580: No Such Thing As Bin Day On A Nuclear Submarine

Speaker 1 Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway. We demand to be home.
Winner, best score. We demand to be seen.
Winner, best book. We demand to be quality.

Speaker 1 It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Speaker 1 Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th. Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

Speaker 2 A happy place comes in many colors.

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Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunt and Murray, and Anna Tashinsky. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

Speaker 2 And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is James.

Speaker 2 Okay, my fact this week is that the first submarine to go around the world was only seen by one civilian, a Filipino kayaker who saw the periscope and thought it was a sea monster.

Speaker 2 It's pretty amazing because we have a photo of that man. Like this is

Speaker 2 take the photo. So we'll get into the big story, but there was a photographer on board.
And so anytime the periscope went up, they took a photo of what the periscope was seeing.

Speaker 2 And in this shot, you had a man sitting there called Rufino. Yeah, we also know more about him because National Geographic went out looking for him.
Yeah. And they found him and interviewed him.

Speaker 2 And that's when they found out that he thought it was a sea monster. He immediately went home and painted the names of Saints Peter and Paul on his boat for protection against the sea monster.

Speaker 2 Sensible. And by amazing coincidence, this submarine that we're about to talk about started and ended at St.
Peter and Paul Archipelago in the Atlantic. It's incredible.

Speaker 2 What a coincidence. Yeah.
They've blown it wide open. What is evidence that we are living in a simulation? In a very unimaginative age.

Speaker 2 So, yeah, this is 1960. We're talking middle of the Cold War.

Speaker 2 The Americans and the Soviets are not getting on very well, but maybe there's going to be a peace summit in Paris. But before they do that, the U.S.

Speaker 2 decided to show off a bit and say, we've got a new submarine that can go all the way around the world with no one noticing it. And so that's why they did it.
It's called Operation Sandblast.

Speaker 2 They could just say they'd done it, couldn't they? Like literally,

Speaker 2 we sailed all the way around the world underwater without anyone noticing it. Yeah, but you're still here.
That's because we went all the way around the world. Oh, we just, yeah, finished.

Speaker 2 They just should have, they should have sent it underwater and then just had it coming through a big tape at the end. Yeah.

Speaker 2 They were really hardcore, Bright. So there were a couple of moments where it looked dodgy where really they should have come up and they didn't.

Speaker 2 There's one instance where there was a member of the crew who had kidney stones and they did have to get him off the submarine sort of halfway through the mission.

Speaker 2 And they fired him out of the torpedo.

Speaker 2 Basically, that might have been an option because what they ended up doing was putting up a bit of the submarine out of the water for him to be collected from it while while keeping the main hull underneath.

Speaker 2 And they didn't know, like none of the crew knew what they were doing, did they, until they were out at sea, under sea.

Speaker 2 There was just their captain, Captain Beach, which is quite nice given it was sandblasts. Amazing.

Speaker 2 And given that they were at sea. And what's the sea surrounded by? The beach.
Yeah, and it's got a beach under it, arguably, as well. Well, let's discuss that, shall we? Where is the beach?

Speaker 2 I don't want to go on your package beach holiday. Yeah, exactly.
I don't want to go for a picnic on the beach. Everyone, get your scuba gear on.

Speaker 2 But yeah, he didn't tell the crew until they were out at sea and underwater. And I think the crew had just been told to prepare to be away a little bit longer than usual.

Speaker 2 And then they're going around the world. Yeah, they were told to get all their tax details in order because it was going to go over the tax year.
Really?

Speaker 2 Really? Like, whatever you do, make sure you pay your tax because you're not going to be back in time for it. It's a good excuse, though.
It's a very good excuse.

Speaker 2 I really like this. So the submarine, submarines these days, nuclear ones, have their own way of making air on board.

Speaker 2 But this one didn't have that capacity because it was an early nuclear nuclear sub. It had to have its own, it had to have a snorkel, basically.
It would stick up the periscope and go

Speaker 2 and then go back down again every night. I actually, honestly, this might just be a blind spot for me, but I didn't realize what a nuclear submarine was.

Speaker 2 I thought a nuclear submarine was a submarine that had nuclear bombs on it. I think because the British trident ones are, that's what I thought they all were.

Speaker 2 I just want to say the missiles are trident, the submarines are vanguards. Sorry.
Sure. But yeah, no.

Speaker 2 Well, it can be a sub with nuclear missiles on board it can be but by definition a nuclear submarine is something which is powered by a nuclear reactor and what that means is you can just stay underwater for way longer and these days you can make your own oxygen using the nuclear reactor by taking in the seawater separating the hydrogen and oxygen and that means you could stay underwater for months and years.

Speaker 2 Right. So cool.
There are various problems with the fact that we can now have submarines underwater forever, essentially. There are various reasons why you can't do that.

Speaker 2 So one of which is like, oh, your clothes get so dirty dirty in the end, you run out, and people get claustrophobic and upset. And another is rubbish.
I didn't know what they did with rubbish

Speaker 2 on submarines. Oh, okay.
On sort of all submarines now. They bring on board lots of metal sheets, and then they have a special machine on board that turns the sheets into a cylinder to be a bin.

Speaker 2 Because obviously, if they just brought on loads of bins, they take up too much space. Yeah, yeah.
So then they

Speaker 2 spaces at a premium.

Speaker 2 And then the bins all get secured once they're filled with rubbish. And then they just jettison them out of the submarine with weights on them to take them to the bottom of the sea.

Speaker 2 To the bottom of the sea. To the beach.
To the beach?

Speaker 2 The people sunbathing down there are pissed off. That's fancy.

Speaker 2 Because the whole point of a submarine is that, I mean, the whole game of being in a submarine is that you're being quiet and undetectable.

Speaker 2 And enormous efforts have gone to to make submarines quiet and undetectable. But if they're just pooing out metal bins wherever they go, you're not going to see it.

Speaker 2 The ocean is big, Andy. No, I know, but the whole thing is, I mean, the amazing lengths they go to not to be spotted.
Well, then, can I just say about the bins? Yeah, yeah. given that you

Speaker 2 given that you've broken

Speaker 2 like my neighbours what day what day do they go out again

Speaker 2 it's tuesday this week is a bank holiday

Speaker 2 um uh some people on submarines say that they're so careful about not drawing attention to themselves that eggs old eggs they haven't eaten are pre-broken before they're put in the trash disposal unit because if they broke after being released they would generate enough sound that they would be detectable what that's how sensitive some other submarines are to noise Really?

Speaker 2 Other submarines are constantly. Yeah, they don't.

Speaker 2 They're an egg break.

Speaker 2 It's so quiet, don't they? I've just

Speaker 2 it's not that quiet under the water.

Speaker 2 It's pretty noisy under the water. How about the engine running the submarine? What are they doing about that? That's very heavily buffered.

Speaker 2 They put, you know, the egg boxes, they put them around them.

Speaker 2 No, it is nuts how quiet they are. And so, for example, bubbles.
Oh, yeah. Okay.
They put their bubbles through a diffuser to spread them out before they release them.

Speaker 2 Because otherwise there's a big plume of bubbles at the surface, very obvious. Oh, there's a submarine down there.

Speaker 2 Is that like if you feel a big fart coming and you somehow manage to let it go out in a very slow little... It's exactly like that.
And MI5 spies are trained to do that.

Speaker 2 Just in case. They're the only ships that fly Jolly Rogers, which I should have actually phrased as, what flies a Jolly Roger? Submarines.

Speaker 2 I've screwed it up now, yeah. But if you hadn't done the research and I hadn't just said that, what would you have said? I've known that for years.
Okay, but if you weren't a QI researcher,

Speaker 2 I just can't imagine a mobile I wouldn't have.

Speaker 2 I have a question. Yeah, it would be quite soggy.
Yeah, trying to fly a flag underwater. That's a good point.
They display it flattened. I guess they fly it when they come up in triumph.

Speaker 2 So I think traditionally, if they've had a triumphant

Speaker 2 Sejourn, what do you call it? Expedition.

Speaker 2 I don't think it's Sejon, yeah.

Speaker 2 I think they're pretty sure in most wars they go. Subs, you're going on a Sejourn into the Baltic Sea now.
It's amazing. There's no space on the summary because most people are wearing cravats.

Speaker 2 The number of cigarette holders you have to have on board, it just takes up loads of space. And then the actual battle itself is called the Box Social.

Speaker 2 Whatever they're called. Mission.

Speaker 2 Good mission. When you come back and you've had a good one, you have the, you fly the Jolly Roger don't you? If you've sunk somebody else.

Speaker 2 I think if you sunk someone else, but now I think they quite often do it because sinkings happen very rarely these days.

Speaker 2 And it's because it's like middle finger to First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, who complained in 1901, as I'm sure you'll remember, that submarines were underhanded, unfair, and damned un-English.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 And then in 1914, there's someone sunk someone else in the war, the great one.

Speaker 2 And they came back flying the Jolly Roger to say, screw you, you think we're underhand and piratey. That's what we've done.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 We have so many correspondents in the fish inbox, FinBox, about nuclear submarines. Almost all our listeners seem to be on nuclear submarines.
It's stunning.

Speaker 2 I didn't know the Wi-Fi was that good down there. Amazing.
Yeah. They must pre-download it.
They definitely.

Speaker 2 Good point. Take a plunge.
Yeah. What are they telling us? Okay, well.
Interstate secrets. We've got some secret correspondence, actually.

Speaker 2 Tim, I'll say Tim W writes, it's okay because his friend's brother is learning to operate a nuclear submarine, but you should not flush the loo at sea. Why?

Speaker 2 Well, there was once a U-boat that was sunk because they flushed it. It was Colonel Schlitt.
That's it. Yes.

Speaker 2 And yeah,

Speaker 2 the whole thing went down. So that's a good reason not to do it.
But basically, you shouldn't dump fresh water at sea

Speaker 2 because

Speaker 2 it has a different sonar signature to sea water.

Speaker 2 It refracts sound waves differently, and so it shows up as a massive blob. Oh, come on.
Wow.

Speaker 2 It just gives flush. Gives you away.
But why don't they just keep samples of different ocean water that they are traveling in?

Speaker 2 It gets put into the cistern whenever they... It's limited.

Speaker 2 No, that's a a good idea that's a really good idea well it's actually it's quite interesting i didn't realize this about oceans this story of the submarine going around the world has taught me this that uh four days after they were thought to be a sea monster in the philippines they were going in the lombok strait and then they were making their way into the indian ocean and then out of nowhere they plunged from periscope depth height to 125 feet in 40 seconds because the density of the saltwater is different in the indian ocean than it is to the lombok straight that that they were coming through.

Speaker 2 Hang on, so it wasn't, it's not like there's a wall there and they hit it and suddenly dropped like a squad.

Speaker 2 I think it is because it came out of nowhere that they just plunged. I had a feeling that when you go from one ocean to another, you do get those like quite solid blocks.
Really?

Speaker 2 Yeah, because there's such different densities,

Speaker 2 they can't mix. Isn't that wild? It's crazy.
I have

Speaker 2 a riddle for you. Yeah.

Speaker 2 The first people to successfully escape from a submarine did it in 1851. It was called Le Plange Marin, a marine diver, and it was operated like a pedala.

Speaker 2 So there were three crew, two crew on the pedalau bit cycling along, and then one bloat was the captain.

Speaker 2 Anyway, they sank in a test dive in Keel Harbour, and they waited five hours for someone to rescue them. No one came.

Speaker 2 There's an escape hatch, but they can't push it open because they're underwater, so the water pressure is too much.

Speaker 2 And then the captain, who was the inventor, and he was a guy called Wilhelm Bauer, he grabbed a small valve, unscrewed it and whipped it open so water started coming in.

Speaker 2 And his crewmates were like, what have you done? You've gone mad, Wilhelm, you're going to kill us all. Why did he do it?

Speaker 2 Is it the same reason as if you hold a straw, the top of a straw, and then put it in water, the water stays in there?

Speaker 2 Because it releases pressure, which means then there isn't pressure holding the door closed. Yes, because what does the valve do? It lets water in from the outside.

Speaker 2 So as the water came in from the outside, then it equalized the pressure. So suddenly you've got water inside as well as out.

Speaker 2 So there's a really horrible moment where you all have to hold your breath as the whole thing fills up with water and you're suffocating to death because the CO2 levels are so extreme.

Speaker 2 And then suddenly it hit the pressure equality and it went pop open and it fired them up onto the surface in the middle of their funerals.

Speaker 2 What? What? Yeah, they were doing an impromptu service because it had been over seven hours. Pretty quick.
I'm sorry. I would like more efforts to be made for me.
He's been in that toilet 20 minutes.

Speaker 2 Shall we have a funeral? That doesn't make any sense, Seather.

Speaker 2 The wives are with their new partners.

Speaker 2 They were having a service.

Speaker 2 They assumed they were dead little you know not that the coffins weren't out yet yeah have you seen the other way that you can escape a submarine if it is sunk you disguise yourself as an egg i know that

Speaker 2 no what are the lifeboats of a submarine if it sinks like smaller submarines torpedoes no it's a suit that you wear it's a life raft but you're in the life raft you're in the raft picture homer working in the nuclear power plant with that big helmet on but it's it's all fabric and he can see through a window in his face It's

Speaker 2 a picture of a Haskem suit. And there's no need to bring The Simpsons in, please.

Speaker 2 That's another way, a more bland way of giving the picture to the audience. So you go out of the submarine and you slowly rise and then you're just bobbing up there, waiting to be rescued.

Speaker 2 I think a lot of the time, if you're stuck, you're stuck, right? Yes.

Speaker 2 It's not foolproof this. Yeah, I think almost that is almost never that you can get out.
Yeah. We have one other person, right, who actually was a sonar operator on a nuclear submarine.

Speaker 2 This is so cool because with sonar, right, what you can do is it lets you count the number of blades on a propeller. So you can guess what kind of ship something is by your knowledge of the propeller.

Speaker 2 Because you fire your sonar at the propeller and sometimes it hits and sometimes it misses. Pretty much.

Speaker 2 And then you can make an educated guess as to the kind of propeller and therefore what kind of submarine you're observing.

Speaker 2 So the whole game is to cover up the propeller when you're in a public port for secrecy. So no one knows how many blades you've got on your propeller in case someone spots you.

Speaker 2 And this, I should say, it's a diesel-electric submarine as well, so it's slightly different. But it's for sneaking around the Norwegian fjords and for that kind of stuff.
And I love this.

Speaker 2 I'm just going to read this. The snorkel has a valve at the top that automatically closes if a wave goes over it, right? The snorkel bit.

Speaker 2 But then when that happens, the diesel engines suck loads of the air from the rest of the submarine. And that means the air pressure drops.

Speaker 2 So it really hurts everyone's ears on board. But what that then means, if the air is moist, the air spontaneously condenses and it starts raining inside the submarine

Speaker 2 because of the pressure changes that have happened so he says that's an amazing experience wow on propellers this is going from memory so it might be wrong but i think it's right there was an episode of i think doctor who

Speaker 2 where they needed a submarine they got this model submarine and they looked at the propeller and it was exactly the same as one of the most secret submarines that the UK had.

Speaker 2 And the UK defense were like, holy shit, where did they get the designs from? That's absolutely ridiculous. And they brought these people into questioning and said, Well, where did you get it from?

Speaker 2 And it turned out they'd been to Woolworths and just bought a towy submarine and used it. And just by coincidence, it had the exact same specifications as this British New York.

Speaker 2 Oh my god, that's amazing.

Speaker 1 Sucks. The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.
We demand to be home. Winner, best score.
We demand to be seen. Winner, best book.
We demand to be quality.

Speaker 1 It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Speaker 1 Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th. Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

Speaker 2 Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact.

Speaker 2 My fact this week is that the original Little Mermaid production was almost delayed because all of their underwater bubbles got caught up in the Tiananmen Square incident.

Speaker 2 And tell me, Dan, what exactly was the Tiananmen Square incident?

Speaker 2 It was a... For all of our global listeners.
It was a sojourn by the Red Army.

Speaker 2 This is quite a surprising fact that The Little Mermaid, which was the last entirely hand-drawn and hand-colored movie that Disney was producing decided that rather than photocopying drawings of underwater bubbles they would have each individual bubble millions of them drawn by hand and they couldn't do that on their own so they farmed that out to a company that was called Pacific Rim in China and

Speaker 2 great film great film and the offices of pacific rim happened to be right next to tiananmen square and when suddenly all the chaos broke out in tianan square all the protests and all the military coming in, the bubbles were still being drawn and they were locked up in a safe there.

Speaker 2 And the producers didn't know whether or not they were going to be able to get them out. They didn't know how long this was going to last.
They needed to. And they're so fragile bubbles.

Speaker 2 I mean, that will pop at the slightest

Speaker 2 point and give away their location if one goes off as well. If you look carefully, a lot of the bubbles in the little moment are actually eggs that have been just after you then.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 But they did manage to get them out of the building. They got them onto a ship.

Speaker 2 So it's quite interesting there to ship their bubbles back over to the states and uh and then it made it into the film but it's yeah if you look at the film so i was watching lots of clips and once you know this there are shedloads of bubbles every time they move there's bubbles all over the shop to be honest like that's one of the best things about the movie is the way they animated the water yeah it's very good and it would have been worse i think if they had done the photocopying agreed um because it's it was quite interesting so it's the xerox process they called it which is a bit like photocopying but for animation and for film and they should have used that because that's what people had been using I think the last film to use the hand-drawn method was Sleeping Beauty which was ages before that but when you photocopy stuff it gives it a black outline and this was so interesting because if you watch any Disney film that was Sleeping Beauty and before so like Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Pinocchio, Bambi, there's no black lines around the cartoons.

Speaker 2 So they're all like realistic. Like I'm wearing a yellow jumper.
There's no black line around it. There's just yellow jumper, then air.
And that's, if you watch Sleeping Beauty, you'll see that.

Speaker 2 Every film after that has black lines around the cartoon. So they look more cartoony and less realistic.

Speaker 2 And if you do want to sound like a big old snob, you can just say it's a very inferior period of animation for Disney. Before they fixed it.
And sweetly, that was for Beauty and the Beast.

Speaker 2 They brought the beauty back. The co-director of The Little Mermaid, John Musker, said, because he was interviewed about the

Speaker 2 bubble, the bubble thing. And he said, yeah, no, we cared about the guy in front of the tank and that democracy might take root there, but we were wondering, what's going on with our bubbles?

Speaker 2 In the next paragraph, he reveals he was joking. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Because this was an incident where, well, there were loads of protests in China, pro-democracy protests, and the Chinese government went in and killed a lot of people. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 James and I, you and I met Kate Adie, who was there at the time, and the footage. The Little Mermaid Premier.
Yes. Wow.
Yes. She's always been hard hitting.
I have no idea. Right in the thick of it.

Speaker 2 Yeah. she's bubble-obsessed.

Speaker 2 She was there, and the footage that was taken,

Speaker 2 I think, James, am I right in saying it's particularly the footage of the man standing in front of the tank?

Speaker 2 She had to get that back to a British embassy, and she had some Chinese guards trying to take the camera reels off her so that she couldn't get through.

Speaker 2 So she ended up kicking one of them in the nuts and climbing over a wall in order to get into safety. And yeah, so that's how we have the footage.
It was King.

Speaker 2 I didn't know that. I believe that's right.
That's certainly what she told us. Yeah.
Just a fact for Dan about that. The Simpsons,

Speaker 2 they have an episode where they go to China. And in the middle of it, there is a picture on Tiananmen Square.

Speaker 2 It says Tiananmen Square on this site in 1989, nothing happened, which is obviously about the fact that references to it are banned in China.

Speaker 2 But then Disney decided to omit that episode of The Simpsons. So you can't watch that in China anymore.
Really?

Speaker 2 What's the Disney film that they made about Mermaid? Little Mermaid, Andy.

Speaker 2 The first Disney film about a mermaid was Splash.

Speaker 2 You didn't say specify first. Yeah, you didn't.
You just said, what's the film they need?

Speaker 2 Oh, what was the first one? It was Splash. Daryl Hanna.
Daryl Hanna and Falling in Love with Tom Hanks. Walking out of the water with her bum out.
Yeah. I was a teenager when that came out.

Speaker 2 That must have been formative.

Speaker 2 I think they've re-edited it, so she's got longer hair now. So I'm afraid, James, the next time you

Speaker 2 want to see Daryl Hanna's bum, you'll have to do it some other way, basically, because

Speaker 2 there's no ways to do that on the internet these days.

Speaker 2 I don't believe so.

Speaker 2 No, yeah, so they made Splash way before they made The Little Mermic, like five years before.

Speaker 2 They were trying to make films for grown-ups, and this was their first one. You know, she's a bum age, Tom Hanks is a man, and they fall for each other.
But we've all seen Splash.

Speaker 2 It's the story of the Little Momic.

Speaker 2 I can't believe you're leading with that, rather than the fact you just dropped in that they've extended Daryl Hannah's hair in the modern version to cover her hair.

Speaker 2 Oh, they didn't give her a hairy bum. They extended it.

Speaker 2 I misunderstood.

Speaker 2 You didn't say which hair they extended in Venice. Yeah, they've extended her back hair to cover her, but yeah, extended her bum hair and then they plat it into her head.

Speaker 2 The British Board of Film Classification have some things to say about the Little Mermaid.

Speaker 2 In the additional issues section of their website, it says, in one scene, a female character comically shakes her bottom while singing about the importance of body language in attracting a man.

Speaker 2 And what's the issue there? Bannet.

Speaker 2 Not woke.

Speaker 2 I had a look at a lot of other Disney movies on the BBFC to see what their additional issues are.

Speaker 2 In Frozen, there is some very mild humour, including reference to picking your nose and eating it.

Speaker 2 Which is offensive to see.

Speaker 2 Children? It's on there. Wow.
In Brave, there are moments of mild, rude behavior, such as a Scotsman scotsman burying his behind by lifting his kilt

Speaker 2 well they've extended his hair since then

Speaker 2 and in honey i shrunk the kids which was also a disney movie there are upsetting scenes when a friendly ant is killed

Speaker 2 wow because there are those terrific christian websites which do this kind of forensic detail this is on the bbf scene wow i quite like how they did ariel's whole look because daryl hanna played a part in how ariel looked as well so she is the little mermaid, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah. So Ariel is the little mermaid.
Splash had come out and so they changed her hair color, Ariel's hair colour, to red because the original hair color was too similar to Daryl Hanna's. So

Speaker 2 that had a very immediate influence on their movie. The actress Alyssa Milano was the face model for Ariel.

Speaker 2 There was a different body model who they had come in, who was who was a comedian improviser who came in and would do all the scenes. So you can see the footage of them doing the scenes.

Speaker 2 So all the body movements would be... Besides Sherry Stoner.
Sherry Stoner. Well, Well, there are hardly any people alive with the body of the Little Mermaid, are there?

Speaker 2 There's actually very little colours. You're right, but they used half of her body.

Speaker 2 A lot of her material as a stand-up is about the fact that she has a massive tail.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly. But the most interesting one is the hair and how it moves in the water.
And that was inspired by the space shuttle astronaut Sally Ride.

Speaker 2 They looked at her hair and zero gravity to create the water look that they needed. So yeah.

Speaker 2 Someone who gets a lot of shit is Sebastian and the Little Mermaid. The crab.
Yeah. The friendly Jamaican crab.
Ah. Under the sea.

Speaker 2 What's Sebastian's accent? Jamaican. Jamaican.
Incorrect. Caribbean.

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, you just broadened it. That's not fair.

Speaker 2 So, Sebastian, he was originally going to be called Clarence and he was going to be like a posh English guy.

Speaker 2 And they made a good move because you can imagine he's really strix, that Zazu type character. You can imagine why they wanted to do that.
Jansen-style voice. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 And then they thought, let's make him more fun. So they decided to make him Jamaican.
But then they found the person to play him, Samuel E. Wright, who'd just been in a film playing Dizzy Gillespie.

Speaker 2 And Samuel E. Wright couldn't do a Jamaican accent, but he could do a Trinidadian accent.
So actually,

Speaker 2 tell everyone you know, he doesn't speak with a Jamaican accent. He's really interested with a Trinidadian accent.

Speaker 2 Because a few years later, when they made Cool Runnings, they brought in these four Jamaican actors and they said, okay, can you do these lines? And they said, well, you don't sound Jamaican.

Speaker 2 And they're like, well, we actually are Jamaican. This is how we talk.
And they're like, no, no, we need you to sound like the crab from the Little Mermaid. No way.

Speaker 2 James, we've pieced it together. It's amazing.
The producer basically said, if you don't sound like Sebastian, I'm going to get fired. And so they all put on these kind of like fake Jamaican accents.

Speaker 2 That's amazing. It's amazing.
It was bizarre. Wow.

Speaker 2 Okay, so the reason that the crab was made Jamaican, let's say Jamaican, despite the accent,

Speaker 2 was the songwriters were working literally in the room next door to the animators, and each other were influencing how the movie was going along.

Speaker 2 And one of the songwriters came in and said to the filmmakers, tell me about Sebastian the Crab. They said he's this British posh guy.
They said, can you make him something more Caribbean?

Speaker 2 Can you make him Jamaican? Because I think this song Under the Sea will be great as like a calypso style song and the accent will go great with that.

Speaker 2 And they changed it for that reason because they were working in tandem together.

Speaker 2 So if you find a VHS of the little mermaid and it has a drawing of the penis on the cover, it could be worth up to £30,000.

Speaker 2 Really? And it doesn't work if you just get one of your oil yourself.

Speaker 2 Is that true?

Speaker 2 This is true. This is a sort of urban myth.
There are mythy parts about it. So there's a guy called Bill Morrison who was drawing all the artwork for Little Mermaid.

Speaker 2 He was doing all the different things. And they said, can you do the VHS? And they said it really last minute.
And it was the middle of the night. And his deadline was just coming up there.

Speaker 2 And he just sort of scribbled something together.

Speaker 2 and it had to look like this sort of castle in the background and castles have turrets and turrets can look phallic sometimes if you're not concentrating your penises all have crenellations

Speaker 2 yeah yes they do okay

Speaker 2 we fire arrows out of them

Speaker 2 where do you think the boiling oil comes from

Speaker 2 um so he rushed to do it and then he made this thing and no one noticed it for anything was it deliberate no no that's it was just so just yeah the myth goes that it's some pissed-off employee of Disney who put a penis in there to piss everyone off.

Speaker 2 In actual fact, it was this guy who was doing his best and just happened to accidentally draw a penis in the thing.

Speaker 2 And then it basically came about that someone noticed it once it had already been printed. And Disney were furious.

Speaker 2 And they said, they're so relaxed about this kind of thing. They said, if we find out who did that, they're never going to work for us again.

Speaker 2 And this guy's company was, this was most of their work doing stuff for Disney.

Speaker 2 So in the end, you either kind of pretend that you don't know anything about it, or you say, Look, it was us, but it was an accident. And that's what they did.

Speaker 2 And eventually, Disney sort of realized that they were, it was an accident and they couldn't. They leaned into it.
Imagine the dick mountain ride at Disneyland.

Speaker 2 Very, very, very steep up, then very, very, very steep down the other side.

Speaker 2 And Bill Morrison, one for Dan, he left this company and went to work for The Simpsons, where he did some drawing for them. So, why Homer Simpson's head also looks like a penis.

Speaker 2 And this was about bubbles in The Little Mermaid in Frozen, which is another princess movie. Obviously not bubbles, but snow.

Speaker 2 Snowflakes, stuff like that. And there is a thing, Dan, which I'm sure you know about called the Diatlove Pass Incident.

Speaker 2 It's a conspiracy theory thing about a load of kids who went walking just outside Dekaterinberg. And disappeared, doesn't mean it is.
They disappeared, and we never know what happened to them.

Speaker 2 And last year, thanks to Frozen, we might have found out what happened to them.

Speaker 2 And that's because the technology they used to make the snow in Frozen was so amazing, like the computer programs, that you could use that to work out what happens with avalanches.

Speaker 2 There was a scientist called Johan Gaum, who was from the Snow Avalanche Simulation Laboratory in Switzerland. And he saw Frozen.
He thought, what they're doing is amazing.

Speaker 2 And he went over and he said, can I borrow your technology to show what happens with avalanches?

Speaker 2 And he tried it and using the lie of the land in Diatlov and stuff like that, he showed that it was possible that these kids might have been taken away by an avalanche as opposed to a Yeti or aliens or whatever everyone else thought.

Speaker 2 Wow. Oh, that was Frozen.
That was Frozen that did it.

Speaker 2 Because I thought you were going to say the other sort of wild theory about Frozen is the reason that that title was picked for the movie was to stop everyone from spreading the idea that Disney was frozen cryogenically.

Speaker 2 So if you went on Google and you put Disney Frozen, you get the movie now, as opposed to Disney's head. Walt Disney's head has been frozen cryogenically.
Yeah, that is a theory out there.

Speaker 2 Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy.

Speaker 2 My fact is that the longest road tunnel in the world is so long that the builders recruited a team of psychologists to stop people crashing halfway through. Very good.

Speaker 2 So this is a tunnel called the Laadal tunnel in Norway, and it is 24 kilometers long. So what's that? 17, 18 miles.
It's quite, it's long. Yeah.
It's long, all right. It's the longest.

Speaker 2 It's been over for 25 years now and it helps people drive between Oslo and Bergen. And it's partly because Norway is so crinkly

Speaker 2 and it's hard to get around and it's perilous crossing the mountain passes in winter.

Speaker 2 So you know, you either sort of fly little distances in small planes, which is a big way of getting around there, or you drive. But this allows you to drive much straighter because you're in a tunnel.

Speaker 2 That's how tunnels work. It helps goods get through as well.
Completely, yeah, yeah. All of that.
So it was a very impressive engineering project. But.

Speaker 2 Do we know the effect of the psychologist, like what they said and what happened? Oh, yeah, that's the important part.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, that's why they did it. They were consulted on how people can drive through this tunnel and not go crackers because it's 20 minutes of the same lighting, the same panels passing you.

Speaker 2 It's hypnotic. You're driving.
I'm already going crackers just from you saying that. You've crashed.
You've crashed into the wall, James. There we go.
You've hit the wall. And no radio signal.

Speaker 2 Can't get radio four four in the middle of a tunnel, can you? That's always the annoying thing about tunnels. That's true.
It's like being in a nuclear submarine, basically.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so pre-download before you go through the tunnel. Pre-download before you go through.
Talk about this pre-download thing.

Speaker 2 So the shrinks basically, they were a crack team of shrinks called in and said, Yes. And they said

Speaker 2 they were the people who originally cast to play Savastrian. Yeah,

Speaker 2 and they

Speaker 2 said, well, you've got to break it up for people. You've got to make it feel more varied.

Speaker 2 I'll be honest, Andy, I think without any psychological training, I reckon breaking things up so people don't get bored is pretty root one as well. Like this, like this bit of me speaking.

Speaker 2 And you've just helped to do that by breaking it up to the people at home haven't crashed yet. themselves.
That is what this podcast is, is us breaking up Andy's monotonous words.

Speaker 2 Okay, that's it. That's enough, Anna.
Okay, let's do another five kilometres, Andy. Thank you.
So basically, there are these mountain caves, as they get called, strategically placed along it.

Speaker 2 And every five minutes, you get to another mountain cave. The lighting all changes completely.
The road opens out and it looks like you're driving into a sort of beautiful mountain past.

Speaker 2 It looks like there's daylight above you. It's really gorgeous.
I think it looks quite trippy. I would feel like the drugs had kicked in as soon as I got to certain bits of it.

Speaker 2 It's like avatar in there, all of a sudden. It is a bit.

Speaker 2 It's like you're in... an aquarium, like you're in the actual water with it surrounding you.
It's this like mountainousy, dark blue, blue, trippy as hell.

Speaker 2 I would want like, because you're expecting a tunnel. I'd go into that tunnel and suddenly you're not really in a tunnel anymore.
I agree with that. That would freak the fuck out of me.

Speaker 2 You've had a lot of tunnel already.

Speaker 2 You're filled to the back teeth with tunnel. What you want is a bit of variety.
Don't know. I mean,

Speaker 2 I don't think people frequently go do Lally halfway along a tunnel. So it clearly works.
It is a good idea.

Speaker 2 And I think one of the reasons it's a good idea, them doing this, is because for the longest road tunnel in the world, not many vehicles drive through it. So a thousand vehicles a day.

Speaker 2 So basically basically, the chances are you're going to be driving through completely on your own, which is what would freak you out, right? Like, if you're going behind a bunch of cars, it's fine.

Speaker 2 Have you ever been driving like a place which is so the same that you think maybe I have died? Yes, I have. I have.

Speaker 2 Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 I was driving down the coast of Croatia, and there's all these inlets, and you don't

Speaker 2 go on an inlet and you come back around again, and you drive for a bit, and you have another inlet, another inlet, and another inlet, and they're almost all identical.

Speaker 2 And after about two hours of that, you're just like, Maybe I have have died, maybe one of these times I missed the corner

Speaker 2 and I've been doing this forever. Frack is fractal, yeah.

Speaker 2 Do you have that thing when you're driving where you sort of come to and you realize, oh, I just drove half an hour there, you know, and then your conscious mind reasserts itself.

Speaker 2 You're like, Oh, and you've got a bloodied knife next to you on the

Speaker 2 and there's bags full of money

Speaker 2 in the booth,

Speaker 2 but not that bag. Oh, no,

Speaker 2 um, I once, in fact, more than once, when I worked in an office as an accountant, would sort of come to at the desk and not remember how I got there.

Speaker 2 Like, as in, I just sort of got up, got out of the house, got dressed, drive the car all the way to the office, sat down, started work, and without even realizing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, promise.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, I see that.

Speaker 2 Have you ever woken up midway through a fact on fish?

Speaker 2 I'm hopeful it might happen eventually.

Speaker 2 It's called highway hypnosis.

Speaker 2 And people noticed it all the way back to 1921 when it was called road hypnotism and basically what it is is even when you're looking at something your eyes are making very slight movements all the time like your your eyes are always like darting this way and that and whatever and normally they're a response to something that's happening outside there's a bird go past or whatever but what happens when you're driving for ages is your eyes start to go in this sort of predetermined pattern.

Speaker 2 They start, they're still moving, but they move left, then right, then up, then down, then left, then right, then up, then down, and whatever.

Speaker 2 And the thing is, they don't really alert the brain properly. The brain starts thinking that not really anything is happening.
And then you start losing concentration.

Speaker 2 So you should roll your eyes round and around and around. Well, you should take a break.
Or have something, or watch something on your phone. That's another.

Speaker 2 As long as you've pre-downloaded it, then that's the enough. Yeah, yeah.
This tunnel. In 2000, I love this.
Someone got married in the middle of the Laodal tunnel. Did you read this? No.

Speaker 2 It was a young couple, young Norwegian couple and the uh the groom was called ronny linde and he said that his mother-in-law had attended the wedding but she had been slightly sceptical about it and i just love this he said she's scared of two things dogs and tunnels we've recently bought two alsatians and now we've got married in the tunnel

Speaker 2 and i would say maybe the psychologist should have got involved there too another thing they have in this tunnel is a rumble strip in the middle of the road okay and the idea is if you're driving along, you slightly veer off to the middle, you hear it rumble, it wakes you up.

Speaker 2 These things were invented in 1955 by a guy called Harold Griffin, and they were originally called singing shoulders.

Speaker 2 That's very nice. That's better.
But they cause a 44% reduction on head-on fatal crashes if you have them on a road. These are US figures.
Wow. They should be the same in most countries.

Speaker 2 So head-on collisions are hugely caused by falling asleep or losing concentration. Absolutely, yeah.
Right.

Speaker 2 And there are large areas of Michigan with no rumble strips. So most places in America, they have to have them now on highways, but there are large areas of Michigan with no rumble strips.
Porquoi.

Speaker 2 Why? Ooh.

Speaker 2 There's no double-lane roads. That's good.
In Michigan? No.

Speaker 2 They have to transport something

Speaker 2 which is delicate.

Speaker 2 like eggs to the market and if they hit the rumble strips they break all the eggs all about eggs for you exactly and they're happy to have a full head-on collision as long as they don't break a few eggs.

Speaker 2 That actually, weirdly, more eggs get lost by the rumble strips than in the full collision. No, no, it's a certain group of people who in London they joined.
The Amish. The Amish.
Who the Amish?

Speaker 2 The Amish

Speaker 2 or Amish.

Speaker 2 I've never, in my knowledge, called the Amish. Really?

Speaker 2 Do they not like...

Speaker 2 It's the horses.

Speaker 2 Their horses don't like them and they refuse to cross rumble strips because it makes them hard to set their feet down because of the the way that they're really you can't step over them i mean they're not that broad yeah but the horses just don't like it and so there are certain areas

Speaker 2 i was trying to do a rumble horse name that was really good didn't come out right sorry it worked if you saw it though what you're doing with your lips there so in any location in michigan where horse-drawn buggies utilize the roadway uh you are not supposed to use shoulder corrugations which is what they call them unless a crash history exists right London has a new tunnel.

Speaker 2 In the week we record this. No.
Yeah. Have you guys been reading about the Silvertown tunnel? No.
No. Oh, it's so good.
It's great.

Speaker 2 It's just next to the Black Hall Tunnel, which is a very, very trafficky tunnel in London, basically. It has to shut down, I think, 700 times a year.

Speaker 2 It gets shut down because the traffic just gets too crazy. So they've just opened another tunnel next to it, but bikes can't go along it because it's for cars.

Speaker 2 So they're running a sort of bike bus for it.

Speaker 2 But it's very, it's amazing how they built it. So, you know, TBMs, tunnel-boring boring machines okay

Speaker 2 the one that built this tunnel was called jill after jill viner who was london's first female bus driver okay and they wanted two tunnels right because it's really big stop yawning james um

Speaker 2 they wanted two big tunnels right yeah normally it's really hard to build two tunnels with the same machine because turning it around down there is a bastard you know it's really difficult so reverse just get some wingmirrors on there or don't they famously come out the other side

Speaker 2 didn't they um sorry to interrupt, but for the channel tunnel, I think the boring machines, they just kept boring down. They sometimes do buried them under the ground.

Speaker 2 They do, yeah. So this one, they wanted to use it.
They wanted to use it again. They wanted to get good use out of this machine because it's a massive factory.
Like it's huge underground thing.

Speaker 2 So they put it, I just love this, on nitrogen skates. They put it on compressed nitrogen.

Speaker 2 like some skates which rest on compressed nitrogen like a hovercraft okay and that allowed them to turn it round in a special underground chamber cool and then go back the other way they must have had to build a massive underground chamber because these things are up to 170 meters long so i don't know i don't know what that chamber was like but it's crazy yeah they are awesome and i think they do like to reuse them now they break up them up into little parts because every one is like the width of the tunnel it's specifically made for that one tunnel so you can't really reuse the whole thing but you can take it apart and use it but yeah in the olden days they did random shit with it like as you say in the channel tunnel one of them was just like buried Another one in 2004 was

Speaker 2 I can't wait for archaeologists to find that. That's going to be a great day for them.
So, they literally just changed its directions and it bore its way down to the bottom.

Speaker 2 It's going to come out in Australia sometime soon.

Speaker 2 It's going to split the world in half. I think it actually went into more of a lay-by.

Speaker 2 It is buried under.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and then they bricked it. They bricked it up.
It reminds me of that really sad Thomas a tank engine episode where they bricked one of the engines in Henry. Henry, he's very sad.

Speaker 2 Why do they do that? He's been naughty. Oh, wow.
He won't won't come out in the rain.

Speaker 2 Anyway, we'll save that.

Speaker 2 But there was another one in 2004. One of the TBMs using the channel tunnel was sold on eBay.
There were obviously loads of prank bids, but then it was actually sold for £39,999.

Speaker 2 What was posted in Packard Mean?

Speaker 2 That's such a good question, Dan. You've hit the nail on the head.

Speaker 2 I never thought he'd say this, but if only the buyer had been as smart as you are, because he bought it and he signed the contract and everything, and then they got an email from him who was called

Speaker 2 Steddenum according to his name. Guess how much it was going to cost him to collect it?

Speaker 2 I mean, an insane amount of money. So, he paid how much for the thing? He paid 40 grand, which is a bargain, is it? For a big tunnel machine? Yeah,

Speaker 2 secondhand. Like, that's like that's a vintage.
That's a really nice car, second-hand. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Like, or you get a machine that could dig a channel.

Speaker 2 I don't think they're that road worthy, but yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay, what's

Speaker 2 it cost a quarter of a million pounds to move it?

Speaker 2 And can you back out on that sale? Sometimes they're really strict on eBay.

Speaker 2 You can't back out of the tunnel either. You can't do anything.

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Speaker 2 Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that walking backwards is healthier than walking forwards.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 2 With some caveats, like, you know, don't do it at Russia on a main road. So do it through a railway tunnel.

Speaker 2 Through Through the railway tunnel.

Speaker 2 This is just sort of a raft of stuff that's come out in the last 20 years, I guess, about the various advantages. Most crucially, it burns more calories.

Speaker 2 So, like, the metabolic cost of walking backwards seems to be significantly higher.

Speaker 2 I think the first study was in 1995 that found this, and it found the oxygen intake and heart rate of the various, I think it was 27 subjects, increased between 38 and 119%

Speaker 2 walking backwards compared to walking forwards. Okay, I have to say, I'm not massively surprised by that, given that for two million years we've been evolving to walk forwards.

Speaker 2 Like, doing something hard is harder than doing something easy. It's like doing press-ups constantly is harder than just lying there.
But that's because I'm evolved to just lie there.

Speaker 2 You might as well say that walking like a kangaroo is healthier than walking like a human.

Speaker 2 Basically, doing anything really difficult that feels unnatural is better for you.

Speaker 2 I think so. A lot of this stuff makes kind of perfect sense because it's doing stuff that you're not used to doing, right?

Speaker 2 So this is why it's often used in rehabilitation for things like osteoarthritis.

Speaker 2 Because let's say you've got knee problems because you put too much pressure on your knees, you go for runs, you're walking on tarmac a lot, you start walking backwards, suddenly you're putting pressure on different parts, like your quads are taking a lot more pressure, or if you've got plantar fasciitis in your heels, oh my god, it's a pain, isn't it?

Speaker 2 I feel for you. But if you start walking backwards, then you don't have such an impact on your heels.

Speaker 2 Did anyone do some walking backwards for this? I did 15 minutes in my garden. Did you?

Speaker 2 15 minutes? That's a lot. Yeah, well,

Speaker 2 I couldn't be bothered doing any research. I must, I meant to say you look fantastic today.
Thank you. Well, you should see my heels.

Speaker 2 So how was it? Well, to be honest, I didn't really see much difference in the 15 minutes that I did.

Speaker 2 Apart from, I would say it worked slightly different muscles in my legs, like my Achilles probably, and my calf that normally wouldn't feel it after 15 minutes walk. I could feel it after 12.

Speaker 2 Also, your neighbours all think you're a witch now? Yeah, I've no doubt.

Speaker 2 I did because quite a lot of my neighbors' houses overlook my garden and I did think they probably think I'm a bit weird.

Speaker 2 They already know. Yeah, I'm sure you've done worse things in that garden.

Speaker 2 Where did those bags of money come from?

Speaker 2 But it's quite good. I read a few articles where it said that backwards running as opposed to backwards walking is quite good in warming up if you're an athlete

Speaker 2 because it uses slightly different joints and tendons as you would normally do.

Speaker 2 Also, there was another person, an orthopedic specialist called Nicole Haas, who in one of the papers, she said, actually one of the main things is it's using your brain in a slightly different way.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Because like one of the things you're doing quite a lot when you're walking backwards, as I know, is working out.
where everything is and what you're not falling over.

Speaker 2 Because my garden is not very big and I had to do lots of laps of it to do 15 minutes.

Speaker 2 And all the time you're thinking, where did I leave that barbecue? Yes, yes.

Speaker 2 Well, next time you do it, you should do what a man called Patrick Harmon did when he took on a challenge to walk from San Francisco to New York, which is he walked backwards, but he had installed near the front of his chest a car mirror so that he could see everything that was behind him.

Speaker 2 I mean, it makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

Speaker 2 He said it was good for him. So he did this in 1915.
Yep. It took him about a year.
Yeah, 290 days in total. Yeah, about a year.
And

Speaker 2 a big chunk missing.

Speaker 2 The bulk of a year.

Speaker 2 And I'm really looking forward to going to your 60th birthday. Yeah, it's going to be when I'm 52.

Speaker 2 And he claimed that it had made his ankles so strong, it would take a sledgehammer blow to sprain them. So he clearly felt some kind of benefits.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's interesting that he, because he did that in 1915, did you say? Yeah. Because there was a guy called Plenny Wingo who

Speaker 2 he's the one in the Guinness World Record Book because he walked 8,000 miles from Santa Monica to Istanbul. So a bit further.
But I think he believed he was the first person to come up with it.

Speaker 2 Twice as long.

Speaker 2 Just to

Speaker 2 when you say a bit further. And almost a year.
A bit further.

Speaker 2 Well, fact-checkers Schreiber today.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, more than I've been. You don't want us doing down the backwards walkers, do you? They need to get their justice.
Some respects, please. Plenny Wingo.

Speaker 2 He lost his business.

Speaker 2 In the Great Depression. In the Great Depression.
So we're so excited about that. We're going to be seeing lots more of this kind of great stuff soon.

Speaker 2 So Rand, we're topical.

Speaker 2 Limber up.

Speaker 2 He had the idea because he was listening to his daughters, his 15-year-old daughter, her birthday party, chatting to her friends, saying, Everything that could ever be done has been done now, because it was this age of stunts.

Speaker 2 We've talked about flagpole sitting before. Everyone was sitting on flagpoles and crawling up mountains, pushing peanuts up mountains with their noses.
And he said, Not everything's been done.

Speaker 2 No one's ever walked backwards around the world. And then he thought, bugger, now I've said that.
I'll have to do it.

Speaker 2 And he tried to do it. And he got as far as Turkey.
And then they kicked him out and told him to go home.

Speaker 2 I don't think he did make his fortune. It's very hard to know.
No, he didn't. He didn't.
I'm pretty sure he didn't.

Speaker 2 They said when he got to Turkey, they said he had to leave the country for his own safety. Because I think the idea was that people were throwing things at him quite a lot.

Speaker 2 I'm surprised you got as far as that.

Speaker 2 Apparently, according to one article I read about him, he was in New York City walking backwards and he agreed to walk backwards along the top ledge of a 12-story building in return for money.

Speaker 2 Oh gosh.

Speaker 2 And then loads of people paid him to see him do this and he did it.

Speaker 2 But the guy who was working with him and collecting all the money off the onlookers just did a runner and took all his money off him. Forward or backwards runner.

Speaker 2 Well, if you're walking backwards, it's hard to catch anyone, isn't it? It is. That's crazy.
His wife left him. Mrs.
Wingo. Oh, no.
I mean, mean, I understand why she did it, but he was so.

Speaker 2 But he was still walking backwards for decades. So, in 1976, he appeared on the Johnny Carson show, one of these American talk shows, saying, I'm doing it again.

Speaker 2 And he claimed he was going to do another sort of round-the-world. I think that suggests that he didn't make his fortune the first time.

Speaker 2 I think it does, sadly.

Speaker 2 There is a profession who walk backwards, maybe more than any other. And maybe, I'm not certain about this, but it's a good, I think it's a good photographers.
Oh, no, no, no, that's good.

Speaker 2 That's good contact. I was reading a paper about sports people, and they said rugby league players, handball athletes, and soccer referees do a lot of

Speaker 2 referees. That's the one I saw.

Speaker 2 I think there's, is there not a famous one? I think we might have even mentioned it before, about at the White House, it's people who are doing the tour guides.

Speaker 2 They walk backwards to Pentagon, I think it's worse.

Speaker 2 Yeah, where they have to memorize where the corner is so that they can go around around it. Yeah, why is it so they keep an eye on people? Yeah, oh,

Speaker 2 just get the mirrors, yeah, the mirrors, exactly. But I've trained as a football referee, and for sure, as part of the training, they teach you how to run backwards well,

Speaker 2 yeah. Or they don't teach you, but they just say, make sure you know how to run backwards.

Speaker 2 I used to do it quite a lot, I'd say, when I was like when I was a nipper, yeah, I was running backwards or referee.

Speaker 2 I did a lot of oh, was that avoiding the wedgie as they chased you?

Speaker 2 Okay,

Speaker 2 okay

Speaker 2 okay

Speaker 2 you can't be wedgies

Speaker 2 the front wedgie is far more it makes it look like a disney tower

Speaker 2 there's another group of uh people who are becoming expert backward walkers in recent times um and that is celebrities

Speaker 2 so taylor swift spends a lot of her time walking backwards so that she can avoid the paparazzi taking photos of her is it so that they can't sell the photos because they're trying to sell them as photos of her walking forwards no as in the paparazzi stood in one particular place yeah you need to have your back to the paparazzo so that they can't see your face yeah i saw a quite a recent news article about her walking through the woods right yeah she went did a whole mountain trail basically walking backwards so that the paparazzi couldn't get shots of her yeah bag overhead she should do bag overhead and holes for the eye that's a good idea

Speaker 2 i don't but if someone's walking backwards so she's walking backwards towards the pepperazzi.

Speaker 2 Let's say she's come out of the building. There's paparazzi waiting outside.
She faces the other way to get in the car. But I would film that.
And that's that's like, but it could be anyone.

Speaker 2 It could be anyone with blonde hair. Oh, please.
I'd know Taylor Swift's ass anyway.

Speaker 2 I wouldn't even recognise her face, but there's an amazing woman called Justine Galloway, who I think we might have mentioned in our sports book that we happened to write semi-recently.

Speaker 2 She's a runner. She's 44 and she used to run loads of marathons.
And then in 2011, she was running her third Boston marathon and she got really good times.

Speaker 2 And she suddenly her left leg started staying up in the air too long, sort of swung out to the left a bit and it just wasn't working properly.

Speaker 2 And she basically got what is called runner's dystonia, which is a bit like the yips in golf where you just suddenly kind of can't do it.

Speaker 2 And within a few weeks, she couldn't run at all. It's like this weird neurological issue where your brain and your body will not connect at all.

Speaker 2 And she was obviously devastating, like running was her life. And then she realized if she ran backwards, she was fine.
Crazy. And now she's got the world record for running a half marathon backwards.

Speaker 2 Does she do mirrors? Or does she do she does mirrors? Yeah,

Speaker 2 when you do a half marathon with her, does she start at the end and go to the start?

Speaker 2 That's when she passes everyone halfway. Yeah, she gets mown down in the middle.

Speaker 2 So it is a competitive sport. Yeah, I mean, there are all sorts of records.

Speaker 2 There aren't many full races of people running backwards, but there's a guy called Aaron Yoda, who's the

Speaker 2 world record holder he is.

Speaker 2 Runs backwards, speaks backwards.

Speaker 2 He's done a mile in five minutes, 54 seconds backwards, which I'm quite sure is faster than I could do a mile for sure.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So walking backwards, right?

Speaker 2 Imagine you're walking backwards and stuff is happening in your peripheral vision. Some people are better at noticing those things than others.
Only if you're walking backwards?

Speaker 2 Only if you're walking backwards. Yeah.
Can we guess this?

Speaker 2 It's like football round. Scottish people.
It's a class of people. I'd be astonished if you went to that.

Speaker 2 Is it a profession or a nationality? It's a

Speaker 2 hobby group.

Speaker 2 Oh, so like birdwatchers or

Speaker 2 train spotters? Not them. Think of a hobby that slightly more normal people might do.
I'm the tunnel boring machine enthusiast.

Speaker 2 What's the normal hobby?

Speaker 2 Something that cool people might do, slightly more cool people than you. It's people who play video games.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, those

Speaker 2 jocks. Those funny jocks.
So there was a study that was done. Really cool.
Sorry. Can we question? I was just thinking cooler than boring enthusiasts.
Oh, yeah. On a par for me.

Speaker 2 I actually was thinking, I'd love to write a film script set on a tunnel boring machine. I just think that'd be a really cool set.
Like a really slow version of speed.

Speaker 2 We've got to keep going at 0.25 miles an hour or she's going to blow.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 the thing is, right? They wanted to find out: do people who play video games have better perception? And especially people who play, you know, like first-person shooter games. Okay.

Speaker 2 So they tried that and they realized that actually people have equal perception.

Speaker 2 If you and the other someone who plays video games are walking straight down a road, then you equally can see things in your peripheral vision.

Speaker 2 But for the people who play video games, when you're going backwards, they have much better perception. And that's because in video games, often these shooters are moving backwards.

Speaker 2 Like when you move backwards on your joystick, your character moves. It's so easy to do.

Speaker 2 So they're seeing that quite often in their day-to-day hobby, whereas we hardly ever see it because we hardly ever walk backwards. That's cool.

Speaker 2 I thought you were going to say it so that you had a peripheral view on seeing whether or not your mum came in to tell you to stop playing video games. Oh, yeah.
So you just built a better.

Speaker 2 So video games are probably wankers.

Speaker 2 Nature's joystick.

Speaker 2 Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts.
Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 2 If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our various social media accounts.

Speaker 2 I'm on Instagram on at Schreiberland, James. My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin.
Andy. One blue sky at Andrew HunterM.
Yeah. And if you want to get to us as a group, Anna.

Speaker 2 You can go on Instagram to at no such thing as a fish, Twitter at no such thing, or emailpodcast at qi.com. Yep, or you can go to our website, no such thingasafish.com.

Speaker 2 All of our previous episodes are up there. You can get a link to merchandise, to our live shows.
We've got a gig coming up in Sheffield in July. Come and see us there.

Speaker 2 Or join Club Fish at a steal, £2.99. While stocks last.
While stocks last. We have lots of bonus episodes up there.
Add-free episodes as well. If you want that, do check it out.

Speaker 2 Otherwise, you just come back here next week. We'll be back again with another episode.
We'll see you then. Goodbye.

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