584: No Such Thing As Drinking A Sock Full Of Custard

Hi, everyone.

Welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish.

Andrew Hunter Murray is away on holiday looking for rare species of moss, or perhaps covering his entire house in solar panels.

I'm not sure what he's doing, but he's not here.

And so, in his place, we have the founder of QI, John Lloyd.

Now, you'll all know John because he's been on this show many, many times.

But if you're a new listener, then he is

like a master master of British comedy over the last 40 50 years he was instrumental in things like not the nine o'clock news blackhadder QI of course spitting image if you were a fan of that back in the day there's a really nice anecdote later on in this episode where he talks about that basically he's an all-round genius and I'm sure you'll enjoy his talents on this week's show I should quickly say because I know he would want me to that his son Harry who is a good friend of all of us he is in a band and they have a new new single out and the band is called Waiting for Smith so if you're interested in that then go to anywhere where you get your music or any bit of social media search for waiting for Smith and you will find all about that anyway without further ado let us continue with another episode of No Such Things a Fish with Mr.

John Lloyd on with the podcast

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Tashinsky, and John Lloyd.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Lloyd.

So my fact is that Picasso inhaled his first cigar on the day he was born.

So

Picasso was born at home on the 25th of October 1881.

He had a very difficult birth, and he was unusually small and undeveloped.

The midwife wrote him off as stillborn.

Oh no.

Right.

And literally parked him on a side table while she looked after his mum.

Right.

And it it was fortunate because Picasso's uncle, his father's brother, Salvador Ruiz Blasco, who was also a doctor, happened to be there and he was smoking a cigar, as you do in those days.

Of course,

and he strode over and puffed a great waft of smoke into Picasso's face and the baby went, ah!

Oh, really?

Made a horrible face.

Okay.

Lazzled a huge yell and saved his life.

Wow.

Okay.

So he didn't enjoy his first smoke.

Like many of us, it sounds like he didn't embrace it first time round.

Well, he he came round quickly because he was a lifelong smoker.

In fact, he smoked until seven years before his death, aged 91.

But tellingly, he never inhaled.

Oh, that's right.

So there you are.

Bill Clinton.

Yeah, he died in 1973.

Yeah.

Which I worked out meant that he could, in theory, have met Pharrell Williams, the pop star.

Okay.

And do you think they would have got along?

Well, Pharrell was only three days days old when Picasso died.

And for all that time, Pharrell was in Virginia and Picasso was in France.

So at least one of them would have had to make quite a lengthy trip.

Yes.

Or a Zoom call.

A Zoom call.

Yeah.

What are you thinking we're missing out on by them not meeting?

Why them two specifically?

Well, I just think Pharrell is a very, very modern day name, right?

Right.

And Picasso, for anyone who was born after he died, like myself, he feels like someone in the past.

Do you know what I mean?

So I think it's quite surprising that those two could, in theory, have met.

and of course virginia the home of tobacco virginia ready-rubbed and so on it would have got on really well yes

uh he was baptized pablo diego jose francisco de paulo juan nepo messeno crispin crispigniano maria de los remedios de la santissima trinidad rui picaso

actually not Because the priest made well you could have said that before I started

the priest made a spelling mistake.

Oh, did he?

He was supposed to be called Crispiniano because St.

Crispin's Day, the 25th of October was the day he was born.

And the priest made a spelling mistake and called him Cipriano.

Cipriano, which is a brand of crisps.

His first word, there's a legend behind that that his mother says, which is that it was pencil.

So he sort of seems like a child of destiny in a way.

Yeah, piz.

I'm not allowed to do the accent on the show anymore, John.

I just pronounced the English version.

That's like a penis in Spanish as well.

I think it might be.

Is it?

Well, there's nothing else.

It's a means little penis, doesn't it?

Penicillas.

Yeah.

We'll never know which he was referring to at the age of one and a half.

They both could have been quite prescient, couldn't they?

They were sort of his two leading tools, I would say, weren't they?

We should say, for anyone who's already switched off because we're talking about Picasso.

His reputation has taken a bit of a dive, hasn't it, the last ten years?

I hadn't quite realised how much his mistresses were in basically all of his art.

So it was sort of all about his sex life and his shagging.

And a lot of people do criticise the way that he exploited women.

And, you know, people say women were tools to be exploited for his art.

And he did once say, every time I change wives, I should burn the last one so that, you know, you can wipe the water.

The last wife or the last painting?

The last wife.

The last wife.

Okay.

Yeah.

And he only actually married twice, but I think he's referring to all his mistresses then.

Two types of women, he said, goddesses and doormats.

One of his early lovers, Francoise Gillot, is part of one of my favourite facts, which is that she later married Jonas Salk, who developed the polio jab.

Oh, that's a good fact.

Yeah, isn't it?

So she was basically Picasso's muse, and then she married this guy who saved the world a little bit, really, because so many people were dying of polio in those days.

But people asked her later why she was attracted to such outstanding men.

And she replied, I think I am just as interesting as they.

Lions mate with lions.

They don't mate with mice.

That's very good.

I think, wasn't she the only muse who left him?

Yes, she was immune to his charms.

She's such a.

She's a nice person to read about after, I suppose, all these women who ended up, according to some accounts, destroyed.

She just said, he didn't know me very well at all.

I'm very secretive.

I smile politely, but I don't agree.

And I didn't invest my narcissism in being represented by him.

I couldn't care less.

Yeah.

And waltzed off.

He wrote a book about him, a very famous book, Life with Picasso.

I actually read it when I was like 15 years old, saw it in a library.

It's an amazing book, and it basically caused a lot of problems when it came out because no one wanted to know this side about Picasso.

When it was released, there were 40 intellectuals who signed a petition to have it banned and scrapped and pulped.

And were there intellectuals if they thought his reputation will...

Yeah, including one of the major biographers who wrote numerous volumes on Picasso's life afterwards, saying that this should be in like a tabloid as opposed to

8 out of 10 cats,

yeah.

He was fuming, he was furious.

Um, but interestingly, she was asked about this in her 90s about this biography, and she said, All these men who wrote that had never met me, didn't know what I was talking about, and she and John Richardson became really good friends, despite him slagging it on.

How interesting, yeah, and you will see her on Countdown, um,

when Rachel Riley's off for maternity, yeah, friends and son, yeah,

and yeah, Richardson argued that his art was almost almost parodying the machismo of Andalusian males rather than him actually being like that, which I don't believe.

It's a really interesting thing.

I've always believed that when you're at work, if you're going to do it well, you mustn't have an ego.

And I used to say for years and years, you know, Picasso famously didn't behave terribly well in all sorts of ways.

But I'm guessing that when he went in front of the easel, that all went away.

And years later, I found this wonderful quote saying, when I enter my studio, I leave my personality outside the door as a Muslim leaves his slippers outside the mosque.

He did spend a lot of time at the easel, though, didn't he?

It's hard to find the exact number of works that he did, but it was a lot.

It's insane.

147,800, but that's not exact.

That's according to

the official website.

Yeah, they've done counting up and they, and we've lost a lot of it because in his early days, he used to burn his bits of art to keep his fire going so along with his wives yeah

I worked out that that's one work of art for every five hours 25 minutes of his life if he started as a baby

and carried on going until he met Pharrell that time which once you've had your first smoke you might as well give up a paintbrush he also was responsible for a major art theft which I hadn't realized because we'd mentioned before on the show that he was accused of stealing the Mona Lisa he was interviewed by the police right yeah he was yes.

Because of Polinaire, his friend shopped him to the police.

Yes.

And Picasso then went to court and denied he'd ever met him, even though he's one of his best friends.

It's quite a low moment, isn't it?

In their friendship, in their moral lives.

That's probably the best indication of the power that Picasso had, that he thought he could Jedi his way through.

The thing was when he described the person who actually stole it, the police did a sketch and the nose was on this side of his face and the eyes were on this side of his face.

But there's more to it, Anna, isn't it?

Well, there there is more to it, yes, because so that was 1911, but actually in 1907, there were these two Iberian statues stolen from the Louvre, and I think there's just been a book written which puts all the pieces together, but Picasso had first spotted them in about 1904, fallen in love with them, told all his mates, I love these statues.

They were put in storage, then they disappeared.

Turned out they'd been stolen by this chap called Pierre,

and he was mates with Picasso and the dodgy Apollinaire.

He was Apollinaire's secretary, I think.

He was Apollinaire's secretary, yes.

But it turned, basically, Picasso's lover at the time, Fernando Livier, said that he had all lots of artworks around his house, and then he had these two statue heads under some clothes in his wardrobe.

And she asked him about them once, and he said, oh, we shouldn't display them anywhere too prominent.

And it turned out to be these two stolen statues from the Louvre.

And we assume that Pierre had given them to Picasso.

Maybe Picasso had asked him to steal them.

Some people say that Pierre couldn't have carried them both out under his coat, which is what he claimed.

So maybe Picasso was there.

It's a lot easier to steal stuff from the Louvre in those days, wasn't it?

I was pissed, yeah.

Yeah,

lousy security, didn't they?

Yeah.

I think there was a story that Pierre once said to his girlfriend, I'm going to the Louvre today.

Do you want me to pick anything up for you?

And then ironically, Picasso is the most stolen artist in history now.

But I think it's largely because he made so much.

You can't help stealing.

Yeah, and the Folinair's secretary had something to do with it, I'm sure.

Shifting his stuff back to...

Yeah.

So even when he was in his 70s and 80s, he was quite a womanizer, Picasso.

And whenever anyone came to his house who he fancied, he would make a little sculpture of a little man with an enormous phallus and then give it to them as like a love gift.

Right.

And

did that work a higher percentage of the time?

It didn't work so often because he quite often did it in front of his wife.

And anyone who'd been given this like phallic item was not allowed back in the house.

Because his wife would just be like, well, you're obviously not coming back.

Yeah, yeah.

And again, this is going to John Richardson.

One ought to say, you know, given all these sort of anecdotal things and the naughtiness, that he was an extraordinary painter.

And those two statues you mentioned inspired him for Les Demoiselle d'Avignon.

Yeah, which is a great painting.

It's described by John Golding, the art critic, as the greatest painting of the 20th century.

It was so influential.

It's kind of cool for him to take, like, looking back at it now, if the ends justify the means, it's fine that he stole those things if they inspired those great works.

Yeah, and no one gave a shit about two random Iberian statues from 2,000 years ago in storage.

Remind me to not have James as my lawyer anything like that.

We were going to do a fact about them in the podcast the next week.

He used to make some of his paints as well.

There's a particular particular brown that he made, which we only now know what the secret source was.

HP?

No, not quite.

It was his three-year-old daughter's poo.

Oh, well.

Come on, Dan, no.

Pooh Casso.

Surely not.

Yeah, he used to say that the best feces as well would be from a mother who the infant was being breastfed.

Well, I would say that, like, this is a three-year-old child, right?

Yeah.

But definitely the poo of a much younger baby is a colour that you can't really see anywhere else in the world.

Especially, yeah.

I never see the felt tip the same colour as a nappy from a two-month-old.

You've seen my tie, though.

It's very

similar.

For our listeners, John is wearing a tie which is like 50 shades of feces.

Come on.

The nice orangey baby feces.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The harmless kind.

He also, I mean, we're talking about his paintings, but he predicted in his own lifetime that he would be more known for his poetry than his paintings.

Picasso?

Yeah, after his death.

Did he?

What did he do?

He wrote over 300 poems, and he also wrote two surrealist plays.

He can't really have believed he was because he was incredibly famous for his paintings throughout his life.

And no one was going, do you know what, Picasso?

People should make more of your poems.

Did he really think that?

Well, he just, he probably thought they'll forget about it one day and my poems will live on after me.

I think this is a common theme with artists, though.

You know, rock bands who always pick the wrong song that's going to be successful and hate the one that's famous.

Yeah, yeah, John Richardson is always asking him in interviews about eight out of ten cats does countdown, and they never ask him about his Picasso by reference to that.

But that, like that, Arthur Conan Doyle quote you must have touched before.

That if in a hundred years I'm remembered just for Sherlock Holmes, I would have considered my life a failure.

Yeah, sorry, mate.

Embrace it.

Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that the national song of St.

Helena was written by a man who had never been there.

He based his lyrics on a postcard that he had seen.

Incredible.

Let's hear it.

God save our great.

No.

That is the national anthem of St.

Helena because it's a British territory.

So did he base it on the stamp of the postcard?

He wrote another anthem called My St.

Helena Island, and it's kind of the de facto anthem it's not the official national anthem but it's the one that all saints as they're known as in saint helena would sing and it was written by an american who is better known for his appearances on eight out of ten cats does countdown called david mitchell

stunning uh david mitchell he was nicknamed old saddlebags uh and he was a dj on ascension island which is i was going to say nearby it's not nearby but it's the nearest place to St.

Helena, because St.

Helena's in the middle of the ocean.

He became friends with some people from St.

Helena, and they suggested that he writes a song for them.

And he was a bit reluctant to do that because he'd never been there, but they sent him some postcards and he wrote this song.

And that's what happened.

It goes, My heart is drifting southwards to my home down in the sea, to the Isle of St.

Helena, where my loved ones wait for me.

We're having a lovely time.

Weather is changeable.

Food is awful.

Wish you were here.

Yeah.

It's great.

Yeah, genius.

It's really good.

And he recorded them officially, the songs, and they made records of it.

And he sent a bunch of records and pictures of himself to St.

Helena as part of, like, here's the merch that you can have.

But he's not really known anywhere, even in his hometown in Memphis.

But yeah, he's someone who's still around.

I mean, it's not that long ago, right?

So I think he's dead.

Do you?

Oh, okay.

The site.

He's recently dead, I guess.

Right, okay.

I might be wrong about that.

But nobody's blown cigar smoke in his face yet, so you can't can't tell.

It's interesting of postcards

because both Matisse and Picasso used postcards to inspire some of their greatest work.

Did you know?

So Les Demoiselle d'Avignon, for example, was based on a postcard that Picasso found.

I did not know that.

And did you know that it's not the only national anthem or national song, because it's not strictly a national anthem, that was written by somebody who'd never been there?

Did you know?

Guinea-Bissau on the west coast of Africa.

The music was written by a Chinese guy called Xiao Hei

because the words were written by a separatist leader of the African party called Amilkar Cabral, who was the leader of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde.

And in 1963, he went on a delegation to China and they met this guy, Xiao Hei, and asked him to write the music.

Really?

Yeah, literally last year in 2024, Xi Jinping held a welcome ceremony for for the current president of Guinea-Bissau, who's a guy called Umaro Susoko Mbalo, and they played the

anthem.

This is our well-beloved motherland.

It feels like it's got an edge to it when you're being hosted by Xi Jinping as the president of Tiny Guinea-Bissau, and he's saying, here's your national anthem.

We wrote it, by the way.

Forget it.

Well, if anyone doesn't know where St.

Helena is, basically, from Guinea-Bissau, head west, and it's pretty much the first place you get to.

It's like a tiny island in the middle of the atlantic it's so isolated when you look on a map if you go on your google maps or whatever on your phone it is insanely isolated

we cannot find a way of getting there you get a lot when you try direction exactly and there's like there's a lot of uh i watched a few tourist videos for it where they said you can achieve all you need to see in a single day but why not stay for three

it's just well because that's when the next boat leaves yeah possibly right yeah i should just say thanks to my sister-in-law's best friend who gave me a lot of information about saint helena because she lives there um the national dish of saint helena is tomato paste sandwiches

they're called bread and dance and the idea is that if you're at a wedding there'll be a big sort of table with a load of goodies on and everyone will dance around it and then you'll eat something from the table and it's usually some bread and dipped in tomato tapalade yeah pretty much

because it's really hard to get hold of fresh stuff there basically once a month you get a boat that comes in with fresh fruit and vegetables and everyone likes it to the shop.

Six pack of Watsits, which is £2 at Poundland in the UK, is £4 on St Helena, and a box of cornflakes that's £2.85 in the UK is £7 in St.

Helena.

But there's not that much else to spend your money on, so

you're not complaining.

No, there's not a lot going on.

But two very famous residents, as most people, if they think of St Helena, Napoleon being exiled there after Waterloo in 1815.

And the other famous resident, you know who that is?

No.

Jonathan the giant tortoise.

Oh,

who lives in the grounds of the governor's official residence and he's 192.

Jonathan's still alive.

Yeah.

Still going.

Pretty amazing.

Yeah.

He was five when Queen Victoria was crowned.

Probably he's died quite a few times, and they've just replaced him with another tortoise.

No, no.

Like Esseo Trot.

Yeah.

He's not.

He's terribly well.

I've got a quote about him.

Yeah.

No, it's from his vet.

Said carbungatuit.

It's from his vet.

Jonathan is now blind, but he still has a tremendous libido.

So that's your Picasso note.

Sorry, isn't it?

It kind of started off with the East India Company, who

were doing lots of trade with the East and with Europe, and they needed somewhere to stop on the way, because there was no Suez Canal in those days.

So you go all the way round Africa, and they would always call it St.

Helena on the way.

And eventually they decided to put a colony down down there.

And the first laws included: God was to be worshipped and served diligently, and seamen were not allowed to stay on the island without permission.

Oh, really?

If you were caught harbouring a sailor, you'd be fined five pounds.

What's wrong with sailors?

Should be inviting people, I would have thought.

Yeah, I think they just didn't want anyone coming on the island who wasn't supposed to be there.

Okay, given it was only sailors who were going by.

Yeah.

Yeah, who else are you going to get?

Swimmers?

Yeah.

Do you know what the postcode is?

Wasn't Helena?

No, that's good.

Well, it's S-T-H-L-1ZZ.

The point being, it's a Royal Mail postcode.

And it had its own postcode, I think, but apparently people kept writing to St.

Helena and mail kept going to St.

Helens in Merseyside, which is quite, actually, quite a long way to go from there.

That's brilliant.

It's hard to know what to do with that mail when it drops through your doorstep.

So they gave them a Royal Mail postcode.

Because that was the only way you could really get there for a very long time, which was the RMS St.

Helena.

And it was the Royal Mail ship that would bring all the post over.

So you would sort of jump onto that in order to get over.

And someone tried to post themselves out of St.

Helena, actually, didn't they?

Yes.

So another thing that was used for by the Brits was in the Boer War, 1900 to 1902, they sent 6,000 Boer prisoners of war to this tiny place.

God knows how they suddenly accommodated them.

And there was one prisoner of war called Andreas Smorenberg, who made this crate and he wrote on it, curios only inside here, and then he climbed in and he got the crate put in a place where it was going to be picked up by a passing mail ship, put a fake address on in London, filled it with like clothes and matches and water and bedded down for the 20-day journey.

And sadly,

even though, there's also even though he marked it with care and this side up,

it was tossed around quite badly and he was very severely concussed.

And then when they landed at Ascension Island, they got out sort of an unconscious um damaged man and sent him straight back to saint helena oh so he didn't die no okay he didn't die no but they left him in someone's bim area for a few days

so saint helena and the the rms saint helena the boat that used to get there on both of course named after the actual saint helena which i'm sure you knew the mother of uh the emperor constantine and also a saint

famous for uh discovering parts of the true cross which she excavated from the Holy Land when she was visiting there.

She excavated three crosses, actually, but she knew she'd got the real one when it created a miracle by curing a sick woman who touched it.

But not only that, she also discovered the true nails that were holding the cross

Jesus onto the cross

and parts of the true hammer that was used to bang the nails in.

No, no, that isn't mentioned in my research.

But the nails were there, and also uniquely, the holy rope that Jesus was tied to the cross with, which is unique.

It's the only relic of the holy rope.

How interesting, because I was taught at school that he was nailed and that the other

nails were tied, and he wasn't tied.

It could have been that one of the thieves is.

I mean, it's all made up, isn't it?

Well, we don't know where she was born.

That's the thing.

And there's an old British legend that she was a British princess.

Yeah,

the daughter of old King Cole of Colchester.

A merry old soul claim.

Yes.

And Colchester has is on its coat of arms, it has the three nails that she discovered.

Really?

Wow.

That's very cool.

Well, this is interesting.

So, where do you think the second largest collection of St.

Helenians?

Saints

are.

Well, I'm going to say St.

Helens.

I reckon.

In Merseyside, they got this directed.

It's not.

It's Swindon.

Is it?

Swindelina, as it's known to the locals in Swindon.

Like St.

Helena.

Swindalina.

Swindalina.

There's about a fifth of what the current population in actual St.

Helena is in Swindon.

So there's like 800 people.

What are they doing there?

Well, they were all given British nation in 2002 after the Falkland Wards.

And so if you want to go meet locals from St.

Helena, go to Swindon.

Didn't John Richardson move to Swindon?

He did move there.

He moved there because he worked out that it had the best transport links in the whole of the UK.

Yeah, to get into London and to get to the gigs he needed to.

That's right.

God, he's more prolific than we've given him credit for, isn't he?

Are we trying to get him on the show?

What's going on?

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that to go into the BBC's sound department in Made Avale, you have to walk down a set of steps that are each one-third concrete, one-third carpet, and one-third wood.

This is amazing.

I saw this fact, I should say, when I was just scrolling through Facebook earlier this year, and Tony Way, who I'm friends with, he's a movie star.

He's in The Edge of Tomorrow, the Tom Cruise movie, which is a clank.

Yeah,

he's also in a lot of British sitcoms, Black Books, and I mean, anything you can think of afterlife with Ricky Drevais, he's part of it.

He's a great actor.

He was there, and he took a photo of it and showed it.

And it's pretty amazing.

So when I say that the staircase is a third of each.

It's like you've got a runner down the middle, but either side is different.

That's a very good way of putting it.

Yeah.

So this is where the BBC do their foley, which is the sound effects, the extra noises that go into TV, radio and movies.

And they have a whole bottom floor there, which is pretty extraordinary when you get a walkthrough.

So I watched a video of Sean Keeveny doing it, the radio.

Another friend of yours, is he done?

Actually is.

Yeah, he is.

So they have a kitchen that's set up and it's all mic'd up and so you can make tea and you can slam cupboards and you can move bottles so anytime they need that that's all done there they have a room where it's just full of seaweed and sand and little mats that you can walk on that can create the sound of the ocean the forest with the magnetic tapes or compressed snow when you throw the mat on top of sand seaweed

yeah i mean now that you're not seaweed making yeah is that

a really good point it must it must be artificial uh it looked exactly like seaweed in the is it seaweed inside the water?

No, no, this is just on the floor.

Seaweed would just dry out in a battle.

Oh, they've probably got a seaweed person who worked.

The intern's job.

I know.

It wouldn't have been seaweed.

When I worked in radio when I started, we used to use quarter-inch tape, recording tape, for lots of effects, like walking through grass.

Yeah.

You'd rustle that.

Well, that's what they had, though, yeah.

All this tape that was in piles.

And I messaged Tony to say, is there anything else that you saw there?

And he said there's also a Foley coat.

So it's made of different fabrics.

It's a coat you put on, made of different fabrics with different kinds of zips and fastenings attached to replicate any kind of clothing sound that you want, but all in one coat, which is pretty exciting.

I thought it would be a really cool coat.

No, Anna, how often have you been getting off a train and you're like, I need my ticket, and you've only got five pockets, but you've no idea which pocket is in.

You're making a mad array of noises.

Sorry, guys.

I wonder if that Foley coat was used.

There's a very famous story about Mrs.

Dale's diary, which was the sort of forerunner of the the archers way back when.

They were trying to get the sound of somebody opening a parcel.

Mrs.

Dale was delivered a parcel.

They tried paper, it didn't sound anything like it.

Because famously in sound effects, often you think of a helicopter, sounds like,

which we used to make using what's called a double ender, which is a wire with two brass plugs on the end.

Right.

It sounds like a helicopter, because what a helicopter actually sounds like is not like what you think a helicopter is supposed to sound like.

No, it's just a very, very loud hum.

It's a loud engine.

Yeah, a loud engine, yeah.

You can't really hear what you're saying, yeah.

So, anyway, somebody undid their zip as an experiment.

And so, by the precept, what's that?

That's an amazing sound.

That's perfect parcel opening.

So, in the scripture comes Mrs.

Dale.

Oh, hello there.

Oh, what have you got in there?

She said.

Okay, I'm seeing where the double ender name came from.

I really hadn't quite realised that what being a Foley artist entailed, and I think I want it as a job.

It's so cool.

If you're working in the films, films, basically they'll be sent the film and they'll come into a room and they've got all their props and often they've collected, I think all photo artists collect just like hundreds and hundreds of different props, bring them in, lay them all out and they've got a script which tells them vaguely what sounds to make.

But then they watch the film and live they try to imitate what the person's doing.

So you see them sort of jerking around, clutching at something quickly, stomp, stomp, stomp.

They have to grab a shoe, reach for a cloth.

It's amazing, isn't it?

It is amazing.

And those items, like, if it makes the perfect sound, you just want to keep it forever.

And they get passed down from generation to generation.

So I was reading an interview with someone called Alison D.

Moore,

and her former partner in Foley had retired.

And he gave her a copper towel bar with a koi fish on each end.

And when you twisted it, it made a screech that sounded exactly like a startled cat.

And he was like, this is my pride and joy.

I take it everywhere I go, but you can have it.

Now I've retired.

Wow.

so good the bbc i wonder john when you were saying that about the foley sounds was that live radio the foley was happening live along with it i didn't do i did very little actual live radio no you just you just add the sound effects as you as you went along so although you were recording live of course and there's a famous um not famous to you but to me i used to do a radio show called the news hudlines with roy hard he was incredibly quick on the draw a bit like a sort of lee mac of his day is very fast and um there was a sketch that involved a fridge.

And in the script, the studio manager saw SFX door opens.

And that's a standard BBC sound effect because the rattle of the doorknob

like that.

And so it said, Rory said, I'll just look in the fridge.

And there was a

wooden fridge.

It's a wonderful moment.

It is amazing, but it was really, it was a very strong thing with the BBC for live radio, particularly comedy shows like The Goon Show.

And there was a famous incident where in the script, Nettie Seagoon, who was played by Harry Seacomb, was to be hit by a sock full of custard.

And they tried all these different sounds.

They couldn't get it.

And Spike Milligan got so frustrated during rehearsal that he took his sock off.

He grabbed an assistant, sent them to the BBC canteen to fill it up with custard, which they did, brought it back, walloped Harry Seacomb over the head with it, and it still didn't get the sound that they need.

But that story got out.

out and the BBC got lots of complaints because this was in the last year of post-war rationing and they said, you are wasting good custard.

Did they not drink it afterwards out of this art?

Well, regardless of what they did.

Yeah.

No, that is waste.

Because they usually say on those programs, don't worry, the food was shared amongst the crew afterwards.

Yes.

Those bizarre sound effects, I remember I used to briefly produce a program called The Burkis Way, which was written by David Romick and Andrew Marshall.

And they used to take great pleasure in writing sound effects that are impossible to do.

And I remember one was SFX Genghis Khan Slices Somebody's Stomach Off.

Oh, wow.

Quite a while that took to get

that.

What did you do?

Well, I went to the canteen.

I got a fresh stomach.

It is interesting.

It's one of those unsung things in movies and television because without those little sounds, it doesn't have heft at all.

When we did the first episode of Spitting Image, we decided not to have a laugh track because I don't know why.

No time, I think.

And it seemed completely boring, because we used to make Spatinos by recording the voice track first, and then they puppeteer Smime to it.

And of course,

they're made of rubber, so when a a puppet, you know, touched the desk and it was a pre-recorded thing, nothing happened.

So the two guys, two sound guys, absolute geniuses, stayed up literally all night doing all the, you know, touching the table, banging each other's heads, you know, scratching their clothes.

And suddenly it comes alive.

Well, no,

it was an amazing thing because actually, we owe the whole existence of Spadina to those two guys.

Yeah.

I was talking about this Foley artist called Alison D.

Moore.

I read an interview with her.

It's really interesting.

She said that there are more astronauts on Earth than people working in Foley at the moment.

What?

So I reckon that there's

about a hundred people doing Foley, and there are more people who've been in space than that.

She said that they can literally change the rating of a film by the sounds that they put in.

So

if there is, for instance, an oral sex scene,

if they make it sound really filthy,

then okay, it can go up from a 15 to an 18.

But what's the, what's the, is it just like, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, what?

That's normal oral sex.

That's how that sounds.

I think that downgrades it to like a U if you do that.

It's important to say that the foley is a specific thing, which is something that's made on the spot, isn't it?

Not like a recording.

Yeah, yeah.

That doesn't count as a foley.

You get lots of sound effects artists.

But I just want to give some people a hint of things, recordings that could be useful in other contexts.

So, for example, the roar of a leopard sounds like someone roughly sawing wood.

Okay.

Which is useful.

Okay.

Bill Bailey said, without the beat in the background, jazz basically sounds like an armadillo was let loose on the keyboard.

So if you wanted that sound.

It's amazing, though, because since BBC started recording their stuff and other massive production studios, there's these huge Foley archives that now exist and a lot of them have been made available to the public.

So the BBC have over 33,000 of its sound effects that are just on a website you can download and use as part of whatever you want to use.

It's open to the public.

Hanna-Barbera also is used a lot.

So Hanna Barbera that made the Flintstones and so on.

Their sounds have been used in so many places you wouldn't expect.

Multiple Mario Kart and Mario video games have the sounds that would have been used in the Flintstones that are sort of peppered all the way through.

And they made those sounds by getting a pterodactyl to put their beak on a record later.

Yeah, but it's yeah, it's pretty wild.

And we missed, I think it was the first 10 years of any kind of recording with BBC radio until the arrival of a thing called the Blatnerphone.

It was only one machine that was recording all the radio output at the time that was coming from the BBC.

And it wasn't a great recording necessarily, but the machine, the spools that would held the tape were ginormous and the tape would be traveling at really high speeds.

So it would be traveling at five feet per second to record it, which was really dangerous for anyone who had to monitor the tape because if it broke off, it would be like shrapnel shooting out the tape and it was like a razor's edge.

You would be cut to pieces if it shot off.

Like an injury.

Yeah, yeah.

So it was incredible.

That's a great murder mystery.

That should be a Jonathan Creek episode.

Yes, that's true.

Yeah.

And that would happen.

It would be more dangerous because eventually they got two of these machines-the Blatinophone, which meant that they could change tape on one while recording on the other.

So, that was a seriously dangerous thing.

They used to have to wear heavy gloves, and any time they were doing something that looked a bit delicate, they would run to the other side of the room in case it exploded on them.

Um, hang on, presumably, when you change the tape, you stop the

yeah, yeah, but just I mean, the thinking overheat, they had incidences basically where it just got too much.

Um, it was a it was the most dangerous job in the world working for the BBC in the 50s, it was in the 70s.

Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that every year, tens of thousands of people attend Rwanda's annual gorilla baby naming ceremony.

Isn't it sweet?

It is good.

It is sweet, yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Nothing dark to it.

Kuita Izina, which means to give a name in Nikinya Wanda, which is the language.

And this is so cool.

It's this whole full week of activities devoted to gorillas and it's all about their conservation and their protection because there's a huge deal in Rwanda.

And the highlight is this naming ceremony where they get, they've got a huge, really cool looking stage, which is a wicker sculpture of a gorilla or bamboo sculpture of a gorilla the size of a house, and then a celebrity and all researchers or who's the celebrity?

Lots of different celebrities.

We'll get to the list.

Probably some of your mates.

John Richardson's gotta have a look in Nami again.

John Keveney goes there often.

Yeah.

There are multiple characters who will come up on stage and then they'll name one of the new baby gorillas that's been born that year.

And a big picture comes up behind and they say, I name this gorilla.

And they give them sensible.

They don't call them sort of Barry.

Well, quite a lot of Arsenal footballers go there.

Ah, because Arsenal are sponsored by Rwanda.

So they are, yes.

And there's the presence of big Arsenal fans.

He is, yeah.

So in 2018, Alex Scott went.

In 2019, David Louise went.

In 2020, Hector Bellerin and Patrick

Abamayang went.

Abamayang named a 14-year-old gorilla Ligitego, meaning goal.

And Bellerin chose Miyugariro, meaning defender.

So it's like appropriate stuff for them.

So maybe next year they'll be runner-up or

smashed by Paris Sanchez-Man.

So, do these poor gorillas have to wait sometimes nearly a year before they get a name?

Yes, I suppose they do.

They probably have a holding name, they might have their own name in their own language, and they might not care what we call them.

No, I doubt it.

No, they couldn't.

I don't know about the gorillas, but did you know that marmosets are the only non-human primate that call each other by name?

Do they?

Yeah,

and they say hello, Barry.

Oh, yeah, And it's all always Barry.

Always Barry.

They're all called Barry.

It's very pointless, really.

Yeah, because it may not be their name at all.

It may be just a

burp.

Idris Elba, called they get big names.

Yeah.

Called one Narame, meaning long life.

David Attenborough is obviously named one.

Yeah.

But yeah, it sounds really fun.

And the idea is to protect gorillas.

And the story of protecting gorillas in Rwanda is an amazing success story, isn't it?

So

Diane Fossey.

Diane Fossey, yes, yes, who I'm sure we'll talk about.

It's estimated that one mountain gorilla, and it's mountain gorillas there, so there are four species and subspecies of gorilla, but one mountain gorilla can generate $3 million during its lifetime from tourism, and that all goes back into conservation, to protection, to the extent, and I found this really interesting.

So, there are, like I say, four species and subspecies of gorilla.

There's western lowland, of which there are between 150 and 300,000.

Remember that.

There's Cross River Gorillas, of which there are about 300.

Mountain Gorilla, I think they're about 800 to 1,000.

And Growers Gorilla, 6,500.

All are critically endangered, except one, which is just endangered.

Right.

Now, have you memorized all the figures?

Yeah, the lowland, western gorillas, you said.

There you go.

The western lowland, 150 to 300,000.

Surely they're just endangered.

No, they're critically endangered.

And the mountain gorilla from Rwanda is the only one that's only endangered, even though there are only 800, 800, because their numbers are going up.

Because they're going up, but that's, I think that's how they do it, right?

No, of course it's how they do it.

But I think there's an extraordinary discrepancy between 300,

800,000.

It's kind of surprising that they're going up.

Well, certainly over the last 30 years or so, because they had a big old war in Rwanda, yeah.

And in actual fact, there were 16 guerrillas killed during that civil war.

But the population still.

This is a problem now.

Guerrillas or guerrillas?

Guerrillas or guerrillas?

I should check that actually.

That I'm not talking about guerrillas.

What do you call a gorilla with a machine gun?

I don't know.

But yeah, basically, the guerrillas moved up into the mountains away from all the humans and all their violence.

And so that's why their numbers went way higher.

And also, none of the factions wanted the bad publicity of killing gorillas.

So, yeah, they're not.

And that is amazing, but mostly the reason because it is such a success story is because Rwanda has run an extraordinary protection program

since then, which basically means that they're, yeah.

How have they stopped the poaching?

Is there a sort of security force?

There's just been an amazing investment in local communities.

So a lot of the poachers, because people, I always think poachers get a bad rep.

Largely they're poaching for survival, right?

These were people in a country that was so poor.

People were struggling.

And the poachers are now involved in conservation.

So there are a lot of poachers who do various tourist things now.

And it's just giving them real national pride in this thing, like this big ceremony.

well that literally doesn't happen yeah because they worked out as you say one gorilla can bring three million in in an entire lifetime so it's more profitable now to be a tourist guide rather than to kill one and get a one-off payment yeah um which and so that I mean it has largely come down from the stuff I've read to Diane Fossey.

I mean, I know she's the ambassador name, but she really kind of, she moved there back in the 70s, plopped herself on the side of the mountain when there was virtually no one doing that.

She was given a name, which was the woman who lives alone in the forest by all the locals.

Big ceremony, was it?

Yeah.

Natalie Portman came along.

You had to wait a year before they thought of it.

But yeah, so Diane Fossey, the reason she went out there was this was off the back of a man called Louis Leakey, who we've mentioned before, one of my favorite people in the world of paleoanthropology.

Had wild theories and also had a lot of discoveries about ancient versions of Homo sapien and so on.

Big one.

A few episodes ago, we had to fade you out when you started going into this kind of thing.

Well, he thinks that the reason that we became the dominant species on planet Earth is because we were too smelly to eat as we were in the wild.

He's a brilliant guy, but he thought that the people who should go out and study apes should be a single woman with no scientific training.

He's very much the Picasso of the paleoanthropology world in that he was a bit dubious with women.

He had a lot of researchers around him who were, let's say,

at his whim.

He was a bit deviant.

but he did amazing things.

Did you say he was your favorite?

Do you know what?

We can edit that one, right?

But he picked Diane Fossey.

He thought she'd be perfect.

And he said to her, The only thing that you need to have to go out there is no appendix.

And so she took her appendix out to go.

Someone else must have taken it out.

Well, yeah, somewhere.

A doctor took it out.

And then she got a letter six weeks later from him saying, By the way, I was joking about the whole appendix thing.

No.

Yeah.

No.

Yeah, it was too late.

She already did it by then.

That's the problem with deadpan humor.

If you don't put the emoji afterwards, people don't get it uh she was quite controversial though diane fossey right absolutely um i read that once she captured or her her um associates captured a poacher stripped him of his clothes, laid him spread eagle on the ground and lashed his genitals with nettles.

Yes, yes.

And she thought basically the way that you deal with poachers is not, like Hannah says, improving society and giving them other ways of making money.

You should just beat it out of them.

Yeah.

I mean, that, to be fair, is kind of the twist in her story: she arrived as a conservationist.

She learned so much about gorillas, wrote that incredible book,

what was it called?

Gorillas in the Mist, is a movie based on her.

Yeah, based, but that's off her book.

So she wrote a book, which was a memoir of her time there.

And then when poachers killed a gorilla that she'd really become close with, they lobbed the gorilla's head off.

Digit.

It was called Digital.

Digit.

That's right.

There was a turning point where she goes from conservationist really to poacher killer.

And she was furious.

and anyone who was in her way was part of the problem so even the anti-poaching league she thought no you're part of it as well and to be fair she had a horrific time in her early days there she was kidnapped by rebels um she was uh sexually assaulted she was she had a lot of bad times there yeah she was tough as nails woman i mean bad child had tough times there yeah extraordinary person but then she did go a little bit

Well, she just went hardline, didn't she, towards the end and sort of beat up poachers, which is quite hardcore.

And I actually had no idea that she was murdered Diane Fossey until researching this but it's just such a wild story to Digit was decapitated by the poachers and his hands cut off to make ashtrays out of and she was horribly murdered she was found dead in her cabin and bizarrely blamed on a jealous fellow researcher in absentia who I don't think was ever really solved but I think we assume it was angry poachers yeah we still don't know there's so many theories out there and she's she's still there though she's buried in the gorilla cemetery next to digit she's buried next to Digit.

Yeah.

Gorillas though,

amazing animals.

They get high by spinning in circles.

That's a new discovery.

Really sweet.

Yeah.

And that was like, I really love this bit of science.

Basically, there was a viral clip that went around of a gorillas spinning round.

And they thought, oh, that looks fun.

Let's see if anyone else does that.

And then they did more research and found out that, yeah, they do do that.

Well, if you will withhold drugs from the kids, they'll find a way, won't they?

They make a mess.

You know how we make a big deal about lions and tigers roaring?

I think the gorilla roar is the most frightening.

So they do that, and then they make the belch sound, which is their other main kind of vocalization.

And that's a little, sort of like a little burp or a growl, which says, I'm here, don't worry, I'm your friend.

And so, if researchers are working with gorillas, then they learn to make that sound straight away to reassure them.

Because you're in the jungle, you don't have that good visibility, so it's not as much about facial recognition.

Although, the other thing that researchers have to do is learn to memorise, and this is something that I think was pioneered a little bit by Diane Foste, but learn to memorize their nose prints so that after a few months, you can spot one 50 yards away and immediately know.

That will make sense.

Barry.

Yeah.

That's great.

Is it that obvious what the prints are, or do you have to get really close?

Because, like, fingerprints, you need to put your fingers in ink, right?

It's definitely more obvious than that.

It's like

wrinkles on a face, on quite a wrinkly face.

Okay.

I noticed you were looking at me when you said that.

He was looking past you.

Do you know

that when you arrive into rwanda um they go through like any airport security you know there's certain countries you can't bring fruit in and so on do you know what you're not allowed to bring in to rwanda there's a drugs not drugs oh you are allowed to bring drugs well no it's just not the answer i'm looking for okay

what's the answer you're looking for plastic bags oh if you go to their official tourism website that's on there saying you will be stopped and you can get in serious trouble if you're trying to smuggle plastic bags into the country 12 months in prison for using plastic bags.

Wow.

Is it?

You're joking.

100%.

A fine of up to $540.

Now, that law is really in place for large companies who are breaking the law.

Like, if you or I brought a plastic bag in, we probably wouldn't get 12 months in prison, but it is actually on the law books that that's the punishment.

Yeah, I remember that happening.

We all thought, mad.

Imagine living without plastic bags.

And now we all sort of do.

We don't, do we?

That's Not to lie.

We just pay our 5p and suck it up.

I think, even though we've had all this talk of gorillas, the favourite animal in Rwanda is the cow.

They're obsessively into cows.

It's great.

And so there's lots of dances inspired by cows.

So you've got the kind of Rwandan ballet, which is inspired by cows, where women emulate cows' movements.

Maybe they're more graceful in Rwanda.

Like, what does a cow do?

It just stands there for ages and occasionally eats a bit of grass.

Gentle is what I read, and I actually didn't watch it.

So, gentle movements, it's a bit of swaying sometimes.

Swishing away to fly.

It's a tail.

It's all in the tail.

Very unique.

All Rwanda women have tails.

Did I not mention that?

Is that right?

Yeah.

If you want to wish someone well, you say, may you have a cow or have thousands of cows.

Same in America.

Don't have a cow, man.

Yeah.

Okay, yeah.

As the turtle says.

Yep, okay.

There's a lot of crossover.

But they also love milk.

And instead of going to a bar in

Kigali, capital of Rwanda, you will go to a milk bar very often.

And I think this is since the 90s when after the genocide there was massive urbanization and crops were decimated.

A lot of the cattle were massacred and everything changed.

And a lot of people missed that agricultural connection.

And now they all go to milk bars.

And they are colic milks.

You can get that.

they are not

um that's what they claim it might be that they're all getting pissed but they're all claiming they just like a hot or a cold milk right there's also a thing called the garinka program which is um the idea that the government will give every poor family a cow

and over the years they've given over 400 000 cows to different families and the idea is that you can use the manure to fertilize the land you can help drink the milk um if you're not living in the city for a second i was thinking you're sitting there in your flat in the city third floor with your cow in your lounge.

I'm going, what the fuck are we going to do with this?

Oh, man.

Do you think the naming ceremony is based on a sort of human?

Because there are lots of those around the world, aren't there?

Yeah, it is.

It is.

It's big in Rwanda.

Giving the name, the name that you give someone determines their life.

They are born, they have their first cigar, and then you have a big ceremony where you name them, and all of the family members come along, and some people suggest different names, and then they decide which one they're going to go with.

And there's a big old party.

And it's usually a Driselba who it comes down to the decision in the end.

He's a very busy man.

But the ancient Romans had one called Dies Lustricus or Purification Day.

That was what the naming

day was called.

According to Plutarch, until the baby had a name and the umbilical cord fell off, they were regarded as a plant rather than an animal.

Really?

Yes.

It was only when the umbilical cord fell off.

Like a stall?

Yeah, I guess you're rooted to something.

So this is a thing, I didn't know.

I knew that

from somewhere that ancient Roman women had very small choice of names, but if you were called Claudius, for example, you had a daughter, she'd be called Claudia.

You wouldn't have her own name.

And if you had a second daughter, she would be called Claudia Minor, and the first one would be called Claudia Major.

And if you had a third daughter, she would just be called Claudia Tertia, you know, Claudia III.

I think Julius Caesar had like four sisters all called Julia.

Yes.

Really?

Yeah.

Wow.

In Hungary, there's a Hungarian naming day.

Have you heard of this?

So the idea is that a name is associated with one day of the year, and a lot of people will celebrate their name day rather than the day.

Oh, yeah, I think that happens in a few years.

I think we've discussed that quite recently, haven't we?

Often the same day.

Oh, right.

It's all like Ghana, where they name kids after the day of the week.

Yeah, right.

So, in Akan, for example, Kofi, as in Kofi Anan, means born on Friday,

and Kwasi, as in Kwasi Kwaten, means born on Sunday.

And Liz, as in Liz Trust, means born yesterday.

A

bit of three-year-old satire there.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

You can find us all on our various social media accounts.

I'm on Instagram at Triberland.

James.

My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin.

John, you're on Instagram, aren't you?

I'm John LloydQI.

Nice.

And anything you want to plug while we're here?

Well, I really want to say my son Harry, who you all know, is an amazing band called Waiting for Smith, and they've got a great new single coming out called I Got That Smiling For You, which I think is going to be his smash thing, Waiting for Smith on Instagram or all the other platforms.

Nice.

And if you want to get to us as a group,

you can email podcast at qi.com or you can go to Instagram at no such thing as a fish or tweet at no such thing.

Yep, or you can go to our website, no such thingasafish.com.

You can find all of our previous episodes up there.

There's links to some live shows that we're doing.

There's bits of merch.

There's the gateway to club fish, the membership club where we have bonus material popping up every fortnight.

It's a really fun place.

Check it out.

Otherwise, just come back here next week because we will be back with another episode and we will see you then.

Goodbye.

Can you do some folio?

I'm just going to walk over there.

Yeah.

That's offensive.

He's not that heavy.

And I'm back.

I just

I just went to the bookcase because staring me in the face is this book, The Adults of London.

And it's by John Richardson.

Wow.

It's by another John Richardson.

This is so good.

What a coincidence.

This guy is amazing.

He's a polymath.

How does he get time to do the polymath?