426: No Such Thing As The Man-Trap Of Walford

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Hi, everyone.

Welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish.

Daniel Schreiber is not here this week.

He has gone to a place that shares a name with something you might take to the beach with you.

And if you listen to the rest of this episode, you'll be able to work that out.

But anyway, the main thing is that Dan is not here this week.

And so we needed someone to replace him.

And who have we got?

We have the most incredible guest.

It is comedian Lucy Porter.

You will absolutely love her on this week's podcast.

And at the end, you're definitely going to want to check out all of her stuff.

And that would include Fingers on Buzzers, which is a podcast she does all about quizzing with my good friend and the fixen from the TV show, The Chase, Jenny Ryan.

Lucy has also got a brand new stand-up show called Wake Up Call.

She's taking it to the Edinburgh fringe this year, and then she'll be touring the UK in 2023.

If you want to go and see that, and I definitely recommend you do that, then go to lucyporter.co.uk and you can find out more about Lucy.

Anyway, I'm certain you're going to really, really enjoy this podcast.

We had such a good time making it.

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 Covent Garden.

My name is Andrew Hunter Murray and I'm joined this week by James Harkin, Anna Tajinski and special guest.

It's Lucy Porter.

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

And in no particular order, here we go, starting with Lucy.

My fact is that if you were a baby born in Korea in December 2020, you could be one, two, or three years old.

So just take your pick.

Yeah, multiple choice.

Just be whatever.

I am very keen on being able to manipulate your age, as so many people in show business are.

But I had never heard of this until I was watching Ultimate Beastmaster, which is my favourite of the competitive obstacle course shows.

What?

Everyone's got to have a favourite.

Ultimate Beastmaster.

Ultimate Beast Master.

Is it like Sakeshi's Castle?

It is.

It's like it's

yes, it's a big beast.

And there was a Korean contestant on that and talking about his kid.

And he went, Oh, well, he's two in Korean age.

And I was like, What is Korean age?

And it turns out that in Korea and other parts of East Asia, there is a different numbering system for age.

So the Korean system, which is when you're born, you're a year old, right?

The minute you come out, that's your first birthday, which makes sense because your first birthday is your first birthday.

So then

you gain another year every New Year's Day.

So effectively, what that means is everybody gets a year older on the same day.

Which I like the idea of that because I think birthdays are depressing when you wake up and you're maybe a little bit hungover, certainly a bit tired after your birthday, and you're another year older.

Whereas in Korea, everybody celebrates on the same day.

But then it'd be hard to get a table in TGI Fridays wouldn't it if everyone had a birthday the same name?

Yeah the sole branch of

also you've literally just have to buy everyone Christmas presents and then you have to buy an entire new raft of birthday presents.

Oh yeah.

Well you'd help you'd get two for one wouldn't you?

I mean it was I suppose you can cheat it like that.

Yeah yeah yeah.

So there's one system where you get a a new birthday, a new year every New Year's Day.

There's another system which is the New Year birthday where you are no years old when you're born.

You have your first birthday after a year, and then you do the thing where you add a year on New Year's Day.

Or, of course, they also use the international system where you just turn one year older on your actual birthday.

So that means you can have three different birthdays.

So confusing.

Or ages, three different ages.

But I used to think, did anyone else used to think it was so unfair that people born in a leap year, like my granny, remember she was born on the 29th of Feb.

And I thought that meant she would live four times longer than the rest of us.

Because we'd always say, you know, oh, Gamma's only 15 years old.

That's so interesting.

Then I used to get so annoyed.

And actually, she has not lived, it turns out, four times longer than everyone else.

That is a shame.

That is a real shame.

But there was a study, wasn't there, of three, four, and five-year-old children asking them about, you know, changing your age and birthdays and stuff.

And quite a large percentage of them thought that when you had a birthday, that was when you got older.

And so if you had like three birthday parties in a week, you would gain three years straight away.

Terrifying, I know,

these four-year-olds, idiots, aren't they?

They're all idiots.

Well, the because the queen two birthday thing, I always was when I was a kid, I was very jealous, as you would be, of like, why do you get two birthdays?

Because my birthday is the end of January, which is a rubbish time.

You should get to choose when your birthday is, shouldn't you?

I know.

Well, the reason apparently the queen has her birthday, the two birthdays, was it was George II who had a November birthday, and he was like, Well, the weather's always miserable so I'll move it to June or whenever it is.

Oh really?

Yeah.

But she actually has loads of she has the official birthday, the actual birthday and then New Zealand, Canada, Australia.

We've done we mentioned once, James worked out that she's actually 79,000 years old.

She can't see all her birthdays.

She was definitely in the high hundreds.

669

birthdays.

I think this is what's happened to me is that I've actually I've aged in dog years somehow.

I've just

we all consider you royalty so I think that might have come across the grand old dame of

actually had 586 birthdays

and in in Korea they even find this confusing don't they to the extent that they are apparently changing it although I don't know if they they will president-elect who I think might be president by the time this podcast goes out President Yoon

he says he plans to abolish it and 71% of Koreans are in favour of abolishing it because they're confused and also when you have things like the retirement age, sometimes it's a good thing.

There was a thing with COVID, wasn't there, where you were getting your injections at a certain age,

but they didn't say whether it was your Korean age or your international age or whatever.

And so people were kind of gaming the system.

Well, I suppose as well for things like if you're, you know, on the cusp of being able to drink booze, or yeah.

I remember when I was young, and I used to, I didn't like to lie because I'm very Catholic, guilty.

So if I was asked for my age when I was trying to buy booze illegally, I would say, say, oh, well, I am in my 18th year.

Wow.

Does anyone ever fall free?

No, of course not.

Because I sounded like I was a Victorian.

I am in my 18th year.

You're either a time traveller or you're...

You're in your 150th year.

Well, the other thing for Koreans that is difficult is that you greet people and talk to people differently depending on their age.

So you do actually need to know how old people are because that will affect how you talk to them.

So if you're saying happy birthday to someone, if they're your age or younger, you say sang il chuk ha he.

If they're a little bit older than you, you say sang il chuk ha hei yu.

And if they're much older than you, you say sang il duk ha dur ya yu.

I was so confident at the beginning, again, it kind of allowed that song Witch Doctor.

That was a bit of that there, wasn't it?

I apologize to our Korean listeners, but that itself seems absolutely ripe with the potential for offence.

Because if you're someone who's older than you, well, here you just get someone the very insulting card, and that's how you do it.

Yeah.

A horrible card that you see in the shops.

Racks and racks of these cards saying, you old bastards.

I've no idea who's buying them.

I've never bought one.

I always just go for one with a dog on the front or something.

But they have a mean card.

Yeah, they do.

Well, it is women overwhelmingly buy greetings cards, don't they?

But they buy buy them for men to give.

So apparently, it's like I'm going to make up a statistic because why not?

Like, you don't care about bags, guys, right?

But like 80% of greetings cards are bought by women.

So it's women buying really, you know, cards for their husbands to give to people they really don't like.

But not back to them to give to other people, other members of the family or friends or whatever.

You wouldn't go to a shop if you were buying something for your husband to buy for you.

You wouldn't buy dear old bastard cards.

I dare you to give this to me.

We may have mentioned this before: that women buy almost all the candles made on the planet.

98% of candles made in the world are bought by women.

And is it true, Lucy, that women buy horrible candles for their husbands to give people, you know, smelling of burning tyres and stuff like that?

The last candle I bought smelled like Jeremy Clartson's balls.

Is it meant to, or did you just get a smoking thing?

I know that.

Yeah, I was like, I recognise that smell.

It was like a Madeleine moment.

There's a whole anecdote there that really

is like.

Gwyneth Patro's range has really expanded, hasn't it?

They've united.

It's a natural partnership, Gwynneth Patrol and Jeremy Clarkson.

Anyway, South Korea.

Yeah.

In 2017, they became the highest life expectancy in the world.

So a girl who was going to be born, let's say, in 2025 or 2030, would expect to live to about 91, we think.

Men probably around 84.

Now, the reason I saw in an article that they're living so long, possibly kimchi is very good for you, you know,

foods,

business food,

another thing, they said hypochondria.

Apparently, only 35% of Koreans believe they're in good health.

And so they all go to the doctors a lot.

And apparently, that's one reason why they live a long time.

But I also thought that obviously we're adding two years to their age, right?

Yeah, I mean, we have no idea how old these people are.

Let's be honest.

They are very much, you know.

Do you remember when we did a story a couple of years ago?

Doris Day found out that she was two years older than she thought.

She was turning 93,

and so to sort of celebrate her birthday, Ohio's Office of Vital Statistics looked into her life and stuff and uncovered some cool stuff about her.

One of the things they uncovered was that she wasn't born in 1924, as if she thought she was born in 1922.

So she found out she was 95.

She wasn't Busan, as well, wasn't it?

Turned out she was Korean.

You can't tell how.

So, Doris Day couldn't have told how old she was by going in a scanner or something, because I was reading about this.

It's so hard to tell how old people are based on their bones.

So, there are lots of arenas where it's tested, like dental scans.

And the other thing is wrist bones.

Apparently, this is a way of measuring, but it's not very accurate.

Because when do you think you get your adult wrists?

I thought that I had the wrist bones.

I think men get them about 13 or 14,

just in time.

I genuinely thought I had the wrists now that I was born born with.

James, you're not Popeye.

Because James has got quite powerful wrists, you know.

Do I?

Well, yeah.

But what I thought...

So you're born with a wrist.

I mean, you know, I know babies are floppy, but your hands drop out first.

The body comes after.

Look, look, all of you.

Basically, wrists can reach maturity, which is where the bones are fused in a particular way,

as young as the age of 15.

But on average, it's 17.6 years.

You know, that's the average age that wrists wrists mature, but it completely varies.

So most children do have adult wrists, as it were, before they are actually adults.

So that is a bad way of telling.

Wait, so I didn't actually realise our wrists fused differently as adults to as children.

I assume they were just the same as the rest of us and gradually grew.

But do they transform into grown-up wrists?

They do.

Yeah, they do.

They develop more serious wrist watches.

That's the way you can tell.

The old Mickey Mouse watch falls off and a new Timex or something grows in its place.

Yeah.

No, just like the bones fuse.

Like your your collarbone, for example, that that's the last bit of your body.

That's the last bit of your body, yeah.

Yeah, interesting.

But then also, even if you can tell that they're probably over 15 or whatever, you can't tell anything beyond that by the wrist, can you?

So, everyone's either under 15 to 17 or over 15 to 17, if that's how you're aging people.

And also, you've had to cut off their hand to find

it.

This is going to make getting into nightclubs very

much.

Hand in here.

Like with fish, you can tell with their ears, right?

They have little otoliths in their ears.

Yeah.

And they get an extra, you know, it's like a tree ring kind of thing, and you can count the rings.

But we don't have that, is what you're saying.

That's what I'm saying.

You know, Happy Birthday is a song.

Because I don't know if we mentioned that it was illegal for ages.

It wasn't illegal for ages.

It was copyrighted for ages.

Sorry.

Yeah, but

people in TV shows and films would sing

happy birthday to you.

Yeah, exactly.

Which is sort of how it gets song anyway.

It was even illegal to sing it in a made-up language.

I like it so much.

There was an episode of Star Trek where they were going to sing a happy birthday in Klingon, and they checked it out and they thought, no, we can't do that one.

We have to pay thousands of dollars to Warner Triple who owned it.

So they replaced it with, for he's a jolly good fellow, in Klingon.

I read something the other day on Twitter, and I think it was Jason Haisley who tweeted this, but it could have been Joel Morris.

But they basically said that when you sing happy birthday, the first note you sing is the lowest note you will ever sing.

And that's really useful to know because when you get to the end, it's too high.

And you know, if you started too high, then you can't reach that last note.

But if you know that the first one is the lowest, you can start really low.

And by the time you get to the end, you'll be able to sing it properly.

Did anyone else genuinely think that James Bent is the lowest note you'll ever sing?

The only way you could reach those depths is by singing a nervous thing.

That is the note that makes people poo themselves.

That's

scientifically proven.

It makes for very awkward birthday parties.

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

My fact this week is that in 2018, a new quiz show was launched on Chinese Prime Time TV where all the answers were about Xi Jinping.

It feels like an easy quiz.

Now the quickfire round

instant buzz.

Yeah, or if you're doing Blockbuster's Witch X.

Well, he's lived a long time now.

I think he's done quite a lot.

So

there's a lot of stuff to memorise there.

But yeah, it managed to last for five full episodes of Xi Jinping-based trivia.

It wasn't cancelled.

It can't have been cancelled because the break-ins were like, I don't think

the first question is like, which

premiere from China looks nothing like Winnie the Pooh?

It was quite similar to that.

Some people would say it was embarrassingly brazen.

So this was on Hunan TV, which is China's most popular TV channel for young people.

And it's called Studying Zhi in the New Era.

And it was about

understanding his thought and memorising bits of his speeches and knowing interesting facts about his life.

And the questions were things like, and they all got it right.

So I think.

Well, you would, wouldn't you?

I mean,

you would.

The ones who got it wrong.

We now move to sudden death.

I watched a quiz over Christmas and it was a Harry Potter quiz and it was loads of teams and they were all massive Harry Potter nerds.

No one got a single question wrong in the whole show.

Like one person would get one question wrong and then that would be the end because no one else would get anything wrong.

Was that coaster by Helen Mirren?

I don't recall.

Yeah maybe.

I've read about it.

There was a sort of Harry Potter tournament, Hogwarts.

Because you ask young people about anything they're interested in and they know everything about it.

That's the beauty of being young and having a memory, isn't it?

Yes, exactly.

It's It's an absolutely pointless exit.

It reminds me of when Andy Osho was on Mastermind, the brilliant comedian Andy Osho, and her specialist subject was John Humphreys, who was the host at the time.

And it was brilliant.

Yes.

Get in his head.

Is there an advantage to getting in his head?

I guess so.

Well, I mean, it's a very strange place to be, his head.

I mean,

I did Mastermind when he was the host, and we had to, you know, you do like the banter, and it was a very strange chat.

They edited out a lot of it, yeah.

I mean, we'll come come back to that.

Can I ask quickly about the Andy Osho thing?

When he phrased the questions, did he ask about himself in the third person?

Or did he say,

what colour are my pants?

I don't remember, actually.

Or did he keep it professional?

What colour are John Humphreys?

Anyway, so Xi Jinping

is, I'm sure he's very embarrassed about this programme and just can't believe they made it about him.

And it feels dreadful that they've had to do it.

But it does feel a bit like a propaganda thing.

But

there's some quite interesting facts I learned about him from it.

So he knows the whole of Faustus off by heart.

Because one of the questions was, at the age of 15, President Xi was sent to become a farmer.

During that period, he walked 15 kilometers to borrow a book.

What was the name of the book?

Faustus.

Very strong.

And

Anna, I was reading this.

This she quiz was a follow-up to another ideology-based quiz, which was called Marx Got It Right, which had a very ambiguous take actually on Marx's legacy, whether it was good or bad.

Yeah, yeah, we could have called it like Top Marx or something like that.

That's a much better title.

The New York Times reported that contestants have nothing to lose but their chains, which is a very good nice, that's funny, yeah.

Yeah, and the winner is everyone

again

and forever with no points.

Just in terms of Chinese high-stakes quizzing,

the exam to be in the civil service service in Imperial China was even more gruelling than this TV game show.

So you would take bedding, a chamber pot, ink and brushes, and spend three days and two nights in an exam centre.

And if people died, the walls were so high that apparently nothing could get in, so that there was no possibility of cheating.

And also you'd write your exam paper and then it would be transcribed by someone else so that there was no chance of somebody seeing your handwriting and recognising it.

And if you died, you were just bundled up in a sack and

tossed over the wall.

Is that right?

Thanks for playing, but

when you were at school, there was always a rumour, wasn't there, in your GCSEs or whatever, that if someone died in your year, then everyone would get an A.

Do you remember that?

No, we never had school.

They just told us if someone died, they get tossed over the wall.

Yeah, that's more of an incentive, isn't it, really?

Yeah, it was amazing that thing, wasn't it?

It changed throughout the centuries because these exams they took place throughout all the different Chinese eras.

But at one stage, they came up with an exam to do the exam.

And then when you passed that exam, you would get to do the main exam.

And then everyone who did that main exam then would do one final exam.

So you had to do two exams to get to the final exam.

The Emperor themselves would apparently supervise the final exam.

In vigilante.

Yeah.

Again, that's very scary, hearing the clack, clack, clack of the emperor's speech as you walked up and down.

No gum.

And apparently, the first exam that you would do, which was the regional one, it was so big and so important that all of your family and friends would kind of sit outside because they want to know how you did.

And they would set up like stalls and food stalls and stuff so that they'd be able to land on their heads.

And you'd see your body parabolic towards them.

Is that?

Yes, it is.

On communism and quizzing, in 1975 on University Challenge, you'll probably know this, Lucy and James, about the Manchester University team, which was David Aronovich.

I didn't know he did this, journalist now, of course, very famous journalist, but he was a socialist student back then.

And he entered with a team.

It seems to be some kind of accident, because they entered intending to take down University Challenge from the inside for its elitism

and answered sort of Trotsky, Engels, Marx until they got told off for every question they came.

Well, yes, until Bamboo Gascoigne got really really pissed off.

Which of the Kardashians?

Yeah, no footage exists of it, sadly.

They wipe the tapes, but yeah, it's a legendary university challenge.

And it's interesting that no footage exists because it's really the fallibility of memory.

Because according to David Aronovich, he just said nonsense answers.

He remembers it as like he asked, did you like Yellow Brick Road or a fluffy hat?

That's what I did on University Challenge, but not intentionally.

You just got really lucky, didn't you?

It was a fluffy hat.

What was a fluffy challenge?

I did, the sort of so-called celebrity one, which is much easier.

And then, yeah, everyone's like, yeah, you want to do the actual university challenge.

But yeah, no, I went to pieces completely.

Me and Rob Rinder, Judge Rinder,

just sat there looking like, oh, what are we doing?

But Lucy, yours was a protest about the elitism of university challenge, wasn't it, when you fell apart?

It absolutely was.

Yeah, one woman protest was staged through the medium of looking a bit confused.

But yeah, that was.

Judge Rinder, he was protesting about his wig, which he wanted a new wig.

He wanted a wig.

He wanted to be allowed to wear a wig on it.

Well,

no footage exists of that but there is footage readily available of the contestant on Family Fortunes, the UK version of Family Feud, who answered the same thing

to every single question in the final round.

So I'll ask you the question.

Let's see.

So name a food that you would stuff.

Turkey.

Pepper.

Stuffed pepper.

I was thinking turkey was my first thought.

Well turkey is your first thought and that was exactly what he answered to every single question.

Or to every question.

Yeah, so was the stuffed one the first answer and then you just got stuck on turkey?

No.

Was the next one name a country which is in both the European Asia?

Imagine this.

What do you get if you remove the letter N from the word turnkey?

No, I'm out.

Yeah, well, what they think happened was, you know, they have a soundproof booth, and obviously something had gone wrong with the soundproof booth.

And he had heard the guy who went first answer the question, name a food you stuff with chicken he sort of lost his mind basically and he came out and the first question was name something you'd take to the beach and he said

maybe he did maybe him and that talking had great days down brighten beach

there's a chinese quiz show at the moment where one of the most recent episodes um one of the people in there had to spell the word toad

and not only did they get it wrong there were three judges and they couldn't decide whether or not they'd spelled it right.

Well eh there are two ways of spelling toad.

There are three ways of spelling.

Yes.

Toad the line, toad the car or the

hole.

Toad in the hole.

Yeah.

This is obviously the Chinese characters dictation competition.

Oh sorry I was forgetting we were in China.

Yeah we're in China and the thing is that the word toad for the animal has 46 different individual strokes.

And so if you want to do it perfectly, it's actually really, really difficult.

And a lot of people make mistakes and it was a 14 year old contestant called Yu Shuang

and she missed out one little dot in the word toad and two of the three judges noticed and then she got kicked out of the fight.

So it wasn't done, it's not done verbally is it where you have to say a straight line and then a curved bit and then two dots underneath and then it's like diagonal

incredibly boring DNA.

So you write it down and then the cameras can see it but her teammates are there as well and the camera sort of pans to them, and they're all kind of drawing it with the finger in the sky.

Do you know what I mean?

Going, no, no, you need to do it this way and do it this way and do it this way.

Oh my god, really cool.

That's a really crazy format.

Yeah, spelling bee in China.

Who knew?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I didn't realise how far bees go back generally.

And they,

I mean, they evolved, obviously, from insects.

No, not those kind of bees.

Bees go back over two centuries, I think, in America.

I was looking up the earliest mentions of them.

In the late 18th century, there were references to things like quilting bees.

That seems to be the earliest kind.

And bee just meant a gathering of people who were doing something that was kind of useful.

Often for a single person.

So a quilting bee would be like, this person needs a quilt.

It takes months to make a quilt.

They're cold now.

If we get together, we'll get it done in one day.

And you'd have a quilting bee.

But the thing I like best is raising bees.

They were for when a new settler came to town.

and wanted to live there.

And I guess it was in America where lots of new people were turning up a lot.

Then the raising bee was when the village would get together and build them a house.

So that's where you would rock up and be like, Do you mind having a raising bee?

The barn thing.

Because the film witnessed with Harrison Ford, where he's a cop and there's a murder, an Amish murder has happened, and he's in this weird community that he doesn't know anything about.

And there's a scene where they raise a barn.

Oh, really?

It's confusing, isn't it?

Because raise can mean either lift something up or burn it to the ground.

If you get the wrong memo.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If you missed the spelling bee last week, you turn up a bit late, burn the new part to the ground.

Well, if you get at the wrong end of the stick with spelling B, then you could be very embarrassed because you think you've just got to spell B, which is one of the easiest words to spell.

I might have a drinking B later if anyone's interested.

Let's just apply B to anything.

I'm having a crying B if anyone wants to join in.

When you were on Mastermind, Lucy, did you win Mastermind?

Well, I don't like to talk about it, but I have won it twice and am the current champion of champions.

But I don't like to mention it.

I wish you hadn't brought it in.

Oh, that is.

What are your your special subjects?

So I did Steve Martin the first time and then Victoria Wood the second time that I did it.

But I thought it'd be quite a nice thing to just sit and watch his movies for a couple of days.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lovely.

Very good.

Because you are a quizzer, but you're also a quizzer, I would say.

Because the word quizzer, the first use of it, was someone who tells jokes.

Oh.

So a quizzer used to be a comedian.

In 1797, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word quizzer meant someone who does pranks or jokes or whatever.

And then, obviously, the word quiz is more recent than that, isn't it?

For like quizzing.

We think it's 20th century.

Well, I, for years, the legendary origin story of the word quiz was that there was an Irish theatrical impresario who wanted to attract attention, so wrote it on walls in Dublin.

And everyone said, Oh, what is quiz?

and

complete nonsense, obviously.

Yeah, that guy was called Richard Daly.

And the anecdote, the earliest I could find, was from 1835 in the Manchester Times.

Times.

But he died in 1813.

So it's quite close to him dying that the anecdote was used.

You know, quite contemporanorious, sort of, however you say that word.

Yeah, it's contemporanorious.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was listening to an old episode and I realised that I don't know how to say that word.

And I think I've said it quite often.

And I don't know how to imagine that.

That's cool.

I'm going to leave it.

But Richard Daly is really interesting.

He went to Trinity College in Dublin when he was 15.

And he was a really turbulent student.

He used to to get into fights all the time.

Apparently, he fought 16 duels in the first two years that he was a universal thing.

And then he left Dublin to go and live in London.

And we're not sure why, but one of the rumours was that he killed a billiard table marker in a duel, and he had to leave and go to London.

A billiard table marker?

That's a person, not a thing.

Well, it could be a misprint for maker, but all of the sources say marker, so it could be someone who draws the lines on a billiard table.

All the old crafts are dying out, aren't they?

Wow.

But yeah, and then he went to prison

after he was doing a show and he got in a fight with an audience member.

And when he was in prison, he wrote a lurid account of an affair with one of his singers who was called Elizabeth Billington.

And she was amazing.

She was

basically of all the English singers who have ever gone to Italy, up to the current day, she had the best reputation as the best singer from England ever in Italy.

Okay until she shagged this guy.

Well she was you know she was sometimes known as the Poland Street Man Trap because she had affairs with the Duke of Rockland, the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Sussex, this person.

Wait, and this was the woman, to trace the back, who shagged the guy who apparently did, but actually didn't write the word quiz all about town.

That's why we're talking about her

clearing things up with the list.

Well, I'm delighted to have heard of her.

I want to hear her version of happy birthday to a start.

I think she probably would have done that.

The Poland Street Man Trap.

Yeah.

I'm going to go and hang around Poland Street now.

It's not far.

Try and co-opt that.

The Poland Street Man repellent.

That's

what I want to be.

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

My fact is that in 1804, William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy built a hut lined with moss.

Thanks, Andy.

Lucy, you're familiar with Andy's moss obsession that we're trying to tramp down, right?

Tramp it down.

We're tramping it down.

We're trampling it up.

The moss man cometh.

I should say, this was sent in

to me by a guy called Nick Hodder on Twitter.

So thank you, Nick,

for the moss fact.

He can now send me moss content every week.

It's great.

So

he and Dorothy, his sister, they visited Scotland the year before 1803 and they saw this hut, a wooden hut, lined with fog, which is what they called moss at the time.

So they were very taken with it, and when they got home to the Lake District, they built their own hut, lined it with moss, covered it with heather on the outside, and it was destroyed very sadly, this important bit of English literary heritage, by the later owner, Thomas de Quincey.

Oh, really?

I know, opium fan and fellow word celebrate Thomas de Quincey.

You probably smoked it.

Can you smoke one?

I'd probably roll the whole thing up.

Give it a go, wouldn't you?

Moss smoker.

And anyway, so the good news is that in 2020, 200 years after this absolute travesty,

a new version has been built.

Isn't it interesting that the word fog in Scotland means moss?

Yes, it is weird.

It's weird, that, isn't it?

Apparently,

it used to be a word for grass, like long grass, and then it became moss because it's like unkempt ground.

And they both come from an old Scandinavian word meaning wind blown.

So you would kind of get fog blowing over the hills, and you would also get the windblown grass and it comes from an old norwegian word fucker

which meant sea mist or light drizzle

if you trace any etymology back far enough eventually you can find a swear one somewhere that's so great our weather forecast must have been so much fun it's going to be an absolute fucking coming in

from north

so wordsworth and dorothy they were tight weren't they they were super they were super tight um

brother and sister obviously But they didn't grow up together.

Or they grew up in the first bit of their childhood together, and then both of their parents died very sadly.

And they were separated.

And William went to school, and Dorothy was sent elsewhere, and they reunited in adulthood.

And they seem to have been full-on soulmates.

And there are even things like the night before Wordsworth's wedding to Mary, who was his childhood sweetheart, who I actually think was a friend of Dorothy's.

The night before his wedding.

You're not applying anything like that.

Sorry, so he married Mary.

He married Mary the night before his wedding.

Dorothy, his sister, wore the wedding ring in bed that he was going to give to Mary.

And then in the morning, William and Dorothy did this ritual where Wordsworth sort of knelt beside her and took the ring off her finger and replaced it onto her finger again.

Sort of a sort of ceremonial marriage to his sister.

And then went and married Mary.

Blind wows.

And she didn't go to the wedding, Dorothy, his sister.

No, no, she didn't attend.

Do we know why?

Was it a wasn't invited venue not big enough kind of thing?

You have to throw a line somewhere with those media, don't you?

It's like

I think she just was grieving terribly that this was happening and that this big, you know, emotional change was happening in her life.

Who knows?

But she did have a diary, which he read, by the way.

Another aspect of their relationship.

But when she heard the wedding had happened, there were people coming up the driveway to inform her, oh, yes, they're married now.

She wrote, I could stand it no longer and threw myself on the bed, neither hearing nor seeing anything.

Wow.

And she lived with them for the rest of

their lives.

She outlived William, then she died, then eventually Mary has wife.

So when William died, with the two women living together, there's a sick comedy.

Sitcom indeed, isn't it?

That's awkward.

I can have the ring back now.

Maggie Smith in that section.

Oh, yeah.

That would be great.

It would be like, do you remember Death Becomes Her, that movie?

With the

Goldie Horn kind of gradually disintegrating.

Yeah, there's like two people who live together, but they're immortal.

Yeah.

And they hate each other and they start trying to beat each other up.

And because they're immortal, they just all their bones break and their wrists get all floppy.

Not their wrists.

Their adult wrists.

Well, shit, on the subject of the diary and stuff, though, but they sort of had joint journals, didn't they?

And they collaborated.

And I did not know that the I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, the inspirational walk for that, was one that Dorothy and William took together around Ollswater in 1802.

I mean, how annoying would it be if you're on a walk with someone, it inspires a poem and it's called I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.

It's like, oh,

I'm him, I was there.

Because my sister had stopped to tie her laces.

And it was her, because she wrote up the daffodils encounter.

Yeah, because they did see a load of daffodils on the walk and then there was a lot of daffodils around there all sorts.

And she was writing, she used some very evocative language about them.

They were, you know, bouncing around and flopping about or whatever.

It wasn't that.

But, you know, the waving dancing host and all of that, that was, some of that language made its way into the poem.

So, you know, co-writer credit.

Well, I think they were co-writers of lyrical ballads, basically.

There was this amazing kind of threesome they had, essentially.

So it was Dorothy and William and Coleridge.

They all lived together in Dorset for a while, in Somerset.

And they, like you said, Lucy, they wrote in each other's notebooks and they sort of finished each other's sentences.

And Dorothy would write up this journal of their walks and the flowers and the clouds and shit.

And so I think it was a collaboration, lyrical ballads.

But Wordsworth wouldn't let anyone else have the copyright of it.

So I think even though it's got a bunch of Coleridge in there, it's got five or six Coleridge poems in there.

Isn't Ancient Mariner poster?

Including Ancient Mariner.

Which is one of, you'd want to own that, really, wouldn't you?

It's the biggie.

But Wordsworth was such a genius poet and Coleridge was all like, Wordsworth, you're the better one.

You know, you're the genius.

you take this.

So it was

when we first met, the Coleridge said he was so excited that he leapt over a fence to get at Wordsworth.

It's such a sweet, it is like a real sort of fanboy.

It really is.

I mean, and I had only recently got to know anything about Wordsworth, and I had thought, oh, he's the daffodils, and it's all very pretty.

And

what a life!

What a life he had.

Illegitimate children, children,

revolutionary France.

He was in revolutionary France, fathered a child, and then buggered off and couldn't get back to the child for like 10 years or something.

Couldn't?

Although,

yeah.

So sorry.

The revolution still happens.

Sorry.

Because we're so aristocratic that it's a bit of a risk.

Yeah, can't even send any money.

So

he did send money, by the way, in case his family are listening.

Yeah, he did.

He sent money.

But yeah, he didn't invite them out of revolutionary France.

And they were royalists, so there was probably some tension for

the...

Which is very bizarre because he was a revolutionary, at least at the start, like all cool, trendy people of the day.

Obviously, he went to France, thought these whole ideas of equality and fraternity and liberty, I love it, sounds great.

Met loads of other fellow revolutionary reformists, and then got a bit put off by all the sort of mass murder that happened.

The terrorist suffers.

And I think he was very good friends with someone who I think he saw get executed.

I think that will put you off sometimes.

It was basically his gap year.

He was 22 years old when he went.

And

the thing about Wordsworth is he lived a very long time, he lived 80 years at the time, 1770 to 1850.

So it was a long old life.

And I think the imagination is of him as quite an old man because he was for

a while.

Depends when you define older starting.

Well,

measure the wrists.

Do you know one thing Wordsworth couldn't do?

Ride a motorbike.

Yep.

What couldn't he do?

It's actually the daffodils.

He would not have been able

to smell them.

Yeah.

He had no sense of smell.

It's anosmic.

Early COVID.

Anosmic.

Early COVID.

And he had no sense of taste, as I think we can tell from the prelude.

That was joking about his big long poem.

Yeah, his nephew Christopher wrote his first ever biography in 1851, so the year after he died, and he wrote, With regard to fragrance, Mr.

Wordsworth spoke from the testimony of others.

He himself had no sense of smell.

God, that's awful.

As someone who is so infatuated with the countryside and nature and all of that, how dreadful.

Although daffodils don't really smell, do they?

Yeah.

Do they?

Yeah.

I don't like the smell of daffodils, actually.

Oh, they smell a bit like weed, don't they?

Yes, I don't.

Yeah, I didn't like to say, but you know.

They do have a big old smell, yeah.

Yeah, you're right.

Sorry, they smell very strongly of urine, so I have to slacken them out.

That's probably why he wrote that.

He wrote this amazing poem about daffodils, and everyone else is like, are they not the ones that smell of weed?

You say he lived to be very old,

but a lot of people would say should have died younger,

should have copped it earlier because he got quite crap later on in life, according to I suppose most literary critics.

And even he, when he was asked to be poet laureate when he was 73, said, Look, I don't think I'm good enough.

I haven't written anything decent for years.

And he never published anything as poet laureate, did he?

Well, when he was asked to be poet laureate, he said no at the start.

But then Robert Peel said, well, the queen really wants you to be poet laureate, and you don't have to do any work.

So would you like to reconsider him?

He went, all right, fine.

But he was really famous at that time, wasn't he?

And there's a bit where his wife was writing about when he was 77 years old.

She's writing a letter to someone.

And in the letter, she says, I'm looking up and a group of young tourists are standing before the window.

So there are just people looking in his window and just going, oh, look, there he is.

And apparently he was reading the newspaper.

And every time he lifted his head from the newspaper, all the tourists would bow to him.

Oh,

amazing.

I think that would put you off your work.

That's why.

That's incredible.

But he also always wore shades as well when he got older.

Seriously?

Yeah, because he had very inflamed eyes, and so he wore dark glasses to stop the light from getting in.

Blimey.

Couldn't smell and then couldn't see anything because of his shades.

Eventually, he would have been an entirely tactile-based poet.

He got quite reactionary as well.

He did the old classic, and this is why better to die young.

He went from being cool, revolutionary, reformist and thinking things like he was sort of part, he was essential to the founding of the National Trust because he really believed in land being shared by everyone.

Everyone should have access and should get outside and experience nature.

The working classes should be, you know, should be brought up to the lake district and shown how lovely the rivers are or whatever.

How come I went to

a National Trust property the other day and it was four o'clock on a Sunday and they said, sorry, we're closed.

Yeah, sorry about that.

They're not staying true to the spirit of Wordsworth.

But, well, he went off the idea anyway in his later life because he became very pro the death penalty, wrote poems in favour of the death penalty,

just to make sure people knew where he stood.

There's so few poems in favour of the death penalty.

It feels like a weird crossover, doesn't it?

Yeah, a death penalty fan and a poet.

You don't see them often in one person.

What was it called?

Do Do you know?

Yes, it was called

Noose on the Loose.

It was called Sonnets Upon the Punishment of Death.

Wow.

And he didn't like it, actually, it turned out, when the trains got up and running and people did start getting the train up to the Lake District from sort of Manchester and stuff and disturbing his peace and quietude.

Turned into a miserable old goat.

Oh, I know.

Really?

I suppose if people were standing outside your window, you'd be like, well, well, I don't want more of them coming up to stand and look at me while I read the paper.

Fair enough.

I think the death penalty for people who stare.

If you drop a guillotine from your window.

God, Porter's Britain is going to be a

pretty intense place.

We thought Pretty Patel was half a pate.

You looking at me.

There'll be quiz shows about me on television.

That's the main thing that I'm looking

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

Okay, my fact this week is that we know of five people who have died in the Queen Vic in EastEnders, although one of them was murdered 120 years before the TV show began.

That's a prequel, isn't it?

Wasn't it?

They were stabbed to death while staring at lovely father William Wedgeworth.

That's true, because Lucy has been in EastEnders, right?

I have very recently,

yes.

What did you play?

Didn't get murdered in the Queen Vic.

So

I had a very small part as a woman called Rita who was the love interest of a character called Mitch.

So for our overseas listeners, EastEnders is a beloved soap opera.

And if you get a part in EastEnders, it is absolutely mandatory for everyone you know to then talk at you in a cockney accent.

All right, you're in East Enders or you're not my mother.

And

it's my name above the door, Frank.

So,

yeah, but I didn't get to go inside the Queen Vic, so maybe I was lucky given that it's obviously

all of your scenes outdoors.

No, I was in the Laundrette, which is another sort of

iconic location.

But I don't know if I've been killed off because they don't tell you.

Obviously, when you go into EastEnders, they're not allowed to tell you anything about what's going on.

And especially when I was in it, there was a big murder storyline which has now been resolved.

But they bumped up their murder count because there was a man called Gray who was murdering loads of people.

And so I got the script and they were like, well, you can't tell anyone what happened because not my bit was like the little comic relief nonsense.

But this big storyline was being resolved.

And in fact, when I got onto the set, I was in the laundrette and this murderer came in and it was his last day.

And I was was like, oh, because he was the most hated man in Britain.

And he came in, and it was his last day, so he did this lovely speech about how wonderful it is.

And I've had such a wonderful time.

And it was like seeing, I don't know, Fred West or Ted Bundy.

So, well, it's all been a marvellous luck.

And

wow, that's amazing.

Was that in the last four or five years then?

That was in the last year.

So, because, yeah, because I know EastEnders wasn't very murdery for a while.

It was always Coronation Street, I think, was the most murdery.

And then Hollyoaks.

Really?

Hollyoaks took over.

It was the hot bit of hollow.

I've got a friend who's in Hollyoaks, and during Covid,

she had to do some kissing scenes, but she couldn't do it because obviously you weren't allowed to go near.

And so her partner had to come on and be her love interest, but you only kind of saw his shoulder the whole time.

He's a singer in a band.

He's got long hair, very skinny guy.

And her partner was this kind of hunky Asian bloke.

That was an amazing bit of camera work to make sure.

Yeah, what a needle to thread.

They've both got shoulders, haven't they?

So she just kisses him once on the shoulder.

That should be fine.

Well, even when I was filming, it was like you couldn't, you had to stand and shout across the laundrette at each other.

But that's fine because you shout all the time in East Enders anyway.

And in laundres.

It's a noisy working environment.

So

you got to do the tennis ball hat on a stick thing.

What's that?

Any standards during COVID?

They had.

I watched a sort of little documentary on all the tricks they had to do.

And one of them was: whenever you see anyone in a close-up scene with someone else in Isandas during COVID, they were talking to an empty space, but they would put a little tennis ball at the top of a pole, which was where you were supposed to look to see their eyes.

So if they're sobbing or laughing or chatting, it's always engaging with a tennis ball.

So, those two-person shots were you seeing their face, but the other person's back of their head?

The reverse, or they did it in plates, so they did it,

they'd film one person, A bit like how they did the parent trap.

I mean, they could have used it to make someone their own twin for a while.

If you're going to do it that way,

they could have done like, is it Eddie Murphy in that movie?

Muffy Professor 2 the Clumps.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or in Kind Hearts and Coronets, that probably be a better person.

Everyone's Phil Mitchell.

They should have had a completely Phil Mitchell episode these days where he played all the roles.

That would be good.

I haven't really explained the fact, have I?

No, sorry.

I went

very, very quickly.

So

they

in February 2020, one character called Sharon Mitchell decided to tell us.

Sorry, the tentativeness with which you said one of the seminal Eastenders characters names.

Is that

she's one of the five biggest characters in it?

Sharon.

Letitia Dean.

I mean, she's a brilliant.

Oh, is it?

Yes, well,

by my accent, you could probably tell I'm a Coronation Street guy.

But anyway, so Sharon Mitchell talked about Mr.

and Mrs.

Bagstock, who were the original landlord and landlady of the Queen Vic.

And apparently back in the 1860s when the fictional Queen Vic was first built,

this landlord killed his landlady by drowning her in the bath.

And maybe that's why they've had so much bad luck in Albertson.

Haunted them.

It's a haunted pub, effectively.

Yeah, I tried to see if there was a such person as Mr.

Bagstock in London, but Bagstock doesn't appear to even be a name.

It's in Dombey and Sons, but I think it's just a made-up Dickens name.

Oh, that's quite a nice literary pedigree, though, for this random bit of Queen Vic trivia.

That's great.

So, one thing that EastEnders has in common with William Wordsworth.

Oh, yeah.

They can't smell.

They can't.

Nobody can smell.

Yeah.

Death penalty.

Daffodils.

Oh.

So there are some daffodils in Albert Square, but Wordsworth wouldn't have been able to smell these ones for a very good reason, which is that they're fake.

And the reason that they're fake daffodils, I'm probably good filming reasons for that, but also they film, is it about six weeks in advance?

You film the episodes about six weeks later.

So they make it look like spring.

Even though it's still winter.

Right?

So that's their way of doing it.

It's basically a time portal.

And then at the other end of the year, they obviously have to shave the trees.

No, that's

not real.

Because I I was thinking the very first lines of the first episode of EastEnders was Dirty Den walks in and he goes, sticks in here.

Oh, yeah.

So it might have been sticks of wheat in here from all those daffodils.

They're definitely real.

Dirty Death.

Well, didn't he get killed by someone was holding a bunch of flowers

the first time?

He wasn't actually dead.

Yeah.

But someone was holding a bunch of daffodils and they shot them, shot him through it.

God, I love it.

It's all tying together.

My God.

It's David Lynch, isn't it?

We've broken EastEnders wide open.

Um, so the person behind EastEnders was Julia, a woman called Julia Smith, who, when she was advertising for jobs, said only EastEnders need apply.

So, it was all real people from the East End of London at first who were on it.

And they weren't actually calling it EastEnders at the time, they were calling it East Eight.

And she wrote that they called it East Eight, referred to it as East Eight when they were working on the show before it came out.

And then she realized a bunch of her friends were saying, What's this estate programme you've got?

When's that coming out?

And it just is the word estate.

But it could have been called other working titles, Square Dance,

or Round the Houses, which isn't that another show.

That's quite a good title.

Round the Houses.

It sounds like a much more huggable.

I think there are fewer murders in Round the Houses.

Yeah, that's the Lovable 70 sitcom, isn't it?

Yeah,

that's the Terry and June style.

Yeah.

Oh, Reg Cox is fine.

He was just pretending.

It's a prank.

On the subject of the script security, because you know it's set in Walford, right?

So, this was the fictional place they've created.

So, when my husband was in East Enders a few years ago, and the

it was Christmas Day episode, which again, you know, they don't want anything to get out about the Christmas Day episode.

So, they have this ridiculous procedure where they send you a script, but they won't send the password to unlock that script to the same email that they've sent the script to, because obviously that might get hacked.

So, what they do then is they phone you and then they give you another special code which sort of unlocks something else.

anyway.

It's like a seven stage.

It'd be easier to get the nuclear codes than to get into an East Ender script.

But what really made me laugh when my husband did it was that they went through all of this and he had to be by the phone at a certain time to take the phone call.

And he answered the phone and went, uh-huh, uh-huh, and then started typing it in, and the password was Walford, which was something that

I did it recently, and they have changed it because

I told everyone I knew about the A was a four, wasn't it?

So no one knew that.

Yeah, impenetrable levels.

Wow.

Walford probably named after Walford Road, which is in Dulston, because one of the other co-creator with

Julia Smith was Tony Holland.

And he lived in Dulston or nearby.

And he probably saw Walford Road and gave it that name.

He based Albert Square on a place called Fassett Square.

in Dalston,

which I went to yesterday, had a cycle round.

Very nice.

And the nearest pub to Fassett Square is called the Victoria, which I'm fairly certain must be where he got the idea for the Queen Vic name at least because it's got its license in 1848 so it's a very very old pub.

Anyway I went there last night and

you murdered someone.

I was hoping.

You discovered you were your own father and the whole place burnt down.

I was so hoping for that kind of thing but basically it's the hipsteriest place you can possibly imagine.

Instead of like light fixtures, it has upside-down plant pots with trees coming out of it, and it sells four different types of kombucha.

But it's really fun.

That's

a kind of IPA and read my book.

Dot-com wouldn't have approved of all of this, would you?

I mean, everybody does complain about the fact that EastEnders is now set in an area of London where nobody who's in it could afford to live.

You know, it would all be merchant bankers and hedge fund managers.

Or podcasters.

Your podcast is doing well.

Trust me, not most podcasters.

But yeah,

but Ofcom.

I was reading all the Ofcom complaints about EastEnders, and uh one complaint was people saying that uh people spend too much time in the cafe.

Someone had calculated how much the characters would spend if they were buying the amount of drinks and snacks because, of course, they're always eating and drinking.

Yeah, but have you seen how many times Peggy Mitchell said, it's on the ass, it's on the ass.

That's true, that pub would have gone under, wouldn't it?

Yeah, very good.

They're always all free drinks.

I was reading some of the other complaints, actually,

and there there was one saying that people were throwing the cigarette butts on the ground.

And if they did that, why did they not get a fixed penalty notice for doing it?

You can be, yeah, you can be having an affair with your brother's, sister's

cat.

But the unrealistic thing is.

Something else realistic is Barbara Windsor's life.

I always felt that her life was quite true to the what seems like a very unrealistic East Enders life.

So

she was quite in the gang world, really.

Yes.

In the 70s, 80s.

She went out with Ronnie Cray.

Hold on, who was the not mad one?

She went out with Reggie Cray.

Ronnie was the really mad one, wasn't he?

I mean, it's like the Williams sisters.

They're both good at tennis.

She went out with the equivalent of Venus Williams, I suppose, in Cray Brothers.

And she was married.

She was married to another guy called Ronnie Knight who was another gangster really the Venus Williams of the underworld

I think they'd both be flattered by that

now ladies and gentlemen please give your applause to the Ronnie Crayo tennis

So she married a Ronnie Ronnie Knight who was another kind of gangster and Ronnie Knight's brother I ended up reading his his Wikipedia page basically, his brother, his brother's killer, and the man who killed his brother's killer were all murdered.

That's a trail of four murders.

Sorry, so, so, sorry.

So, Ronnie Knight, Barbara Windsor's husband, was

his brother was murdered.

Okay.

And then his brother's killer was murdered.

And then his brother's killer's killer was murdered.

It's an endless trail of murder.

I'm still picturing it in the world of tennis, and it's becoming...

I mean, in the world of gangsters, it's not as implausible because we're still in the group stages yeah

exactly so and did did barbara windsett kill all of those people

turns out

well actually her husband ronnie knight probably did kill his brother's killer because he admitted to it in his autobiography later but he'd already been tried for it and exonerated so under double jeopardy they couldn't get him in your face

there is a thing about so lucy you said about um

the murder stats yeah way higher in eastenders So in EastEnders,

you're about 100 times as likely to be murdered in East Enders as you are in Britain.

But

there's a concomitant bit of good news, which is that residents of Walford are much more romantically faithful than real people.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Both of these things are only good news and bad news if you live in the world of EastEnders, not in the real world.

Yeah, it's bad news for all of us.

Except me.

So I just need to move in full time.

So on the show, it's

a tiny percentage.

2% of female and 1.7% of male characters have an affair each year.

Is that right?

I always thought they were all having affairs in East Anthony.

Me too.

I would have thought.

So this is a study from 2003.

So maybe they've sexted it up since then.

But that's way lower than the stats from 2003 for men and women in the UK having affairs.

Also, this was the other finding, the men of Albert Square are also less likely to visit a prostitute.

That's good.

Just 0.18% of them are knocking on that door.

Good on them, yeah.

Well, again, you see, I should be suggesting this to the storyliners.

I should say I could, I mean, become a sex worker, make the show more realistic.

I could be the man trap of wolfies.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Andrew Hunter M, James, at James Harkin, Lucy, Lucy Porter Comic, and Anna.

You can email our podcast at qi.com.

Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing.

If you want to go to our website, which is no such thing as a fish.com, we have all of our previous episodes there and lots of merch live shows.

We're coming to Scotland and Wales quite soon.

There's all sorts of other stuff there.

So go and check it out if you like.

And you should also check out Lucy's podcast.

It's fingers on buzzers.

She hosts it with previous fish guest, Jenny Ryan.

So you're getting two fish graduates for the price of none.

Fingers on Buzzers.

Check it out wherever you get your podcasts from.

And we'll be back again next week with another episode of the podcast.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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