487: No Such Thing As A Short Dalek

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Hi, everyone.

Welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, where we are joined by our very good friend, Jenny Colgan.

Now, Jenny Colgan is, well, she's on a bit of stand-up, but she is mostly well known for being a writer, a writer of romantic comedy fiction and of science fiction.

If you are a fan of Doctor Who, then you may well know her.

She's written all sorts of spin-offs and audiobooks and stuff for Doctor Who.

We might get into that in the first fact today, spoiler alert.

But what we'd like to let you know about most of all is that Jenny has a brand new book.

It is called The Summer Skies.

And if it is anything like Jenny's other work, it is going to be absolutely fantastic.

Just perfect for a summer holiday.

And you can get that wherever you buy your books.

On top of that, the usual stuff, do join Club Fish if you want a bit of extra fish in your life and some ad-free episodes.

And if you go to no suchthingsoffish.com forward slash podfest, then you will find that there are one or two really not many at all tickets left for our show at King's Place in September we are on the verge of booking an amazing guest for that I promise you you will not want to miss it if you can't get down to London then there are streaming tickets available okay really hope you enjoy this sweet show and all that's left to say is on with the podcast

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Jenny Colgan.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one and that is Jenny there is on Doctor Who a Dalek named after a Dickens character

wow highbrow I learnt this fact for money or not actually for points really because one of my kids teachers is a great Dickens fat and he said to the kids if you bring me a Dickens fact that I haven't heard before there's something in it for you.

So I kind of put it out to the world, which was kind of fun.

And actually, the most Dickens facts that everybody knows, one, he's the first person ever to talk about dinosaurs in fiction I did not know that there's a reference to a dinosaur on page one of Bleak House

and then the other thing that most people know is that Hans Christian Anderson came to stay with him on holiday and was the worst guest ever and they both wrote about it in their diaries with Hans going oh I'm feeling so weary and Dickens going how do we get this guy out of our house and so these obviously the teacher knew these very famous facts but what he did not know is a friend of mine who's an actor plays a Dalek on Dot Who and they tend to keep the same people because obviously it's quite skilled.

And you tend to be in the same Dalek casing because they're really small and it's not very pleasant to spend 10 hours in a really small space.

So you have your own Dalek and the Dalek is named after you in the props covered.

And my friend is called Barnaby.

And he's named after Barnaby Rudge.

And so there is

in the BBC Dalek Barnaby.

Dalek Barnaby.

Dwayne, Danger.

Dinser, I must exterminate you.

Yeah.

That's amazing.

So yeah, so for anyone that doesn't know Doctor Who James, I'm looking at you.

Yeah, I'm afraid I don't.

You know what the Daleks are, though?

Yeah.

Yeah, they're like little robots, are they?

Yeah.

They're a tall villain.

Oh, so bad.

So out of that.

They're tall.

They're not little.

When we say little, they're remembering.

If I had to describe a Dalek, the first word I'd go is wasn't.

Oh, they're quite talented.

The guy over there, what can you describe him?

Yeah, he's tall.

He's got a sip plunger coming out of his tall tunnel.

Did you tell me anything about the criminal who came over and tried to exterminate you?

Well, yeah, first of all, he was tall.

I was simply addressing your first point of saying they're small.

I was simply hitting that off as a busted myth straight away.

Okay, so there's...

Let's let Jenny do it.

She knows that.

Ah, right.

And they're kind of, they have a kind of plunger.

at the front and they are in fact they look like they're the monsters but they're not they are kind of strange creatures inside.

Used to be people.

So they're like a tank for a...

That is exactly what they're like.

And when you say pepper pot, I read that when they were designed, the person who decided how they would move used the pepper pot to kind of move around the table and said, this is how they'll move.

Is that true?

I think it is.

Was it Ray Kusick who designed the look of the...

It's really weird, the story of how they were come up with, because...

The creator was Terry Nation,

who was involved in working on the very early scripts.

And he just described them in the script, but he didn't really describe them very much.

And then Terry Nation was just

some call any of these.

And then Ray Kusick took the job to design them, and he worked with a model maker called Bill Roberts.

And they actually, they're the ones who built the look, as far as I understand it.

Is that fair?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And Terry Nation, though, holds the, as it were,

the copyright.

Well, he became hugely wealthy because he owned the copyright to Daleks.

And so.

And to the point where when the new series came back all those years ago with Russell T.

Davies, the first one with Chris Reccleston, we didn't know if we were going to get the Daleks back because the Terry Nation Estate said, no, we don't know if this is going to be

funny.

They had to consider that the Daleks would not return with Doctor Who.

And what is the very first thing the Daleks do

when they come back?

I know this one.

I actually know this one because that's one of the very little bits of Doctor Who I've seen.

They go up some stairs.

They fly up the stairs.

It was in such a lovely moment when kind of Rose escapes up the stairs and the whole country's going, aha!

The one thing I know about Daleks.

And then they levitate on it.

I'd love to know if your friend Barnaby, if he's been in the same Dalek for all these years, whether or not it's like when you go into a small biplane and you know, the person's got a picture of their kids up on

some dice, you know, is the inside.

Have they got all these little mementos?

Lady Dalek.

This is not the only literary reference that made its way into Doctor Who.

The very first companion of the very first series of of Doctor Who was Ian Chesterton and Ian Chesterton was named after G.K.

Chesterton because the original script writer for the show, Coburn, was a devout Catholic and a massive fan of Chesterton and so gave him that name.

Yeah, so Chesterton made it in as well.

And Dickens is the first historical figure that turns up in New Hook.

Really?

So he's in the second episode, I think.

Of the original series.

Of the new series.

Of the new series.

Which of course isn't new anymore.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like really old.

And it's played, of course, by Simon Callow, who has played Dickens so often, I get them very muddled up in my head.

Dan, you just said the first

companion was named after who?

Cheek Estherton.

Yeah.

So I've got...

I thought the first assistant was the doctor's granddaughter.

Are we confusing companion and assistant?

Oh my gosh, I'm so going to get letters.

That's the one who does the inbox.

I just feel.

I did a pub quiz recently, and the quiz master, she said, we had a Doctor Who quiz in here last week and I barely got out alive.

Famously the quickest way to end a punch-up in a pop quiz is to ask how many Doctor Who's the Venus.

Luckily, your inbox is bigger on the inside.

Yeah,

that might be a technicality because the granddaughter is the granddaughter.

Right, right, right.

The brief was really interesting for the casting.

It was she had to be a with-it girl of 15, reaching the end of her secondary school career, eager for life, lower than middle class.

Avoid dialect, use neutral accent laced with the latest teenage slang.

What's the gig?

Wow.

Cat cat.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And that she was made his granddaughter because it was, was it William Hartnell the first one?

It was her.

And it was to avoid any suggestion of, this is a bit weird, isn't it?

This old bloke travelling around with a 15-year-old girl.

She was really careful with that for so long.

In fact, right up until I started writing for it.

And I started to.

Did you change it?

But no, when I went to see them, they were really, because I write romantic comedy and they were really quite funny.

Like, you know, we can't have any kissing or anything like that.

And I was like, fine, I promise you have a debut.

I will not do any of that.

Then the show completely changed.

And actually, Matt Smith spends pretty much his whole time being naked or getting married to folk by mistake.

Or, you know, this suddenly became a massive romantic overtone

all the time.

Yeah.

Is that true?

Yes.

Faking and drunk.

You get his hearts broken.

Oh, I'm getting good knowledge.

Yes.

I just kind of slip in anything that I know.

Oh, dear.

I did read that there have been Doctor Who top trumps over the years.

This is interesting because I do know about top trumps.

And PAC 6 has a lot of bad guys in, including Adolf Hitler.

And if you put PAC 6 against PAC 7, you can fight Adolf Hitler against Queen Elizabeth I.

So I want you to guess

who is the bravest out of Adolf Hitler or Queen Elizabeth I, according to Top Trumps.

Elizabeth.

Yeah, agreed, everyone.

I'll say the minority.

Sorry.

Are you voting for Hitler?

And just keep checking.

I just want you to say out loud that you think Hitler is a bit of a fit.

I think Hitler's braver.

Braver.

Not better.

I'll say Hitler to promise.

You're wrong.

In fact, bravery was his lowest possible thing.

He was good in lots of the things, but the bravery was the worst.

Who do you think is the strongest out of Hitler or Queen Queen Elizabeth I?

Oh well, I got Elizabeth Hamburg last time.

I was going to say Elizabeth I.

Stronger?

She is the strongest.

And Hitler wins on brains and terror.

Okay.

Just a thing.

Right, right, victory for Hitler.

Thank you, Doctor Who.

He does spend his entire episode locked in a cupboard, does he?

So I could have got you to the bravery thing, but the brains one slightly defeats me.

What's Hitler's episode of Doctor Who?

It's called Let's Kill Hitler.

Oh, wow.

Really?

Gosh.

One of the first people involved in the BBC side of things, it was a guy called Sidney Newman, who was the head of drama.

He was a really interesting guy.

So

there was a play that was broadcast in his career called Underground, right?

And it was about a group of nuclear holocaust survivors living in the London Underground.

I think this was early 60s or late 50s.

Like it was quite, you know, it sounds very terrifying and dramatic.

But it was a live broadcast, and one of the actors in it died of a heart attack halfway through the television screening

off stage, so he wasn't on camera, but it was in between scenes basically.

He was in Palestinians makeup, and you know, he died.

And the play had to improvise its way through.

And Newman was kind of in charge of it.

He said, just treat it like a football match, just play on,

adjust, yeah.

Oh, so it wasn't like there's been a murder, like they didn't shift the whole thing to be.

I don't know if it was.

Wasn't really deathful kids.

Can I just say if someone dies in the middle of a football match, they do stop the game.

That's a very good point.

That's a very good point.

Well, Dan, that's the weird thing.

The character was meant to die of a heart attack later in the play.

The character, not the actor.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I guess they just had to shift it.

What a gig to agree to.

This will require you dying.

It's going on BBC One, so you've got to think of your career.

Peter Capeldi, I think, auditioned for The Doctor Who.

And got the role, but he got it 20 years later.

So he auditioned in 1996 when they were casting for the they made a film, didn't they then?

And that was.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

And lots of people audition, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Rick Male.

Rick would have been great.

Although, you need to be kind of kind to be the doctor, and I think he was a very kind man in real life, but on screen he was terrifying at all times.

Um, others auditioned Brian Blessed, no, no, do you know what?

There's a certain I think it's a very English tolerance for Brian Blessed, and I have not inherited

the gene.

I can't, you know, I get it, everybody loves him.

It's one of those English things that I don't get, like freaking Tim Henman.

I think Candy would make a good Doctor Who, I think he would.

I think you...

Yes!

Let me see your fingers.

Yeah, okay.

Sorry, what are you looking for though?

They've all got really long fingers.

Have they?

Is that a requirement?

Maybe that's why Capaldi got the gig 20 years on.

He was older.

Taller.

Fingers longer.

Actually, the very nice thing is Shutty, who is the new Doctor Who, is also Scottish, so we've had the most sensational run of it since we grew up in Faith.

One of the most famous things about Doctor Who is the fact that during the 1950s and 60s, or even to the 70s, about 60 to 70% of all BBC video that had recordings of shows were deleted.

And so we're missing, it was over 100 episodes of Doctor Who.

It's slowly going...

a bit slow.

I think it's under the 100 mark now, purely because there is a dedicated group of fans who are out there in the world trying to track down all of these missing episodes and it's fascinating every few years we get a message that comes through from fans online saying another's been found the BBC will say nine found in Nigeria in the cupboard of a random TV local TV station and they just find the reels do they yeah they find the old yeah because what they used to do is they used to send out all of these reels to different countries but explicitly would say once you've had it for this many months there's an expiry date on it yeah burn them up I have a yeah I have at home.

I have a vinyl record of a goon show episode called Yeti, which says on it, smash this in three months' time.

Here's the expiry date.

And someone just hadn't smashed it.

Is that why the Mission Impossible films got this message will self-destruct in five seconds or whatever?

Could be.

Could, yeah, I don't know.

Yeah.

No, I don't know.

It might be.

But yeah, but so we still have like 97 episodes that are still missing.

So they keep getting.

If you find one, is it worth like a million quid or something?

Hmm, that's interesting.

Yeah, I think.

Not really.

It kind of belongs to the BBC still.

And also it's such a kind of proper Indiana Jones sleuth-a-thon.

You know, people have dedicated extraordinary amounts of time to this thing.

It would be seen as bad if you put it on eBay straight away.

Yes, it would be seen as bad.

But also, I think the kind of glory and honour of finding it.

The missing ones, they've kind of animated them.

Do they have the scripts?

They've got scripts.

Right.

Okay.

When you think of Doctor Who, largely it's the villains of the the old Doctor Who, the Daleks and so on, and Cyberman.

Thank you.

Well done, James.

But then there's also, James, the weeping angels.

That's right.

So Stephen Moffat, who created that for the show,

created a monster that was so iconic to the new fans of Doctor Who that when there was a poll done in 2012, it came on top as the best villain of Doctor Who

above the Daleks, which is very rare.

It's the first time I think that's ever happened.

So the Weeping Angels, for anyone that doesn't know it, it's basically angels that are effectively weird aliens or something.

And if you turn your gaze away from them or you blink, they get closer to you, and they get closer to you and get closer to you until they catch you.

Grandmother's footsteps.

Yeah, exactly.

What time is it, Mr.

Wolf?

Yeah.

And if they capture you, they don't kill you, but they send you to another time on Earth, and you're just stuck there, and there's no way of getting back.

So it's basically a death to some extent.

Also, if you're playing top trumps, then they have the same terror as Adolf Hitler.

Wow.

There we go.

Well, that puts them in context.

Thank you.

The problem with the Weeping Angels is a monster.

Oh, yeah.

Because I think if we we had them now, there'd just be a queue of people closing their eyes in front of them saying, could you send me back to when I could buy a house?

About 1981,

Manhattan is flying.

Yeah, exactly.

But so Stephen Moffat was actually inspired by an original statue that he saw that looks so scary and he had this idea of what if that kept encroaching on me.

So years later he decided, having told his son about the story, to go back and show him the weeping angel that had inspired this.

And they went there to the exact spot and it was gone.

Was it an old slave trader or something?

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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is when the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, George Bernard Shaw wrote to the Times in disgust.

He was upset that there was an unnecessary B at the end of the word bomb.

Thank you, George, for your contribution on this terrific day.

I know.

It's like, you know, Churchill said it was going to save a million lives.

Gandhi said it was the potential suicide of mankind.

But George Bernard Shaw wrote, I can scribble the word bomb barely legible 18 times in a minute and bomb without the B 24 times in a minute, saving 25%

by dropping this superfluous B.

And he reckoned that it would save 131,400 seconds per year in the entire English-speaking world.

How soon after the bomb was dropped did he send this letter?

It was a few weeks after.

Oh, okay, so he waited for the initial.

I think that was more the post.

Right.

I mean, yeah, talk about missing the point.

Yeah, it was.

Well, he was one of these people who really wanted to improve the language, so to speak, by making spelling simpler.

Pick your moments, though, mate.

What the hell?

That's never.

Has anyone ever written B-O-M for bomb?

Was he trying to call back to something or was he trying to bolt something?

It feels like it's an Italian-ish word, bomb.

I think it comes from the Latin bombus, meaning it's onomatopoeic.

It's just like a noise.

Bomb bomb.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, and that's how it works.

But anyway, I thought we might talk about the Manhattan Project because, Jenny, you are something of an expert.

Is that fair to say on that?

I would say it's not really fair to say because that is a hostage to portion.

However, I did mastermind and I picked it as my specialist subject.

Wow.

And I don't really get nervous very often.

I have never been so nervous.

And I wasn't nervous about the subject, which I thought I knew.

And I wasn't nervous about being on.

I'd already lost pointless and I'd already lost, you know, whatever that other Chasey one is.

So I wasn't nervous about that.

I was really nervous.

You know how every year there's one person that gets zero points and it goes on YouTube.

And, you know, and I just...

That was just right in front of my eyes.

In particular, I was like, oh, they look at me and they go, oh my god, there's a girl and, you know, she thought she'd she'd pick this stupid topic oh and the headline would have been Cogan bombs

and I would have written to the newspapers going how are you spelling the word bum you could have saved this much honey and who was your host it was one of the tall white-haired pointy guys Humphreys yes

because everyone who watches Doctor Who has their doctor don't they who they grew up with for me it said Magnus Magnusson is my mastermind

well he did the you know you do the bit of chit chat yeah and he said you write about cakes.

And I was like, occasionally.

And he said, why aren't you fat?

And I was like, what kind of a question?

Why are we fat with this?

Wow.

So I think.

That's the Today programme training kicking in.

Just brutalise the guests before you ask the question.

I can't help, Andy, but to notice that Jenny's description of tall there to describe the host was very useful.

Actually, I actually, no, you're right, Dan.

I don't think it was.

Sorry, Jenny.

You want a rubbish round describing Humphreys.

He's sitting down.

Great point.

So, the Manhattan Project.

Yeah,

but Oppenheimer.

And he was an interesting cookie, wasn't he, Oppenheimer?

He was.

He's someone who was a bit of a troubling kid.

I keep running into stories where his dad kind of has to bail him out at various different times to sort of save the career that he's hoping to have.

He, at one point, was at Cambridge University.

He was studying there.

And he was furious with one of his teachers who was called Patrick Blackett.

And Blackett would go on to win a Nobel Prize himself.

And Blackett was forcing him to do things that weren't theoretical physics.

He was taking them away from his interests.

And so, applied physics, fucking approaching.

And so in a bit of fury, in a bit of rage, Oppenheimer, and this is the story.

There's lots of different stories, but roughly this is it.

He poisoned an apple and left it on Blackett's desk for him to eat.

Like proper will kill you.

Proper poison.

Yeah, there's a lot of murky sort of territory to the story.

What we do know is definitely the dad stepped in and said, if we promise to send him to a psychiatrist, can we keep him going going on?

And if he keeps his meetings, can he stay?

And they said, Yeah, sure.

And so, that's the only reason that lenient in those days, wasn't it?

I know,

and they weren't like people who go to these posh schools grow up.

Yeah,

the rules don't apply to them.

Yeah, it is, it is crackers.

Wasn't that the way that Alan Turing killed himself as well with the poisoned apple?

It was, yeah, supposedly, that's the story, cyanide into the side of an apple.

A lot of poisoned apples around, yeah.

No, Oppenheimer was very odd.

So, Oppenheimer is the person who, when they were setting up the Manhattan Project, they came to him and they said,

we want you to head this up.

And the location, Los Alamos itself, was picked by Oppenheimer when he was on horseback going off around.

And he went, this would be perfect.

But even though he was given all of this high clearance and he was the head of this very secret operation, he was under constant surveillance because they also thought that he was a communist, because he was very pro-communist.

He was never card-carrying, but he'd said enough stuff that they thought this guy's going to be stealing our secrets and sending them out.

Well, the guy that did, there was a guy called Fuchs who was there who ended up, and is possibly, depending on how you look at it, guilty of one of the worst crimes that has ever been done, who did go and sell the stuff to the Soviets, or he took it to the Soviets.

How would he compare against Hitler and the top Trumps?

That's an excellent question, James, when you want to get back to his match.

Sorry.

And nobody suspected him.

Not only that, they all really liked him because he had a car and he used to give them a lift into town all the time.

Because obviously they'd chit-chat.

He'd be like oh yeah, come on, I'll give you a lift to the airport.

And he caught all of them.

Not a single one.

Super nice guy.

Would he say, I'll just throw your briefcase in the back of the car while we drive?

Exactly.

And there was someone in the back of the car, like under a blanket, who would then read through the story.

Can someone go and pick up Enrico Fermi?

I'll do it.

God.

That was another dad rescue moment for old Oppenheimer.

He once got in a car crash because he tried to race a train and failed.

What do you mean by racing a train?

Are they going alongside each other?

It feels like he was trying to outrun it and be done it.

As opposed to sometimes it would be like you're trying to cross the path to the train.

I think he was just racing.

I think he was just trying to get ahead of it and it left his girlfriend unconscious.

And in order to make up for this and turning into a big story, the father had to go over to the family of the young woman's house and gave a painting and an original Cezanne drawing as well.

I do that by the way, that racing after the train on the M1.

You know, the last bit of the M1, the train goes on one side the road.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

But my car, like, it's an electric car, so if I go above 70 miles an hour, I lose all my battery.

So

I tend to lose the race quite quickly.

It's so funny.

I really think that this film should probably be about his dad.

Well, it's a comedy if it's about his dad, isn't it?

It's like, oh,

it's like a Dennis the Menace movie then.

Yeah, in this flat when he was growing up, there were three Van Gogh paintings and some Picasso's too, and clearly some Cicernes as well.

I mean, they were very, very, very wealthy people when he was growing up.

But his, Dan, you mentioned the, he was suspected of, you know, being a communist or of being suspect.

He was approached by Soviet intelligence in 1943,

and he said no.

He said, no, I'm not going to show you the secrets.

But it still wrecked his career anyway because he didn't tell anyone.

So he lost his clearance, his security clearance in 1954.

Feels like it's...

cats out of the bag then.

I mean, they've got the bomb.

Anyway, but it was overties to communism.

It was in the whole McCarthy witch trial period.

But the US Department of Energy did reverse their decision in 2022.

Just 55 years after he died, they said, you know what?

You can have your security clearance back.

Very helpful.

I mean, it was a gesture, obviously.

Maybe he's still alive.

You don't know what these atomic bombs are going to do to your...

I would say that there was a movement on to stop people smoking on film because it wasn't very starved.

Oh, yeah.

And it was kind of poo-pooed down.

And then I watched Casablanca because I'd never seen it.

And And everyone is chugging on facts 100% of the time and it's disgusting.

It was so disgusting.

And Oppenheimer never ever took a breath that didn't have a cigarette on it.

So I'm feeling quite sorry for the actor.

Killian Murphy, who's playing in the movies.

Because he never, he was a chain smoker.

He never took a breath without a cigarette on it.

That's what he says part of the prep of trying to become Oppenheimer was basically cigarettes and cocktails were the yeah, cigarettes and martini.

I'm going to have to go method.

It's really weird because when I think about the atomic bomb, and I think most people, obviously, we see it as one of the worst moments in history.

And there's obviously the arguments that people make that it may have saved more lives, like Churchill and so on.

But to sort of actively celebrate it feels quite an odd thing to me.

And if you do go to Los Alamos now, that is very much what they do.

Like it's their tourism trade, isn't it?

So there's a supermarket there with an atomic bar.

You can get atomic seltzer that you can buy and purchase.

There's atomic bumper stickers.

There's a you can buy clothing for babies where there's a mushroom cloud on it that says the words, I've been dropping bombs since day one.

You know, there's all these merch things, and it feels a bit out of taste, except I guess it's not to them, right?

Well, I don't know.

I mean, I grew up in a world where we went to a big room on Sunday and there was a guy with nails in his hand.

That's true.

I went to Hiroshima.

I don't know if I've said this before, but if you go to Hiroshima, you can go where the bomb was dropped to the exact spot.

And there's a sign on the wall, and it says the first nuclear bomb was detonated something like 100 feet above this point and then you sort of look upwards and you can imagine the exact spot where the bomb would have gone off and they detonated and killed all those people.

It's really amazing.

Do you know about

trinitite?

Trinitite?

I think it's trinitite because it was the Trinity test.

Yeah, the Trinity test.

Okay, so it's not got three nitrogen atoms.

That's what it's called.

No, sorry, no.

I just said it wrong.

Yeah, trinitite, I'm sure.

And it was...

Is it a type of stone?

It's a type of glass

made from the sand diffused.

The sand turned to glass when they tested the first bomb.

Wow.

And it's called, it's also called atom site.

It's light green glass.

And it was just left there.

Is it radioactive?

I think it is not very anymore, but it's still a little radioactive.

So most of it was bulldozed by the U.S.

Atomic Energy Commission and buried, you know, but some of it's still there because ants will bring it to the surface, these tiny beads of glass, because some of it's under the soil and they're digging their tunnels and so it just gets pushed up.

It's crazy and it's illegal to take it away now.

But for a while it was just thought, oh, it's just, you know, sand, it's just sand turned to glass.

And so there was a period in 1945 and 46 where it was marketed in jewelry.

You could get

Trinitite jewelry.

There was a designer who made some earrings and hairpins from it.

And there was an actress called Merle Oberon.

She wore some some of it to a fundraiser, supposedly to this is quite dark, to discredit Japanese claims about radiation injury.

Which

so, you know, well, I mean, an actress is wearing some of the sand-fused glass, so it can't be that dangerous.

But obviously, that's terrible.

Yeah.

Supposedly, I don't, I just because you've mentioned this, I haven't gotten this written down, but using one of these bombs is one of the methods that they've been thinking about to try and get deeper and deeper and boring into the ground.

It can get something like 18 miles really quickly just through an explosion.

But because of the,

well, I don't know.

As I say, I sort of like asked.

For instance, the Soviets were going to use nuclear bombs to open up waterways in the north of Russia, for instance.

So that has been thought of in the past to use nuclear forces.

Oh, no one's held one of those stupid billionaires that just could use nuclear.

And what would happen, though, is that the surrounding casing of the hole would have fused into this glass-like so rust as well.

So it would be like a really amazing slide, like almost immediately.

That's you've been spending too much time in soft places this time.

Not coming to your soft places, right?

Will six both

on those?

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

My fact this week is that the actor John Candy was born on Halloween.

Okay, it's time for fact number four.

And his name's Candy.

His name's Candy.

And what do you get on Halloween?

There you go.

Was he called John Skeleton Candy?

Terrifying ghouls.

I wish.

Yeah, so John Candy,

most of you should know him.

The Candyman.

Well, no.

John Candyman.

The man.

John Candy.

He was in Cool Runnings.

He was in Cool Runnings.

He was in plane trains and automobiles.

He was an uncle Buck.

He's one of the greatest comedy actors that Canada has ever produced.

And I found this, by the way, in a really great book I'm reading reading at the moment called Wild and Crazy Guys, which is all about that period of when SNL in America exploded.

So you had Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray and Eddie Murphy and John Belushi and Chevy Chase and so on.

And John Candy, obviously a big player in that area.

And yeah, so it's just a little detail in that book.

And I thought I'd love to talk about John Candy.

Great.

Well, we're not going to.

Yep, let's move on to other types of candy.

Also born on Halloween, John Keats.

Just

who in that episode, I think I might have mentioned, was possibly a grave robber, John Keats, because he was a medical student.

And at that time, they weeded bodies to do their experiments on.

And possibly he could have been

one of the body stealers.

Ad Rock of the Beastie Boys.

Oh, yeah.

Beastie Boys.

Nice.

Yeah.

Sidney Park, who's an actor from The Walking Dead.

Shorn on Halloween.

Born on Halloween.

And Kirk Noble Bluntsworth, who was the first American sentenced to death to be exonerated post-conviction, so was supposed to be executed, and then it turned out DNA testing meant that he hadn't done it, so he got off.

And the Halloween link is that he's got blood, isn't it?

Death.

Oh, yeah, blood.

Yeah.

Come on, that was really stretchy.

Yeah, I felt this.

That's an afternoon's work.

But it's unusual because fewer people are born on Halloween than on other sites around the UK.

Do people kind of hang on or push through or?

It's really miserable in February.

It seemed pretty obvious

he doesn't know when halloween is

um well actually in february that is the one of the most common days valentine's day is a very common day for births um which is when my daughter was born actually on valentine's day but there's a 3.6 percent increase on births in valentine's day and a 5.3 percent decrease of spontaneous births on halloween is that like the Christmas thing where it's just that hospitals are a bit quieter?

I think it's a bit of that, perhaps.

The other thing is that caesareans is a big difference.

Right, you wouldn't not book a Caesarean for Halloween, would you?

Now, if you were given three dates to choose, you might decide not to go for Halloween.

Really?

They can't be emergency ones, obviously.

Also, don't forget that in some places, not necessarily here, but in some places, that's quite a big drinking night.

So, you may not possibly want a bunch of student medics wearing bags.

So yeah, that's a thing.

Wow.

That's very cool.

Love it.

Yeah.

Can we talk about candy?

Yeah, okay.

Yeah.

No, Dan, you've got a lot of stuff on John Candy.

No, I just want to quickly just say, because he died very young.

He was 43 when he died of a heart attack.

And it's,

he was, he was, you know, he was in Home Alone.

He was in there's so many seminal movies of the 90s that he was in.

He was known as Sweet Tooth when he was a kid, so he did love candy as well as he was growing up.

All kids love candy.

All kids love candy, but he was called John Candy and he was called Sweet Tooth.

Are they all called Candy and Sweet Tooth?

No.

He wanted to be a sports star.

That was his big thing.

And so he had an injury which meant that he couldn't do that.

He played American football, right?

Yeah, he played American football.

So he had the physique, which was trained to be someone who was going to play that game.

So all the cast members of Saturday Night Live and all the other things he did always used to say that if you saw John Candy and you approached him, people like Dan Aykroyd say this.

He would lift you up with one hand vertically and spin you around like a pizza was being prepared.

prepared.

Yeah, he used to every one said that if you saw John Candy, he would lift you up with one hand, hold you above his head and spin you around.

Well, American footballers don't do that.

No!

True.

But the point is that he had a physique whereby lots of other people say that one of their favorite things to do was to act like an NFL ball.

And if John Candy came into the room, he'd throw you 800 yards.

What was the...

No, they would run at him, jump at him, tuck, and he would catch them as if they were an NFL ball.

Come on, man.

He was a grown adults, you know, Akroid six foot three.

He was an offensive linesman in American football, I read.

So that means that he's basically a blocker.

You give the ball to your player back who's trying to do something and he's trying to stop everyone from coming towards him.

So he must have been big.

He was.

He was a, yeah, he was tall.

I mean, he was six foot three himself.

He was a big guy, but he was also just, he was physically ready to catch humans.

I just don't think any of that stuff happened.

It is.

Multiple people said it.

Like, it's not like it's a, yeah, like a fan saying it.

I did actually, to be fair, I was looking a little bit at John Candy.

I did read that if, like, if you ran at him, he would put you on a big wooden pallet and he'd slide you into an oven.

Horrible.

Just, like, I think they're exaggerated stars.

These are the stories.

These are the stories they say.

Maybe it was gingerbread.

Shall we talk about candy?

Yeah, yeah, John Candy.

Oh my gosh.

Well, I'll just say one really sweet thing is that when he died, again, he was very young.

He had a heart attack while he was making a movie in New Mexico.

Did he die from the atomic bomb?

Was he in that movie that Andy was talking about where people had a heart attack?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Wow, lots to chew on.

But

he had a funeral at Sunset Boulevard, and then they went down to the cemetery and they took the 405 three way, and it was completely clear.

They had no idea why it was completely clear.

And what it turned out was that the highway patrol had stopped all road access to anything but this, and it was their choice to do that.

And it was them tipping their hat to say, We loved you and we miss you.

And it's because in 10 of his movies, and you know, he didn't live that long, so it's a short time he made these movies, he played a law enforcement officer in 10 of these movies, and so they felt like there was a friend that they'd lost, you know, one of them.

Yeah, anyway, R.I.P.

John Candy.

I know I'm a bit late in saying it, but yeah, condolences to the family.

All right, do your candy now.

You handy candy.

Andy, give us some candy.

Well, I was just thinking, Jenny, you're from a great confectionery nation, Scotland.

Yes.

We have some tunnels on the table.

We have some tunnels in front.

It's very exciting.

We've made you not diving in, I feel.

Yeah, it's funny.

I'm opening one now.

Okay, I might do as well.

Yeah.

Okay.

When everyone's finished.

Okay, so get this.

This is a sort of scientific thing about sugar.

People who are from Northern Europe are some of the most sugar-sensitive people in the world.

And there might be a proper

evolutionary reason for that.

Do you mean by sensitive?

Do you mean as in it's bad for us?

No, as in sex can detect it.

Oh.

Can detect it more easily.

So this is really interesting.

There are particular variations in a sugar sensing gene and people from northern latitudes have that more than people who live in tropical areas.

And the theory is one theory is, that's not certain, obviously, but in higher latitudes, really sweet fruit and veg are a bit less common.

Yeah.

And they're necessary to survive.

It's not like in tropical regions where you have really sugary, sweet things and it's easy to find them and survive.

So maybe if you move north, you will benefit from having that sensitivity.

Like if you ate a, like carrots and parsnips are quite sweet.

But if you can't detect that, then you might not realise and you might not grow those foods or you might not seek them out and you'll be less likely to survive.

So Jenny, you're from further north than the rest of us around this table.

Do you feel that that's true?

Junior, that does.

Well, I'm very wary of things that feel true.

But that does actually kind of feel true.

And whilst it's kind of touching in a way, it's also horrendous that the number one operation performed in Shelton in Scotland is tooth extraction.

Oh, wow.

I read that you know, like how dogs are good at detecting things.

We might come on to that later.

Oh, yeah.

But everyone thinks that, you know, like dogs have got amazing smell compared to humans, which they do, but it's for certain chemicals.

And for certain chemicals, humans are better.

And I think, like, for instance, if you were to put a bar of chocolate in the middle of a field and train the human to look for it and train the dog to look for it, the human might come out on top.

Wow, wow.

Because we're really good at looking for sugar and looking for fats and stuff like that.

That's so cool.

I don't know if that's true.

We might come on to that later.

Do you know?

I was looking for what's the most popular candy.

I hate that word.

Do you say sweets?

Sweets.

My husband says lollies because he's from New Zealand, and my children say bonbo because they're from France.

Right.

Sorry, can I just stop and just...

I think the way that you're eating this tunnel's tea cake, Jenny.

You do it upside down too.

Yeah, that's what happens.

This is basically what my only fans is.

So Jenny has taken, if you know what a tea cake is, it's marshmallow with a bit of biscuit on the bottom of cake covered in chocolate.

Jenny has...

sort of separated the cake and the marshmallow and it's starting to make it.

I'm now terribly self-conscious.

You're like turning it into a naked burger where you just take the buns off and leave them on the side.

Well, you know, just shoving it all in my go-to doesn't work very well.

No, Jenny, I do the same thing.

There we go.

Same method.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You've just been into it.

No, I haven't.

I've done it carefully.

I know what I'm doing.

I de-base it.

And by the way, Azzi's family are from Scotland as well.

The old skills, they kick in.

Genetic.

Yeah.

Speaking about teeth stuff, Shenny.

This is an interesting thing.

Candy floss was popularised by a dentist.

Woo!

Actually, do you know, when you were talking about John candy, you know, nominative determinism, how tedious it is, because it makes us all look like really boring humans.

It's literally made us our fortune on this podcast.

Oh my god, we get a lot of correspondence about it, so please be careful.

The inbox will just be recovering from the Doctor Who on stores.

I was only going to say, and I think, I hope this is not too controversial because it is true, that dentists' first names are vastly over-represented by for women, Denise, and for men, Dennis.

That's so good.

It's just such a kind of you're a big meat sack.

Digs the easiest route out

you can possibly think of, humans.

It was called Fairy Floss at the time.

I just have to say who it was.

William J.

Morrison teamed up with a Nashville confectioner in 1897.

And despite being president of the Tennessee State Dental Association,

no small thing.

Was he trying to drill up more business?

Drill up.

Very good, James.

Nice.

That's good.

Sometimes

you've got to be the one to acknowledge

how good it was.

Drill up in that sense.

No, ma'am.

Oh, God.

I don't know what came up and be there.

You didn't even give us time not to laugh.

Trim up, did you?

Do you know what candy floss is in Greek?

Oh, no, I don't, actually.

Well, it translates as old woman's hair.

Oh,

because it's wispy.

Yes.

And in Afrikaans, I love this.

It's ghost breath.

Lovely.

Do you know what the Mexican term for eye candy is if you say

eye candy?

No.

Eye taco.

Stop it.

It's eye taco.

That sounds like a new Apple product, doesn't it?

The revolutionary eye taco.

After just six hours of charging, you can enjoy the taco for 10 minutes.

I was reading about my favorite confectionery, which is popping candy, which I genuinely think is completely underused.

in the world and I think you should really pretty much put it on everything and it was invented by a guy who was trying to make an instant soft drink this is amazing so he's trying to make something like let's say coca-cola and what his idea was he wanted something like cordial you would have something and you would pour the water on it and then when the water comes in it turns automatically into a fizzy drink

and so he got some sugar and he heated it up really really high put it under a load of pressure added a load of gas into it and then cooled it down and in theory what a great idea as soon as you put the water in the gas will get released and it'll be really fizzy It didn't work.

That's so cool, though.

But he started eating it and it gave him these sort of explosions in his mouth.

So his experiments went wrong and he went, I'll just stick it in my memory.

Good science.

Isn't that cool?

And then everyone, all of the other people in his office saw that this was happening.

They used to have competitions to see how much they could put in the mouth of this stuff.

They would get bigger and bigger rocks of it and see how much they could do.

But immediately, as soon as they went on sale, pop rocks, they're called in America, there were rumors that children's stomachs were exploding.

I was going to say, the first fatality was yeah, it was all over the place.

And the Pop Rocks company had to take out full-page advertisements in more than 40 publications around the country to say, These will not make your child explode, honestly.

And the head of the company wrote 50,000 letters to school principals saying, Can you please stop danning these things?

Marketing genius.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's amazing.

That's it.

Almost certainly won't kill you, kids.

Bring it!

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Does anybody want to hear my worst Japanese Kit Kat flavor?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

You know, there's now over 300.

Yeah.

Okay, wow.

And I was looking down the list, and there's some pretty bad ones in there.

I think.

European cheese.

Oh, wow.

What is European cheese?

There's no such thing as European cheese.

I believe the Dutch would like a word with you.

Well, no, no, sorry, there are European cheeses, but there is not one archetypal European cheese.

In Japan, you might lump a sort of yellow pungent cheese as a European cheese, right?

Like

dairy is not that big in Japan, right?

Or China.

Well American cheese comes in single shrink-wrapped slice form.

Yes, but it's different types of cheese.

But that's that.

But what?

But no, no, sorry, no, no, no, I'm not having a hit.

Here's the thing, but this is something interesting, I think, and I might butcher this, but I'll try my best.

So when cheese first came to Japan, because it wasn't traditionally eaten over there, they called it something like dairy tofu.

Okay.

Something like that.

And when tofu first came to France, they called it soya cheese.

Brilliant.

I think that's right.

That's really good.

That's distracted me from my anger about the other things.

James always manages to find a fact to calm you down.

Yeah, yeah.

Get two on top of it.

Well done, James.

You're well done.

Have you guys ever had an aniseed ball?

Yeah.

No.

What's that tiny bit in the middle?

Right.

Is that what you're going to tell us?

No.

That's an aniseed.

Seed.

I think it is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Can you describe it to me or don't you?

So it's a small, round, purple ball, very, very hard, and it's layer after layer of slightly flavoured, licoricey.

Boiled.

Yeah, they're very unpopular with lots of.

They're quite 1930s.

Not gob stopper.

No, it's like a very small gobstopper, but it's quite strong tasting and aniseed, right?

So, okay, this is very cool.

They slightly helped to win the Second World War, aniseed balls.

Brilliant.

In 1939, at the War Office, they wanted to build a limpet mine that you could stick to the hull of the ship, swim away from, and it detonates later, right?

Yeah.

And the War Office, they contacted a science magazine editor called Stuart McRae, and he contacted someone he knew, an inventor called Cecil Clarke, who was also a caravan maker.

detail.

They started working together, right?

They had the details of the mine and they had the the explosive and they had the way to attach it to the ship.

So they were doing really well.

But what they needed was something to keep apart the hammer and the detonator, right?

So that when you're swimming up, when you're a frogman swimming up, you attach the mine and you prime it, it doesn't go off immediately.

So you need something

that slowly dissolves and separates the hammer and the detonator.

Wow.

And Clark's kids were eating aniseed balls and they tried them out and they found they dissolve in about half an hour in water.

But you didn't have to suck the grenade.

No, you didn't.

Yeah, it's a mouth activated.

Yeah.

So Clark and McRae, they bought every aniseed ball in Bedford, right?

And they, like, they just, because for their experiments.

But the problem was they also needed something to keep the aniseed ball dry until the mine was in place, right?

So they also went around buying all the condoms in Bedford.

And they got it.

Imagine getting to the supermarket checkout.

You just got a trolley full of condoms and aniseed possible.

Clark said we got a completely undeserved reputation as sexual athletes because we were.

And then, anyway, but they worked.

The antise balls worked in this mine.

And the MOD commissioned them, the war office commissioned them, and they started buying Anassy Balls directly from the manufacturer.

And I love this.

Clark also commissioned some miniature condoms from a rubber factory to cover the firing mechanism.

Imagine with the pharmacist to begin with going, Do you have any smaller condoms?

Smaller.

Smaller than that.

I love how we've gone from like the biggest bomb the world has ever known.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

My fact is that there are only three newt-detecting dogs on the planet.

Brilliant.

This is a woman called Nicola Jane Glover.

She's

a dog owner.

And she's got a Spaniel called Freya and another dog called Newki.

And

this was in an article in The Guardian recently, but it's actually been going on for a few years.

So

I think at least in 2018, Freya was detecting newts.

And the reason you need to detect newts is that there's a species called the Great Crested Newt, which is protected.

And if you're developing land, you have to show that there are no newts there.

So because, you know, they don't want to endanger them.

And it's really hard to find them because they spend a lot of their time underground and in the water because they're amphibious.

So

Nicola Glover, she and her colleagues, they trained Freya, the Spaniel, to detect live newts and Freya can do it really, really well now.

90% detection rate.

And it's a good method of...

Saving the newt.

Saving the newt and saving a lot of time and fuss and newt detection work.

And the other thing about this story, oh, there's a third one who's Rocky from Flintshire,

who was also trained separately in 2020.

There was a correction in the Guardian article about the dogs, which I think you saw, Jenny.

This article was amended.

An earlier version said that great-crested newts reached an adult overall length of 17 meters.

That's the one I read, and I thought, well, why did you need a dog?

It should have been 17 centimeters.

Yeah, I read an article from 2011 that said that they were starting to do this with

the crested newts, but also desert tortoises, kiwis, kakapos, bats, cheetahs.

I'm not sure why.

Ground tree snakes, seals, and bed bugs.

So dogs are being taught to look for all these things for various different reasons.

The cheetahs, I think, they're looking for the scat for the poo.

Not actual.

Not actual.

Oh, one went past about five minutes ago.

Who's a dog person?

Who's a cat person?

I'm a dog.

Your cat person.

It's not a bit embarrassing when someone goes, oh, my dog just discovered the ancient caves at Lesou.

And you're like, yeah, my cat ate a curtain.

Yeah, my cat doesn't give a fuck.

Yeah, I mean, I would say I'm probably not really either, but I've had cats spossed upon me, so.

But

I went following the story in terms of things dogs do.

Unbelievable stuff all the time.

Yeah.

You're a dog person.

Well, yeah, but my dogs are crappy.

They're absolutely rough.

I've got two dogs, each idiots, who fight seals on a regular basis unsuccessfully.

They'd love seals where we live.

Oh,

yeah.

Well, it's not cool because the seals just go, see see you later, and swim off, and then you have to go and rescue your dog, who's a moron.

But they're cool.

But maybe you've not given them the chance to work out if they're like semen-sniffing dogs or if they are.

That's on my list.

That's on my list.

Why would that be the first on your list to say?

Is that what you'll say to anyone who's walking a dog in the park?

You're like, have you ever given it a chance to be a semen-sniffing dog?

I've got a pocket full of amazing balls, I've got another pocket full of mini condoms.

You've got a seamless sniffing dog.

Let's talk.

It's up with an E.

Are you spelling that with an E?

No, I don't think that is.

No, it's no, no, no.

Jenny, you write romantic novels, don't you?

Have you ever had a seamless

just here for the inspiration?

Hang on.

Type, type, tight.

She was a girl from the city with a seamless sniffing dog and a heart of gold.

So, okay, so

well, it's used for, you know, I mean, unfortunately, it's used for

terrible reasons, yeah, for crimes and so on.

But that's an important thing.

They need to sometimes have a dog detect whether or not someone might have recently have left some semen out because it can find the traces on it.

And it can detect as little as 0.016 milliliters of seminal fluid.

So they're very good at it.

And so what I'm saying is your dog

might not have been given the chance to show that it can smell seaman.

Really shine.

Spying whale poo because they do that as well.

They sit on boats and they can find whale poo.

It's a clever dogs like Spaniels.

Spaniels are like real teacher pleasers.

Perms and they're one-yard ducks?

Kind of just terrifying half-cougar things that we found in a lay-by.

Are they mutts?

No, they're terriers.

But they're kind of, they're theoretically ratters,

but they're kind of, they're just a bit rubbish.

What does that fit in your...

I'd need to see a photo there's a game called hound pooch or much any almost any dog fits into those categories oh hounds they're hounds they're hounds okay yeah yeah yeah yeah

um in the when uh malvis sang you ain't nothing but a hound dog yeah he was playing that game wasn't he yeah yeah yeah yeah he'd try he'd already recorded a version called you ain't nothing but a pooch dog

rubbish um it was an interesting story about um a man i'd never heard of really really amazing he was a german diplomat he was sort of sided on the side of the nazis at the time and okay he well he's an attaché for the Nazis.

He's called George Ferdinand Duckwitz.

Duckwitz.

Must have had a rough time at school.

Ferdinand Duckwitz is asking for a spoonerism.

He's an amazing character.

He sits in the world of Oskar Schindler.

He was someone who helped to save a lot of refugee Jews who were stuck in Denmark.

And supposedly, 95% of their Jewish population was successfully taken out of the country to a safe place in Sweden because of this this guy.

And he risked his life to do it.

So he's an amazing character.

And you called him a fuckwit, James.

Oh.

Okay.

Sorry, duckwits.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

I'm not going to trivialise his memory.

Not well done, James.

Okay, so where's the dog coming in here?

The dog comes in here because when they were taking them out on all the boats and they were hiding them in the cargo, a lot of dogs had been trained up in order to sniff out any humans that were on board.

So this was a problem that they had.

So what they did was they came up with an idea that they could deceive the sniffer dogs by placing semen.

No, they...

You're giving me that look like it was heading there.

They created what was a mixture of dried rabbit blood and cocaine and they gave it to the fishermen and

they gave it to the fishermen

who would coat it in handkerchiefs.

Right, and then they would put the, they would hold the handkerchiefs and the dogs would race towards the handkerchief.

They would ignore any of the other smells that were on the bell.

Wow.

Yeah.

And so, as a result, they would have no other interest than what was going on here.

And that would become the main focus.

I mean, rabbit blood, I guess dogs like dogs hunt rabbits and rabbit blood.

The rabbit blood is to attract them, and then the cocaine is to

be not interested in them.

They're talking about themselves.

I can tell you about some rabbits I caught.

A couple of modern rabbits.

It supposedly temporarily would knock out their smell.

Wow.

God, that's so clever.

clever.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's amazing.

Yeah, so he's a huge hero.

He saved 7,200 Jewish refugees.

Wow.

Can I say something about the Great Crested Newt?

Oh, yeah.

All right.

So they have a very colorful belly.

Okay.

No one really knows why they've got a colourful belly.

If you're a newt and you're colourful, often it's because you want people to know you're toxic.

And it turns out they aren't toxic.

Their warts contain chemicals.

And there was a naturalist called Eleanor Ormorod who tested it by biting a live newt's tail.

Just the tail, and the tails will grow back and stuff.

And then she recorded all of her symptoms.

So she was foaming at the mouth.

She had shivering fits.

And so she proved that they were toxic.

It's a lot of scientists putting stuff in their mouths.

So we found out that they are toxic, but the weird thing is they're newts.

So they walk around a lot with their belly pointing to the ground.

And so no predators can see their bellies anyway.

And so no one knows still to this day why they have a colourful belly.

That's so strange.

I'm pretty sure it wouldn't.

Moles and stuff come up and eat them.

The moles, yeah.

They come from the ants.

They swim?

They swim, so maybe fish from the feet.

But you're right.

Normally you'd feel like birds would be.

Yeah, yeah.

Descending.

Eleanor Omarod, anyway, she's really famous.

She was an agricultural entomologist because she was living in Victorian times, so she couldn't really be a professional scientist in those days if you're a woman.

But she found a kind of a role where she could use her skills and apply them to agriculture.

So, you know, like if people's crops are dying, she could say, Well, you should get rid of these newts or you should get rid of these moles or whatever, stuff like that.

And she was so famous that Virginia Woolf wrote a story about her called Miss Ormerod, which is named after her.

Just a pretty cool person.

That's very cool.

There's a lot of things women had to do to be scientists and naughty.

I know, I know.

She's going to bite me poisonous.

We know it's poisonous, but we don't know how poisonous.

So, Eleanor, if you could.

I'm going to mention one last thing before we wrap up.

Yeah.

I don't know if it's useful, but just in case you're wondering, we've been talking a lot about dogs sniffing humans, and I discovered that there's a job whereby you as a human can sniff a dog.

Are we looking for the dog, or is that the idea?

No.

Chocolate lamp.

This is for people who work in factories that are making dog food because one of the things that owners hate about dog food is the breath that it can leave on their dog.

And they make a very concerted effort not to make food where chemicals are altering the smell of the mouth of a dog so that it's very pongy.

So one of the jobs that, if you work in one of these factories, is to go up and sniff dogs' mouths who are experimenting with new tastes and new formulas and so on.

And then if a dog has ejaculated recently, you can no, not that.

I just love how excited the dogs were to get their jobs.

I'm a taster at Dogfit Factory.

Yeah.

The other dog's like, oh wow, that sounds awesome.

That sounds cool.

So they sniff you?

God, that's so...

That's not a lovely job.

No, I think.

Can I ask another question?

You won't know the answer to this, but

it's not just important, presumably, that their breath doesn't smell, you don't want their farts to smell bad.

Oh, I guess right.

Yeah, you say really good point.

You don't want that to the other side.

Do you not have someone whose job is to smell all the dog farts?

It feels like you must.

You must, right?

You must.

I think he's right.

It's probably the unspoken.

That's what they tell you once you've got the gig.

They say, by the way,

there's a second hatch over there.

Open that on that one.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland, James, at James Harkin, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

And Jenny, at Jenny Colgan.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, no such thingasoffish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there and uh just a quick reminder jenny your latest book is out now it is it's called the summer sky the summer skies and of course all of jenny's other books are available to buy as well and so do check them out and also check out her doctor who stuff as well there's numerous jenny colgan books that are out there and audio adventures jenny m colgan is the jenny t colgan jenny t is the pseudonym if you want to look for those so yeah uh also we are playing a live show for fish on the 14th 14th of September at King's Place, part of the London Podcast Festival.

And we're going to be live streaming it.

So, you're able to buy live stream tickets for that by going to no such thing as a fish.com/slash podfest.

Check out tickets there, and of course, check out Club Fish.

It's our secret members' club where we do all sort of bonus extras, compilations, drop us a line, which Andy does, which is a show where we go through all the correspondence that you've sent in.

It's a really fun place,

but that's it.

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

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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