574: No Such Thing as Pyramids in Johannesburg

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'm sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, and Anna Tashinsky.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go

starting with fact number one and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that if an eel ends up in a predator's stomach it can reverse out through its gills.

That's pretty amazing.

This is Japanese eels and it's recently found out that they can get swallowed by these sleeper fish, dark sleeper fish, and then they go through the digestive tract but then then they are just able to wibble their way back out towards the gills and then slink out.

I think some slunk out through the mouth, and then some were able to slink their way out actually through the slits that were the gills.

Yeah, that's amazing.

I actually don't really have a good idea of fish anatomy.

I wouldn't have thought that the gills would be attached to the digestive system.

It does sound all hollow, doesn't it?

Our gills, as people, our lungs, yeah, are sort of connected.

You know, there's a bit where the pipes branch, but.

That's true.

It's like if you swallow a piece of apple the wrong way, it goes down towards your lungs.

Exactly.

I mean, kind of, sort of the same way they're coming out of the bit we use for breathing.

You'd have to take a few turns, probably.

But it is mad.

It is so concerning.

And the scientists who did it, I love it.

It was a team at Nagasaki University, and

they filled the eels with a chemical that meant they could be x-ray.

They could show up on an x-ray.

And then, it was really a bit mean.

They just introduced the eels to the dark sleeper fish, which were going to be very hungry for them.

And one would get swallowed, and then they just observe.

And about a third of the time, the eel escaped by this method.

That's interesting.

Do we think it happens in the wild then?

I think it is.

I think it definitely happens.

Yeah, it does.

I think, and they see that some make it halfway out, some almost make it out, but they get stuck with their heads.

It's not, yeah, it's not a foolproof process.

But what a weird thing to be the sleeper fish.

You eat your lunch

and then it's sitting next to you a minute later.

It does happen a bit in nature, doesn't it?

That things get eaten and then can escape.

Yes.

I reckon.

Like Jonah.

Jonah.

I I think is one of them.

There's a snail called Tornatelides Boeningi that's also found in Japan, and it's swallowed by this bird.

And 5% of them are able to escape out of the bum.

And they

out of the bum.

That's all the way through.

That's very impressive, isn't it?

That's a waning game.

Well, on the other hand, you don't have to reverse.

You just put your head down and go for it.

Yeah.

But then 5% of them can get through and survive for at least one week.

And actually, quite often when they come out, if it's a female who's pregnant, they'll give birth straight afterwards.

And some people.

As in, like, it rings on neighbor.

Yeah.

Wow, like eating a curry or something.

Maybe she did it on purpose.

She was so sick of being surprised.

Do you think it's like in the land snail community?

They're like, oh, maybe if we have sex, then the baby will come.

And they're like, yeah, but maybe if we get eaten by a bird, it will come.

That sounds like that's just the inducing method.

Imagine that.

Hospitals, if you have to be swallowed by an animal in order to

baby needs to come early.

I found this great book called Eels by James Prosek.

It's one of those classic books that we love, where it's just the single subject, the whole history of the animal.

And it's pretty fascinating.

We've spoken about before about how eels, they have the call, which kind of brings them back to the ocean because they are born in saltwater and they find river water in order to give birth.

And most animals do the opposite of that.

Salmon will do the opposite of that.

They're so mysterious.

And we've spoken about this.

They've never, we just never have seen any pregnant eels really or how they give birth.

But what's fascinating is how strong that call is.

So this guy, James Prosack, he has some eels in his house in a tank.

And he said he woke up one morning and they had busted through the top, which was held down with rocks and they were wriggling on the floor just trying to get out.

So then he reinforced it.

He put them back in, put the lid on and then he came down and they were slamming their heads onto this.

He was constructing a rudimentary drill

from the stuff in the tank.

That is incredible.

He said basically some of them even like to the point of killing themselves, but they were smacking their heads so hard to try and get through this thing.

Okay, I'm not going to say that that's not true, but that's amazing.

Is that a film?

It's in his book, and he's like a leading drive.

I was implying there's a subtext there.

There is a thing that when they first realized that there was a homing instinct in birds, one of the experiments they did was they got the birds in a cage and put little sort of ink on their feet.

And then they would put paper on the floor of the cage, and then they could see that the birds were trying to go in a certain direction.

Right.

God, it's so interesting.

It is amazing.

They will often, if there's a bit of damp ground in a field, they will make their way out of their pond or whatever bit of fresh water they're in, and they'll slither along and start eating some farmland stuff and come back.

But when they want to go back to the ocean, this is all true, James.

They can stay and wait.

They just wait and wait until the circumstances are right to get them back to the ocean.

And then once they need to make that trip, once say a storm has come and the water levels have risen a bit and everything's wet, they perform like ninja-like abilities.

So if they get to a hill, they roll into a ball and roll down the hill.

No way.

Yeah, yeah.

They can climb up walls by braiding themselves along the side of moss walls.

It's extraordinary.

Did you watch a cartoon?

This is James Prosick Eels.

It is incredible.

Do you know where has an eel festival, by the way?

Ely?

Oh, Ely, yeah.

Ely.

Correct.

Which one?

Ely.

Well, that's that.

There we go.

Not Ealing, London.

It wasn't a trick question.

It was actually just an on-the-nose.

Because Ely is named after the eels, isn't it?

I believe so.

But very sadly, the last eel catcher in Ely retired 10 years ago.

Because

they've had this terrible decline of population, mostly due to humans.

But

they used to be a staple food in Cambridgeshire.

I just find that so bizarre.

You just, like, a thousand years ago, throw a rock, you'd hit an eel, effectively.

And the main thing to do now is removing barriers in rivers.

Because there are just so many hundreds and thousands of these things.

And most of them are out defunct.

They're like an old water mill.

Yeah.

You know, build a barrier across the river because they needed to harness the power of it.

But And locks and stuff.

Like,

we've got quite a lot of eel stairs near us.

I would like to go over locks because I live in the fens, which is where they used to be all over.

Yes, you're like your eel country.

Yeah, near eel, yeah.

But it's incredibly hard to work it out to get an atlas of eel barriers because the researchers looking at it found there are 300 different words which describe obstacles in rivers, which I find really insane.

You know, a sluice or a lock or a weir or a, you know, like all of these things.

There are hundreds of terms, so you need to map them.

But there are like groups removing them slowly but surely, which is very cool.

I think it's a bit mysterious why they've their numbers have declined so rapidly, you know, by 90% in the last 50 years.

But they're so sought after now.

There are 350 million eels taken from Europe to Asia every year.

Is this legal or illegal?

All illegal, very illegal.

Eel smuggling.

Yes, because they're very endangered now, and so they're very protected.

You're only allowed to take certain ones.

I'd love it if they get there.

And then they wake up the next morning after having arrived, all the eels have just migrated back.

Just eel-shaped holes in all of the buildings.

These are just holes, aren't they?

Yes.

Well, they might go sideways through the work.

Speaking of smuggling, or not speaking of smuggling, but you'll see where the connection is.

Last year, there were doctors in Vietnam who pulled out a two-foot eel from a man's intestines after he inserted it into his bottom.

Oh, dear.

And the problem was not so much putting the eel up there, although that was quite bad, but he'd also shoved a a lemon up there so that it couldn't escape.

No, I don't believe it.

I don't believe this, James.

Well, it's true.

It's true.

It sounds like he's trying to make a delicious meal inside himself, a squeeze of lemon, and then was it a sprinkle of salt?

The man survived, even though the eel had started biting through his abdominal cavity.

I don't think we can blame the eel a touch for that.

No, no, I'm not blaming the eel.

I'm blaming you for raising this, and I certainly, for one, I'm not finding it funny because I'm well aware that in 2013, there was a similar, very serious incident.

And 33 people, staff at Auckland City Hospital, were punished, and a few of them sacked for looking at an x-ray unnecessarily of a man who had an eel stuck in the lower parts of his digestive system.

Well, you can get fired for looking at an x-ray.

It was found that they did not need to be looking at the x-ray or his notes.

Oh, I can see his notes, maybe, if it has incriminating down over here.

Speaking up for medical male.

As long as it's funny.

You have to learn as a doctor.

You have to see things you would not normally see.

Exactly.

What happens if then the next day someone else comes with a needle up the bum, but you don't recognize it?

Sorry, I don't know what to do.

It was too funny, and I wasn't allowed to do it.

Do you know where European and American eels come from?

Europe and America?

No, the ocean bit where they're born.

Do you know?

Haven't we said on the audience from the Sargasso Sea?

Sargasso Sea, but do you know where the Sargasso Sea is?

It's in the

Atlantic.

Isn't it Bermuda?

It's Bermuda.

Oh, God.

Oh, there we go.

No, no, no, no.

It is within the triangle.

Let's head this off at the path.

Is it within the triangle?

Well, the triangle is an undefined border.

We don't really know how far the triangle extends.

Are we in the triangle now?

Technically, yes.

I thought it went from Bermuda to the tip of Florida to the tip of South America.

I thought it was defined, though.

I don't know.

I don't really know about this stuff.

It might be

my area of interest.

It might be a lumpy triangle.

There might be a little bit of flexibility.

I heard it on a podcast called The Kryptotite, and I am very clear about the definitions.

Oh, well, I trust them.

It's a great show.

Yeah, no problem.

What's your theory?

They're all getting no theory.

Just saying the mystery of them, I can't believe that hasn't been folded in as an extraordinary case.

If they're being called to a, yeah, let's say a mothership.

Yeah.

You know, metaphorically speaking, that's they're being drawn to a mothership.

Yeah.

And they talk about it.

They say the mystery of them being this calling to the Sargasso C, you know, they left as glass eggs, eggs, basically, is in their look.

They get carried in the currents all over the world.

They end up in fresh water.

They live there up to 100 years.

And then they somehow find their way back to the Sargasso Sea.

I suppose that is also true of many, many, many other species

that they managed to go back to their original breeding.

They are mysterious, aren't they?

They are kind of...

It's incredible we haven't cracked it, even with all our knowledge.

You know, you can, all your computers and all of that, and all your internet, and you still can't do it, can you?

You can't crack the eels.

Yeah,

get onto an eel on Musk.

Oh, God.

Well done.

Well done.

Let's distract him with that.

We've mostly been talking about

European eels.

But conger eels we have, and they're massive.

And they all hold on to each other.

They all go back to the Sargassa Sea in one big line.

Yes.

Apart from when one line of congareels accidentally breaks off and goes to the wrong place.

That's the American.

That's the American eel.

No, the conger eels, different spelling,

are hunted all over the British Isles, particularly in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly.

And I just read in an old book, and I can't find it anywhere else, but that the way to catch conger eels, you know, sometimes you'll put a stick into a river and the eels would wind around it and then you'd pull it up.

I didn't know that, okay.

Well, I think that's what people did.

Well, apparently, the traditional way to catch them in the Isles of Scilly is you suspend a small boy upside down in front of the hole in which they live, wait for the eel to wrap itself around him.

And these things can be up to three meters long.

And then you pull the boy up.

Why does he need to be upside down?

I think maybe he wants me to wrap them up.

He will get a headache before too long, this boy.

I think they come pretty fast.

We don't seem to be concerned about his welfare, so it's fine.

He's happy to oblige.

He gets some of the jelly deal.

Do you guys remember?

I'm sure I pitched an eel fact about six months ago and it didn't get any traction with you guys.

It was because in my local news agent, they had a Fisherman Monthly magazine.

And it had a picture on the front of a guy with the largest eel you've ever seen.

It was incredible.

Yeah, but that's not a fact.

That's the thing.

You can't just say, my fact this week is you get really big eels.

He'd broken the record of the biggest eel caught in Britain.

I can't remember his name now.

I wrote it down at the time, but I've forgotten it.

And what was the fact?

It's just like the record for the largest eel fished in Britain have been smashed by this guy.

But guys, honestly, it was so...

It was like an elephant's trunk.

It was incredible.

Yeah.

It was a few feet long.

I think this is maybe because this was this period where all your facts were the most massive massive kettle in just everything was an undefinable size that you refused to tell us the measurements of.

It was a trolly big eel.

Anyway, I bought that magazine and I'm sure there's a fisherman near where I live who's gone absolutely devastated because he trots along to his news agent for the one copy they stock of this magazine.

It's not a big rack of them.

Oh, he's missed the biggest eel news

for centuries.

He's still living in a fool's paradise.

He's done the time, Andy.

He owned that edition.

I feel like there's an elephant in the room, given that we're doing a fact about things surviving being eaten.

In years to come, people will have forgotten this news story that has been quite big this month of the person who's been eaten by a whale.

He was a kayaker, wasn't he?

Venezuelan guy.

Did that happen?

Because I saw the headline, didn't read the article, and then saw a debunk and didn't read that article either.

It did happen to be sure.

The video is quite good.

How enticing does something have to be, then, before you'll click on it?

I go through a lot of web pages every single day.

I'm like, yeah, yeah,

he got into the world's mouth.

And in the world's bad mouth.

So he didn't go through into those.

No, no, no.

No, no.

It was a few seconds later.

Actually, I heard about this story on a recent episode of what was the show you were talking about?

Cryptid Factor.

They did a really good breakdown of that whole story.

Yeah.

Bit by bit.

They did, yeah.

Actually, that was the thing where I saw the headline that just scrolled past it.

Very sensible.

I saw the weird thing about it.

Well, there were two quite sweet things.

So they were going on a kayaking trip for this guy's dad's birthday.

Initially, the headlines were like, caught on camera by his dad.

And I thought, oh my God, this insensitive father's filming the whole bloody thing.

But he did have a kayak-mounted camera.

If that's what anyone else is worried about, he wasn't holding the camera rather than saving his boy.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Did you take the picture of the insensitive dad on your show?

I defended him because I think that if

you know the eating habits, you'd probably go, he's not going to swallow him.

He'll be back in a second.

Yeah.

That's a bad thing.

And also, he was a distance away.

Yeah.

What are you going to do swim over and have a word is you just keep filming

but you're both fathers also you'll need a crime reference number from the police so they need evidence take it from me i mean i'm not normally on any side of this kind of thing but i've just been skiing with my three-year-old and the number of times i filmed her falling over as opposed to going and helping her yeah right you guys social services are coming

this is all right i'm sure i'll come out with a mouth anytime now so it was mounted on his kayak so the dad was not just holding a camera filming him but i thought the quite interesting thing about human reactions is the dad didn't make a sound when it happened.

So he's seen what happens, but he's so shocked.

And when the guy was then spat out of the whale's mouth, the dad was like, mate, you're okay.

Shit, don't panic.

It's still there.

Get back in your kayak.

But it's silent as he watches his son get swallowed by a whale.

Men don't like talking to each other.

What do you want?

Unless it's in a podcast format.

Even then, the only question is, is that the new kayak that's just been.

I think we want to normalize this and we want to say to guys, if you're listening to this, if your son is ever eaten by a whale, then do try and talk about it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The legend.

Have a chat.

Okay.

It is time for fact number two, and that is Jane.

Okay, my fact this week is that Sweden's Minister for Equality has a pathological fear of bananas.

For all bananas equally.

Very nice.

Yeah.

This is incredible.

I mean, it really is a clear, isn't it?

Well, yes, it is a fear.

It was in the newspapers quite recently, especially in Sweden.

Unsurprisingly.

That's where it started, didn't we?

Swede afraid of bananas.

She herself is a vegetable.

Yes.

Yeah.

I suppose so.

There were some leaked emails to a tabloid newspaper called Expressen, and they said that this lady who's called Paulina Brandberg has a strong allergy to bananas.

So we would appreciate it if there are no bananas in the room where she'll be staying.

And the big scandal really is that she isn't allergic to bananas.

She's just scared of them.

Yes.

And she said, like, they asked her, they were like, are you really allergic to bananas?

And she's like, well, it's sort of an allergy, you could say.

It's something that I got professional help for.

And then eventually it came out that she was just really hated.

And but I mean, in fairness, you know, it's equally bad.

Isn't it?

Is it equally bad?

Well, it depends how bad your allergy is.

Yeah, I don't think it's...

This is a big...

I don't think this is a big scandal.

There have been bigger in the world of politics.

I know Sweden's politics are, you know, changing, but it's still, guys, if this is still what you're concerned with.

And you know what?

Like, the opposition party, they could have taken advantage of this and maybe brought down the Swedish government.

But

one of the opposition social democrats, Teresa Carvalho, said that she also has a fear of bananas.

And on this issue, we stand united against a common enemy.

Yeah.

That's not plausible.

Stop trying to jump on the bandwagon.

There can't be two.

You're right.

It's quite a rare phobia.

I think it's lovely.

And you know, she can't just...

spot a banana and be alarmed by it.

She can smell bananas or if someone has recently eaten a banana in the room, she can truffle that up.

You know why?

Speaking of truffles, it's a bit like my severe hatred of mushrooms.

Yeah.

Isn't it like I can tell if there's a mushroom in the or if someone's eaten mushrooms recently and stuff.

You don't have a phobia of of mushrooms.

I think I do really, actually, yeah.

I find them really disgusting, but also if there's one growing in the corner, I'll try and not walk near it, kind of thing.

It's a stronger, it's a strong aversion to something which actually is not going to harm you.

The Prime Minister backed her as well.

He sort of said, yeah, so like when he found out...

What was the aversion to sack her, basically?

I think she was getting mocked, and he said we shouldn't be mocking people for their various little known phobias.

Well, it's hard, isn't it?

Because loads of people have phobias of things that are quite mainstream.

Like heights, is that a phobia?

Heights are a bit dangerous.

Some spiders are dangerous, you know.

I would say these are phobias because these are like, look, they're phobias of things that aren't going to harm you.

A phobia of spiders in this country.

It's ratio.

There is a theory that there's some kind of spider called, I think it's called the six-eyed.

I can't remember.

It's a spider.

It's a bad one.

And

it can be lethal if it bites.

a human and that lives in the plains of Africa, which are the cradle of humanity.

So maybe there's something genetic going on there.

So that might be where spider fare comes from.

Yeah, six-side sand spider.

Sand spider.

There you go.

And I think the problem, like the reason that the Prime Minister of Sweden and the opposition sort of backed her on this is one, because it's ridiculous that anyone should care about it.

But two, because it was kind of distracting from the good work that this woman's doing in equality.

The famously unequal country of Sweden.

It's not as obscure as you think.

It was an issue that was brought up on loose women.

because one of the stars, Charlene White, has a phobia of bananas as well.

I don't know.

How come all these people suddenly claiming there is one person with a banana phobia who's the most ironic person given the name?

Oh.

Can you guess who it is?

The guy who voiced Banana Man.

No.

No.

Banana Rama?

Oh, the band.

I actually checked to see if they were allergic.

The founder of the big yellow storage company.

Oh, very good, but no.

So it's this person's surname is very related to bananas.

John Peel.

Very good, but no.

Okay.

Oh,

monkey, something.

Famous types of banana.

Oh, Cavendish.

The Duke of Cavendish.

Cyclist Mark Cavendish.

We both know it's the first Cavendish you think of.

The first Cavendish that all of our listeners will be thinking of when they hear that name, the Duke of Cavendish.

No, Mark Cavendish, the cyclist, he says even seeing someone eating a banana gives him goosebumps and even thinking about it makes him gag.

That's incredible.

Wow.

And he said it's the stringy bits on a banana that he really hates.

They're not the best bits.

They're not the sweetest part.

Well, he once won a bike race in Alania in Turkey and he was given the world's biggest bunch of bananas as a price.

Oh yes.

That's the caravilla of your fears.

And that's why it's bad having one of these niche phobias because it's very hard to like no one presents you with like a bouquet of pigeons at the end of it.

Another person who has a fear of bananas, Harriet Kensley, the comedian.

Doug, the comedian.

Yeah.

On another podcast called Off Menu, which I've never heard of.

You guys heard about bananas?

No, I think it's Cryptid Factor, I think the fans are later on.

Yeah.

Well, she was on that and she said she hates it when you throw a banana peel into a bin and it doesn't go all the way in.

So it looks like it's crawling out.

Yeah.

And I think I can see that actually.

Oh my gosh.

People have a lot of time to think, don't they?

Sorry, but just...

I think it's instinct.

I mean, really non-intended, yeah.

Did we say that the Cavendish the cavendish banana is named after the duke of cavendish we'll just we'll get emails otherwise i think we have meant i think all of our listeners are very familiar with the duke of cavendish honey

um fears of bananas i just the guardian did a bit of digging into this i think off the back of the swedish politician they found a woman with a banana phobia who you know had it pretty strongly like again breaks out in a sweat can't bear being around them avoids them in the supermarket that kind of thing she once was on a flight quite a long haul flight she woke up in the morning after everyone on the flight had been asleep and everyone around her had been given their mid-morning snack of banana.

I mean, just absolute nightmare territory.

Just imagine you're in a plane.

Bananas on a plane.

It's like a basically.

I was looking up kind of more common, uncommon phobias, and bananas was a surprising one.

I didn't know that it was quite common among the uncommon phobias, but it does seem to be bananas, sidon globophobia, which is an intense fear of cotton balls, seems to be another one.

Sidon on globophobia.

That's surely more niche these days.

Cotton balls?

Are cotton balls still a big part of.

I use them every day.

Okay, Grandma.

You know, Anna has an extremely common accent, but she puts them in her cheeks and it makes her speak this way.

Exactly.

I've got a lovely glass antique container next to the bath full of cotton balls.

I really don't know.

It doesn't surprise me in the least.

It doesn't surprise me.

Are they useful for washing things?

Yeah, I actually do it to,

yeah,

Makeup removal.

Like women will be more au fa with cotton balls than men.

I mean, I have more makeup in the time that you've known me.

No.

It's washing, washing food off a child's mouth.

Yeah.

Right.

Cleaning very, very young babies' bums.

You would use cotton balls.

Yeah.

Whenever you wear makeup, you basically continue to wear makeup for the next two weeks until it goes off.

Whenever we do a photo tree every couple of years, I look more and more like I've got black eyes.

But another one is balloons.

I need someone with a phobia of balloons.

Oprah Winfrey.

Really?

Yeah, she's got a fear of balloons.

The popping sound reminds her of a gunshot.

So apparently balloons are not allowed near Oprah.

In the same way bananas are not allowed near this Swedish.

Well, there was one guy who has a phobia of balloons who had to miss his brother's wedding because

he's balloons at the wedding.

And I just thought, as his brother,

are you going to insist on balloons at your wedding or let your brother come to your wedding?

Good point.

I mean, balloons are not a big feature of a wedding unless both parties are nine years old and it's one of those European royal weddings.

They always get balloons at weddings.

Every wedding that I've been to, I recommend.

Excuse me, James, you're at my wedding.

I challenge you to spot a single balloon in there.

James brought it.

I fucked it in on a wicker chair.

Stop the wedding.

It should have been me.

But would you, if the groom had said, listen, my brother has an extreme phobia of balloons and can't come if you have the balloons, would you have gone to the trouble of taking the balloons?

That's such a good point.

Dodgiphobias.

Yep.

I just love this.

In 2014, a French government minister,

he had failed to pay his income tax for three years and explained it was due to administrative phobia,

which also meant he hadn't paid rent on his flat in Paris for three years and he also hadn't declared a company he owned.

You know what?

I didn't read about that, but I did read about a man in Sweden who got a load of letters saying that he'd been speeding, but had a phobia of brown envelopes

and he got off.

He said, I thought I hadn't got any warnings because I hadn't read any of my

warnings.

Well, and then I went on to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and looks if there was any weird phobias on there.

And I found someone called Gina Frattini, who was a British fashion designer in the 70s.

And she also had a brown envelope phobia, according to the ODMB.

Really?

So I think it is like this thing of, you know, you think it's going to be bad news all the time.

it's the tax of writing you're so scared of it that you just won't open any of the envelopes yeah i can kind of i think you're a soft touch chamber

you knew they'd arrived hadn't you so

you've seen that what did you think was in the brown envelopes

a couple of other famous names who have phobias macaulay colkin after making home alone developed a phobia of leaving the house Did he?

Yeah.

He had agoraphobia, and that was because his life absolutely changed.

The paparazzi everywhere leaping out of bushes, sort of following him in cars.

He got petrified, so he needed to stay at home.

He needed to be away from everyone.

Pretty reasonable.

Nalhoran from One Direction, the band, petrified phobia of pigeons.

And when they're on tour, they have people sweep the area for pigeons if he's going to a venue.

You would think he would just carry like a sparrow hawk with him wherever he went.

Or a daxon.

Well, a sparrow hawk's better.

Sorry, that's more rock and roll.

Much more rock and roll.

I wasn't thinking about the optics.

On agro-phobia, as you mentioned,

I think that was the first ever modern recorded phobia, really, when psychologists started talking about phobias.

And it was a guy called Westphal, who was a psychologist in the 1870s.

But people were quite obsessed with it in the late 19th century.

And Westphal described a patient who basically was a fear of anything that doesn't remind them of home.

So he'd be out in a big square and he'd have to cling to the buildings on the way around because that reminds you of being like surrounded by your all four walls.

And then he said, to get home, if he has to get home and can't cling to the buildings, then he'll either follow someone very, very closely, so that close another human, or he'll acquaint himself with a lady of the night and begin to talk to her until she realizes that he's not trying to get any custom.

Officer.

Let me assure you,

this is all a simple misunderstanding.

Read Freud and you'll understand.

Would he get her to walk him home?

He'd get a number of ladies of the night to walk him home.

So

just change the Officer.

Officer.

Me again.

It's not a neurotic conga.

It's.

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

My fact is that.

After Chernobyl, nearby children were treated for potential radiation sickness with compulsory hourly drinks of red wine.

So

this, I think, was sent in originally by Billy Vishin.

So thank you, Billy.

Schnobl was in the Soviet Union, now in Ukraine.

It was a nuclear reactor.

It fell over in 1986, had a big,

you know what I mean.

It went over.

It went badly wrong.

It went bang.

It went bang.

There was a huge explosion.

And in the wake of it, obviously, lots of radiation, which spread all the way across a big chunk of Europe.

Yeah.

Including the UK.

Including the UK.

And in the local area,

there was a belief that red wine was good for radiation sickness and doctors recommended it.

And there were numerous cases of children who were hospitalized, not because of radiation sickness, but because their parents had been giving them red wine on the hour, every hour.

It wasn't just around the area, it was in the whole of the Soviet Union.

Really?

So, I spoke to my in-laws who were there at the time.

Apparently, it was a common opinion that alcohol helped radiation poisoning.

And they said that actually most people, as opposed to red wine, they would drink something called rectified spirits, which is 97.2% alcohol.

Oh, yeah.

Could actually kind of get by getting normal vodka and then distilling it and distilling it and distilling it until it's like really, really strong.

Wow.

Well, the red wine connection was there was a talk that went around at the time that Soviet submarine sailors would have wine with all of their dinner meals while they were down there.

And the idea was to clean the system of radiation in the submarines.

Wait, so were they actually doing that?

Or that was a rumor that they did that?

They were definitely, I saw a menu from a submarine, a Soviet submarine.

An incredible menu.

How are they?

Yeah.

How?

I wasn't aware there were menus.

Yeah.

As you sit down, do you have anything a bit further away from the reactor, please?

I ordered the eel, but it escaped.

Wow.

Yeah.

And you would have a ration of red wine for most dinner meals of most of the week.

So, yes, a rumor went to the bottom.

And was that because of radiation?

Who knows?

But that was what, yeah, according to people who lived in Chernobyl at the time who

we now know that actually it does help.

Yes, bizarrely, isn't it?

There's been a study, hasn't there, that sort of proved it.

Yeah.

A study from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in 2008 found that something called resveratol,

which is an antioxidant found in red wine, may offer protection against radiation.

It helps cells.

If you've got some cells in a petri dish, then it helps them against radiation.

But it didn't help mice when they tried it on mice.

Oh, I thought it did help some of the mice.

No, there was something called acetyl resveraterol,

which is like the previous thing that i tried to pronounce but has got acetyl at the start of it and that does help mice right okay but the thing that you get in red wine on its own doesn't right and also as they said it was a really funny thing to report because journalism is mad every headline read wine can

like the telegraph headline literally was red wine can protect against radiation scientists may soon recommend that it is best you start drinking heavily if exposed all of them saying it will protect you the scientist who did this study was very very clear.

He said that the dosage you would need to get enough to help you with any kind of radiation sickness would be 720 bottles of wine.

Yeah.

So

it's pretty amazing all the stuff that happened just after Chernobyl had the moment where everyone in the government was trying to downplay it.

within the Soviet Union, trying to say, oh, it's not as bad as it seems.

So I read this amazing article by a lady called Natalia Charikova, who spoke about being there and what it was like and all the things that were being done.

She was saying that experts were going up onto TV just saying, you know what, actually, small doses of radiation are really beneficial, we found in rat health.

And so actually,

it's like the study saying, yeah.

Wow.

So this is not actually going to be too bad for you.

Like that happened in the US as well after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There were 132 news items in the New York Times about the bombings and not a single one mentioned anything about the radiation.

And there were 15 articles in the 10 months after the blast mentioned radiation at all.

And they all said there are some medical and biological benefits to be gained from radiation.

And the other thing is Oppenheimer said there is every reason to believe that there was no appreciable radioactivity on the ground in Hiroshima.

So he was just like, oh, no, it's all fine.

Yeah, no, we just blew them up.

Gosh.

At Chernobyl, when it happened, they flew over in helicopters.

They dropped 5,000 tons of sand and lead and clay on top of the fire to snuff it out, basically, to stop the rest of it.

Because only a small amount of of the radioactive material in Chernobyl actually uh was in this explosion.

And so the the impetus was to put out that fire, which they managed to do, because if that if the rest of it had gone up, Europe might have become uninhabitable, basically.

Wow.

Yeah, and it worked.

I mean that what they you know, what they did.

It worked eventually, although I didn't realize that the sand, the the dumping in the first three days was almost completely ineffectual, the sand and boron.

So they di they dumped lots of sand to put out the fi try and put out the fires and the boron was to um counteract the radioactivity.

But I read that the opening in the roof the where they were trying to get it was really small and basically all the sand missed it at first yeah and also when you dump sand you picture it going down in a big lump i hadn't thought about it but when you dump sand it all like scatters out in the air and sort of ends up floating down you should have put more water in it should have made wet sand

big hourglass i'm sorry to i'm sorry to have some creative thinking here but you know that funnels it doesn't it yeah oh you mean the top half of an hourglass yeah i wouldn't have the whole hourglass yeah yeah it just goes up and down or gigantic sand castle bucket where where you just lower the sand on top and just build a lot of good solutions.

The interesting thing about the hourglass is you can have as big an hourglass as you want, but the little funnel bit has to be the same size because it has to be the size of a grain of sand.

So, actually, you're only going to get a tiny trickle of sand on the side.

That's a good point.

It will take a while.

Sitting in that helicopter, day nine.

Andy, are we sure about this?

So, and then obviously, you've got to cover this thing over.

So, they built what they called a sarcophagus, like this massive steel and concrete structure to cover the reactor, what's left of the reactor.

And I find this amazing.

The crane operators who put that sarcophagus in place did so without ever seeing what they were doing.

What do you mean?

Riddle me that.

Okay.

Okay, so they're in a crane next to this thing that's happening.

They were given blindfolds because...

they weren't allowed to know where it was and they got led away.

Any advance on that?

No, not bad.

Sorry, secrecy, official secrecy.

Yeah, because like, how was it who whose grave was it where they blindfolded everyone and

it was nighttime?

Oh, that's good.

That's actually the, did they just use a pencil?

Answer for that one, yeah.

What it was is they were inside lead-lined cabins because the radio activity when this was being lowered was more well known about and it was very high.

So they were following instructions over the radio.

They were basically doing pin the sarcophagus on the reactor, wow, from like they were getting instructions from people who were observing from a long distance, yeah, yeah, yeah, and they just were doing it blind left, left, no, my left, no, my left.

Okay, we're gonna need another sarcophagus now.

Well, they did put a second one on in the end, didn't they?

They did.

In fact, this is something we talked about on No Such Things the News last short-lived TV show.

Oh, yeah, yeah, um, when because I think it was around that time when they put a new big bit of concrete over it, and it was like the biggest dome that had ever been created.

Is it concrete?

I thought it was one of them was was steel, right?

Because I feel like the first one was concrete, and that got dilapidated.

And then they have now made this steel dome, which I think is going to last 100 years-ish.

But it still feels like you're going to have to set an alarm for a hundred years' time when you've all forgotten it.

It's just snoozing, isn't it?

Basically, yeah.

Because it basically is Chernobyl turned into basically a giant Russian doll.

Oh, it's just bigger and bigger.

Yeah.

Massive Ukrainian doll, we should say.

Yeah, Ukrainian doll.

You can now, given that we're talking about alcohol at Chernobyl, you can get a drink called Atomic.

And I've ordered some of this.

I love this.

Have you?

It's harvested from apples from abandoned orchards in the local area, all of which are now producing apples which are

very low in radiation.

So it's completely safe for consumption.

And it goes to funding local bits of Ukraine which have been severely hammered not only by the nuclear reactor going off, but also by the war.

And it's still being made and distributed, I believe.

So that's amazing.

The thing is, you don't drink vodka.

I'm going to try.

But good ones.

If it's made of apples, it might be more like schnapps.

It's exactly.

I think it is, actually.

I think think it's basically schnapps.

Is it an apple sour?

Yeah, it's an apple very sour.

Yeah.

It's amazing, the fallout, how far it did travel.

Like, they have found a little layer of radioactive materials at the bottom of Loch Ness, for example, which has come up.

Hey, listen, I can't.

Did the Beatles find it by any chance?

They were in a yellow submarine on the menu each night.

But no, do you know what?

What's interesting, talking earlier about the sort of the experts coming on and trying to downplay it, as a result, people sort of started thinking, actually, this might not be true.

And according to Natalia, whose article I read about the experience of living there at the time, she said everyone started experiencing radiophobia.

Like her grandmother used to put iodine in her meals just to make sure that

then also parents were just, if they couldn't get out from where they were, were just putting their kids onto trains with their names and just, this is my name, please look after me, and just saying, go.

And they sent them out further away and further away.

Because these weren't people in the exclusion zone because the exclusion zone was completely evacuated yeah yeah yeah yeah people who were just close enough that they thought i'm really scared now yeah it just spread around that like how far did this travel a lot of people in the uk were scared as well it's in all the newspapers

i probably would have been quite scared yeah i've got one of the letters that was sent out to people living in the local area at the time it's really interesting the phrasing because they're trying to persuade people to take some precautions but also trying to say it's all fine so the letter begins dear comrades

Positive, the result of detailed analysis showed that living and working in your village will cause no harm to adults or children.

Great news.

And then it said, we've got a few tips.

Do not eat berries and mushrooms gathered this year.

Children should not enter the forest, limit fresh greens, remove topsoil from the garden and bury it in specially prepared graves far from the village.

But apart from that, I think mushrooms are particularly bad, aren't they?

Because they sort of get the nutrients from the soil and they can't really...

Now.

Is that not true?

Is this where your mushroom thing comes from?

Oh, maybe.

You look at a mushroom and you see radiation.

You were alive at the time.

It was in the news.

There might have been a triggering incident.

Could have been.

That's usually the case, isn't it?

That's what they all say: that these people who are scared of bananas must have had some terrible banana incident.

Yeah, yeah.

That was a woman who was electrocuted while looking at a bowl of bananas.

Sorry, it's not funny.

It's not funny.

Got an electric shop.

Not electrocuted.

Electrified.

Well, she wasn't...

She didn't convert to run on electricity.

It's a word we haven't worked out yet.

Have you guys heard about many things about the Samosali?

They're the people who chose to return.

So about 1,200 people after they're evacuated decided, you know what, my home's Chernobyl or the surrounding area, I'm going back.

And they went back in the couple of years that followed.

Wow.

Like two, three years after.

Like some of them went back months after.

A lot of them did.

And there are about 200 of them left.

And it's fascinating because they're spread across about 164 villages.

So there were just over one person per village.

Wow.

And they live extraordinary lives.

I was reading an interview with one called Ivan who was remembering the time and said that, you know, they weren't really scared.

He remembered going and handing alcohol to everyone there because they all knew it would cure them.

And he lives in a village with two other women.

The journalist said, Do you ever see them?

And he said, No, we almost never social.

I'm really sorry to say this, but sitcom.

I know I say it all the time when something like this terrible thing happens.

But you think this is the one?

I mean, one guy and two women living in a village on their own, and they never like to speak to each other.

It's a recipe for comedy.

Did you see BioNerd 23?

What's that?

She's someone who had a YouTube channel and she made over 60 videos of her going in the exclusion zone and she would do things like pick apples off a tree and take a bite into them.

But she was also a scientist and so she would show you that it was safe.

But she hasn't posted, I think, in about five years now.

And she never gave her name and no one really knows who she is.

Wow.

So we don't know what's happened to her.

But she's a legit sort of YouTuber from back in the day.

A legit YouTuber?

What is a legit YouTuber?

Well, she she was a scientist who was trying to show you that.

Because a legit YouTuber is just someone who has a camera on their phone.

Everyone apart from you.

There are a lot of dogs around Chernobyl today,

and they're genetically distinct from dogs that are just about 10 or 20 miles away.

Is that just they've mated with each other?

They've got their own clan, and so they've become...

It honestly is that.

It's just they've kept up themselves to themselves and the other dogs have kept themselves to themselves and they've lived apart for long enough that they have genetic markers that are different between the two dogs in them.

Wow, that's interesting.

They're quite sweet because they're basically survivors of the cull, aren't they?

When one of the lessons, well, all the jobs are quite unpleasant after it, but a specific police squad was sent in to kill all the pets that were left in Chernobyl so that they didn't go and spread.

And the idea is perhaps there was something about them that made them able to survive the cull, and that's like a slightly genetic difference that has then, you know, continued to

ability to hide under a sofa.

But that's the same.

All the frogs around there are now black.

And this is very weird is because initially, slightly darker frogs were slightly likelier to survive the radiation.

And this is how long ago?

Nearly 40 years now, which is 10 to 15 frog generations.

So they have observed microevolution even in this time.

And darker ones

in the exclusion zone, the frogs are all black now.

I've read recently that grey squirrels are turning black.

Is that so?

We've got black squirrels around us, and I always wonder what the hell they're doing there.

Well, apparently they are more likely to survive if they're dark because it means they can hide behind.

Well, they want to blend in, would be

that's a bit depressing.

I read that in a study this week, so actually, and actually I just read the headline.

I haven't read the study yet.

But hang on, concrete is grey.

I would have thought grey squirrel or grey concrete is perfect.

Yeah, you would think so.

But then your campaign, you get run over.

Black squirrel used to stand out.

And is that why, do they want to stand out?

I really wish I'd read this article now.

That was like a one-hour side.

I'm just speculating wildly.

Isn't this what Dan's all the podcast is?

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

My fact this week is that the song Take Me Home Country Roads was written by three people who had never been to West Virginia.

Take Me Out to the Ball Game was written by two people who'd never been to a ball game.

And the Pina Colada song was written by one person who had never drunk one.

Lovely.

A lot of this makes sense.

I mean, the reason you want to be taken to a ball game, because you've never been to one.

Oh, that's true.

That holds together.

But on the other hand, take me home to Western.

That's tougher.

So that famously is a John Denver song written by three people, Bill Danoff, Taffy Nivert, and John Denver.

The first two were in a band before, and Danoff wrote that song Afternoon Delight, if you know that.

Sky Rockets and Flying.

Yeah, exactly.

If you've seen Anchorman, you'll know that movie.

Sorry, you'll know that song.

But yeah, so they were riding around in their car on Clopper Road in Montgomery County, Maryland, and they had an idea for this song,

but it didn't scan.

Skay Home Clopper Road.

Yeah, it didn't scan.

And they were writing the lyrics one night, and John Denver happened to come over to their house, having busted his thumb and gone to emergency hospital surgery.

He was sitting with them in their house early in the morning.

They'd planned to sell it to Johnny Cash, and he started hearing the song.

He thought, this is incredible.

And they stayed up all night writing the song.

And because because none of them had been to West Virginia, they got an encyclopedia down and they had to look up all the details in order to make the lyrics work.

Is the rest of the song, does it show an encyclopedic knowledge of West Virginia?

Because I thought it was.

Population!

384,000!

I heard that they basically

liked the scanning of Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah River and stuff like that.

They like these phrases.

And that's kind of why they went for West Virginia.

Because those are the famous bits.

If you just do the main population center, there's probably going to be less romantic.

Yeah, and they, but also they were going to use Massachusetts because it's got four syllables as well.

Just looking for something with four syllables in it.

Right.

West Virginia.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What about this ball game thing?

Oh, the ball game?

Well, the ball game, that was written in 1908, and that was written by a guy called Jack Norworth.

And he wrote the lyrics, and he brought the song, the lyrics, to this guy called Albert von Tilser, and he put it to the tune that we now know it as.

Both of them had never been to a game before.

They would only go, one of them 32 years later after writing the song, and then the other 20 years later after writing the song.

But it became popular because there was an incredible announcer for the Chicago White Sox.

He would announce their games called Harry Carrey,

who used to sing it.

We should just say that this is, if you go to a baseball game, they play it at every baseball game in America.

So that's why it's kind of famous.

It's massive.

And they play it at the same point as well.

It's during the seventh innings.

I don't think I know it.

Is it like the equivalent half-life thing came out?

Do you know British people wouldn't know it?

I don't know.

Take me out to the ball game.

Wow, really?

British people would not know it.

It's just in so many American movies.

Is it the equivalent of The Rare Farise Wanker?

That was their follow-up interesting.

That was actually written by a man who had never masturbated.

A lot of people look back on this song now because most people don't know the lyrics to the song, certainly the first verse.

They just know Take Me, they know the main chorus, which is sung.

But it's pushed as a really progressive song for women at the time and this was a result of he based it on he was having an affair at the time uh with two vaudeville characters his main girlfriend was someone called tricksie fraganza uh who's also a bit sorry

for not a real name before you say so she was an outspoken suffragist as well as a vaudeville no good honorable sounds like a suffragist name doesn't it tricksie fraganza um but she had her most famous act was a striptease

uh where every time it looked like she was going to take off off an item of clothing, she did, but you never saw anything because there was always more clothing underneath.

And she would just keep going.

There'd be more and more and more clothes.

She's covered in layers of suffragist pamphlets.

Yes.

But it's pushed as a really progressive song for women at the time.

And this was a result of him basing it on Trixie.

So the lyrics basically say she was baseball mad.

This was a time, 1908, where women weren't going to baseball.

And it wasn't.

So it was a real push.

Cool.

It was good.

Good, Trixie.

Progressive.

I won't hear a word against her.

Okay, what was the last one?

Oh, Pina.

Pina Colada.

Pinclada.

Yeah.

I love this.

Yeah, well, do you want to take over, Andy?

Well, so Rupert Holmes from Northwich in Cheshire.

Really?

Yeah.

Who wrote the Pina Colada song?

He wrote the Pina Colada song.

Northwich now.

Lovely part of the world.

Is it?

I've never been.

No.

Well, it now has a Pina Colada Festival every year.

It does.

And he had never had one.

And also, it wasn't meant to be Pina Colada in the song.

Initially, when he was writing it,

it was Humphrey Bogart.

Yeah.

If you like Humphrey Bogart.

If you you like Humphrey Bogart.

Yeah, you would have to say Humphrey.

No, I think you can go.

If you like Humphrey Bogart.

No, guys, if you like Humphrey Bogart.

That's easy.

If you ooh, like Humphrey Bogart.

So, yeah, he just thought, what is a nice sounding drink?

He had never had it.

And the sales were terrible of the song at first, despite the song being mega-popular.

So it's a great, it's a brilliant song.

It's about this guy who's bored of his lady, and he posts.

You're reading a spilopina colada son now i think i am actually he posts he reads an advert in the newspaper if you're halfway through listening to the pina colada son just turn off now

he reads this advert in the newspaper saying if you like pina colada and getting caught in the rain uh if you blah blah blah blah blah then you know let's get together and then he turns up and um it's his wife they realize they work they did love each other they they are compatible but Anyway, whatever.

What a lovely story.

And the thing is, come with me and escape.

And the song is called Escape.

And everyone was listening on the radio.

The radio fans were going nuts for it.

DJs were playing it all the time.

But no one was buying it because they could not remember the name of the song.

Oh, my God.

It was what's that song?

Oh, you know, the Pina Colada song.

And then his record label.

And the whole couple were shopkeepers in those days.

If you went in and said, what's the song about Pina Colada?

Were they like, lips are sealed?

No, no, no.

Never heard of that.

Nope.

And his record label put

his record label put on escape brackets, the Pina Colada song.

I just love the idea of them saying, unless you say the exact correct name, I'm not going to get it.

A lot of record shots were staffed by Rumpel Stiltskin in those days.

But the record label added those brackets, literally escape brackets, the Pina Colada song, and it went quadruple platinum.

It just went nuts.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

On

sort of songs that don't befit their writers, which I suppose is the title for this.

A hard one to research.

But the famous one really is the Barry Manelow song, I Write the Songs, which he didn't write.

It was actually

written by Bruce Johnson of the Beach Boys.

Wow.

Which I hadn't realised.

And Manelow did say at the time that he knew that he would be in trouble as soon as his producer handed it to him.

And he said, Look, I know that I'm going to get in shit for this because I didn't write it.

But have you ever heard the Barry Manlow song?

I really do write the songs.

No.

It's really good.

I love a song sequel.

It's so good.

So it's a spoof, basically, responding to all his critics who were saying, but you didn't write, I write the songs.

And it's a manual for how to write a song.

So it has lyrics like, you start off with the verse, and that's the part that tells you what the song's gonna be about and you can talk about dope or death but love is probably the best it's better than this the actual lyrics and then it does sound like they have used an encyclopedia entry yeah that one

you know the thing with i write the songs he didn't want to sing it because he wanted to write his own songs

and he was presented with it by his his producer and it's the singer of the song is the spirit of music.

It's actually from the perspective of music itself.

I write the songs, right?

Like I'm the inspirational channel.

But when he read the lyrics, he thought, this just sounds like me, Barry Manelow, singing, I write the songs.

And that's what people interpret it as.

So I don't want to do that.

And Bruce Johnson said, no, this is God narrating the song.

And it's going to come across much better if you're speaking as God.

Yeah.

He really didn't want to sing it until he was strong-armed into it by his producer, and then it went to number one.

I think he quite enjoyed it.

As in, I think now, like doing that piss take that ends in the climax, sometimes I really do write the songs.

And he does refer to it.

I feel like he's taken it quite well.

You could could have got quite pissed off about that attention yeah i'm not like frank sinatra actually did a version which i didn't know and he insisted on changing the lyrics to i sing the songs which i think is a bit of a cop-out yeah it is do you guys know the song girls just want to have fun

cindy lauper well she didn't write it okay it was written by a man called robert hazard

And the amazing thing is, not only did he write it, he also sang it.

And he sang the same lyrics more or less.

They're slightly different, but they're more or less the same.

But when you listen to them, how he sang them, it's got a really different meaning.

I bet.

So, if you think about it, my daddy said, What are you going to do with your life?

You're not the fortunate one, girls just want to have fun.

What he's saying is, I'm not going to care what I'm doing in my life, I'm going out and I'm going to sleep with a load of women because they just want to have fun.

Fair enough, yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's a different song to what's going on.

It's a different tone, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

I think I'm Every Woman was also largely written by a man.

Yeah.

What do you mean, largely written?

Like, he wrote I'm Every Man on

the W O.

I think it was co-written, but he wrote most of the lyrics.

Really?

Yeah, yeah.

I do know that Respects

R-E-S P-C-T.

Indeed.

Ari Frankers, which was a big feminist anthem, obviously,

and a civil rights anthem, but that was originally written about a man saying, My wife's got to respect me when I come home tired from work after a long old day.

And

wow.

And then

one little tweak.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

My favorite one's always been that the song It Wasn't Me by Shaggy.

15 years after the song was released, he revealed that it was in fact him.

He was the cheater in the song.

Because it's about someone cheating.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's actually used legally now as the shaggy defense.

That's where you've got irrefutable evidence that you did something and you just say, no, I didn't do it.

Exactly.

Yeah.

The shaggy defense.

It's a bad defense.

It's a Trump defense.

Toto, you can guess what I'm about to say about Africa.

They've never been to Africa.

Yeah, this is David Page, who wrote, I was reading about, I basically thought, I bet Toto had never been to Africa.

And I looked it up and they thought, and they hadn't, when they wrote it.

And the guy who wrote it was a member of the band called David Page.

And he sounds quite arrogant.

He said he was humming the melody and then the words came to him.

And he thought to himself, hang on, I'm a very talented songwriter, but even I'm not this talented.

A higher power is writing through me.

That God, again.

That bloody God, he gets everywhere.

And he used descriptions that he'd read in National Geographic, and I think he'd read a biography of Dr.

Livingston to get his Africa

bang up to the minute.

The very latest news out of the continent.

He'd basically been, I think we can say.

Are there any really incongruous lyrics in the song?

I can't remember how it goes.

There are a few.

I hear the rains down in Africa.

Is that it?

The Serengeti is in the wrong place.

I can't remember what the lyric is.

Like something rises over the, a mountain rises over the Sereni.

Kilimanjaro over the Serengeti, I think.

Which isn't.

It's not too far away, isn't it?

Close enough.

It's all Africa.

Yeah, okay, got it.

He did admit...

that he hadn't been and then he went in the late 1990s.

So he wrote it in 1982.

And then they toured in South Africa.

And apparently, he said, when he was touring in South Africa, all these South Africans ran up to him and said, wow, so when were you in Africa?

And when he said he wasn't, they said, but you describe it so perfectly.

the way that the pyramids reflect the beauties of Johannesburg it's incredible

the other toto sorry I've just got one more thing about the other toto yeah toto the dog the doggy yeah wizard of oz what's the famous song we're off to see the wizard oh sorry somewhere over the rainbow

oh my god the author had never seen a rainbow

I shouldn't have picked a film which is banger after banger after banger

somewhere over the rainbow is the song I'm thinking of there were concerns about that song can you guess why so it's an ecosystem based on selling sheet music.

Okay.

Studio executives were very nervous about this song.

Is it because it's a set, it's very short?

No.

It's because of the way the notes muck around.

There's an octave leap.

And it's really, you know, it's hard for amateur singers to sing that well.

And the studio bosses were like, no one's going to buy the sheet music.

Oh, this is the music.

This is junk.

Change it.

Because you can't sing along to it easily.

Pretty much.

Yeah, yeah.

And so, therefore, that would, you know, would damage their margins.

Oh, interesting.

I think I should shout out to our colleague James Rawson, who I appeal to for this fact.

And he just really wants to air something that's annoyed him for years, which is the Alicia Keyes debut album, Songs in A Minor, which was a great album.

Where's this going?

You might remember that.

They're not songs.

They're all in A minor.

It's fine.

Yeah, there's only,

well, the internet says there's only one song in A minor, and I wasted quite a lot of time.

I'm not very good at the piano, putting Spotify on and then working out what key they're all in.

And I think there are two songs in A minor on it, but it's still not all of the songs.

It's only two out of 16.

So, Alicia, that's great.

Sort yourself out.

And then I learned she had a son called Egypt, but he has been to Egypt.

But in fairness, she's called Alicia Keys, so obviously, it's going to be in different keys.

Brilliant.

That's a good point.

She's pulled it back.

Here's an interesting thing.

The song Ain't No Sunshine by Bill Withers.

Yep.

Oh, yeah.

Is unfinished.

Is it?

Yeah.

Really?

Because he just goes, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know.

And I've never got to the end of that bit.

That's the bit.

He got to the recording booth with the song unfinished.

And he just improvised.

I know, I know, I know, I know.

And he's like, I'll do this later.

And walked out the booth so it sounded like a fade.

Is that true?

Yeah.

That's really funny.

Well, thinking it'll come to me in the moment, it's fine.

Yeah.

And then

at the end, if you listen long enough, he it goes, I don't

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've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our various social media accounts.

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Goodbye.