468: No Such Thing As Drama-Free Pringles

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Hi, everyone.

Welcome to this week's episode of No Such Things A Fish, the first in the post-Ana apocalypse since she's gone on maternity leave.

But don't worry, she'll be back before you know it.

And in her stead this week, we have the amazing Sarah Pascoe.

Now, you don't need me to tell you who Sarah Pascoe is, but you might need me to tell you where she is about to go on tour.

She has a brand new show, she'll be in the UK, Ireland, and Australia.

And if you're in Cambridge, Dartford, or Leeds and you're listening listening to this when it goes out you might be able to get tickets to see her right now this weekend.

If you're in Northampton, Brighton, Oxford, Newcastle, Hull, Manchester or Birmingham you'll be able to see her in the next few weeks then in Dublin, Cork, Belfast, Aberystwyth, Cheltenham, Cardiff, Bournemouth, Colchester, Milton Keynes, Liverpool, Harrogate, Basing, Stoke that will be over the next month or so and then in April and May she will be appearing in Sydney, Canberra, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.

Like I say you have to go and see Sarah's show.

It's called Success Story.

It's absolutely brilliant.

Tickets are available now at Sarah on Tour.

That's S-A-R-A-Ontour.com.

And you can also go to her website, which is sarahpasco.co.uk for more details about Sarah.

Anyway, once you've got those tickets, then please do enjoy this week's show.

I'm absolutely certain you will.

And what else is there to say apart from 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 Covert Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Sarah Pascoe.

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, that is Sarah.

Okay, my fact is that the man who invented Pringles was buried in a Pringles can.

He was tiny.

He was very small.

You've seen him, the guy with the moustache and the round face.

He doesn't have a body, so I just skipped him right in there.

Did people have to carry him down there?

Yeah,

they employed four, but they only needed one.

So they passed him like in a relay base.

The baton, yes.

So I should add, he wanted to be buried in a Pringles pang because I think he was very proud.

And actually, it's quite an interesting story, I think.

So the backstory is for this.

In 1968, Pringles went on sale, advertised as Pringles Newfangled Potato Chips.

That was their full name.

They're not called that anymore because of one of the five Pringles dramas that I'm going to be telling you about, which doesn't even include being buried in a Pringles.

So, backstory.

1939, I don't know if you know, there was quite a big war, and crisps were deemed non-essential, and they stopped making them.

Okay.

Yeah.

They brought them back after the war, and they were rubbish.

They were really greasy.

Apparently, there was loads of air in the bags, and all the crisps were broken.

This war sounds horrible.

I know, and that was the worst thing that happens to anyone.

So, people really moaned about the crisps.

I'm sure they had other things to also moan about, but you know, they were like, We're miserable, let us have cheap, tasty snacks.

And so, Procter and Gamble

started trying to invent something better.

In 1956, they employed a chemist and mathematician, Frederick T.

Bauer, to invent a new kind of potato chip that was more palatable.

He spent two years inventing a saddle-shaped, the mathematical term is hyperbolic paraboloid, a saddle-shaped chip that would go in a tubular can, which meant there would be no air in it and they wouldn't get broken,

but they tasted rubbish.

So he got moved.

So he got moved.

Why the saddle-shaped?

Because you could just do a round in the same tube.

You could absolutely fit that in.

I wonder what it gave you.

No, they're not stronger.

Are they maybe stronger?

They're stronger than a flat, for sure.

Okay, and if they have to be that thin, there's quite a lot of buildings made in that shape, for instance.

The um the what's it?

Not quite a velodrome.

There's a velodrome in London, for instance.

That's one.

Name ten.

Ten Pringle buildings.

I don't think I could name ten buildings under this kind of pressure.

No, you're right, you're right.

But yeah, quite often in buildings, you will have odd shapes and it will be to do with strength and support and something.

Maybe it was just aesthetically pleasing for a mathematician to sort of go, this shape will fit together.

I can give you a reason why it looks stronger, because I just thought of why.

Oh, I only want nine more Pringles.

It's because they have two arches.

So, you know, an arch is a strong shape.

Yeah.

Now,

a Pringle has two arches.

One goes in one direction and the other one goes in the opposite direction.

And so you've got two arches which are both strong and they're both fighting against each other.

So it makes it super strong.

That's really good.

Can I ask you a question?

Because you seem to know a lot about this.

Is that the same with feet?

It is exactly the same with feet.

So that's why feet.

Oh, so there's your second Pringle shape.

There we go.

Our human feet.

That's why feet are so delicious.

Yeah.

Okay, so he made one that was disgusting.

Yeah, so he made one that was disgusting, but it fitted together really neatly.

So he was moved to a different snack.

I couldn't find out which snack he was moved to.

Right.

But he was moved somewhere else.

But then a couple of years later, they came back to his idea.

Bauer was granted the patent in 1971,

and they came up with a new recipe, which was

paste of dehydrated potatoes, rice, corn, and wheat.

They used a cookie cutter to make them that shape flat, and then they put them on a saddle thing that Barrow had invented to give them the shape.

I didn't know there was a saddle shape that they sat on to invest that

to it.

Yeah, that's the saddle.

The Pringle is the drocky riding that saddle.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so lots and lots of work.

And he didn't just invent Pringles, he also invented freeze-dried ice cream.

That other snack we're always popular.

He was really proud of his freeze-dried ice cream, wasn't he?

Of Of course, but he didn't get buried in one.

Isn't that like astronaut ice cream with a freeze-dried ice?

Basically, it's just add milk.

Yeah.

And then you have ice cream.

Well, you have to freeze it as well.

You have to freeze it and add milk.

I'm not exactly sure what was remaining.

It's making instant coffee.

I think that's completely fair enough because you have to pour hot water in it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I like that.

We don't know who the original Pringle was, because the original was Pringle's newfangled potato chips.

And it's Pringle apostrophe-S.

Yes, there's a few theories.

There's a few theories, but they're all really boring.

Yeah.

Because I did think, oh, maybe this will be juicy.

And it's like, oh, there's a guy called Mark Pringle who's named as one of the people on the patent.

And two people lived on Pringle Road.

But they were going to call them Winkles, weren't they?

Were they?

Yeah.

I think they paid an advertising company to say, what should we call this thing?

And the advertising company came back and said, let's call them Winkles.

Wow.

And they thought, no, that sounds a bit like a Willie.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Can I just quickly say, Frederick was cremated and then his ashes were put in.

He wasn't buried.

Yeah.

Oh, everyone listening knew that, actually.

I didn't.

But I really like that it was only most of him got into the tube.

So I think there was a lot of him after the cremation.

So the overflow went in an urn, classic, and then most of it went to the tube.

But his son, Larry, was interviewed in Time magazine all about it after he died.

When did he die?

About 2008?

2008, exactly.

Yeah.

And he was interviewed by Time magazine because it's, you know, it's important stuff.

And he said, Larry Bauer said, My siblings and I briefly debated what flavour to use, but I said, Look, we need to use the original,

which I think is fair.

Not the original original, which tasted like shit.

I've written a list of all some of the Pringle flavours.

I'm just clear.

And these are, a lot of them are special, so they weren't out in every country all the time.

But here's some.

Shout if you like it.

Ketchup, Zesty Lime and Chili, Chili Cheese Dog, Pizza Licious, Buffalo Wing, Low Fat, Jalapeno, jalapeno, honey mustard, cheesy fries.

Low fat, was that a flavour?

Onion blossom, screaming dill pickle, pumpkin pie spice, soft-shelled crab, shrimp, which was pink, seaweed, which was green, blueberry, hazelnut, lemon, sesame, mushroom soup, eggs, benediction, hot diggity dog.

Oh,

that's my one of hot diggity doggity.

Imagine if someone comes to you at the Pringles restaurant and has to go through all those.

Every single person's gonna order hot diggity dog, yeah, exactly.

Well, one of the smaller Pringle dramas, and I was so impressed by this, they've had two flavours recalled because of salmonella, which is amazing with something with such a low food content.

It was a raw chicken flavour, wasn't it?

Yeah,

cheeseburger and taco night were both uh taken off the shelves.

Well, did you know that of all these flavours, um, quite a few of them are vegan options?

Oh, they were vegan, yeah.

So, is that changed now?

One of the dramas?

I hope you're can't sing it home.

I've got it as drama number four.

Pringles added milk.

And apparently, from the articles online, vegans were in uproar.

But I know quite a few vegans.

I think they just choose other snacks now.

Right, yeah, yeah.

You're vegan, aren't you?

Yeah.

How many Pringles can you have?

You can't have any.

You can't have any.

Look, they added milk to it, they used to be plant-based.

And something to do with the adhesion of the flavour.

It's in that textured,

hydrolyzed vegetable protein.

I've got another controversy.

What was it?

Pringles dramas?

I'm saying dramas.

Pringles dramas.

Yeah, because I don't want them to sue me.

They've had too many court cases.

Wait, wait, let's try and put it.

I say Sarah does have this.

Yeah, definitely.

This is a rumour that went around.

Oh, and it's about Bauer himself.

It sort of relates to the fact, actually.

Oh, okay.

Was the Pringles creator cremated and sold to customers?

Oh, and is he Pringles?

No, no wonder it's not vegan.

Every single can.

Yeah.

And And yeah, no is the answer, right?

The answer is no.

Yeah, yeah.

Snopes did a pretty quick debunk of that one.

Right.

But that did the rounds on the internet a while after he died.

Okay, yeah, yeah.

It would be, because you know how they always say that in every glass of water, like two of the molecules had been weed out by Julius Caesar or something.

Yes.

I wonder how many, if you put one of his molecules in each crisp, that still wouldn't be that many, right?

No.

I would eat it if I knew that there was one molecule, which is such a small amount, of the founder, and it's kind of a tribute in a way.

Right.

Would you please?

I would have paid more for it.

Oh, no, I wouldn't pay more for it.

I'm too skimplified to pay

for the Frederick Edition.

I so would pay more for it.

That's exactly the kind of thing I'd buy.

It's like how I tried to buy a frisbee that had the ashes of the Frisbee creator inside.

Yeah, they did a range.

The family did a range of frisbee infused with the ashes.

And that was the guy who invented the frisbee.

Yeah.

Was it just as a tribute?

They went in a load of different limited edition frisbees.

Yeah, yeah, and there was a limited edition.

I don't know.

It was just as a fun thing.

That's fun, isn't it?

It's making me think if I want to be buried in an interesting way, I'm going to have to invent something.

Otherwise, people are never going to want to eat me.

One of your DVDs, maybe.

Yeah, something associate like.

Oh, yeah, if I do a Netflix special and then they have to show my autopsy

or something like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's a big extra name.

Yeah, for the Amazon Prime.

I'll buy that.

So, Pringle Guy, Pringle Man,

Mr.

Pringle.

Mr.

Pringle

has a first name.

Yes, well, this is the first time.

Drama number five.

This is the final drama.

And it's maybe the best drama, actually.

Do you think the juiciest drama?

Well, you take the lead here.

I'm going to go through the boring dramas.

Yes.

And then let's come on to this final drama.

Okay, well, let's hold back.

I don't want us to, yeah, to

I do a drama which I'm not sure you'll have.

Okay, great.

This is Simon Lee, 28,

who was stopped by security in Asda after they mistook a bulge in his pants for a can of Pringles.

Wow.

This is reported in the Metro.

I'd still go to see a doctor.

That's on my list of Simon Lee dramas.

Not Pringles.

Oh my God.

What was it?

What was it?

It was just a fold in his pants.

So Simon Lee28 said, looking back, I could see the funny side.

It was just a cock-up, no pun intended.

And the spokesperson from Asda said, no colleagues at this store are aware of this incident.

What?

So it wasn't an official member of staff.

It feels like he might have made it up and the Metro reported it.

But I don't want to get sued by Simon Lee 28, so let's call it a drama.

Yeah, I think there's definitely a drama.

Yeah, so here's the legal dramas.

Drama number one: the US FDA in 1975

ruled that Pringles were not potato chips because they're not from sliced potato, which is what people expect from potato chips.

So they couldn't call themselves the newfangled potato chips.

They could say they were potato chips made from dried potatoes.

They thought that was too long, and then they changed their name to crisps.

Yes, I found that really interesting.

And in fact, I think we might put it on this season of QI of like what do Americans call this?

And put some Pringles on, try and get the forfeit of chips.

But also, you know, you can't call them Crisps.

Oh, really?

Because this is the next court case.

In this country, though.

In this country.

And also, then it got overruled.

So I actually don't know what you can.

It would be clangers going off all the time because

their next court case in 2008, Procter 1 Gamble lawyers successfully argued that they're not even crisps, even though it said crisps on the back end.

They won it.

The potato content is only 42%, they argued.

And they said their shape is not found in nature.

Which I love.

It's so ballsy.

No one get their feet out and say, What are you paying for?

God, those are good lawyers.

So they were doing this to avoid paying VAT on crisps.

But then I think it went to appeal.

I think it went to the highest court in the land, which was then the appeal court.

Yeah, and I think the judges there ruled that, no, that's ridiculous.

They're clearly crisps.

You have to pay your tax.

And I think it cost them about about 100 million quid.

And they'd already paid it because they knew they were going to lose.

Right.

So they did that thing of like, hey, we've been paying it proactively all of this time.

Because I think it's, I mean, tax dodging isn't a nice thing for a company to be very publicly doing.

And we're not suggesting that Pringles did that.

No, they didn't.

That's what I'm saying.

Oh, yes.

Sorry.

If they did want to send us some of their disgusting sombre products

vegans can't even eat.

Ash-infused, please.

Yeah.

It was exciting.

At the time, the appeal court, Lord Justice Jacob, I just like this thing he said.

He said, there is more than enough potato content for it to be a reasonable view that it is made from potato.

Wow, yeah, that's a good old-fashioned legal thing.

68% then.

It's flowers, so sort of wheat, corn,

a number of delicious other

palatable ingredients that are legal.

Agreed.

Yeah.

So I think the funnest drama, so some people, because they weren't.

Number five now.

This is what it's actually number two.

So

people trace their popularity back to an advert in the 80s because originally 60s, 70s, they were flop.

People didn't really eat them.

But then Brad Pitt was an ad for them.

What he?

Yes, Brad Pitt did an ad.

You can go and watch it on YouTube, which I really recommend.

It's because it's really fun.

It's fun, but it's also just a young Brad Pitt.

Is it sexy?

He's so sexy.

Oh, okay.

It's about theft.

So I'm going to disagree with Azure.

Does he put some priggles down his pants?

Sneaks straight out of Azure.

What period Pitt are we talking about?

Proto-Pitt.

Pre-Telmer and Louise.

That was his first break.

Although apparently he was 27 in the ad.

So it took him a while to get his big break.

His big break is Thelma and Louise.

It's not too big.

Well, actually, I'd argue it's Pringles.

Yeah, well, I think without the Pringles ad, he probably wouldn't have got Thelma and Louise.

Well, most actors at the beginning will survive off those kind of jobs.

Pringles.

Well, that's what the thing in the advert is.

You've got these boys in a car, and all of them are wearing their sort of swimmers, and they're driving, but oh my god, they've all got a tube of Pringles that's empty.

Like they've run out of Pringles.

But then they use the Pringles cans as like binoculars, and they see three hot chicks in their swimmers, also driving in a car, but they've got like a whole sack of Pringles with them.

Oh, wow!

So they all get out by the side of the road and they dance while eating Pringles.

Pringles audio, yeah, it's pretty easy.

Then the girls turn around, and the guys have stolen not only all of the remaining Pringles, but their car.

Oh, wow.

They just drove off in their car.

Okay.

Once you twuck, you can't stop.

So let's come back to the final drama.

Here Here we go.

Mr.

P.

Mr.

P.

Mr.

P.

So it suddenly got revealed that he does have a first name, and that his name is Julius.

Julius Pringle.

And people loved this, including Pringles.

So Pringles tweeted it.

It was on one of the American talk shows.

People were really excited, like, oh my God, guess what that guy's name is?

He's Julius Pringle.

And then...

Well, it's a sort of early day Wikipedia hoax, basically.

Someone went into the Pringles page on Wikipedia, edited it in.

Someone saw that, that got passed around.

So nothing.

There were two students in Chicago.

They were watching American football.

One of the players was called Julius.

One of them asked the other, What do you think the Pringles guy is called?

And he said, Julius Pringle.

They thought it was so funny.

One of them went into Wikipedia and changed it.

The other one was a moderator went in and backed it up.

And so all of this can be proven as well because they've still got the same sort of app name.

So Justin Schillock, Platypus 222, there's records of him changing it on Wikipedia and on Twitter.

There was a previous Facebook group where he was called Boris Pringle.

They went in and changed it to Julius Pringle so that it was backed up everywhere.

Wow.

And when Pringles was sold, Pellogs just went back to the Wikipedia.

They said Procton Gamble would never have fallen for it.

They knew that they hadn't called him Julius Pringle, but they just

folks.

Yeah, they said, fine, it'll be Julius.

There is a theory who Mr.

Pringle is.

What it is, is

there was one other person who was involved in the initial concept of Pringles in the making of it, and it was a science fiction writer, a guy called Gene Wolfe,

who writes pretty incredible sci-fi novels.

I actually haven't heard any of the titles before, but they seem to be really well regarded.

And he was responsible for developing the machine that cooks.

I don't know if he invented the saddle.

I think that must have been Bauer, but he did the machine.

And if you look at a photo of Gene Wolf, some people have noticed that he's got the parted hair, he's got the big mustache,

he's got zero body,

and he looks very pringly.

So yeah, so

but that's that's a tiny theory.

I'll admit it, it's one person's theory.

I haven't seen it.

Well, every theory starts with one person.

Exactly.

You know, relativity started with, you know,

is that true?

Yeah.

Is that what standed on the shoulders of giant spheres?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Did you know that Julius Pringle, because we might as well call him that now, he once shaved off his moustache for November?

Did he?

Did he look like he shaved it for November?

Yeah, yes, the opposite, but to raise money for Movemore.

So he just had a white round face on the Pringles.

Because is he a potato?

Oh.

He shouldn't legally be, but is he?

Maybe he's 42% potato.

Yeah, his dad was a potato.

His mum was some corn powder.

Yeah.

Do you want to hear a.

This isn't a drama.

It doesn't even merit the name drama, but I just...

I read a bit of a spicy takedown of Pringles.

Oh, yeah.

And this was on the website SiriusEats.com, so you know it's pucker.

The author wrote, I've creepily watched a lot of folks eat Pringles and can say with absolutely no authority that most people pop them in their mouths oriented as an upside-down saddle, right?

So you're putting that.

Now, this mostly makes sense because it's the way they come out of the tube and you get all the flavor on your tongue.

But the more enjoyable way is to eat them flipped over so that you're working with a crispy saddle for your tongue.

I'm confused about which when you eat bringle are you popping are you popping it on your tongue like a saddle?

I see yeah.

Or are you popping it the other way?

I do it the other way because of a retainer I had as a kid and it feels like it slots into the top of your mouth quite nicely.

You do have taste buds at the top of your mouth as well.

That's powerful.

Not that many.

Oh yeah definitely.

You don't taste any of the hot diggity dog.

It was you guys who said there were taste buds on testicles or something.

Yeah, that's how I used to do it.

They're just that they're a nice little saddle for the testicles.

I'm never glad that guy was in Asda.

Yeah,

shoplift, put them in individually.

Delicious shoplifting.

Time for a sofa upgrade?

Visit washable sofas.com and discover Anibay, where designer style meets budget-friendly prices, with sofas starting at $699.

Anibay brings you the ultimate in furniture furniture innovation with a modular design that allows you to rearrange your space effortlessly.

Perfect for both small and large spaces, Anibay is the only machine-washable sofa inside and out.

Say goodbye to stains and messes with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics that make cleaning easy.

Liquid simply slides right off.

Designed for custom comfort, our high-resilience foam lets you choose between a sink-in feel or a supportive memory foam blend.

Plus, our pet-friendly stain-resistant fabrics ensure your sofa stays beautiful for years.

Don't compromise quality for price.

Visit washable sofas.com to upgrade your living space today with no risk returns and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Get up to 60% off plus free shipping and free returns.

Shop now at washable sofas.com.

Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that the world's first IVF clinic was opened in a town called Bonn.

I love it.

Brilliant.

We never heard that.

I couldn't believe it.

I couldn't believe I've never heard it.

So, this was

we're talking 1978, the first IVF baby, Louise Brown, in Oldham.

And just after it had happened, the NHS kind of refused to support the service.

So it was really controversial.

You know, we might get to it later, but a lot of people did not like the idea at all.

Can I quickly ask, is it more or less controversial than Mr.

Pringle's first name?

I'm not sure how many dramas we're going to get to to in IVF.

But yeah, so the NHS wouldn't support them and they didn't know what to do.

They had to find a building where they could start up their own clinic and they found this old Jacobean manor called Bourne Hall, which I think is in Cambridgeshire.

And they started the IVS centre there and, you know, many thousands of babies were born there.

And it's just fun names.

So where did you say Bourne is?

I think it's in Cambridgeshire.

But there's another nice coincidence, which is that the first IVF baby born was Louise Brown.

And Brown is, with one letter different, an anagram for born.

Oh, yeah.

Except, of course, that she was born in Oldham, which is somewhere else.

And what's the opposite of old in Oldham?

Young.

What are babies?

Oh, my God.

Come on, it's all coming together right there.

Yeah, yeah.

See?

Sometimes you've got to sit back and just watch the magic.

It's beautiful.

Yeah, she's

a pretty amazing character, Louise Brown, because she's become the spokesperson, really for what a success it is.

And she goes all over the world, basically, doing conferences.

So does her sister, because her sister, who is also an IVF baby, was the 40th born baby and then the first ever person to have a baby off the back of being an IVF baby as well.

So her sister had children first, did she?

Yeah.

Okay.

But Louise Brown did as well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because I think it's hard enough being sort of a middle child, let alone

your elder siblings like, oh my god, a medical miracle.

Oh, Andrew.

And And you as well, did they?

One thing about Bourne, is it called Bourne House?

Bourne Hall, sorry.

They were there, the pioneers of IVF, partly thanks to the Daily Mail.

Wow.

That's a very interesting thing.

So, yeah, they...

You're always talking about how much you love the Daily Mail.

I love

the rest.

I didn't even cram it in again.

Every episode we edit out an extended round about how great the Daily Mail is.

But

the pioneers,

specifically two doctors called Steptoe and Edwards, and

the editor of the Daily Mail got in touch and promised help and helped them to look for premises.

And the Mail originally purchased Bourne Hall, the Jacobean house,

and they appointed architects and surveyors because it needed lots of work to turn it from a crumbling manor house into an IVF clinic.

But then in 1979, they pulled out because apparently the venture was too risky.

So

it's not an unblemished success story for the Daily Mail, unlike most of them.

And then Steptoe and Edwards raised money and bought it themselves.

And Jean Purdy as well.

Yeah, we've got to bring her into the story because she has been left off.

I'm not saying, Andy, you're leaving her out, but you did.

And I think it's time to bring Jean Purdy back into the story permanently.

She was a pretty amazing character, and by all accounts, this wouldn't have happened without her.

To the point where many people see her as the nurse who was working on it.

Therefore, if a plaque was ever put up about them, it would have the two names of the doctors.

And then she would be LinkedIn to and all the supporting staff.

And famously, Edwards, the doctor who was still alive, absolutely was refusing to have anything to do with it unless they put Purdy's name on it, saying that I feel strongly about the inclusion of the names of the people who helped with the conception of Louise Brown.

I feel especially about Jean Purdy, who traveled to Alden with me for 10 years and contributed as much as I did to the project.

Indeed, I regard her as an equal contributor to Patrick Steptoe and myself.

And there was a point when Jean Purdy's mum got ill and they just stopped everything because they couldn't do it without her for months.

So she was so integral to this thing.

Yeah.

Andy.

But because she was so she because she wasn't a doctor.

That's why people overlook the fact that she was involved in the whole process.

Yeah.

She found the hall.

She's the one who located

in the first place obviously.

And then she died before they gave the Nobel Prize, so she wasn't...

allowed to get a Nobel Prize because you can't if you're dead.

And stepped home as well, right?

So it was just Edwards who ended up collecting it.

Yeah.

And it was controversial, wasn't it?

It was sort of like everyone, particularly within the religious faction, sort of thought, are you going to give birth to a soulless baby?

Well, I did IVF and they still now, because there's two different kinds of IVF.

You have IVF, or you have ICSI, which is where your partner for some reason has low sperm count or substandard sperm.

There's probably a better term for it than substandard.

If your partner's got really weird sperms,

then what they do is they pair them up rather than letting the sperm swim and choose.

And when they do that, they say, obviously, some people have real problems with that because it doesn't allow the accident of nature for them to choose.

So even within IVF, there are still frontiers where people go,

well, that's so clinical.

Wow, yeah.

There are interesting.

I mean, I can't believe they're real, these things, but they're, what are they?

They're micro-syringes.

I'm going to get them wrong.

Micro-needles, which they use to inject a single sperm into the centre of an egg.

Yeah.

It's not just introducing them anymore.

Well, they do both.

I think they do both.

needle that's small enough to inject an individual sperm probably with microscopes

actually no sarah i think it's an old craftsman called luigi who's got a very steady hand I think that's it.

Yeah, so when she was born, she was called the test tube baby.

And she was made in a test tube.

It's a petri dish, yeah.

So test tube is the term that's the media threw out there, which we've all kind of kept going.

But yeah, it's petri dishes.

And she was saying that there was all that stuff, so is she going to have no soul?

Are they making franken babies?

All that sort of stuff.

But there was a lot of love as well, and a lot of people were writing anonymous letters in, just sending them support.

When she returned to her hometown after coming out of hospital, the the streets were blocked and lined with people from her town and a hundred reporters on the streets, and they all stood out there like it was like the queen coming.

You know, you know, it was a huge showing.

And one of the people who was standing in the crowd was a young boy called Wesley Mullander, who would go on to become a bouncer and then one day Louise Brown's husband.

So

I'm not going to say you wouldn't let her ink seen exactly like she was.

Sorry, you need a soul if you can't get in there.

I'm sorry.

It'd be so great to be like, Louise Brown, he was 16 and a half, I believe, if I remember exactly when we had that parade.

Wow.

But yeah, he was seven years old at the time watching his future wife be brought up.

That was

crazy.

Well, the birth was completely mad.

There were police officers lining the corridor in hospital where Louise Brown's mum gave birth because it was so

controversial.

And the birth had to be filmed to show there was actual documentary evidence that this baby belongs to this mother and is real.

She had the baby, Louise herself, when she was a newborn, you know, they normally have, what do do they do, about five tests when you're a newborn baby just to make sure

the ears, the eyes,

the colour of the skin.

Yeah, Louise Brown had to have 60 tests before her mum could hold her.

Wow.

It's really just testing absolutely every aspect to make sure this is a completely healthy.

For the first time, you would be a bit like, oh my god, this can't just be, it can't just flippin' made a human, I think.

Yeah, you would, part of you would be like, double check that everything's there.

And it is an incredible thing.

People who don't go through OVF, I know they think about it as like very medicalised, but when you have your embryo transfer, you watch it on an ultrasound.

So you see the little globule of water that contains the embryo sort of being inserted inside you, and your partner can be there and they give you

an ultrasound picture.

Wow.

So, like with our son Theodore, we've known him since he was five days old.

Wow, wow.

Yeah, so actually, I feel really romantic about it as well.

As well as like that, oh my god, it's so incredible they can help you.

Also, it's really smooth running now.

Yeah.

Sorry, when you have

that process you've described, is the old Italian craftsman...

Is he in the room or is he?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sorry.

Where's that needle?

Only he hasn't dexterous fingers that can pick the needle out of the room.

It will be sad when he dies.

And he wants to be buried in a tiny needle.

Steptoe was in a shipwreck.

Was he?

Really?

Yeah, but and a proper full-on shipwreck.

So he was born in 1913 and he was a naval surgeon during the Second World War.

Uh-oh, he was the right age for that.

And his ship was off Crete, and the Germans captured it.

Well, they sunk it, captured it, and he became a prisoner of war.

Right.

And then

he helped other prisoners escape while he was in a German prisoner of war camp in Crete.

Cool.

And then he was put in solitary confinement for that.

Quite alive.

He sounds like that.

Some more things on conception in general.

So Elizabeth Christine was a wife of Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI,

and they wanted a male heir.

And they decided to do that.

They prescribed her a gluttonous diet, large amounts of alcohol, and to spend all day looking at erotic paintings of men.

Oh.

She was like, all right.

If you think it'll work.

Wow.

People say a thing now, which I don't think is based on that much evidence, but about

the gender of the sperm making a difference at how fast they swim.

So, like, early in your ovulation, if you want a boy, and late in the ovulation, if you want a girl.

Oh, right.

Yeah.

Well, because females sperm are slower swimmers.

Or they live longer or something.

There's something to do with the weight.

I don't think it's based on that much evidence.

It's like one of those old wives' tales when people like you go pass at the door.

So it's going to get down here with just people like you, just to speak clear.

And also, the old thing about wearing boxes or briefs.

Oh, yeah.

That thing.

There was a recent study and they found there was no appreciable difference in scrotal temperature in men who wear briefs and boxes.

Although the NHS kind of says, even though it doesn't seem to affect sperm quantity, you may want to wear loose-fitting underwear.

So the NHS kind of, you know,

hedge their bets a little bit, but according to the studies, it doesn't make any difference.

But they do say they say the thing about hot baths and showers.

Well, that would be like a hot bath would change the temperature.

It would change your core body temperature.

I guess the thing is that Tehstals are really clever at removing themselves from the body when they need to cool down a little bit.

And the idea I think they thought with pants it would mean they couldn't do that because they'd be stuck there.

But with a bath being so much hotter, I mean, they can't jump out.

What you need is one of those bath rests.

You know the things that go across the bath for reading the book on

a tray of food.

There'll be someone in the bath right now listening to this podcast.

Just tie across a little net and put the nuts in that.

Yeah, that helps.

I don't know.

Because these guys know this, but when we were trying for our third child, my wife went to an acupuncturist because she thought we weren't conceiving.

And she said, Does your husband take hot baths?

Yeah.

And she said, Yeah, because I love hot baths.

She said, Well, that's the problem.

It's his fault.

It's all his fault.

And then she booked me a sperm test.

The acupuncturist just booked it for me.

And Fenella was like, Well, you gotta go.

So I went and I did the thing, and I was furious that I was going to do this thing off the back of the acupuncturist.

Then I wrote to them and said, Where are my results?

And they said, Well, we sent it to the acupuncturist.

So she then had my results.

Damn!

And she's been telling me GDPR researchers.

I know, she opened yours, she didn't open them.

She did.

She did.

This is why alternative medicine doesn't have a contribution.

And she's been giving Fenella crap for weeks, like saying, your husband, this is your husband's fault.

This is all your husband's fault.

And Fenella was getting angry at me.

You and your buddy boss have been trying for ages.

So she opens it up.

Fenella calls her up and says, can we get the results?

And she says, I've been doing this for 20 years.

In all my time, I've never seen such strong sperm results in my life.

He is a super sperm holder.

He's so inappropriate.

Even though though that's a compliment, I couldn't believe it.

Anyway, you know, having a high sperm count can be bad for conceiving as well, yeah, and that's because you're more likely to get two sperms that go in the egg at the same time.

And obviously, I think that can

be twins, but it can also cause problems.

There are too many people at a cocktail party, no one enjoys it.

They're used to talking over each other, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

you need just the right number.

But it's never happened at any of my parties, I'll tell you that much.

I'm lucky to get four.

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

My fact is that there is only one guy in Dijon who makes mustard.

And he's busy.

Any girls who do it?

I don't know.

And did you find this out from the Daily Mail?

Sarah, I got all my facts on the Daily Mail.

No, actually, I found this out from Atlas Obscura, and it's about a man.

His name is Nicholas Chavi.

And since 2009, he's been the only mutadie in Dijon.

And he wasn't even born to it.

You know, he's made himself a mustard maker.

Was anyone born into mustard?

There must have been some mustard dynasties.

The Coleman family, maybe.

I don't know.

But he used to work in I.T.

And then

he has a tiny boutique.

It's not a lot of Dijon mustard that gets made in Dijon.

Are they allowed to call it Dijon if it's not made in Dijon?

You are allowed to call it Dijon if it's not made in Dijon.

Horseradish.

In fact, there are no rules about whether you can call something Dijon.

Is that right?

Yeah,

it's a wild west for Dijon mustard.

We can't say anything is Dijon mustard.

You can call any mustard Dijon.

So it's a recipe rather than some local project.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Interesting.

Yeah.

So there's Grey Poupon, which you might have heard of.

What?

What?

That's a famous Dijon mustard, and that's based in the USA.

Hasn't been since the 1940s.

What did you call it?

Grey Poupon?

Grey Poupon.

To rhyme with coupon.

Have you not heard of Grey Poupon?

I'm afraid I haven't.

No.

It's one of the most famous mustards in the world, but only because

from about, well, no, there's no, it's basically because it's in so many rap songs.

There's a real thing where lots of rappers, like from about the early noughties, they started mentioning.

I'm going to go all Pringle Buildings here.

I want 10 rappers.

Lil Poupon.

Biggie Grapes, yeah.

The Wu-Tang clan.

Kanye West.

Ghostface Killer.

Buster Rhymes.

Kendrick Lamar.

I could go on with that.

Wow.

Oh, wow.

There's a brilliant Vox piece where it was noted by a writer called Estelle Caswell, who I think she writes for Vox, or she was writing for Vox at the time, and she basically made a supercut of grey coupon references in rap sites.

It seems to be the thing that you mentioned if you want to say...

I think, I mean, it's just a mustard.

It's just a slightly more expensive than normal mustard.

Yeah, who knows though?

Do you know, not rap, but have you heard of DJ Mustard?

No.

DJ Mustard, big DJ.

Record producer.

Yeah, yeah.

He's worked with a lot of famous people.

It's not a joke about Dijon.

Well, why do you think he's called DJ Mustard?

Because Dijon contains DJ.

Oh, no.

He's as keen as mustard.

That's a great one.

It's about cutting the mustard, isn't there?

There's lots of

stuff going on.

Getting the mustard?

Mustard must have other slang.

Yeah, well, it's not that.

It is that his name is Dijon.

His first name.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's an unusual name.

That's an unusual name.

Mustard.

Dijon Mustard.

I don't know how he's pronouncing it, but possibly.

Can we talk about mustard?

Yeah.

The Romans were the first to eat it, but the Greeks had it and they would use it medically.

They would rub it on the chest for bronchitis.

If your baby had sore teeth, they might rub it on the teeth.

And Pythagoras took it against scorpion stings.

Yeah, my friend, I was talking to my friend Ed about mustard the other day, and he said that his dad used to put it on his horse's legs.

Selma's back as a condiment.

No, he said a racehorse when they got leg muscle inflammation,

and this was during the 70s and 80s, I guess, is when he was doing it.

Yeah, you'd mix it with linseed, with confre, with water.

You'd make a paste, then you would put it on and you'd bandage up.

And the poor horse is like, are you basting here?

Pope John XII appointed his nephew as the grand mustardier to the pope.

Oh, what a name.

He was the pope's mustard maker.

And the pope's mustard maker became a word for someone who was quite pompous and they had a pointless role in society.

That's great.

I was supposed like someone who would give your car a ticket, like a traffic warden, you would call them a Pope's mustard maker.

Okay.

Okay, right.

I'm going to stick out to the traffic ward.

I think they've got an important role in society.

Oh, no, I agree.

I do agree.

But I'm thinking that you might say it because you're a set of cross-cuttings.

But that's the third missing mustard phrase.

We've got cousin of mustard, Keena's mustard, and you're the Pope's mustard maker.

Yeah.

And it's a tragedy that that one dropped out of circulation because I think it's a good thing.

I think it's because it sounds too much like a euphemism.

Yeah,

yeah, you're right.

And you said it's a nephew who made his.

It was his nephew.

So it's nepotism, basically.

Wasn't the Pope's nephew thing?

It was often their illegitimate sons who they that's a good point.

They would call them nephews.

Yes, I don't know if this is that in this case.

Because they're not supposed to use their mustard maker.

Oh,

my God.

That's now the fourth phrase.

The guy in Azte thought it was my mustard maker, but it was actually a kind of pregnancy.

Oh, that's horrible.

France had a huge mustard crisis last year.

Okay.

Yeah, they ran out of mustard.

They ran out almost completely of mustard.

French people eat a kilo of mustard each, I read somewhere.

Okay, right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sorry.

Which is that's a lot, though.

That's a good few jars per person per year.

You've got to be shifting it to get through that.

But basically, 80% of the seeds used in French mustard are from Canada.

Yeah.

And they had a terrible summer of weather failures and things like that.

Crops all suffered.

And

France uses 35,000 tons of mustard seeds every year.

The other thing was that a lot of the yellow mustard seeds come from Ukraine and Russia.

And so that meant there was a shortage in yellow mustard for people like the Germans and the British.

And so the Germans and the British started eating Dijon, and that meant that the French didn't have any Dijon

nightmare.

Okay, I knew they were going to blame it on us somehow.

In the 14th century, the Duke of Burgundy held a gala where the guests ate 85 gallons of mustard in a single sitting.

With what?

Did they say with what?

It really doesn't say that.

It must have been like a fondue, where they just dipped it with breads in there and stuff.

But how much of that was left on the side of the plates after they finished their actual meals?

It was a single sentence in the book Gastro Obscura, which is made by the same people who do Atlas Obscura.

Didn't say anymore, and I couldn't find anything about it, but that's a lot.

It didn't even say how many guests there were.

So

it's one of Andy's parties.

Yeah, so it's a lot per guest.

Let's be real.

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

My fact this week is that the poet W.B.

Yates once had a vasectomy to cure his writer's block.

So So

there wouldn't have been much of a second coming for him.

Is that one of his books?

It's his most famous poem.

And you know, if that stays in, and it's a big if really at this stage, there'll be a few people who really like that.

Yeah, yeah.

I'll keep it in.

Yeah, yeah.

Actually, you can still orgasm if you've had a vasectomy.

I really love the reference to the poem, though.

Podcast at QI.com.

Do you want to make that point?

I've got to have these parties to

cure his writer's block, they bored his writer's cock.

Spoonerism.

Very not technically in the penis they're a good procedure.

I really like this podcast.

Have you run out of facts or something?

Is it just you in the inbox?

I'm assuming you can name Sarah.

It's uncanny.

So I got this fact from someone called Georgia Granger.

She's got a PhD in the history of vasectomy.

You can find her on Twitter at SNPHist,

which is, so she does a lot of vasectomy facts on there.

And yeah, she was, I asked her, what's the most interesting thing that you know about vasectomies?

And she said, about Yates and how he did this.

And this used to be a thing.

Why are you googling vasectomies down?

The super spam.

I've got to stop it somehow.

There is no vasectomy strong enough.

We don't understand.

These tubes appear to have been unknotted from the inside.

Yeah, keep on just shaking

20.

Yeah, so this used to be a thing that it was believed, these are sort of, I guess, partial vasectomies.

And the idea was, is that

there was rejuvenation, and it was written about in the 1920s.

And the idea was by sort of taking the tubes and tying them up, would do something to the production of the male hormone, and that would be increased, and that would go back into the body and sort of revitalize it.

It was kind of like Doctor Who getting another regeneration.

It was kind of like a whole new life, basically.

And he was quite old, Yates, when he had this.

He was 68/slash/69 years old when he had it.

And he called it his second puberty because it kind of really did work for him, particularly on the creative side.

His wife said his writing was just extraordinary from that point on.

Whether or not that's a placebo or whatever, but psychosomatic.

Yeah, but it did the job.

Having an operation, when your body recovers from pain, you quite often do feel rejuvenated.

So it could just be having a sort of minor procedure, even that in itself.

Yeah, wow, so for all riders blocked, just have no, I'm not going to recommend it, but because I think that whole thing, like men losing their life force through ejaculation, kind of goes around and around

in the industry.

Yeah, so similar kind of time when they were sewing monkeys' testicles onto people.

Yes, this is the same time, yes, to give them extra, again, the same theory, extra sort of male life force.

The guy behind this procedure,

Austrian doctor Eugen Steineck,

He

made extraordinary claims for

his procedure.

Obviously, as so many of these doctors did.

So, just to quote from one piece about this: he claimed his patients changed from feeble, parched, dribbling drones to men of vigorous bloom who threw away their glasses, shaved twice a day, dragged loads up to 220 pounds, and even indulged in such youthful follies as buying land in Florida.

That's the most virile thing you can do.

That's what young young people do by landing in Florida, because that's not what I've heard.

How interesting.

But the other side of this, so Sigmund Freud, again, a similar kind of time, was doing the same to women with clitorectomies.

Yes.

That same thing of.

It was moving them, wasn't it?

It was.

Moving them in terms of orgasms, but also lots of people had them removed from that same sort of argument.

Well, Freud is one of the people who, when Yeats was looking into it, was amongst the list of notables who had had the vasectomy done in order to help him.

And he did it for he had jaw cancer, which they thought that that would help with that, as well as other things of the yeah.

I mean, he kept smoking, unfortunately, did he?

Yeah, which was probably the reason he had jaw cancer in the first place.

I wonder if they wouldn't have known that at the time, right, I guess?

No, I don't think it would have been conclusively proven.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yates did loads of sort of spooky spiritual stuff, didn't he?

Yeah.

That's why we're talking about him.

That's why we're talking about him, really.

Yeah, I mean, he was someone who was very closely associated with the world of Aleister Crowley and all that sort of stuff.

And he was very much part of a

movement which was, was it Blavatsky?

Was he part of the Theosophical Society?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Which is...

She was this extraordinary character, Madame Blavatsky, who was an occult leader.

And she just took under her wing all of these big thinkers of the time.

And she had theories about Atlantis and our origin stories and so on.

And her sort of disciples were everyone from Crowley through to Rudolf Steiner.

You know, the schooling education I had was as a result of Blavatsky, basically, and what Steiner took from that and built on it.

And Yates was someone else who very much believed in it.

Yeah, she claimed to have gone to Tibet and had these llamas who she'd met, and they could send her ideas through astral projection.

They can move from one place to another, but they can also send her thoughts into her head so that she could kind of speak to the dead or tell what the future is going to be, tell all sorts of stuff like that.

And there was lots of things like seances where letters would fly around and all that kind of stuff.

And Yates was involved with

the mob.

But even when he turned up, she'd already been theoretically discredited at that time.

So one of her acolytes had gone to the papers and given them all the tricks of what she used to do to make things fly around the room.

And it was in, it might have even been the Daily Mail, but it was in...

Yeah, it was.

He wouldn't write it down because it involved a woman.

Oh my god.

Oh my god.

But yeah, I think at that stage, it's the kind of thing where you double down even when things have been debunked if it's what you believe in.

You're kind of like, well, they would say that.

They're trying to stop us from doing it.

Yeats is...

I don't always approve of the thing of looking at

thinkers and writers exclusively through their romantic lives.

As in that, it can be a bit reductive.

But Yates' sex life was extraordinary.

I mean, strange, really weird.

He proposed to an Irish woman.

She was a politician.

She was called Maud Gawne.

And she was later a really big Irish independence movement leader.

He proposed to her, and he'd been in love with her for about 20 years at this point.

She said absolutely not.

Then he proposed immediately, like three weeks later to her daughter.

Second rejection, then said fine, never mind that.

And then immediately proposed to someone else who said yes, Georgie Hyde-Lees, and

they got married, I think, kind of within a few weeks of that.

Well, part of the reason was that this, I think it was Blavatsky or someone like that had told him that the best time for him to get married, or in fact, he would get married that year.

And so he was like, Well, okay, well, let's go through the list.

That's what they say about marriage, don't they?

It's not about the person, it's about the date.

It's about the spiritualist who's told you it's this year.

You've got a suit, you've booked the guests.

But the relationship with Maude Gunn was really interesting.

And Maude Gunn, actually,

a character.

She had a second life in Paris, which is why she turned him down all these times.

But they did get married in 1898, but they got married telepathically.

They had a shared vision where they kind of together imagined getting married on the astral plane.

Amazing.

Gates and gone.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, it's cheaper, isn't it, on the astral plane?

You know,

the rooms are bigger.

Yeah.

You can have more guests.

It was a good idea.

Yeah.

But yeah, they did do that.

So they had done it, but not, I mean, nothing.

But that's not legally binding.

No.

But she, oh my god, Maud Gone.

I mean, there's one story, and I'm sure you guys have read this, or possibly not.

So she was part of, as we now know, the astral plane, part of this mysticism stuff.

She had a son, a little boy, who sadly passed away when he was very young.

He was two years old, and she decided that she was going to force reincarnation

back into existence.

And the way of doing that is she went to, she had a sort of a place built for her son, the mausoleum, and she went inside with the partner who she had George with.

And they went down and by the coffin of her little son, they had sex because the idea was to conceive while being next to the coffin would force the spirit and soul into the new child.

This is a lot like early IVF, actually.

So, incredibly, she did conceive.

Like, nine months later, the baby was born.

So, they assume from stories that this was the point that this happened.

And then, and the daughter's name was Isalt.

They had a terrible relationship with each other, I guess, because of a slightly fracturous beginning where she sort of was treating her as if she was the reincarnated son, and it became quite clear that she wasn't.

Well, the other thing is that Isold was the daughter who Yates proposed to.

Proposed to.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, So, Yates,

we haven't said properly who, if anyone doesn't know, outside of that poem that Andy referenced right at the top, but excellent.

Everyone got it from that, though.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But he was an amazing writer.

He was a poet.

He got the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923.

He was a sort of Oxford University honoured guy.

He was an amazing character who still held up.

And then there's all this sort of.

Irish, of course.

Irish, of course.

And he came from an amazing family.

And his brother was an Olympian.

He got an Olympic silver medal, the first that Ireland Ireland ever got, for swimming, which is amazing.

That's cool.

And it's not swimming the event.

It was a painting that he painted called Swimming because this was back when you could win Olympic medals for paintings.

That's so funny.

Yeah, and so it's

an Olympic silver.

You don't look like an Olympic silver.

Why are you drowning?

So just clinging onto his painting.

And they were a very creative family.

He had two sisters who were also, they were very artistic.

They're sort of getting a second, you know, kind of like Purdy from IVF fame or lack of fame, getting their moment now because they were very influential on Ireland being a new, its own state.

And Yates kind of half was and half wasn't as well, wasn't he?

I think he was influenced by Maud Gone and really wanted to be involved with nationalism when he was with her.

But I think also when he wasn't with her anymore, he wasn't that fussed about it.

Yeah, and she kind of weird.

She drifted in a very radical direction.

Yeah.

And I think by the time that he ended up proposing to her in this realm,

she was really, you know, very hardline and very radical.

And she was also apparently a chloroform addict.

And it was all a bit much for him.

So when he proposed to Maud, to the mother, he added quite detailed conditions, which basically ensured he would get a no from her.

Really?

Yeah.

That's interesting.

So he puts out the chloroform.

But he felt, yeah, but he felt he had to propose because I think she had been with another partner who, and then they were not together anymore, and he sort of felt it was incumbent on him to propose.

How interesting.

Just on the marriage that Yates ended up having with Georgie, or George, as he called her, they were also involved in the spiritual stuff because

their honeymoon was going incredibly badly.

I mean, really badly.

If he's proposed to two other women in the previous month, it's not incredibly surprising the honeymoon's going to go quite poorly.

Side note, it was in the Hundred Acre Wood, which is cool.

Oh, is it?

Yeah.

Or the wood that Ashdown Forest is called, which was later the 100-acre wood of AME.

The bad honeymoon there.

I know, two, six every day.

He stole all their honey on the first morning in the nightmare.

But basically, even on honeymoon, he was writing letters to Izalt.

So, this is not a good sign for the pros of the honeymoon.

And I know, like four days old.

I almost thought you shouldn't listen to psychics.

Psychics acupuncturists.

I mean, be careful where you get your advice, basically.

But then

she turned it round.

She said, Let's try some automatic writing, you know, where the spirits will guide my hand.

And we'll just see what comes out.

And she said a bit later on that it had been fake, her word, and then she

repented and recanted using that word.

But basically it turned the corner for the entire marriage and it turned what was a very unpromising marriage, obviously four days in.

Together they wrote 4,000 pages in the first three years of marriage.

And the spirits seemed to be really interested in him getting over Maude and Israel.

They suggested diet tips for him.

They suggested ways to spice up their sex lives.

This is such a clever topic.

The spirits that they told him, they told them when George was ovulating so they would have better odds of conceiving.

I mean those spirits were unbelievably useful.

Yeah, apparently there was a bit that was stressing the husband's duty to give his wife sexual satisfaction was one of those.

She's a genius.

She's an absolute genius.

Which someone pointed out that these messengers must have been reading a book that was actually published at the time by Mary Stopes, which called Married Love,

which had that exact thing about sexual satisfaction

for the wife.

So just on writer's block, as this was what Yates was trying to deal with in the first place,

I found the person who I think may have had the worst writer's block in history.

Oh.

A writer for The New Yorker.

Very, very successful, well-known writer.

He was called Joseph Mitchell.

And

for 32 years, he didn't write a single article.

He turned up every day to work at

the New Yorker.

And he didn't write anything.

He was working on a memoir, but he couldn't get past chapter three.

Oh, no.

No, he just had to write it.

I think we just skip onto chapter four and come back to it.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's fair.

But there's a theory that he stopped because of someone being nice about him.

Someone wrote that he was the greatest living master of the English declarative sentence.

Wow.

And that just clamped him up.

Oh, no.

I know.

He just couldn't get it.

You should have checked his app messages.

Read your tweets.

Read the comments under your articles.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland, James, at James Harkam, Andy, at Andrew Hunter, M, and Sarah, at Sarah Pasco.

Yeah, and you can also go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, no such thingasofish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there, but don't bother going to our website this week.

There's way more important websites to go to.

Sarahontour.com or sarahpasco.co.uk.

You'll find links to all of the upcoming legs of tours in the UK that Sarah is doing.

And she's also going to Australia very soon.

So if you're living over there, make sure to check it out and go see her show.

And

anything else, Sarah, to mention?

I don't have an H on Sarah.

There's no H on Sarah at Sarah S-A-R-A.

Pasco for the Twitter and then apply that to the relevant internet domains.

Okay, we'll be back again next week.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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