555: No Such Thing As Catherine Of Croydon

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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast.

This week coming to you live from Drury Lane.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Anna Toshinski, Andrew Hunter, Murray, and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered round 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, as well as the world-famous white cliffs of Dover, Britain is home to the world-unknown white cliffs of Croydon.

For listeners at home, we're looking at a majestic, huge set of glorious white cliffs.

I mean, in fairness, they are white cliffs, aren't they?

There's no doubt about that.

Are they white cliffs?

Are they a disused quarry?

It doesn't matter.

Oh, right.

Is that what they are?

They are the white cliffs of Croydon.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is a bit of Croydon.

Is there anyone in tonight from Croydon?

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

Excellent.

Were you familiar with the white cliffs of Croydon?

No, mixed with us.

Yeah, we weren't sure if it was a thing, and it turns out, Andy, you sort of helped to coin it, I think.

Well, I definitely didn't coin it.

This is in a bit.

Croydon is a bit of London, we should say, and in Croydon, there is a bit called Riddles Down, which is home to a disused truck quarry.

And if you look at it from the right angle, it looks exactly like the White Cliffs of Dover.

From sorry, from a right angle, or from

at right angles, which is the right angles.

So this, and in fact, quite a lot of my research, it comes from a new book which is called Croydonopolis

by Will Noble.

It is fantastic.

I cannot recommend it enough.

If you only read one book about Croydon this year, make it Croydonopolis.

Croydon gets a really bad rap for anyone listening overseas.

It's a shithole.

Well.

But it is, yeah, for international listeners, it is the punchline to jokes.

It's what is that place, you know?

It's like France is Belgium.

Yeah.

So, and famously, just people hate it.

I think most famously, David Bowie hated it, didn't he?

Did he?

And yeah.

Sorry, Dan, and you love David Bowie, and you love Croydon, apparently.

Yeah,

This is faithful.

He literally said Croydon was an insult to him.

He would say, it's so fucking Croydon to mean

he said it's the most derogatory thing you can say about something.

It is, and

I try to look for good stuff in the news about Croydon, and I mean, the headlines that come up do not do it any favours.

One here was, teenager loses finger at Croydon rave, but continues dancing because the bass was hard.

That's good.

Yeah, I guess so.

Yeah,

showing, you know, that's a good news story.

How about this one?

Freyden Hospital leaves human teeth embedded in man's leg after bizarre iPad trampoline incident.

Did you read any more into the article?

No, I thought it was better just leaving that as is.

Well, they do, they have a fun palace which has 60 trampolines.

Do they?

I believe.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, they do.

So Henry VIII said it was a place that he could never be without sickness.

And there's a city.

Did he mean sick hasn't good?

No, I don't think he did.

I think that would be very charitable.

It was one of his wives from there.

Catherine of Croydon.

That's right.

She was the fourth Catherine who never gets any credit.

No, the first one.

Who was she?

Catherine of Array?

I think he supposedly proposed to Catherine of Arrow.

It was one of the Catherines, anyway.

I'm one of the odds, 50-50.

Deforce beheaded, died.

Deforce beheaded.

Got some teeth stuck in their leg after an iPad accident.

But there is a huge and story history of Croydon, it turns out, and actually, we've all been very unfair to it.

So, for example, it used to be the summer residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Is that right?

Yeah.

I mean, some time ago.

I thought the summer residence was a bucolic, beachy, or mountainous place you went to relax, not a brutalist grey tower block.

But this is all before all the tower blocks and the car parks and things.

So

the name might mean valley where the wild saffron grows.

Right.

Krogdina.

Krogdina.

It's a nice.

It sounds

nicely.

I I think it used to be the place where all celebrities wanted to be seen, right?

At what period?

So we're talking early 20th century.

Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Babe Ruth, JFK, Rita Hayworth, all these people wanted to be seen in Croydon.

And that's because Croydon was where their airport was, the main airport in London.

And they weren't really doing airports in America at the time.

And planes are really cool and trendy and new.

So everyone wanted to go there and be seen with the airplanes.

Also, the base is hard.

No, you're right.

It was the aerodrome was a mega, and it was until the Second World War, it was basically the most, like, it had 100,000 visitors a year who were just turning up to see planes.

And Mayday was invented there, presumably by a pilot desperately trying to reject.

Sore it.

Mayday, Mayday.

And they're going, what's that?

Sounds awesome.

We should lock that in.

Is that like you're in trouble?

Amy Johnson flew from Croydon when she flew to Australia in 1930.

And then when she came back, she came back to Croydon airport and 200,000 people greeted her there.

So, sorry, she was the first woman to fly a long way.

To Australia.

Okay, yeah.

So she came back, and there were 200,000 people there.

And according to articles at the time, at least 12 people were run over by the slow-moving procession.

But one journalist said they were all quite cheerful as they were carried off to hospital.

Probably because they were leaving Croydon.

And apparently, the Daily Mail paid for all the compensation of anyone who got injured.

Oh, wow.

Yay.

Good old Daily Mail.

I said no one ever.

I did a quick hunt for sort of underappreciated white things in Croydon.

Arthur Conan Doyle lived in Croydon and he wrote quite a lot of the Sherlock Holmes stories there, obviously very, very famous.

But when he moved there, the first thing that he published, which was a three-volume book, was The White Company, which was a historical adventure novel, which was massive at the time.

No one now really knows what that is, unless you know Conan Doyle's bibliography really well, but it was big in the day and it kind of disappeared.

That was published while he lived in Croydon.

Will Hay, the comedian, in 1932,

he is noted as having discovered a great white spot on the planet Saturn from his garden in Croydon.

It was like a big new astronomical discovery.

Everyone's really excited.

Not so much anymore.

It's getting nothing in here.

And then lastly, C.B.

Frye, the great cricketer and sort of multi-everything person.

Wasn't his party trick?

He used to be able to just jump backwards onto a mantelpiece.

Yeah, that was his party trick.

He'd just be chatting to you and go, hoop!

And then he would be on top of the mantelpiece.

And he was like, party trick.

C.B.

Frye, lesser-known, appreciated white is his mother, Constance White.

White feels.

This is good crowbars.

The crowbars are strong.

It also has the world's grumpiest woman, Croydon, in it.

That's it.

Self-professed world's grumpiest woman.

This is according to a news article in 2015 about a woman who was completely naked aside from a large sash that read World's Grumpiest Woman who glued her bum to the Croydon Debenham store window.

From the inside or from the outside?

Do we know?

You'd think it would be too cold outside, but she was committed and she was actually wearing fake pubic hair, which which would have kept her warm.

So I'm going to say outside.

And

was it a protest?

Yes, but it was just a protest about how grumpy she was.

She just did a long rant about how grumpy she was.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

But Debenham said it's great to hear our customers like our window displays so much that they want to be part of it.

So it's good that they saw the silver lining.

It is quite more recent stories about Croydon have they've definitely, they're not Archbishop of Canterbury quality stories.

So one of the most recent stories about Croydon from the BBC is about a homeowner in South London who has complained after Transport for London erected a toilet for bus drivers outside his house.

He's called Brett Kemp and he said it was putting off potential buyers because you keep seeing bus drivers go in and go to the loo.

You should put a door on it.

I think even with a door, he says it's not the most appealing thing for potential buyers.

He says it's nicknamed the turdis.

To bring it a little bit more highbrow, Samuel Coleridge Taylor was born in Croydon.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge?

No, Samuel Coleridge Taylor.

Oh.

He was named after Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Confusingly, there's a piece called Kubla Khan, which was written by Taylor Coleridge and Coleridge Taylor.

So as in the words are written by Taylor Coleridge and the music is written by Coleridge Taylor.

Because he was a composer, the collateral one.

Yeah, yeah.

So he wrote a violin concerto.

towards the end of his life and he sent the music over to America so it could be learned before he went there.

Bad news, he sent it on the Titanic.

Oh no.

Good news, it turned out they'd been mislaid and they hadn't gone on the Titanic after all.

Bad news.

This is a roller coaster, Chase.

Well, it goes downhill quite quickly.

Bad news, he died before that discovery was made.

So it's his sort of undiscovered and then posthumous piece of work.

Yeah, exactly.

And they did play it 100 years after his death.

Wow, that's very cool.

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

We haven't even got onto White Cliffs of Dover yet.

Why do you need to when you've got the White Cliffs of Croydon?

Look at it.

You're right.

They used to have an atmospheric railway.

So do you know what that is?

No.

Okay, it's imagine a railway, but it doesn't operate with boring engines, diesel, electricity, whatever.

It's vacuum...

I don't need to explain an atmospheric railway to any of you.

You mean like a pneumatic railway?

I mean exactly that.

You mean a pneumatic railway?

Pneumatic railway.

A vacuum pipe railway, as I call it.

And this was going to be the future of transportation.

Right.

And it was very exciting.

It was mid-19th century.

It was when, you know, we hadn't definitely settled on the train.

The train was looking pretty good, but the atmospheric row was potential.

And it was actually built and it was tried out.

The only problems where there were, sometimes it would miss the station and it couldn't go backwards, so the passengers would have to walk along the tracks.

Or sometimes male passengers had to get out and give it a little push because it stopped and couldn't get going again.

And then when it got going again, it just left without you because you couldn't come back up.

And the third problem was that rats would chew their way in and then they would just fly their way along the tubes and out into the pumping station.

Hundreds of rats a day.

They had to put a sack over the outlet tube just to catch the rats.

But apart from that, it's great.

It's the system.

Wow.

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

My fact this week is that the world's most expensive super yacht probably doesn't exist?

What?

Wow, sounds like a dan fact, that one.

Sounds amazing.

What on earth does that mean?

Well,

I think it's an extraordinary thing.

If you Google, and all of you go to the world's most expensive super yacht, you've got loads and loads of top 10 lists of the most expensive yachts in the world.

And number one is always this one called History Supreme.

And these aren't like proper, probably boating websites, you know, they're reliable sources.

History Supreme is worth $4.8 billion.

The second on the list is Eclipse, which I think is or was owned by Roman Abramovich, which is $1.5 billion.

So this is, you know, three times more than that.

And it was bought by an anonymous Malaysian businessman.

It's extremely lavish, and it probably doesn't exist.

According to quite a few people who've looked into it and pointed out things like the photo, so it's never been seen in real life by anyone who's told anyone about it.

And it's quite hard to hide, I think, a super yacht.

They're not subtle.

But it could be floating somewhere secret, like private islands for the wealthy.

That's a thing.

That is a thing.

Well, it also, so a statement was issued by another yacht-making company, Buyer Yachts, saying that all the photos that were posted on the designer's website when it was designed a few years ago were actually of a completely different yacht that they designed, and they'd just been coloured gold.

Because one of the things about this yacht, amongst the many ridiculous features, is that it's covered in solid gold.

Another thing that's been pointed out is if a boat is covered in solid gold, it's going to struggle to float.

But it's so weird and it's insisted on.

And the designer, it's actually passed away now, but he's a guy called Stuart Hughes, known for designing very

expensive things, as you can imagine, like iPhones encrusted with diamonds and stuff.

And yeah, he said, I think the best thing about this super yacht that he said he'd made is a wall feature that's made from a meteor with Tyrannosaurus Rex bones shaved into it.

He is just making shit up now, isn't he?

It's mad.

So, what do we think the deal is?

Is this a tax thing, or is it just a joke, or what?

Do we know?

I think people think it might be like the one of the world's best pranks.

Because I don't know how it could be a tax thing.

I mean, yachts are quite a shady business anyway, right?

Often we don't really know the world that exists beyond them.

We don't know who the owners are.

It's said that the owner of this one is Malaysia's richest businessman, a guy called Robert Kwok.

I cannot just say they are owned by rich people who are often quite powerful as well.

So, I'd just like to say that I believe them all.

Yeah.

So here's the thing.

Robert Kwok is 101 years old.

What?

And yeah, he's 101 years old.

He turned, I think it was October, November last year, turned 101.

I know him.

No.

Yeah.

So, okay.

Now, do you remember last week on the, so the latest show that went out that as of recording was my parents had a salon and they used to do the hair of Bruce Lee's supposed mistress, Betty Ting, right?

Yes.

Another person whose hair they used to do was Robert Kwok.

No.

Yes.

So as a result, after he got his hair cut by my mum, he said, hey, you should have a salon in my Shangri-La Hotels, which he owned all the Shangri-La hotels in the world.

He's the founder.

So they set up a salon there.

So I kind of grew up with Robert Kwok in my life.

Did you ask him, or can you ask him about his yacht?

Yeah, so I messaged my sister because she's still best friends with his granddaughter.

And I messaged it just before the show.

We went to school with each other in Hong Kong.

I was going to do a humorous drawball of the audience of like, who owns a a yacht or knows anyone who owns a yacht because no one does.

But of course you do.

I don't own a yacht.

Yeah,

your best mates with the granular.

Oh, we know them.

Anyway, I messaged my sister, but it's, of course, she's in Australia, so we won't hear back for another 12 hours.

But I've been on his boat.

His yacht?

Yeah.

What?

A different one.

A different one.

It's not that great.

Wow.

Wow.

All right, look, we're all sucking up to billionaires.

So can I just say a couple of things about...

So Larry Ellison,

he's a Squirreler as well, he's founder of Oracle,

software guy.

He bought a yacht in 1999 that was called Izanami, and he changed the name after it was pointed out that that name was I'm a Nazi backwards.

No way.

I know.

Is that what they used to do?

You know, like ambulances have the name backwards.

If you look in your rearview mirror, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That guy, Larry Ellison, his yacht has someone in a speedboat who follows it around, and their whole job is to retrieve the basketballs that he throws overboard

because he's got a basketball.

Because he plays, but it's not just that's his hobby to throw basketballs overboard to torment a speedboat guy.

Yeah, he's got hoops.

He's got a hoop, and he must be really bad at basketball, you would think, because he misses quite often, and this guy has to go around and collect all the balls.

Because basketballs are so expensive that you can't.

No, I think it's because he cares about the environment.

Oh, okay.

because yachts are very very bad for the environment have you heard of the Prince of Brunei's one so he had one ages ago it's now been sold which of your parents

was the manicurist to him

he had one it's now gone but when he had it it was called tits

That was his yacht.

And

that's the thing in, you know,

it literally just means tits.

And he, and we think there's, there's a lot of questions about how the name came about, but they think it must be that because when a lot of his personal collection was sold, they found a lot of erotic statues.

He had watches with two figures that would copulate on the hour.

So he clearly had a thing for it.

They must be exhausted.

Yeah.

Jeffrey of Brunei is.

Yeah, that's right.

And Bill Clinton was meant to...

I think he's called Jeffrey.

Jeffrey of Brunei.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, Jeff of Brunei.

Cool.

And Sniffy of Brunei is his baby.

But yeah, Clinton was meant to go on it, but apparently they just said he can't because of the name.

They're like, we don't need that in our life.

We don't need the Clinton scandal like that.

And it has a helipad on it.

And his son, who's called Prince Hakim, is a helicopter pilot.

And he flies in a jumpsuit with the name Iceman in a reference to Val Kilmer from Top Gun.

Although backwards, Iceman reads, I am a twat.

Jokes on him.

Did you guys hear about the sort of the very ancient yachts, like

Roman yachts?

No?

So um caligula had a uh the emperor caligula had some pleasure barges basically which were kind of the ancient world equivalent of yachts um so uh the historian suetonius writes about them there were ten banks of oars which is a lot um they were about 240 feet long they were used mostly for parties they were kind of stationary uh i think they were on a lake actually a lake in italy um anyway emperor caligula commissioned them and he only got to enjoy them for a year because he was then stabbed to death by his senators and his own guards and everyone else.

But, I know, sad, but

they were dredged by Mussolini in the 1930s.

Also, spoiler alert, not a great ending ahead for Musso.

But this is the way, okay, this is the amazing thing about these yachts because they were luxurious, they were real, they sank, their location was known, and they were dredged, right?

There were some mosaics, beautiful mosaics, which had been dredged up.

And around the end of the Second World War, a lot of stuff was going missing across Europe.

And one of the mosaics just went AWOL, and it was never seen or heard of again until in New York, this was a couple of years ago, there was a book signing by a guy who'd written a book about Italian marbles.

And as he was sitting at the table doing his signing, he overheard a couple standing nearby.

One of them said to the other, Oh, Helen, look, that's your mosaic.

And a New York couple had bought it, not knowing where it was from.

And for the last 45 years, they'd been using it as a coffee table.

No.

Yeah.

Helen's my auntie.

That is amazing.

That is extraordinary.

So now it's got a coffee stain.

It's beautifully open into the middle.

I think it was repatriated, though.

I think it was agreed that they probably shouldn't be able to keep it.

And so it was sent back to Italy.

Didn't they get a replacement table at least?

I'm sure they did.

I said before they're bad for the environment yachts, and I think they are.

I mean, they use a lot of oil and stuff, and they have big anchors that can get rid of the seagrass in the bottom of the sea, stuff like that.

Jeff Bezos has got a new yacht.

A big anchor himself, I would say

massive anchor again a very powerful man

complete anchor yeah yeah

and his relies on wind power which is quite good unfortunately it has to be followed everywhere by a diesel engine support vessel that carries all of his supplies and also has his helicopter pad wow

yachts in waiting is a thing that is mad and the bigger super yachts have these other yachts that follow them around which i guess this is one of.

And they have everything, right?

They have additional accommodation for the slightly less favored guests.

The crew will stay on them.

And they also contain all the toys.

Now, if you're ever invited onto a yacht, I just think this is going to help you out in terms of terminology.

Do you know what the toys are?

Of course.

Yeah, of course.

Grow up on them.

No, they're jet skis and stuff like that, right?

Yeah, but according to the article.

They're large rubber ducks.

Yeah.

Oh, really?

Exactly.

Oh, right.

Sorry, yeah, yeah.

Jet skis, banana boats.

That's...

I thought that was, you know, they're referred to as the toys are kept in here.

All the entertainment.

They're massive as well, aren't they?

Like they are bigger than your average boat.

And this is the thing trawling behind.

Tits apparently had two trawling behind it.

They were supposedly called nipple one and nipple two.

But yeah,

it's wild.

You can't just buy a yacht.

You have to buy the follow-up yacht to carry all the stuff for your yacht.

It's so annoying.

It's like getting an app, like a game app, and then you have to pay for all the...

I mean, I don't do this, so I don't quite know how it works, but you have to pay for it.

That's pretty clear.

But it's like, I think it's like once a yacht salesman has seen that you can afford a yacht, they probably think, well, we could probably sell this guy another yacht.

There is, this is again slightly old-fashioned, like sailing yachts, you know, not super yachts and mega yachts, just old school, nice yachts.

There is a yacht club which has been going since 1984 called the Southwest Shingles Yacht Club.

It is very exclusive.

It's invitation-only, founded by a yachtsman called David Latchford.

And it is for people who have massively screwed up sailing their ships or yachts.

So he pranged a boy.

He what?

A B-U-O-Y, a boy.

Boy,

boy, a boy.

He has to say it in the New Jersey accent.

A boy.

He pranged a boy.

And he.

So it's very embarrassing.

It's broad daylight.

You're not meant to bump into the boys.

And so he did that.

And he saw, oh, I was found this club.

And he has incredibly eminent people who are now members of the club.

Like, there was the commander of a Royal Navy submarine who hit a rock in Scotland in clear daylight, daylight which is a big no-no uh a royal navy commander who hit london bridge nice

really bad um and it also has some genuine sort of yachting heroes like there's a guy called tony bullymore who was his yacht capsized when he was on i think a yachting race across the oceans and uh he spent four days under his own yacht in an air pocket four days four days and then he was rescued and he survived and he was yeah yeah yeah what kind of luxury stuff did he have under there was it like he had the full dining table and a gym that he could exercise on again sailing yacht, very different, very different thing.

Cruise ships are like yachts that poor people can afford to go on, like me.

Yep.

The biggest cruise ship was unveiled by the Royal Caribbean this year is called the Icon of the Seas.

It can carry 7,600 passengers and 2,350 crew members.

That's the same as the population of Cyrencester in Roman times.

Thank you so much.

So that vital context, its gross tonnage is 250,000 tons, which is the same as all the cars in Surrey that are ULES compliant.

And

it's 360 meters long, which is the same as the length of the furthest golf shot at the 2023 World Long Drive Championships.

So just so you know, exactly.

Thanks, James.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

We're going to have to move on in a sec, guys.

Actually, just on Bezos' yacht that James mentioned earlier,

when he first had it made, because a lot of these yachts have been made quite recently,

it's called the Coru, I think, and it was made in the Netherlands near Rotterdam.

And to leave the place where it was being made, he had to get through the Conningshaven Bridge, and that was too low for his yacht, which was going to be the tallest boat in the world, to get past.

So he said, Could I dismantle the bridge?

Now, this bridge was built in 1927.

It's a heritage site.

It's a very historic historic building.

Obviously, the people of Rotterdam said, absolutely not.

Sod off, mate.

And so he was trapped.

So there was a period where Jeff Bezos had this gigantic super yacht stuck in a little kind of harbor somewhere inland in the Netherlands.

And then he just realized he could take the masts down.

Right.

That's that brilliant business acumen that's got to worry us today.

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

And my fact this week is that the reason that the band Ace of Bass became successful is because a cassette of their music got stuck in a producer's car, and after two weeks of having nothing else to listen to,

he went from hating it to liking it.

And he was like, it's a sign.

I saw the sign.

Yeah, you see?

That's one of their songs.

That's one of their songs.

I had to play ace of bass to Andy backstage here.

You hadn't heard it before.

No, and you were playing me the biggie, weren't you?

I was.

I was playing the baby.

Are you having another baby?

No, I want you to have another baby.

She wants another baby.

What is it?

All she wants is...

She wants a baby.

She wants a baby for him.

All that she wants.

All that she wants.

Is another baby.

Another baby?

For heaven's sake.

She's got six already.

Do they specify in the song how many babies she already has?

We don't know.

I don't think anyone's listened to the lyrics ever

of any of their songs in the past.

But listen, this is.

Do you mean either of their songs?

Well, there's also Don't Turn Around, which I imagine if he played that in his cassette and he had his GPS on and they were going, please turn around, and the song's going, don't turn around, please turn around, don't turn around.

No one's made any ace of bass jokes for about 30 years.

Yeah, yeah, we've got to dust them off.

And look, we joke about it, but I remember being a 12-year-old kid, absolutely love it.

I remember sitting on my buddy's yacht just going, bang that tune.

It was, that was a big cassette back in the day.

And it's not just me who liked it.

It was the best-selling album of 1994.

It's one of the most successful debut albums of all time.

And it was all because this producer, Dennis Popp, he was a 28-year-old pop producer living in Sweden.

And he got given this tape and they were like, please listen to it.

He put it in his car.

And as I said, he went to eject it when he got home, really hating it.

He thought this was terrible.

And it just wouldn't come out.

It wouldn't come out.

And by weird coincidence, his radio was broken at the same time.

So he had nothing else to listen to.

And every day he would pick up a mate of his who's also in the music business.

And as a joke, they would just listen to it on the way to work, just mocking it, just going, God damn it, this is so bad.

And then as the weeks went on, he was like, hang on, there's a bit of a hook there.

And by the end of the two weeks, he went, this is a hit.

And the song song was called Mr.

Ace which is then retitled to all that she wants so that was the song but I think they were already famous ish weren't they yeah they'd had a number two hit in Denmark

so so they were pretty big deal they were kind of big but then he was the one who made them so big they were massive in America they had a number one album in America which no Swedish band had ever had including ABBA yeah

and this and this is all thanks to this guy Dennis Dennis Pop Deniz Dennis.

Yeah.

Dennis Popp.

With a Z at the end, that's why we're saying it with Dennis.

You might know him as the other half of the production team.

He worked with Max Martin, who is, I believe, a very famous music producer who made everything from Baby One More Time through to Shake It Off and beyond.

And they have this amazing method of...

recording songs.

So all that she wants is another baby and baby one more time.

Is that also about wanting another baby?

And weirdly, so is Shake It Off.

That's, yeah.

Oh my god.

It wasn't meant to be rude, but it's become rude.

And so Max Martin, who incidentally started off on the French horn.

It was just

a bit of information.

Dennis Pop, by the way, couldn't play any instruments.

Really?

No, he started taking the recorder when he was a child, but gave up after three attempts.

Because he thought musical instruments were boring.

But you don't have to play musical instruments to make pop songs.

You do not.

And it is, as you say, he made those hits.

But But really, if you look at the list, every single catchy, slightly trashy song that you're a bit embarrassed that you love from the last 30 years is basically written by Max Martin.

It's so weird.

Like Maroon 5, Backstreet Boys, 5, Pink, Katy Perry, Coldplay, Ariana Grande.

Name anyone with catchy songs.

They were all Taylor Swift, who wrote.

No, he's written for Taylor Swift.

I'm so sorry to say it.

Heckler in the audience.

Come on, get Keir Starmer out of here, please.

yeah it's crazy it is crazy also they're a band of siblings so three of them um were related to each other

sorry jumping back to asa base yeah so you had jonas you had lynn and you had jenny and then they had a cousin ulf but they were siblings they were like they were like the jonas brothers actually like literally There was a Jonas brother in the band itself.

And then the one person who wasn't a brother or sister was a Nazi, I think.

He wasn't a Nazi.

Well, now what was his yacht called?

He was called Ulf Eckberg,

and he, as a child, had been a skinhead, or not a child, it's a teenager.

I mean, all children right at the beginning are skinheads.

Oh, we've given birth to a Nazi!

Oh, my God.

Yeah, as a teenager, he was a skinhead.

And he later said that he regretted it and that actually Ace of Bass is supposed to be inclusive and lovely and everything.

Well, all she wants is another baby.

It does sound like it's the kinder kircher kucher model of

pro-Aryan family structure.

So

anyway.

I won't be a part of this conspiracy theory.

I know we're talking about Dennis Popper and music production, but just Dan, as you mentioned, family bands.

Yeah.

So I was reading the list of music considered the worst on Wikipedia, which is a real article, very good.

And it contains this band called the Shags.

Oh yeah, the Shags.

So 1969 album, I think it was their debut, called Philosophy of the World.

They were a band of three sisters, right?

And what marked them out as unusual in the music world is that they had no interest in being in a band, but their father...

Their father's mother was a fortune teller and had told her son, their dad, you will have some daughters and they would go on to form the greatest music group on the planet's history.

Wow.

And their dad basically insisted they become musicians off the back of it.

And they were not good.

Really?

They apparently composed, I'm quoting here, bizarre songs with untuned guitars, erratic time signatures, disconnected rhythms, wandering melodies, and rudimentary lyrics about pets.

They were cool, though.

They had attitude.

They were awesome people.

People who were thought to be shit at first.

Actually band origins so where band started Fleetwood Mac yeah similar kind of Area to ace of base

fans would agree.

Yeah, okay, cool.

Yes in that they're a band.

Yeah

They're Do you know who they're named after Fleetwood Mac?

Yes.

Well, they're named after two of the members.

So if you know them you you'll know Mick Fleetwood and John McVeigh.

But McVeigh, the Mac, wasn't in the band when they started.

They basically named it Fleetwood Mac to lure him into the band.

So it was started by Peter Green as the other one.

Peter Green and Fleetwood formed this band and they had been in a band with McVeigh and McVeigh was like, I like the old band, it's regular income, I'm staying here.

And they called it Fleetwood Mac in order to persuade him.

He's made a band off you now, mate.

Now, that is emotional blackmail, I would say.

That's very clever.

Yeah.

Simon and Garfold weren't originally called Simon and Garthulkle, were they?

The band.

Really?

No,

they didn't like their names, and so they changed their name to John Landis and Tom Graff and called themselves Tom and Jerry.

And Paul Simon changed his name to John Landis because it was a girl that he had a crush on, was called Landis.

And Art Garfunkel called himself Tom Graff because he really liked graphs.

Wow.

Wow.

Really?

He

used to do graphs of how many records people were selling and stuff like that.

Do you know the band Joanna Gruesome?

No.

They're pretty obscure, but I do love the way they found each other as bandmates.

They were all sent to the same anger management course.

Oh wow.

How good is that?

Yeah.

They were incredibly angry teenagers.

They were at school and they all got sent there.

Hi, everybody.

Andy here.

What a great fact about Joanna Gruesome that just was, right?

Well, there's only one problem, which is that it turns out it actually wasn't true.

There was someone in the audience at this gig who sent us an email.

He's called George Ford, and he wrote, Hi, I was at your show on the 23rd of October, but the Juana Gruesome fact of the band forming an anger management class is not correct.

They made this up for an interview.

This was because they had no original formation apart from just being friends.

My source is that the drummer was my design technology technician when I was at Heathside School in Weybridge.

So that's from George.

So sorry, that's it's not true.

It's not true at all.

And we thought we could either snip it out or record a bit of extra bonus information, just a little bit of how the sausage gets made.

Okay, back to the show.

Cheers.

Bye.

Pet shop boys, how did they meet?

At a pet shop?

It was at an electronics shop.

Oh, really?

Harry Styles, his bandmate Mitch.

Do you know how Harry Styles found Mitch?

In an advert?

They're usually in adverts.

In a pizza shop.

A pizza shop, really?

They just met in a pizza shop.

Was he, hang on, was he like a musician or was he making?

He probably is a musician.

Okay.

He wasn't making him a pizza and Harry Styles looked at the way he made pizza and went, do you know what those hands would be great at?

Playing guitar.

When you finished arranging the pepperoni on that, come and arrange some creative songs.

My tunes, yeah.

I don't know about music.

It's becoming increasingly clear that none of us does.

I know.

Actually, there's one more Swedish band, which I think I'd heard of.

So...

Obviously, we've got ABBA, we've got Ace of Bass, and the Hives, I think, a moderately famous Swedish band, and they sung, I hate to say I told you so.

And do you know who all their songs are written by?

I thought they wrote them them themselves.

Well, they did not.

They're all written by someone called Randy Fitzsimmons.

And that's the reason they exist is because they once got a letter in the post from this Randy Fitzsimmons telling them to meet up in a certain place and form a band saying, you'll be massive if you do this.

This is 1993.

And he said, I've got all these tunes in mind for you.

And he started writing them songs.

And he's written them songs ever since.

And even up until very recently, all the songs were credited to Randy Fitzsimmons, who wrote them.

No one knows who this person is.

I think their latest album is called The Death Death of Randy Fitzsimmons,

which is, and all the music on that was composed by Chip Montgomery and Wilbur Fitzsimmons.

Wait, what's going on?

Is it, is he, did they make him up?

I think they made him up, yeah, but they've never admitted they made him up.

It's possible that Randy Fitzsimmons is just a great music writer.

Have you got any real facts?

Fake Yorks, fake songwriters?

I was looking.

We've got a lot of stuff about how bands started.

I thought I'd look at what happened after they left.

Oh, yeah.

So these are people who were kind of big when I was younger.

The cheeky girls.

Oh, yeah.

They're now both working as second-hand car dealers.

Get out.

Yeah.

One of them works at a Hyundai dealership in York, and the other one works in Lincolnshire.

Right.

What kind of dealership?

I didn't write it down.

I think she might have got her sister the job, so I think it might also be Hyundai.

Well, that would make sense, yeah?

Yeah, a bit cheeky.

Lisa from Steps is now a head teacher at a school in Dubai.

Okay.

And Abs from Five went on to become a farmer, but then in 2021, he said, the animals just all died.

They are meant to.

When you're a farmer.

The plants weren't growing anymore.

I'm a rubbish farmer, so I'm back in London.

Because you're so right, Anna.

Like, the animals all died.

Could be the best farmer in the world.

The animals all died on time and under budget, and they've become sausages.

I think one of the favorite facts of our colleague Anne is about the origin, talking of song origins, of the Hansen song mmb, or what it means.

And I just really enjoyed an interview with Zach Hansen, who everyone will remember, who said it's the most misunderstood, successful song of all time.

And he said, Is it about someone having another baby?

And that's the sound it makes.

Was that an impression of a woman in labour?

I've not been at many births, but I go to the simple and relaxed affairs.

I know the end of the small.

Makes sense you're asked to wait outside.

That's not what it's about.

Do people know what it means?

Because it just always makes me laugh.

It represents a frame of time and it's about how quickly time gets away from you.

Your life will disappear before you know it.

In an mm bop, it's gone.

Oh, that's deep.

It's so deep.

It's the deepest song you've ever heard without knowing it.

That's incredible.

I just find it really funny.

I still can't get over abs.

That's insane.

He just decimated this whole farm

and then went back to London.

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We need to move on to our final fact of the show and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that being visited by a clown can help you get pregnant.

Ah, this gives you your answer to how she gets another baby.

That's not the first.

Look, what does the clown have to do?

Well, it just...

It could be one sexy clown.

He just goes around having sex with people, but no, it's just, they just need to clown around.

It's sounding sexy when you say clown around.

It's never sounded sexy before.

It didn't sound sexy to me.

Just to me.

So this is from Benefits of Medical Clowning, a summary of the research by Amy J.

Stephson.

She references a 2011 study by S.

Friedler, and they looked at 219 patients, 110 of whom interacted with medical clowns and 109 who didn't.

And the pregnancy rate in the clown group was 36.4% compared to 20.2% in the control group.

Whoa.

And that gave the clown group twice the odds of pregnancy.

So it was significant.

Yeah.

That's mega.

And when they interacted with them, were they just doing clown stuff, like nose honking and car stuffing, and

what have you?

That's it.

Nose honking.

Now it does sound sexy, I must say.

How many clowns can you fit in this phone box?

Doesn't make any sense.

They were just doing clowny stuff.

And like you say,

that kind of thing.

On the left one or the right one?

It's weird.

Because I just didn't know that they were such an established thing, medical clowns.

You say it.

Really are.

But medical clowns are brought in largely for children, right?

Hippocrates had clowns.

Really?

In ancient Greece, yeah, he had his own hospital on the island of Kos,

and he had constant troops of players and clowns who would come and play to the people to keep them happy.

So, in this study by S.

Friedler, they said, We were very surprised by the results, and frankly, we can't explain it.

But one theory that they had was maybe that stress reduction might improve fertility

until you're a bit less stressed.

They are extremely beneficial in other ways, and it is largely with children that they're used, understandably.

But there was a study that followed 51 children with pneumonia who got, as well as getting ordinary treatment, got 15-minute visits from a medical clown twice a day.

And then it had the same number of children who didn't get the visits but still had the treatment.

And it was pretty much like half the length of time that the ones who were visited by the clown stayed in hospital.

I know that sounds like they just said, please get me out of here.

They were discharged sensibly.

They needed only two days of antibiotics compared to three days for those who hadn't had the clown.

So they have an amazing impact.

They also use them during preoperative anesthesia.

So as you're going down, you'll turn and there'll just be a clown staring at you.

Come on.

And apparently that reduces stress and anxiety as opposed to make you going, wait, hang on one moment.

So I read that down, but I read a doctor saying that in some minor surgeries, a clown replaces general anesthesia, which I think

cannot be correct.

You can imagine if a kid's cut their finger and you need to give them two stitches, maybe it's a look at the clown.

Why are you giving them general anesthesia for two stitches it raises more questions than

what's the one disease a clown cannot help

um

the nose alcoholism because it's all in the nose alcoholism and it like just gets rid of laughter bingo is it oh what this was a patient who lived in hawaii and he had suffered uncontrollable lifelong laughter

He was 40 and from the age of eight, he'd just been laughing pretty much non-stop.

Oh my God.

Did something happen when he was eight?

That was just like the funniest thing that ever happened.

What it is, is he contracted a small non-cancerous tumor on his brain.

That's almost the opposite of funny.

It's the opposite of funny.

Yeah.

Can we say he went to see Jimmy Carr?

Maybe?

Just.

No, it's a thing called a gelastic seizure.

And gelastic is the word for related to laughter.

Because I think agelastic means you can't laugh.

Exactly.

And this guy was very gelastic indeed.

And it turns out it was due to a hypothalamic hematoma, which is not funny, but was operable and so could be cured, but not by a clown.

That's nice.

But when he'd been cured, did he never laugh again?

Well, he just went to see Jimmy Carr, and that sorted him right out.

There's a thing in New Zealand whereby if you're about to be made redundant, you're allowed to bring someone in to be a support friend.

And there's a great story about a guy who hired for $200 New Zealand a clown to come in with him.

So as the boss was very sternly trying to tell him that he was no longer going to be employed by the company, there was a man in full get-up next to him making balloon animals.

And who, as he was told and handed the sheet saying that he was going to be redundant, had the clown go, oh no!

doing the fake tears with his hand.

It's so good.

I read about this guy too, Dad.

Josh Thompson is the name of the man.

The clown was called Joe.

He had to be told to stop a few times, the clown, because the squeaking of plastic as he made the balloon animals was too noisy for Josh to be fired.

Just so good.

It's so amazing.

I don't know, you guys know this about me, but one of my favourite things is whenever a clown is put in a medical situation.

So I'm probably the only person who loves the movie.

Well,

it's not something that's quite no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Did you say we probably know this about that?

Yeah, you know that MASH is my favourite TV series.

Described Dan in one sentence.

Well,

Patch Patch Adams is one of my favorite movies, despite everyone hating that movie.

I absolutely loved it.

Patch Adams is quite an interesting character.

He's still alive, and he's quite alternative.

I watched a YouTube video of him talking about the things he believes will cure stuff.

So he doesn't really believe in depression.

He says you can avoid, and he has been severely depressed in his teens, to be fair to him.

But he says things like, you can avoid being depressed if you think about things things like, what a beautiful sunset, or

if you take pleasure in stroking a purring cat.

To hell with depression, just go out and sing to the world, hug a tree, and follow an ant as it walks across the ground.

There you go.

He's an interesting guy.

He named his first son Atomic Zagnut.

It's very interesting.

So a lot of doctors do become clowns and they do go out into struggling countries that are going through war and so on.

And there's one guy, Ping Pong, who's

one of the clowns.

He had a thing where he was going through airport security and he got taken into a room and they opened up his suitcase and basically they did it because he had a hundred confetti cannons and all these ping pong balls and they didn't know what it was when they went through the scan and according to ping pong the guy went what are you some sort of clown

no laughter can be dangerous though can't it?

There was a meta-analysis of 785 academic studies done by the University of Birmingham and they found that laughter can cause fainting, asthma, headaches, incontinence,

dislocated jaw, infectious diseases.

Hang on,

that's the first one where I've thought, I haven't actually done that.

How do you get an infectious disease from laughter?

Well, if you're laughing so much,

your mouth is open, isn't it?

And if you're near some other people.

Yeah, you're basically expelling more fine particulates from your mouth.

It is very dangerous, yeah.

Yeah, and there's a thing called Bohr Haver syndrome, which can rupture your esophagus if you laugh too much.

And that's actually fatal.

Wow.

Wow.

So the rest of this show will be no more jokes.

Do you know who's one of the chief villains for clowns?

The chief villains.

One of the chief villains.

Is it someone else in the circus?

Well, she was in a kind of circus, actually.

Oh, Liz Truss?

Thatcher?

Thatcher.

Oh,

Margaret Thatcher.

Yeah, Michael Truss.

Do they just hate Thatcher because they love jumping on a bandwagon, squeezing into a car?

No.

No, it's that in 1980, the Clowns Training School was closed due to government cuts.

Just thanks to Margaret.

Not entirely.

It wasn't like she said,

shut these clowns down.

But it was funded by the Arts Council, and there were some Arts Council cuts happening at the time.

And she got a complaint about it from some children who said, why have you cut the Clowns?

And she wrote back saying she was sorry that they were upset, but the Clowns would continue receiving some kind of public funds.

P.S., no more milk for you.

Bye.

There's a great story I read about Jimi Hendrix.

He was for his first, I think it was his first tour in the UK, and he went to Liverpool.

They did a gig and they went to a bar afterwards.

And the bartender was incredibly suspicious of Jimi Hendrix as he was walking in.

And he went, oi.

We don't serve your kind here.

And he went, what?

And it was a really intense moment and everyone froze and the bartender went read the sign buddy and it read no clowns allowed and basically hendrix's 60s get up which was very flamboyant and colorful and there was a circus up the road the guy thought wait if i let you in all the fucking clowns are gonna come in here i don't want it being overrun why they they'd had a sign made say no clowns no clowns allowed how much clown related trouble had they had i think something had happened there hadn't it a few days earlier yeah um do you know where the word clown comes from?

Oh, no.

Clown?

No.

It's probably from the Danish clunt.

Come on, guys.

Which means log or block, and then it meant like a blockhead, and then it meant like a silly person.

And some other words for clown in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Bagpudding, clodhopper.

cluster fist,

lobcock, and Meriandrew.

Oh, Mary Eyes.

Mary Andrews.

Sometimes I feel like the OED doesn't have its finger on the pulse.

Do you ever get that?

Can I?

This fact was about getting pregnant.

So I have a loosely related getting pregnant fact that I happened upon this week, which is that

everyone knows the 12 labours of Hercules, right?

I mean, you don't have to recite them now.

I'm not going to test anyone.

But like the clean out the stables and bring back the dog with three heads, Cerberus, and there's a river to say.

It's about a lion, maybe.

Kill the lion.

Exactly, kill the lion.

Do all the the big stuff.

So 12 labors of Hercules, these big things he had to do.

Who knows about the 13th labor of Hercules?

Well, this was written about the same time, and his 13th labor was to impregnate 50 women in one night.

Whoa!

I'm going to need a lot of clowns.

Yeah.

That's 50 additional labours of Hercules, right?

I think they counted as one fiftieth of a labor each.

No, no, it's a labour each.

Because Because you'd go into labor when you're.

Sorry, no, it's a pun.

That is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much.

We'll be back again next week with another episode.

But very quickly, Drury Lane, you were awesome.

Thank you for having us.

That was magical.

We will be back again next week with another podcast we'll see you then goodbye

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