583: No Such Thing As A Tuna Macchiato

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Hi everybody, before we start the show, I just wanted to let you know I am joined by a very exciting guest right now.

It is a world-acclaimed author, Andrew Hunter-Murray.

Hello, Andrew.

Hello.

You've written a book, I hear.

Yes, I've written a book.

It's called A Beginner's Guide to Breaking and Entering.

It's out in paperback now.

Yes, I've actually read it.

And not even just because I'm friends with him, because it's such a fun read.

And it's actually not a guide to how to break into a house and burgle it, which is obviously what I was hoping for.

It's It's even better than that.

Tell us about it.

Well, it's about a young guy called Al who lives in lovely, empty, second homes when the real-life owners are away.

He doesn't break things, he doesn't steal things, he just makes his way in, lives in these gorgeous places, and then gets out again.

And this book is the story of when he and his friends break into the wrong home on the wrong day, someone ends up dead, not his fault.

And things just get more complicated from there.

It's a caper.

It is a plus a little bit of satire on the housing market, which every good book needs.

And obviously he joins up with a fun, motley crew of fellow breakers and enterers.

It really is such a fun book to read and I believe it's available in bookshops.

Is that right?

It's available in all bookshops and even better if you're an audio person it's in a two-for-one deal on Audible.

That and one of my other books, The Last Day, are both included in the current Audible deal, which is lasting a few more days where you can get two books for one credit.

Do it.

Go listen to the book and then read the book.

Do both.

It really is worth it.

And speaking of guests, we had a fantastic guest on today.

We had so much fun with her in the episode that you're about to hear.

It was the excellent comedian Rosie Holt, who I'm sure many of you are familiar with.

And once you've listened to this, if you're in the market for some very sharp skewering of what's going on in politics today, you have to check out her podcast, which is called Non-Censored.

On the other hand, if what you fancy is a very witty satire on the last government, then check out her book, which is called Why we were right so that is non-censor the podcast or why we were right the book but for now enjoy the show 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 Anna Toshinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and Rosie Holt.

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Rosie.

My fact this week is...

All the werewolves in the film Howling 2 are actually monkeys because the wrong costumes were delivered.

so so much to unpack here you said howling two like every listener is gonna know who knows about the famous film howling two i think um somewhere howling two was called the the worst sequel of all time

those people clearly never saw howling eight

and you're you're a fan right rosie

sort of i i'm fascinated by it so i don't want to spoil too much for people who are really excited about watching howling 2, but it leaves off where Howling 1

finishes, where spoiler alert, the female lead turns into a werewolf and she is killed.

And at the beginning of Howling 2, it's her funeral.

And the best line ever is where Christopher Lee pops up, because why not?

And

he says, I'm afraid your sister was a werewolf.

And the guy goes, God damn it, that's my sister you're talking about.

And he says it at the funeral.

Yeah.

He turns up at the funeral.

No one knows who he is.

He's just a weird guy.

She's a weird old guy.

He stands at the back and then says that.

And you can understand, we haven't led up to, like, did you know there are more things on Earth than I dreamt of?

You know, like, werewolves exist.

As far as I can tell, this is fresh in the middle of the day.

It's a cold open.

I must say, because I think I might be the person on the planet who's watched Howling 2 most recently.

I finished one hour ago and then I came straight directly here.

That's so.

And it's really good watching it with the knowledge of what happened with these costumes.

It was a mix-up.

They were Planet of the Apes.

Yes, can we get the costume story?

Yes, Rosie goes.

So basically, they were sent the costumes.

The costumes were late.

When they opened the costumes, it was actually from the Planet of the Apes TV show.

And then good old Christopher Lee saved the day because he said, this is what we're going to do, Philippe.

That's the director.

We're going to shoot a scene where we simply explain that werewolves go through three phases, a human phase, a monkey phase, and then a werewolf phase.

And that will solve everything.

And it did.

Yes.

That's what they do.

Yeah.

Pretty much.

So do they look like monkeys?

They look like monkeys.

Yes, they look exactly like monkeys from Planet the Apes.

It's really, it's really confusing.

And they have shot it all in the dark.

And then later on, once they got a werewolf head, they splice in lots of shots of a random werewolf head crossing a screen.

It's terrific.

It's so good.

I mean, there's so much in this film.

Yes.

And there's lots of great little facts.

So the other thing about the costumes was there's a threesome scene where they're all werewolves and they're all having sexy fun but if you you probably remember andrew i remember the scene very well yes it's not a terribly i mean vigorous threesome they're sort of sort of tentatively kind of stroking each other and growling and it's because um so they they'd had to be covered in hair for the costumes and this took i think this took like eight hours and then they found out that when you touched each other the hair came off yeah so therefore they were having to not touch each other because they realized if they actually did an orgy well a film orgy all their costumes would fall off because it wasn't a costume it was them naked for eight hours

with them putting little bits of hair was it them naked like yeah sorry i didn't explain that very well it would have made more sense to put them in the monkey costumes for this but i guess they thought because they're sort of naked it's still going to be sexy not quite as sexy as the monkey costumes yeah it's the hairiest and most chased threesome ever committed it's a rare double award rosie how is this one of your favorite films or something it's not one of my favourite films but i do have a real soft spot for it because it's genuinely so bad bad, it's good.

It is so bad, it's good.

After the first 10 minutes, I thought, I can't believe we're going to kill this in case someone watches it.

And now, I say, watch it.

Yeah, do you take it?

I mean, it has.

The weird thing about Christopher Lee is that he's a good actor who's only done shit films, with a few exceptions, obviously.

Lord of the Rings, Man with the Golden Gun, The Wicker Man, one of the greatest horror films ever made.

So he's done some good films, but he's done a lot of really bad films.

I think the only reason he did this movie was because he realised he hadn't done a werewolf movie.

So he thought, okay.

This is the one.

He's the one, Howling Chase.

This is the one.

The filming of this one sounds amazing because Christopher Lee, we must have mentioned before, is like an amazing character.

He had this great war pass where he worked for the SOE, the Special Operations Executive in the War, which was like the Secret Service under Churchill.

No one really knows what he did there because he was never allowed to talk about it.

But it seems like the one person he confided in was the director of this film.

It was called Philippe Mora.

Yeah.

He was the Nazi hunter.

Yes.

But apparently they landed in Czechoslovakia, which it was at the time, where it was being filmed, and they got to the airport.

And there was this huge crowd of people who were all like cheering and waving and giving this hero's welcome.

Hang on.

Yeah, go on.

Quick query.

Go.

He's a super secret war hero and Nazi hunter.

And yet he's so globally famous as a Nazi hunter that everyone in the Czech Republic knows who he is at the airport.

He must have been like James Bond, where he just didn't hide.

I mean,

is that totally plausible?

No, no, there were elements of his war past that were known at that point, because it was the 80s by then.

And basically, it seemed to be widely accepted that as part of his spying war history, he'd been involved in the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, who was the highest

ranking Nazi ever assassinated by the West.

So he landed in Prague and he got this hero's welcome.

The director was like, one do that's for.

And Christopher Lee was like, I'm going to stop you there.

It'll be for me.

for my Nazi killing.

I have seen a couple of stories saying, Did he exaggerate his war record at all?

And I haven't had a time to properly look into them, and I just hope he didn't.

I didn't want to be scared.

If he got such a hero's welcome, surely he didn't exaggerate any of it.

Yeah, but he was.

He was also a globally famous film star at the time.

They might be chewing any old star.

I don't think that's relevant.

I don't think that's to do with it.

Czechs are above that.

But because it was filmed in Czechoslovakia, Christopher Lee and Sybil Danny, was it Sybil Danning?

Yeah.

Yeah, they both were getting followed the whole time while they were shooting by two creepy men who would sit in the corner when they ate in the restaurant in the evening.

As in like Iron Curtain spies or something.

Iron Curtain

Smiles.

Iron Curtain Smiles.

Because they did, yeah, they did.

They were like, they were making phone calls back home and they could hear them like

in the background, just like men breathing and coughing as they were listening in on the conversation.

Where spies were they that the Soviet Union had?

No wonder it fell apart if it didn't have its shit together to stay quiet on a phone call.

Well, I think they're using the Christopher Lee lead tell you i'm a nazi murderer uh process they don't care the lead actress is sybil danning as as you just said there is a bit of the film a slightly sexy bit where she rips her shirt off it's a very charged scene you know yeah um but she apparently had been asked to do this in lots of films because she was very attractive and she was a bit bored of it and she said do you know what i think i'd like to do just one topless scene or even one topless shot entirely in this film.

Is that okay?

And the people said, yeah, great, great, great.

Anyway, she turns.

So she said, I want to to be limited to once.

Yes, she just wants to do this once.

Which happened.

She then turns up to the premiere of the film where the credits, the closing sequence of the credits, uses that shot a further 17 times for absolutely no reason.

Yeah, it just has on repeat, like exposing her chest.

Wow.

It's like a sort of sexy duck.

If you give them an inch, they will take them off.

But it's so Maura, the director, back to him for a second, he didn't know they were going to do that to Denning, the actress.

So he actually

because they were friends, weren't they?

They were friends.

And he kind of, at the end of the movie, they brought in some other people to do a final edit on it.

And part of that edit was throwing in 17 shots of her topless during the credit sequence.

And he was really pissed off by that.

So he then goes on, he says, I want to make Howling 3 because I want to fix the reputation of what this did.

Because of that credit sequence.

Well, he was just pissed off by that.

It was a whole film, I think.

He did a lot of rehab work on your career.

I don't think the credit sequence is the main problem.

It's problematic, but it's...

Yeah.

So Howling 3 sounds amazing.

Howling 3, the marsupials.

This then completely set in Australia.

Has no reoccurring characters, has no plot that is connected to anything else.

In it, the humans that are transformed into the Howling have pouches like marsupials.

Amazing.

Yeah, it sounds pretty amazing.

He generally, just in praise of Mora, because he's an Aussie film director and I'd never heard of him, but his list of movies is extraordinary.

I'm really obsessed with a movie that he directed called pterodactyl women from beverly hills wow i know right so listen to the plot paleontologist dick chandler discovers a dinosaur egg prompting an eccentric witch doctor named salvador dali to put a curse on chandler's wife pixie causing her to slowly transform into a pterodactyl after pixie lays an egg Dick tracks down Salvador Dali and apologizes and the curse is lifted.

Now, Barry Humphreys is in this movie.

It's like a proper movie.

I can't wait to see that.

Barry Humphreys is in it.

There's a bit where Christopher Lee says in Howling 2, right, there are some sort of king werewolves and queen werewolves.

They cannot be killed with silver.

There's an oh no moment.

Oh no, what are we going to do?

Then he just says they can be killed with titanium, which, although a slightly harder metal to get a hold of, was very much easily available at the time.

It's stunning.

Is that a copyright thing with Bran Stokers people?

I have no idea.

I read an interview with the director and he was really so enthusiast because it got so panned and he's so enthusiastic about it.

And everything he got asked, he would go, thank you for asking that.

And one of the things he said, which I liked, was in the poster, there's Sybil Danning, she's wearing these sunglasses, which obviously appear in the movie.

And that came about because he said that she came along and she had conjunctivitis.

And they were like, what?

What were we doing?

He was like, don't worry, you're a werewolf.

And a werewolf can wear sunglasses indoors if they want to.

I read that somewhere that that became very influential in the movie industry.

So, if you think of the Lost Boys, the vampire movies, and so on, they're all wearing glasses.

And according to numerous people, that was a direct influence.

It suddenly was cool to do it.

It's hard to imagine this film had any

80s.

You know, Christopher Lee's in it.

It was a proper release.

It's part of a massive franchise.

Yeah.

I was just looking at monkey costumes.

Yes.

Oh, yeah.

And

gorilla movies used to be a really big thing in the 20s and 30s.

They were a cultural preoccupation.

I suppose they are now, actually.

Like King Kong, anything else?

It's all leading up to King Kong.

Basically, they started with normal-sized gorillas and then they worked their way up to Kong.

But we still have loads of Kong stuff now, and we're still having Planet of the Apes.

So this is a permanent societal thing.

But there was one guy called Charles Gamora who was known as the King of the Gorilla Men in the 20s and 30s, partly because he had his own suit.

So any film that needed a gorilla, get Charles Gamora on set now.

And he'd done a bit of, like, he'd look, he'd seen how he was very convincing in his suit.

And he was the right sort of height.

And he was, you know, he'd been to the San Diego Zoo and sort of observed them.

And so he was trying to do it properly.

He was going method.

Anyway, in 30 years, he was in 43 films, 39 of which involved him being a gorilla.

Right.

The others, he played two aliens, one bear, and one cannibal.

Same suit with bits sewn onto it.

Same suit.

I don't know.

But it just sounds great.

He's doing one called The Monster and the Girl, where a gorilla receives the brain of a man who is seeking revenge because he was wrongfully executed.

Right.

Yeah.

And that's his brain goes into the gorilla.

That's where he goes.

I mean, I really hope modern Hollywood is still using the.

Well, he's got a suit.

Yeah.

Andy Circus just has one great costume like that.

That's how Danny Jr.

got an iron bag.

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

My fact this week is that the author, Elizabeth Gaskell, died in the middle of saying, when I am dead, but only got as far as when.

So how do people know?

This is really, it's really interesting.

We should just say very quickly before we get into it, this is Elizabeth Gaskell, Mrs.

Gaskell, as she was often known.

She was an English novelist.

She wrote short stories.

She was a biographer, most famously having written a book about Charlotte Bronte.

Maybe we'll get on the story.

Although that's certainly not like, you know, she most famously wrote brilliant works of fiction.

She's Mary Barton.

Yes.

She was one of our great Victorian novelists.

But at the time,

she was most famous for writing by the girl.

Her obituary basically said.

Charlotte Bronte's biographer.

Dead.

Yes.

When?

When, exactly.

So

what happened was, this is 1865.

She is 55 years old.

She's at her home, which is a sort of secret home that she's purchased.

Yeah, I feel like we'll go into that before.

I'm just leaving some little plot moments as we go along.

So she's at her house.

She's sitting with her daughters and suddenly she keels over and she dies, but she dies mid-anecdote.

And we know what happened because of a reverend called Reverend Hawkes who recounted the story as was told to him by one of the daughters.

So she was with her daughters and her son-in-law.

She was telling a story and she says, the judge said when, and then that's when she passed away.

Now she was telling an anecdote.

Fortunately, one of the four people there had already heard this anecdote, presumably so many times that they knew exactly what was coming next.

And the line that was meant to come next was, the judge said, when I'm dead, Lady Crompton can visit Rome.

A great, a classic line.

Classic line.

Everybody laughs.

I think you can see where she was going in the conversation because a little bit of backstory is that Justice Crompton had just died.

He was her son-in-law's dad.

And I think her son-in-law's present.

So the guy she's talking about.

is the person who said, when I am dead.

So I imagine she was going on to say, so now lucky Lady Crompton can book her flight to Rome because, you know, it was relevant.

It's funny because he is dead.

So it's got a bit of gallows humour to it.

So you've sort of solved the end of the anecdote.

I think that's what's happened.

Yeah.

It's like Edwin Drude, it's finally been revealed.

Thank God.

How great, though, to sort of not be lost on that last word?

Like we should all practice our final words with someone in confidence beforehand so that if we do go mid-sentence, you know, I will be saying something I've already said loads of times already because that's I'm down to a limited stock of anecdotes now.

And just people know my things.

Do you think it was a bit of a letdown though when they said, well, she started by saying, well, and then someone went, no, no, actually, she's told that several times before.

A bit of a bore, actually, Lizzie.

Always whanging about the same stuff.

That's probably why old people repeat anecdotes all the time, isn't it?

Just to make sure that once they're saying their anecdote, we know where they were going with it.

Very wise.

Yeah, it's very wise.

Has anyone read?

I've read Mary Barton.

Thank you.

So I've read North and South.

Thank you.

I think I've read North and South.

Or Mary Barton.

Or have you just seen the TV series?

No, I'm going to be a little bit heretical.

I don't think she's all that.

She's good.

She's good.

They're good novels.

But they're very Victorian.

They're a bit, you know.

They haven't aged brilliantly.

God, I think they really have.

I think she's much more radical than people.

Yes.

That's what I don't like.

Mary Barton, it's a sort of a working-class character, and it's very much in that life, which was, you know, not so much the dumb thing back then.

I completely agree.

I think, like, her and Dickens.

are two people who really engage with people who are having a shit old time in life more than almost any other Victorian novelist, you know, because they're all about factory workers, the strife between bosses and labourers.

Not into that though, are you, Andy?

I like reading about aristocrats with minor social problems.

That's my thing.

Because

she did write about that stuff.

It was really controversial, wasn't it?

In her community as well, particularly where she was representing these characters.

Because I believe I actually haven't read any of her stuff.

But it sounds as if the other writers of the time who were in the same field, so Bronte, a friend of hers, Austin, they would write about a period slightly gone, whereas she was writing in the present.

Interesting.

And then that, so that was a bit more controversial.

And there's a few books.

She had one book called Ruth, which was very controversial.

And they actually actually burnt copies in her local church.

Yes, members of her own church.

Yeah, which is why did they do that?

Because it was debauch.

It's about a fallen woman.

Oh yes, they should be.

And it has a threesome scene out there.

Wolves dressed as gorillas.

That's what fallen women do.

Yes.

Gaskell wasn't allowed into her husband's library.

He had to get books out for her.

It's very weird.

Really?

Local library, not like his personal.

Exactly.

No, not as.

She was allowed.

She was allowed the run of the house at home.

But no, he was a member of her.

sanctuary like Bluebeard.

What's that?

Do you know

the tale of Bluebeard where he marries this young woman and he says you can go in any room you like except for this one?

You're talking about Getty and the Beast.

No, I'm not.

I'm talking about Bluebeard.

Are you talking the pirates?

No, everybody.

Kurt Vonnegut novel?

No, it's a very famous tale that none of you have heard of.

I know what's in the room, but you say it.

You say it.

What's in the room?

So she finally,

because he keeps going away, so she's wandering around all these rooms and she gets impatient.

She goes, I just want to know what's in the mystery room.

So she uses the skeleton key.

I think it's a skeleton key, maybe embellish that.

And she opens it and inside are all the dead bodies of his previous wives.

Oh.

Don't draw attention to it, you idiot man.

But then he comes back and he goes, oh dear, looks like I'm going to have to kill you too because you opened another notch of the skeleton key.

Yes, another notch in the skeleton.

Yes, it's a funny old story, isn't it?

Where is it from?

Is it an author we know?

Is it like almost like a folk tale?

No, it's very old.

It's a very ye-old tale.

That wasn't the case in Gaskell's husband's library, as far as I know.

Well, you don't know because no one went in there.

That's true.

But the thing about her, I think, which kind of annoys people or bores them, is that she actually was really normal.

And the thing that's quite nice about her is that she just basically had a really happy life.

She was quite conventional in how she lived.

You know, she married this vicar.

Wait, or was she?

Or what?

Do you know the hidden history of her orgies?

Her orgies.

Well, wasn't there a rumour going around when she died that she and her husband were separated and that's why she was in the separate house?

Well, I do think that that's got weight.

So I'm glad other people who aren't gossips like me have said it.

Because you're not a gossip.

I only bring the fact.

You're an intellectual.

It's a separate house.

She bought her own house she dies in.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Without telling her husband.

And the story is that it was a surprise for her husband, like a retirement home.

Oh, we're going to move to the country, this lovely mansion.

And she was in the house with all her daughters saying, Isn't Daddy going to be delighted?

But I think.

Children are there as well.

Yeah, yeah, okay.

Which is why slightly the story suggests that that is what was going on.

But

is he at home at the breakfast table at House One?

It's very quiet this morning, isn't it?

God, they're sleeping in today.

Yeah.

I bet they were separated.

Do you reckon?

Yeah, I think so.

Or it was a secret death house.

Sorry.

She thought, my time is up.

I like how animals like to go and you know, die under a log or something.

She thought, I'm going to die in a house that's not my own.

It's a huge faf to buy a full house.

Yeah, but houses were cheaper than I think it was probably easier to do.

A few years ago, a university got a collection of letters that were written by someone who was friends with Elizabeth Gaskell and they were having correspondence.

And in it, Gaskell predicted her death that year.

She said to her, I'm not going to make it to the end of the year.

So I better buy a house.

Yeah.

But perhaps she didn't know that she was doing so well.

You know, she could sense it.

There is an argument in Gaskell's life for so the house, the secret house that she bought was in Alton in Hampshire, which is where Jane Austen lived

for the last years of her life.

And Alton Towers?

Is that there?

No, it's in a completely different place.

It's hundreds of miles away.

But Gaskell grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon, home of Shakespeare.

So is this a ley line?

So is this an argument for ley lines in terms of literary creativity?

Probably.

There's certainly something going on, isn't there?

Yeah, certainly, I think.

Do you know she gave us the word squiffy to mean drunk?

Really?

Oh, brilliant.

I know.

I love that fact.

I love the sound of her, I have to say.

As in...

When you read about her social life, there is this comparison, I think, with Dickens, where Dickens was partying all the time.

He was everywhere.

He went around the world.

That's exactly what Gaskell did in a time where it felt like that would have been much harder.

She was a mother of how many children did she have in total i think she was she was pregnant seven times a couple of the children didn't live okay right five daughters and one son yes which is quite a lot that is yeah she was writing she wrote god quite a few novels a lot of short stories a biography she traveled the world she was constantly said to be dancing half the night at parties she was a real socialite I think she sounds really fun.

I think you would have gotten along with her very well.

Yes.

She was a real butterfly.

She even wrote one of her novels while she was staying with Florence Nightingale.

Like she just touches all these little elements of her past, which I really love.

She sounds like someone who deserves to have been let in the library.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know though.

I know.

It's a slippery slope.

I really think she should have been allowed in that library.

You let them in libraries one day, you know.

And they just go in there willy-nilly.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Killy squiffy.

I have another theory about her that I think we should spread this gossip.

Her brother John.

And if you read about him, he was about seven years older than her.

So she had, her mum died when she was one and she was sent to live with an aunt who she loved.

And she lived in this very female-dominated community, it was all women.

But she did have this older brother who still lived with her dad, and they wrote to each other a lot.

He was really fond of her.

And then he joined the merchant navy and they kept writing to each other.

And then he just vanishes.

And everyone says he was either abducted by pirates in India or his ship sank.

But she, after writing him for years, she's 17.

Yeah, never

bluebeard, yes, kidnapped.

A bluebeard and blackbeard brothers or friends.

They must know each other.

They're naughty cousins.

So, yeah, suspicious.

And she never mentioned it.

She never mentioned him to her kids, except to say, oh, I don't really remember him.

But of course you'd remember him.

Too painful or?

Well, I don't know.

What's your theory?

You seem to be driving at something here, Anna.

I think.

Is he in the library?

I think his corpse was on the shelves.

I think maybe he ran away with like an Indian lady and told only her and she could never tell anyone.

That's a good theory.

Yeah, I like that.

Just on people who wrote anonymously.

Yeah.

Because Gaskell was always by a lady would appear on her title pages.

I think she was Mrs.

Gaskell later in her career.

But I didn't really realise how common this was.

So between 1750 and 1790, 80% of all novels did not list an author.

on the title page.

Male and female writers.

You know, it just wasn't a thing.

For women, it was because it was, you know, it was a bit risque to be writing a novel.

It was too similar to prostitution, which, I mean, that's genuinely the theory I read.

But by a lady was a good phrase to use because it showed that the author was someone of a decent class, you know.

So Jane Austen was by a lady, and then later on, by the same lady who brought you sense and sensibility.

I was genuinely at that.

And she never saw her own name on the title page, Jane Austen, which is kind of tragic.

Yeah, it's sad.

Do you think other books at the time were written by a different lady?

Not that lady.

I can't believe it's not a lady.

Yeah.

But all of it, like Tristram Shandy, Byron stuff, Jonathan Swift, it's all anonymous.

Really?

Really?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So the novel was quite new then, wasn't it?

Maybe it was still a bit like, oh, this might not go down very well in history.

It was risque, definitely.

And it was quite fun as well.

So Jonathan Swift, he sent his stuff to a publisher via someone else.

So there was no way of tracing it back to him.

Really?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then when the printer said, look, who is the author of Gulliver's Travels?

Swift and his friend Alexander Pope, they pretended,

I don't know who wrote this.

They would even write letters to each other privately saying, who wrote this Gulliver's Travels book?

Completely between themselves.

Yeah.

I don't know.

It's so funny.

They're just like, it was a bit of a game.

But was there a royalty thing that they would still have in place?

Yeah, I guess you could be paid anonymously quite easily at the time.

There's just one person who's called like Anna Lady, who's just funneling all the money

accidentally sent to her.

Gaskell obviously gave all her money to her husband at first.

In fact, I think it went to him automatically because married women weren't allowed to earn money.

Really don't approve of this husband, I tell you.

Keep in Brennan's library.

Apparently, it was very affectionate.

I was listening to a.

And that's why she bought a secret house.

I think it was a little joke.

He was the one who suggested she write to get over the death of her one-year-old son, who had very sadly died.

And he said, as to help you with grieving, write a novel, probably not suspecting she was going to become a world-famous novelist.

And yes, when she got paid, it went straight to him, and he sort of jokily pocketed it, saying, Well, you know, women shouldn't be earning or in control of the purse strings, should they?

I'll give you some pocket money.

But I think it was all meant

all-mention jest.

It was all meant in jest.

It was a different time.

It's so hard to know when it's written, isn't it?

You do know the tone.

Yeah, it's really, they needed more emojis, I think.

How much of history would be different if emojis existed?

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.

Winky face.

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

My fact this week is that one of Ovid's tips for seducing a woman you fancied was to pretend you'd seen dust on her cleavage and then go to brush it off.

It's a great line, isn't it?

Oh, you've got a very dusty cleavage.

It's it's what every woman wants to hear yeah and when you say go to brush it off follow through and actually brush it off follow through yeah so these were his exact words

go to and then complete the brush complete

do you think it's like an updated thing of the no sorry a downdated thing

because

because now it's if you've got an eyelash oh you've got an eyelash on your cheek isn't it and then the man like removes the eyelashes you know this man come on i have a pocket full of eyelashes that i try and subtly sprinkle onto people's cheeks It's true.

Absolute classic.

Absolutely classic.

I've had that tried on you.

Does it work?

Oh, you've got an eyelash on your

eyelash.

And then they lift it off your face.

What harm is that eyelash?

And then they go take a take a wish.

So maybe it's the same.

It was like, take you, you've got some dust on your cleavage.

And then they hold it out and go, make a wish.

Make a wish.

Plow on it like a dandelion.

I think this book of Ovid might contain a lot of things that you guys could try out, and I'd love to hear the results.

So this is a a book called Ars Amatoria, and Ovid was a Roman writer.

He wrote this in year 2 AD.

So it got in early.

Box fresh, yeah, got in early, so a couple of millennia ago.

Um, his exact words were: As often happens, if perchance a little dust should fall on the bosom of the fair, it must be brushed off with your fingers.

And if there should be no dust, still brush off that nun.

It would work for me.

I

would, I'd I'd like it.

He has so much good stuff in there.

Oh, he also said, Let it be your object to please the husband of the fair one that you fancy.

I suppose we're assuming.

Oh, this is nice.

Because once made a friend, he will be more serviceable for your designs.

So I think, you know, you'll get invitations to the house a little bit more.

Not like come in and have a hairy threesome.

No.

No, he did specify that.

Did he?

Specify no bad gorilla costumes and no no threesomes.

I mean, he was a very risque writer at the time.

He was,

what's the word?

He was not evicted.

He was deported.

Yeah.

He was banned.

Exiled.

Exiled.

Exiled to the worst place in the world at the time, he claimed.

Seems to have been a completely normal city in modern-day Romania, but compared with Rome, I guess it was rubbish.

And for the last 10 years of his life, he spent there writing the Tristii, which were basically sad letters saying, please, can I come back to Rome?

to everyone he knew in Rome, including the emperor.

But I think he was evicted because he was quite a libidinous, quite a licentious writer.

Lots of sexy stuff in the Ars Amatoria, lots of love poetry.

But it's quite mysterious why he was actually kicked out.

Yeah, we don't know.

No one knows for sure.

There might have been a scandal involving the daughter of the Emperor Augustus.

Yeah, Julio.

Oh, I think.

Maybe it was.

It might have been a general back to basics campaign that Augustus was running because Rome was getting a little bit seedy and Augustus didn't really like that.

And he was trying to raise public morals a bit.

And Ovid was still out there saying get dust in you know all of that

so it's really unclear why he was

in

bang and the dust is gone

these ladies so so there were there were three volumes of this book right the art of love first one which teaches the reader how to seduce a woman the second one then is okay okay you've got her now how do you continue to seduce her which is very interesting and then the and then the third one is how how for women so there must have been feedback going hey this is all very man-based Can we get the opposite version?

So he wrote how a woman can seduce a man.

But the fourth volume, which is a separate book, is the most exciting one.

The marsupials.

Yeah, love it.

Develop a pouch in your front.

Remedia amorus.

This is the book of how, if it's unrequited love, do you stop loving a person?

What a great idea for us.

For it,

it's fantastic.

The publishers must have been absolutely chuffed.

Yeah.

It's got a great advice in it as well, the remedia.

There's join the army.

Become a lawyer.

Become a farmer.

Get a hobby.

How is this supposed to get you out of unrequited love?

I think it's when you're heartbroken.

It's how to get over it.

It's a distraction.

It's not like

my dad gave me some advice once when I was a teenager and I was very heartbroken over a boy who did not love me back.

And my dad said, just picture him on the loo.

Oh, wow.

Really?

I can see that going in there.

Well, there is a similar issue.

Did it work?

No.

And I said to Dad, because he said, I was in love with Sarah.

I can't remember her surname.

This girl he was in love with when he was a teenager.

And he said, I don't know.

I've got to give her a shout out, right?

Cleveland.

Sarah Cleveland.

Oh, thank God.

Great.

Now we're legally secure.

So I was in love with Sarah Cleveland.

And I would picture her on the loo to get me over her.

And I said, did it work?

And he went, no.

Right.

If anything, I developed a weird fetish that has daunted my life ever since.

Well,

okay, well, Ovid wrote, maybe this would have worked alternatively.

And this is about if you're a man and you've had your heartbroken by a woman, go and see her unannounced, right, early in the morning.

And she hasn't got her makeup on.

She hasn't got her makeup on.

And you'll be reminded.

She's got too much dust on her clean edge.

You need a room to get that out of love.

Yeah,

also the classic kind of like teenage movie techniques, burn all the items that are associated with them.

so sit in with a fire and throw the letters in the love letters and the bits of clothing or whatever has been left over in your house do that and but what a great book what a what a forward-thinking book he has to yes there are some ropey bits of it maybe it doesn't stand up to a lot of feminism but he was very pro-makeup actually he wrote a whole separate book on why women should wear makeup because there was a lot of pushback in society at the time about how women were um overdressing their faces with makeup augustus back to basics let's take off that thick slap exactly don't have natural beauty.

Exactly.

And he was like, no, natural beauty.

Have you seen their natural faces underneath?

And that's also a good read.

Lots of slap, dusty bosoms.

He gets quoted a lot as a kind of proto-pickup artist.

Yeah.

And there was a brief trend when that sort of

thing

of pickup artistry was doing a thing.

A lot of proto-bros were saying you've got to read ovid in much the same way that they were all saying you've got to read sun tzu's the art of war like are you reading that are you really are you actually reading marcus aurelius's meditations are you it did actually really remind me of that i didn't realize people are collected those it reminded me of that game mentality

a lot of his advice is quite sort of modern like when he says um

how you should befriend the lady's maid yeah that's how to get in there

yeah it's very clever so it is a bit like that yeah i mean he's

like befriending of your lady's maid.

What kind of life do you lead, Rosie?

So,

what you do,

um, but one of the people who's written loads about this is a woman called Donna Zuckerberg, who is a classicist, and she's written a book called Classics Beyond the Manosphere, all about this.

And she is an interesting person.

She's the only Zuckerberg sibling not to have become a tech titan.

Wow, yeah, she's sister of Mark, and there are four, I think, four Zuckerbergs.

And, yeah, well, she, yeah, so she wrote a book as well as the one that you were talking about called Not All Dead White Men.

And the idea was she was talking about how the sort of alt-right of America have really harnessed all the, you know, Roman ideas and so on.

And Ovid is very much connected to the Neil Strauss, the game pickup artist movement that's going on.

And she wants to keep showing the connection between those two things.

And it's so interesting that she is Mark Zuckerberg's sister.

because the very first thing that he did was a site called Face Mash, where you got students who went to Harvard University, both women, their pictures, which he hacked off a system, and you ranked who you thought was hotter.

That was the original Facebook, basically.

And so she must have been horrified by that and decided to dedicate her life to showing what a misogynistic move that was by her brother.

Yeah, sounds like they have parted ways.

Well, so she's saying Ovid was a misogynist, and so...

Not necessarily.

She's sort of saying that, as Andy was saying before, it's that thing of using an old historical idea to give legitimacy to wives.

You can't all blame the fact that men keep befriending my maids.

A lot of it.

Because a lot of it does obviously be quite sleazy, but a lot of it doesn't.

You know, he says, send very eloquent love notes.

Cry in front of your loved one.

I don't recall seeing Andrew Tate saying, you've got to be able to cry in front of her.

You know, that's not, it is a bit different.

But what's also different, and which Donna Zuckerberg writes about in her book, is that it was actually, it was quite a lot more dangerous in the times, the advice that he was giving, giving, because when he was saying things like, befriend the husband of the person you're fancying, there was death penalties back in the day for things like if you were having a child out of wedlock, if you were, well, it was dangerous.

It was, there would be certain things that you weren't allowed to do that in this day and age, you'd get away as sort of just, it's bad manners.

But

is that how you think the affair is going to go down then?

Yeah.

That's surely bad manners.

No, but yeah.

So she points out that the risk level was much higher back then.

Right.

If you were employing these tactics and they worked on certain women in society.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And he suffered the pay the price because he suffered relegatio.

He did.

That was the official term for the exile that he was put through.

And he died out in.

Died out there.

Relegatio was the mildest form of exile.

What I want to know is when he died, was he with somebody?

Was he, did he find love?

Or did he die in exile alone?

His last word was when?

And sadly,

we don't know the answer.

No, he died very unhappy.

The last 10 years, he was writing these Tristii letters.

And it was, you know, his book had been banned from libraries.

And he said, look, it's completely awful out here in modern-day Romania.

He said, you know, the wine freezes in the jars and the ice is so thick on the Black Sea, the dolphins can't even jump through the water.

You know, really horrible.

Poor guy.

But he was constantly writing poems to his friends and to the emperor and to his wife, probably in that order, to defend his cause, say, I'm really sorry about all the licentious stuff.

I can change and I will change and create pity for himself.

And it did not work.

That's so sad.

It reminds me a bit of, you know, how John Donne used to write lots of sexy poems.

And then in his later life, he did lots of like, no, all his poems were like, no,

ah, God, God.

Ah, they were all, that was the kind of vibe.

Right.

It's got more like that.

I feel like I've read more the sexy ones.

Yeah, his early ones are all sexy, and then the later ones are all more self-hating.

God forgive me

for my sexy past.

God, we all turn into such balls, don't we?

It's like Tolstoy.

No one ever stays the fun playboy slash playgirl.

Yeah, it's very sad.

Bit of a good update on Ovid.

I do have a bit of good news about that.

So rain with that sentence.

Is this breaking news?

Has this just come in?

It's recent

because Ovid's exile was eventually revoked in 2017.

When Rome's city council, who are not what they once were, I suspect, voted to repair the serious wrong that he had suffered and say his exile was now officially ended.

Was he like the knight in Indiana Jones 3?

He came back.

He came back.

You decided why is he?

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

My fact is that the largest collection of contemporary South African art in the world is in Nando's.

Which branch?

Every branch.

No, no, I'm joking.

The Manchester Salford Keys one.

Yeah, yeah.

Salt in there.

Yeah, and it's big.

So there was a terrific piece in The Guardian recently about Nando's collection of modern South African art.

Nando's is a chicken restaurant.

For anyone who doesn't know, I don't know.

We have American listeners.

Do you have Nando's?

Don't write Nick.

They do have Nando's, don't they, in America?

Should we have a Nando's?

Nando's is global, yeah.

Is it?

But it's the biggest here.

I think it's, you know, it's...

I think it's worth explaining.

I've only been to one.

Here is the highest ever Perry-Perry penetration on the planet, I think, in this country.

You've only ever been to one Nando's.

With you guys, in fact, yeah.

Oh, one Torch one, was it?

Was it the one at Salford?

It was the one at Salford, yeah.

And I only went for the art.

Would you like anything, madam?

Just a tour of your 70s pieces, please.

Yeah.

Seriously, you've only been to Nando's once in your life.

Yeah, I don't really like dry chicken.

Wow, it is quite dry chicken.

Dry.

But he says that they're in more than 20 countries, Nando's.

Uh-huh.

I know it'll be be more than that, you know.

Yeah.

20 is not that much, isn't it, really, in the grand scheme of countries.

Depends on the countries.

Yeah, if you're only in Tuvalu, Vanuatu.

Yeah, then you're doing something wrong in your marketing, I think.

Yeah.

So I don't know if they're in the USA, but they've got about 1,200 restaurants.

And across those restaurants, they own 32,000 odd pieces of art.

And they buy another couple of thousand every year.

And it's the main thing.

It seems to be the main thing keeping the South African contemporary art market going.

It's really nice they really support artists yeah they have a thing called the creative block program where they basically hand out wooden blocks for it to be drawn on so it's it's original commissions as well and they have programs where they look after artists it's i don't know what the rest of the business is like sorry the wooden they like send wooden blocks to south africans and say draw something on this and send it back to us well two artists who are on the scheme like they run all these schemes for for young artists and they run a thing where

It's an apprenticeship program where they take disadvantaged young people who don't have skills and they train them up over three years to become mosaicists or ceramicists.

Oh, wow.

That's quite cool.

Yeah.

I mean, obviously you get skills.

So, yeah.

So Nando's are doing something quite good.

I don't know many other restaurants that

any other restaurants that do this.

Does Pizza Express have a...

But we didn't know this about Nando's.

You know, Pizza Express might have the largest collection of statues in the world.

We don't know.

They also do a mentorship scheme, which is basically for furniture, lighting designers.

They have a lot of this stuff.

The only one that I can think of that does a similar kind of scheme is Whole Foods globally in every Whole Foods, they hire someone who is the artist in store.

So when you go into Whole Foods, you might see a lot of different art.

You might see a lot of different like paper-mache sculptures around the mushrooms.

They might have a big mushroom.

That's one person who's doing it bespoke for the Whole Foods as part of the payroll.

And they're always sculptures of the food.

No, no, like whatever it is, whatever they decide to do as the resident artist of Whole Foods, they get to do.

I thought you meant it was like, you know, in Japan when they show sushi, they have sushi models outside restaurants.

It's not like that.

You're like direct and you've got it'll be signs, it will be posters, it will be whatever they want to do, but that's their job.

They're the Whole Foods artists.

I was quite slow on the uptake on that.

I was thinking, what's what are the what?

Are they working behind the counter?

It's like, well, let's take an artist and get them

giving out fish, give them a proper career.

Something that will earn some money.

I just want to be buying this salmon, this broccoli, and I'd like a sketch of me, please.

While you ring it up, Domino's Pizza.

Do they have corporate art?

Well, they have a really close link to Frank Lloyd Wright, like probably the most famous architects, 20th century American architects, one of them.

And like, you know, had all these utopian visions of what you want to do with his architecture.

And the founder of Domino's Pizza is this chap called Thomas Monaghan.

And he bloody loved Frank Lloyd Wright.

It was in the 60s when he founded him.

And he was responsible in the 80s for Frank Lloyd Wright's works, like his furnishings and his decorative art, going up in price single-handedly because he just spent millions.

Did Frank design the little table that goes inside the pizza box?

That was quite

a bit of fun.

So, what was Frank doing to the pizzas?

Ah, so I think.

It was a side job just to fund the architecture.

I don't think Frank gave a shit about pizzas, but I think he was dead by this point.

So, this is getting more tenuous by the moment.

No, no, because the whole of Domino's Pizza is like based around Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture.

So, its centre of operations is a place called Domino's Farms.

It's World HQ, and the whole building is meant to imitate Frank Lloyd Wright's prairie-style buildings because the founder of Domino's is so obsessed with him.

And there's a whole section in it, which is a gallery, an exhibition of Frank Lloyd Wright artworks, which he's bought up.

He spent more on Frank Lloyd Wright artwork than anyone else in the world.

Rosie, do you collect art?

Have you got any pieces in your house?

No, not yet.

Okay.

I've got my mic from this Frank man.

Again, I don't know if he's still available to buy from me.

Are you a Nando's fan?

So like you, I find the chicken a bit dry.

Also, is it free range?

I don't know if the chicken's free range, is it?

It's really good.

And I get, if I have battery chicken, I get chicken guilt.

Okay.

But it is an interesting place in general because, well, it started in 1987.

As did I.

That is interesting.

Yeah, yeah.

Wow.

So, you know, I feel an affinity with them.

But there is this big thing of the Nando's black card.

And I know I've looked at three people who've all got one, which means you have free Nando's anytime, any place.

Forever and ever.

Yeah.

My buddy Tom Davis had it.

Do you know Big Tom?

Yeah, yeah.

Tom, yeah.

When I, Tom and I used to go almost every day with his black card in Kentish town.

You've got to use one of the black cards.

Many times.

And why was he given one?

Because the person I know who had one was a radio host who was

cool at the time.

It's just for being famous.

Tom wasn't famous at the time.

How did he get one then?

Tom called up Nando's and he said, I'm interested in the black card.

And then he got called up to the chicken council and he had to present his case.

Chicken council.

And then he had to present his case for why he wanted it.

Who sits on the chicken council?

That's like the library.

We don't know what's going on.

I can't see it on the library.

Are they in chicken suits?

Well, they wanted chicken suits, but they only had gorilla suits at the time.

do you know anyone who has the dishum dice have you heard about the dishumedice

so um e.n akbar has the dishumed dice and what it is is um at the end you throw the dice and if it lands if you get two sixes

then you get to get the whole meal for free

no way and what do you have to do to get the dishum dice i don't know yes because that feels like a relatively low risk financial investment for them send a couple of plastic dice out to some influencers and they have a one in 36 chance of getting their meal for free.

I went and he rolled, and we'd ordered so much food, and he got it, we got it all for free.

And they were so.

I think they were really upset because they looked like they didn't even know.

Oh, my God.

I mean, yeah, because you can get them weighted.

You can get those.

That's what I would do.

I would go off and have them weighted so that no matter what, they land on situations.

Maybe you can't do that because they're special dishes.

They must be designed

to look like this shit.

But if you pay just a few thousand pounds to a dice crafter, he'll be able to make you two double six every time.

But then that'll go on the spreadsheet at Dishu MageQ.

Well, you'll spot that.

Do you tell your mate, I know the world-leading dice.

He makes the weighted dices.

He does them for people like,

get out.

Dan, I thought you were just bullshitting then when you were saying with such authority, you know, you can get any dice you like weighted.

I had drinks with him with the world-leading dice.

He's a king-weight around secrets.

Oh,

possibly.

We can redact that in the...

Yeah.

He's very good friends with my friend who's the Loch Loch Ness Monster Hunter and we had drinks on Loch Ness and he told us all about the dice and showed us.

Anyway, that's an incredible fact about Dishung.

Yeah, that's terrific.

That's an incredible fact of yours about Tom because Nando's insist that the only rule is they never give their black card to anyone who asks for it.

They say it's just if you're famous.

How wonderful.

Before this, I didn't even know there was a chicken committee.

So you think, what are the chicken committee doing the rest of the year?

Yeah, it's water wolf.

They're pecking.

they're walking.

I was looking at some logo stuff, corporate art logos.

Actually, do you guys know slash remember?

I don't know if any of you are old enough.

Rosie, don't know how old you are.

You could be 60.

I am 60.

If so, you might remember the time when the Starbucks logo was naked.

Oh.

So you know she has hair over her breast now.

She used to have tits out.

Stop it, did she?

I'm going to have to Google this right now.

Yeah, because she's a mermaid, right?

Was she?

Yeah, yeah, she's a mermaid, although she has two tails, so it's quite an unconventional mermaid.

Oh, yeah, there she is.

She's actually quite unattractive and frumpy.

She's very unattractive.

I don't want to judge her.

I'll judge her.

This is a 15th-century drawing of a siren, though, and that was the Starbucks logo.

She looks like your drunk uncle at a wedding.

Wow.

Yeah.

She does look drunk because she looks like she's saying, I've caught these two fish and doesn't realise she's holding her own lower body.

Oh, that's classic.

Yeah, yeah.

Wow.

So for two women who are very positive about Mrs.

Gaskell, it's not universal.

No,

sisterhood.

This is not what a feminist looks like.

I watched her, they're both in agreement, though.

At least there's consistency.

You've just got to go with us.

That's what true feminism looks like.

So that was the Starbucks logo, a weird 15th century.

Why did they change it?

Well, it is just an upgrade, isn't it?

Yeah, as a Nordic woodcut, she is, yeah.

boobs out and bits of tail in each hand.

She looks more like she's holding fish now because you can't see the bottom of her tail.

So if you look at the Starbucks logo, it looks like she's just holding two dead fish.

Right.

Because I don't think they sell anything with them sell anything fish related no they do they do the tuna macchiato that's lovely

it's really nice

so oh it was was it controversial because she agreed to the one wood cut but then they put her on all of the cuts and all of the yeah exactly yeah right um just to tie together this with uh the howling i didn't spot any artworks on display in howling 2 right but it's really hard to use original art in films they're all like the world of image rights has tightened up a lot lately.

You can't just, if you want to show the Mona Lisa or Girl with the Pearl Earring or whatever, you can't just stick a print in a frame and pretend in the film because the artistic estates get a bit funny about that and rightful owners and all of this.

So

lots of times when they make a film which features art, well, they want it to include really famous art, they take weeks and weeks making replicas.

And then the estate of the artist insists that the artwork is destroyed, that the filmmakers record and film the destruction of the artwork, and then send them the evidence of the fake artwork being destroyed.

That's so interesting because

you'd figure that would go on a memorabilia market as opposed to being passed off as a...

I don't know what they're worried about.

It might be passing off.

Yeah.

There was a film about Basquiat in 1996 and the estate asked for so much money to use Basquiat images that they said, well, we can't make the film.

So instead, they just knocked up a load of Basquiat style.

artwork.

But then they had to have a lawyer look at all of the artworks and say, that's fine, that's fine.

That's that's too close to actual basket, can't use that.

Wow, so all of that is sort of artist-approved.

Yeah, there's any film producer that ever experimented when they get that initial rejection with saying, Okay, well, instead, we'll draw a load of badly sketched cock and balls, claim that's basket, and see what the estate has to say about that.

I don't know, I think that was a strong position.

You'd be a great film producer, you'd be like, Really ballsy, you'd be like, That doesn't work for the movie

if it's a Da Vinci code, it's a plus.

Yes, it's in the Da Vinci code.

If the Mona Lisa looks looks like

a cock and ball,

you've got to hope that they bling first.

Otherwise, you're stuck with the waistcoat.

Who's going to look more stupid?

I don't know.

I don't know.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our various social media accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland on Instagram.

Andy.

I'm at Andrew Hunter M on Blue Sky.

Are you on social media?

Oh, yes, I am.

At RosieIsAHALT on Instagram and various others.

It sounds rude, but it's not.

It's not.

It's not rude.

It's just the way I delivered it.

Yeah.

And Anna, if they want to get to us as a group?

You can get us on Instagram at no such thing as a fish or Twitter at no such thing or podcast at qi.com is the email address.

Yeah.

And

Rosie, if they want to find out anything else about what you're up to, is there anywhere else they should be checking out?

Check out my podcast, non-censored, which is very funny.

Well, do check that out.

You can also go to our website, no such thingasafish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

There's also links to a live show that we're doing later this year in Sheffield as part of the Crossed Wires Festival.

That's going to be really exciting.

There's also bits of merchandise and there is a link to our secret club, Club Fish, where we have bonus episodes that go up all the time.

Do check that out.

Otherwise, just come back next week.

We will be back with another episode.

We will see you then.

Goodbye.

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