions, genuinely, because the ethics around the justification of undercover policing is not studied or questioned enough. According to the Regulations Ripper Act of 2001, undercover work should only be used where conventional policing is not possible or has failed. So it's a very high bar where it should be used. And I'm not sure that Operation Julie would get approved nowadays. But the test isn't strong enough, I would say, because there's no judicial oversight. And there is certainly no justification for the kind of work that I used to do. Because none of the work I did has ever reduced crime or made society safer.
15:29 Speaker 05 And there's no evidence to support that it does. And in fact, the violence and intimidation of organised crime that grows perpetually in our communities is in response to two particular police tactics. The use of police informants and the use of undercover operatives, because it makes the market more dangerous. So if you can intimidate people into not cooperating with police informants or undercover operatives, you are more likely to survive. So the very presence of undercover people in the drug markets causes more problems than it solves because there's no police activity ever reduces the size of the market. Nobody goes without a drug of choice today.
16:12 Speaker 05 In fact, Operation Julie may well have been the very last operation where it actually interfered with the supply chain of any illicit commodity.
16:23 Matt Forde? On television and on film, drug busts look amazing. I mean, they look like the coolest thing ever. How close to reality is the TV version of a drug raid?
16:35 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's very close, actually, but sometimes it can be even more dramatic. I remember being in a pub that I'd infiltrated for a good few weeks, a good months. And my cover couldn't be blown too early, so I had to be arrested at the same time. And I remember this rapid entry team from Leicester Police had the room controlled with everybody cuffed in plastic ties in 11 seconds from the moment they entered the room. It was absolutely terrifying to be on the receiving end of that and handcuffed by these armour clad cops. It was terrifying. But I remember when I did an operation to the Burger Bar Boys, which is
17:17 Matt Forde? Oh, in Birmingham?
17:17 Speaker 05 Well, a Birmingham gang, yes. They'd actually taken over the supply in Northampton and I spent seven months infiltrating them.
17:26 Speaker 05 And by the end of the operation, I'd really got a dislike to these people. They were the people who'd stripped me at gunpoint. They'd assaulted me. They were really, really terrifying. So I remember looking at the whiteboards in the secret location. And if you ever see a TV drama, you have the big whiteboards with all the names and the photographs and the lines between them. It's exactly like that. But there was 96 people I'd gathered evidence against. The six main gangsters and 90 of their support people. I thought, wow, this is going to absolutely wipe the trade clean from the city overnight. So there was cops brought in from all the surrounding counties, five different counties, hundreds of police involved for the arrest phase.
18:09 Speaker 05 Doors smashed in all over the place, drugs, guns seized, just like you see on the news. And I remember speaking to the intel officer who was tasked with keeping his ear to the ground as to the impact of the operation a week or so later. And he says, yeah. We managed to interrupt the drug supply for a full two hours.
18:31 Alice Levine? No.
18:32 Speaker 05 Seven months of work, being quite convinced I was going to die on multiple occasions. All those resources, all those armour clad cops smashing doors in and seizing. Yeah, two hours.
18:43 Alice Levine? So why do it?
18:45 Speaker 05 Well, that's the question, isn't it? That is the question. I eventually, I tried to change attitudes within policing when I realised this wasn't just futile, this is causing a big problem. But I couldn't change things from within, so I actually resigned from the police to become an activist to try and stop this, you know, because we're just making society more dangerous. We're criminalising addiction. We're making the very worst elements of our society more powerful. And the only way of defeating it is changing our drug policy.
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21:28 Alice Levine? Looking back at Operation Julie, you said it's probably the last instance of disrupting the supply chain. What stands out to you about the scale of the operation and the way that the police infiltrated the group?
21:41 Speaker 05 I'm not convinced that Operation Julie would get authorized today because I think they identified the addresses primarily from conventional policing. They were aware of the people involved and targeted them. I spoke to Stephen Bentley when I was researching my second book. Stephen Bentley is one of the undercover officers. And he was a fascinating character, but it just didn't sound like, really, they'd found much more information in the two years or so that they were actually working undercover than they had to through conventional surveillance. And there was a lot of police involved in it. But, I mean, you have to put the commodity into context here because there's a lot of talk about Operation Julie being huge in value and how many doses of LSD were seized
22:22 Speaker 05 and the fact that it was probably 90% of the UK's trade was represented by these people. It's still relatively speaking a small trade and it was generally just hippies and intellectuals who were using it. So the trade really accounts for how many countries they were exporting to. Of course, the LSD trade now is much, much bigger and would be completely resilient to any of the operation like this.
22:46 Matt Forde? And just thinking about the social impact of that, why do you think the prevailing establishment view is still that basically drugs are bad?
22:54 Speaker 05 LSD was made illegal in the We Need War on Drugs by Richard Nixon because he had political enemies. One of those political enemies was the anti-war group and he believed that if he could make the drugs that was associated with that movement illegal, then he could target their leaders. So it was always a political move. But banning drugs of any type has always been about targeting minorities. The laws have never been based on the evidence about how dangerous a drug is or how addictive it is. It's never been based on any evidence about the best way to tackle addiction when it arrives. In the UK, we used to have the best drug policy in the world. It was called the British system. And it meant that if you developed an addiction to a drug, you went to the doctor and you
23:38 Speaker 05 were given care. And more that care meant for heroin or cocaine is you were given a clean supply to protect you from the exploitation of organised crime. And the evidence is very strong to support that. In Switzerland, they use British evidence to do that. They do that now and they do it also in the Netherlands for heroin. But unfortunately, the reason we have the drug policy we do now is because the Americans bankrolled the Second World War. Europe, we collectively owed them an enormous amount of money. So the British system was killed off and the American system was brought in, which is basically... Drug use is a moral failing, addiction is a moral failing and it should be criminalised. And that is the reason that we have the laws that we do. Now, if you look at LSD, it becomes even more absurd.
24:23 Speaker 05 And if you look at Operation Julie and the way that it's celebrated, again, it becomes particularly absurd. Because LSD isn't even addictive. It's not a drug that people develop a problem with.
24:33 Alice Levine? Well, that's what I was going to ask you. I mean, was Operation Julie, was that paranoia, was that panic? How did that come to be such an investment of police time?
24:43 Speaker 05 There was a misunderstanding that LSD is this evil drug that will ruin our youth and people will become addicted to. And it's simply, it's just not true. It is quite interesting that you're covering the topic of Operation Julie now, when we have this awakening now, scientific awakening, of the benefits of psychedelics.
25:02 Matt Forde? Just thinking about Operation Julie, if you were around during it, what would you have done?
25:07 Speaker 05 If I, well, if I was a serving police officer at the time, I would have dutifully done as I was told and enthusiastically taken part.
25:18 Speaker 05 But, you know, I've got the benefit of hindsight.
25:21 Alice Levine? So if prohibition isn't working, is regulating drugs realistic?
25:26 Speaker 05 It's the best option of difficult options. Because drugs are difficult to manage, they're difficult. Some of them can be dangerous. We need to protect our children from them. But the truth is, our children have easier access to cannabis, cocaine and MDMA than they do tobacco and alcohol. Because legal regulation protects our children better than prohibition. So, yeah, of course, it's, it's realistic. It's the only option that is, that it's going to reduce the power of organised crime, end the violence that exists within the drug markets, stop the corruption that comes from the vast wealth that's created by prohibition.
26:12 Speaker 05 Legal regulation is the only thing we can do. And the sooner we do it, the less damage will be caused.
26:17 Matt Forde? And those that disagree would, would say what? That actually, if, if the state says it's okay to take these things, the risk is more people will take them. And then you get more people effectively withdrawing from work or society.
26:30 Speaker 05 Well, where regulation has happened, where heroin is controlled legally by doctors and not children, like we have selling it in the UK, where it's controlled by doctors in Switzerland and the Netherlands, they don't have a heroin problem like we do. We have thousands dying of heroin. They have hardly anyone dying and they certainly don't have children dealing it. Do we really care about how many people are using drugs? Or do we care about how many people are dying or how many people are using problematically? These are the numbers that we need to be considering. So where you have prohibition, where people are stigmatized and they can't get help, they are more likely to suffer
27:11 Speaker 05 and they're also going to be exploited by organized crime, which happens in our society. So it's about the numbers that are dying, you know, where you have a health-based approach to drugs, more than a punitive approach to drugs, you have less people dying. It's as simple as that. In Portugal, where they decriminalized the possession of drugs in 2001, they did have the highest drug deaths in Europe and now they've got the lowest. So we need to be looking at the right numbers. But to answer your question, probably the most important answer is that legal regulation protects our young. And if drug policy should be about nothing else, it should be about that because drug dealers don't ask for ID.
27:53 Speaker 05 But when a child tries to buy a drug at a licensed outlet, they have to show ID and so they don't get the drug. So actually, the move towards legal regulation is not only supported by the best evidence, it's urgent that we do so.
28:08 Matt Forde? Neil, have you tried psychedelics? And if so, what were they like?
28:14 Speaker 05 Well, just recently, a few weeks ago, I went to Peru and I was taken to Peru by this wonderful charity called Heroic Hearts, who for many years have been helping military veterans with PTSD who use ayahuasca in Peru in a traditional setting. And they were very kind enough to include me in that. And it was eye-opening is a unfortunately soft phrase for it. It was...
28:44 Speaker 05 Healing, it was very difficult. I did three nights of ceremonies. The second of the three was incredibly difficult, one of the most difficult things I've done in my life. But by the end of the third ceremony, I think I had my entire cortisol system reset. And since I've done that, I've had significantly less hypervigilance. I've entirely given up alcohol, which at times in my life I've used problematically because of my conditions. When I decided to leave the police and become an activist, I have, you know, I study this every day. And I have done for many years, but experiencing it myself and experiencing the benefits
29:28 Speaker 05 to a psychedelic therapy that is made on my own mental health has strengthened my resolve really, because these psychedelics that have been grouped into the wider war on drugs are actually the antidote to a lot of the harm that's been caused by the war on drugs, in particular to many police officers who are now struggling with their mental health.
29:50 Alice Levine? So potentially you might be the next Richard Kemp?
29:55 Speaker 05 I'm not nearly clever enough to be a chemist like that. But I will certainly be advocating strongly for legal access to therapeutic applications of these psychedelics and also decriminalisation of those people who want to consume them for their own reasons.
30:15 Alice Levine? Can you imagine in the thick of your policing career that you would have had an experience like this?
30:23 Speaker 05 No, I could never have imagined that at all. But then I never would have imagined that I would have developed complex PTSD and moral injury either, because no one warned me. You know, I used to be so smug as a young man, thinking, wow, I can cope with near-death experiences and I enjoyed the reputation I developed as being fearless and managing to do these things. But of course, you know, there's harm happening, you know, the damage is happening when you're doing these things.
30:53 Matt Forde? So do you think Richard Kemp was right?
30:55 Speaker 05 Well, I mean, I got to know Alston Hughes, one of the people who was arrested and imprisoned. Smiles as he was known, a lovely man. I was really fond of him. It was sad that he passed last year. And he said that Kemp's acid was the best that he ever had. And that he was a perfectionist. So was Kemp right to pursue perfection in the quality of his product? Yes, I'm sure. But was he an idealist? Was he an intellectual? Was he a hippie hoping to open people's minds? Was he just driven by money? Does it matter? I don't know. But I know that the people who were involved in the supply of heroin and
31:39 Speaker 05 crack cocaine had become much more dangerous than the Richard Kemp's of this world.
31:45 Alice Levine? As you say, hard to know his motivation or motivations reliably. But do you feel an affinity with that ethos of awakening?
31:57 Speaker 05 I do feel an affinity with that ethos, because I remember having a conversation with Smiles. And of course, he made money from this trade as part of this wider gang. But I believed him entirely when he said he believed he was doing a service for mankind to be able to make people healthy. He believed, even in the 1970s, that he was helping people with their mental health. Because he was former military, and it had helped him with his mental health. And he understood that even in the 70s. And he thought he was helping with people. And I believe that. So yeah, I understand the ethos, and I celebrate it
32:40 Speaker 05 now. And it was very interesting, actually, when I spoke to Stephen Bentley, one of the police officers he befriended, Alston. Because one of the things he said to me when I spoke to him is that, bear in mind that Stephen Bentley was on record as having mental health problems as well. He said, I never tried any of Kemp's acid, but nowadays I wish that I had. I think that's quite telling.
33:05 Matt Forde? They also made a bit of money as well. I mean, there was a business element to this, wasn't there?
33:09 Speaker 05 Of course, yeah, of course. And you could argue that they became greedy as well. There was a lot of money in it, because they effectively had a monopoly.
33:19 Matt Forde? And do you feel like you're winning the argument? Are there people in the police, in politics elsewhere that are more open to this now?
33:27 Speaker 05 Oh, absolutely. We're winning the argument because the evidence completely supports drug law reform. And yes, yes, we are winning the argument. But we need to win it quicker. Change needs to come quicker, because the power of organised crime is becoming entrenched.
33:43 Alice Levine? I know you said at the beginning, Neil, that you were told, first and foremost, you are not an actor, you are not clever enough to be an actor. But after spending years convincing criminals, you were somebody else. Ever tempted by the thesp life?
34:00 Speaker 05 No, I honestly think I'm not clever enough for that. You know, I am in awe of actors who can maintain a role and, you know, completely occupy a different persona. So no, I just don't, I don't consider myself clever enough by far.
34:17 Alice Levine? You've never been scouted?
34:18 Speaker 05 No.
34:21 Alice Levine? Neil, thank you so much. That was brilliant.
34:24 Speaker 05 No, you're welcome. Thank you very much for covering this and in such an intelligent way as well.
34:29 Matt Forde? Thank you.
34:32 Matt Forde? That was phenomenal. Massive thanks to Neil Woods for his brilliant insights. Alice, what do you have for us next week?
34:39 Alice Levine? Can we just have Neil on again? I want you to think about Tom Hanks and Cast Away. That's your clue.
34:45 Matt Forde? Oh, no. Is this about what's happened to Wilson?
34:48 Alice Levine? That would have to be a thirty-parter, not a three-parter. Okay, another clue. Sperm whale.
34:54 Matt Forde? Free Willy, because the way they treated that poor animal was a disgrace. And I don't know what the British connection would be, but maybe finally we're going to get justice.
35:04 Alice Levine? That daft little fin. My goodness. Okay, I'm just going to tell you, because this is getting painful. We are going to take a trip to the Galapagos with a young couple from England who set sail to New Zealand on a yacht in search of something other than life in the burbs. They certainly found it, just not quite how they expected. Our next series is The Shipwrecked Marriage.
35:24 Matt Forde? From Audible Originals and Samistat Audio, this is the fourth and final episode in our series, The Acid King.
35:31 Alice Levine? British Scandal is hosted by me, Alice Levine.
35:33 Matt Forde? And me, Matt Ford. For Samistat, the producer was Louise Mason. Our series producer was Chica Ayers. Our studio engineer was Jai Williams. Our senior producers were Joe Sykes and Ashel Isit Sina. Executive producers for Audible were Theodora Leludis and Estelle Doyle.
35:56 Speaker 07 There are books that change how you see the world, and there are books that change how you see yourself. In a new podcast series, A Great Book with Barack Obama, President Obama sits down with a series of surprising and sharp guests to explore six books that have shaped his life and perspective on the world. From Song of Solomon and The Fire Next Time, to All the Pretty Horses and Gilead, the president is joined by guests like Tom Hanks and Ta-Nehisi Coates to reflect on how these timeless stories shaped his thinking on everything from fatherhood to leadership, and discover together what they tell us about the world we live in and the world we want to create.
36:39 Speaker 07 Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of A Great Book with Barack Obama ad-free right now, plus access each audiobook discussed in the series. Download the Audible app today.
36:56 Speaker 07 Journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia spent her life exposing powerful people. Then, in 2017, she was killed in a car bombing. I'm Stephen Gray, and for the past nine years, I've been trying to find out who wanted her dead. That search took me to Malta through secret companies, organized crime, and eventually to one of the island's richest and most powerful men. Now, after years of waiting, this trial has finally happened. But when the verdict came in, the case took a turn that almost no one had expected. In a brand-new update to the multi-award-winning podcast, Who Killed Daphne?, I'm returning to Malta to find out how we got there and where the search for the truth goes next. Listen to the new episode of Who Killed Daphne?
37:40 Speaker 07 wherever you get your podcasts. And you can hear the full six-part investigation from the beginning, ad-free with Audible. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app and by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.
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