463: No Such Thing As An Especially Attractive Barge

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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'm sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin.

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 my fact.

My fact this week is that to combat people sleeping during church, priests used to employ a sluggard waker who would walk around the congregation poking people awake with a very long stick.

Brilliant.

Yeah, this is an amazing thing.

Did you see that job, Andy?

I think it sounds quite fun.

Yeah.

It does.

You wouldn't make many friends, but you're not in the business to make friends.

You're not in the business to keep people awake listening to the sermon.

Exactly.

I reckon you'd be great at it, yeah.

Why?

You've just got authority about you, and we all respect you so much.

Oh, when you put it like that, I suppose, yeah, I will be a pretty.

You think I like correcting people for

minor errors they've made?

Yeah, and you really piss people off.

So it sort of feels.

You're not losing anything.

I've already got zero status in this society.

Yeah, the congregation don't like you anyway.

I'm disliked enough that it doesn't matter if I'm.

yeah.

And you always walk around with a massive stick.

Prod people with it.

Actually, that's an even better reason.

Yeah.

How long was the stick?

Do we know?

Well, in some cases, they'd be 10 feet long because you've got long pews, don't you?

Very long pews.

So if you've got someone at the end of a pew and you need to reach them, you've got your stick needing to...

That's the slugger baker saying, isn't it?

I would touch him with the 10-foot pole.

I read about this in a book that I was checking out called Old Church Life by a guy called William Andrews.

And it's a very old book and it's full of really odd, quirky little nuggets about the church back in the day.

And so these people would be paid good money to go around.

Well, money.

Well, but money, yeah.

Yeah.

They were paid.

I think, I think one of the wealthiest, most high-status people in society.

Yeah, they weren't.

Although some of them were given a small amount of land to live on near the church.

Nice.

And in one case, there's a place called Yulegrave in the Midlands, and they had one who was entitled to a hat

as well as the small wage.

And then one in in Wakefield who also got hats, shoes, and hoses.

That's part of the job.

They turned Sleepfield into Wakefield.

Brilliant.

That was what they had on their bag.

It is a part-time job.

You wouldn't expect it to pay a full salary.

It's only when there's a sermon on, isn't there?

Absolutely, yeah.

And often they did other things, other jobs as well, and that was just a bit of it.

But sometimes women got separate treatment and nicer treatment.

So sometimes they'd have a stick with a knob on one end and a little brush on the other.

And as a woman, you got a little tickle.

Whereas a man, you've got knobs around the face.

Everyday sexism.

There's a guy called Obadiah Turner who wrote a journal.

He was from Massachusetts living around the 1640s.

And he, in particular, had a fox's tail on one side of his stick.

And on the other one, he had a long thorn which he used to prick people.

Really?

So it wasn't just a little whack around the head.

He actually stabbed you with it.

And he said there was someone called Mr.

Tompkins who fell asleep.

And and he pricked him with his long prick and the guy woke up and said bust the woodchuck

and apparently he'd been dreaming about a woodchuck biting his hand when actually you know when you're asleep and you kind of integrate the alarm into your dream yes but that's what he'd done was it

is he saying bastard woodchuck bus the woodchuck that's a good church it's a good church appropriate swear swear yeah yeah you haven't seen it's midst oath isn't it yeah yeah yeah do you think it was more or less annoying for the priest giving giving the sermon that rather than have people falling asleep quietly, it was just a constant cacophony of, ow, fuck!

Bust the words up!

That's a good point.

I'm not sure it was about being annoyed so much as the people in the church are supposed to be listening to the word of God.

Exactly.

So, who's got ultimate authority over this system?

Is it the sluggard waker has autonomy and is allowed to basically stand at the front and see people falling asleep?

Or does the priest have to say, there,

pew three, seat form.

No, the priest is doing his gig.

You've got

sluggards there to make sure it all goes smoothly.

That's the skill of the job, surely.

It's the only skill of the job, is spotting the sleeping people.

If this priest has to keep telling you, then you're being fired.

Here's a person who needed a bit of skill.

Betty Finch, who was a sluggard waker in Warrington.

She was known locally as the bobber because the way that she woke people up is she had a fishing rod and she had a little bob, like a little weight on the end of her fishing rod, and she used to swing it round and wake people up very deft with the rod.

And if you did it repeatedly, she got a hook into your cheek and just reeled you up.

She was the only, I found a few names of the actual people given the job.

She was the only woman with the job I found.

So it feels like a very sort of male-dominated industry.

Yeah.

And as I said, they did often have other roles in the church, didn't they?

One of them seemed to be dog whipping, which was an important thing to do because in church services in times of yore, and we're talking about a long period of time, Sluggard Wakers existed, I think.

Yeah, yeah, six years ago.

Something for millions of years.

Yeah, yeah.

So farmers would often, if they're going to church, they'd be like, well, I'm going to use this chance to bring all my sheep, sell them at market.

So they go, sell the sheep at market, go to church, and they've got all their sheepdogs in church.

So you've just got a bunch of sheepdogs running around.

So yeah, the Sluggard Waker also whips the dogs out of the church during services.

Well, can we give the the proper name of this position?

The knockknobbler.

The knock knobbler.

That's the person who has to chase the dogs out of church.

Distracting, I would have thought.

That's like the Benny Hill show down there.

Yeah, then no, that's the knockknobbler or the dog noper.

That was another one.

Who just has to get in there and whip the dogs.

And they have special tools as well.

So the dog whipper, who might also be the Sluggard Waker, was sometimes issued with a special set of tongs for those hard-to-reach dogs.

If a dog had hidden in a crevice or something in the church, you'd have to use the tongs.

Yeah, I've seen those.

We have been, this is really exciting.

We've been somewhere which has a dog whipper's flat.

Okay.

A flat.

A flat like an apartment.

Oh, right.

So we've been somewhere.

Was it the Sydney Opera House?

That's right.

Yeah, very late

when it was being built.

They thought, that's just okay.

No, it's Exeter.

We went to Exeter on tour last year.

Yeah.

And Exeter's got a cathedral, a lovely cathedral, which I visited.

Didn't see any of you guys there.

Yeah.

No praying?

Well, we had confidence in our research.

We didn't really feel like we had to go and get help from the Almighty.

He was, oh, please, God, please, I just

see one good fact about Lasagna's.

Well, it's not an actual apartment.

It's a room.

But it is a room.

It's a really nicely placed room.

So as you go into the cathedral, it's just above you there.

And it looks out onto the nave.

It's a viewing spot, basically.

So you can, you know, be on 24-hour shift looking for dogs in the cathedral.

Well, and then you have to descend quickly as soon as you see a dog.

Yeah, there's a pole.

You slide down it.

Yeah.

Swing on the zipline.

Yeah.

That's cool.

Do you think that's where whippets come from?

They maybe were the worst behaved.

Yeah, whippets.

And you needed to whip it often.

Oh, really?

Definitely the origin.

I think it did really used to piss priests off, by the way.

I know we were saying, would they go through the talk?

It really did.

And there was in American Boston in the 1600s,

there was such fury from a priest over there that he suggested that a cage be made so that you would drag the sleeping person into it and cage them up like a bird and just let them have to wake up and deal with that.

And that was off the back of someone being woken up and in a rage attacking the sluggard waker or tithing man as they were often called

tithing man as they're often called in America.

Are they called that?

Interesting.

That's why.

Because a tithe is the bit of your income you give to the church.

Yeah.

So probably as well as doing this, they collected the money.

Yeah.

They're actually very busy people, the sluggard wakers.

They also rang the curfew bell.

So we had in this country a curfew bell again since early medieval times, which was, I think the original aim of it was to keep people from having like rebellious, seditious meetings.

But anyway, it was quite useful because it stopped fires, because curfew, literally coming from the French, I think to cover the fire, couvere feu is like time to cover your fires now.

And it tended to be 8 o'clock.

And so at 8 p.m.

every evening, then you'd have the curfew bell rung to like cover your fires and go to bed.

It's early.

Even for Andy, who's

famously not a night owl, you wouldn't want to have to be in at 8 o'clock every day.

Even I normally make it to the watershed at 9 p.m.

Half an hour of rude TV, straight to bed.

Praying for your sins of watching it after this.

Have you guys heard of the role of the beggar banger?

Beggar banger.

Banger.

The beggar banger.

Yeah.

No.

What's that?

It's not as exciting as it sounds.

It's someone who was responsible for controlling the length of stay of any unwanted strangers in the parish.

Okay.

They were known as the beggar banger.

Was that employed by the church?

Because that's not a very churchy, welcoming thing to do.

As a church, you are supposed to embrace particularly beggars and paupers, aren't you?

Charity has its limits, Anna.

And you know,

as Jesus said.

Are you guys aware of Acts of the Apostles chapter 20, verse 7 to 12?

Can you just...

They are just start me off and I'll okay.

So Paul was preaching.

Oh, yeah.

Okay, and he was preaching.

He's doing this speech, and it's a very long speech.

And there's a guy called Eutychus.

And Eutychus was listening, but it was a really, really boring speech.

So he fell asleep in the middle of St.

Paul's preaching.

And as he fell asleep, he fell out of a third-floor window and died.

So this is what the Bible says will happen to you if you fall asleep while someone's preaching.

And that's why churches are always on the ground floor now.

Yeah, you get very few on the top of skyscrapers.

I was just thinking a third floor window is pretty, is a risky place to risk falling asleep.

Well, quite.

Yeah.

Probably don't sit there if St.

Paul's doing nothing.

Anyway, luckily, Paul went down, picked him up, brought him upstairs and said, oh, don't worry, he's fine.

Even though everyone could see he was dead.

But then, a bit later, he did come back alive.

Oh.

Any more explanation on that?

It's the Bible, Dan.

That's the kind of thing that happens in the Bible.

Zombies, very common.

I've got to read this book.

Have you guys heard of pew openers as a job?

No.

No.

A pew opener was someone who basically was an usher.

He would collect you at the front.

He would walk you to your pew and they used to have little doors.

And he would open up the door and he would allow you to not have to do that on your own.

And he got paid a very minimal amount for doing that.

And you could also pew rent.

So you could rent the actual row that you wanted.

You know, he was a concierge kind of character.

It's quite interesting because if you go to church, you'll find that the same people every week go to the same church, right?

And they all tend to sit in the same places.

And if a new person comes into the church and sits in one of those places, there are eruptions.

Do you think the pew opener would say, excuse me, I think that's actually where Madam.

Because certainly,

I imagine he did this mostly for the wealthy families.

They would have their own pews where they would sit.

Yeah.

And he'd be the one guiding them to them.

Have you guys ever been to a church with a box pew system?

No, what's that?

Those are good.

So it's, you know, pews are in rows normally.

And some church, some

Georgian and earlier churches would have box pews.

So it's kind of a little pen that you sit in.

The Murrays don't have to sit with the riffraff.

Well, you know, or any surname, any family, yeah, yeah.

Any family of good standing.

No, no, no, but that was a.

We once did an ostentatious photo shoot in a church which had those.

That's very, very interesting.

That's what they were made for.

Do you know someone else whose job it was to guide you to your seat?

Could be, would be the deaconess.

And the deaconess seems to be one of the only official church jobs you could get as a woman, and from like really early church time.

And basically, so one of her jobs would be to guide you to

your pew.

Another job would be like you'd help distribute communion.

You could take communion to people in the community who couldn't make it to church.

And they were basically ordained.

And the reason they came into being, really, was to stop male church officials from seeing naked women.

So their initial job was baptism.

Because,

yeah,

and baptism was almost always adults then.

And it was always get your kit off.

You got your kit off, you went into a river, and it was very improper for a male priest to be seeing accompanying a woman into the water.

Sure.

So, that would be her job.

She'd undress the woman, hold the veil up so none of the clergy could see, go into the water with her, baptise her, pop out again.

That's awesome.

Do you guys know what a pedo-baptist is?

Here we go.

That's someone who baptizes children.

It's you're very close.

It's someone who believes in baptizing children.

Yeah, there's a big divide in the church between pedo-baptism and credo-baptists.

Did they have John the Baptist and John the Pedo-Baptist?

It's funny, only one of them's made it to the big time, hasn't he?

What was the other?

Credo-Baptists.

Credo-Baptist.

And they're people who believe that you should only be baptized once you have been able to come to an adult understanding of God on on your own.

Credo is Latin for I believe, right?

And so the idea is that you can say yourself that you believe it, as opposed to a child who doesn't really understand what it all means.

What have they done to deserve?

Well, I always thought it was just about protecting them to get into heaven.

Ah, and it's interesting because it seems like Hannah and I are credos.

Yeah.

Damn, it sounds from what you're saying.

Big old pedo.

Interesting.

I'd never heard those

terms.

No, I don't think they get bandied around actually, so I don't know why.

I said I'm a credophile.

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

My fact this week is that the Queen of France once pranked a girl at court by secretly taking in her clothes to make her think she was pregnant.

This is just

great, yeah, pretty mean.

This is this great, great story from the memoir of Hortense Mancini, and she was one of the Mancini sisters who were so fun.

But

her uncle was a guy called Cardinal Mazarin, who was the closest person to the royal family in France, really.

And Cardinal Mazarin decided that he would start teasing his six-year-old niece.

That's the thing.

That's the thing.

You hear this fact and you think, oh, it's a clever prank to play on someone who's probably, what, 20 or maybe a teenage.

It's a six-year-old.

That's what makes it so funny.

So there's this girl called Marianne, who's six-year-old, and she's the person who's writing the account hall tense.

It's her little sister.

And Cardinal Mazarin says, Hey, you've got an admirer, and he's got you pregnant, hasn't he?

And then they would take her clothes away and secretly take them in, so they got tighter and tighter.

So she thought that she was pregnant.

And the whole court got in on this gag.

You know, it was just hilarity for everyone.

Billion, wasn't it?

Really?

Oh, look, it's a fine line, isn't it?

Between are you laughing with her or laughing at her?

It's a fine line, and I think they crossed it.

Anyway, the queen, it was Anne of Austria, and she was the queen mother at that time.

She had been married to King Louis, and then she'd been the Queen Regent, so she's referred to as the Queen.

She turned up by the six-year-old's bedside, consoled her, said, Gosh, yes, you are a pregnant, aren't you?

And then they planted a live infant in her bed, which we think was a baby of one of the servants.

This is next level, I think.

Yeah.

This is Jeremy Beadle level.

This is crazy level.

This is amazing.

And then what happened next?

Well, the queen offered to be the godmother, so well done, you.

And then I think they probably at some point came clean.

I don't think they made her raise the child.

I think the person whose child it was would have objected.

Well, they asked her who the father was, didn't they?

And she said it could only either be the king or the comte de Guiche.

Yes.

Because they were the only ones who she kissed.

Yes.

And she was like, that's quite sweet.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Although the Comte de Guiche was a known absolute playboy, so right.

She wouldn't have known that.

She's six.

She was so excited.

He just gave a little kiss on the cheek.

I quite like this in the memoirs from Hortense, who was three years older than her at the time.

So she would have been nine.

And she said, She was very proud to know the truth of the matter, and I never tired of laughing about it just to show that I knew it.

Which is such a relatable thing when you're a slightly older sibling doing that over-the-top laughing to be like, yeah, yeah, oh, yeah, I get it.

Yeah, kissed.

Please don't do this kind of thing to me.

I feel like an idiot.

I was looking up pregnancy pranks.

Oh, yeah.

There aren't many good ones.

No.

It's mostly pranks that you, if you're pregnant, can pull on people around you.

Oh, right.

It's not like because you could sort of throw a water balloon at someone in the night and then they think their waters are broken.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

That's one.

That's one.

When you were pregnant, you could walk around with like a doll hanging between your legs.

So it looks as if

you given birth without noticing.

Yeah, these are all about the level of the ones I found.

The only one I found that was any good potentially was using your pregnancy to help someone else with their pregnancy prank, where you can pee on their pregnancy test.

Oh, yeah.

And then it'll come up as a yes.

Yes, right.

And then she'll be able to say to whoever, you know, oh, look, I'm pretty sure that's so funny.

Here's the thing: that men don't really know much about pregnancy tests.

So you could literally probably just take a vape and draw a line on it and say, oh, look, I'm pregnant.

You can

take a COVID

test.

I'm not pregnant, but you do have COVID.

This book is, it was published in 1675, and I guess at the time, it's sort of quite sort of timely.

We're talking about it.

It's sort of the Prince Harry memoir of its day to an extent because it was very much a...

What an amazing attempt to make this book relevant to absolutely other people.

No, but it just totally is.

It just totally is.

Who is this hortense?

Yeah, hortense.

Did she get a prospits and penis?

Well, she, no,

this was the first time that, you know, this is someone who was amongst the royals.

She was almost basically a queen at one point.

And it was a book that was published when women weren't really writing books either about their personal life.

And so when it came out,

it was a huge bit of news.

And it was scandalous.

And she filled it with gossip.

It would have been like Prince Harry's book coming out and everyone going, oh, wow, you've actually said that.

God, cool.

I've never heard of her prior to reading up on this, but she wrote her autobiography, and then a couple years later, her sister wrote her autobiography as well.

And as you say, they led just an incredibly, interestingly bizarre, fun, but also quite tragic life.

They were in marriages which were very unloved and which fell apart.

They had to flee the country from time to time because of being exiled as a result of their dubious affairs and so on, and their husbands being furious.

It's a real rollicking adventure.

Well, let's let's quickly mention this husband that she had in for

who appears to have been slightly unhinged.

Oh man.

He believed that milkmaids shouldn't touch cows' udders in case they became aroused by them.

Yeah, there are a couple of accounts to this.

Let's give his name.

He's called Armand Charles de la Porte de la Mayor.

That was his name.

And he was incredibly rich, wasn't he?

He was.

He was like the richest man in Europe, pretty much.

Yeah.

And he...

So I read that account that he was worried about milkmaids finding milking sexy.

But then I read another account saying he worried that men might get aroused by the sight of milkmaids doing their milking.

Yes.

You actually think

Hortense didn't write about any of these things actually.

These all came from a guy called Abbé de Choisy

who was he wrote his memoirs and they came out after he died and they're all about the story of how he went to live in the countryside in France, pretended to be a woman and seduced a load of young girls.

And he apparently was friends with Perrault, who wrote a lot of fairy tales.

So we think actually a lot of it might not have been true.

But he was the one who wrote all this stuff about this crazy guy.

And he was basically the idea with Armand Charles was that he was incredibly pious, wasn't he, and very religious and imposed really strict rules like that.

So he thought everyone was going to be aroused all the time.

Did things like he had a collection of priceless works of art that he'd inherited, and in fact, from Cardinal Mazarin.

And he went around knocking all their genitals off because he thought the genitals were improper.

You know, he'd slash tapestries, he'd painted black bits of penis and balls and nipple on various paintings.

And there are so many different accounts.

So one of the things I read is that he did that specifically because he was worried that she, Hortense, was going to get aroused by them.

To be fair, she did have quite a few affairs.

She did, she had a ton.

She had a ton.

She was even around.

And she almost married Charles II when I mentioned before that she almost became queen.

So Cardinal Cardinal Mazarin, who was sort of, he was their uncle and he was very much taking them around town and trying to set them up and arrange marriages.

Charles II met Hortense, fell in love with her and thought, I've got to marry her, made the offer and he said no, because Charles II was in exile.

And he said, no, you've got, you know, you've got your name, but you've got no money, you've got no title, I don't know your prospects.

And so he denied it.

And then only a few months later, even weeks, Charles II suddenly is restored back as king.

And so Mazarin comes running back saying, actually, Hortense would love to take your offer.

And he says, Nah, I'm afraid that's not going to happen.

Such a shame.

Yeah.

This could have been a queen of England.

Yeah,

because they did hang out in England.

Hortense definitely fled to England and spent a lot of time at court, and she was super fun, livened the whole place up.

And they were the thing is, they were this Italian family, and we should say they were called the Mazarinettes.

And there were seven of them all together, and they were the seven nieces of the cardinal.

And they all looked quite different.

They were dark-skinned when everyone was very pale-skinned.

They looked similar to each other, but different to normal

people.

To normal noble women, yes, who were all very pale.

They all seemed to have the same name.

There were two Laura's, two Anne-Marie, and one Marianne, which is quite confusing.

But yeah, they were fun, and Hortense, especially.

So at one point when she ran away from Armand Charles, she ended up in a convent, or I think she was put in a convent to try and make her behave.

But she became best friends with this woman called Mademoiselle de Corcelle, who maybe she was in a relationship with or had a little fling with.

Maybe they were just really close friends, and they sort of played practical jokes on the nuns quite a lot.

They all thought they were pregnant.

I promise I haven't had sex, all the nuns.

Yeah, she did things like she filled two chests with water, and apparently the water leaked through onto the nuns' beds.

But she had this really cool adventure in the convent where her husband came to try and kidnap her away when he found she was misbehaving.

And her and Mademoiselle Corcelle found, it's like the stuff of fantasies, they found a little hole in a grate in the parlour, which they could just squeeze through to escape.

And so they squeezed through this grate and they climbed out the outside.

And then they actually realised it was a false alarm and their friends were visiting, not her husband.

This is the story of the sound of music.

This is...

They're a baddie, they're in a convent, you're squeezing through a gate.

Yep.

Come on.

Yep.

Well, then they squeeze back in because they were like, God, we're going to look stupid.

It's just our mates.

And she got stuck in this grate between two iron bars for about 20 minutes and mademoiselle corcel had to like tug her out and then they ended up covered in soot on the parlor floor for a snogging no i've i've i've embellished some of the ending but yeah it sounds fun after she died her husband um caught up with her and um had wanted actually to to repatriate her for ages but it's so much easier to catch up with someone after they die well exactly

yeah yeah yeah well he caught up with her he got he got her her body he put it in a sealed coffin great fair play.

You know, it's what you're meant to do.

And then he just

carried it around Europe on a sort of weird, posthumous honeymoon to all the places they had been together in life

for four months.

Yeah.

Long time.

And then eventually he left her in a country churchyard.

And then eventually when he died later, they were buried next to each other.

I don't know how she would have felt about that.

And then during the revolution, they got chucked in the scent.

Yeah, so it it has a an unhappy ending.

Not if you're the people.

Obviously, Andy, you know, I'm a big fan of the aristocracy.

I read an article that she introduced champagne to Britain.

Yes, I read that.

Yeah.

I think popularised snow.

Popularised.

Yeah.

She was fun.

Oh, my God.

Then this is the most fun thing about her.

I did all this reading and then finally, at the end, find this one article which talks about this extraordinary saloon that she opened up in the 70s.

I think salon.

I think a saloon is a Wild West.

Yeah.

Is it not a saloon?

It's a salon.

All the ladies in London used to come, didn't they?

They had to leave their guns at the car

and had those swinging doors and the piano player that would stop when Hortense walked in.

That's it.

Yeah.

So we're calling it Salon, shall we?

Let's go with Salon for the moment.

Because it was kind of French, so let's say a saloon, but with a French angle, like Salon.

So let's land on salon.

I mean, that's definitely.

That's what they're called.

Salons.

Very popular in those days.

Yeah.

So she ran this.

Let me get to the fucking fact.

17th century London.

She had basically this extraordinary book club that she ran next to St.

James's Palace.

And all the ladies who were encouraged not to do this, to have intellectual conversation, to read books and discuss them with each other, to share their ideas, their philosophies, would go.

They would drink champagne and they would do all this stuff together.

And

she was just such a, the article describes her as an influencer of the time.

Definitely.

The interesting thing was these salons were massive in France, weren't they?

They were like a huge thing in France at the time.

And all the middle class and upper class women would go to these salons and kind of learn things.

But she was the one who brought it to London.

Yeah.

Because it didn't exist here at the time.

Yeah.

You could say that really podcasts are the salons of the present day.

In all sense.

Well, we're discussing things.

We allow one woman on our podcast, I'll see you.

Yes.

Traditionally a male environment.

Okay.

Yeah.

It's loose.

It's a discussion, isn't it?

We've all got champagne.

Oh, God, yeah.

I wouldn't come to this if that was a promise.

But she, I mean, this was how great her influence was, particularly with quite obscure texts.

If she introduced a text to be read, it would get round town that this was like something that was amazing and it would boost up a big run of it with translations because people suddenly were going, what are they reading there?

And we have to be part of that.

It was very much the Richard and Judy's book club of its day.

Yes.

Exactly.

That's what it was.

And that's more of a salon.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know what's interesting about Hortense, if you Google her, the first image, the painting that comes up of her, is of her looking very beautiful and then just a little nipple hanging out from the boob.

Did you see that?

Yeah.

And there's only a few paintings of her that are around, but that's one of the signs of that.

I think that might be just your history.

Is deciding what pictures you get.

Yeah, that's possible.

It's interesting you'd have that painted in to an official portrait, not official, but a portrait of you ends up with a bit of nipple in.

Yeah, it's just a general portrait that you get done to show that you're a sexy person, like Janet Jackson.

Yeah, that was why she did that.

But the thing is, with Janet Jackson, it was a malfunction, right?

Which she quickly covered up.

But with a painting, you'd have to sit there for about three days.

Maybe the artist was just too embarrassed.

You know, when like someone has green in their teeth, and they just want to say, but you don't say it, he's like, I've just got to paint it in.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that, according to their origin story, the minions serve the most evil person on Earth.

But they were conveniently frozen in a cave and unable to serve anyone between 1933 and 1945.

Is this official Minions Canon?

I believe it is.

Yeah, why is it?

It's in the movie.

It's in the movie.

It's in the second movie, yeah.

Oh, wow.

So the dates, you've altered the dates there, but that is part of the period when they were frozen.

I gave the dates for Hitler rather than the dates for the minions.

Exactly.

But basically, there's this thing on the internet that people keep...

doing this meme where they say, oh, the minions, they serve the most evil person, but what were they doing during World War II?

And it's like a big joke that, ah, they haven't thought of this, but of course they have thought of it.

And it is in the movie, which I haven't seen.

Yeah, so we did say who the minions are, but they're these little yellow creatures who are in the film Despicable Me, and then all the other and then the film Minions.

Yeah, so they were henchmen that got their own spin-off series, and Minions was 2015.

And in the opening sequence, it tells you the history.

So it says that they serve various evil masters from the T-Rex all the way through to...

When did they get out of the cave?

Sorry to interrupt you, Dan.

So they go into the cave in 1812.

That's when they first go in.

And they emerge in 1968, I think, to avoid being so obviously avoiding the Nazis.

So 1812 would have been just after Napoleon's retreat from Moscow.

Yeah, yeah.

So that was probably well it was very cold in how they were treating.

Exactly.

There we go.

All right I'm on board with the um with the lore.

I love it.

I wonder who they're serving now, who's the most evil person on earth.

A few candidates aren't there.

None in this room.

Sorry, I'm looking around.

The director, one of the co-directors of the films is Pierre Coffin.

Peter Coffin.

Peter Coffin, I have a lot of people.

But his name doesn't actually...

Coffin in French doesn't mean coffin.

What does it mean?

I don't think it means anything, but the word couffin means basket.

Which is very close.

I really thought it was called Peter Coffin.

And then I thought it was called Peter Basket.

And actually, he isn't called either.

But he does the voices of plus the minions, right?

Lots of the minions.

All of them apart from maybe one.

Yeah, well, there's Jermaine Clement from Flight of the Concords does one.

No, one.

Literally one minion, and then this guy, and someone else, but this guy does 899 minions.

Wow.

So there's another director, the co-director of the film, I think, does that.

Who also does some minion voices.

And the language sounds so difficult to do, because every word is, I think, a real word from one language or another.

I think there's some gibberish in there.

There's gibberish as well.

Mixed in with loads of other languages.

But they sound so funny to listen to.

I love the sound of the Minions language.

It's really funny.

Have you seen them all?

No, I haven't seen any of them.

I've seen any of them.

Yeah, I've seen Minions in bits.

You know, you walk in and out while a kid's watching a movie.

Sure.

And then you're asked to leave the cinema because where's your kid?

You know, and you're like, All right, I'm out of here, geez.

Yeah, he's cool, Kofa.

And I think that one of the reasons that the minions speak this combination of languages is that he is very multilingual, I think.

So he's like half Indonesian, half French, grew up in Cambodia and Japan,

and yeah, invented this language.

And interestingly, when it's dubbed into other languages, it gets changed because you notice that they say English words enough that you're like, oh, they must be talking about toast now, or bananas, famously.

But in other languages, they'll sub those words for

that language.

So they'll still use the Indonesian and the different places, but then whenever there was an English word, they use whatever country you know.

Yeah, or just drop in more local words where that's cool.

Yeah, his mum was a famous novelist, wasn't she?

Was she?

N.H.

Dinny Coffin's mum was called.

I'd never heard of her until I did this, but she is an Indonesian novelist and feminist.

Very nice.

At least two of the Minion's films have been banned or altered by censors in China

who dislike various aspects of the plot.

So there's, and I just really like this.

So the film The Rise of Grue, which I think is one of the most recent ones,

the Chinese censors added an entirely different bit of the film at the end of it, clarifying that one of the characters who previously had been involved in a heist in the film, you know, fictional film, fictional heist, everything, was caught and served 20 years in prison for the heist.

I mean, that's so gale.

They also say that Grew returned to his family and his biggest accomplishment was his free children.

And apparently the reason that they've done this, most people think, is to promote China's three-child policy,

which they've been trying to do to increase the birth rate over the last few years.

Wow.

God.

I've been reading about other animated villains, various guys.

And

so Scar, the Lion King.

Yeah.

No spoilers, please.

I haven't seen it.

I think I can avoid spoilers.

Great.

Who is sexier, Scar or Mufasa?

According to just us or you?

According to you?

Are they both lions?

Yep.

Equal.

Mufasa.

Mufasa.

Okay.

Jane says equal.

I find them both equally attractive.

I do say that lions could be more or less sexy than each other.

It's apparently completely impossible for James to compete.

I thought it was a subjective question.

Do you find all you must think there are some animals which are sexier than other animals in the same species?

How about that buff kangaroo?

I'm not sure that that is true.

Do you think of all humans as being equally sexy?

Absolutely.

I don't see sexy.

Apart from my wife, of course, who's slightly less sexy than ever.

Wait, doesn't your cat have a modelling contract, though?

No, she doesn't.

She has

appeared.

She has appeared in some adverts.

So you must think she's sexy.

You don't have to be sexy to be an advert.

That's not what they are always casting about.

The difference here is...

Captain Birds are

a terrible example.

The sexiest man.

Can I just say I don't find my cat sexy?

Yeah.

You're allowed to say that.

It can be a modeller, not sexy.

It's the human personality which is adding to the sexiness of these characters as well.

Well, they've got voices, haven't they?

Yeah.

Human voices.

And speaking in English, yeah, yeah.

For me, I would say that physically, Mufasa definitely sexier, but in terms of personality and voice, Scar, of course, is more sexy.

Okay.

Wells.

Scar's like old and mankey, looks like that.

No, but I know, that's why I said.

No, I know.

No, no, and he, personality-wise, is evil.

Okay, well, can I say one of you is right and wrong?

Mufasa is less sexy than Scar.

Scar is the sexier one

physically and would be in the real world as well.

In fact, specifically in the real world.

So, this is a study about what makes a lion sexy or unsexy.

And for years, they've been thinking about...

Come on, you're talking from a lion's perspective.

That was the whole point.

This is about main darkness.

Right, yeah.

Because some lions have really, really light manes, and some have really, really dark ones.

And, you know, scientists have been trying to work out for years,

does this have any effect at all?

And they just introduced these faked lions and they could sort the manes around.

And you could attach them with Velcro, so you could whip off a mane and then reattach it.

And the dark manes were very much preferred by the lady lions, lionesses, as they're also known.

But interestingly, dark maned lions have more abnormal sperm.

Because they have heat stress, because their manes are so dark that they keep absorbing sunlight.

Interesting.

And they have to eat smaller meals as well, because they get more heat stress.

And if they eat a massive great meal, you know, it warms you up.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, sometimes you have a huge meal.

Oh, it's so hot.

Now I've made sperm are deformed.

Would you like a dessert?

No, they're deformed enough already.

That's why I make my husband dye his hair peroxide blonde before every meal.

I've got to watch out.

I'm sure that peroxide touch for him.

Lex Luther, do you know what made him evil?

He's the villain in the Superman universe.

I don't.

I don't know.

I don't have a handle on where he came from.

What is he?

He's just like a rich guy.

He's a rich guy, but he was a scientist.

It was basically Superman made him bold.

And that is why.

Bold?

Yeah.

As in no hair.

So he used to have a huge amount of ginger hair on his head.

And there was an incident between Superman and Lex Luthor where they were in a science lab.

Lex Luther was trying to make something really good.

Superman had to blow it out because something went a bit wrong.

And in the big Superman blow that he did, it just pushed these chemicals onto Lex Luthor's head, made him bold.

He was so furious, he became a supervillain.

And that's an overreaction.

It's an overreaction.

He's got temper issues.

What's amazing is this is a retroactive story to explain why he suddenly goes bold.

Because you know, part of like comic book artistry, they would hand it to sort of, as it was, ghost artists who would come in and do the sort of comic strips and help them.

One of the guys who was in charge of it one week mistaken Lex Luthor for one of the bold henchmen and accidentally drew Lex Luthor as a bold-headed man.

And so it was a total mistake, and it ran for a couple of weeks.

It went out, and then another one went out, and that just had to be it.

So he had no hair.

So the only reason he's bold is an artistic mistake.

Who the hell is proofreading this?

That was like releasing a few scenes from The Lion King, where a hyena plays Scar and no one notices.

And then, what?

Lex Luthor would buck the trend of most supervillains because villains in fiction, and particularly depictions of villains, are generally more pointy

than heroes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's this sense of that.

You know, you can draw Mickey Mouse with three circles.

But if he was bad, it would be triangles.

Well, yeah.

So I was reading an explanation about this, about the graphology of films and some of this.

You know, Darth Vader literally has a triangle on the front of his face.

More scary.

Yeah.

But more sexy very often.

I mean, they genuinely are made to be a bit attractive.

Sorry, Darth Vader.

He's got a dark mane, Darth Vader, actually.

So he is more attractive to female Vedas.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He was king of the pride.

Darth,

More like...

All the women, actually, often sexy.

Is he not sexy, Darth Vader?

Darth Vader?

He's got a sexy voice, hasn't he?

Have you seen Under the Helmet?

I haven't seen any of the

helmet.

Don't look under the helmet.

Keep that helmet on.

If you're making out with Darth Vader, just keep that helmet on.

Yeah.

I think in Disney films, the female villains are acknowledged as sexy.

In fact, there's a book called The Enchanted Screen, The Unknown History of Fairy Tale Films.

Who are you thinking of?

Which says...

That woman in the little mermaid, the big octopus.

I'll pick the one example of that daughter.

Although she's got some nice lipstick on.

There's arguments about whether or not she's an octopus because she's only got six arms.

But then human arms or octopus

tentacles, hasn't she?

Right.

I think she has tentacles.

The argument is she does have two human arms, which makes it eight.

Yeah.

But hang on.

Isn't there a QI fact that octopuses have six legs and two arms?

Two like pedipalps.

Yeah, because they use their legs to walk, and they use their arms to grab things.

So they've got it bang on.

She's a perfect octopus.

Six legs, two arms.

Yeah, I guess so, except that she's a myrrh-something, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I don't know.

Do you count the human part in with the octopus part?

I don't know.

I don't know.

Anna, I thought you were saying something about.

I don't think I've got too much time on some weird forums, Dan.

I was just saying that in Snow White, that queen in Snow White is acknowledged according to this book.

It says, as is well known, animators all preferred drawing her when they were making Snow White because she was very complex as a woman and much more erotic than Snow White.

Oh.

And she isn't even Corella Deville.

She is.

And

in sort of that.

They're kind of glamorous, you know?

They're glamorous.

Yeah.

Maybe it's glam.

I think it's glam.

Yeah.

No, they're glamorous.

They're powerful.

They're independent.

They know what they want.

They want to skin dogs to make a coat.

I like a woman with ambitions.

And be sold.

Yeah.

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah.

Yeah.

One thing that they do often have villains, I think this is more men than women actually, but they often have terrible skin.

And dermatologists are not happy about this because they say it may foster a tendency towards prejudice in society.

Because all the bad guys in movies have bad skin, if you see someone with bad skin, you're going to think they're bad.

And really, there's quite a lot of people who are saying that really you shouldn't do this.

We should stop having scars.

We should stop having

a lot of fun.

I'm trying to think who has bad skin.

Well, for example, almost all James Bond villains even

Christoph Waltz in anything that he's in yeah has like scars doesn't he but the the most recent Bond movie has two villains both of whom have facial disfigurements Javier Bardem has one in a previous film and it's

baddie Roger Rabbit there is a like there is a lot of it when you start looking I thought you were talking about acne because I think I mean scars are kind of cool but being covered in acne I can see that that would like be in like

insulting no no no but it's like it's lots of people who suffered facial scarring for whatever like for whatever reason and then you see like, film after film after film, the baddie, you know, is a baddie because they've suffered some facial scarring.

The joker.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

When you start, you do realise, yeah, this is mad.

Yeah.

That's true.

Just another backstory, and another World War II-related backstory.

Oh, yeah.

Donald Duck.

There's a theory about him that I quite like.

So basically.

Is that anything to do with his cockscrew-shaped penis?

Like, the whole duck's up.

I think you can probably make it to do with that.

I believe in you.

But But before World War II, Donald Duck existed, obviously, as part of the Disney franchise.

Lots of shorts with him.

But he was quite a light-hearted, fun-loving duck.

Can I just quickly say, lots of shorts, but no trousers.

Very good.

Thank you.

Thank you for that.

So as we know now, Donald Duck, bad temper, right?

That's what he's famous for.

He's always shouting at his nephews.

He's very...

That's uncanny, James.

That's a good impression.

Really good.

Yeah.

I didn't know you could do that.

It's not a good-tempered noise.

It's not a happy noise.

So he changed.

And the theory is that it was the war that changed him because he is the only character in the Disney franchise who actually saw active service.

So you know that.

He was on the beaches at Normandy.

He only wanted a piece of bread.

What do you mean he saw active service?

He since all those cartoons.

You know all the propaganda cartoons that Disney released during the war?

Loads and loads of propaganda cartoons.

So all the characters featured in these, but they didn't go actually actually into battle except Donald Duck, who did, I think, in which theatre?

What do you mean?

In which theatre of the war did he fight?

The Pacific.

Sorry, I didn't see that.

I actually think it might have been the Pacific.

Well, he is a duck.

It would be, it makes sense for him to be in the water.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He should be maybe.

If he's in any of the services, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I can't remember, to be fair, but he's seen serving, shown serving in the US military in one of the propaganda films, fighting an air battle against the Nazis.

Oh, an air battle.

But he is is a duck, after all.

Makes sense that he should be in the air force.

He's the perfect weapon.

He doesn't even need a plane.

No.

Wow.

And you're saying that he's got PTSD

straight after the World War II.

His temper got worse.

He became very sensitive to loud noises.

You know, if his nephews make a racket, he gets upset.

And that's the idea.

And actually, in a recent DuckTales, he had to have anger management courses.

Wow.

So that's the theory he's got PTSD from the war.

And all the evidence is there, I think.

Whenever anyone was shooting, they would go, duck!

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

My fact is that every barge firm on the River Thames used to have its own signature whistle.

Oh my god.

That's very cool.

Yeah.

This fact, Andy, I reckon if you put all of your facts into an AI,

this is what they might come up with.

London whistling and a means of transport, because it's not very popular anymore.

Yeah,

seemingly dull.

But really interesting when you get into it.

Well, let's find out.

Yeah, exactly.

You be the judge at home.

So, anyway, this was on a British Library blog post about the decline of whistling, which is absolutely meat and drink to me, obviously.

And it's about Leiterman.

Leiterman were the

men, almost exclusively, who steered barges to their destinations.

And barges are basically flat-bottom boats that were used to transport lots of cargo.

So you might dock your ship in the river because there isn't a proper dock.

You just drop it in the middle of the river, and then you have to unload it.

And the barges are the things that go back and forth,

emptying them out or loading them up.

And there were different barge firms, and every barge firm had its own whistle.

And it was so you could identify yourself at night.

There we go.

Whose was that?

Yeah, that's the sexiest of all the barge firms.

James obviously doesn't see any difference between sexist and barge firms.

The barges are all the same.

Yeah, so barges.

Barges are great.

The apprenticeship used to be five years long just for the Thames.

Anna's been on a barge.

You've looked after a barge, haven't you?

Yeah.

Well, a canal boat, so not one of the big Thames barges, which you had to sail must be the same.

No,

James, please.

We're going to get deeply into the difference between a narrow boat, a barge, all of it.

But the apprenticeships lasted for so long, didn't they?

So they were introduced, I think, in 1555.

And that was when Parliament established the company of Waterman and Lighterman because, you know, they needed to regulate the industry.

And I think it only stopped maybe 500 years later.

I think it was 2007, the government suggested.

Maybe we don't need to spend five years learning.

So more than 500 years, exactly.

I mean, it is tough, but come on.

Also, there are no working barges on the Thames anymore, so it does seem quite weird to be doing that.

Do you think it's a good thing that we stopped people learning how to barge?

like getting them to do maths instead these days?

Well,

you can now do do it.

It takes just two years of training now and six months of local knowledge training, which is.

But then are people just trashing barges into each other?

Yeah, it's woefully inadequate.

It's ridiculous.

Have you seen the Thames here?

So you're saying there's no barges these days, but they're clearly.

Well, there are barges for other purposes.

So it's not really for freight anymore.

It's for tourism or for taking

like restaurant barges.

I don't think there are any that are having iron deposited from Europe and carrying them on the bottom.

Well, there were two, right?

You had the lighterman, which is carrying all those goods back and forth, but then you had the watermen, who were the people that carried people across, which was a massively important thing back in the day, because getting across from the south side of London to the north was an incredibly hard thing sometimes.

Or the other way.

Or the other way, even if you...

Why would you go south?

Good point.

I live south.

Yeah, so people like Pepys write about it, saying, you know, it was the quickest way to get across because often the clogging on the bridges would be so great it was you say bridges was bridge

bridge london bridge was the only one east of kingston which is a lot of river with one bridge across it so they were they were massively important and get this i love this so loads of their trade came from transporting people to the theatre so that was why you would go to the south bank because it was where all the theatres were yeah so like that was a huge bit of trade for the watermen and then when covent garden set up where we're recording this podcast,

their trade suffered massively because there were suddenly theatres north of the river.

No one had had to cross the river anymore to go and see a show.

But you could still get carried down the river, couldn't you, if you lived in Chelsea and you had to get to Covent Garden?

Oh, yes.

True, although there were other means of getting from Chelsea to Covent Garden.

So they were so...

angry about the loss of their trade and they campaigned so much uh to charles the first when he was king that in 1635 he banned taxicabs in the city unless they were travelling three miles out of the city no way to keep the barges in business keep the barges happy I try to find any notable lightermen.

So the closest I found, well, Danny Dyer, who's a quite famous character, his family, he came from a long line of lightermen.

Oh, is that right?

That's interesting.

That seems classic.

But one that I thought was a bit relevant to us was I found that a comedian came from a long line of lightermen, and it was a comedian who was called Malcolm Hardy.

And during the boom of alternative comedy in London, particularly, he was a great voice, and he used to open clubs and they were known as dangerous clubs because you would have heckles from the audience.

He would heckle the act coming, you know, I don't know about this next act.

They might be a bit shit.

I think they are.

Please welcome to the stage.

You know, and then bring to him.

Cheers, Malcolm.

Thank you.

So he was an amazing character and he wasn't a lightsman himself, but he did live on the Thames.

He had a boat that he lived on.

And sadly, quite a few years ago, he fell into the Thames and died.

But what is interesting about Malcolm Hardy is he's very relevant to us and even the listeners of this show because he opened up a club in Greenwich called Up the Creek,

which is where we do all of our live shows often in London.

And that is the Malcolm Hardy Club.

Have you heard of the Trojan barge?

No.

No.

So this was during the 80 years war

and the Anglo-Spanish War because they kind of coincided with each other and it was the city of Breda

and the Dutch and the English were trying to capture it it and the way they did it was with a Trojan barge.

There was a canal or a small like a shallow river that went into the city and they had a barge with a load of peat in it, a load of moss,

one for you.

And they all hid underneath the peat and they got into the city and then jumped out and then took the city.

That's brilliant.

And it was kind of like one of the turning points of that war.

Really?

Yeah.

So wait, did they, when you say that barge with a load of peat, they didn't put peat on top of the barge and disguise it.

They did, they they disguised it.

They hid underneath the...

No, no, the barge, everyone knew it was a barge.

Everyone knew it was a barge full of peat, but what they didn't know is that there were soldiers in between the barge and the peat.

That's incredible.

And the soldiers used the peat to kind of hide themselves even once they got off the barge.

So

the people afraid they were being attacked by moss men.

This is like the moving forest in Macbeth, basically.

Yes, you're being attacked by

that.

That is so cool.

Yeah.

Did they have to snorkel through the peat?

Because peat, I think, was being very heavy, very dark.

If you're lying with peat basically buried under peat, that's not good for you.

Probably the amount of peat above them wasn't so much that they all suffocated.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I see that.

Yeah, I'm just imagining like a little flat hat that you'll kind of wear.

Yeah, but you can't kind of have too little peat, because otherwise they'll see.

Oh, wait, isn't there something under that peat?

Probably a Goldilocks amount of peat that they used.

And that was the amount that they used.

Brilliant.

Well, that's military planning for you.

That's magic.

They actually did do a previous run with another peat barge.

So yeah, they did it with just like one or two soldiers to see if it was going to work and it did work and then the next time they did it properly.

That's so funny.

What do the soldiers then do once they're in the city?

But there are only two of them.

Pete, give you peat.

Anyone want some peat?

Fellow Brada people.

I don't have any frame of reference to the 80 Years' War.

No, and nor do I in this short paragraph that I've written.

But yeah, it was basically the...

I think it was just...

I'm going to be wrong, but I think it was just before the Glorious Glorious Revolution.

So I think it's whenever that was.

1688?

Oh, yeah.

It's one of those.

It was one of those mid-European, mid-century wars.

Yeah, they all merged.

The 80 Years' War, the Hundred Years' War, the 27 Years' War.

They weren't very creative with the names, were they?

I've got one more barge anecdote for you.

This is actually sent in by a listener.

This is sent in by Hannah Watson a while ago.

In 2004, there was a sightseeing barge trip happening in Texas, right, on a lake called Lake Travis.

There were 60 people on board.

Unfortunately, the barge then passed a place called Hippie Hollow, which contains what was certainly then the only public nude beach in Texas.

Every single person on the barge moved to one side of the boat in the hope of seeing somebody naked, and it capsized and it ditched them all in the water.

Beautiful.

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 Anna.

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That's right, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, no such thingasfish.com.

It's got all of our previous episodes up there.

It's also got a link to Club Fish, our secret members' club, where you can hear all sorts of bonus content.

Do that now.

Otherwise, come back here next week.

We've got another episode waiting for you.

We'll see you then.

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