492: No Such Thing As York Minster Crisps

This fall, let your home smell as good as it looks.

Pura's app-controlled diffusers bring you premium scents from brands like Nest New York, Capri Blue, and Anthropology.

From Spiced Pumpkin to Whitewoods, your fall favorites are just a tap away.

It's home fragrance that feels as elevated as it smells, and right now, it's the perfect time to stock up.

Visit Pura.com and bring home the best scents of the season.

From Australia to San Francisco, Cullen Jewelry brings timeless craftsmanship and modern lab-grown diamond engagement rings to the U.S.

Explore Solitaire, trilogy, halo, and bezel settings, or design a custom ring that tells your love story.

With expert guidance, a lifetime warranty, and a talented team of in-house jewelers behind every piece, your perfect ring is made with meaning.

Visit our new Union Street showroom or explore the range at cullenjewelry.com.

Your ring, your way.

Hi, everybody.

Andy here.

Just before we started this week's show, I wanted to introduce our very special guest who was live at the Soho Theatre with us a couple of weeks ago when we recorded this.

He is none other than the mighty Richard Osman.

You might know him from Pointless, you might know him from Richard Osman's House of Games, his appearances on QI, his appearances on every other brilliant British comedy panel show ever made, and he is also the author of a series of books called The Thursday Murder Club.

And if you have read a book in the last few years, there is a pretty good chance that it was one of the Thursday Murder Club novels because they are absolutely titanic.

They have broken so many records, they have sold millions of copies.

The first three in the series are called The Thursday Murder Club, The Man Who Died Twice and The Bullet That Missed.

They're about a gang of retired sleuths who live in a retirement village in Kent.

They like going through case notes of old murders and then they find crimes start happening a little closer to home.

They're honestly such good books.

They manage to pull off the trick of being simultaneously gripping and thrilling and they are page turners.

You have to keep reading, you have to find out what comes next, and also being heartwarming and joyful and very human.

And the characters are beautifully drawn.

There is a reason that they have sold so many millions of copies around the world and that's because they're really good.

We are all huge fans of them and the next in the series is called The Last Devil to Die.

Very exciting title.

And it is out soon.

It's out on the 14th of September.

It is available to pre-order now from wherever you get your books.

It is a safe bet that anywhere that sells books will be selling The Last Devil to Die, and they will have lots of copies.

So that's it.

We just wanted to say we're super excited to have Richard on.

We've been trying to get him for years, and finally, he's free.

So we really hope you enjoy the show.

We had a blast recording it.

We hope you like it too.

Home with the podcast.

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

This week coming to you live from the Soho Kia.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and Richard Osman.

And once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go starting with fact number one and that is Richard.

Tunbridge Wells does not have a Waitrose.

For anyone who's not from England, I should explain Waitrose is a very high-end supermarket and Tunbridge Wells is the sort of town you would be absolutely fucking insane to think didn't have one.

Yeah.

And

when you write a novel, there's a wonderful group of people called copy editors, and they're the greatest people in the whole world.

And copy editors pick up on every single little thing in a book.

I wrote in one of my books that Joyce, who's the head of the Thursday Murder Club, or one of them, she gets a drink from a trolley on a train from Polgate to Victoria.

And the copy editor says, They stopped trolley service on that route in 2008.

So, just to give you an idea of how good they can be, they pick up on every single thing ever.

The one thing they didn't pick up on, I sent someone to waitrose in Tunbridge Wells and nobody even bothered to check because why would you?

And now people at Tunbridge Wells are furious with me.

That's incredible.

I reckon it's like a dirty secret of the people in Tunbridge Wells that they don't have a waitrose right.

Well no because Richards told them they do so it's kind of

no but I think Richard picked a really sore subject for them.

So I started looking into this.

Yeah.

There has been a sort of decade-long campaign in Tunbridge Wells to get a waitrose,

and for whatever corporate reasons, maybe they're just doing it for the fun.

Waitrose keeps saying, I'm so sorry, we just can't find a space.

We just can't find a site.

Like 2016, this story ran: Shoppers in Tunbridge Wells are fuming after a new store to open in the town was revealed to be a Wilco.

Imagine they put up the W and everyone's like, oh, whoa!

Because Tonbridge, just a standing road, just a few miles away, they've got a waitrose.

They've only got 8,000 people.

Tonbridge Wells, as we all know, has 56,000 people.

Weirdly, my

wife's family live down in Heathfield.

That is weird.

And I get the chance.

Whoa.

Why has he never mentioned that before?

Nine years, nine years I've been sitting on that.

But I thought Richard brought the waitress Tunbridge Wells back.

And so I get off at Polegate all the time.

No.

And I know there's no trolley service.

So, hold on.

Right.

Two questions.

A, are you my fact-checker?

B, why didn't you pick up on the Tunbridge Wells thing when you were at my fact-checker game?

I think if Dan was your fact-checker, you would know about it by now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This book is much longer than when I sent it in.

Also, my three sons were born in Tunbridge Wells, so I'm really rooted there as a kind of, yeah, my history now is.

Did you pull down to the Welco to buy a celebratory?

I did.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, we did a gig in Tunbridge Wells, and I got to meet the daughter of a barber shop guy.

He's passed away.

He ran a salon there, and he was the seventh son of a seventh son, which means he's a wizard.

And he had the Guinness World Record for shaving most faces in the shortest space of time.

He did like 100 faces in something like 10 minutes.

They just came.

Do you remember?

He was a military guy and he just went

and he kept covered in blood.

And weirdly, the next day,

the local morgue broke the record.

I think another name for a barbershop guy is Barber.

I was confused when that's a barbershop guy.

I was thinking, oh, and both my parents are hairdressers.

I don't know why.

That came out like that.

I was thinking, is he the baritone?

I did.

In the most recent book that

I I bought out, I sort of did an apology of sorts.

Joyce, who writes a diary through the books, she goes to Tunbridge Wells and she said, I had read somewhere there was a waitrose, but there isn't.

So whoever wrote that had got it wrong.

Oh, wow.

And that's my apology to the people of Tunbridge Wells.

I have a little quiz for you, Richard.

Okay.

How many times do you mention Waitrose in the Thursday Murder Club?

Just in the first book?

Yeah, in the first book.

I mean,

is it over 100 or less than 100?

I'm going to say I mentioned Waitrose.

The word Waitrose.

Yeah.

Eight times?

Five times.

Okay.

Okay.

Sainsbury's?

Oh, okay.

Three times?

Twice.

Okay.

Starbucks?

Starbucks.

I think they definitely go to a Starbucks in an airport at one point.

Oh, and they go to...

There's a lot of Starbucks.

I'm going to say four times.

Three.

Are we going to go through all the words?

So just to sip on it.

I've only got Tesco, Azda, Little, Acosta, and Aldi to go through.

I I mean, I do need people to buy these books.

There's murders as well.

It's not all just shops.

I'm just saying for the next book, if you need the fact, Jacko, I kind of know all the shops you mentioned.

That's very kind.

My daughter, who speaks Chinese, was reading the Chinese version of the book, and literally the footnotes are longer than the actual book itself.

She said, even in the first three pages, they'd had a footnote explaining what Oliver Bonus was,

who Mark Duggan was, and what Lilt is.

So, if you need somebody who speaks Chinese to fact-check that back,

I am also available.

I mean, we're gonna have to take your word for that.

I definitely did speak Chinese just then.

I'm gonna be fucking out there if I do.

Wow, what a way to get cancelled.

Yeah, I feel like I need to help the non-English listener about these supermarkets in the UK.

So, a little bit of information: I read that there was some research done by the sex education show, which was a channel for classic.

And they looked at people who went to different supermarkets.

And they found that people who shop at Marks and Spencer's are big fans of sex parties.

They do such big cakes, don't they?

Is that Colin Caterpillar in your pocket or is it just case you see me?

I should say it's double the national average, which presumably isn't that high in the the first place.

Or people who like second sex parties.

People who go to Iceland are more likely to be involved in cosplay.

And people who go to Waitrose are more likely to use nipple clamps.

Whoa.

So just a little bit of context for that.

And people who go to Liddell like it up the middle aisle.

Is that right?

You never know what you're going to find in there, Dela.

You never know what you're going to find.

Yeah.

Hey, baby, I've come back with a kayak.

So, mistakes in books.

There are some which are, you know, you get your typos, you get your small factual ones.

I think my favorite one that I found out was there was the Bridget Jones book, The Return of Bridget Jones, after a long, long gap for the third book.

It was called Mad About the Boy.

And there was a bit of a typo in that book because readers, when they bought it, suddenly started reporting back to the shops that about a quarter to halfway through the book, there were suddenly 40 whole pages of David Jason from Only Fools and Horses autobiography in there.

Wow.

Just 40 pages of him talking about his Uncle Albert.

And was that Helen Fielding just absolutely phoning it in and thinking no one's going to get this?

What if Bridget just reads someone else's book for 40 pages?

What a great idea.

This just got it mad about the delboy.

No one will notice.

Was it just a printing cock-up?

Yeah,

so they had to return and pulp and all that sort of stuff.

There was a thing, this is maybe an author's nightmare, something that happened to Jonathan Franzen, the big American

business.

He was recording a reading for Newsnight of his book Freedom, which was absolutely massive.

It was a mega book.

And he stopped halfway through the reading and he said, I'm sorry.

I'm realizing to my horror here that there's a mistake here that was corrected early.

And they'd printed the wrong version of the book.

They'd printed an early file of the book.

And it was obviously full of all the bits he didn't want to.

be read and you know it just sounds like it was the british version and this this was like called the book of the century he'd been working 10 years on it it was a massive book and they published like something like 80,000 copies

called the corrections yeah

oh that's an that's a nightmare you wake up in a cold sweat when you've handed a book in thinking just little things like about could he've got there on Tuesday if he was there on Friday you just think you've missed something because by the time it gets printed maybe 10 people have read it, maybe 12, something like that.

So it's not many.

So if we all miss the same thing,

that's it.

You could get this book when everyone just goes, why did you not notice that the...

Yeah, I think, oh my God, it literally.

Yeah.

Do you remember that on the...

You've got to tell I've got a book coming out really soon.

So you're terrified.

Do you remember when our first book was just going to the printers?

You literally rang our produce.

I had a lucid dream the night before the book went to print.

Bullshit.

You've never had a lucid

in your life.

So I honestly, I was really sweating.

We did a book where it was called The Book of the the Year and in it, we made references to all over the books.

So you would say, see this article, and you would go to it.

And the introduction was full of these things.

So I was having a dream.

And this was, I was down in Tunbridge Wells.

So I just got the Polgate train.

I mean, I was in, sorry, in Heathfield.

Yeah, yeah.

So my in-laws picked me up from Polgate.

I'm starving because the trolley service is gone.

So off I go to the Heathfield Costa anyway.

So in the dream, I'm, and this is true, I'm showing Frank Skinner our book and I'm saying, look, Frank, this is how the intro is, and all these words.

And I read in the book a reference to something that I knew was not in the book.

And then I kept reading, and this is, I'm now awake in the book, reading the book, going, that's not in there as well.

That's not in there as well.

I wake up and I grab a PDF of the book, and it turns out I'm completely right.

We forgot to change the new articles.

And I managed to get through to Nigel, our editor, in the morning, and he stopped it from going to print.

It had to be printed within the next two hours.

And he sent a new PDF

and I managed to change it at the last second yeah

a lucid dream with Frank Skinner you are

one of the world's great heroes my friend

can you imagine what would have happened

us as a nation

wow yeah things things could have been really going to shit now yeah

I was reading about some errors in rap songs so this is rap songs that could have done with a fact check

all right remove some of the more choice words from these.

But there's a song by Common featuring cannabis.

And they said, I'm your worst nightmare squared.

That's double for those who ain't mathematically aware.

Although, if your worst nightmare is two,

then.

There's a song by Drake who says, I could wrap around those others like a cobra snake.

Cobras are venomous.

They're not constrictors.

Major Laser said, Make yourself bigger like mushroom Mario Kart.

He's referring to Super Mario, not Mario Kart, where they make you go faster.

And Nelly once wrote, I'm a sucker for cornrows and manicure toes.

And he meant pedicures.

That's nice.

Amazing.

I hope we have beef with all of them now.

Come at me, major laser, whoever the fuck you are.

Let's see, the

very first thing I ever have published in my life had a typo in it.

I was like 15 years old, and there was a magazine in Brighton called The Punter.

And at one point, they said, oh, we want someone to write just a little small thing about some of the towns outside Brighton.

And I lived in a place called Havers Heath.

So I said, oh, I'll do Haywards Heath and Burgess Hill.

I said, I'll do both of them because I think it was £7 each.

So I wasn't just going to do one of them.

So I wrote this thing, and it came out.

It's the first time my name's ever been in print, first thing I ever saw.

And it said at one point, Burgess Hill is like Hayward's Heath with anemia.

Right?

And my mum read that.

She went, that's pretty good.

I went, yeah.

Yeah, it's not bad, is it?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Burgess Hill is like Hayward's Heath with anemia.

And one of my teachers, who lived in Brighton, said, I read your thing, Burgess Hill is like Hayward's Heath with anemia.

He said, that's pretty good.

That's not bad.

I go, yeah, well, listen, this stuff comes into my head.

What I'd actually written was, Burgess Hill is like Hayward's Heath with a cinema.

Which is factually correct.

Navigating wellness shouldn't be overwhelming.

Azure Well makes it simple with thoughtfully formulated supplements made from clean, purposeful ingredients.

No gimmicks, no clutter, just targeted support you can feel.

From daily balance to deeper support, our formulas are created to work with your body, not against it.

Ready to simplify your wellness routine?

Visit AzureLivingwell.com and use code iHeartAZ15 for 15% off your first order.

That's A-Z-U-R-E-Livingwell.com.

Code iHeartAZ15.

Wellness made simple.

New customers only first order a minimum of $100 terms apply.

Starting a business can be overwhelming.

You're juggling multiple roles.

Designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life.

But for millions of businesses, Shopify is the ultimate partner.

Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S.

From household names like Mattel and Gymshark to brands just getting started.

Build a stunning online store with Shopify's ready-to-use templates.

Boost content with AI-powered product descriptions, page headlines, and enhance photography.

Marketing is easy with built-in tools for email and social media campaigns.

Plus, Shopify simplifies everything from inventory to shipping and returns.

If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify.

Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side.

Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash try.

Go to shopify.com slash try.

Shopify.com slash try.

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

My fact is that after successful amnesties on knives and guns, in 2016, a Scottish council offered an amnesty on Zimmer frames.

And this is the thing you get happens all the time that they have these amnesties

because everyone's got old Zimmer frames in their house or walking sticks.

Everyone.

Fact check.

Have a look.

Yeah, well, no, you're right.

But a lot of money is tied up, hundreds of thousands of pounds in walking sticks that are given out or Zimmer frames.

And then...

Like you injure yourself, they give you one.

After a little while, you get better.

You don't need it anymore.

Use it as a clothes horse yeah yeah yeah yeah they reckon there's something like 160 000 pieces of equipment that are needing to come back that haven't come back yeah yeah so they had this amnesty and they got lots handed back in crutches too um wow walking sticks walking sticks

and amnesty an amnesty is one of those things that say look if you deliver your knife or gun you will not be prosecuted yeah we will not send you to prison you know if you delivered a zimmer frame like two years later said i'm so sorry we found this in my mother's house and we realized this we've tracked you down we realized this is where it's come from.

You're not going to go to prison.

Yeah, they actually

wrongly banged up.

Oh, rightly, if you look at it that way.

I think so, yeah.

No, you're right.

It was, yeah, yeah.

Amnesty was a kind of sexing up way of putting it, but yeah.

There were punishments.

Yeah, they had a load of them in the 80s and 90s.

I was reading in the newspaper archives.

In Hull, they said that people were using them to hang clothes on, like I said, and that's why they had all gone missing.

In the Wirral, they said people were using them to grow climbing plants.

Torbe made a special Zimmer frame bin so you could return them anonymously if you were a bit worried about handing them in.

That you might get a big, big,

huge bin.

I was really waiting for you to say, and in Tonbridge, they use them for their sex parties.

Well, I got one link with Tonbridge Wells slightly, and that is that the stairlift was invented in Tonbridge Wells.

Was it?

Getaway.

Yeah.

Like, so.

Wow.

It's the navel of the universe.

Yeah, so I mean, there have been old ones.

I think Henry VIII might have had one, but that was just sort of like

people because he was so big at the end of his life he couldn't get up the stairs.

But this is an invalid chair with tramway for use on staircases that were patented in 1931 in Royal Tunbridge Wells by a guy called Walter Muffet.

Okay.

And the only other thing I can find about him is that he was once the oldest St.

John's ambulance member in the world.

That's really good.

That's okay.

I wasn't going to get out my stairlift fact

right at the beginning of this fact because it's incredibly boring, my one.

Do it.

Do it.

Do it.

Do it.

Okay.

It's so shit.

I gotta stand on our, because we have a Discord for people who are members of Club Fish, who are subscribers.

Yeah.

And they have a big conversation about the most boring fact you've ever said on fish.

This fact is gonna

shove the others aside for the podium, I swear.

Right.

The 500,000th standard stairlift ever made was produced in part by Prince Charles, who pressed the button to start the procedure.

Oh.

And he, he,

I told you it was bad.

Then he said, I'm someone who is a great admirer of family companies, particularly hereditary lift makers.

Anyway, I started telling my wife this fact, and she said, literally, wait, think to yourself, is this interesting?

Think about it.

That could literally be the title of the podcast.

I've got something worse than it.

I think.

I was looking when I saw you talking about Zimmer frames.

I'm always fascinated about who Zimmer might have been.

Because when you look inside companies, it's interesting.

And I assumed he was German, he's not, he's American.

and he's called Justin Zimmer and it was sort of post-war I think that he set up this company it's one of the biggest companies in the world now this company that he set up so I was googling him but unfortunately there's also a defensive linebacker for the Miami Dolphins called Justin Zimmer so I literally gave up because everything was about him.

So I can tell you that Justin Zimmer, the linebacker, is now a free agent.

He is now available because

the Miami Dolphins cut him in

pre-season.

So

he's 30, but you know, still, I think he's got something in his legs.

He's got time.

Yeah.

That's very good.

He just in the Ozimmer of Warsaw, Indiana, he also invented the aluminium splint for broken arms.

The advantage of that was the old ones were like Papier Maché, and the new ones just covered part of your arm so you could put it in a x-ray machine and you could still x-ray your arm, your broken arm, without taking the cast off.

So that was a good thing to do.

That's clever.

That's very cool.

I prepared a little quiz, game quiz for you.

Oh, great.

Let's do it.

Play your canes right.

Yep.

That's clear.

What about Richard Osman's House of Canes?

Yeah.

There you go.

All right.

That would have been a lot better, Andrew.

That would have been, yeah.

All right.

Not getting invited back on that show.

Right, I'll give you a cane, and you have to tell me if it's worth more or less than the previous celebrity-owned cane.

Okay, cool.

Oscar Wilde.

Oh, sorry.

I haven't told you this yet.

I'm going to say higher.

Is it higher?

It's harder than it looks, isn't it, Richard, there's Switch Shelves here.

Higher than zero.

Higher than therefore.

All right, Richard's off the blocks early.

Yeah, Oscar Wilde with Inkwell.

Interesting.

His walking stick had a little inkwell built into the top.

Oh, that's nice.

7,700 quid, roughly.

Okay.

Sir James Craig,

who was, of course, the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland.

Okay.

I mean, less, obviously.

I'm going to go more.

It's more.

No.

Sir James Craig's walking stick was sold for £10,000.

That also

was full of cocaine.

Wait, Oscar Wilde's cane was sold for £7,000.

Yes.

No.

Yeah.

What year?

Like the 1800s?

No, recently.

This century.

I don't think people have that.

I think they like his writing.

I'm not sure the cane is the thing they.

He had an inkwell.

He was walking Oscar Wilde would have done.

He had an inkwell.

That's a historical artifact.

Michael Collins.

The space, the Astridal.

The Irish Republican leader.

Sorry, it's an Irish-themed play of cane's right.

Yeah, yeah.

Right.

Wow.

More or less than £10,000 for Sir James Craig.

More.

I'm going to say more.

Yeah, it must be more.

It is more.

It's £52,000.

See, again, that's a format problem because

we all gave the same answer, didn't we?

It's more.

It's £52,000.

Last one.

Whoa.

Yeah, a lot.

Oscar Wilde must be gutted.

Labour leader Michael Foote.

Oh, I hope.

Not Irish.

Oscar Wilde.

Can I just say Oscar Wilde always had a cane.

Stephen Fry, the poster, he had a cane.

I'm sorry, this is a historically important cane.

Richard, if you want to get Dan angry at any point, just tell him that an item of very recondite celebrity memorabilia sold for less than Dan would have paid for it himself.

Like, he has steam coming out of his ears.

Me and my friends, just equally, like we've put in together, paid a lot of money for Sir Edmund Hillary's backpack.

He's the one who got to the top of Everest first, but for his second expedition, when he looked for the Yeti, and we bought it, and no one else bid.

But

you went straight in there at 50 grand.

How much do you pay for it?

New Zealand dollars, it was 12,000.

But in actual money,

I think that's what, six quid?

That is a translation.

No, I think that's a few thousand.

It is.

But there was three of us, and yeah,

but no one else bid.

Well, we accidentally, one of us outbid each other.

We've got two incredibly motivated buyers.

It's so weird.

I mean, I feel like no one's taking your quiz seriously.

Yeah, it does feel like no one's interested how much Michael Foote's cane was auctioned for.

Okay, lower, lower, lower.

Yeah, lower.

I'm going to say lower.

Thank you.

Oh.

But what do you want to do?

Oh, I'll say higher for a bit of a different format.

Well, thank you.

That's really kind, Richard.

Yeah, it was obviously much less than...

It was £650.

Dan, you're interested?

That's a bargain.

Michael Foot.

Foot, cane, yeah.

Yeah, okay.

Big cane.

Bigfoot, they used to call him.

Edmund Hillary found him.

There was a a cane up for auction recently for half a million dollars.

Okay.

Do you know what cane that was?

Charlie Chaplin's.

Charlie Chaplin's cane from Modern Times sold for $420,000.

This one went for more?

Did Yoda have a cane or am I?

Yoda has a cane, yeah.

Who has a more famous cane?

No, who is it?

Michael Kane.

No.

It was Michael Kane.

No, it wasn't Michael Kane.

It was a very normal cane, but it had a light on the end with batteries, and it lit up.

Oh, the lightsaber?

It wasn't a lightsaber.

It was used by a survivor of the Titanic.

Oh, yes.

On the lifeboats.

This is incredible.

She used it to signal.

And it was essentially a cane, but I don't know why she thought to take it on the boat.

Because what else is she using it for?

Oh, onto the lifeboat.

Yeah, she took it onto the lifeboat.

She signaled with it.

And

the guide price was $500,000.

And it went for $50,000.

It went for $50,000?

It went for $50,000.

That's not even as much as

Michael Collins' cane.

Well, he's been to space.

So, come on.

That's where he got the idea for a United Island.

Yeah, he looked down.

But it was to be shared between 11 of her heirs, and they thought they were going to get half a million.

They got, what's that, like 4,500 each they got in the end?

Hey, here's the most significant walking stick in history.

I think this genuinely has a claim to be the most important one.

It was wielded by the Archbishop of Milan in 2005.

Okay.

So come on, think of your church history, what's happening in 2005.

Roberto Baggioli's Milan, was it that?

A new pope?

New Pope.

And he was a very significant Catholic leader.

Wow.

You have gone downhill.

What do bears do?

Tell me, Andrew.

Sorry, yeah.

The Archbishop of Milan was a senior guy.

And he might, he, like, I dread to think what my wife would say of that fact.

The Archbishop of Milan was very senior.

He could have been a contender.

He could have made it to be Pope.

And he appeared in public at the conclave, whatever it is, walking with a stick.

And it was seen as a sign by the other cardinals who might have voted for him on block that he's saying, no, I'm sorry.

Because they always vote for such youthful people, don't they?

You're right, right, they're the voted for Cardinal Ratzinger, who was the mid-80s.

Yeah, yeah, you're right.

Yeah, he would have been a.

He would make a secret sign to say, look, I don't want to be.

Well, that's how it was interpreted.

Yeah, and he would have been a very radical pope.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well,

he was pro-contraception, pro-no, he wasn't.

He was none of that.

But

he was slightly more progressive maybe than the Benedict XVI ended up being.

So, you know.

I need to move us on in a second.

Oh, some amnesties quickly, very quickly.

So they quite often have these things where you can give in your weapons or whatever.

And there was one quite recently where there was a rocket launcher handed in in Cleveland.

In Guernsey, they handed in a Klingon war sword.

Oh, wow.

In Birmingham, they handed in a three-foot cannon.

And in Hertfordshire, they handed in a herb cutter and a fondue fork.

All right, we need to move on to our next fact.

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

My fact this week is that in 2010, the annual Liars Club Lie of the Year award was marred with controversy when the winning liar was accused of having lied about his lie.

Huge news.

It's big.

In Burlington, Wisconsin.

So this is a club that began in 1929 because of a lie as well.

The story is that two journalists basically decided to announce that there was a local lie of the year that happened and they sent it out as a news story and they thought it would disappear.

But then the country picked up on it and it got spread around the country.

And then as the next year was approaching, they were getting all these messages saying, we're so excited for the lie of the year competition from the liars club.

And so they had to then actually invent the liars club in order to have the lie of the year.

So it's been going since 1929.

And it's effectively, if anyone was reading, every year Edinburgh does the funniest jokes of the fringe, right?

It's that kind of thing.

It's that kind of thing.

Usually a bit of a joke.

Exactly.

So the lie was sent in by someone called David Mills.

And he said his lie was, I almost had a psychic girlfriend, but she left me before we met.

That was the lie.

That's not a good lie.

And every single lie that you read of the modern day Liars Club, it's just these one-liners.

And it was discovered that that wasn't an original line.

That was someone, possibly Stephen Stephen Wright, the comedian.

Oh, yeah.

And then the two runner-ups were also stolen lines.

So people were allegedly just taking funny lines off the internet and saying, this is my line.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So the times have changed.

So the Liars Club obviously had to deal with this.

And they just came out and said, well, we don't care.

That's fine.

And so it just went on and they kept their championship.

But yeah, it made me realize that there's a line club and it's not the good one.

The good one is the British one.

Did you read about the British one?

The one in Cumbria.

Yeah.

Yeah, so that was, so this one in America has been going since the 20s.

The one in Cumbria has been going through since the 70s.

And it was held in honor of a former landlord at the Bridge Inn.

It was revived by his grandson, who was a 160-year-old former cesspit cleaner from Hungary.

But it is essentially just the same thing, isn't it?

Although I think the Cumbrian one, they tend to tell a bit more of a long story.

You get five to seven minutes and you go up and you build this long story.

So someone who won it one year has said that they took a wheelie bin as a submarine and traveled under the ocean.

A real

whimsical tall tale.

Yeah, yeah.

There was one in 2011, Glenn Boylan won after telling a tale about crossing a whippet with a mink.

But Paul Burroughs failed to defend his title with the story about a bishop and a magical sausage.

The one in 1929 was supposedly won by someone who said that they'd seen a three-mile-long whale.

And then the second year, they rang up and said to the people, so, okay, live the year.

Last year was this thing.

What's the live of the year this year?

And they didn't have an answer because they didn't have a competition.

And so they said that the local police chief had said, I never tell a lie.

And that was their lie.

They kind of do a few things like that.

So there was one year, a few years in, they had a thousand entries.

So this was the fourth year in.

And they had one from Canada.

And they disqualified it because they didn't want it to be an international contest and the head of the contest said let the foreign countries pay up their war debts if they want to get in the liars contest

is a huge leap

you can imagine like um germany and britain and france go on we might as well pay up then yeah

is there a war debt from canada not as far as i knew but you know clear he knows about something might be superkins did it one year the british one

and one yeah did she Yeah, yeah.

She's a winner of the Liars Club.

Oh, Liars.

I tell you, he was a nice guy.

Paul Hollywood.

That's a joke.

He is a nice guy.

That's a joke.

No, it was Mary Berry.

It was Mary Berry.

But there is a thing about what men and women lie about.

Because men, I think there are surveys, various surveys, that say, oh, women lie more, or oh, men lie more.

And I'm sure there's almost nothing between it.

But there seems to be a bit of evidence that women tend to lie more about positive feelings.

You know, like, oh, no, it's nice, or whatever.

That it's that, like, that kind of thing.

That's a really interesting fact, honey.

Wow.

You should do that on the show, absolutely.

No, it's completely average, darling.

And,

you know, like men.

Men sort of boast lie more.

You know.

No, it's completely average, darling.

Anyway.

There is a thing that if children lie early on in their life, then it's supposed to be a sign of intelligence.

So they did a thing where they gave kids a toy and put it behind them.

And then they said, whatever you do, don't look at it.

And then they left the room.

And some of the kids looked at it and some of them didn't.

And some of them lied about it and some of them didn't.

And they found that when they looked in the future, or they didn't look in the future,

in the future, when they looked back, they found that the ones who kind of lied about it had a higher IQ.

The absolute best ones were the ones who didn't look at it and didn't lie about it.

They tended to do better in future life.

Someone at my primary school said that he wrote Golden Brown by the Stranglers.

That's amazing.

And he was convincing, because actually, if you think of the lyric, I was thinking, yeah, I can see that.

I was absolutely fooled.

I found out the truth somewhere around 2017.

Did you guys hear about Theodore Scharschmidt?

No, who's that?

He's a doctor.

And he was writing a report about lying and patients he treated who had a particular condition to do with lying.

And this is amazing, right?

In the 1990s, he had a patient who he nicknamed, because, you know, when you write up patients, you don't give their name, you give a pseudonym for them.

He had a patient who he called Mr.

Pinocchio.

And the reason for that was...

If Mr.

Pinocchio ever tried to lie, if he tried to lie, he would pass out and have convulsions.

Okay?

There was something in his neural chemistry which meant

he couldn't do it.

The only problem was he was a high-ranking European official constantly involved in negotiations.

Every time he even so much as tried to lie, he would start having convulsions and passing out.

And so it was a nightmare.

Has he been involved in Brexit?

Yes, on our side.

And it's, yeah, and it's, he, he, it was a form of epilepsy.

He had this tiny tumor.

It was incredible.

Tiny tumor inside his brain.

It was operated on successfully.

Is it a superhero thing in a way?

An amazing prime minister, right?

Yeah.

You know he's telling the truth.

I cannot say that.

You're all like Prime Minister admitted hospital for 50th day running.

But it is like if everyone knows that if you ever lie, you're going to do this, then they know that what you're saying is the truth.

Yes, except that he had the operation, had the tumor removed.

Or did he?

Those are the only people who aren't allowed to enter the Liars Club, isn't it?

It's politicians.

Politicians

Club.

I'm sorry, people with incredibly rare tubers.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Them as well.

Yeah, yeah.

It's a weird, yeah.

It's a weird thing.

Isn't it great?

I'm just remembering an old childhood story when you're lied to as a kid and you don't realize it until you're in your 20s, in this case for me.

Well, I got told a story at school.

I was at my friend Tom's house, and I went to the toilet, and there was no toilet paper there.

And I came out afterwards and I said to my friends, oh, they've got no toilet paper there.

And then one of my friends said, oh, yeah, none of them in the family wipe their bums.

And I went, what do you mean they don't wipe their bums?

And they said, they're all clean shitters.

It just happens.

So they don't have toilet paper here.

And then my other friend went, did you not know that about Tom?

And I said, oh, no, I didn't know that about Tom.

That's amazing.

And so I believed for about 10 years.

More than 10 years.

You told us this anecdote at a time when you still believed in it.

Yeah, yeah, no, no, no.

No, no, no.

I remember this.

I remember this clearly.

Here's what I mean.

10 years in, the logic broke down for me because I thought that can't be possible.

And instead of accepting the truth, I went, hang on, this is incredible.

Are you telling me that the parents who are not related, because this could be genetic,

they both don't need to wipe their ass?

They must have been dating and then they moved in and they just noticed the one toilet roll just kept hanging there and then they produced non-ass wiping children.

That's what happened 10 years after.

I continued the logic outside of it and then it was yeah late 20s that it clicked.

I was like hang on a second I think they were lying to me.

Dan, does your wife ever give you advice about which facts to say on the show?

She's never heard the show.

It is time for our final fact of the show and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that unusual crisp flavours in history include prosecco, fish curry, buttered garlic scallop, vagina,

and Arthur Scargill.

Almost didn't let me get to the end of that one, guys.

This is, I know, Richard, you're a big fan of crisps.

I'm just, at some point, you must have made a choice about which order to put those last two crisps in.

Is it vagina Arthur Scargill or is it Arthur Scargill vagina?

Which of those is funnier?

I think you made the right choice.

Oh, thank you.

Who is Arthur Scargill?

I don't actually know.

That's not really the important part of the facts.

He was.

What's a vagina?

Arthur Scargill was

basically the main guy in the miner's strike in the 80s, I suppose it was.

And And basically, there was a guy who made some human-flavoured cannibal crisps.

And they came in traffic warden, bank manager, and Arthur Scargill flavor

in the 80s.

And he was going back because there were hedgehog crisps.

And hedgehog crisps were really famous in the 80s.

And he was kind of going in a slight sort of animal welfare thing and saying, well, you shouldn't really be eating hedgehog crisps, but why not eat Arthur Scargill crisps instead?

Do you remember hedgehog crisps, Richard?

I remember hedgehog crisps.

I remember Arthur Scargill.

Very well.

I remember.

Yeah, hedgehog crisps was like, everyone, it blew everyone's mind.

I was like about 10 or something, and everyone just went,

you're kidding me.

What?

Hedgehog crisps.

It's like that's the funniest thing anyone had ever done in the history of the world.

Like someone had invented hedgehog crisps.

They were just like beef, really, as anyone who's ever eaten hedgehog will know.

So I don't think they had real hedgehog in them anymore than Arthur Scargill crisps had real Arthur Scargill in them.

No, that was the problem, I was hoping.

Because they called them hedgehog crisps, and then trade descriptions said they couldn't use the name because they didn't have actual hedgehogs in them.

And then later they called them hedgehog flavor crisps.

Because this was actually in the early days of like proper crazy flavours of crisps.

Yeah, right.

Do we know what Arthur Skarvga, what he would have tasted, like what the flavor was of the.

To be honest, I think they were just branded like that.

I think they just tasted of random beefy meat.

Okay, right.

He would have tasted like the solidarity of the working man, my friend.

He would have tasted like...

He would have tasted a social justice after Scargo.

Did you hear of Virgin Mary flavoured crisps?

So these were released in the last decade, this was 2013, by Preta Monger.

They released, and they got a lot of complaints, obviously, from Christian and Catholic groups.

And what Preta-Monger had intended was...

the

non-alcoholic version of a Bloody Mary,

Virgin Mary,

tomato juice.

It was basically a tomato flavoured crisp, but they called them Virgin Mary flavoured crisps.

That's very funny.

Is that the sort of thing the Pope would have been unhappy about, or would he be fine?

Well, if it had been the Archbishop of Milan, he probably.

I wonder if vagina crisps would have been available in the UK because I was looking up what you're allowed to do as a product and release it, and there's so many rules with particularly companies' house.

Dan feverishly got 15 tabs open, trying to find anywhere that'll ship these to you.

Oh,

he's trying to find out about the trade's description rules, actually.

Yeah, it's uh yeah, it's it's a bagina, it's a bagina, it's a herb, it's a New Zealand herb.

But it's amazing.

Um, so the there's been a list that's been revealed of all the company names that have been rejected since 2019, and it's over 56,000 names.

So, I don't think Vagina Crisp would have made it into.

And so, okay, so these are a few of the names that were applied for to say, can we be a business in the UK?

Um, that were rejected.

So, you have got Anus Anus Ale Limited not allowed Ass Cleaning Limited

rejected twice

Mix Shagger Limited

Belle End Holdings

and Little Pricks Acupuncture

None were allowed.

The vagina crisps they're made actually by a Lithuanian company so you're right to be doubtful.

They're called Chas.

And I looked at the ingredients.

So to get a vagina flavor, they used salt, onions, garlic, sugar, cream powder yeast extract oh

lemon powder parsley black pepper sour cream and bay leaves and they also come penis flavoured oh and when i say come i mean

and their flavoring comes from smoked salt tomato powder sugar yeast extract again maybe some cross contamination there and spices

and they also sell borsch flavoured crisps where all the money goes to ukraine So yeah, they're kind of a cool company actually.

Wow.

But is that, is that, do you think they've actually worked out that the average penis and vagina smells what those ingredients make up?

Taste rather than smells usually in crisps.

I mean, you know what's opening the packet on.

Oh, yes.

Dan,

you're about to lose your mind when you first taste a crisp.

It's so exciting.

Smelling the taste.

I snort my crisps.

Smell is very integral to taste.

What they claim is that that did happen, that they got a load of experts in the field.

Yeah.

Which field was this?

And they went to some flavoring experts and put the two together and they came up with this tasting.

I haven't tasted them, so I couldn't possibly say.

And they just left one packet of vagina crisps and one packet of penis crisps in the factory overnight.

Next morning, a million packets.

So I found a slightly old claim.

It was from about 10 or 15 years ago.

And it was that half the crisps eaten in the EU, or what was the EU, are people eating crisps in Britain.

That Britain ate half the crisps in the EU.

Oh, yeah.

That's a huge difference.

Because crisps are not as much of a thing nearly on the continent.

And they, like, you might have an olive, you might have some sort of very civilized.

They have lays, don't they?

That's what I always notice when I go abroad.

Yeah, but who buys the lays?

It's British people in holidays.

British people abroad.

Yeah.

This goes right to the top, James.

Is that why they call them lay?

Because it's kind of funny.

It sounds a bit like having sex.

And they think they're going to get English people to buy this.

That's right.

That's why they do it.

Yeah.

Wow.

That's why I bought those biscuits in Montenegro called knob lice.

Wow.

Anything to declare, sir?

I have nothing to declare except this cane and these knob lice.

But in Europe, they eat paprika crisps, right?

That's their

favourite thing.

Whereas we're the geniuses behind corn maize snacks, is the truth, which we always think of as crisps.

And the 1970s was such an extraordinary era.

It was like the 90s for the internet, but for corn maize snacks.

1970.

Sorry, what is it called?

Can you give me an example?

Oh, I'm about to.

Okay, sorry.

Oh,

don't you worry about that.

By the end of this little bit, you will be in no doubt as to what a corn maize snack is, I promise you.

Carry on, Professor.

1970, they invent Watsits.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

Wow.

1973 they invent skips.

1974 they invent Frazzles.

1977 they invent Monster Munch.

All within seven years.

The big hitters all within seven years.

Wait, who were they?

You're saying it's like NASA.

Well, do you know what?

Quavers were invented in 1968 before man walked on the moon.

Wow, before the Beatles broke up.

Yeah, exactly.

Gosh,

you could have been eating some quavers as you heard the news that the Beatles have broken up.

That is striking.

That is striking.

Thank you.

It is striking.

You could have had Quavers on the Moon.

That would have been amazing.

That would have been amazing.

Do you know, listen, I know you love an undiscovered hero on the show.

Do you know what Leslie Ivey did?

No.

In 1974, Leslie Ivey.

Okay, something to do, something snack-related.

Yeah, very much so.

Okay.

Invented a new flavor?

Leslie Ivey is a machinist.

He was a machinist at the Smith's Crisp Factory.

And he is the guy who who invented how to put stripes on frazzles.

Wow.

Yeah.

Wow.

And he's here tonight.

That's a weird suntan you've got, Leslie, sort of.

The first two ever flavors.

You know,

it used to just be ready-salted.

And it was Tato Chris who came up with...

flavors for the first time.

A guy called Joe Murphy, he ran it, and Seamus Burke, who was his chief technician.

And they thought, we found a way to get get flavor onto a crisp.

And they experimented with two flavours.

They thought, we're going to start with just experiment, with just in the lab, with just experiment.

And those two flavors, the first two flavours ever in the history of crisps, cheese and onion, salt, and vinegar.

Ah, wow.

How about that?

Still don't like that they've got the stranglehold on the flavor market because they are the two.

Yeah, exactly.

They were literally the first two they ever tried.

I was reading that they thought of crisps in the old days as potatoes because they're made of potatoes.

So you would.

Well, no, but they're not.

We always like to throw something you don't know.

Yeah, that's a shame.

Oh, my God.

No, no, no.

First, the Pope now list.

Because let's ask that guy, please.

Please go on, Professor.

So, but the potatoes are made.

Look, so Chris was made of potatoes, right?

That's right.

They thought, you know,

only things that go with potatoes, cheese and onion, you'd have a potato dish, you know, that we, and you'd have some cheese and onions on the side of it, or you'd slice potatoes and boil them up with some cheese and onions.

So those were the natural things, and they hadn't freed their minds yet using the process that was called gas chromatography.

And

that was a new procedure after the war.

They invented that.

Basically, in the old days, to get an apple flavoring, you would have to start with a ton of apples, then you'd end up with two grams of apple flavor.

And then gas chromatography meant you could identify the compounds that made that flavor and recreate it.

Another hero from the history of crisps, Laura Scudder, and she invented bags of crisps.

Okay, so before her, you would get a big barrel of crisps or potato chips in America, or you'd be tins or display cases, and you'd go in and they kind of shovel them into something and you would take them up.

A bag?

A bag.

A bag.

There's no getting around it.

It was a bag.

But what she did is she got her workers to take home sheets of wax paper.

They ironed them in the shape of what we would now today know as crisp bags, and then they would take them to the factory the next day and they would put actual crisps in crisp bags.

And we never had that before then.

Right.

And she was also the first person to put fresh by dates on any products.

As in these will be fresh for this.

Fresh by

best before end.

Used by.

In America, yeah, fresh by dates.

Fresh by the well, let's say yes.

So

she's really interesting because she only got into crisps because she had a shed and she wanted to rent it out to people.

And that was

what she came up with.

Yeah, yeah.

She was selling it to people to work in, and there was a guy who claimed to be a barber, but he was actually selling bootleg alcohol.

And she was very religious and she didn't like this.

So she kicked him out.

And she's like, well, what am I going to do with this shed?

I might as well make crisps.

Sorry, can I ask a question?

Just a point of order.

By barber, do you mean barbershop guy?

yeah she couldn't get insurance for her delivery trucks because she was a woman and so she had to find a special insurance company and she once turned down a nine million dollar offer for her company because the buyer wouldn't guarantee her employers jobs wow so arthur scargill would be proud yeah

And quavers,

is it true, and I'm looking at you, Richard, when I ask you this.

Is it made of the leftovers from potatoes, which have not made it into crisps?

So basically, it's the starch that gets Walker's Factory has a log flume that the potatoes all go down,

which washes out some of the starch.

They all get their photo taken, don't they?

Oh, I want that one.

Look at you.

Oh, I definitely want that one.

It's above the mantelpiece.

Every time I remember, look at his face there.

Look at his eyes.

Dead now, of course.

Dead now.

Good question.

I don't know.

I thought that they were corn, but perhaps they're not.

Press their potatoes.

I think that's why they got invented a bit earlier.

Maybe, yeah.

I read that the starch has turned into quavers from the potatoes.

So it's a way of using everything that they have, basically.

Like nose-to-tail eating.

Yes.

But for potatoes.

Yeah, exactly.

That's good.

I know that Monster Munch were not originally called Monster Munch.

They essentially got released a year earlier.

I think this is the best ever name change that a product has had.

So in 1977, they came out as Monster Munch and were a huge hit.

But the year before, yeah, they were called something else.

I would say, I think

they look like hands to me.

I would say hands is the name.

Yeah.

Do you know what?

When they first came out, they were called hands.

Yeah.

That's right.

They were called hands.

Good name.

Yeah.

Good name.

What were they called?

They'd also look a bit like if you had tiny hands, like knuckle dusters, right?

Like you can fit, you can fit your, you can fit two fingers in and maybe.

Wow.

i was talking about the vagina chris i was talking about

oh god i assume it must have had some monster yes in the original oh so yeah was it to do with the dance was that big

monster the monster star monster mash the monster mash yeah no although no not that it's a really bad pun oh monster monster so i tell you you won't get it if you're thinking irish monster i don't think you're i don't think you are capable of doing a pun this bad york minster york monster

oh yeah nice.

Not a million years away.

He is capable.

Yeah yeah.

I'll take it back.

I stand corrected.

Welcome to the world, our new brand, York Minster.

We were told it was a bad brand.

They were called Prime Monsters.

I literally was about to say that.

And I thought that's so shit, I'm not going to say it.

Richard, if someone says that on pointless, do they still get the point?

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I don't do pointless anymore.

But yes, if I look in their eyes and believe them, oh my god, I didn't even get the poem number for the first time.

The Prime Minister, Prime Minister, Richard, that's genuinely going to go down as one of the most disappointing moments of my life.

And you've had a few, right?

Yeah.

My kids will hear this episode.

Not my wife, obviously, if she doesn't listen.

Let's do a little edit.

Anybody?

Anyone, anyone guess it?

Dan?

Prime monster?

It's the right answer.

And that's all the time we have.

That's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

I win this episode.

And

if you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James.

At James Harkin.

Andy.

At Professor Andrew Hunter Murray.

At Andrew Hunter M.

Richard.

That's a good question.

At Richard Osmurray.

It's at Richard Osmond.

There we go.

Or you can get us on our group account, which is at no such thing, or you can go to our website, nosuchthingasafish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there, so do have a listen.

Thank you, everyone, for being here tonight.

Richard, thank you so much for being here.

And

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

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.