556: No Such Thing As A Ghost In Blue Jeans

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So, what do this animal

and this animal

and this animal

have in common?

They all live on an Organic Valley farm.

Organic Valley dairy comes from small organic family farms that protect the land and the plants and animals that live on it from toxic pesticides, which leads to a thriving ecosystem and delicious, nutritious milk and cheese.

Learn more at ov.coop and taste the difference.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Theater Royal Drury Lane.

My name is Dan Shriver.

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

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 Andy.

My fact is that the very theater we're recording this show in, the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, was known in 1794 as the Fireproof Theatre.

I think you know what's coming.

In 1809, it burned down.

Yeah, so that's.

But then they built it again.

That's the brilliant thing about theaters.

Yeah, yeah.

And it really is fireproof this time, almost certainly.

Yeah, absolutely is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And in fact, I think it's the second, it's burned down twice.

So there have been four theatres on this.

What are the chances it will happen a third time?

Things don't happen in threes, famously.

That's the point.

So it was built in 1663.

Oh, no.

Bad year for people who know a thing or two about big fires in London.

1663.

And then 1666 came along.

So it wasn't a bad year.

No, that was...

Unless, did they do a warm-up?

No.

Did they do a rehearsal Fire of London three years earlier?

My point is

that it avoided the Great Fire of London.

Then in 1672, it caught up with the curve and it burnt down.

Then it was rebuilt.

Then it was demolished and rebuilt again more than a century later, 1794.

Right.

Okay, and that was the one that was supposedly fireproof.

And it did have amazing systems.

I think they pioneered things like the Iron Curtain, and they had, this is so cool, hydraulics that relied on the River Thames itself, had the water flowed in from the river.

It's awesome.

And an Iron Curtain is where the left-wing people in the audience had to go on one side and the right-wing people on the other side, wasn't it?

Oh, in fact, sorry, all Iron Curtains until the 1970s were Thames water.

So they had to.

Even the ones in Leeds.

Oh, my God.

London, sorry, I'm being London-centric.

Anyway, do we know what was, was it like during a production that it burnt down?

I actually don't know about the 1809 fire.

It was usually because they had the lights were made of actual fire, weren't they?

That was a thing.

They used lots of candles and things like that.

Right, yeah.

I think Richard Sheridan was in charge, wasn't he, of Drury Lane at the time?

And when it was going down, he obviously left the building because it was on fire.

And he sat on the street with a glass of wine in his hand.

and said, a man may surely be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own fireside.

Very droll.

That's yeah.

Very droll.

That's yeah.

You don't believe it, Dan.

No, I believe it.

I just can't tell if that's awesome or if he's a wanker.

I can't quite,

your building's burning down.

You're like, oh, let me warm myself by the fire.

Do you know, by the way, because there's a bunch of pubs that are around here, but there's also that giant Masonic building that's just outside of here, right?

So just speaking of sitting in pubs, if you walk past the pub, maybe not tonight, but usually on a lunchtime around Friday, you'll see a lot of men who are in black suits with briefcases sitting on the table and they are the Masonic people going inside and inside those briefcases more often than not there's a wizard's wand what yeah they still use wizard wands as part of like ritual so if you opened up their briefcase it would be like it would be like Harry Potter what is it a stick it's a stick

it's yeah not like a classic magician with the two white ends on the on the black stick oh so it is just a stick no it's

a guardian leviosa it's that kind of shit you know Is it a wand or a stick?

If it works and does anything, it's a wand.

And if not, it's a stick.

So they're all sticks.

I think that's what I'm saying.

Sheridan, by the way, who was the owner who was doing the drinking outside, he once fought a duel on Henrietta Street down the road.

He'd eloped with a girl who'd been promised by her family to another man.

And this man came back and they decided to have a duel.

And the duel was so bloody that that was the time that the weapon of choice for duelists became the pistol, whereas previously it had been swords.

What?

Because they just so much.

much cut each other up so much.

Oh, really?

Yeah, yeah.

Wow, that's so weird that in a duel, you'd be like, hey, you've gone too far.

We're taking your swords away.

That's the point, isn't it?

I mean, they often would just deliberately nick each other.

They wouldn't actually try and kill each other.

It'd be whoever drew blood first.

And you're not supposed to maul the person.

It wasn't just meant to tear them to shreds like a rabid dog.

It was meant to be, you know, one clean shot, isn't it?

Is it?

Yeah, you wouldn't have gone down well in the world of dueling.

He's done with his magic wand.

Come on!

God's sake, it's not working.

Oh, dear.

It's a shame that in this fire, they didn't have one of their famous water-based shows.

Because I think we've talked a bit before about how, in the olden days, stagecraft was so much more impressive.

So, here tonight, for the listener, it's kind of shit.

We've got two tables,

a couple of tablecloths, and a projector screen behind us.

Back in the day, they would create a flood on stage.

The whole stage would be transformed into a lake.

Can I just say thank you to our sound and lights team who have

worked very hard today to get this working?

No.

Yeah.

But they did used to do amazing things.

So this stage was flooded quite a few times.

There was an earthquake simulated here where the whole thing vibrated.

But one of the best floods was actually in a show that apparently saved the Drury Lane Theatre.

So this was in 1803 and it was a show called The Caravan.

And after it was put on, the manager of this theater said, you know, we were about to go under.

They were already struggling.

Thank God for this play.

And basically, the reason it was so successful was because it was the era of famous dogs.

And the star of the show was a dog.

So at the end of the show,

there was a big flood which simulated a lake.

Someone's son fell into the lake off a boat.

And then this trained live dog every night on stage jumped into the lake on stage and rescued this boy.

This dog, Carlo, became the biggest celebrity of his day.

People thought he was better than any other actor.

He got louder applause than David Garrick.

He actually had a spin-off biography written about him the year after called The Life of Carlo.

It was great.

He eventually got in trouble because his agent started demanding too much money.

So there was a bit of a scuffle over whether he was going to perform one night and a bit of a riot.

But yeah, the job days of theater.

It is an amazing, like, just for us to, for a second, appreciate the history of this place, you know, the greatest clown of all time, arguably Grimaldi, used to perform on this stage.

And the first ever production of the West End of My Fair Lady with Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison that happened right here on this stage.

Monty Python recorded albums here.

Dame Edna Everidge did shows here.

Like this is a frozen is on here.

Yeah.

Is it?

Yeah.

Wow.

Did you hear about the the horses in 1909?

This was a good show.

Oh yeah.

I can actually write down the name of the show.

This was this stage.

If you can picture this now, it was home to 12 horses galloping at the audience on a special horse treadmill.

Yeah.

To do a horse race.

I think they had like 12 treadmills along, and imagine how terrifying it was.

They were running full bolt at you like an OK Go video.

Yeah,

exactly.

It's the original OK Go.

That's amazing.

It's just bad.

And that did malfunction, I think.

I think it was called the Whip

The play, and it malfunctioned on the first night.

It also featured a train crash live on stage.

That's right.

And they brought on a real train and sort of crashed it.

It was a real train.

Yeah.

Had to be a different train every night.

And in the first night, so the main horse, the Equine Hero, was supposed to win the race.

And the first night, the horse lost the race somehow.

Which sounds a bit all because it has to change the whole plot.

And the person in the horse box behind it, it crashed and flew up into the rafters, disappeared offstage, and ended up dangling from the,

what are they called?

The bits that hang down from the theater backstage?

The flies.

Flies.

I think it also, performances in this particular room have done, it's done weird things to people.

And there's quite a few stories of the royals that used to come.

So, for example, George V saw an actor called Frank Benson, who was so good at Julius Caesar that right after, and this is in 1916,

he had a sword taken out of the props room to knight him immediately because he was like, you were so great.

I'm going to make you a sir right here.

He was in his bloodied toga.

Yeah, it used to be pretty upsetting for him.

You see the actual king coming towards you with a sword.

And then another king, apparently, and this is the 18th century, he saw a play called The Mysterious Husband, and he got so emotional that he went, it's banned.

He was like, that's so amazing.

That's incredible.

Never again.

No one can see this.

That was Sarah Siddens, though, who was the greatest actress ever known to man.

And it was George III who was mad.

But Sarah Siddens, there was a thing called Siddens fever.

Audiences would go into fainting fits and shrieking in paroxysms.

She was the Beatles of her day, and they had to be helped out of the theatre.

And she was such a compelling actress that there were various occasions where the audience had to be reassured.

So, at one point in a scene, her lover's strangled before her, and she falls lifeless onto the stage.

The audience gets so upset and thinks that she's really dead.

So, the manager actually had to come on stage and explain to the audience that she was just acting

and she was fine.

You mentioned George III.

Of course, there was an assassination attempt on him in this very theater in 1800, and it was by a man called james hatfield who also thought he was george ii

oh oh so like there can only be one yeah yeah what's he doing here this is this is not exactly and they came over and he tried to kill him and then he got arrested and i think he was the first person to plead insanity i think wow and to be found not guilty in fact for insanity incredible and i think they might have changed the law to say that you can detain people even if they're found not guilty after that because he was obviously a very dangerous human being right

god save the king apparently this was the first major performance of that song it got a rapturous applause and then it subsequently people are like have you heard this new track it's amazing and then it became it became the song of the of the nation yeah

it was during war with scotland wasn't it Essentially, that that happened.

They sort of were singing God Save the King.

And actually, the Scots were singing God Save the King at the same time, but they were talking about a different king.

And it was why they added the extra verse, which was, may he he sedition hush, and like a torrent rush, rebellious Scots to crush.

God save the king.

Is it still in there?

It's still in, but it's not like, it's not a fan favorite.

Can we mention the ghost quickly?

We can't mention the ghost, right?

Well, the thing is, is everyone says that this is the most haunted theater in the world that apparently has five ghosts in here.

Now, I don't personally believe in ghosts.

I love hearing the stories.

And we've spoken to, just with James and I, just before we came on stage, we spoke to a mysterious old lady.

No, she, okay, so some of the famous ghosts here are Joseph Grimaldi, supposedly.

Yeah, you get like, if you look in the corners, you might see some floating clown heads.

Yeah, and also supposedly for acts on stage, if Grimaldi feels as if you're not doing well, you get kicked up the butt.

And that has happened to a few people, according to Yvette Fielding on Most Haunted.

But But the most interesting thing is, it's not about the anecdotes that you read in the papers, it's the real-life story.

So, we were on the side of stage, and we spoke to two of the guys who work here, and they often have to go up right up into there where the chandeliers are, and there's a big vacuous space there that they can go in and they can alter things.

And the first guy that we spoke to, who's called Specs,

he said he saw some

blue legs, just blue legs.

How good is this guy's eyesight?

His nickname is Spex.

Is it possible he saw someone in jeans and a dark top

and can i just say thank you again to all the people who have helped make this happen tonight

and ben ben was the second guy who separately saw it uh something happened with blue legs they they were he was like i saw blue legs up there and he's like i saw blue legs the g the denim jean has been the most popular trouser in the world for a century well what are they doing up there in the ceiling probably being spooky

exactly um panto was pretty well invented here.

Modern Panto.

We believe in ghosts.

We're done with ghosts.

Sorry, sorry.

No, no, it's fine.

It's fine.

But Modern Panto was basically invented here.

Oh, no, it wasn't.

Thank you.

It's just it were you guys

because I gave you the feed line twice and it was nothing and James had to step in and that's unprofessional.

You should all see because he would have done it three, four, five times.

You'll all feel a bit of a bump up your bum now from Joseph Grimaldi himself.

Oh no, they won't.

There was Augustus Harris.

There's a bust of him on the corner of the building.

It's fantastic.

He was one of the managers

kind of late 19th, early 20th century, and he basically invented modern pantomime.

And the shows that went on here were extraordinary.

There was one production of Alibaba and the 40 Thieves, which featured 500 people on this stage.

Okay.

What?

There is a scene in this play where each of the 40 thieves comes out of the cave, like

the back of the stage.

Each of them brings out their own band of followers.

took 40 minutes for everyone to come out of this bloody cave.

It started at 7:30 p.m.

and it ended at 1 in the morning, the show.

Wow.

And that's what we'll be doing in tribute tonight.

I'm going to have to move us on in a sec.

We mentioned David Garrick earlier.

He ran the place before Sheridan.

And he had a thing where he wanted to ban young drunk men from sitting on the stage.

He said, no, Mo, we're not having it.

But it took him 15 years to eventually get the last one off.

And it used to be that there were lots of riots in theaters and stuff, didn't you?

And it always used to happen.

It would be like the poshos would be in the stalls, like you guys, and then the scum would be right up there.

Yeah.

The greasy scumbags,

as Washington Irving wrote about them, saying that if they didn't like the show, they would throw stuff, but it wouldn't be able to reach the stage.

So it would just hit the people in the stalls.

and he said your advice was just to sit down quietly bend your back to it and let it happen wow right

it was even kings rioted here right and this is such a cool thing about this theater which is that it's the only theater in the world according to its website which has two royal boxes because The king had a punch up here once.

Again, this was King George III of Madness of Fame.

And there were two King George IIIs?

No, it was him and his son, Prince Regent.

And they were having a big old feud because I think the Prince Regent kept saying, you're really mad, Dad, let me take over.

And he was like, no, I'm not.

And so they came to Drury Lane one night to see a show.

They had a massive punch-up together.

And so the theatre said, listen, lads, you can't be doing that.

From now on, we're going to make two royal boxes.

Lads.

We're going to have to make two boxes now.

I sat in the Prince of Wales box earlier.

I think it's up here.

It's on this side.

Is someone in there?

Oh, there's people in there.

Wait, what's that?

A pair of blue legs?

Oh.

Hey, do you know, just a very random thing, but we can't really see any of you with the lights like this.

And

when Barry Humphreys did the Day Medna show here, it's got this fascinating document where it's the entire map of the audience.

And there's a key, a legend at the bottom, where anyone who Day Medna had a very specific joke to tell to.

there would be the word that would say the type of person that was in the crowd that the joke needed to be made of.

So before Barry Humphreys came on stage every night, he memorized the paper.

And what would he say, like middle-aged man?

Yeah.

Exactly.

So we'd say that in the legend.

So he'd be like, oh, you know, middle-aged men like you, sir.

And he wouldn't know where he, that was memory.

He had to hope that that person was.

That was the same with me saying the scumbags were up there.

Yes.

So, what do this animal

and this animal

and this animal

have in common?

They all live on an organic valley valley farm.

Organic Valley dairy comes from small organic family farms that protect the land and the plants and animals that live on it from toxic pesticides, which leads to a thriving ecosystem and delicious, nutritious milk and cheese.

Learn more at OV.coop and taste the difference.

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

My fact this week is that the president of Slovenia's previous job was to stop people naming cakes after Melania Trump.

Right.

How was this kind of on a one-on-one basis?

As in, did she wait until someone had named a cake after Melania Trump and then tell them to stop?

Or did she just tell people, don't do that, if you were thinking about it?

It was sort of the latter, really.

She said, you know, to the population of Slovenia, if you are thinking about doing this, but it was based on the fact that a lot of people already were.

I think it wasn't so much people in their kitchen making a cake and going, I shall name the Melania, as companies selling cakes and going, this is a Melania cake.

No, she had spies in every home, James.

Shall I say why she wanted to do this?

Absolutely, yeah.

Otherwise, it's very confusing.

But she was a lawyer.

And it's a woman called Natasha Piertz Moussar.

And before she became president, she did a PhD in law and immediately founded her own law firm in 2016, which was Piertz, Moussar and Partners.

And Melania Trump immediately hired her because this is around about the time, I don't know if you remember, when Donald Trump was becoming president president of America, Melania was getting a lot more attention, and the people of Slovenia, the bakers of Slovenia, were capitalizing on it and naming all sorts of stuff after her.

And so Melania said to Pits Muzart, look, can you send a press release out to all these cake makers saying, stop naming the cake after all that stuff?

There was a lot of stuff.

There was honey from Melania's home garden.

There was the Melania breakfast pudding.

Sounds amazing, a breakfast pudding.

There was a local salami named

lady after her.

My favorite one was a pancake maker who created a Melania Trump theme pancake.

And when he was asked by reporters if he was worried about copyright infringement, he said, no, I'm not worried about copyright infringement.

I don't really know what copyright infringement is.

So I shall not worry about it.

That's very funny.

Yeah, there was an underwear lying, some high-heel shoes.

But also, Ljubljana named their Christmas tree Melania.

And the journalists asked, are they going to make them change that name?

And they said, no, we have nothing against the Christmas tree named Melania because this has nothing to do with commercial purposes.

So they were just trying to stop people from making money off the back of her, which I think is fair enough.

Yeah, look, not criticizing.

Absolutely fair enough.

She did a good job.

You'll not find a single thing in Slovenia named after Melania Trump anymore.

But yeah, it was interesting.

And she's an interesting woman.

She did have lots of jobs.

She was a TV presenter, Pierce Mutsar.

Oh, yeah.

And became a lawyer.

And she was also the lawyer who, when everyone was saying that Melania had been an escort before she met Trump, she was the one who shut all those down as well.

Oh, right.

Okay, right.

I found something, just, I know we'll come back to Slovenian politics in a moment, but please.

There is, this is interesting, an orchid named after Melania Trump,

made by a guy in America called Arthur Chadwick, okay?

I'd never heard of him before.

He's an orchid breeder.

And you can kind of experiment with orchids.

You can make your own new variants.

And, you know, there's a lot of kind of craft and science behind it.

And every single election, Arthur Chadwick makes two new orchids and he names them after the two potential first ladies.

Wow.

So there is a Michelle Obama orchid.

Is there a Bill Clinton one?

Yes, because he keeps a reject orchid pile.

Oh, he doesn't just stomp them down when they lose.

No.

Because some of them are beautiful.

Yeah, so if Hillary Clinton had won that election, then Bill Clinton would have, that orchid would have been sort of made public.

But as it is, it's just sort of festering in his greenhouse.

And he's really sad about that because, he says the Ann Romney is a real stunner in a definitely not creepy tone of voice like that.

Yeah, so there is just this huge pile of orchids that are either the winners or the others.

That's actually surprising.

Why does he not just release them all?

If he's invented a new plan, I don't like that's pretty incredible.

But yeah,

weird things that you can trademark.

Cakes do get trademarks, I wouldn't say all the time, but relatively often, I would say.

There was, in 2012, a local baker called Mary's Cakes and Pastries in Alabama received a cease and desist letter from the University of Alabama for using their A.

And turns out the university trademarked the letter A.

Oh, wow.

Was it a particular style of letter A?

It was a style of A.

Was it like a font or a font that they'd created?

Yep.

I mean, but I think her argument was: they get eaten really quickly if they're good enough cakes.

So that A is not going to be sitting there forever.

It doesn't work.

If I make a Mars bar and I say, well, it's really tasty, so people will eat it straight away.

Yeah, so it doesn't matter.

See, this this is why I'm not a lawyer.

You're absolutely right.

It doesn't work as a defense at all, does it?

Have you heard about the illegal bakeries of Florence?

No.

These are great.

These are sort of underground late-night bakeries in Florence because it's not allowed to sell pastries directly to the public if you're a baker.

What?

I know, I know, I know.

But the city has a kind of pastry underworld.

Can you?

I just feel like we need to revisit.

Do we know why?

Is this just a Florentine mystery?

You can't.

It must be that the people who own the shops have their own unions and stuff, right?

There's probably some complicated reason which I didn't bother researching, but you're absolutely right.

I'm sorry.

But just if we take that as red, quite an unlikely sounding thing, that if you're a baker, you're not allowed to sell bread to the public, whatever.

But at night, you knock on a door, you go down an alley, you do it in the reverse order, you

come and find me.

You go

down the alley, you knock on the door, you get a coin, you get a Euro out, and you pass it through the window into the wizard hand of the night Florentine baker, and you take whatever you're given, right?

So they'll give you something.

Oh, really?

Yeah, a mini cake, a piece of bread, probably one of those things.

And if you're loud or drunk, they serve nobody.

They ban the whole queue.

You know, they just say, right, go away.

I'm not interested.

They shut up shop for half an hour.

That was like when one person in class at school was a dick in class, and you all got detention.

That's it.

That's what happens in the night, night Florence Bakeries.

I love, Andy, I've got to say, I love this new method of you making a fact even more interesting.

By entering mistazzo into it.

You put a coin through a door.

That's just buying something Andy, isn't it?

That's Tesco.

No.

No, no.

It's not far off.

You put the coin in a slit and it gives you a trolley and you take the trolley, unshackle it from its prison.

Free it.

Free the wobbly beast.

And that's disgusting.

Can I just say

free the wobbly beast.

You You get kicked out of Tesco if you do that.

No,

done.

I've been getting away with that for about four months and now you've robbed me completely.

You're going to have to find facts now.

Anyway, sorry.

This actually is so similar to something I was researching for the Drury Lane fact.

What's the one thing you associate with Drury Lane?

The Muffin Man.

The Muffin Man.

The Muffin Man.

I was looking that up because I just suddenly thought, what the fuck is a Muffin Man?

And in the early 1800s, and he was disappearing by the 1830s because people could afford to make their own muffins, he was someone who walked down the street ringing a bell, and everyone knew the Muffin Man's bell, and children flocked to the door, begged their parents to be let out, just like an ice cream van.

So, you knew the Muffin Man's Bell when he came?

I have to tell you a moment that happened at home the other day.

Oh, God.

I was at home with my son, Ted, he's four, and out of nowhere, I was just sitting on the couch, and I went, Do you know the Muffin Man?

And he went, You know the Muffin Man?

And I was like, Yeah, I,

and he meant the song.

He had no idea that I knew the song.

And I was like, I do know the Muffin Man.

And he went, The Muffin Man?

And it was like a fucking comedy sketch, but

it was the sweetest thing I've ever experienced.

You know the Muffin Man?

Beautiful.

Dan, you know there's quite annoying podcasts where parents wang on about their kids that no one cares about.

You mean the most successful podcast in the UK parenting?

Hell, yeah, I do.

Yeah.

Maybe start one of those.

I'm just trying to bring in that crowd.

Let's bring things back to edible underwear.

Oh,

okay.

Do you know that?

Any underwear is edible if you are determined and patient?

They were invented by David Sanderson and Lee Brady, who were drunk and stoned and discussing the phrase, eat my shorts.

And they thought, let's make some edible underwear, which they made with licorice.

And they tried to get a trademark.

The trademark was candy pants.

But the U.S.

Patent Office wouldn't give them a trademark with the explanation that the words candy and pants were mutually exclusive.

Oh, and they were saying, Look, we've proved it wrong.

Yeah, but they were saying there is no way you can have candy pants, so we're not going to let you trademark it.

That's amazing.

They're not still made of licorice, are they?

No, they're not.

Those ones got hot and sweaty and fell apart,

which is quite sexy, I suppose.

But they got such a good thing.

So, you want something sensible and durable for those long nights?

Sensible, durable, and edible.

I'll have mine made of thick, thick pastry, please.

That'll be one Euro

If you name your child

after

a copyrighted character, you can get in trouble over it.

So who's a copyright?

Like Dennis the Menace, say.

Perfect.

Hand burglar.

These are names that you wouldn't necessarily give to your children, I guess.

Exactly.

And there was a problem recently, very recently, the Home Office in the UK, normally a benevolent and understanding organisation.

They denied a seven-year-old boy a passport when his family applied for it on his behalf because he was named Loki Skywalker Mowbray.

And they said Skywalker is copyrighted.

That's interesting.

I know, and this happened again.

Because they just gave a fucking passport to Paddington Bear.

I know.

I know.

Yeah, but he is Paddington Bear.

He is Paddington Bear.

Yeah, yeah.

He's not named after him.

This happened again.

There was a child with the name Khaleesi, who's a Game of Thrones character, and they were also turned down.

They were told, no, you're going to need a letter from Warner Brothers to get your child a passport.

Really?

The fact is that Warner Brothers have trademarked the name Khaleesi for goods and services, not for people.

But is there worrying that they will then turn 18 and set up the Khaleesi edible underwear company?

And then they say, well, it's my name.

I'm allowed to do it.

I don't know if the Home Office thinks in that kind of strategic manner.

I think it was just a flub.

I think you are allowed to call your child Skywalker.

James, you mentioned the U.S.

Patent Office and I

discovered in the course of this research that the U.S.

Patent Office hadn't trademarked itself until three years ago.

No.

Yeah.

It's been around since 1802 and it was having a serious problem because scammers kept on pretending to be the U.S.

Patent Office and they'd call you up and they'd say, hey, you need to trademark this, pay us 100 quid and we'll do it for you.

And the U.S.

Patent Office was like, oh, what are we going to do?

And a spokesperson said, we tried all sorts of things to try to protect people, and eventually we stumbled upon the good idea of registering ourselves with the US patent office.

It is tricky because I think there are cases where it's clearly, you know, you don't want someone, if you're Melania Trump, you don't want someone literally putting your face on a cake that they've made and then flogging it for money.

Okay, just see what you think of this example.

This is a guy in 1990.

He filed a trademark for stealth condoms, okay?

Stealth?

Stealth condoms?

And the catch line was.

Oh, hang on.

Surprise her.

no

is they'll never see you coming right

that's good okay now oh Jesus good

now Northrop who made the stealth bomber plane yeah claimed this is damaging to our trademark

and it infringes our rights now okay so whose side are you on at the moment

I am on the condom side okay I think what if they came in packages shaped like the stealth bomber plane?

And now I think I'm on the bomber's side.

Yeah.

And his business voicemail said, Howdy, this is John.

Me and the rest of the stealth test pilots are out right now.

Yeah.

There are good people on both sides.

It's tricky.

It's tricky.

Speaking of good people on both sides, Cafe Press, which makes T-shirts or sells T-shirts, they took down a T-shirt that someone had designed that called Donald Trump a Cheeto-faced shit gibbon.

And they said that they took it down because it violates Frito-Lay's trademark of Cheeto.

And they suggested maybe instead you could call him a cheese puff-faced shit gibbon.

Wow.

It is time for fact number three, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that Tower Hamlets in London has by far the most 105-year-olds in the country,

and by far the fewest 90-year-olds.

Riddle me that.

How is that possible?

Well, this is from a recent study by Saul Justin Newman at Oxford University, and it's called Supercentenarian and Remarkable Age Records Exhibit Patterns Indicative of Clerical Errors and Pension Fraud.

Killer time.

And he basically says that while most people say that longevity is due to eating lots of vegetables and your genetics and stuff like that, in actual fact, it tends to be people pretending they're old.

It's so good, this.

It's so good.

It's amazing.

There's all this stuff about blue zones.

Has anyone heard of that?

There's some weird bits around the world where there's an island off the coast of Japan, there's a bit of Italy, there are just various zones where people seem to live to incredible ages.

For decades, people have been studying the diets of these places and the social customs and everything.

And it it turns out what they all have in common is people's birth certificates have gone missing at some point.

Apparently, the state introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69% fall in the number of people over 100.

It's amazing.

A Japanese government review in 2010 found that 82% of Japanese people over the age of 100 were dead.

They're not there.

And in China hamlets, is it presumably it's well A, I am confused about how it can be not many 90-year-olds, but presumably I think there's a correlation between how wealthy or not an area is and this, right?

Because the incentive, the pension for all of them.

It is that.

And it's also, there's lots of different things, basically, but it's the 90-year-olds are, a lot of them have taken over the lives of people from the previous generation.

So maybe your parents die and they're about to get their pension and you decide, well, I'm going to...

pretend that I'm 65 years old and I'm going to get the pension instead, that kind of thing.

We should quickly say for overseas listeners, so Tower Hamlets, Bit of London, which is kind of a multiple number of names that you might recognize.

So if you've ever been to the Tower of London, that will be in Tower Hamlets.

Bow is in Tower Hamlets.

Bethnal Green.

Wow.

Okay.

How old are you guys?

It's so creepy when you ask that fan's term.

These days, after what's happened in the BBC, you have to ask.

Yeah, it's like Tower Hamlets.

The name comes from, it was like the little villages that were around the tower of london like brick lane is in tower hamlets yeah whitechapel is all that kind of stuff yeah can i give you guys a bit of the maths about how this yeah and in fact how how people who are fibbing or wrong tend to dominate the stats okay just okay let's say right now i gave myself 10 years okay i declared i was in my late 40s rather than in my late 30s okay i'm likely to have a better lifetime than you know what i i feel like they didn't believe you and that's really insulting yeah

i'm 37.

I'm practically in my early 30s.

But if I did that, I would have a better lifespan, right?

Literally because

I'm younger than my declared age.

So over time, the people who have aged themselves up, like I have, they are a bigger proportion of that population.

And by the time I'm 90, but I'm claiming I'm 100, it's mostly people like me.

So

one in a thousand people who live to 100, then live to 110.

And if only one in a thousand people are committing fraud, they they will be more common than real super centenarians yeah you see what i mean so even if the fraud is very very unusual it just becomes more obvious because there's less people around exactly right yeah so if you meet a 110 year old it's likely they're a liar

well i believe so this guy this person saw justin newman he basically said if it turned out that 70 of the galaxies that we thought existed didn't exist or 70 of the people in the uk that we said existed didn't exist there'd be a massive scandal but the thing is, we all kind of want to believe that people live to old age.

And actually, what's the damage?

Do you know what I mean?

Well, the damage is that we've all force-fed ourselves olive oil and, you know,

and made friends with each other.

Yeah.

That's the thing.

So, so, my grandmother, my sorry, my great-grandmother, she lived to 103, okay?

Full shit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, she was 65, my great-grandmother.

I had a conversation with her before she passed away and after.

That's the kind of guy I am.

Love a seance.

So I said to her, what's the secret to

your long life?

And she said,

milk.

And that was her answer.

And then she said, and happiness.

And it was a kind of, it was a nice thing.

And I just did a random Google of like claims they live to this age because of, and the things that come up.

So one person said being single is why they live to their age.

Another said regularly drinking the beer Coors Light, which is an American drink.

Someone else said luck and fish and chips, adding that in.

One person said giving up cigarettes.

That was a 117-year-old who decided to quit at that age and ended up living till 122.

So there's something in that.

And then the oldest Briton in history, Henry Allingham, said a bunch of stuff, but mainly the wild, wild women.

That was his thing.

So there's no consensus.

Well, it's almost like when you put a sample size of one, you can't draw a reliable conclusion, isn't it?

I think the luck is quite a good one.

It's quite a likely one, really.

Yeah, because everyone says it's like genetics or this or whatever.

There's a guy called Professor David Chems at University College London, and he looks after nematode worms.

And these nematode worms are all genetically identical to each other.

They all live in exactly the same place.

They all should be, you know, living exactly the same amount of time.

But, like, some of them die of old age at about 10 days, and some of them die at old age about 30 days.

Wow.

And it's just like, you know, you can't tell which one it's going to be.

It's just kind of lucky.

Yes,

well, but they do say making friends.

Do some of them club together and befriend each other?

The worms?

Yeah.

Sure.

I feel like that's the only variable you can change under those conditions.

They all go outside and smoke together.

So that's nice.

So there's something to do.

Yeah, they do do that.

They do say that the friendship thing is true.

There was a town called Rosetto in Pennsylvania, wasn't there, where everyone there was very, they were kind of closely related.

There were just a few families.

They had a lot of social cohesion and they had a very, very high lifespan.

But then as soon as basically they let the foreigners in from other towns and other cities, suddenly they regressed to the national average.

So that's a good reason to be xenophobic.

Yeah, nice.

We're that kind of podcast.

Yeah, exactly.

You know,

Jeanne Carmont?

Oh, yeah.

So she's the French woman, right?

The oldest person ever.

We spoke,

right?

Because the claim is a bit dodgy.

She's, I think, the only person who's ever lived to 122, supposedly.

Yeah.

So there was a piece about her in The New Scientist, or rather, it was about human skin, which is an interesting thing.

And the piece began on her 120th birthday, Jeanne Calmont, generally regarded as the oldest person ever to have lived, proved she still had her wits about her.

I've only got one wrinkle, she wisecracked, and I'm sitting on it.

Funny.

Wait, wait, wait.

Funny, but untrue.

The French woman was by then extremely wrinkly.

With deep wrinkles and discoloured skin.

She looked like butt cracks all over her body.

This is the theory that wrinkle, it's not aging that makes you wrinkled, it's wrinkles that make you age.

So does that mean if you have Botox, you can live forever?

Potentially.

Wow, wow.

And our new sponsors, sorry, I should have said this in the break.

No, there's a theory that as skin ages, it releases chemicals around your body that could kind of drive and accelerate the aging of other organs.

So, you know, kind of inflammatory proteins.

So, you know, that's a theory, isn't it?

Yeah.

On Madame Calmont, just very quickly on her, there's a book by Nikolai Zak and Philip Gibbs, which goes through all of the things that her friends and family have said and debunks everything that they've said, according to them.

The final line says that she's called Madame Calmont.

And in French, the phrase Madame Calment

means Madame, she is lying.

So, if that's not evidence, I don't know what it is.

Wow, it's huge.

There was a, I just want to say, not all of these people are deliberate liars.

One of the things that Saul Newman pointed out, and I think he's won an Ig Nobel Prize for his research, like he is amazing that he's done this.

He's kind of exploding this myth.

And he pointed out that a lot of people just don't remember their age.

And I suppose that felt a tiny bit true.

So in polling, he was saying that in like big polling samples, when you ask people their age and then you cross-check it with what you know is their age, often it's wrong.

And I actually ended up on Mumsnet, one of my favorite sources.

And the woman at the top said, I regularly have to Google how old am I and put in my date of birth to work it out.

Apparently I'm 50.

And then this woman said, I remembered loads of phone numbers, postcodes, national insurance numbers for my entire family, all my car details, my government gateway number, all login codes ever, including random number strings, but I can't remember how old my children, husband, or myself are.

And then loads of people agreed with that.

That's so funny.

I think it's quite odd.

Because I think all of those other numbers always stay the same.

Like your government gateway number is always the same.

Your NI number is always the same.

But your bloody age keeps going bloody up.

I lose my bank card every six months, so it actually changes more often than my age.

If you get to be lucky enough to get very old, one of the things that you need to defeat is falling.

That's the big thing, right?

So there's a lot of technology at the moment where it's kind of like in avatar when they get into those machines and they walk around.

It keeps balance like an exoskeleton.

Like an exoskeleton and make sure that you don't fall out.

We're going this way.

Someone else is going the other way and there's a system that they're trialing out.

Wait, wait, what?

Destabilizing babies?

What's the...

So there's a guy.

Those little guys, they don't fall over often enough for my liking.

There's a guy called Clive Pye.

He brings people in and the idea is to make you understand how tripping can happen quite easily.

I'm going to just shove you.

And the idea is that if you can understand how balance works, rather than needing a giant exoskeleton, then maybe we could all be living till 150.

But they're looking for volunteers to do the shoving and pushing because I'm so available.

You want to shove old people?

In a controlled environment.

I don't say it like that, but yeah, I think I do.

It's a tough job, but someone has to do it, Anna.

Someone has to do it.

Okay.

The idea is that if they can write themselves, then when they're at home, they're ready for the moment when when they trip on a card.

What if they write themselves and then Anna pushes them even harder?

Probably.

Did you guys hear of John Taylor?

John Taylor's dad.

He's buried in Scotland.

He was born in 1633 and he lived to the age of 137.

Oh.

Yeah.

He was a miner.

He worked in mines, lead mines and gold mines, only until the age of 117 when he found he was slowing down a bit and retired.

Anyway, I just found a very good report on him on the Gerontology website which says it says on his gravestone that he lived until the age of 137.

People are now quite sure that he was in fact actually 133.

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

My fact this week is that in 1979, the not terribly good club of Great Britain, which celebrated failure, had to depose its president for being too successful at the job.

So it was formed in 1977, and Stephen Pyle was the president.

He was the founder.

And basically, it was a collection of people who really were incompetent at things and wanted to celebrate that fact.

And so after a lot of meetings, they put together this book, The Book of Heroic Failures.

Unfortunately, the book became a bestseller, which meant that the president was a success.

And so he had to leave his role as the company head.

It got even worse because at the back of the book was an application form that meant you could join the club itself.

And over 20,000 people applied, which was far too many, meaning the club was way too successful.

So they had to shut the club down entirely as well.

It's so good.

Yeah.

I have a little exciting thing to say.

Actually, earlier today, I rang Steven Pyle, this guy, author of one of the funniest books ever written.

This is huge.

This is like speaking to God in QI.

This is really, he's amazing.

So initially, I didn't get through because he sent me the wrong phone number.

Yes!

And after several hours of trying to get through to him, I eventually got the right phone number and we spoke.

But, I mean, so good.

But he said

he never, this was his way of having parties.

He said, I never held parties because I was never confident they would be a success of any sort.

So this club was a way of legislating for the fact everyone else had parties and I never did.

And they had these meetings and they would have people, they had a salon des incompetent where people would turn up and show off their particular area of failure.

This is who they had at one of their first salons.

I love this.

They had

our not terribly good parachutist, an extremely petite girl, outlined some of the problems caused by being so light that when she jumps in breezy conditions, she invariably goes up.

Come on.

By the time she lands the pilot has usually finished his tea and gone home.

And that's like dozens of those.

It's so good.

And this, so Andy's got sitting next to him on the table the hardback original edition of it.

It was reprinted in America and when they did that they forgot to include half of the introduction of the book.

So the next edition they published in America had a literal physical paper that was an erratum that was longer than the introduction itself sitting inside the book.

Anything that went wrong was a positive.

He said that he had these parties.

When his book came out, I was looking at the newspaper archives of the interviews, and he said he was going to book the Royal Albert Hall for a festival of incompetence.

But as far as I could see, it never happened.

Apart from anything else, he tried to book it from a payphone, which kept eating his coins and cutting him off.

But it was supposed to have the UK's only tone-deaf rock group and the worst animal trainer in the country with his elephant Sheba.

I mean who doesn't want to see that?

But yeah, the book is amazing.

I mean, you could just literally sit here for 50 minutes and read bits.

My favorite one.

That's all we're going to do, isn't it?

My favorite one is the guy, Roger Moss, in 1993, who was mugged.

And the mugger took $20 out of his wallet.

But as the mugger went to go away, Moss yelled, Give me my wallet back.

And the mugger was so confused, he gave him his wallet back, but he accidentally gave him his own wallet,

which contained $250.

So good.

The opening example in the original book is The Least Successful Explorer and it's a guy called Thomas Nuttall, 1786 to 1859, a pioneer botanist who, as an explorer, his work was characterized by the fact that he was almost permanently lost.

During his expedition in 1812, his colleagues frequently had to light beacons in the evening to help him find his way back to camp.

One night, he completely failed to return and the search party was sent out.

As it approached him in the darkness, Nuttall assumed that it was aggressive locals and had to escape.

They pursued him for three days through bush and river until he accidentally wandered back into camp.

That's the kind of stuff.

And it's a real variety, right?

It's great historic stories.

And, you know, the woman who called the fire brigade to rescue her cat, which they did, but then immediately ran it over.

It's stuff like that.

But one of the things that I got obsessed with, and I have to recommend everyone downloads it, it's a book called English as She Is Spoke.

And it's by a guy called Pedro Carolino.

He it was published in 1883, and it's an English to Portuguese phrase book.

But Pedro Carolino did not speak English, nor did he have an English to Portuguese dictionary.

What he had was a French to Portuguese dictionary and a French to English dictionary.

So he took Portuguese phrases, sent them through these two filters, and you have to read it.

Every page is comedy gold.

So we'll have, you know, common things that you might say in conversation, the ears are too length.

For to visit a sick, you might say, live me see your tongue.

Have you pain to the heart?

And then in response, you might say, I felt some pain everywhere, body.

Are you altered?

Yes, I have thirsty often.

And the whole book is like

that's incredible.

It's such a good book.

So he does take it seriously.

He said that he thinks that the art of failure is a noble one.

Yeah.

And it's much more interesting than success.

Like, way more interesting.

And he also updates his own records.

So he used to keep a record for the smallest live show audience, which was a pantomime which one person turned up to.

Oh, no, he didn't.

The single audience member had to do both halves of that.

He had to say both halves of that.

But then the record was broken by an Australian folk singer called Jean Meloux, who hired Capital Theatre in Canberra to give a concert of his folk songs, which he did in front of an audience of zero.

The show overran by 20 minutes due to encores.

That's super fun.

So failure in general,

you might say choking in sport.

You know, you're doing very well and then suddenly you choke and you end up losing.

And choking is what happens when you overthink something.

The best solution, apparently, is wine.

That is reading the work of Dr.

Jerry Wine, who came up with distraction theory.

And in distraction theory, you kind of mutter to yourself or whistle to yourself or just do some kind of music in your head.

And that will stop you overthinking and just let you get on with some memory.

Oh, okay.

It's not like distraction if someone's running the hundred meters.

You say, Oh, what's that over there?

And they run off court.

I think the hundred meters is not classically a place where you run 80 meters and forget how to run.

Start crawling, run backwards.

Other sports where you get, what is it called the yips?

The yips.

The golf.

The yips, for sure.

We don't even like to say that word.

Really?

Is it like Macbeth, too?

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Well, we're all doomed.

Hope you've had a nice life.

I found a great failure recently, which is there was a TV show in the Netherlands called Netherlands Worst Driver.

And the winner was decided after one of the drivers ran over the host of the show.

And I've seen the footage and it's intense.

They just, it's all jokey.

You get an

inside of the car camera and then he just loses the plot.

He crashes into the wall and you literally see a person fly.

And

they go over and see him like, you're okay.

And then the rest of the show is the host doing his VTs from a hospital bed.

Going, my spine's okay, luckily.

I think we found a winner.

We do need to wrap up the show.

Here's a failure from 2023.

In Uganda, politicians tried to ban a festival that they described as an orgy of homosexuality, nudity, and drugs, akin to devil worship.

They failed to ban it, and the description caused a huge increase in sales,

including 5,000 foreigners who traveled to Uganda specifically for the event.

Lovely.

That is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

Drury Lane, you were awesome.

Thank you for having us.

Thank you to the ghosts for having us.

And we will be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

This is Bethany Frankl from Just Be with Bethany Frankl.

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