FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Short Stories

We Gave Limmy Some Scenarios and He Improvised Short Stories on the Spot

Ed Sheeran gets decked, a man is jailed over a Greggs fiasco and a couple confront some awkward truths about their sex life.
Screenshot: YouTube

Today, BAFTA-winning Scottish comedian Limmy – most famous for his deeply Scottish cult BBC sketch programme Limmy's Show – will release his second book. That's Your Lot, a follow-up to 2016's Daft Wee Stories, is both a collection of short stories and a probe into the mind of Limmy, which is often a pretty dark and bizarre place to end up. Given Limmy's ability to craft stories and sketches that are often as funny as they are bleak and deeply troubling, we thought we'd get him to create some original stories on the spot. We gave him a call, gave him a scenario and he came up with some new stories spontaneously, improvising the plot, characters and narrative. They're all incredibly dark, so stop reading now if you don't like stories about death and grievous bodily harm.

Advertisement

If you're totally fine with that stuff, enjoy:

Scenario: Man who works in the Carphone Warehouse gets sick of the busker outside playing the same songs every day

There's a guy called John and he works in the Carphone Warehouse and he loves his job. Everything has been going well: he loves it, it pays well and he just loves deals and things like that. One day he starts not liking his job. It has nothing to do with what's happening on the inside, but outside there's a busker and he just keeps playing the same stuff over and over again, always playing Ed Sheeran. He's got the full fucking gear, the pedals, a laptop and the stuff to loop all the music. He's really proud of himself and he kind of looks like Ed Sheeran. Maybe that's how it all came about – he's almost like an Ed Sheeran impressionist. There's a big crowd and every time John goes for his lunch he's having to squeeze by a big fucking crowd and this cunt's playing the same tunes again and again, using his guitar and his loop pedals. Constant fucking loops.

So he asks his boss, "Fucking hell, can we not ask him to move? Is there nothing we can do?" And his boss says, "No, we don't own the space outside. There's nothing we can do."

He's on his lunch one day and the guy is on a bit of a break, so he decides to talk to him.

"So you'll be here for the rest of the year then? You never want to move around a bit?" He's trying to be friendly.

Advertisement

The Ed Sheeran guy just sort of goes "uhh" and makes a wee sound.

John asks, "Is that aye or no? Do you never move about to get money from different places?"

"Oh, this is great, this bit. This bit is brilliant," the Ed Sheeran guy says.

"Right, right… it's just I'm here every day and I like Ed Sheeran and that, but I'm hearing it every day – is there any chance you could maybe move about a bit?"

"No, I'm fine here."

"I'm not asking, I'm telling," John says. "I want you to go. I can't get my work done properly, mate. How would you like it if I wouldn't let you do your work properly? If I was interrupting you?"

"Get lost," the Ed Sheeran guy says.

"What's that?"

"Oh, fuck off!"

There's nothing John can do. He just walks into the Carphone Warehouse and tells his fellow members of staff: "You hear that cunt out there?"

One day the Ed Sheeran guy comes into town and he's playing the same fucking music again, and John is just watching him do the pedals and seeing how it all works.

He says, "Fuck this, man. Fuck this."

He walks out right in front of the crowd and says, "Eh, watch this, I've got a tune. Watch this. Where's the button to clear it all?"

He presses that button.

"Watch this everybody," he says.

He holds the pedal down and he punches the Ed Sheeran guy four times: one, two, three, four to get your 4/4 beat, and then he presses the second pedal, and every second beat he puts his finger in the Ed Sheeran guy's eye, so it's like "boof, ahhh, boof, ahhh," and he just builds it up with all these different things, like kicking his balls, sticking a finger up his arse when he's not expecting it, pulling his trousers down – and it becomes like a cracking sort of beat box. A violent beat box sort of tune.

Advertisement

People don't like it to begin with.

"Somebody stop him – call the police, my god," they are saying.

They're all filming it.

But then they start going, "Wait a minute, wait. This is good. This is good."

Eventually that Ed Sheeran guy is lying there in a pool of blood and John is cranking this fucking tune and the ambulance turns up and so he presses a pedal for that and gets the sirens in there too – "woo, woo", like a techno version of Ed Sheeran.

The video goes fucking viral, people are like, "This is horrific," and Ed Sheeran sees it and thinks, 'This is fucking great. This is great.' John is then asked to go on Britain's Got Talent, so he goes on that and gets to the final. Then, as a surprise, guess who walks on at the end? Ed Sheeran. John and Ed Sheeran do this song together.

Ed Sheeran says, "Listen, because this is the final and I want you to win, I'm going to let you do all that to me."

So he starts battering Ed Sheeran and the tune isn't as good as the video, but it's quite good. Ed Sheeran dies from his injuries. John wins Britain's Got Talent.

Scenario: A man gets caught shoplifting pasties from Greggs and tries to talk his way out of it

Ben goes into Greggs and he loves a cheese and onion pasty – he always picks up it from the shelves and then gives it to the person to heat up. He gets it every day and there's big queues and sometimes they run out. There's one particular day and he's at the back of the fucking queue, and people have got a habit of getting to the front of the queue, then going to the shelves and picking up a pasty. So he's decided to walk right in, go to the front of the queue and pick the fucking thing up and then walk back. So he does that, walks up and somebody else gets it first, and he thinks, 'Fuck.'

So the next day he goes in – he's late again – and he thinks, 'Actually, I can't do this with people seeing me; I need to just go in and knock the thing. I have to make it look like I'm not picking it up.' He goes in and there's a big queue – you're only allowed to pick things up at the front of the queue, you see. He walks up to the front of the queue.

Advertisement

"Hey, what's that up there on the ceiling? Is that a fly?"

Everybody looks up and he takes a pasty and puts it in his pocket.

"Oh, I suppose it wasn't a fly," he says.

He then walks to the back of the queue really happy. He gets to the front of the queue.

"What do you want?" they say.

"This," he says, and pulls out the pasty.

"Where did you get that from?"

He explains he picked it up earlier.

"Right, that's shoplifting," they say.

Security come and they grab him.

He's like, "What are you talking about? I'm not walking away with it, I'm wanting to heat it up, I'm buying it."

"No, you put it in your pocket," they say.

They take him into the back.

"I cannot believe this is fucking happening. I was going to buy it, I was just trying to skip the queue," he's saying.

Security is there and they bring in the police and everything. He explains the situation and that he just loves the pasty so much that he was just wanting to avoid missing out on one by queuing.

"Is it a crime to enjoy coming to Greggs that much?" he asks.

The PR guy comes in and says, "Listen everyone, stop what you're doing, this is actually great. He loves Greggs so much he's willing to shoplift."

"I wasn't shoplifting – I just had it in my pocket," he pleads.

The PR guy says, "It doesn't matter – people don't care about the truth. They care about a story. Now, we've got a deal for you: would you be willing to get jailed for this if we give you a bit of money and you say, 'I couldn't help it – the pasties in Greggs are just so fucking delicious that I had to try and knock it?'"

Advertisement

He asks how much, knowing he has a family and he'd be depriving his wee 'uns of a dad and that. They say seven years.

"Seven years for shoplifting a pasty?" he says

"So you admit you were shoplifting?"

"No!" he says. "I'm saying what you're saying. Seven years for shoplifting?"

"You'll have to do something extra, like punch a security guard. Make it look like you're a threat to the public," they say.

"During those seven years we'll get a really good campaign going – we'll do an interview with you later, and when you come out we'll give you some more money."

"Aye, alright," he says.

He punches the security guard, but knocks him out, and the guy is in a coma for three weeks. Serious stuff. He gets seven years and he's in there and he looks in the paper and it says, "Guy loves Greggs so much that he's shoplifting and cracked a security guard," and so he's thinking, 'Right, good.' He phones his girlfriend and she comes to visit with the wee 'uns.

"Did you get the money through?" he says.

She's like, "What money?"

"The fucking money – they said they were going to give me money."

"Who did? What money?" she says.

"It was a deal," he says. "I didn't really shoplift. They offered me £10k if I did this."

"Oh no, I've not had anything. Anyway, so we can't come to visit you as often, is what we've come to tell you."

"What you talking about?" he says

"We're moving away. I'm taking the wee 'uns."

"What?! So you've not got the money?"

Advertisement

"Who cares about the money? She's not got a dad now, so I need to move on. Barry from next door has been looking after us while you've been away, so we're going to move to Tenerife with him."

So he does like five years and he's trying to get The Innocence Project involved to explain he's been ripped off. That Greggs didn't keep their side of the deal. Greggs are denying all of this.

They say, "We didn't give him any money – he simply is just someone who loves Greggs so much that he shoplifted, and even though we think that's terrible, it just goes to show you how tasty our cheese and onion pasties are."

He reads that in the paper and he's like, "Fucking cunts, man." He's at the canteen in the prison, and they're making pasties, and the chef has been learning how to bake to make him a cheese and onion pasty because he knows the cunt's been set up.

"Oh, this is nothing," he says as he bites into it. "It's nowhere near as good as Greggs." He says thanks to him and that he appreciates the gesture.

Craig, the baker, says, "Ah, no problem."

Ben goes to his cell and on the way he speaks to someone who works in the laundry
and asks for an extra sheet. He goes back to his cell that night and they find him the next day; he's tried to hang himself – unsuccessfully. They let him out on compassionate grounds.

He gets out and he keeps going into Greggs every day, but that Greggs is shut now – it's a shoe shop. But he keeps going back in.

Advertisement

"I want my pasty," he says, day after day.

They just go along with it and give him a shoe, and he pretends he's eating it and all that. Then a couple of years pass and he just sort of slips away in his sleep.

Scenario: A man catches his girlfriend watching something in the middle of the night

William normally goes to sleep at about 10 o'clock, and he needs a good night's sleep. His girlfriend, Sarah, goes to sleep about the same time, but every time they wake up in the morning he notices that her tablet is sitting on her lap while she's sleeping, like she's been looking at it during the night.

He starts to notice it – they go to bed and the tablet isn't there, and she falls asleep before him, and then he wakes up in the morning and she's got the tablet across her. So, he's thinking, maybe during the night she wakes up and so she looks at her tablet. He starts thinking about it and he starts thinking about it that much that he must have consciously woken himself up, and one night he's having some light sleep because he's got it in his head, and thinks maybe it's around 2AM she wakes up. So his body clock kicks in and he wakes up around two and he opens his eyes and there's a light, so he's thinking, 'Is it morning yet?' because he can sense the light. He opens his eyes a bit more and he can see this light coming from this tablet. He just sort of waits and he's ready to lean up and look and see what she's doing, but he doesn't want to do that because it could be a surprise – she could be ordering him a wee present or something.

Advertisement

So he acts like he's just turning around, and he looks at the tablet and he can see that she's watching this porn, but it's not just any kind of porn – it's that fucking specialist porn. It's called rule porn, or something; there's a whole website of it in which, if there's anything you can think of, then there's porn of it. It's got all sorts – The Simpsons – and she's watching The Flintstones.

There's Fred shagging not Wilma, but Betty, and Barney Rubble is shagging Wilma, and there's foursomes and all that, and they're shagging the dinosaur, Dino, and the wee 'uns are shagging and everything. He's thinking, 'What, is this a joke?' He's just lying there thinking, 'I cannot fucking believe it,' and he's noticing the covers moving and she's having a wank, and he's thinking, 'Oh, this isn't happening.' She scrolls down and it gets more and more into the mad stuff, like there's fucking boulders, big Flintstone prehistoric boulders half full of people that are dead, and then there's another bunch wanking off like some mad fucking satanic ritual, and the harder these things get the more she's wanking away. He's like, 'I didn't know she was into all of this.' He decides he's just going to go back to sleep.

He wakes up the next day and sees the tablet on her, as usual.

He asks her, "Did you get up last night? Why's the tablet there?" just to see what she says.

"Oh, just shopping. I was looking for a new jacket," she says.

Advertisement

"Are you happy?" he asks.

"What do you mean?"

"You know, the things we get up to and that in bed?"

"Yeah, of course. What makes you say that?"

"If there's anything you want to just try out or anything then just let me know."

"Aye, I don't know what you're talking about, but aye," she says.

A few days pass and he sees her doing the same things during the night, and he asks her again if she's happy.

"What's all this about?" she says, and he just says, "Nothing."

One day it's a pal's 40th birthday party and it's fancy dress.

"Oh, I think we should get dressed up as John Travolta and Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction," she says.

He's like, "I might do something different."

"What like?"

"I'll do my thing, you do your thing."

"Are you alright? Is everything alright?" she asks.

"Yeah, I just think it would be good for me to surprise you and you surprise me."

He then says, "I'll just meet you at the party – I need to go round to my dad's and pick up a few things. I'll just meet you there. It'll be a better surprise at the party."

She's there at the party as Uma Thurman and everyone else is Elvis and shite like that, and then people start going, "Oh my god," and everyone is looking towards the door, like my god what is it? And here's William walking in and he's got a Fred Flintstone suit thing on, like a mascot would wear at a football match, and he's walking in but there's a wee hole cut out and he's got his cock and balls out through it. He's not got a hard-on. It's all floppy, kind of wee.

People are like, "Is it stuck on?"

Sarah is like, "Oh, for fuck's sake."

It starts to dawn on her a little bit – she's beginning to know what all of this is about. He walks up to her and he says to her – although nobody can see him talk because he's got this massive head on – he says: "You can see my cock here. This doesn't turn me on, but if this is what it takes to get me and you back on track, and for me to get to know you in a deep way, then this is it."

People don't know what's going on, and so he explains that he's seen her watching this Fred Flintstone porn and people all get it.

She's like, "Come on, we better leave, let's talk about this."

"No," he says, "let's do it here," and so she pulls up her skirt and Fred Flintstone gets a hard-on and starts shagging her, and everybody gives them a big round of applause. He slips on the ground and falls and then lands on his arse and goes, "Yabadabadoo!" and everybody's in tears because they're thinking it's so nice.

Other women are saying to their men, "Why do you never do things like that for me?"

@DanielDylanWray