539: No Such Thing As Kimchi Pirates

Hi, everyone.

Welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish.

Very quickly, just to remind you, we are going on tour in the very, very near future.

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Really hope you enjoy the show and hopefully see lots of you on our tour.

Okay, on with the podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

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 James.

Okay, my fact this week is that if you like kimchi, you're a victim of government propaganda.

So does anyone here like kimchi?

Yeah.

Not at all.

No.

What?

Well, you know, I don't know what kind of like weird political messages I'm propounding, although I quite like South Korea.

They're not doing too badly these days.

Do you like BTS?

Do you watch Squid Game?

Did you enjoy Parasite at the movies?

I don't know what BTS is, but the other two things I did.

Wow.

Did you dance to Gangnam style when it came out all the time?

Every day?

Every day.

All these things are part of HALYU, which is a South Korean government-promoted push of the country's culture.

And this is all about diplomatic cultural exchanges between countries and at the moment Korea are especially good at it yeah what are they so what are they doing are they sort of responsible for kimchi advertising worldwide and stuff yes

absolutely so they might pay tv broadcasters in europe or in the us to have documentaries about korean dishes they might get newspapers to write about korean dishes they might provide assistance to restaurants um that are going to have korean food on the menus that's crazy Because I'm obsessed with bibbin bap.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, you love it.

Same.

I love it, but it's only in the last few years.

Well, that's why, because they started this around 1996.

That's perfect.

The timing matches up.

I did.

So, what had happened was Korea had had a problem economically.

There was a big crash around the mid-90s, and the government had to ask the IMF for an emergency loan.

And it was a big embarrassment to the whole country.

And around the same time, Japan was making its own kimchi, and they were selling that around the world, much to the chagrin of the South Koreans, because the only good kimchi comes from South Korea.

And they put those two things together, and a couple of presidents decided that they were going to rebrand the nation.

I completely understand that.

Yeah, I completely get that.

I mean, my countries do it all the time.

I can also see who the propaganda's worked on.

The only good kimchi in the world.

Imagine if France started making pork pies.

I'd be furious.

Would you?

Yeah.

And then you went and you traveled to China and they were like, oh, have you heard about about the French pork?

Amazing French Melton Moubri.

I would feel patriotic suddenly.

Yeah.

So South Korean kimchi, it's all this particular kind of cabbage, isn't it?

Called a nappa cabbage.

Yeah.

So I should quickly say what kimchi is.

It is a fermented vegetable and fish relish.

You kind of get loads of vegetables and fish paste and stuff like that.

You put it in a big bundle of cabbage and then you put it in brine and you leave it to ferment.

And then it becomes, to some people, delicious.

I personally personally can't stand it.

Really?

I actually, I have a problem with fermented food in general.

Interesting.

I don't know why.

It's the national dish of North and South Korea.

There are 2 million tons of it eaten in the South alone every year.

Over 60% of people in South Korea eat kimchi at three meals a day.

Yeah.

It's a lot.

And even this is, I love this.

There's a ritual where a traditional thing where every autumn eat families make their own kimchi, right?

And I think it's called kimjang.

And

it's a traditional thing.

Obviously, not everyone does it.

Some people just get this from the supermarket.

But Samsung, the electronics giant, make special kimchi fridges.

And thousands of people in South Korea have a fridge that's just for the kimchi.

I don't think thousands.

I think it's 98% of the books.

Everyone.

It's literally everyone in the world.

Yeah, thousands.

I just mean many thousands.

You can specify

thousands of thousands.

But I just think that's stunning.

And there's supposedly,

it feels like a massive swizz to me because all those special kimchi features are things like it stays the same temperature.

which no no it is important because yeah most your fridge at home is going to be around three or four degrees but if you put kimchi in that fridge it'll go off in a few days yeah it needs to be colder it needs to be colder and there needs to be less airflow going around

it's got less moving in no no it needs to be warmer than a freezer no i can't think of a single temperature warmer than freezer let me tell you one degree

which is the exact temperature because the traditional way to keep it is you'd bury it outside right so you'd make it in the autumn you'd bury it outside and during during the winter it would stay at one degree.

Do you think there's lots of buried kimchi still in South Korea?

Is it like squirrels, you reckon?

And there's just, they can never find it.

Kimchi pirates just going around trying to find the lost buried treasure.

Yeah, Mr.

Kim.

And then you open it and it is just rotten, fishy vegetables.

Is it a thing that it never goes off if it's at the right?

Oh, it will eventually.

It can.

But it lasts many more months, but I think it would eventually go off.

It would eventually go off.

Can I tell you what Kimchi's saying?

Yeah.

Please.

Don't drink kimchi soup thinking that someone will give you rice cake.

Translation.

Translation, please.

Don't do that.

So it's don't do something expecting something else will happen.

Yeah.

So it's like look before you leap.

That's quite good.

Say one more time.

Don't drink kimchi soup thinking that someone will give you rice cake.

Or is it just literal?

It's just this is bad etiquette.

No,

there's a pretty exact analogy, actually.

Is there?

So is there a reason you'd want rice cake after kimchi soup?

It comes next in the traditional form of the meal.

Right.

That is what you would expect.

So don't like, don't do phase one of a process, assuming someone's going to help you out with the next bit.

Right.

So what's a British phrase that...

Is it not that?

That's a very common phrase one.

It's like my old grandma used to say, don't do phase one of a process.

It's just don't count your chickens.

You know, don't assume.

It's not guaranteed that you'll get rice cake just because you've got kimchi soup.

But in that case, it sort of is guaranteed because you're having a traditional Korean meal.

Yeah, I don't think that is quite exactly the same, is it?

Are you not counting your chickens?

Don't count your chickens.

So it's like

if you have 10 eggs, don't think that's definitely going to be 10 chickens because one of them might not turn into a chicken.

Okay, cool.

I feel like that phrase needs a little caveat at the top that says prior to hatching, don't count your chickens.

Oh, it does say

the whole thing.

The whole thing is, don't count your chickens before they've hatched.

Right.

Dad, you've never heard this saying.

No.

You've never heard don't count your chickens.

That's stunning.

I've heard that bit of it, weirdly.

You've heard don't count your chickens.

That's because everyone knows the second bit.

And

what did you think it meant when you just heard don't count your chickens?

It's bad luck to count chickens.

Oh, yeah.

So we went to the petting zoo today.

Oh, how many chickens were there?

Well, you know what they say?

That's so weird.

Only 7% of kimchi in Korea is commercially produced, as in that you buy it in shops.

Wow.

7%.

And the rest is sort of after that.

The rest is made homemade, yeah.

And it's part of this festival that one of you mentioned.

Yeah, that Andy mentioned.

Basically at one time a year, everyone just makes kimchi.

It lasts the year, right?

It lasts the year, yeah.

And it's huge because it's like everyone does it at the same time because it's like kimchi season.

Yeah.

So everyone has to buy cabbage at the same time.

So the price of cabbage goes through the roof

every year.

It's harvest time, I guess.

And then you buy it.

But it's always in the news at this time every year saying, don't forget to get your cabbage before it's don't count your cabbages.

That's so cool.

Apparently, at the moment, there's a bit of a worrying time for kimchi in South Korea because they're actually importing more kimchi now than they are exporting.

They are, it's the world has woken up to it.

China particularly has woken up to it.

And so if you buy kimchi in a market, let's say in the UK, it's probably more likely from China these days than it is from South Korea.

But the Chinese say it's fine because actually they invented it.

I think that, yeah, they sort of claim that a similar Chinese pickled cabbage fell under the bracket of kimchi, didn't they?

Yeah, but it's like saying, oh, our pork roll is actually a pork pie.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like saying that, isn't it?

It's rubbish.

Fermenting, huge deal at the moment, very trendy

because apparently it's the answer to all our health problems.

And I am so looking forward to it in 10 years' time when everyone realizes that was complete bullshit.

No, what?

We're all going to live forever because of that.

Because of the microbiome suddenly diversifying.

That's good for you, isn't it?

I'm sure it is good for you.

It is obviously really drummed into us how good for you it is.

And it is such an interesting process.

So I didn't quite realize that the only reason fermenting happens is because it's dead.

So the bacteria that eat the cabbage or anything that ferments, the cabbage is spending its whole life fighting them off.

And it's just as soon as you chop it, they can suddenly go for it.

That's great.

And then it can't just be any fermenting.

I think this is why you add salt to it.

You can't just let any bacteria eat it.

Because that's just rotting.

It's just rot.

Yeah.

Don't just leave cabbage out and wait for it to.

I was always a bit confused about what is fermenting and what is rotting.

I thought fermentation involves the particular, it's something to do with the brine and the salt and the

it is, but I agree.

I didn't know either.

And it seems to be it's just about the type of bacteria that are doing it.

And as long as you use the salt, so you sort of feed the right type of bacteria, they turn it and they ferment it properly.

But the thing is, like, there are lots of types of bacteria that do this.

And I don't want to get all antibacterial and pro-bacteriophage like I always do.

But there are some bacterias that do do fermentation that are really bad for you.

And so sometimes people who do like homemade fermentation, like where you're making your sourdoughs or you're making homemade kimchi or artisan cheeses or whatever, any kind of stuff like that, if you get the wrong kind of bacteria, it can make you sick.

And most people, it would be fine.

Like for the four of us around here, it would probably be fine.

But, you know, if you have underlying health issues, it can be a problem.

Yeah, yeah, of course.

Right.

I didn't even consider that.

I really like it with this fact is it's basically what's known as gastro diplomacy as well, right?

Because they're using food in order to spread culture around the world.

And this started, there was in the early 2000s, Thailand really were leading the way with this.

Oh, yeah.

There was this thing where people were going, why are there so many Thai restaurants in America?

We don't have that big a population of Thai people here.

It doesn't make sense.

And that's what it was.

It was a government program where you were able to get a loan for millions of dollars from Thailand if you were going to open a restaurant over in America.

And you had different packages.

So there were different styles of Thai restaurants that you could set up.

The sort of more McDonald's-like fast food, chainy one, which was just not that good food, all the way up to the high-end Thai, which, you know, golden leaf kind of thing.

And

all the arts that you might see in those places might have been created by government propaganda people who wanted to just push.

So weird.

It's so interesting.

I think we said before that they invented Pad Thai for that reason.

Right, yeah.

I think it is like a really important thing.

And not to get too political, but our government/slash our government until last week.

We'll see what happens.

Like, the idea of them kind of taking money away from cultural stuff, which is what has happened over the last 10 years or so, is such an own goal.

Like, because Britain has over the last century or so had so much soft diplomacy through be it the Spice Girls or be it like Downton Abbey or they were there to promote pepper and beans,

the original draft of the spice girls.

Before then, we had the opium girls cars.

But yeah, I mean, like, to take away money and to, like, make the BBC World Service and stuff lose money and all that stuff.

Is it just trying to get government funding for the podcast, James?

Because

we are a cultural jewel in the crown of the nation, I would say.

But there's so many countries to it.

It's not just the Thai government, the USA.

They have the Diplomatic Culinary Partnership and they have the American Chef Corps who were recruited.

Teach you to flip burgers.

What is that?

So it's, in fact, that's almost the opposite of it because it was specifically sort of, it's more than just burgers and hot dogs, guys.

And it was about all the great American cuisine that there is and all the different kinds of American cuisine.

I've got to be honest, they're very good in a lot of ways of propaganda, but that element hasn't worked on me so far.

Fair enough.

But you would get a special jacket with an American flag and your name embroidered in gold if you were part of the chef corps.

And you would travel around the world cooking for foreign diplomats, traveling abroad.

You know, it was a sort of crack unit of chefs.

And they did some sort of Native American cooking or different from all the different parts of it.

Grits.

Probably some burgers as well.

Grits.

Yeah.

Movie industries are often used as sort of that kind of soft diplomacy.

And in fact, there are kimchi westerns.

No, like spaghetti westerns.

Exactly that.

Really?

Kimchi.

So the spaghetti western was a western filmed in Italy, right?

Because it looked broadly like the American Western.

Actually, usually filmed in Spain, but by Italian directors.

Yeah.

So is this a Western that's filmed in Korea?

It's just what you think, yeah.

It was a specific decision by the Korean government in the 2000s.

The film industry was going quite badly.

I think Hollywood was swamping all of their homemade films.

So they thought, let's make our own Westerns and they'll be called Kimchi Westerns.

And the first one was called The Good, the Bad, and the Weird,

drawing very slightly on American traditions.

Is it a proper like Western cowboy plot?

Absolutely, yeah.

So it is, it seems very much based on the good, the bad, and the ugly.

You know, there are three

protagonists who are after the same treasure who are all sort of after each other.

Is it buried kimchi?

That film is actually a sequel to For a Fridge Full of Kimchi.

That's based on For a Fist Full of Dollars.

No, I go, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Downloads looking very much at don't count your chickens.

That's why I've been silent for the last 10 minutes because I've been trying to think of a South Korean Western title and I couldn't think of one.

And I'd argue you didn't really, do I?

Okay, it is time for fact number two.

That is Andy.

My fact is, there is an entire railway tunnel in Derbyshire, which was constructed so the railway could be hidden from the Duke of Rutland.

No one wanted him to get on the railway?

He never paid.

He never paid, despite being very rich.

He's a fair dodger.

So this comes from a great website called peakrail.co.uk, which is about the peak district railways, not about like this, it's peak rail.

And

it's about the Duke of Rutland, who there is still a Duke of Rutland, I believe.

In the way there always is, there's always another one.

And he was a big old landowner.

This is the middle of the 19th century.

And it was when the railways were going gangbusters across the whole UK.

Hundreds of railway companies were springing up, building lines, going out of business, consolidating.

It was just a railway fever had gripped Britain.

It was a great time.

I wish I'd been there.

And the Duke had point-blank refused a railway to go across his estate, you know, not through his house or anything, just across some of the many, many acres he owned.

And the rail company had to go underground.

And there's a long tunnel.

It's about a thousand yards long.

It really is quite a big railway tunnel.

And it's 12 feet deep because they just needed to hide it very slightly from the Duke.

You could do a cutting, couldn't you?

They could have done a cutting, which is basically a sort of V-shaped trench.

And you just have it going along that.

That would have preserved the view from his ha.

Like a haha, exactly.

But the Duke apparently did not want to see smoke and steam rising above his gardens so they had to just cover over this thing called cut and cover where you dig a little bit and you cover it back over so it's the most most pointless railway tunnel it was probably really expensive and it's all for the duke of rutland and they don't use it anymore right it's like

yeah they don't use it did it get um beachinged uh

it oh as in mr beaching i can't recall actually whether it was part of that but anyway that line doesn't use that tunnel anymore and they're thinking of opening it up so cyclists can go through it.

Oh, gosh.

It's really nice about that because it's always nice and flat when they sort of use an old railway line for that kind of thing.

Just for sorry for it to any international listeners who are

speeching reference.

I feel like Dan went into his chicken's glaze again.

I think the Duke of Rutland probably dealt with the confusion of people listening.

Well, we should say for international listeners as well, Rutland, it's a small county which is in

a duke as a member of the nobility.

And for any Americans listening, a train is the kind of thing we've got.

No, it's in the East Midlands.

It's got a population of about 41,000.

And it's got this really interesting fact about it, which is that it is the smallest county in England, but only when the tide is out on the Isle of Wight.

So when the tide's in, that is the smallest county.

It goes out.

So it becomes the smallest county once every day and then loses that award.

The Duke of Rutland, he was the sixth Duke, the one we're talking about.

He was also a Tory MP for Stamford.

He won Stamford with 200 votes versus his Liberal opponents one vote on

20th in 1837.

And according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and I quote, his present wealth and future dukedom meant that his Tory colleagues had to bear with him.

It is idle to pretend, wrote Robert Blake, that he was anything other than a stick.

Apparently, he was absolutely useless, but because he was so rich, they were like, oh, well, you're going to have to be part of the party now.

I couldn't find evidence for but i would like it to be true for the fact that so he never married and he had a couple of crushes apparently and there seem to be claims that when he died he left his friend's wife lady miles a yacht his yacht in his will yeah which i really like as a move um but i don't know if it's true but yeah that's it's reported in multiple places isn't it uh yeah it does seem to be and i like the idea of being the husband who's because are you happy that you now kind of co-own a yacht that was left by a a dead person are you suggesting that he fancied this woman I don't know if you leave someone a yacht if you're just friends do you

I think there was suggestion

like if you've got a yacht you have to give it to someone yeah yeah yeah like you've got no heirs so you're right could just be mates why specify the lady rather than both of them though that's true I think if my

spouse got left a yacht by someone by James when James died for instance yeah you're not an anyone I'd narrow my eyes across the breakfast table.

Can I just say, if anyone listening to this podcast would like to give my wife a yacht,

I cannot adjot.

Scandal-wise, it was interesting.

I was reading about the current family, and I found an article which is all a bit sort of gross when you see the wealth, the amazing kind of.

It's a bit odd, but there's all these tiny details that are so bizarre.

So one thing is that him and the Duchess are no longer together, but they're both living with new partners in very separate bits of this giant beaver castle.

Well, and it's pretty easy to do that when you've got a castle, isn't it?

Yeah, if you live in an apartment in Tottenham, it's pretty hard to still live with your ex.

Yeah, there's all these, like, you get reports of all these little details that have been added to this castle.

So, like, there's a button that gets pressed, which opens a safe behind the bed that brings out a giant erection jug set.

That's just that.

It's kind of like a jug set.

So it's like a penis erection

done as a jug, but it's hidden in a safe behind the bed right that you can sort of have reveal it's very odd it's just the way you said an erection jug set like we all knew what that was

that's a phrase back in australia that's when we were counted chickens of old you clarified a penis erection

or a penis erection

oh dear i did not know that that's very who installed this

are they have you seen this no it's just reported in this article the the interviewer sat down to chat to him he sat on a sofa with a photo next to him that was framed and signed that says, Dear David, looking forward to the time when I can completely cut off your head.

Love from Rambo.

It's from Sylvester Staller to David, the current Duke.

They got their earlships slash dukedom slash all that kind of stuff in the Wars of the Roses, I think.

And they became Earls.

And then...

During this time when they were becoming politicians with the Whigs, that's when they became dukes.

Right.

So for American listeners, an earl is less than a duke.

Yeah, yeah.

And for ordinary British listeners,

but the fifth Earl of Rutland supposedly wrote Shakespeare's plays.

Oh, good.

Yeah.

Who was that then?

He's the fifth Earl of Rutland.

Okay, yeah.

He will have been called something Manners because they're all called Manners, aren't they?

Yeah.

James Manners.

A lot of them are James Manners.

Right.

And the evidence is that he had a close relationship with the Earl of Southampton, who also didn't write the plays of James Manners.

I think they were interested in each other's penis erections.

But the poem Venus and Adonis was dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, and we don't have much evidence that Shakespeare knew him, but we do know that this guy knew him.

But also, Rutland went to Italy and taught, and two of his students were called Rosencrantz and Gilda Stern.

What?

The actual names?

Were those

definitely 100% were students when he was teaching in Padua?

Well, that's...

He should have led with that evidence.

That's the fiesta resistance.

No, wait.

I thought they were sort of made-up words by Shakespeare, who, as it turns out, is this random duke.

Can I tell you about a member of the Manners family?

Yeah.

There's a slightly more recent one.

I think it was late 19th, 30, 20th century.

So it's Ralph Tolemack was his name.

And he was very fond of history.

He had 15 children.

The names included his first names, Plantagenet, Saxon,

Eduolo, Leoness, Leolf, Leona, Leonella, Leonetta, and a boy who was, he became a captain in the First World War, right?

His name was Leone Sextus Dennis Oswalf Frauda Tifilius Ptolemac Tolemac de Orelana Plantagenet Ptolemac Tolemac.

Imagine shouting that under a hectic situation where you're being fireman.

Doug,

you should have just said duck.

You didn't need to say my old name.

Pretty much the Elon Musk of his day, in fact.

I mean, he's the Jacob Reese Mugg of his day.

Yeah, he is.

Oh, yeah.

He is, yeah, yeah.

Or opposite.

God.

Wow.

There was also around that time

Lady Diana Manners, who was useful because she could be nicknamed Mrs.

Bad Manners because Bad Manners.

Very good.

But the reason I raised her is because she was part of a group that I didn't know existed called the Coterie.

Oh, yeah.

Or sometimes the Corrupt Coterie.

Have you guys heard of this?

No, no.

It really sounds like one of those groups that you kind of want to be a member of, but that's also awful.

It's like the Bullington Club for the pre-First World War generation.

And she was really the linchpin of it.

They were incredibly glamorous.

They were basically took all the aristocrats in the UK and all the cool ones who went to all the fun parties were in the coterie.

And they were wild.

They would spend their whole time like gambling, drinking, but just also injecting heroin a lot, snorting a lot of cocaine.

They loved taking chloroform.

So, and she, throughout her life, apparently she'd go to parties and liven them up all the time by taking heroin.

And no one really minded because, you know.

When was this?

This was just before the First World War, because sort of sadly does taking heroin liven people up

if you're lady bad manners i think maybe it does yeah and they were all and this is what you get for being a spoiled aristo with bad habits pretty much all wiped out in the first world war all right um so she married almost the last remaining one who returned who was called duff duff cooper um because there's one other thing about one of the daughters of the current uh manners family so this is eliza she recently was fined half the normal amount that you would be fined for a speeding ticket because of cash flow issues.

Oh, can you do that?

Yeah.

Because I've had two speeding tickets in the last month.

Really?

Although I did get mine halved as well.

Cash flow issues?

No.

Okay.

Just paying promptly.

That's what you do.

If you pay within 28 days, you're going to halve.

No, mine happened within two minutes of each other.

So they said it was the same lapse of judgment.

If you just stay speeding, that's what that film is about, actually.

Keanu Reese.

Just trying to avoid getting two tickets.

Can I tell you an aristocratic railway thing?

Yeah,

back to the old Duke of Rutland.

So

dukes loved opposing railways.

It was for a while their main hobby.

I mean, they were being built on their land, right?

Completely.

I don't want to take their sides, but actually, the whole country was being dug up for railways at that time, which is a good thing, of course.

But they owned most of the land.

Exactly.

And there were lots of clashes because you could have your land compulsorily purchased.

And railway makers wanted to build straight normal routes over relatively flat ground because that's obviously why you build a railway.

Yeah, yeah.

And dukes would sometimes, or landowners would sometimes hire thugs to stop surveyors surveying the land for a railway.

And then they would hire gangs of heavies to go and beat up the surveyors who were just trying to say, oh, yes, it could go over there, couldn't it?

And they had to do it at night, or they had to have decoy teams of surveyors, the railway companies.

It's quite hard to survey at night, I would say.

You're right.

It does rely on vision quite extensively.

But it was such, it was a violent time.

One railway company was warned, we have barricaded the towing path and have in readiness a few cannons from Lord Harborough's yacht.

But it was like genuinely a perilous time.

All except the third Duke of Sutherland, who built his own private railway line and loved it and would drive it himself.

And he was one of the, I admire this guy so much.

He had a cab built with a four-person upholstered seat at the back, right?

So that the Duke could sit in the cab while the driver was driving it.

So you're literally up front in the engine.

Oh, in the train.

Yeah, yeah.

yeah.

Right, right.

So guests he had on his upholstered seat have included King Edward VII, King George V, King George VI, King Alfonso of Spain.

And was this the original format for that where a famous person gets a celebrity in their car and interviews them?

Kaiser Wilhelm II was in this train.

Winston Churchill?

One of the key pro tags of the World Wars had been in the middle of the train

train.

Did it go anywhere or was it just a little stretch of rail outside his house?

It is far, far northern Scotland.

Right.

It's really, really far up north.

but he had the power to drive his own train until the killjoys of British Rail revoked it in 1949 okay and that for me is where the rot set in

can't drive his own train yeah what kind of a world are we living in

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

My fact this week is that legendary guitar maker Les Paul had his arm permanently fused at roughly a 90 degree angle so that he could forever strum a guitar.

It's magical.

It's a, yeah, it was an interesting moment in his life.

That's what he said.

Is it like he's like, he's like RoboCop, basically.

Not really.

Well, no, but let me hear me out.

What did RoboCop do?

Was he someone who sculpted his whole body to perform certain tasks?

RoboCop was, whereas they tried to save a human by creating a mechanical body.

Whereas this guy just had a little bit of bone put into his elbow.

Robocop was fused.

RoboCop was based on Les Paul.

That's what I said.

I feel like he said, hey, Doc, can you fuse my arm at 90 degrees so that I can forever masturbate?

And they said, what?

He said, I struck a guitar.

Oh, my God.

Imagine if it was that.

One day a doctor will say, well, you want to know what really happened.

Yeah, so, okay, what happened?

This is the story of Les Paul's.

horrible accident.

He was out driving on a long trip to California with his partner at the time, who became his wife, called Mary Ford, and she was at the wheel.

He was getting rest.

He was laying down on the car seat when suddenly the car swerved and they were going off a bridge.

Put his arm on her.

He said, this is it.

They both thought they were going to die.

But fortunately, because it was a convertible car, they were able to fling out of it and they survived.

So actually, the very fact that he was laying down, didn't have a seatbelt on, she didn't have a seatbelt on, meant they kind of were able to survive.

I read that claim that...

He said, actually, it was a good thing we didn't have seatbelts.

Are we sure?

That was a theory at the time, actually, because there were motor racing drivers who didn't want to wear seatbelts because they wanted to be thrown away from the wreckage if there was ever a crash.

I just feel like, obviously, we're saying seatbelts are good.

Yeah, it's a belief at the time.

It was a belief.

At the time, there were arguments that seatbelts might trap you in wreckage.

You want to be as far away as possible from that car crash.

Yeah, yeah.

Now, they survived this, what was said to be a 20-foot plunge into a ravine, but they shouldn't have then survived because no one should have known that they were there.

But it just so happens that as they careered off the road, they crashed into a a telephone and telegraph pole and they phoned and

on the way down.

No, so when those lines went down, the lines of the area went down.

So some emergency services came to rectify that.

And then they saw this car down there.

This was eight hours later.

They're like, what's that?

And they found them.

So he was seriously injured, broken nose, punctured spleen, broken vertebrae, pelvis was done, and he'd shattered his elbow, his right elbow.

So the plan was they were going to amputate his arm, but a doctor said, no, I think we can fix this.

And so what they did was they decided to take some of his leg bone and they put it in place of the elbow.

But in doing so, they needed to fuse it into one position.

So usually someone who is having that would have it in a arm out position.

Right.

He said.

Would they?

Or maybe

it's

not that.

What would you go for?

Hand on the hip.

Peace sign.

Peace sign.

The peace sign is just your fingers, and it's all about where it is.

Oh, I get to move my arm.

Okay.

It's about arm position.

No, you get to move your fingers.

You don't get to move your arm.

I will go for a salute in that case.

Patriotic.

Salute position.

That could facing the wrong way look like a Sig Heil.

I will never be facing the wrong way.

I'll always be facing the king.

Yeah.

So anyway, the correct answer is for the four of us to do Y, M, C, and A.

So what he ended up doing was he said to his doctor, put my forefinger in my belly button when you set it.

That's how I hold the guitar, and I'll still be able to play.

That's what they did.

And so, yeah.

But thank thank God he did do this because he was a genius of guitar creation.

I think actually that's why they did it.

I read that he overheard the two surgeons, one of them saying we're going to have to cut his arm off.

And the other one saying, well, he's a guitarist, so maybe we should try and save it.

Wow.

Yeah.

I mean, thank God.

I just, I'd never heard, I'd heard of Les Paul very, very vaguely as a brand before.

Yeah.

But in the same way you've heard of a Gibson or a Stratocaster or whatever.

But I don't really, I don't know any of the stories about them.

Yeah.

And he was amazing.

I mean, he invented the modern electric guitar.

Yeah, he kind of innovated.

He advanced it.

There's other claims to earlier models, but he's the one who basically was a combination of an artist and an inventor and just got it out there and people saw it.

His one went forward.

Yeah, his was the one that got it.

One of the reasons was when he had his accident, he couldn't play guitar for a while, of course, because it's getting better.

But while he was waiting, he was reading electronics manuals and he was learning how to be an electronics master.

So he did this other thing.

There was a brilliant essay about Les Paul on this.

I think it was called The Quietist.

It's a great website.

And it's about how the fact that Bohemian Rhapsody is partly thanks to the Nazis.

Okay?

Hear me out.

I knew we had to thank him for something.

Okay, so he did these experiments with multi-track recording, right?

Yeah.

And he was working with Bing Crosby, friend of the podcast, I'd say.

Is he?

Quaintie.

Acquaintance of the podcast, yeah.

He's popped in.

He's popped in.

And he, because he wanted to pre-record his radio show.

And one of his staff found a guy called Jack Mullen, who'd been in the US Army Signal Corps and who had acquired, probably next,

two reel-to-reel recorders from Nazi Germany in 1945.

You know, there's a lot of

moving objects about, and he'd come across them somehow.

And he had...

What was the time of moving stuff about?

What was the time of that?

Borders.

Yes.

And he'd worked out the design.

He sort of backformed it.

He'd found these reel-to-reel recorders.

He'd backformed it.

And Crosby invested that.

And

he notified Les Paul who comes into the story here and he added an extra playback system to this reel to reel thing which meant you could hear what was on the tape as you recorded it that was the brilliant innovation yeah the eight track recorder it absolutely just revolutionized and one extra thing yeah and you can suddenly hear and sing and it so so and that and bohemian rhapsody is is possible because of that basically that bit with all the voices in the middle oh i see

that's the point of that it's sort of sort of every song is yeah thanks to that really well of modern music well that makes you think when you next listen to something you know, you're basically collaborating.

So

anyone who likes pop music, according to Andy, is a Nazi,

which coincidentally is.

I've already thought.

He used to do a show with his wife on TV as well, with Mary Ford, and it was from their house.

And the thing was, is that he was inventing so much stuff so quickly that was so impossible, really, for a layman to understand that he created a fictitious invention called the pulverizer, which he said, I'm just going to press the pulverizer and it's going to make this work and that's where he was playing pre-recorded multi-track and so on but it sent the whole industry into a kind of what is this pulverizer we have no idea what hang on so sorry what was he claiming i was doing he was so let's say he was using a pre-recorded multi-track that he'd already recorded and they were singing on top of it live for the tv show yeah rather than having to explain this new technology of what was going on or every little innovation that he was making he would just say the pulverizer has invented this yeah because i always you know you hear about multi-track stuff and recording over it being an invention.

And I always think, I reckon of the few technological things, I could have invented that.

I always think it's not this easy.

You just get a bit of music, you play it, and you play something else over it.

Yeah.

Come on, guys.

It was thanks to him innovating it.

I read someone saying it could have been done, but he was the one who thought to do it.

As in his genius was, it wasn't technically an impossible thing to do.

Got it.

It was the idea.

Exactly.

Actually, I heard him in an interview with the New York Times, he said, the only reason I invented these things is because I didn't have them.

So he knew there was a thing he needed.

He knew it was quite an easy thing to invent, but no one had invented it.

So he's like, oh, I have to make it.

So cool.

You said that he did this show with Mary Ford, which is true.

And that he was in the car crash with Mary Ford, which is also true.

But she was originally called Colleen Summers.

And he changed her name to Mary Ford because he thought it was better for their showbiz life.

He found the name in a phone book.

But she wasn't even known as Colleen Summers in the car crash.

She was known as Iris Watson.

And that that is because, and this was in all the newspapers, he was in a car crash with Iris Watson, and that's because he was having an affair with Mary Ford/slash Colleen Summers, and they wanted to keep it out of the newspapers, and so they gave a false name.

So, there's some poor old biddy named Iris Watson somewhere who everyone suddenly thinks is shagging the guitar man.

That's amazing.

He almost died another time, in fact, didn't he?

He almost electrocuted himself in the 40s.

In 1941, he was jamming around with some friends and he stuck his hand in the transmitter.

I don't even know how you stick your hand in a transmitter, but I guess it was more janky then.

Um, and it electrified him really badly.

And I think he was only safe because his bassist threw himself at him and like got him away from it just before he died.

He was, I think, fully unconscious, had to be entirely immersed in a tub of ice immediately afterwards, which apparently helps.

Whoa, I don't know if it does, but that's what they did anyway, I guess.

And then he spent weeks in full head-to-toe comedy bandages.

I don't know if that helps either, but yeah.

Amazing.

Very nearly died then.

Wow.

It must have been hard for him to wank when he was in that.

Oh my gosh.

You got the tissues ready made, though, haven't you?

Guitarists are so innovative with like the engineering side of their instruments.

Like Brian May made his own guitar, which he still uses.

Hendrix just used to walk around with a broom handle, just a big broom, because he couldn't afford a guitar, but he just wanted to practice the movements and shapes on it.

So everywhere he went, he just had a mop, basically.

And then when he got a guitar, he was left-handed, but there was only right-handed guitars around him.

So he had to learn it both upside down, or then he would have to take someone's guitar, unstring all the strings, restring it backwards.

Did he have a left-handed broom or?

No point.

It might have been the worst, only right-handed ones, yeah.

Did he restring?

Is it like putting the toilet seat down?

Did he restring the strings before he gave it back to the person?

You would.

That would be annoying.

Yeah, one of the most influential guitarists of of the 20th century was someone I hadn't heard of called Libber Coffin.

So she was born in 1893 and she was a folk and blues musician.

And lots of people say that they were influenced by her.

So she was a big influence in like bluegrass and jazz and stuff like that.

And it's very plinky, plunky, plicky, plucky the way she plays.

But she was left-handed.

And again, so she was, I think, about 12 when she saved enough money from a job.

She was working to get guitar.

But yeah, had to flip it upside down as you do.

And so she would always play the high notes with her thumb and finger and then the low notes with her little finger.

And she was amazing.

So she played from age 12 to 17.

She wrote a couple of songs, but people didn't hear about her.

She then got married, stopped playing until her 50s.

And then she bumped into in a department store.

In fact, she rescued the daughter of a woman called Ruth Seeger, who was a kind of famous musician.

And she became their housekeeper and re-taught herself the guitar from scratch, again, still playing it back to front.

And she released these songs that became huge influences.

And they like shot into the charts.

I I think Bob Dylan says he's massively influenced by her.

Because she just sounded different than any other guitarist, right?

Because she was playing it in this different way.

Yeah, the plicky plucky.

It was amazing.

And it's often necessity is the mother of invention because you didn't have teachers in those days.

You were just

self-taught.

Have you heard of Carol Kaye?

Yeah.

Yes.

The Beach Boys.

Yeah, so she was the bass player in Gov Vibrations, for instance.

But not just the Beach Boys.

She was the bass player for These Boots Are Made for Walking, La Bamba, I'm a Believer, the theme for the Batman TV show, Suspicious Minds, Riding Stole Cowboy.

Wow.

Like pretty much any song you can name from the 60s and 70s, she was the bass player in it.

And she had a different way of playing, just like this woman you were talking about, Anna, because she started off as a normal guitarist, an acoustic guitarist.

And so she would play with a pick.

And she then turned up at a session and the bassist hadn't turned up.

And they said, oh, can you play bass?

And she was like, okay, fine.

It's just pretty much the same.

I'll be able to do it.

And so she always played bass with a pick, whereas normally you would play bass with your fingers.

But her sound was so different than anyone else.

And she just became the one bassist that everyone wanted on

easy technology.

All you need is an idea.

Yeah.

But if you do watch any old Beach Boys documentaries of the making of that period, the sort of love that comes out from Brian Wilson watching her play is pretty phenomenal.

It's amazing.

It is extraordinary, all these names that kind of disappear, yet what a massive influence they've had.

Like Les Paul is a really good example, and Mary Ford, them as a double act.

They had 36 gold records, 11 number one pop songs.

They were huge.

Yeah, it's a lot.

That's huge.

They sold millions and millions.

And

I only know him as a guitarist, and I hadn't heard of Mary Ford.

Yeah, but like in 50 years' time, will people remember who Duo Leapi was?

I don't know.

He hasn't heard of BTS.

This is the biggest band on the planet.

Exactly, BTS.

Behind the scenes.

Yeah, exactly.

That's what he should do as his thing, like BTS, BTS.

That's what he should do.

Amazing.

So band.

There we go.

Because you know that spiders play guitars.

Oh, they'd be good.

They are good.

Because they've got eight hands.

They've got eight hands.

Be like jeweling banjos.

But da-ding-ding-ding-ding.

They could do it on their own.

I think that's exactly what they do.

Yep.

They play their webs as guitars.

So this is amazing.

They tune their webs and they adjust all the different threads on their webs to different tightnesses.

So they're very aware of exactly what the the tightness is that they've adjusted it to.

And that means whatever lands on that thread, they're going to know what it is.

So if it plays like an A-sharp, they're like, ah, that's a mosquito.

That's exactly that.

Wow.

That's incredible.

And they can tell the spider.

Other spiders gather around and go, oh, yeah, nice web, nice web.

Who's made that top radio bit for you?

Yeah, they do.

And then they eat them.

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

My fact is that firefighters are allowed to scoop water out of people's swimming pools to put out fires.

I should hope so.

As in, I would be furious if I found out they weren't allowed to do that if there was a fire nearby.

Oh, yeah, really.

I don't know.

If I was a duke and I

had a big swimming pool

and I went out to dive in from my big diving bar and there was no water in the swimming.

I'd all be taken to put out some fire in the peasants' village.

I'd be furious.

You're right.

James, were you the one one Tory voter in last week's election?

Well, exactly as you say, Andy.

It's one of those things you're like, I'm glad that's true, but I'm sort of glad they've laid down the law at some point.

And this seems to be true.

Firefighters know it worldwide.

There are slightly different rules.

So in California, the fire department says you can take water from any safe source, and it's completely up to the discretion of the pilot what you use.

So if you are a socialist pilot who hates people with swimming pools, you can go there first.

So they're doing it via helicopter, which we should point out.

Sorry, yes.

Sorry, you're not just wandering over with a bucket.

Yes, so there'll be a firefighter in a helicopter, and they've got a bucket underneath, which are called Bambi buckets.

For reasons I couldn't ascertain.

And you lower...

I imagine that once you've got a big bucket of water underneath your helicopter, you're probably moving around like a deer on ice.

That's nice.

Oh, maybe it's that.

That's good.

I was thinking because it looks a bit almost like an upside-down deer because it's got like wobbly leg buttons attaching it to the helicopter.

Yeah, yeah.

Anyway, these are some of the biggest buckets on the planet.

I'm very excited about that.

Are they?

Honestly, I spent a fair little bit of time trying to find out the biggest bucket on the planet.

Yeah.

And there's not readily available data.

Okay.

So these helicopters.

Yeah.

So they're pretty cool.

Yeah, and they don't call a head.

You know, you could be just getting a road to go out in your swimming pool and you'll see a giant bucket descend from the input.

Has anyone ever been lifted up and scooped up in the bucket and went, oh, that's my child.

Yeah.

They have to do a proper safety scan before they descend.

So you'd hope that would encourage.

You never know.

You never know what's going on.

It's interesting, though.

Could you see?

I was reading a blog and this guy says, we can see very well and

we will see you.

But if you run out and start waving your hands at the helicopter sort of saying, no, I'm going to have a swim.

I want to have a swim.

He's like, we do take that into account.

Also, what I love about it is that the house is tracked.

They mark down where it is.

And then if you ask them, they will reimburse you your water.

Or they'll bring the damage.

They don't bring back water.

They will reimburse you the money to

fill.

Or if any damage was done in the process of lowering their big buckets.

Which almost never, sorry, I want to say in defense of human beings, based on, in fact, two separate firefighters, they said no one's ever done that.

Except there was one person.

I think there was one company where it was completely destroyed, like a nursery school where the whole thing was.

But yes, I think people don't tend to call the fire department and go, you know, when you rescued 100 people yesterday.

Well, my swimming pool's a bit shallower.

But just hear me out, right?

Yeah.

The fire department have scoped out the swimming pool.

They've said, yes, we're good to go, right?

The bucket is descending.

Meanwhile, I walk out.

I've got my...

I'm probably reading my book and I've got my headphones in.

So I don't notice.

The helicopter above you.

Have you been near many low-flying helicopters?

It's very big surround of headphones, you know.

I'm listening to BTS.

I'm listening to BTS.

I'm trying to catch up on this great stuff.

I think it's possible.

I would be.

It's so possible that

I'll be scooped and that I'll end up in the bucket.

I've been underneath helicopters at various heights, and I can tell you you would 100% know there was a helicopter if it was within you know 20 or 30 meters of you.

Also, if you're jumping in the pool with your big noise-cancelling headphones on, because you need to be investigating

special waterproof headphones, and it's a windy day already, so I don't notice the downdraft.

Waterproof book?

It's one of those bath books.

You always say those on holiday, don't you?

I've got the bath and a correct in it.

It's really big.

Do you remember there was that story about, and it was definitely fake, but for a long time before the internet really snopes and all that, it went out there at schools where a scuba diver was found in a tree.

Do you remember that?

It was always told as a riddle I think it was like a scuba divers in a tree in a forest.

How did they get there?

It's that there used to be a sea here but over time

you know like coastal erosion and stuff.

The thing that we're talking about right now

is just a real idiot scuba diver that doesn't realize that you're supposed to go in water.

He's like, I'm here to see some wildlife.

It's Occam's razor, that's it.

He's going to the beach in the afternoon, but he's going to the forest in the morning, but he doesn't want to go home in between the big stuff.

These helicopters, by the way, some of these helicopters, they don't do the bucket system.

I love this.

And this is the big ones.

I think it's the.

There are some Chinooks which do this.

They are big ones.

Maybe it's some of those.

Maybe it's a different helicopter, but they have snorkels.

They have retractable snorkels, which they drop down like an elephant's trunk into your pool and suck up

into the body of the.

They can suck 4,000 gallons in a minute.

minute.

Wow.

Which is quite now that sounds fast, right?

It sounds fast, but I did a little bit of maths.

It would still take that helicopter 122 minutes exactly to empty an Olympic pool because of the size.

So that's two hours and two minutes it would take to suck up an Olympic pool, which is the same duration of some like it hot.

So you could watch the whole thing in the cockpit while you did that.

Yeah, yeah.

And then when you're going to put out the fire, they're like, I actually like it hot.

But the weight must be insane yeah so they can't they couldn't suck up unlimited no obviously they could do the amount you see

it's still heavy though i know i know it is wow yeah so as well as being able to take your water without asking from your pools yeah uh another thing that firefighters can do is they can smash the hell out of your car if they need to right and this does happen a fair chunk and it's often on steam after work

it's been a long day fighting fires so one example was i was reading about a guy who parked his new BMW outside a house in East Boston and he parked it in front of a fire hydrant.

This is a big, big problem.

You shouldn't obviously do that, highly illegal, but people do do it.

And if a fire breaks out and the fire engine gets there and they need the hydrant, what they'll often do is if they don't have enough people to literally pick up and lift the car out the way, they'll smash through the windows so that they can thread the hose all the way through.

That's interesting that the hose just can't go over.

Yeah, right.

Why do you need to take it it through the window?

Because it might be tight, as in the angle on the other side.

That would have to be really tight.

What they say, yeah, is it's all to do with if you want the ultimate amount of water to seamlessly come through, you can't have any kinks.

The reason we often hear about these stories is the car owners say, you smashed up my car, you need to pay for this.

And anytime it goes to court, the judge will throw it out and give them a fine.

So in this case, this guy was fined $100 for his two-day-old new car that he parked outside.

Wait, he was fined for picking a bus.

Parking in front of the parking lot.

Yeah, no, so it's like not only are you not being reimbursed, but we're also fining you for what you did.

Great stuff.

Have we talked about fireman's polls before?

I'm not sure we have.

I'm not sure.

Oh, interesting.

So

it used to be that you'd have the fire engine on the ground floor.

Yeah.

And then you'd live one floor above that.

Yeah.

And then you'd have another floor above that.

Guess what's kept in that?

Like just old stuff that you don't need around the house anymore, but you don't really want to throw out.

Yep, that's right.

The strippers?

The strippers?

No, it's not the strippers.

The horses, though, because the horses would live in a fire station in the olden days, but they live on the ground floor.

This is in the days of horses, though.

The hay, the hay, the hay,

the hay loft.

Wow.

And

you would have poles to, I think, transport the hay.

It's apparently a binding pole, which helps you move the hay around.

You could just drop it.

It's like you can just drop it.

Kills on the pole's not necessary.

I mean,

there was

a chicago firefighter who dropped down the pole allegedly this was his fosbury flop moment where he slid down the pole to responding quickly and the captain of that uh company david kenyon oh my god so they're basically like we've put this pole in for literally no reason you could just drop the pay down completely pointless and then this guy actually finds a use for it yeah and then their crew was suddenly arriving first at every fire in the city because they're doing their pole stuff and um get this only one cat has ever been able to use a fireman's pole.

Wow.

Okay.

Is that am I?

It's not a riddle.

I'm surprised that it's so many or so few.

Yeah.

It would wrap itself around and go down.

Yeah.

Why not?

It was called Sam the Cat, and it was the mascot for the Long Beach, California fire station in the 60s.

And the crew taught Sam to use the pole.

I reckon tons of cats can.

They just choose not to do that.

What I think is nice is that fireman's polls are still going, despite many articles over the last 30 years that keep claiming they're being phased out.

Right.

I've read they're being phased out.

I'm surprised Europe hasn't gotten rid of them.

EU, Brussels,

Brussels.

No, it's woke, isn't it?

Because of woke.

I'm trying to build on my character of being a pro-Duke.

Of course,

Brexit got it.

I think there have been a few less.

And from what Firefighters say, I think there are accidents.

So I think there was one person who said that two of the people I've worked with have ended up in hospital from going down a pole ill-advisedly.

Is that slide injuries, as in you burning yourself on the friction, or is it you've hurt yourself because you've done it upside down for a laugh, or whatever, or you've fallen.

Someone did fall in the hole of Seattle Fireman.

Yes, I did.

Well, there was one person.

What most of them say is it's members of the public because now the fire stations are often open to members of the public or partners.

They don't know that this is the fireman's poll.

How can you not know?

Because

maybe this goes to the back page.

I don't know.

One story that kicked off a big campaign to get them phased out was in, I think it was 2002.

And the poll is you open a door on the second floor, and that's the pole door, the pole door, and you go in, I think, often, and then you go into the body.

Totally free race, and you can be careful.

In which case, you could understand someone falling down, absolutely not looking where they're going.

Someone went in, thought they were going to the loo, and

what they thought was the toilet cubicle, stepped in,

fell straight through the hole.

That's quite funny, it's incredible.

It's quite an awkward moment because you will have shot yourself by the time they get you to

go to the toilet.

Just as you're recovering, a bale of hay crashes on top of your head.

But they're still going.

They're around a lot, yeah.

It's great.

A lot of them in America.

And apparently, I think some firefighters don't use them, and some firefighters do.

And some, one of them said his chief uses it like literally he'll come down with a cup of coffee in his hand, just uses it to get up and down after that.

That's what you would.

I've got a little riddle for you guys.

That's great.

Okay, why in Germany?

That's not a riddle, it's just a question.

Why in Germany are firefighters having to fight fires in tanks?

Oh.

Okay.

Is tank German for fire engine?

No, but that's lovely.

Do they have lots of spare tanks?

Because they're not allowed to use any of their military weapons because Germany has a famously paired-down army.

So they've accidentally made too many tanks.

And they don't have enough fire engines.

They're going along to the fires in tanks?

Yeah.

Shortage of fire engines?

No.

Using the big sort of cannon in front of the tank as a hose?

They probably are using it like that.

Put a big sponge on the tank's barrel, put a big sponge on the front of the tank, and just sort of squeegee the fire out of existence.

Lovely.

Okay, good thought.

No, it's not that.

It's much like Bohemian Rhapsody, very closely connected to the Nazis.

Putting tracks on top of each other.

No, it's a World War II thing.

What this is, is that there are tens of thousands of unexploded bombs that landed during World War II that are still out in forests and so on.

They're buried underneath.

You know what?

I don't want to be on the Nazi side.

I think those bombs were probably probably not dropped by the nazis yeah yeah yeah i was saying it was it was dropped to get rid of i was nazis are connected it's related it's related i think you're allowed they started it yeah yeah

um so basically fire fires would start and bombs would be exploding set off by the fire and so because you don't know where they are it's too dangerous to go in they would often have to use a tank and this is this is recent this is only a few years ago is this happening on the regs in Germany because I feel like unexploded World War II bombs every couple of years maybe you get one but is it

there are going to be areas where there are more, aren't there?

I think there's some areas of France that you still can't go in.

And is the tank, the idea is that a tank is more bomb-proof?

Because I still be nervous in a tank.

Yeah, protection.

It gives you a bit more than, say, just walking or

a truck.

Yeah.

Imagine there's a fire in this room.

Okay.

God forbid.

We are on what floor?

The third floor?

Yeah.

Fourth floor.

But we need to get out to the building, maybe out of the windows.

We can't go down the stairs.

What are we hoping for on the ground?

A big trampoline or like a mattress.

A big trampoline or mattress, exactly.

So, this is the Broder Life Net,

which is this thing that you see in old movies where you get a load of firefighters all holding a big trampoline and it's got a little target in the middle of it.

And you jump out, and hopefully, you're fine.

And that really was a thing.

It existed from 1887 when it was invented.

And it was still being used as late as 1960.

Wow.

But the reason that they don't use them anymore is because they quite often went wrong.

Of course.

I mean, it must be so hard.

It must be terrifying jumping onto one of those things.

Yeah, there's a lot of problems.

Basically, you're probably in a place with lots of smoke, so being able to see the trampoline is hard enough.

And then...

Quite often people would be like, oh, we need to save the safe in the corner with all our erection vases in.

So let's throw that out first.

And obviously they would throw heavy things out and then that would mean that the trampoline would break.

Right.

Or quite often more than one person would jump out at the same time.

Like two or three people would hold hands and jump out.

Yeah.

And that would be too heavy and that would break.

Or quite often you would just miss and you would hit a fireman.

Right, yeah, yeah.

Like it was really the reason that they don't exist anymore is because they did save some lives, but actually their hit rate was quite low.

But wait, surely I'd rather a trampoline than nothing.

Yeah, I mean, like, so when you say, why were they facing, was Was there something better to replace?

Yes, there was.

It was like these big sort of cherry picker machines

that can pluck you out of your window.

Yeah, yeah.

So once you get over like six, seven stories, these things don't work anyway.

Right.

And they managed to get these kind of cherry pickers that would be able to get that high.

So you didn't need the trampolines anymore.

I'm imagining a situation where someone's on the fourth floor.

The whole building's on fire.

They've looked out their window.

Their swimming pool is below them.

I think, yes, they leaped out to safety, landed it, a giant bucket comes in, picks him up, and trots him back into the fire.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on Instagram with at Schreiberland.

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My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin.

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I'm on Twitter at Andrew Hunter M.

Yep.

Or you can get to us all by going where Anna?

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

Yep, or you can go to our website, no such thingasafish.com.

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There's lots of gigs to come too.

Please come along.

We're starting in the autumn.

It's going to be amazing.

Otherwise, just come back here next week for another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.