485: No Such Thing As Ballet On A Staircase

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You probably also know Beck through her YouTube channel.

She's got all sorts of stuff on there.

I think notably, you might know her for her flip chart comedy where she misses lyrics.

There's videos about her show makeaway takeaway that she used to do on CI TV.

There's loads of stuff on there.

And of course, if you're the right age or if you have children of the right age, you will know her from her books.

She has a series of books called Horror Heights.

There are three in the series at the moment.

The latest is called Dead Ringer.

And they are, of course, available in all places where you buy your books.

So that's all about Beck.

There will be a little thing later on, towards the end of the show, where we might have an object which we will sign and give away to one of our listeners.

If you want to know more about that, you will have to sign up to Club Fish.

We will give more details on how to win that during our next bonus droppers align, which will be out next Tuesday.

Anyway, not much more to say.

I mean, we do have a live show coming up, which I think the tickets might be all but sold out, but you can get streaming tickets from that.

You can go to no such thingasafish.com forward slash podfest apart from that really this is the end it's time to say 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 Beck Hill.

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 Beck.

In 1927, a patent was filed for an apparatus designed to scare criminals into confessing their crimes by creating an optical illusion of a ghost skeleton.

How to do it.

It's pretty cool.

Yeah, I mean, the patent was filed, and I mean, it was granted in 1930.

Okay.

It expired in 1947.

So if anyone wants to make that now...

That'd make Call of Duty better, wouldn't it?

Where they're trying to get Call of Duty.

Is that what happens?

Line of Duty?

Line of Duty.

Call of Duty.

Isn't that video game?

It is, yeah, yeah.

I was just trying to work out how it worked.

It would work there as well.

I think it'd work everywhere.

Pop a glowing skeleton.

Sorry, we'll get messages from the gamers.

It won't work in Call of Duty.

An intensely realistic war experience

is more a kind of like, can you storm Normandy than where were you on the night of the fourth?

Which is what this is coming.

More games need interrogation.

Exactly.

The Mario interrogation.

Where's Peach?

I was reading about

show jumping the other day, you know, in the Olympics.

And in the first Olympic show jumping, part of it was, just because we're talking about video games, the horse had to walk along and people would roll barrels towards them and they'd have to jump over the barrels like in donkey cars.

Isn't that cool?

That's amazing.

Yeah.

Imagine if that was your job.

I rolled barrels at horses.

Sorry, this was off topic so quickly.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

So it was like, it was a light.

Do you know what?

I couldn't find out whether it was a real skeleton or a fake one.

But given the date, I'm guessing it it was a real one, but it was a life-size skeleton with red glowing light bulbs in the eyes that would turn on and off to create the effect of blinking.

And it was lit from the top and the bottom.

And basically

the suspected criminal would be put into a chamber, like a room that's completely darkened.

And then

the interrogator would sit behind the skeleton and talk through a megaphone that would sort of come out of the skeleton's mouth, and the skeleton would be lit a little bit to create the effect of a ghostly outline of some of those glowing eyes.

Yeah.

Yeah, and the effect, the idea was the criminal would go into a darkened room to begin with, so they're sort of going, What's going on?

Where's the police officers?

What's happening?

And then suddenly this curtain would raise and this furious glowing skeleton would be there saying, You did it, didn't you?

or whatever it was.

Yeah, it would work so well the first time on, I presume, everyone who'd committed a crime and was trying to cover it up.

And it's a very striking experience to have if you're the one being you know questioned by a skeleton.

But I guess the criminal fraternity would would be more you know would be blase about it after a few years of the skeleton being

they'd have to keep tracking it out and you know maybe drag it out.

Different up the skeleton.

There's a detail in this which kind of confused me because this is 1930s which said that as well as having the the megaphone and the glowing eyes it also had a camera in the head to film.

Would you get sound recording as well?

To record sound as well.

And it actually included a way of

recording the sound and the visuals at the same time

onto this film.

Yeah.

That is very early, isn't it?

We had photographs and we had cinema and stuff like that.

So I think this, it was a woman who did it, wasn't it?

Helen Adelaide Shelby was there.

I think she basically took a load of things that had been invented around that time and said, oh, we could do this with this.

Oh, we could do this with this.

Oh, flashing lights, let's do that for the eyes.

Yeah.

One thing I couldn't find out was her decision to turn it into an interrogation thing.

Like, that's quite a cool effect.

If you were like, oh, well, we could create this effect and put it on stage.

Like, did she just read a Christmas carol and was like, oh, I know what gets people guilty.

But that's the thing as well.

She doesn't come from that background.

So it's Helena, sorry, or Helena, rather than Helen.

And she was a real estate mogul.

She was like, she used to bet on horses.

There's nothing else in the literature about her that suggests that this came from any background in policing or anything like that.

And she kind of disappears as well.

You don't really see her.

I found that she did die in 1947.

Right.

I found in the newspapers.

When it expired.

And I found that her father-in-law, Samuel, was a famous Civil War veteran.

His first foray in the Civil War was down the Mississippi River, and the entire platoon was hospitalized because they all drank swamp water.

Oh.

That's all I found out.

She had a husband called Edgar.

That's the only other detail I've I've got.

Yeah.

Stop blinding us with overwhelming information about that.

It is

so rallying.

It's all she's remembered for now is mostly this skeleton thing.

I found out that Tom Scott, the YouTuber, had recreated this

invention in 2020.

So they recreated the actual skeleton and everything and did an experiment with three other people.

where he left them alone with a cookie and one of them had to steal the cookie and then he interrogated them and they didn't know what he was doing so he was just like i'm trying out a new technique

and then he puts them in this room and

the first two

are scared at first because they're in a dark room and they have no idea what to expect and then when the skeleton appears they just crack up laughing

because

you would though wouldn't you i mean i can imagine it being spooky at first but i'd be far more scared of a dark room yeah so you know the one-way mirror thing yeah there's no actually there's no such thing as a one-way mirror.

There is.

It's actually a window.

That's the dullest fact I found in the course of research.

It's not to do with lighting.

It's all about the lighting.

Yeah.

It's a window covered with highly reflective coating.

It's not a mirror.

What makes the difference between a mirror.

Is it just because a mirror has like a steel background?

I think the mirror has the

properly opaque background.

Whereas with the one-way window, as all the kids will be calling it a microphone.

A one-way window.

It's just a lighting thing.

The OWW.

Because the lights are always off, aren't they, in the room where the senior cops are watching the questioning happen?

The lights are always dark in that room.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And if you turned on the lights in that room, you'd see them.

The thing is, Andy, is you want people to think it's a mirror, right?

That's the whole point.

If you say we've got our window here, then they're going to go, oh, I thought that was a mirror.

Like, you have to call it a mirror in order to keep up with it.

But everyone knows there are people behind there now.

Do they?

Yeah.

Well, you know, the question is, you don't know whether there's someone behind there or not.

I can't believe they exist, actually.

Do they exist?

I've never never been arrested.

No, I've done that.

Have you been interrogated?

What did you do?

I used to work in market research, my first job.

And

there was a market research house, which was in Slough.

Yes.

And I was conducting the surveys.

How interesting.

By the focus group stuff.

Yeah, and it was all one-on-one stuff.

It was with women between the age of 18 and 39 who had acid reflux.

And they had to speak to me for an hour and a half each.

And I had to ask them all the questions about their reflux.

Oh, gosh.

Do you watch them through a one-way mirror?

There were people from, I'm not going to say which pharmaceutical giant were watching them through the window, the mirror, whatever.

And

they were in the next room.

And after the interview ended, I'd pop next door and I'd say, was there anything else you wanted me to ask?

And they'd say, yeah, can you just ask question 17 again?

Okay, so this woman, middle-aged woman with acid reflux, imagine I'm talking to you, I'm here.

There's a big window there.

I mean, mirror.

Is she thinking all the time there's someone behind that?

Or was the...

illusion kept the whole time because I reckon they wouldn't have known.

Otherwise, what's the point?

I think I might have had to say there might be people

observing, but don't, you know, don't worry about it.

Just talk to me.

Look into my eyes.

Yeah,

yeah.

Were you a good interviewer or bad interviewer?

Like, you get good cop and bad cop.

Tell us about the acid reflux.

No, honestly, acid reflux is totally normal.

Don't worry about it.

You can tell me about it.

You're a sick puppy and you're going to burn.

Yeah.

I was not a very good interviewer.

And the weird thing was, it was just two of us working on the case, me and my boss.

And after the fourth day of questioning sessions, we came down to breakfast at the sort of like premier room.

We were staying, whatever, and we both had acid reflux.

No.

We talked ourselves into having it.

That's really interesting.

And then it turns out there was another window

that was watching you.

There's a bigger conspiracy.

And then another interviewer comes in and interviews you, and they get it.

Wow.

I was once in a focus group

with the window thing, but we knew that there were people, because you just know, like, oh, well, someone's got to watch.

It's just so you don't get distracted.

but we had to play video games and give feedback on on the video games I think it was little big planet yeah and I said there should be more interrogation

I was wondering

what happens if you confess but the police offer you confess to as a Catholic because obviously they can't pass on what confessions but it doesn't really

you mean if they're a priest

but like it's a priest cop that's the pitch of the TV series he's a priest by day day, he's a cop by night.

But the priest is not allowed to tell anyone what's been confessed, right?

Right.

Because although when I was at school and I used to go to confession, we had good priests, bad priests.

The bad priest used to rat on you all the time.

Oh, man.

Yeah.

Also, there's that one-way mirror in the confession booth, which technically

spooky images in Catholic churches.

Yeah.

The skeleton would work great.

Right in the crucifix from the top and the bottom.

Glowing red eyes.

But this is the weird thing.

So i think in i think the rule in confession so in confession booths the rule is that the priest can't disclose anything to anyone that's how i understand it yeah but there is some leeway i think if there's so like if dan i'm the priest right dan comes into the booth and he says i am going to kill james in fact number two

next episode of no such thing as a fish right i think i am allowed as the priest I think some schools of thought say I am allowed to go to the police and say, you might want to check on James, check he's all right.

I think it might be a threat to him at some point.

But I'm not allowed to say Dan is going to kill him.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Same with

psychiatry, right?

When you admit,

you know, planning to murder someone.

It took me a long time to get that out in the sessions, but he's a good therapist.

It's a real breakthrough.

Just kill him.

That's not everything.

What are you waiting for?

But they're allowed to pass on active threats, aren't they?

They must be able to.

I mean, there must be vanishingly few cases of people in confession booths or therapy sessions saying, look, this is the time and place I'm going to commit the the moider.

I don't think it happens much.

I like that you tried to make it a lighter thing by calling it moider.

Well, this has gotten a bit dark.

Let's say moida.

Fun cop.

Music is often used in interrogation tactics.

That's a big thing.

Metal music, particularly.

We've heard about that.

Oh, and like one tannamala.

Yeah, and John Ronson wrote about the fact that like Barney music would be played, Barney the Purple Dinosaur.

I love you, you love that song over and over to to make people go insane did they ever play the blobby Christmas number one I bet they have I bet they have it's seen as torture but um one band that gets used a lot is Metallica and Metallica hate it because you know any musician would have this opinion it's that music and politics music and in you know interrogation and questionable torture shouldn't be mixed.

I wouldn't say all musicians think that, but many of them.

Yeah, I imagine most of them.

I think there is a band in the States, a Christian rock band, that were like, you can use our music.

Demon Hunters, I think they're not.

Demon Hunters.

It's not

quite.

Yeah.

So Metallica asked for their music not to be used, which it wasn't.

There was an interview with the guy who has claimed that he killed Osama bin Laden.

I don't know if that ever was confirmed, the SEAL 6 team.

And he said that Metallica reached out to them and said, can you not use our music?

And Demon Hunter, he claimed, then got piped up and said, you can have our music.

It's fine.

And here's some patches.

Demon Hunter came out and said, actually, that's not the case.

We didn't know what it was being used for.

They just said they like playing our music, they made their own patches.

So, supposedly, a demon

like an iron-on patch for you.

Like an iron-on patch for your uniform.

They all be.

Yeah, military like to wear lots of different patches.

They're like the scouts.

That's what I got for killing Osama bin Laden.

You've earned your killing Osama bin Laden budge.

What a dark dog you have to say that is.

One of the most feared Nazi interrogators was a guy called Hans Scharf in the Second World War.

And he wasn't a soldier, he was a Polish-born, I think he was a farmer, and he lived in South Africa, but he was fluent in English.

And if you were an air pilot or air crew and you were caught, you would go to this little town near Frankfurt and you would be put up in reasonably nice digs.

And they'd just talk to you for a couple of weeks.

And Hans Scharf was the one leading these efforts.

And they would present you with this incredible dossier.

They'd say, here are all your unit members' names, here's your home home base, here's the commander's dog's name, here's the pub that you guys all drink in.

And they just would present you tiny fragments of information that made you think they knew absolutely everything,

which meant you were likelier to talk and give away secrets of, you know,

the weaknesses of your planes or whatever it might be.

But

the incredibly weird thing is that Hans Scharf, after the Second World War, he went to work at Disneyland.

Oh, wow.

He became a mosaic artist.

And he did Cinderella's Castle at Disney.

Or Disney World, I think, in Florida.

Yeah.

that is.

Do you know what, though?

If I worked in Nazi interrogation,

I want to go off and then work in a magical wonderland, do art.

Like, you've heard that.

Yeah, that's amazing.

Yeah.

I just imagine the interview where they want to find a mosaic maker.

They're like, well, what did you do in your previous job?

Well, I would be the one who asked the questions.

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

My fact this week is that in real life, the author of Charlotte's Web became the foster parent to the spider children he based Charlotte on.

Okay.

so

spider dad.

Yeah.

By spider children, you mean the children of a spider are not

half spider, half dragon.

So, E.

B.

White, author of Charlotte's Web, who also penned the classics, Stuart Little, and quite a few bigger adult books as well, The Elements of Style and Is Sex Necessary?

which he wrote with James Thurver.

These were huge books back in the day.

He loved animals, and Charlotte of Charlotte's Webb is based on a real spider that he'd seen.

He'd spotted it one autumn in 1949 and he came back later and the spider was gone and the sack of the eggs was still sitting in the web and he thought, okay, I'm going to collect that.

So he took it down and he put it into a box and he goes to New York and he travels with this and he has it in his office and the eggs survived and and they came out these spiders and started crawling over his office and they even had their webs shoot up and he saw them flying across the office and he thought this is great I'm just gonna let them do what they do and so for weeks they just made home on his desk in his office it was his flat I think it was his yeah yeah sorry in New York and and it wasn't until his cleaner came along who just went I'm sorry I can't clean everything but the spiders that are infesting this room that actually then they were murdered what why did she not work around

because my cleaner doesn't kill my cat every time she comes around she could work around the spiders have hundreds of cats the size each the size of a tiny eyelash I don't know it feels like she could work around the spiders yeah you'd think so but she complained.

He said, fine,

you can kill them.

Don't have a cleaner.

Jeez, I don't have a cleaner.

That's how you not get your spider children murdered.

Do your own cleaning.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, yeah, but it's quite nice to know that he never knew the fate of Charlotte, the spider itself.

I believe the species.

The species died.

Exactly.

The species once they lay eggs.

Yeah.

They only lived for a year, don't they?

If it's a barn spider.

Yeah, I think.

Is there a spider called a barn spider?

That's what that was, I think, was it?

It's got a scientific name.

I didn't see it.

Oh, yeah, no, but I didn't even know there was a common name of a barn spider.

I've heard of the house spider, though.

So the spider's called Charlotte

Cavatica?

Yeah.

And is Cavatica maybe the scientific name?

It is.

So Charlotte A Cavatica, and the A is a shortened scientific word.

Uranus, I think.

Right, Aranus Cavatica.

I might be pronouncing that wrong.

Uranus Cavatica.

All right.

Cool.

Sorry, just a quick recap of Charlotte's web.

So there's a pig and a spider.

Yeah.

And the

spider saves the pig's life by spinning words into the web.

Yeah.

Someone's going to kill the pig.

Like the farmer's going to kill the pig.

The farmer's going to kill the pig right at the beginning of the book, I think.

And then, yeah, and Charlotte and the pig have an unlikely friendship.

It is weird that as a farmer, you would see the words written in the web and think, oh, this pig is incredible.

Yeah, exactly.

No one's like, oh, I'm pretty sure a spider's behind this.

This pig makes such good webs.

Wow.

So his, I actually didn't write down his full first two names, E.B.

Elwyn Brooks.

Elwyn Brooks.

Yeah, so E.B.

is Elwyn Brooks, but actually went by the name Andy his whole life.

Did he?

Yeah, and it's a really odd reason.

He went to Cornell University, and there's a tradition at Cornell, which is if you happen to have shared the surname of the person who was the co-founder and the first president of Cornell, who was a guy called Andrew Dixon White, then you had to just be called Andy because he was called Andy.

So they shared the surname white and and so he got given that at Cornell and then the rest of his life that's what it's what his wife called him it's what his friends it's what his colleagues I wonder if that still happens at Cornell if you have the surname white that you get nicknamed Andy

EB

Elwing you know there was a real pig as well as a real spider

yeah so he um it's a lot of it's really drawn from life because he he lived in uh Maine on a lovely farm and he just as Dan said he connected with nature a lot and he almost preferred his farm to well he definitely preferred his farm to city life

but he kept a pig and in 1948 so

three or four years before writing Charlotte's Webb he wrote the essay Death of a Pig, which is all about a pig he'd been planning to slaughter which then got very ill.

And the pig had Eresipalis, which is a

skin condition.

Eresipales?

Yeah,

it's a skin condition Dan famously couldn't pronounce a few years ago on this podcast.

That's amazing.

Wow.

And it's dangerous'cause pe it can transfer to people as well.

Friend of the podcast, every single day listening.

That's so weird.

And he wrote, I discovered that once one has given a pig an enema, there is no turning back.

The pig's lot and mine were inextricably bound now.

So he had to give the pig a medical enema at one point or another.

Right.

And it really brought them close together.

Sure.

I love, everything I've read about E.B.Y., I love.

He just seems such a dork.

He would have been perfect, I think, on this podcast.

Like, here's an example of how dorky he he was.

So he fell in love with this girl called Catherine Sargent Angle, who was a fiction editor who worked at The New Yorker.

And he was a writer for The New Yorker.

She was married at the time.

Yeah, that's right, yeah.

And they eloped and

they had,

you know, they had their marriage.

And then he said, later on, I soon realized I'd made no mistake in my choice of wife.

I was helping her pack an overnight bag one afternoon when she said, put in some tooth twine.

I knew then that a girl who called dental floss tooth twine was the girl for me.

Oh God, that book is sweet.

Well, I quite enjoyed finding out that when someone asked him why he wrote Charlotte's Webb, he said,

I haven't told why I wrote the book, but I haven't told you why I sneeze either.

And a book is a sneeze.

That is his,

yeah.

He doesn't know why.

Inside you and you just have to, you have a story inside you and you have to share it with the world.

Yeah, Yeah, I guess so.

And it leaves your body at 17 miles an hour.

And if you keep your eyes open when you're writing the book, they will pop out.

Did you see that letter that a little girl wrote to him asking him why it was nine years after Charlotte's Webb had come out, and she said, When's the next book coming out?

And he replied, I would like to write another book for children, but I spend all my spare time just answering letters I get from children about the books I have already written.

So it looks like a hopeless situation unless you can start a movement in America called don't write to E.B.

White until he produces another book.

That's harsh, that, isn't it?

Yeah, that is pretty harsh.

But that is like the, that is exactly the sort of reply that I end up start doing on Twitter.

Like,

like with the reply guys and stuff, I'm like, oh, I'm just running out of patience now.

Do you reply to reply guys?

I used to.

Really?

Don't bother now.

No, no, no.

No.

I've never heard that term.

Is that just people who reply no matter what?

Well, no,

it's quite a sex-specific thing, isn't it?

Yeah, well, generally, reply guys tend to be due to reply to women to, and in my case, explain our own jokes to us, or why they might be better somehow than the rendition of something often incorrect.

You do it all the time.

I do it all the time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Have you thought of trying harder?

He had a really interesting process for writing, E.B.

White.

So he could never listen to music because that would be, it would get his attention diverted.

And that's, I think, quite quite famous for any writer, anything with lyrics,

get that away.

But what he did used to do was sit in the bit of his house that had the most traffic in it.

So, his wife passing through, his kids passing through, whoever was in the house.

Yeah.

Not like cars and stuff.

No, exactly, but like

foot traffic from his family.

I think that's crazy.

I agree.

I think that's really difficult to concentrate when there's so much happening.

Yeah, it's difficult.

That must be one of the most unusual writing methods

any writer's ever had.

Yeah, to activate it.

Like, is it like Dan Brown hangs upside down or or something to write?

That sounds like a Dr.

Zeus book.

Dan Brown hangs upside down.

Yeah, he would do that if he had, if he just needed thinking time, he would hang upside down.

I don't think he physically writes what he's upside down.

Because the pen just wouldn't work after him.

Exactly.

He might have a space pen.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, one of his anti-gravity or a pencil.

You know, Stuart Little?

Yeah, man.

Oh, yeah.

What is he, though?

Best friend.

A mouse.

Right.

And when I say right, I mean wrong.

Oh, he's not a mouse.

He's not even a mouse.

Is he a dormouse?

A rat?

No, he's.

So

he's a child

who looks like a mouse.

What?

Oh, right, really?

It's very weird.

No.

In the book.

Really?

Yeah, in the book, it's described as...

Because he's given birth to by his human parents.

And

the book says he's the size of a mouse.

Nice.

And he has all the characteristics of a mouse, but

he's quite indeterminate as species-wise.

So in the book, it's not illustrated, is it?

Or is it?

I don't know if the original edition was illustrated.

Because in Charlotte's Webb, the illustrator wanted to give the spider human-woman facial features.

Terrifying.

Yeah, and they were like, no, she just looked like a spider.

And so it was just a spider.

But in the animated film, she was given,

she's got a lady face.

Maybe that's why he had because he hated the movie, didn't he?

Did he?

Yeah, he saw it.

And I guess, like a lot of children's authors, like P.L.

Travers, seeing Mary Poppins, the movie, hate the way that their work is translated, but he hated Charlotte's Webb.

That might be the reason.

But this kind of makes sense that maybe Stuart Little wasn't a mouse, because he did have a bit of a bugbear about when people made animals a bit more human-like rather than like Charlotte's Webb.

It was a pig and it was a spider.

Whereas he can never understand Mickey Mouse and Donald Doug.

He's like, why are they driving a car?

The hell's going on there?

A mouse doesn't drive a car.

Because I haven't read this book.

Is his spider quite realistic?

Like bounce spider, female bounce spiders will stick some like silk out of their bun and then walk around and that's got like pheromones on it and then the males will follow her around.

Oh, there's a whole chapter about that.

It's where that's where the spider babies come from.

Oh, brilliant.

But he did use a lot of technical terms.

He explained like the different bits of the like he was very he researched spiders for ages to get all of the understanding.

So when you read it, you get an understanding about like, you know, this bit of the leg is called this, this bit of the hand, the hand, is called this.

He was incredibly shy as well, E.B.

White.

He's a very anxious guy about pretty much everything.

When he worked at the New Yorker, he would sometimes go out of the fire escape.

If someone he didn't know turned up at the office,

he'd just pop out of the window effectively.

Wow.

He skipped.

Anytime it was someone he didn't know at the office or someone who was coming to talk to him?

I think probably someone coming to talk to the big office, isn't it?

He wouldn't have got everything done.

Yeah, you're right.

To me, it just sounds like someone who's smoking and trying.

to.

Yeah, he skipped parties.

He skipped the burial service of his wife of many decades.

He skipped the Presidential Medal of Freedom Awards ceremony, where JFK was trying to give him a medal.

The National Medal for Literature Award, he skipped that too.

He just did not want to go out.

He was shy around women, wasn't he?

Was he?

Yeah, he once said, I have too small a heart and too large a pen.

And it feels like he didn't get to the end of that.

The ink ran out.

Yeah, his wife, even when he was communicating sort of love notes and stuff, he would still even hide behind an animal persona.

I don't think he was a furry.

I think he just didn't.

Yeah, I don't think anyone thinks that

you thought that.

Actually, he wasn't a furry.

He was a human with the characteristics of a furry.

Yeah.

This is all, by the way, it's a guy called Michael Sims who wrote this amazing biography on him, who discovered that Charlotte was based on a real spider, found out this story about the egg sack.

And he did an interview on NPR where I was reading this on.

And he said that when it came to the audiobook, the death scene, so spoiler alert, Charlotte dies in the book,

he found it impossible to read the death scene out loud.

And according to the producer, it took him 17 takes in order to get it out finally.

How many takes did your book take then?

I was just crying the whole way through.

You shouldn't have put the word Ariesu plus in so so many times, John.

That's the problem.

But he would go out.

He would go out for walks, wouldn't try and get himself together to go back in and do it.

And he would say, yeah, he was like, this is ridiculous.

A grown man crying over the death of an imaginary insect, go back in, and then just start crying all over.

Not an insect, mate.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, good point.

Yeah, James is in the booth pressing a button.

Maybe that's who he was crying.

You know, the final line is, and then the insect dies.

It is time for fact number three and that is Andy.

My fact is that one of the world's best dance choreographers is called Mr.

Millipede.

I should say this was sent in by a listener so thank you to Maggie Mortensen who sent it in.

Yeah and Mr.

Millipede I think he's Benjamin Millipede.

And now James is looking he's giving me a look.

Millipier is Millipier.

This is how he would pronounce it.

It's how he would pronounce it, but it's not how I'm pronouncing it.

And he's not on this podcast.

So, no, but it's millipede, yeah.

So it translates into French as a thousand feet.

Right?

Yeah.

There we go.

I've seen newspaper articles interviewing him who call him the man with a thousand feet.

Really?

Yeah.

That's crazy.

I think because he dances so well, it's almost as if he has a thousand feet, maybe.

Yeah, I think it would make it a lot harder to dance.

It would be harder.

Yeah, if two left feet, but you've got like, what, 500 instead.

And this is just a fact about someone with an amusing name in the world of dance.

Nominative determinism.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I went to school with a girl called Erin Trimmer who became a hairdresser.

Nice.

Brilliant.

Shout out to Erin Trimmer.

So, Mr.

Millipede is quite notable in the world of Hollywood.

He has choreographed a lot of movies.

He's done June, the first June movie.

He did the choreograph for

the giant worm dance.

The giant millipedes.

Yeah, the big millipede that comes out.

There's a dance in in there, I believe.

I haven't seen the movie myself.

Oh yes,

there's a dance.

There's a cool shifting dance over the sand.

We sachet to avoid attracting the attention of the big old worms that live in the desert.

It's because they feel the vibrations of your feet.

They sense movement, and they're incredibly sensitive to it.

But if you walk in a particular way, then they won't spot you.

Is it a dance or is it just someone walking?

Well, it's a gate.

A gate.

I've not seen June, but I imagined that it was like a bit in the movie where they're like, and now we do the worm dance.

and then like everybody joins in, and they're like, It's just a step to the left.

Yeah, basically, it's I'm imagining

out in Leotal, it's like a Jane Fonda video, yeah.

Um, but he also did Black Swan, uh, which was the ballet movie, and it was on that movie that he met his future wife, Natalie Portman.

So, yeah, Mr.

Millipede is married to Natalie Portman, just some hot gossip,

yeah,

They split up though because he's got together with one of the worms from Dune.

It's very, very sad.

Yeah.

But no, just ballet.

Unless anyone's got anything more on Benny Millipede.

Mr.

Millipede has got a tattoo on his abdomen of a Bauhaus symbol, which I think is quite cool.

You know, the German

architecture thing.

It's like a profile of a face designed by a painter called Oskar Schlemmer.

And Oskar Schlemmer is really cool.

He had five of his artworks in the Nazi-organized degenerative art exhibition in Munich.

Do you know about that?

They piled up a load of art.

Well, basically, the Nazis decided, and Hitler especially, because he thought of himself as an artist, they got a load of German artworks that showed the greatness of Germany and put them all in an amazing museum.

And then down the road, they got all the stuff that they really hated and said, this is all degenerate.

This, you know.

And I mean, which which one would you rather see?

Yeah.

Like, it's so, I would say.

Tragic to yet another Hitler watercolor explaining.

But yeah, Schlemmer had a load of stuff there.

And then they had loads of rooms.

Like, a lot of them were quite anti-Semitic, the names of the rooms and stuff.

But they had some that was like an insult to German womanhood.

And then they'd have a load of paintings that were insulting German women.

Right.

And then madness becomes method and nature as seen by sick minds.

Wow.

Oh, yeah.

These do sound quite like

amazing.

Yeah, yeah, don't they?

Very nice.

Anyway, that's just the thing about Bauhaus.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The movie Black Swan, just very quickly while we're still on Millipede, there was a lot of controversy about the movie when Natalie Portman won the Oscar for it because...

Well, there's a lot of scenes which is to do with really intensive, amazing ballet dancing, and there was a stunt double.

Natalie Portman was good at ballet, but she'd only done it for a year.

She wasn't at the level that you needed to be in order to pull those moves.

But the person who'd played the stunt double didn't get any of the credit.

And there was a lot of questions about whether or not best actor should be going to someone who is not necessarily

acting a lot of the best.

There's a lot of emotional scenes in there.

So there's a lot of acting that goes on.

So it's justified.

I feel it should be a joint thing.

Like if you win best actor for a particular role, then anyone else in the film that had to play, whether it's a stunt double or a stand-in or something, they should all get on.

stage they share it but if it's someone doing the back of your head for a day where you were busy shooting a different sequence like but they they can come on stage, but they have to show only the back of their head.

The Oscar statuette is only the back of the Oscar's head as well.

And they all have to dress in whatever the actor is wearing.

They're all wearing the same outfit.

So we change it from the nominations being the actors' names to the character name of the movie.

Therefore, you can have multiple people.

The character is a really good category.

I really like that.

Yeah.

And then, you know, then it's not as problematic when people eventually do something that makes you go, oh, oh, I don't like them anymore.

You'd be like, oh, I still like that character.

Yeah,

interestingly, last thing on Black Swan, Black Swan was made by Darren Aronofsky, the director, and he also made The Wrestler with Mickey Rourke.

And initially, Black Swan and The Wrestler were meant to be one movie where a ballet dancer fell in love with the wrestler, and that was the initial movie.

It was meant to be one cinematic universe combination, and then he just split it into two movies.

That's brilliant.

What?

What?

I would have loved to watch it.

Would Mr.

Millipede also choreograph the wrestler?

Yeah, the wrestling moves.

Pro-ballet is fake.

There's a thing called beat deafness.

Have you heard of this?

No.

It's like I think I've got it.

Yeah, do you think?

No, I'm sure you don't.

It's like tone deafness, only you can't dance.

It's quite rare.

Dancing well is subjective, isn't it, really?

Yeah, it is.

It is.

I'm more talking about being in rhythm.

So they'd watch Strictly come dancing, for example, and be like, wow, why are they not...

in time to the band.

It's that.

Yeah, well, they would just, it would be completely alien to them.

It would be, they wouldn't think they're out of time or they're in time they would just be like well I don't know what's going on here he's just moving his arms and there's music playing but I can't put the two together right I wonder if anyone famous has that

I mean I definitely can't keep to time I found that out by trying to learn the drums and after many lessons and a very patient teacher realized I just can't keep to time I always get faster always

and I the thing is I love like I love dancing and stuff I did dance in high school I saw a video and I am clearly clearly half a beat behind everyone else.

Like, it's, yeah, yeah.

I've just had to.

What kind of dancing was it?

I did

interpretive because it's a lot harder to prove wrong.

Yeah, that's the best.

There are some dances that it's clear if you're a beat behind.

But if you did the yonkie cokey and your arms in when everyone else is out,

that's really obvious.

Well, because you'd have to do like group ones as well.

And that was more like modern dance or whatever.

Yeah, so that one was one that was always out.

Yeah, yeah.

I'd love to see just videos of that when someone doesn't know hi yeah so we're actually on knees not shoulders

didn't you do a bit of dance me yeah you where I'm thinking of your school because you went to a very interesting school oh yeah yeah we went to a Rudolf Steiner school we did eurythmy which is a dance invented by Ridolf Steiner yeah so you used to go it was I you know it's very kind to call it a dance what it is is you just get given a pole and you have to walk forwards and backwards just moving the pole from vertical to horizontal.

You'd be disappointed if you go to see a pole dancer and that's

Dan telling you about the Yeti while he walks back and forwards.

Ballet moves.

Oh, yeah.

Did you know one of the most iconic sports logos of all time is a ballet move.

Okay, we're going to have to guess that.

Yeah, try and guess it.

The Michael Shoe.

I think I know what.

Yeah.

There we go.

Michael Jordan, the famous.

Can we keep guessing?

I mean, I feel like I don't know.

No, no, no, sorry.

Kanaki swoosh.

Yeah,

sorry, go for it.

I was thinking of the Olympic rings.

Yeah, no, close.

Close.

Do you want it one more?

No, no.

Okay.

Yeah, so James is actually, as I said earlier, correct.

The very iconic Michael Jordan looking like he's going for a dunk.

So his arms are out, he's got a ball in his hand, legs are wide.

It's not going for a dunk.

Going for a dunk?

Yeah, you go for a dunk.

He's dunking.

Okay, okay.

I'm going for a dunk.

Just go for a dunk.

Give it a few minutes.

I'm just in for a dunk.

I had to bounce off the backboard.

That's everyone assumes that that's him dunking.

It's not.

He's in a photo shoot that he was doing with a guy called Peter Moore.

He did a ballet leap, and that was caught in the photo.

And they thought that just looks so perfect a stance for this logo.

Did you know it was a ballet leap?

Yeah, I believe so.

Yeah.

There's not too much information on it.

It's just from this guy, Peter Moore, who pointed out that when the photos were taken, that's what was happening.

So we know that it was specifically that.

So yeah, ballet in Michael Jordan land.

I think I might be wrong about that.

No, I'm right about this.

When my parents used to ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, until I was about seven or eight, I said I wanted to be a ballet dancer.

Wow.

Ah, legend.

And then I discovered football.

Oh, you get to go on my list of famous people.

I'm calling you famous, then.

Famous people who started off as ballerinas or...

I wouldn't say I started off as a ballerina.

Other people on the list?

Tupac?

Oh, yeah.

The rapper Tupac.

I did it with him.

There you go.

Yeah, Tupac was,

he was the mouse king in the school play The Nutcracker, but he actually studied interesting fact about the mouse king.

Yeah.

Not a mouse.

Yeah,

it has the dimensions of a mouse.

Also on the list, the Daleks from Doctor Who.

Bit of a stretch.

No, not really.

So Terry Nation, when he was designing the Daleks, he was inspired by the the Soviet dance troupe, the Georgian State Ballet, when they were performing in London and believed that that would be a perfect, like he looked at it and went, wow, the way they glided, he thought a Dalek would be a perfect way of doing that.

And so not only was that the inspiration, but the very first people who sat inside the Daleks were dancers to help with the movement because they understood how to, yeah, use their feet better than most.

You never see ballet dancers going upstairs.

Exactly.

Incapable incapable of going upstairs.

I think Louis the...

Who's the Sun King?

Louis the Fourth King.

Yeah, he was into ballet, and that's how he got called the Sun King.

It's named after a character in a ballet.

I don't know which one.

Yeah, he was massive into it.

He used to try and do the dances himself at dinners and stuff.

Yeah, yeah.

So what were they called?

Because I was reading that ballerina is the word that you would use for a female ballet person.

It would be Italian, wouldn't it?

So what's the word?

We don't have an English word for a male ballerino.

Ballerino.

That's ballerinos, you know.

Ballerinos.

Yeah, yeah.

Ballerino.

I thought I'd take us down a different lane though looking at ballet today.

And this was quite recent.

The director of a leading German ballet company had to be investigated by police because

he smeared a critic's face with feces, with dog feces.

Wow.

Because she'd said too many bad things about his ballets.

This is a terrible story.

Yeah.

It's a bit.

It was a

drive-by.

It was a drive-by.

Well, no, no, no, no, no, but you know.

It takes some skill, doesn't it?

Just going for a dunk.

Very high passion.

It was a critic.

The critic had written

very hostile reviews of

this particular ballets.

It's the previous show, I think.

Yeah, in the Dutch Mountains, it was called, which had been performed earlier.

Furious with the review that was given, and they were putting on this new performance.

What's interesting is I don't think he knew that she was going to be there on that night.

He just happened to have the dog poo in his pocket.

Which makes it more interesting if that's the case.

Come on, no, it can't be true.

You know, if.

Did he always have a dog with him, maybe?

Like, can he say that?

Well, it was his dog's poo.

So I wonder if maybe he happened to have his dog with him at the time.

God, Crikey.

Yeah.

I won't lie, there's some reviewers who I think would probably.

This

names, we'll bleep them out.

No, no, it's a confessional space, you can say what you want.

But if if I think there is a risk to them, I will have to.

Yeah, um, one of the so the big I mean, there's a huge, um, I guess you'd say a sort of soft power thing for lots of, I mean, lots of very big Eastern European ballet companies, especially Russian.

So the Bolshoi Ballet is a very, very, very famous Russian ballet.

This is interesting.

Again, it's people who you wouldn't think would were ballerinas, but were.

So have you seen Die Hard?

Yes.

Oh, yes.

Yeah.

I know about this.

Yeah, this is

one of the henchmen in Die Hard.

It's Carl.

Okay.

The big blonde guy.

Gets shot.

No,

his brother, they get shot.

Exactly.

Exactly.

He won Best Character 1980.

I can't believe you don't remember this.

16 people accepted the

Carl, the huge blonde henchman, who's extremely tough, he was a former principal lead dancer in the Bolshroi Ballet.

Okay.

Well,

because I've been to see a Balshoy in Moscow, and the guys who do it, they're quite slim, but they're strong.

Yeah, you have to be so strong.

It takes a lot of strength, yeah, yeah.

And it also takes a lot of strength to defect, which is what

he did.

Alexander Godunov did.

Yeah, he was on tour in the USA.

Big thing is ballet defections.

Is it

the Khushnikov?

Was it the other guy?

Rudolf Nurio defected at the airport.

He was about to go back to the Soviet Union.

He had his handlers from the KGB with him, and

he fled to the French police who were there at the airport.

Wow.

But he didn't do a, like, I don't think he did a cool move at the end of the day.

Like away from the movement.

I wish he had a Jordan leap.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that in 1997, Mattel recalled one of its cabbage patch dolls because it had started eating children.

I remember this.

Do you?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, because I was really into Cabbage Patch kids.

Were you?

And I remember that

that particular toy was going to be released in Australia.

And then when they got recalled in the States, they never made it to Australia.

How interesting.

I'd never heard of it before.

But yeah, I mean, it's incredible.

And when I say eating children, it was only bits of children.

It was eating.

Couldn't manage a whole one.

It was a toy which had a mouth which you could feed food into and it had a rucksack at the back and then you would feed them a cookie or something and it would go through the body and then it would mysteriously arrive in the rucksack and that would be the game.

Genius.

But children started putting their fingers into the mouths or the hair or whatever and there was really no way to stop it.

I don't think kids were deliberately putting their hair in them.

I think the hair was getting caught.

The hair was getting caught.

I can imagine them putting their fingers in deliberately, someone with a one-year-old child, that you know that might happen.

but anyway once you put any part of your body into this mouth you couldn't get it out because these because behind the lips of the doll are these two metal rollers yeah they only rolled one way exactly yeah yeah and they had um about a hundred incidents reported uh in this christmas time it started off just a few and then suddenly like more and more and more people started saying yeah my kids are being eaten by this doll

just legally i i did find a claim by mattel that these are all isolated incidents but that really raised a question of how many incidents do there have to be to stop being isolated.

There were about a hundred isolated incidents.

Exactly, yeah.

I mean, they did sell many, many,

at least hundreds of thousands of them.

They sold a lot of them, and so it's a very low percentage of children who got each one of these dolls.

One is too many, isn't it?

Yeah, it rather feels that way, yeah.

Oh, dear, but yeah, cabbage patch kits, they're incredible.

With these dolls, there's there's an extraordinary thing that I never appreciated about cabbage patch dolls, which is basically they're handmade to be in each one is very different from like not even the model.

There's obviously different models, but within the models, each one has differences in it because they are basically handmade.

They're all supposed to be kind of unique, I think.

Like, for instance,

I got one.

Yes.

Oh, it's still in the box.

Well, I only bought it yesterday.

Oh, this is not one that eats children.

This is just a normal Cabbage Patch doll.

Wow.

Wow.

And as you can see, mine is called Leona Jade.

Oh, you've got, is it a ballerina?

Yeah, it has.

She has like a little birth certificate and adoption papers.

And the idea is that they're all unique, pretty much.

And that was different as well, wasn't it?

That

you didn't buy a doll, you adopted a doll.

You got a birth certificate.

Oh, I've got them.

I've got the birth certificates and everything.

Yeah, yeah.

I had one called Alice who had,

came with hair.

like products so you could style the hair it came with a little thing of hairspray so you could uh do its hair and i wasn't a doll kid

I didn't like Barbies or anything like that.

I was more into trolls.

But the Cabbage Patch kid, there was just something about it.

Do you know about the cute schema?

No.

The schema of cuteness.

So there was a study done by a university in Japan.

Of course, they would study cuteness.

And it was to look at the things that we respond to as humans to decide that something is cute.

So the forehead is normally quite large, big eyes, the eyes usually quite low on the forehead, and sort of chunky, short limbs and things.

And they believe that the reason that Cabbage Patch dolls became so popular and became like because they weren't, they didn't do anything, not like, you know, before all of these, the original ones, they didn't do anything.

They didn't eat children.

They think that the reason they went so big is because it violates the cute schema.

So

if you look at a cabbage patch doll, you'll notice that the eyes are actually quite small, quite close together.

And so, there's elements about them that are considered grotesque,

but not enough.

I find them a bit creepy.

And that's why, because it divides people, and people either think they're cute or creepy.

And so, people would talk about them because people go, oh, they're so cute.

And other people go, no, no, no, they're really creepy.

And as we know from just the media today, if you can cause a divide in public opinion, people will talk and debate and argue.

Yeah,

my wife won't let me take this home.

I bought it, and she really doesn't like it.

Is this new or is it like an eBay?

It's brand new.

No, I bought it.

Most of this was in a shop, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So, does anyone want one?

Absolutely, I love it.

No, no, no, definitely.

Or I thought what we could give it away to one of our listeners.

Should we give it away to someone on Clubfish?

I'm pretty sure I just claimed it, but yeah.

No, of course, of course, that's a good idea.

You should always give away adopted children as your wise.

It's just be a double adoption.

Yeah, let's do that.

Okay, we'll work out a competition.

The thing about the sort of the look of the freakish look and so on, that led to one of the great myths about Cabbage Patch kids that circulated in the 80s, which

reading this kind of makes me miss being a kid again and falling for these amazing legends.

Dan, you still fall for these things.

Yeah, that's true.

That's true.

But the story was the reason they looked like that was because President of America at the time, Ronald Reagan, gave a directive to the makers of it to show what we would look like following the survival of a nuclear holocaust

and to get us used to the idea that we're going to look quite freakish and it would be normalized by the time it happened we would sort of accept it as normal humans uh being like that and that went around for yeah it's such a great story but um it it's you know obviously not true but that's really remarkably uh it's not true that's so funny i find everything about them a bit bit rum yeah do you what did you guys read about the babyland general hospital yeah was this what it's so well actually it's mentioned on this box It says that

there was a young boy called Xavier Roberts who discovered a magical cabbage patch and he built Babyland General Hospital where his children now live and play until someone takes them home to care for them and love them.

Right.

And that sounds like just a bit of corporate guff.

Actually, it's a real place.

So he, so he kind of, well, we'll get on, I'm sure we'll get onto the history of how they were originated, but in 1978, I think he opened up, and I think it was a former medical facility.

Yeah.

He opened up Babyland General Hospital, and you could go there as a punter, and they held live births at the hospital.

And there was a write-up on Slate.

Okay, every half hour or so, an employee dressed as a doctor or nurse gets on the PA and announces there is a code green.

That means that Mother Cabbage is in labor

and it's time to head to the magical crystal tree to watch a baby being born.

The birthing process lasts under three minutes.

Not realistic.

A nurse in scrubs and latex gloves stands among the cabbages and tells the crowd that Mother Cabbage has dilated the full 10 leaves apart.

That's such a gag for the parents.

Like the kids have no idea.

The parents are going to be like, ah, I see what they're saying.

Well, there are more very specific parent gags.

As the crystals at the base of the tree begin to glow, the nurse gives the cabbage a shot of imagicillin and announces she will be performing an easyotomy.

A pesiotomy gag there, as opposed to a C-section, which stands for cabbage section.

The nurse gently spreads the cabbage leaves, reaches in her gloved hands, and slowly pulls out a naked doll.

The kids in the crowd murmur, gasp and applaud.

Wow.

People say that's creepy.

I would love to see that.

But it was the whole story was one of the reasons, the other reasons they became so popular because it rather than just being a doll, it was this whole

you were buying into the mythos.

Yeah.

Like you're actually adopting a thing.

You know, the parents would be like, oh, that's a really cute idea.

And oh, oh, my kid can adopt a doll and stuff.

And so, yeah, and it worked.

That's amazing.

It really did work because they were absolutely massive.

They were.

When they first went out, when was that going to be in like the 80s, early 80s?

80s, yeah.

And there were riots when people were trying to get them in shops.

And I was reading some newspaper articles from the time about these riots that were happening in the States.

The Citizen's Voice newspaper, this was in Pennsylvania.

One pregnant woman bit another patron and knocked his hat off.

She was just trying to eat a cookie,

Got caught.

Another woman was punched in the face by a female shopper.

One woman chased a man through a parking lot, calling him an SOB.

The Simi Valley star from California said one woman was swinging a baseball bat wildly at other women to get one of these dolls.

And it wasn't even the last doll in the shop that she was getting.

Apparently, because all these dolls are slightly different from each other.

She'd seen one that she particularly wanted and she just didn't want anyone else to go near them.

So she was swinging the baseball bats.

And in 2008, 4Kids Entertainment Inc., who at the time owned the license for these, they released a special edition of the dolls to commemorate the riots.

Oh, wow.

Isn't that amazing?

And did it come with riots?

No, it was just like...

They've become slightly different over the years.

Like, this is the one that I've got here is a bit more finally and a bit more toy-like than the originals.

The ones that they did to commemorate, they were more close to the originals, basically.

You can see, I mean, it's, you know, since becoming a parent and understanding the Christmas rush to get toys, you can understand why movies like Jingle All the Way are so, you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger's most relatable movie.

It's that was all about a toy.

Have you ever seen it?

It's a most relatable movie.

Absolutely.

No, I never think of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

More than Cole and the Barbarian.

Yeah, yeah.

Even more than Connor and the Blackburner.

More than Julia.

Even more than Terminator, yeah.

More than Kindergarten Cold?

Terminator Terminator 3 Rise of the Machines.

No, not more than a sign.

Quite relatable.

So, Xavier Roberts, person who invented, he's mentioned on the side of the box and correct in your

highly controversial 21-year-old art student when he first

notices that there is a German techniquing of needle molding, and he sees a lady called Martha Nelson who is making these doll babies.

And he goes, Oh, that looks really interesting.

She has adoption papers for the babies.

She has original names for the babies.

He goes off, changes the technique ever so slightly, but it was very much lifted from what this woman was doing.

And then he kind of went off and ran with it and got all the credit for creating this new style of doll.

Yeah, because basically she made this doll, right?

She was selling them to him because he owned a gift shop.

And then he wanted to up the price.

She refused and so refused to give him any more dolls.

So he said, well, I'm just going to make them myself then.

Basically, that's what happened.

And did he want to mass-produce them a bit more?

He did, yeah.

And then the official website says that he was into needle molding and that he learned quilting skills from his mother and all that kind of stuff.

It seems very much.

It does, you know.

Yeah.

So what we're saying is that the side of the box here where it says that the bunny bees.

We're saying they're not involved at all.

No.

I think one really weird thing about this doll, I mean, there's a lot of weird things about this doll, but supposedly there's a guy called Xavier, and he runs a hospital that looks after these cabbage babies until they're adopted.

That's the guy we're talking about, Xavier Robinson, right?

But if you look at any of these things,

he's signed all the butterflies.

It's just showing us the doll's butt.

If you look at the bum of the doll, his signature is on the bum.

And I think that's kind of a weird thing for someone running a hospital to do to their babies.

But it's like those surgeons, isn't it?

You know, there's surgeons, sometimes they get in trouble because there are a few surgeons who got in trouble for burning their initials on a patient's liver, you know, mid-operation, and then it turns out you've just, you know, and it's a kind of, I guess it's a fun joke.

But that's effectively what Xavier appears to have done on all these toys.

Well, maybe you signed them with pen and they went off and got it tattooed afterwards.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It could have been their own decision, you're right.

In 2020, bringing in trolls, my favourites,

there was one,

it was called the Poppy and Sing doll, I think.

And basically, she had a little button on her tummy that you would press it, and she'd be like, Ray, let's do a song or something.

But she also had a button underneath her, so when she sat down, she would say other things.

But that happened to be right, right in the crotch, like right, right in the gusset

was where that button was located.

And most of the sounds that she made when you press that were gasping

at her going, oh, and

like it's just sound effects.

So

there was a petition to recall that by a lot of furious parents who said that it would be grooming children.

Wow, we've got room on this doll for two buttons.

Okay, we've got the tummy one, great, belly button, brilliant.

Can anyone think of where we should put the other button?

You know, the hand.

There was also

Play-Doh had the Play-Doh mountain cake, cake mountain, sorry, play set that came out recently for Christmas.

But the extruder, you know, it looks like a syringe

that you would put the play-doh in to do the icing on the cake is incredibly phallic.

Like, incredibly

phallic enough that it definitely wasn't a mistake.

Children won't understand, but you know,

is there like the equivalent of beat deafness where you're just

phallic and sexual

innuendo blindness?

Yeah, to bias in arrested development, where he doesn't understand all his innuendos.

Yeah, exactly.

I hosted a makeaway takeaway on CI TV, which obviously went so well they decided to close the channel.

But that was an arts and crafts show.

It was really, really fun, but the amount of times they had to stop filming because they'd go,

it's looking a bit phallic, like anything that you would make.

Anything,

because anything you make,

there's usually a moment where you have to make something that's sort of like sausage or something.

That might be our problem.

If everything you've

looking a bit phallic.

She's doing it again.

I'm like,

the channel, close it, shut it down.

It's like closing counters of the third kind with mashed potatoes.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

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

And Beck, at Beck Hill, Comedian, or Beach Hill Comedian, if you spell it wrong.

Actually, no, you spell it the same, but you just pronounce it differently.

Yeah, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or why not email us on podcast at qi.com.

You can also find all of our previous episodes up on our website, no such thingasafish.com.

But why bother listening to our podcast when there's a far superior one out there called The Problem Squared by our guest with us today, Beck Hill, and also one of our very close buddies, mathematician, Matt Parker, amazing guy.

Beck, give us a quick rundown of the podcast.

Our listeners send us problems and we solve them.

Matt solves them and I help.

Are they maths' problems or personal problems?

Most of the ones that Matt answers are maths ones, and the ones that I solve are

usually personal or creative.

Like, how big a burger can you fit into your mouth?

Nice, cool.

And how's it going?

It's doing well.

It's doing well, but we have set our sights on, we're trying to surpass you guys in terms of positive reviews.

So we're on 2,000 five-star reviews on Spotify at the moment.

You guys are on 11,000.

So

we've set our sights on trying to beat you.

We've told people not to then give you less than five stars.

We've just told them to not vote for you at all.

Give us five stars.

Okay, cool.

That's a back-handed compliment.

There's a little problem I'm going to be writing into your show with, Beck.

All right, well, do check it out.

Also, Beck's brilliant kids' books, Horror Heights.

They're amazing.

The third one's coming out very, very soon.

Just come out.

Just come out.

Dead Ringer.

Dead Ringer.

Check that out as well.

And come back next week for another episode of the two-star reviewed.

No such thing as a fish.

We'll see you then.

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