533: No Such Thing As The Farto Phone

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Hi, everyone.

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

Thank you all for snapping up tickets for our upcoming Thunder Nerds tour.

It's going to be so much fun, and so many of you have already got tickets.

It has been absolutely staggering, to be honest.

We have sold out a number of the dates.

There's still quite a lot of tickets available, though, so do go to no suchthingasafish.com forward slash live to see what tickets are available now.

But the main reason that I've come here today is to speak directly to the people of Sydney, Australia.

You, of all the people around the world, have really pulled out all the stops and helped us to sell out the Sydney Opera House in just a couple of days.

Absolute insanity, it has to be said.

But to thank you for doing that, we're going to put on an extra show in Sydney.

Now, the details of that will first be told to Club Fish members members at the beginning of your next bit of bonus content, which is due to come out on the 11th of June.

You people will have a pre-sale.

And then...

If there are any tickets left, they will go on sale on the 14th of June.

And we'll give details at the top of that Friday's show.

So that's the big news.

We're really looking forward to this tour.

It's going to be absolutely amazing.

If you haven't got tickets yet, then do not dilly-dally because they are going super, super fast.

And like I said, you can get those at nosixthingersofish.com forward slash live

one more thing to say and that is that there is a bit of an odd thing about this week's show uh that is that one member of the team was unable to make it to the office on time despite leaving home on time they never made it i will leave it up to you to guess who that's going to be but what it means is that this was a three-person show Obviously, we very much missed the person in question, but hopefully you will enjoy this show nonetheless.

anyway no more to say apart from as we always do every week on with the podcast

hello and welcome to another episode of no such thing as a fish coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn.

My name is Anna Toshinsky and I'm joined here today by James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and a superior replacement to Dan Schreiber

in the form of, if you're seeing the video clip of this, a puppet of Dan Schreiber

who will say much less and I think that'll be appreciated.

I'm afraid Dan is stuck on a train somewhere in the east of England.

Hashtag broken Britain.

Let's go.

Nice to hear broken Britain making a comeback.

No one said that for years.

Is that quite quite dated?

We're too busy living it, you know.

No, Dan is, Dan, this is the first ever, I think, three-person podcast we've ever done.

Yeah.

If you prefer the format, let us know.

Yeah.

I think

this could be it.

Do you think?

We might crack it.

I just want to say, Dan, if you're listening, which I know you will be, I really missed you.

James was the first one to suggest.

He said, let's cut the sandbag loose.

He kept saying, cut saying over and over again.

He said that before your train was even delayed, actually.

We had a whole thread going.

How do do we ditch down?

It was actually me that stopped the train.

I put five people on the track

and then one person on another track.

You put one leaf on the line, so it'll be there for a couple of days.

Anyway, we're going to kick off with fact number one.

And because I'm hosting, I've made that my fact.

My fact this week is that as part of the preparations for D-Day, one scientist persuaded another to inhale oxygen until she vomited.

They got married shortly afterwards.

Sort of a weird rom-com in a meet cute.

In a fact.

Is it a meat cute?

Maybe they already knew each other.

I don't know what meet cute is.

God, guys, that's in a rom-com, the moment where the couple they bump into each other.

She drops all her stuff, he helps her.

She vomits.

She vomits.

They're under the ocean, maybe?

They're in a hyperbaric chamber.

They're simulating me under the ocean, certainly.

Okay, well, it's the original meat cute.

This is from this amazing book that I need to say.

It's written by someone called Rachel Rachel Lance, who is actually a blast injury specialist and a researcher into bodies surviving the extremes of being underwater.

But she's written this book called Chamber Divers, and she's uncovered this story, which is that the D-Day landings hadn't happened yet.

This is Second World War.

But there had been a disastrous Canadian beach landing in the Second World War on the beaches of France.

And it had been disastrous because they had based it on a bunch of old photos they had, like old holiday photos from the 1920s.

Are you joking?

And they're like, where's the ferris wheel?

Exactly.

Where's all the song feeders?

So you've got to make landfall by the donkeys, right?

And it turned out the donkeys and the ferris wheel and all of that have been replaced by German guns.

Oh, that's bad luck.

Which is such bad luck.

And it was awful.

And a huge number of casualties.

Was it that the sand had moved or the tides had moved the sand or that they couldn't land in the same way because of the ocean conditions?

I think it was that they couldn't tell what the terrain was like based on the pictures.

So they thought it was going to be nice and sandy it was very rocky it was very hazardous couldn't land properly really bad and so it became apparent that in order to do a successful beach landing uh to invade the germans the allies would have to know more about the coastline which would mean divers getting right up to the beach spending a long time underwater going deep down getting up to the beach then popping up at night and actually figuring out exactly what was on the beach and to do that we needed to know how to dive which we didn't really in the 40s.

Interesting.

You know what?

I was reading yesterday.

I was reading a book about the history of barbed wire.

And this is really off topic.

There was a thing in it how during the war, they used to put barbed wire under the sea.

So, as in when people would come and land, you would jump off the boat and start running up, but your feet would get tangled because there's barbed wire under the sea.

Yeah, under the sea.

That's mean.

It was a time of menials, 3945.

It was, wasn't it?

That's extraordinary.

I did not know that.

But that would be useful for your divers as well because they would notice it, I guess.

They'd see it exactly with the goggles on because they wear goggles, don't they?

Anyway, this is a long-winded way of getting to the point that there were these two researchers, JBS Haldane and Helen Sperway.

They work for UCL, and they shot themselves repeatedly in these hyperbaric chambers, chambers that could be filled up with oxygen and simulate underwater pressures.

They did this over and over again to find out the effects on the human body so that the D-Day landings could happen.

And Helen Sperway is in there and she's the one who's inhaling pure oxygen because it's the other body deals with oxygen at high pressures because it can be very dangerous.

And JBS Haldane is sitting next to her taking notes in this hypervaric chamber.

And she managed to last for 33 minutes on pure oxygen before she tore the breathing tube out of her mouth, vomited repeatedly, hallucinated and said, I'm done, thanks.

Well, she might have said, I'm done, thanks.

Because

I read about what happens to you in those situations and yeah your voice goes really high like you're helium helium i didn't know that yeah they should do that at kids birthday party shouldn't they well it's kind of tutorial yeah exactly it's well there's a lot of vomiting at kids birthday parties when you say that um it does sound kind of fun apart from people can't whistle when there's so much oxygen either oh no so you know it's it's well i wouldn't like that because i'm a whistler are you yeah yeah yeah i get told off for whistling from my wife's family who think it's bad luck in the house well you're you're whistling out of the window at passing women aren't you

And you've got your hard hat on.

I guess.

They're right.

It really affected Haldane, didn't it?

So I read that in the course of this research he got a bubble at the base of his spine which stayed there for the rest of his life and it made it incredibly painful for him to sit down anywhere.

No.

Yeah.

Yeah, it was extremely dangerous.

He was an incredible guy.

JBS Haldane.

He was, yeah.

Bird on Sanderson Haldane.

He was amazing.

I was just saying before we started recording this, you sometimes you meet someone researching this podcast and you think, I I just want to spend weeks with you.

I just want to do like a month-long special of the show about this guy.

And if you spent weeks with him, he'd make you do so much mad stuff that you wouldn't have the guts for, I'm afraid.

No, okay, fair enough.

But he was constantly experimenting on himself.

And his dad was also a really famous scientist who experimented on him.

And he did all of this science despite not having a science degree even.

He studied maths and then classics.

I'm sorry to say, but if you do that, you're going to end up with a bubble on your butt.

Moving to the professional space.

No, you're right.

You're right.

You're right.

But he was a geneticist by training, and yet throughout his life, he was constantly doing crazy experiments.

Which were really useful as well.

Really useful.

You know, he really did find out a lot about how the body responds to these pressures and different gases.

I think he did a lot of research into nitrogen as well.

If we get overexposed to nitrogen, he went down.

I think

when he was about 13, he was first experimented on undersea by his father.

So, this is a lifelong thing for Haldane.

Right.

He and his father, who was called

also John John Haldane.

John Scott Haldane, yeah.

John Scott Halan, sorry, yeah, yeah.

They went up to the west coast of Scotland on HMS Spanker, which was a navy ship.

Yeah.

Do you have a hat?

I do.

I have a naval cap with the band HMS Spanker, which was an old prop from QI.

And I wear that standing at my window.

And I also have a complaint.

And

his father was trying to work out the speed divers should rise at to stop getting the bends, the decompression sickness.

And they didn't know what caused that, and he found out, basically.

And Haldane Sr.

put his volunteers, including his 13-year-old son, Jack, in a badly fitting diving suit, got them to repeatedly go down into the sea and then come back up at different speeds.

He did work out eventually how to come back up.

But Jack Jr.

became incredibly cold and frightened.

He was 13 years old.

And his dad just apparently dosed him with lots of whiskey and then put him to bed.

And

that was parenting in the end audience.

And then we look back and think, what a legend.

That's true.

Because actually, it was him and Naomi, his sister.

And she was a sort of equally amazing character.

So she was four years younger than JBS Haldane.

And their dad experimented on both of them constantly.

Apparently, Naomi's job as a child, from literally the age of three, was to monitor test subjects through an observation window in these gas chambers that he'd set up.

Make sure your brother's not dead.

It was literally that if they fell unconscious, she had to drag them out and resuscitate them.

Jesus.

Honestly, I'm starting to warm a little less to this guy.

I have to say.

Yeah.

I'm just imagining what a genius he would have been in adult life, Haldane, had he not had his brain squashed by gasses every weekend.

Maybe it was, that's the equivalent of the bonk on the head, though.

Maybe that was what sparked the genius.

Yeah.

Maybe.

Maybe we should all be doing it.

Yeah.

Actually,

he's been his whole life being gassed.

I've just realised.

He was gassed in the First World War as well.

His entire life.

Yeah, yeah.

So he was in the Black Watch.

And the Black Watch are a very famous Scotch regiment.

You know,

like legends of the British Army.

They all wore a Black Watch, didn't they?

That's right.

Cassios.

And that's why they never started their attacks on time, because they'd all drifted a little bit.

One, two, three, beep.

Let's go.

The Germans just opened the machine gun fire as soon as they hear this huge beep.

And so his job was trench mortar officer, so he had to lead groups to throw bombs by hand into enemy trenches.

I mean, it's quite fierce and hard and horrible work.

He loved it.

And he was gassed, which sparked an interest in mustard gas and experimenting on that.

But while he was at the front, I love this, he was writing back and forth with Naimi, his sister, about mouse genetics and he later he boasted he was the only officer to complete a scientific paper from a forward position of the black watch no way it is amazing it is amazing but he must have been like the gas comes towards him he must be like getting a madeline moment of his childhood mustn't he you say oh this reminds me of old dad

he's taking off his mask getting his notepad out

uh can we talk about helen spurway yeah she was also awesome this is she was the other one in the diving exchange she was the one who vomited vomited.

Yes, and whom he did marry, as they did mention, after vomiting all over him, they did get married afterwards.

Go on.

She reminds me a bit of Erica McAllister because

most of her research was on drosophilia, fruit flies.

So she was a...

world expert on fruit flies, basically.

And then she later wrote a paper about pathognogenesis in guppies, in the fish.

So that means that a female guppy can give birth without having sex.

Virgin birth.

Virgin birth.

But she also said that possibly it could happen in humans because of her work in guppies.

She was like, well, there's no reason if it happens in guppies, it can't happen in puppies and then in humans.

Guppies, puppies, humans.

She was extremely hardcore as well, wasn't she?

As you'd have to be.

They sort of found each other soulmates in each other.

And she was quite a strange character.

So there's a Time magazine report of an incident that happened to her in 1956, which you have to bear in mind it is 1956.

It began, Britain's blonde biologist, Helen Sperway-Haldane, wife of brilliant biologist JBS Haldane.

The blonde and the brilliant.

Emerged from a London pub after downing three and a half pints of bitter and encountered a bobby, stamped on his police dog's tail and clouted the cop.

So she was clearly a bit feisty.

Maybe she was just experimenting what would happen if a dog got its tail stumped on.

Maybe she was.

Well, the answer, it turns out, is you end up in prison for two months.

Yeah.

Two months?

Wow.

Yeah.

Yeah, but she was offered to pay a fine and she said, no, not up for it.

And she was about to go to India and she said, I'll fit in much better with some of the other people who've gone to India if I've done a prison spell.

Basically, that's why they left Britain.

So Haldane was at Cambridge and she got arrested for drunk and disorderly.

And he said, well, let's just go to India then.

Really?

Yeah, but.

Whenever anyone asked him why, he said, oh, the Suez crisis, I think the government has handled that so badly that I want to leave leave the UK and I want to go to India.

But it's actually because his wife was a piss out.

That's extra.

Because I read a few reasons that he gave.

One was that he was broke as well.

Like after the war, his lab had no money and he was broke.

And those pipes are bitter, don't they?

And he'd be given a really good job offer from the Indian Statistical Institute.

But also, he then claimed, this is a bit more in the Suez line of things, that he just didn't want to wear socks anymore.

He said, 60 years in socks is enough.

So I'm moving to India.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, you don't have to wear socks.

Well, also, one thing he really liked, apart from the nice job offer and the culture and all that, he liked the socialism there because they had a lot of socialism in India at the time.

And he was a former communist.

He spent years and years in the Communist Party

and slightly embarrassed himself a bit over Lysenko, who was the dodgy Soviet pseudoscientist who claimed he was going to revolutionize crops.

Well, yeah, that's the thing.

Like, Lysenko, he was the one who said Darwin's theories are not completely correct.

But obviously, for Haldane, this is a big problem because he was such a geneticist and he was so that's weird like for him like to be a world expert on genetics for a while he was kind of saying well you know there might be something in it and he slightly compromised his scientific principles Naomi was also a socialist oh was she okay and committed socialist but anyway she also proofread lord of the rings in her spare time get out she actually in fact wrote over 90 novels she was

gonna say over 90 of it

the great dungeon values woman yeah she kind of proofreaded

that I've got him to kind of pare it down a little bit it was actually 19 books long before she edited it.

No, she wrote 90 books.

She's not a master of decision.

Haldane's first wife, Charlotte Franken, was the daughter of an alien.

Oh, yeah.

Go on.

Yeah.

Dan?

No response from Dan there?

No, he's just sat there.

Okay.

Stunned.

You've stolen his only fact.

Her father was Jewish and the son of a German.

And during the First World War, there was a thing called the Alien Restrictions Act.

If you personally who wasn't a British citizen, then they would, you would have less rights than anyone else in the country.

So he decided to leave and left Charlotte on her own.

But she became a reporter for the Daily Express, apparently because, and this is according to the Dictionary of National Biography, because her father had taught her to drink like a man.

So that helped her to become a reporter for the Express.

I believe it.

Yeah, yeah.

It's pretty much the only qualification you needed.

But she was actually married when she met Haldane and she got divorced.

And the divorce quoted Haldane as a person in the divorce.

And he basically got fired from Cambridge because of that.

As in, he was quoted as the person she'd been

monkeying about with.

Exactly.

Cambridge was very uptight back in those days, wasn't it?

He was brought up in front of the sex Viri.

The what?

The Sex Viri.

Viri.

Viri, V-I-R-I.

What are they?

Well, sex.

Six men.

Six men.

Yeah.

So they were the moral guardians of the University of Cambridge, which if you'd done anything wrong, you would be brought up in front of them and they say, you're going to lose your position in the

sex viri.

Sex very.

That must have led to some confusion.

People turning up for a good time.

Seeing the plaque on the door.

Well, Haldane, he contested the charge.

He won.

He started calling the sex viri the sex weary.

That was a bit of a joke.

And they basically lost all of their authority.

Wow.

And they weren't there anymore.

Not thanks solely to that.

Nobody was really part of it.

Really?

Well, the pun, but of the whole

escapade was part of it.

Yeah.

Of course, if you are speaking classical Latin the way it's traditionally spoken, it's pronounced sex weary anyway, isn't it?

Oh, maybe it was an even better joke.

Even better back in those days.

That's great.

Latin.

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Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is Andy.

My fact is that the Swiss have a special kind of wrestling trouser named the Schwingerhausen with a special belt for your opponent to hang on to.

Why does your opponent want to hang on to your trousers?

Well,

the Schwingerhausen are these heavy trunks that you wear in the Alps when you're wrestling with your fellow farmers and loggers and herdsmen and all of that.

It's quite a blokey sport traditionally.

There are some, it's been making strides.

There are some lady Schwingers now, but traditionally it wasn't.

It was a lad's occupation.

And basically, you put your right hand on your opponent's belt, your left hand on their right leg, you brace, I'm sure,

and then you tussle.

And you're trying to make your opponent vulnerable to the schwunger, the schwunger, which are the holds.

There are dozens of holds.

The average schwinger masters several schwunger,

three or four, but they'll know loads, but like you have your three or four signature moves.

It's kind of like Street Fighter, the arcade game.

And once you enact a Schwunge, your opponent might go for a Gegenschwunger, which is a counter-hold.

Oh, I see.

Yeah.

And you get points for the holds that you make?

I think you just get points for throwing your opponent or moving them.

Maybe it's moving them on the floor.

I think it's just throwing them on the floor.

That seems to be the aim.

And if you watch videos, it's very crotch-heavy a lot of the time.

Because if you imagine you've grabbed someone's belt loops from behind, and you're sort of a lot of the time just shoving them towards you aren't they as they're doing the same i see so you're sort of crotch on crotch quite a lot of the time and then eventually one of you flips the other onto the ground and you've won the bout yeah yeah amazing and the um the competitions are often known as swing fests yeah um but don't get them mistaken with the south london swing fest which is a celebration of swing music the sussex swing fest which is a golf competition or swing fest a swinger only festival from East Yorkshire.

Is that swinging, swinging?

Yeah, yeah.

That's right.

So don't get mixed up with any of those if you want to go for your homoerotic Swiss wrestling competition.

Yeah, leather trousers would be useful.

I think they'd probably be useful for a few of those.

For all of those.

Absolutely.

It should be one of those flow charts in a magazine, which Swing Fest are you?

Oh, yeah.

Do you have leather trousers?

That doesn't help us.

Yeah, and I read a great article in the German language press about Paul Eggman, who's a master saddler, and he makes the wrestling trousers.

And he's one of, I think, a handful of people who now truly knows the art of how to make Schringerhausen.

And did you read it in German?

No, I clicked the button that said,

I toggled from German to English.

Oh, right.

I always do that as well.

I don't have languages that I can speak.

It's like, even for English, you toggle

more English, please.

More Englishy.

Yeah.

And there's a quite a nice thing at the end where it's a sort of respectful thing at the end.

The winner ends the match by brushing the sawdust off the loser's back.

Oh, yeah.

Do you think that used to be Day brushed off his back.

He's going to get a tissue.

Come on.

Oh, dear.

It's huge, though, isn't it?

I mean, it's just, I think it's

one of the most well-attended sports in Switzerland, if not the most.

About 300,000 people attend the finals, which happen every year to crown the king of the Schwingers.

Brilliant.

The Schwinger could jungle VIP.

There was a magazine called Schwinger Zeitung magazine, which the first edition was in 1907.

And in that edition, they talk about bets being placed in taverns on schwinging.

But it's also, it's amazing.

There's a big article about how terrible cycling is.

It's

so weird.

1907?

Really?

Yeah, I guess that's when it was taking off, you know, so that would be a...

And people were quite anti,

they were anti-women's cycling, especially.

Why do they think it was bad?

Well, because it was an imported sport.

And compared to swinging, which obviously all normal, upstanding Swiss people love to do, cycling involves wretched hunchback figures on their velocipedes.

You can't commute to work by schwinging, can you?

Schwing your way to work.

If you and another schwinger grab each other and then throw yourselves off the mountain, you can get down to your office in a kind of wheel formation.

So you are the bike, basically.

It's one of the three Swiss national sports, or often cited as one of the three really traditional Swiss national sports.

And the other two being...

Can we guess?

Swiss national sports.

That's it, but give it a go.

Um, skiing, I'd say no from me.

Um,

cow riding, you've got to put a you've got to put a bell around the around the neck of the biggest bull in the valley.

I think, do you know what?

That's not a terrible guess.

Loving that massive horn, that big alpine horn.

Oh, yeah, the

alpine horning.

Oh, yodeling.

None of the, I don't think that's a sport.

Are you calling that a sport?

No, I'm going to take it.

You'll kick yourself making knives.

Anonymized bank accounts,

protecting the Pope

Yes.

I'm going to tell you if that's all right.

So, um

Dan, anything?

Oh, Dan, what was that you said, Dan?

Stein's tossing and Hornusen.

No, you were absolutely right, Dan.

Did I not say Horn Newsen?

Did you say Horn Newsen?

Well, I said Horn.

It has nothing to do with horns.

I think it's like a giant.

I've watched a bit of it.

It's really fun.

It's like fly swatting, but on a giant scale.

And it's a bit like golf.

Someone swings this whip at the hornoose, which is a hornet.

I've seen it.

It's like a golf club, but it's like got a whip bit on the air.

Exactly.

Oh, yeah, I've seen that.

It's like if your golf club, if you had a trick golf club that was flexible and you hit it.

So, what am I hitting it at?

You're hitting it at this massive field in front of you or slope, and up the slope are the opponents, and they're all holding these huge flapping bats that look like giant fly swats.

And their job is to swat your ball out of the air.

And you've got to see.

Sounds incredibly difficult.

Wait, so I'm whipping my ball into the air yeah and they're trying to swat my ball out so imagine i hit a golf ball to you you're 200 yards away yeah and you've got a tennis racket yeah and you're trying to hit the golf ball before it lands right but with additional difficulties and you're trying to get it what past me or

you're trying to get it to hit the ground before someone swats it right okay okay such a pretty basic concept it's the kind of game you come up with as a seven-year-old with your sibling and they've stuck with it and it's huge um and in fact uh rudolf minger who i'm sure you guys know was a 1950s swiss politician

no please come on they it's just a name it's not funny it's not a funny name it's just a name he said it was the ultimate mark of uh patriotism alongside wrestling and yodeling oh can i tell you a thing or two about leather trousers sure did we talk ever about the ale connor

i don't think so

so basically this was this idea that in the old days the way you tested beer was that you go to a pub you'd pour the beer onto a wooden bench and then you'd sit down and you'd see if you stuck to it right and this is a myth it's a complete myth

from 1911 how interesting

yeah

it's from this book ins ales and drinking customs of old england so it really sounds like copper bottom nonsense the idea was that like um a publican might put extra sugar in or something like that and it would make it sticky and yeah if you so you would so you'd come in wearing a leather trouser you'd sit you'd get some beer pour it on your bench sit down and then you'd sit there for half an hour and try and stand up.

And if you stuck to it, it had too much sugar in and it was impure.

If the bench came up with your ass as you stood up,

and they would walk out with the bench stuck on their ass and they'd take your plaque to show you were licensed with them as they went.

And it's

how impure

were ale connors, but they tasted.

There are no contemporary sources all the time saying they sat in a pint.

Makes sense.

Because if it's got sugar in it, you would be able to taste it, wouldn't you?

Yeah, exactly.

That's the test.

Dave, why aren't you parring it on the...

No, no, this is how I do it.

But no, it just tastes really sweet.

It tastes like honey.

No, no.

I'm going to sit on it for half an hour.

Is this my tea or yours?

I don't know.

Has it got sugar in it?

Sit on it and see.

You've never had that exchange, have you?

No.

And if the nail was strong enough, it could make something stick to a table.

Like it's sticky.

That's brilliant.

That's a real exploding of a very niche QI myth, which is something we specialise in.

Absolutely.

I tried to find something interesting out about Theresa May's leather trousers.

Oh yeah.

Which for international listeners who don't keep a hawkeye on British news, Theresa May, former prime minister, wore some leather trousers famously in a photo shoot in 2016 and got in huge trouble for it.

It's probably why she had to leave because it was revealed that they'd cost £995

and also they were just noticeably leather trousers.

And that was worth a lot more before Brexit as well.

And did you find anything?

It was very hard.

They're designed.

All I found out was that she really didn't want to wear them.

And it was the director of communications, Fiona Hill, who you may well remember, who insisted that Amanda Wakely, the designer, send a van full of clothes to Downing Street and sort of squeaked her into these leather trousers.

I'm imagining like that scene in Ross from Friends when he has to sort of put flour down his legs.

And yes, her other director of comms, Katie Perrier, said she didn't even like the bloody trousers.

They were the wrong kind of brown, if you know what I mean.

Which Which I don't.

No.

But it was quite mad because Cameron did habitually wear, and other male leaders do habitually wear things that cost $3,500.

So when everyone was demanding that you declare it,

have you declared this on your register of interest?

I imagine Rishi Sunak's wife runs cost more than that.

Yeah.

Are they leather?

Let's put in a freedom of information request and find out.

He's at the press conference.

He's answered all the big questions.

It comes to, yeah, no such thing as a fish.

Yeah, you can.

That would be amazing if we could get into those junkets.

Oh, my God.

We've got to do that.

How do you get into those junkets?

The Lederhausen has been banned from time to time in Germany.

The church banned it during the 19th century revival of Lederhausen.

What?

And in 1913, the Munich Archbishop declared Lederhausen immoral.

And they've got a Lederhausen scene in Peru as well.

There's this tiny bit of Peru, this village called Pozuzu, between the Andes and the Amazon, and it was set up by Austrian and German emigrants, led by a priest called Joseph Egg.

Oh, yeah.

Hang on, you had another egg earlier.

Yeah, you did.

Did I?

Yeah, an egg name.

It's a German article that you'd got Google to translate for.

Oh, yeah, Paul Eggman, the master saddler.

I am the Eggy Man.

Yeah.

And anyway, so every year they have Pozuzo Fest.

So these Germans went over to South America, did they?

Yes.

Right, okay.

As we said in the previous episode, when?

A hundred years before

the unpleasantness.

Although King Edward VIII wore Lederhausen on his honeymoon with Wallace Simpson, where he went and met Hitler.

Did he?

On their honeymoon, they went off and had a meeting with Hitler.

It's very romantic, isn't it?

It's every girl's dream.

Faux of the podcast.

They went to the Eagle's Nest, which is that, you know, it's called Berchtesgaden.

It's sort of of Hitler's very high mountain alpine retreat.

It does sound like a bit of a glamping situation.

Maybe she

thought when he said, we're going to the Eagle's Nest, I found it on Airbnb, she didn't quite realise.

Airy and BNB.

Okay, it's time for fact number three, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that in 1963, a fire at the Curry building was put out by a man called Bum Farto.

It was also started by him, though, wasn't it?

He was just setting fire to his Fartos.

And no,

this is a fact about Key West in Florida.

City?

Yeah, it's a city.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's the southernmost city in mainland

America, I'm pretty sure.

I think so, yeah.

I think it's probably.

It's on mainland.

I know, because it's right at the tip of the Florida Keys.

It is.

You know what?

The Keys, you can drive there, so it's kind of mainland, but the truth is there's lots of bridges.

Because the Keys are so close together.

So they've bridged it.

They are Isles.

They've been bridged.

I've never been there.

It sounds like an amazing bit of the world.

It's great.

It's extraordinary.

Let's talk about it in a bit.

Sorry, we've got...

So Bum Farto...

Bum Farto.

Bum Fato was a major figure in 1960s Key West because he was a fire chief.

Okay.

And he was a friend, I believe, of Julio DePu, who was one of the main surgeons in the town.

But I thought his name was marginally funnier, so we would talk about him.

But he was really good.

And the reason I came across him, actually, is because there is a musical that's been written about him called Bonfarto the Musical.

And it was written by Pamela Stevenson.

Oh, yeah.

Who is Billy Connolly's wife?

Yeah.

And a writer.

She's a shrink and a comedian.

She's a long route from sort of Rogers and Hammerstein, hasn't it?

We've really run out of all the evil.

We've done Hamilton and we've done lots of other key figures in American history.

So

he was the fire chief.

He wore red suits, drove around in a lime green Ford galaxy, which had a Yoruba shrine on its hood.

Yoruba as in the Nigerian

religion.

Religion, yes, he was a practitioner, wasn't he?

Of the Yoruba religion.

He called himself El Hefe.

El Jeff, if you want to give it this angelic pronunciation, which is more funny.

Okay, the chief.

The chief, yes.

I think he painted that on his car, didn't he?

Yes, he had a license plate that said El Jeff.

Yeah.

And he eventually got done for selling drugs out of the fire department.

That is tragic.

Can I just ask about the curry factory fire?

Did you know anything else about that?

Yeah, I can tell you that it was owned by Mr.

Curry.

whose name, have I written it down?

So he didn't make curry?

Or did he happen to be called Mr.

Curry, but it was a curry factory as well.

No, no, no, it wasn't a factory.

It was Curry Building.

And he was Mr.

Curry, and he was the first millionaire in Florida, and he was a wrecker.

So big thing in Key West back in the day is you would have people sort of sat on big towers.

And whenever a ship went past, if it wrecked, they would go, wreck a hoi, wreck a hoi.

And all the men would run out and try and get at the wreck.

And then it was just like Finders Keepers.

It was just Finders Keepers.

And then they would have a big auction in Key West every month where they would sell everything that they got from the wrecks.

It's very bad behaviour wrecking.

Well, it's bad.

It's bad behaviour where you put the light up and you lure a ship onto the rock.

I think actually most of that is relatively mythic.

That's rare, isn't it?

And I think that's really, really different.

That's like the difference between murdering someone and pickpocketing a dead body.

And I think one is much worse than the other.

Anna is really clear about the difference between those things.

No, you're right.

Wrecking is sort of different to, yeah.

I think that's all all the myths about that are in Cornwall, aren't they?

Yeah, but no, the myths are the same in Key West, actually.

Yeah, basically, in fact, if you read about wrecking in Cornwall and Wrecking in Key West, it's all the same stories.

It's the same myths.

It's the same, you know.

It must be quite hard to mimic a lighthouse accurately if you don't have a lighthouse.

Do you know what I mean?

I've got a pretty good Halloween costume, actually.

It's awesome.

Just going around flashing people.

Look, as a former subscriber to Lamp magazine, I can assure you that I've done my reading on this subject.

Anyway, can we say why Fato was called Farto?

Sorry, why he was called bum.

Yeah, Fato was his actual name.

Fato was his name.

And his first name, his birth name was Joseph Farto.

And his parents probably thought, well, you know, it's an unfortunate surname, but at least it can't get any worse.

And then he loved fire from a young age and he was always hanging around the fire station.

And he was known as the little bum.

The American version meaning tramp, you know, or one friend reported that he was always bumming things, which again shows the difference between American and British English.

Oh, I don't know.

You would say, can I bum a cigarette?

yeah yeah and he disappeared didn't he in the end he vanished and he was never found he's somewhere with Lord Lucan and Elvis and Shergar yeah and Shergar at the party of the century because he was flogging drugs yes and he got caught because he tried to sell it to an undercover police officer and then they arrested him and then he was out on bail and they thought that probably he would go to prison for a long, long, long, long time or perhaps he would daub in the people who gave him the gear in the first place

because he had connections with Cuba.

So then he disappeared.

Maybe he drove off and started a new life.

Maybe the people who didn't want him to dob them in might have

dobbed him off.

And there was a lot of stuff like that going on.

I mean, it was a very shady, gang-heavy world.

And in fact, the person who dobbed him in, who basically told this undercover agent to go and set him up, was a guy called Titus Rudolph Walters.

And he convinced the undercover agent who was a guy called Larry Dollar, who I quite like.

Larry Dollar.

Everyone in the story has a great name.

Titus Walters is a good name.

It's really good.

Larry Dollar.

But Titus, before the deal even happened, where Farto was set up by Larry Dollar, Titus, who dobbed him in, was brutally murdered.

And I ended up reading this description of his murder.

And it was extraordinary.

He was like the Rasputin of his time.

He was murdered by, you know, other gang people who shot him in the head multiple times.

He just wouldn't die.

He was like like crawling out of the bathroom.

Eventually, they had to inject him with heroin and drain cleaner to kill him off.

Lorks, were you just reading it to make sure that somebody had been through his pockets?

Yeah, but a few good things that Fato did when he was fire chief.

He installed a system which turned all the traffic lights near the fire station on green with a push of a button.

That's fantastic.

No, that sounds incredibly dangerous.

Wait, all of them, all the ones.

All of the ones that he needed to go to to get to the main road.

That's brilliant.

There's only like one main road in.

Right, okay.

That's really clever.

That's a really good idea.

Yeah, well, he did it.

I bet he used it a bit nefariously sometimes.

He was late for a date.

Yeah, yeah.

Do modern fire engines have that capacity?

I don't think so.

I think they just turn the sirens and go through red lights, don't they?

Yeah, I think you're right.

As far as I've seen.

But he also had a hotline to his home phone that required no dialing.

So if he was at home and there was a fire, someone could just press one button like the bat phone, the Farto phone.

The Fartophone is a completely different prank toy.

Instead of a spotlight into the sky, it's just they play the noise of a huge guff over Key West.

He hears it.

He stops flogging cocaine to a student.

I must go.

He runs into a phone box and he pulls on the Farto costume.

I think, do you know what?

He would be 104 years old now.

And part of me does hope maybe he's still out there somewhere.

Oh, me too.

Right?

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

I'm listening to this show.

There's a weird coincidence about him, or just like a weird collision of histories, where his parents owned a restaurant in Key West, which is called Victoria, and they sold it to a guy called Joe Russell, who was mate with Ernest Hemingway, who had recently come from Cuba.

So Ernest Hemingway's come from Cuba.

He visits this restaurant that's just been sold by Bumfato's family.

Right.

And he says, you You know what?

You should call this place Sloppy Joe's because that's the name of a place that I used to go to in Banner.

And that is now incredibly iconic.

It's Sloppy Joe's.

I've been there.

And have you?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I've been Sloppy Joe's.

Of course, yeah.

Well, there you go.

That was name suggested by Ernest, anyway.

And it's this iconic bar.

And in fact, once it changed lodgings because the rents were massively increased.

And so it moved across the road.

But the bar never closed when it moved.

The people just picked up their drinks as they moved venue and walked across the road as they moved the signs.

That's brilliant.

That's commitment to your customers.

That's fantastic.

There's a few other good things that Fato did.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Let me just quickly say.

So he ordered the replacement of all foam mattresses in the jails because if there was a fire, he knew they would release cyanide.

So they were really dangerous.

So he got rid of all the foam mattresses.

And obviously, the irony of that is the likelihood was that he would have ended up on one of these mattresses

when he got arrested.

See, if it had been Haldane, Haldane would have delighted in setting fire to one of the mattresses while he lay on it.

Delicious cyanide.

And the other thing was that he was like the unofficial welcome for Cuban exiles.

So a lot of people were leaving Cuba at the time because Castro had just come in, right?

So he would provide food and accommodation just for the first couple of days when you arrived in Key West and then maybe even sort you out with a job and stuff like that.

That's interesting.

Because it's very close.

In fact, I think, is it closer to Cuba than it is to Miami?

It's close to

the Harder to drive, I could say that much.

You'd need a sort of subterranean Haldane-designed car, yeah.

The road down that you drove along, James, it used to be a train.

Yeah, you can see it, actually.

I think there are still some bits of railway.

I think, I think so.

It was called Flagler's Folly because it was Henry Flagler who was a millionaire, and he had this vision of a railway all the way down to Key West, all the way through the Florida Keys, all the bridges that you drive over now.

And it was his life's work.

It took $50 million of his money.

It nearly killed him.

He finally saw it open open the year before he died.

And in fact, he was tragically, he had gone blind by then.

He was in his 80s by the time it opened.

And, you know, he couldn't see his life's achievement, but he could hear as he arrived on the train at Key West, the children of Key West cheering as he stepped off the train.

And he was weeping at emotion at this amazing achievement.

Did you know the, I'd learned something about Miami, which I didn't know, which I thought was very interesting in the course of this.

So the only reason he could bring the railroad down to Florida Keys, all the way down, was because it had extended down to Miami.

But there was a woman called Julia Tuttle who lived on what became Miami in the 1890s, and she really wanted to improve her business standing.

So she owned a few hundred acres of land.

She wanted the railroad to come down there because obviously that's very useful.

commercially.

And she wrote to him saying, Bring your railway down here, bring it down here.

And he said, no, can't be bothered.

She

sent to Disneyland.

Well, damn, she's not quite that cool.

But she did, the story goes, send him during the great frost of 1894 some flowering orange blossom from south in Miami saying, look, our fields are so fertile, even though it's so cold, that it's a great place to, you know, set up shop.

And he eventually was persuaded to build the railway down there.

And therefore, Miami is the only city of any note in America founded by a woman.

So she's the founder of Miami.

I did not know that.

No.

But she didn't make Disneyland, so it wasn't fun.

I read this website.

I've got to say, it was fun facts about Key West.

Look, just judge for yourselves.

At one point, about 10% of Key West's population was chickens.

Okay.

They've got wild chickens.

All right.

Well, all right, here's another one.

I want to know what population they're counting.

Are they counting the insects?

Because when they're saying 10% of its population...

You've got a good point.

Are they covering all animals?

You can't just include humans and chickens.

You can't.

The bacteriophages.

What about them?

Okay, all right.

I've got two more fun facts from the same website for you.

Key West was a major hub for salt production in the 1800s.

Okay.

That is nice.

Because it's near the sea.

Yeah, I guess.

I'm feeling the fun draining away a bit.

All right, here's the nail in the coffin.

Key West is home to the largest historical district of wooden structures on the US Department of the Interior's National Register of Historic Places.

Wow.

Dan, wake up.

The sad thing is, I know how excited you are about that fact, Andy.

Yeah, I mean, that's mega.

Well, a lot of the wooden structures would have been lookouts for wreckers as well because they built, I think there are some that are still there, although they might be reproductions.

But they're just like, if you can imagine like a 30-foot building, but it's just like slats of wood, almost like in the shape of a lighthouse.

I'm thinking of an umpire's chair.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, like a bigger version of that, like that, but with a big sort of flat top which you can stand on.

That's cool.

Although they do have one of those in low sugarloaf key, which is one of the Florida keys, which isn't one of those.

It is a similar looking structure, but it used to be filled with ground-up female bat genitals.

Um, this firstly, grim.

And second, sorry, I just want to say that.

Secondly, is it to lure in male bats?

Is it a bat trap?

Oh my god, you've got it.

Andy's got it.

And why do you want a bat trap?

Uh, you've got too many bats.

No, no, you want more bats?

You want more?

Ah, you're a bat farmer.

Um, no, there's a mosquito problem.

There was a mosquito problem in the 1920s.

So a chap called Richard Clyde Percy read a book about how to get bats to kill mosquitoes, wrote to the guy who wrote the book, said, how do I do this?

And he said, build a tower, fill it with ground-up female bat genitals.

What are they going to do with ground-ups?

Can you just put female bats in the tower?

Would that...

You've got to have the ground up.

Maybe it's easy to source ground-up genitals.

That's so weird.

I guess without being ground up, the female bats can maybe fly away.

Whereas in this way, when they're ground, they're genitals.

I presume you've killed the whole bat.

And you've had to take...

But why not just grind up the whole...

Is it to lure male bats?

Yes, and the male bats come and they eat all the mosquitoes.

So it's only the male bats that eat the mosquitoes?

No, I think just just that's the only way you can lure bats.

Yeah, the males are probably more likely to be like, well, I can smell female genitals.

They might be not attached to a bat anymore or ground up, but beggars can't be choosing.

Give it a go.

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Okay, it's time for our final fact, and that is dan's facts should we um get him to send it as a voicemail and i'll play it in that's a good idea that's a great idea let's do that now

my fact this week is that for over two decades the actors grace kelly and alec dinners secretly hit a tomahawk in each other's hotel rooms around the world

Wow, great fact, Dan.

I've got loads of questions about it.

Yeah, tell us more.

Who's Grace Kelly?

Actually, I didn't look into Dan's fact.

And sorry, to peel back the curtain for a second, he's still not here live in the room.

So I'm not sure exactly what happened with this story.

No, I'm not either.

Did you, Andy?

Yeah, thankfully, I did.

Oh, it's good.

Because I went and read Alec Guinness's memoir.

And so it's a story he told.

Basically, he was making this film called The Swan.

And Grace Kelly was in it too.

And if you don't know who Alec Guinness and Grace Kelly are, they're two of the greats.

That's all we need to say.

The greatest actors ever.

It was brilliant.

And Alec Guinness, he got given this tomahawk by some Native Americans who were also involved in the filming, and it was massive.

It was a kind of, it wasn't a prop, it was a proper thing.

And it was really heavy, and he didn't want to take it at the end of the job.

So he asked a hotel porter, as he was leaving, you know, going off to the next job, whatever, to slip it into Grace Kelly's bed as a kind of joke.

You know, it's a sort of silly thing because she would have known it was his because she'd seen him, you know.

And then a few years after that, he came home from a performance in London.

He was doing a lot of theater at the time, and he found it in his bed.

Dun dun dun.

Dun dun dun.

And she had found a way somehow to smuggle it into his bed.

I don't know if she ever told her end of the story.

Oh, that's great.

He waits a few more years, and then he finds out that

she's doing a project in the USA with someone who he doesn't know actually.

And he gets in contact via a third party of the, I think, the poet she was doing this work with.

She was traveling around with this poet.

And he gets in contact via a third party so her companion can honestly say, no, I've never met or spoken to Alec Guinness.

So he really goes to a length.

And then he gets it back into her bed that way.

But wait a minute, like that does seem a bit pointless because is she going around her whole life just checking that everyone doesn't know Alec Guinness?

She only hangs around with people who don't know Alec Guinness.

After she's found it in her bed, she comes downstairs the next morning and says to the poet, you don't know Alec Guinness at all, do you?

And he can honestly say, no, I've never met Alec Guinness.

But he did.

It was.

And then eventually he goes to Hollywood in 1979 to receive an Oscar.

And what does he find in his bed?

Grace Kelly.

No, he finds the tomahawk in his bed.

And yeah, so that was a long-running good Hollywood prank.

And then one of them murdered the other with the tomahawk.

That's right.

That's famous.

Yeah, Grace Kelly died tragically.

I think she did die because I didn't read the whole story, but I

skinned it.

She did die.

And she died without it ever being acknowledged.

So I think that's this really weird thing that's left hanging.

Her and Alec Guinness never discussed the princess.

No, they never mentioned it to each other.

She died in a car crash, didn't she?

I think in the early 80s.

She was still very young.

She was in her 50s at the time.

But she died a princess.

She did.

In many ways, we all die princesses.

Oh, is that right?

In many ways, we all die a pauper because you can't take it with you.

Really good point.

Well, she died an incredibly wealthy princess.

Yeah, she was the princess of Monica.

Yeah.

Some listeners will remember, maybe.

Yeah.

Some, a few listeners.

She married Prince Rainia of Monica.

Rainier than here.

It's actually a lot drier, I would suspect.

Monica, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, not as rainy.

And she was 26, which means that her Hollywood career, a grand total of five years, maximum, I believe.

Yeah, she was in 11 movies, I think.

Because he forced her to stop, basically.

Yeah, although I think she was up for it, wasn't she?

She was keen to retire.

In fact, do you know why?

One of the explanations she gave for why she liked.

Suez.

The Suez Crisis.

She didn't like wearing socks.

Yeah, I've been wearing socks 26 years.

That's long enough.

She said, when I first came to Hollywood five years ago, my makeup call was at 8 a.m.

I'll be goddamned if I'm going to stay in the business where I have to get up earlier and earlier and it takes longer and longer to get me in front of the camera.

I think saying as she gets older and older, she's going to have to come in earlier and earlier to get the makeup with me I guess.

I see that point.

I thought you'd empathise James with that a bit.

Well, because I'm allergic to makeup

pretty much.

And you know, you like, you used to be like a lion.

Because you have to get in at 6 a.m.

every day for extensive hair and makeup before I get it.

I thought you were talking about yesterday we did some filming and I was wearing makeup and just came out in

sobbing.

Yeah.

If you see the film, we sound cheerful, but James is streaming from his eyes.

Well, that's working with you, Anna.

Don't blame it on the maker.

Yeah.

No, I think he did force her to retire because he also banned any showing of her movies in Monaco.

Well, I heard that, but I also heard that she was in the middle of a big contract with MGM.

You know, you sign up to do seven films and all of that.

And I think the deal, part of the deal, was that she would be freed from the contract.

She didn't have to make any more movies.

But the wedding was filmed and broadcast to 30 million people and it was in cinemas.

Yeah.

30 million people, like half the population of the UK, it is at that time.

There were nearly 2,000 journalists at the wedding.

Yeah, but not many like kings or queens queens of Europe were there.

Because they all kind of disagreed with it because it was a royal marrying a plebeian.

So, yeah, a lot of the royals got invited, but none of them went.

Wow, that's interesting.

Because it was a very much an arranged marriage, it seems like.

As in, it was, I believe, it was suggested to Irania that he find a Hollywood star to marry because they wanted to increase tourism.

Since the war, people have stopped going.

That's right.

And the person who suggested it, did you see that?

Aristotle Onassis.

Oh, yes, the ship guy.

shipping greek shipping magnate again crazy name crazy guy later husband of jackie kennedy

yes i believe his yacht had a had bar stools made out of whale foreskins that's correct oh cool so he did like he didn't have taste all right

there were female whales were flocking to his ship

grace kelly's story is very interesting because it's kind of a riches to riches story like she grew up really wealthy her father was a brick magnate called jack kelly he was he's amazing actually yeah he was an olympic gold medalist and her mother was a a competitive swimmer, Grace Kelly's mum.

So very athletic.

Be honest, the entire family were stunningly good-looking.

You know, it's not surprising that she became a Hollywood star.

He was a rower, wasn't he?

That's why you got his meddling.

And she said once, someone asked her, Grace Kelly, would you write an autobiography?

And she said, no, but I would like to write a biography of my father.

Wow.

And in 1920, he wanted to be in the Henley Regatta, which is a big posh rowing competition in the UK.

But he was banned because in those days, anyone who is a mechanic, artisan or labourer or works in any menial activity was not allowed to take part in the Henleaver gallery.

Silly?

Really?

Was that a sort of class barrier?

Yes, it was.

But it, well, it was.

Sounds like as opposed to like, you don't want them to take the time off their job.

Well, what if someone's plumbing doesn't get fixed?

Well, according to them, it was because they wanted it to be amateur.

And if you had a job as a bricklayer, then you were technically a professional.

It's unfair.

It's actually cheating to have big muscles from your work.

Only softies who've

spent our whole lives punting so far, reading a little bit of Tennyson.

Yeah, yeah.

So obviously it was class-based, but he was very annoyed about it.

But in the same year, there was an Olympics and he won his Olympic rowing medal.

And apparently he mailed his cap to King George V with a note saying greetings from a bricklayer.

Oh,

slam.

That got to George V and if George V had any idea what

random American brick dude.

And then

in 2003, the Princess Grace Kelly Challenge Cup was launched by the Roll Regatta, which was in memory of Grace Kelly, but also in memory of John Kelly, who they snubbed all those years earlier.

Wow.

I read he was nicknamed the most perfectly formed American male, which is quite

an accolade to have.

Sexy, yeah.

That is that's impressive.

It's because it's quite a high bar.

It's not like the most well-formed man in

United States.

It's interesting, isn't it?

Becoming a princess is such an odd thing.

Like, what have you done?

Oh, I've won an Oscar.

Oh, well, I've secured the Grimaldi succession.

Yeah.

Actually, because the current Monaco prince is her son, Albert.

Yeah.

And the reason they were so desperate to find her, as you sort of allude to, is that if he didn't have a son, I think the monarchy would have not existed.

They needed a child.

They needed a son.

So they had to take fertility tests.

She had to be properly tested to check that she could have a children.

She also had to have a virginity test, but it wasn't taken very seriously.

It wasn't a

Grace Kelly did.

And she would absolutely have flunked that because she'd had a love life before, you know, she had lots of boyfriends and things like that.

Was it like a written test?

It was like a driving theory test.

Was it like that?

Have you ever shagged anyone?

Yeah, I think it was a formality rather than a rigidly observed thing.

But I mean, still weird, you know.

Gosh.

Alec Guinness.

No one ever gave him a virginity test, as far as I can tell.

Alec Guinness?

Yeah.

No, as far as I know.

He was called Alec Stephen until he was 14.

And then someone just said, oh, you're not called Alec Stephen.

You're called Alec Guinness.

What was his middle name?

From, I think his mum.

His mother married David Daniel Stephen.

So he was given his stepfather's name in day-to-day life.

But on the birth certificate, he was actually Alec Guinness.

But it was only when he was 14 that his mum just said to him, oh, by the way, that's not your name.

The thing that everyone's been calling you for the last 14 years.

That's not your name.

Your name.

You know, there's beer that everyone likes.

Who's that instead?

We spoke earlier about how Andy, we were wondering whether you would be friends with Haldane.

Oh, yeah.

You know, whether it might be a bit much for you.

I hate sort of all the experiments and all the sign lines.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I probably would not see him a lot socially.

Well, Alec Guinness, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, was a stickler for punctuality and for good service in restaurants, of which he was a connoisseur.

He hated change, which, in his opinion, opinion was almost always for the worse.

And he hated any assaults on the English language, particularly those said on the BBC.

Why are you assuming anything about how we would have been the best of friends?

I mean, we wouldn't have spoken much, but we would have approved of each other.

Yeah, yeah.

A silent nod in the streets.

Yeah.

It is weird, isn't it, that the thing he hated most of all is the thing that now he's best remembered for,

like most widely.

You know, you can talk about the bridge on the River Kwai, or you can talk about Kind Hearts and Coronets, but he's best remembered for Star Wars, which he thought was basically a film for children.

Yeah.

And which made him rich,

quite rich.

You know, he got 2% of the profits.

It must have been very rich, I imagine.

He was a bit mealy-mouthed, isn't it?

He would always say how bad the dialogue was, and he was getting millions and millions from it.

He claims he was taxed very heavily on those proceeds.

So really, once all that was over, he got tuppence halfpenny, you know.

But he was embarrassed.

Harrison Ford kept calling him Mother Superior on set.

He felt very old and out of touch.

It was the thing that everyone really knew him for.

And people started to treat him as a kind of agony aunt for it because Obi-Wan Kenobi is a kind of wise being.

I've only seen Star Wars once.

I think he's like a wise man, right?

I reckon he must be.

He wears a cloak, doesn't he?

Yeah, he's wise.

There's no one who wears a cloak who isn't wise.

There you go.

There you go.

Please write in with your examples of people who aren't.

But yeah, people used to write to him and say, please, can you give me advice on this?

He said, an example of a request I would typically get, he said this in an interview, is, you know, a married couple wrote to me once saying we're having problems in our relationship Can you come and live with us and sort them out for us, please?

Oh my god, that's a proposition though, isn't it?

Yeah, that's a bit of a got Schwinger vibes, hasn't it?

The thing is, if you've played Hamlet, Shylock, Macbeth, you know, and then you've played Obi-Wan, you must feel a bit like you've slummed it, you know, because he was one of the great classical stage actors of the 20th century.

Like, he took it really, really, really seriously.

He did.

His art, you know, and then many people say not as good a stage actor as the true great.

A level below the Oliviers and the Gilgoods, according to some.

sick burn.

Even he said, I'm really only suited to smaller parts.

He was very modest, wasn't he?

Wow.

Okay.

I did find a bad review of his stuff.

And it mentions, foe of the podcast, Adolf Hitler,

where

a film he was in called Hitler The Last Ten Days from 1973.

And the Telegraph said, In Hitler The Last Ten Days, Guinness, having discovered through his usual assiduous research that Hitler was a boring man, unfortunately succeeded brilliantly in bringing this interpretation to the screen.

I'm going to ask you a quick quiz question.

Quite a neat quiz question, maybe.

But Alec Guinness played Lawrence of Arabia in

what did he play Lawrence of Arabia?

Oh, was it in Lawrence of Arabia?

It wasn't, James.

God, you've made a fool of yourself.

Have I?

He played King Faisal in Lawrence of Arabia.

But bizarrely, two years before the film Lawrence of Arabia.

Lawrence of Arabia.

Sorry.

It's a version I accidentally watched.

I can see why the shocked audiences in 1960, actually.

There's your episode title.

It's so nice, isn't it?

When it just...

I can't call it nurses because Lawrence of a Labia.

It just falls right into your lap, you know?

The BBC sounds with that pitcher.

Okay, before he starred in Lawrence of Arabia, two years earlier, he played Lawrence of Arabia in a play called Ross.

So he

played him.

And then they were casting for Lawrence of Arabia and they were said, do you want to be in Lawrence of Arabia?

Yeah.

What a strange name for a movie about Lawrence of Arabia.

You just name it after that guy from French who put flour on his legs.

Okay, that is it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would like to get in touch with any of us on the show today, Andy, you can be found on

Twitter at Andrew Hunter M.

James?

My Twitter is at James Harkin.

You can find down on a stranded train somewhere, or you can get in touch with all of us by emailing podcasts.qi.com or tweeting at no such thing or going to Instagram, no such thing as a fish, or you can go to no suchthingasafish.com to find all our previous episodes or links to our tour of Zivorld.

And if you don't want to do any of that, you can just come back again next week where you'll find us here.

As always, we'll see you then.

Goodbye.