Perhaps the most surprising admission in this episode is Stephen's acknowledgement that he's an admirer of the comedy of Bernard Manning:
"It would be foolish to um, to have a sort of politics of comedy in which you can only find people amusing if you're on the same political side as them. I mean, Bernard Manning, for all the horror of some of his jokes, is, I think, a supremely good and gifted joke-teller. It's incredibly hard to deny that the sight of this man with his large slitty eyes just standing in the corner of a room with a microphone, not moving, telling jokes at, somehow at a pace and er in a way that just makes me crack up every time."
"It would be foolish to um, to have a sort of politics of comedy in which you can only find people amusing if you're on the same political side as them. I mean, Bernard Manning, for all the horror of some of his jokes, is, I think, a supremely good and gifted joke-teller. It's incredibly hard to deny that the sight of this man with his large slitty eyes just standing in the corner of a room with a microphone, not moving, telling jokes at, somehow at a pace and er in a way that just makes me crack up every time."