425: No Such Thing As The Ken Ages

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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 Covent Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Anna Toshinsky, Andrew Hunter-Murray, and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy.

My fact is that if you took all the hedges in Britain and laid them end to end, they would stretch to the moon and most of the way back.

What a knock-up graffiti ending to that.

How far back?

Basically, figures vary about the exact length, but it would definitely get you all the way there, and it would definitely not get you all the way back.

All the alien sheep that you're kind of herding into this gap between the Earth and the Moon, they'd be able to escape from that last little gap.

Well, I don't think they would because there's one layer of hedging solidly between the two.

Yeah, but the thing is, with fences, you need them on both sides of a field.

Yes, what I stupidly imagined is a sort of double row of hedging that runs out halfway back, but you don't actually need that.

Basically, the UK has about 700,000 kilometers of hedges.

Some people say there are only about 500,000 kilometres of hedges.

So the figures do vary.

But it definitely is between one and two times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

Right, yeah.

Right?

That's quite a big discrepancy, 200,000 kilometres.

Yeah, I mean,

it's quite hard to survey.

There are quite good ways of measuring now, as in you can use satellites to measure the distance of the surface.

Who has the time, though, to go through all the hedges from satellite imagery?

It feels like you have the answer to that question.

You're just teeing me up.

And with that, James quit the podcast to start his hedge measuring career.

I was just thinking that I think if you have satellite imagery, there's more important things to do than work out whether it's 200,000 or 300,000 or whatever it was.

It's true, it's true.

I'm saying this, by the way, as someone who has been active in the hedge community in the past.

What do you mean?

When I lived in the countryside, in the Lake District, when I moved in, one of the first people to come around was a couple saying, Would you be interested in getting involved with the hedges?

Right.

And it does sound like a swinging case but it totally wasn't

basically in Silverdale where I lived so it's just outside the lake districts the hedges were very important because they have a lot of wildlife and we wanted to save them I only went to one or two meetings okay so what what happened at those meetings part of it you might go around like picking stuff out of the hedges like cleaning the hedges and stuff but mostly you're just trying to stop people from cutting the hedges down.

Just like vigilante wandering the countryside, throwing yourselves at farmers with

that.

That was probably in the third meeting where all that stuff happened.

Like the extinction rebellion side of it.

I think that came later.

It was mostly just chatting about hedges.

Was it James the National Hedge Laying Society?

I don't recall very well, but I don't think so.

It was a long time ago.

There are a few different hedge bodies.

Yeah.

But isn't this the one grand daddy body of hedging?

I I d I mean the National Hedge Laying Society are huge.

You want to talk about hedge laying then and which is different of course to James's hedge um rubbish clearance?

The National Hedge Laying Society and the National Hedge Maintenance Society are the jets and the sharks.

Hedge world.

Vicious, vicious knife fights between them whenever they meet.

Life on the hedge.

God.

But it is really cool hedge laying.

I didn't know

about it.

I didn't know what it was.

And it is literally making a hedge lie down, isn't it?

It's flatting a hedge,

essentially.

So the hedge pre-exists.

A hedge has to pre-exist to lay a hedge.

Yes.

Wow.

Otherwise, you're just building a hedge, I guess.

So that's what I got confused about.

I do have to plant a hedge, don't you?

Yeah, that's what I thought.

Well, you're planting a hedge into an already existing hedge.

So, hedge basically, this is a way of maintaining the hedges, which it's very important that we do because they're so biodiverse and stuff.

And so, you've got to stop them growing too high, too tall.

Because if the trees that make up a hedge turn into mature trees, then they eventually die, and also their trunks shoot up, and they don't have any foliage at the bottom, and there are big gaps in the hedge, and all the sheep get through.

And so, what hedge laying is, it's really clever, you turn the hedge from vertical to horizontal, essentially.

So, you do this by kind of cutting the upright trunks at the base, so you like make a little slit in the upright trunk.

But you don't cut it all the way down to the bottom because you really don't want to kill the trunk, you've got to keep the sap flowing up it.

And when you split it, you bet you can bend it over, as you can imagine, like a hinge so that it lies down.

And then, when you do that, then it will start growing new hedgery upwards.

So, you've got to keep on bending it over so a new youthful bit

shoots up.

I didn't know that.

Wow.

And it's called pleaching.

Pleaching.

The pleach and the ligger is the bit on a hedge that's horizontal, if you ever want to know.

Those are good new words.

Pleaching and liggering.

Most hedges I've seen in the photos while researching this, they sort of look like they've been blown to a 45-degree angle by the wind.

It's very controversial, the angle at which you should put it.

And there are 35 different types of hedge laying, and people say 30 degrees, 45 occasionally.

I don't know where you saw this hedge.

It was on actually the official bodies website.

Right.

So they've made a statement with that angle.

It's a big website, isn't it?

The National Hedge Laying Bodies website.

I think that's being very kind.

It's nice.

It's pleasant.

Wow.

What do you think are its main drawbacks?

To be honest, I looked at it and thought I might get in touch and just give some suggestions.

I thought there was a lot of information missing.

There was a lot of...

Yeah,

there was a lot more they could do with their annual award for best hedge.

What could they do?

More photos, more understanding of what had happened.

You know, if you're a novice like me coming to it.

Like match reports.

Yeah.

Because they do have an annual championships.

You're right.

Yeah, yeah.

Exactly.

Yeah, the National Hedge Laying Championship.

I did want a bit more pros actually of what had happened in each year's championship.

Because it just gives the kind of winners and the runners are.

Sorry, can I just ask a question?

Is it for the person who's best at bending the hedges, or is it for the actual best hedge?

Great question.

I would have loved to have got the answer as I read the website.

I did get the answer from the website, which is your website.

It's the format.

It's not the best hedge.

It's the person who's laying the hedge yeah it's a hedge you have to scroll down on so there's a bar at the side of a website often and you click the down arrow at the bottom is that what it is you get more it's like turning a page but on your laptop it's amazing because i presume like hedges are hundreds if not thousands of years old right uh and they don't change that much from year to year so whatever's the best hedge in 2019 is likely to be the best hedge in 2020 and 2021 yeah do you know how to tell how old a hedge is?

No.

Ask it nicely.

There's a thing called Hooper's Rule.

No, it's very rude to ask a hedge hedge its age.

Oh, right.

There's a thing called Hooper's Rule.

It's named after a guy called M.

D.

Hooper, who is one of the people who invented it.

And you take a 30-yard stretch of hedge, you count the number of species in it, you multiply that number by 110, and then you add 30 years.

And that will tell you exactly how old a hedge is.

And it's called Hooper's Rule.

And it was published in the 70s, and almost immediately, someone else did a publication saying it's complete bollocks.

At very best, it can give you an approximation, and you should always use village or council or parish history.

A lot of people are not.

Also, that's going to be a hell of a lot quicker than counting meticulously all the species in a hedge.

Yeah, there's a guy, and this was in the article that you sent, Andy, where you found your fact from, where he spent two years, he's a British ecologist, spent two years looking at all of the species inside one particular bit of hedgerow, and he counted 2,070 in total over those years.

And this is not the wood this is like you know little ants and animals and so on and and he's he's amazing Robert Walton he was challenged during a car journey by another friend of his another naturalist not sure what the exact terms of the challenge were but it's basically why didn't you study that hedge for a very long time

and he spent a year on it and he said god i'm still getting loads every single week so he spent another spent a second year on it it was incredible he reckoned there were more than 3,000, but he could only count 2,000 because they were with the naked eye that he was looking at them.

2,000 species is the most detailed study of a hedge ever made.

Ever.

I can't believe no one else has done this.

Yeah, I know, it's weird, isn't it?

Well, that's what he was saying.

It's bizarre how important they are that we know so little about what's in them, in a way.

And also, they've been quite denigrated hedges.

They've had a bad rep for ages.

Definitely, when I was growing up, I thought that the hedge was often quite new, right?

Because you learn about enclosure.

This is the big deal.

Got it drilled into you at school.

Enclosure, agricultural revolution.

You build hedges all around the fields, and there's this common misconception, and it's still on loads of sites today, that the hedges just came up in enclosure when the landowners locked off their fields.

Every listener is going to know about enclosure.

I think we should say a bit.

Nope, that's if you don't remember, if you're not English and don't remember your year eight history.

So, what is it?

I don't know this.

In the Agricultural Revolution, landowners decided to end the common land usage policies that have been existing so far, where everyone could graze their animals and plant what they wanted on common land, and they enclose their land with fences and hedges.

And that's where a a lot of people think, this grand misconception arises, that hedges were all planted.

So, loads of hedges in the south of England do come from the 17th and 18th century.

You basically cut down the entire of year eight history into about two sentences.

There we go.

And now I've told you it's wrong.

Actually, they're all really old.

Wow.

Log on to year nine, bitches.

Everything's a lie.

Forget what you heard.

And like me at Year Eight, I still stopped listening halfway through what was being said.

Guarantee you can't define enclosure 10 seconds after hearing about it.

And so people thought we could cut them down because they're new, so they weren't part of the intrinsic landscape that's full of these amazing ecosystems.

A lot of them are like between parishes, for instance, which goes back, you know, thousands of years and some even before that, just people, when we first got the sheep silver, just trying to keep your sheep in one place kind of thing.

They kind of function as motorways for species, you know, like mice get around the countryside on them.

Animals use them for navigation.

The birds nesting.

It's really vital that they exist.

And the UK destroyed about half of its hedging in the 20th century.

So you would have been able to get to the moon and back again, and maybe to the moon again,

you know, in the good old days, in the 1930s.

And the reason the UK destroyed half its hedging, give or take, is because of Hitler.

Oh,

he always gets the blame, doesn't he?

Get into that give or take.

Oh, I hear

that man.

So the UK wanted to be quite food sufficient after the Second World War because there have been a few problems with food supplies during the war.

And so various governments incentivized farmers to make their fields much bigger, remove the hedges, join them all up, just so you could grow larger amounts of crops.

And they were actually incentivized.

Farmers were paid to get rid of their hedges.

And only in the last 20 years, I think, has it been truly appreciated just what a lot of damage this did to biodiversity and all sorts of things.

And so now there are aims to build many more hedges, not only to fight climate change, but to build biodiversity.

And against the Nazis?

And to just keep the Nazis down, you know, just to stop them coming back.

Do you want some other hedge words, by the way?

Oh, yeah.

Since I've given us some great hedge words.

These are actually words in the OED that have the word hedge in them.

So to hedge hop.

Do you know what hedgehopping is?

Is that to,

there's a field of hedgehogs and you're not allowed to touch the ground.

It's like the floor is lava.

It's a game.

Yeah, you have to get to the other side.

Trampling a hedgehog with every bound.

I'm not saying it's a nice game.

I'm just saying.

Again, once you've torn the hedges down, why don't you do this hedgehog trampling trampling game?

It's not that, thankfully.

It's a colloquial term for flying your aircraft at a very low level.

So you're as if you're falling over hedges.

Hedge wine is very poor quality wine.

And in fact, hedge is used to mean poor quality.

And also hedge wench.

Do you know what a hedge wench is?

Well, a wench is a a lusty woman.

And a hedge is poor quality.

So it's poor quality, lusty woman.

This is a bit more literal.

It's a sex worker who plies their trade in a hedge.

Oh, golly.

That's a painful.

Are people paying extra for that?

Are you going to get

in a hedge?

We could go back to my place, actually.

Just think about it now.

I do think the hedge is going to detract from the experience.

There are 2,000 species and they're all watching at the moment, and I don't like it.

Oh, God.

The Lord bounced up the bum.

Do you know what this proverb means?

It's good sheltering under an old hedge.

It's a very old American proverb.

Does it mean literally exactly what it sounds like?

If you find an old hedge, you're probably going to be sheltered quite nicely.

It sounds like it does.

It's actually more cryptic than that.

It means it's good to marry an older woman.

She's the old hedge

because I guess she's more experienced.

Thicker.

Been laid by many men before.

So, what do this animal

and this animal

and this animal

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

My fact this week is that in the 1940s, prisoners of war in the US helped build a model of the Mississippi Basin that was about twice the size of the Vatican.

Wow.

God, it's actually so many elements in that fact that I'd be impressed if you got to the end of it.

So I don't know what a model of the Mississippi Basin was before hearing about this fact.

Okay, does that mean you because you know what a model is, presumably, certainly.

And you know what the Mississippi is, they refer to it.

But I'm conceptually incapable of joining those two together, is what we've learned.

Well, for those of you who are, you know, imaginationally absent at home, it's a model of a river and its surrounding land.

Made of water.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So

for water in the model, they use water.

They also have to model the banks, otherwise that's just a puddle on the floor.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, I see.

Okay.

You've modelled everything surrounding the river, basically, and then just pour water into it.

Or like the floodplains and stuff like that, right?

Yeah,

all the land around it that might be affected by it.

Yeah, yeah.

Why did we want to model it?

Well, we wanted to figure out how it worked and get to know it better.

So this was called the Mississippi River Basin Model Waterways Experiment Station near Clinton, Mississippi.

And it was built because the Mississippi was always flooding.

And actually, they just had a couple of really awful floods.

So in 1927, there was the worst flood in US history.

1937, another bad one.

And this guy guy called Eugene Raybold said, the problem we're having is that whenever there's a flood, we try and fix it, and this is the problem with flooding today still, but we try and fix it in the individual place where there was a flood, so we'll build a levee or a dam, but that's not understanding the river as a whole, and that just has a knock-on effect further down.

You're just kicking it further down the road.

So what we need to do is we need to build the whole river.

And he was quite short on labourers because everyone was fighting in the war, but what there were were quite a lot of German and Italian prisoners of war.

And so they all must have been so confused when they were carted to prisoner of war camp in Mississippi and told to build the Mississippi River again.

For those men getting home after the war, after the, oh, Hans, we were so worried, you know, you were kept as a prisoner of war, it must have been awful.

What did they make you do?

Oh, you know, just really, it was really difficult, actually.

Yeah, but what were you doing, Hans?

Were you maybe picking cotton in the fields or working in a mine?

Yeah, I mean, you know, we don't model it.

Modeling.

That's twice the size of the Vatican.

I reckon there was a lot of earth being moved around, right?

Yeah, it's not model building like a Warhammer fanatic.

I literally built it.

They didn't come to play with it.

Basically, that's what they were doing.

It feels to me like I wouldn't personally want to be part of that team, you know.

Given the choice between that and other prisoner of war labour, I absolutely will be on Model Railway.

Team Fake River.

Model Railway.

I've given away my

river modelling duty.

How big was it, Anna?

Sorry, I missed that.

So I haven't actually said it, I've just said it it was about twice the size of the Vatican.

So, you know how big the Vatican is, and you know what twice is.

Can you not put those two concepts together?

I can't actually think of how big the Vatican is, because the Vatican is a whole city, right?

It's difficult.

It's difficult.

But it's not a big city, you know that.

Yeah, but that still doesn't help.

I reckon it's about a square kilometre, is it?

It's, well, I can give you another measure.

It was also about the size of 120 football pitches.

It was 210 acres.

We get it in hedges next time.

Sorry.

Distance to the moon, it's God knows.

It's so huge, this thing.

The streams in this thing are eight miles long in total.

Like, it's really big.

Yeah, and the only way you could see it all was from an observation point that was four stories tall, wasn't it?

It's like you had to climb right the way up

and then you could see the whole thing.

Yeah.

One gallon of water in the thing represented 1.5 million gallons of water in the real world.

So cool.

I think five minutes of water running through the basin simulated an entire day of water running through the Mississippi.

So you could quite quickly work out.

And it was super useful.

It was a few years after it was built.

There were some signs of flooding, people getting a bit nervous, signs of flooding in the Missouri River, which is a tributary of the Mississippi, the longest river in the US.

And so they simulated what was happening in the little model.

And they said, oh shit, yeah, it's going to flood here and there, not too much there, build a dam there.

And they did and saved a few million quid.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

I was thinking about the songs because it's really tied into blues and it's also a river that comes up a lot in songs.

And for me, I love Jeff Buckley.

Like Old Man River.

Like Old Man River, Jeff Buckley drowned in the Mississippi.

Did he?

Yeah, and that, you know, so for me, that was a river that I've always noticed in songs.

So I was looking into it and I found out that actually the Mississippi River actually had assigned to it a songwriter and singer called Charlie Maguire.

And he was the singing ranger.

What's the job?

Sorry, he goes.

Yeah, he writes songs about the Mississippi.

I've got to use the word hippie quite a lot.

Dippy, are you going for a dippy in the Mississippi?

It's going to get pretty nippy, slippy.

Wish we could do this job.

It's pretty easy.

It's really good, yeah.

No, he wrote a lot of songs in his time.

And the songs would embody the story of the Mississippi.

So one song was called Great Mississippi.

You know, that was about where it starts and where it ends.

Rock Strata.

When was this guy, sorry?

2003.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The Singing Ranger.

He's the only person that's ever been given this position.

And yeah, he wrote, you know, tons of songs, won lots of awards.

Not Grammys.

No Grammys.

It was the awards for best song about the Mississippi written by the person employed to write something about the Mississippi.

I reckon we've got a chance this year with the old nippy song.

I completely agree.

Here's a cool thing about the Mississippi.

It's a map that was published of the river.

And it was published in 1866.

And it's called The Ribbon Map of the Father of Waters.

And it's a strip map.

So the map was 11 feet long, but only three inches inches wide.

Oh my gosh.

I know.

It's really funny.

And strip maps used to be really big.

So that these just

really long.

If you were planning a specific trip, and this is ages and centuries ago, you might have a strip map if you were going on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem because it's basically one route and it says turn left at this town and then go straight along here for another five miles and then turn right, whatever.

And it was on a spool, basically.

Oh, yeah.

So you just spool along as you went.

I think it was more for tourism purposes than for

me.

I might be wrong about this.

I think they used to have like GPSs of those, did they?

Yes, they did.

I met the guy who owns loads of them, and I borrowed some from him.

And you put a wristwatch on, exactly like James, like London to Brighton.

You just load in the cartridge for London to Brighton.

And then as you're driving along, you just wind on a bit.

So clever.

Oh, wow.

Crawley.

That's so cool.

Wow.

Yeah, really fun.

What happens if there's a closed road?

Yeah,

you can only go in that.

It only tells you that you're on the right route.

Or you need to have several.

The whole back of your car is full of tiny carbon.

Carving permutation.

Exactly.

James Robert Scott.

You know him?

No.

He was in West Quincy, Missouri, when there was a great flood of the Mississippi in 1993.

So there was flooding happening all over the place, and they'd put lots of sandbags in and levees or levees or however you pronounce that.

Anyway, he decided that he was going to remove some of the sandbags and basically allow an area to to flood and it was very no one died but it's very dangerous and also you know lots of people lost land and stuff like that he claimed that he did it because his town was in trouble and he wanted to move the sandbags from one place to another to try and you know keep his town safe

but then apparently he told his friend that he'd actually done it so that he could strand his wife on the other side of the river so that he could have an affair so he could have an affair yeah well how long was he trying to strand her for well a few weeks he was hoping that might happen yeah

he maintains his innocence i should say he's in prison they found him guilty uh he's eligible for parole in 2023 um and that's for the that's for the sandbag moving not for the affair yes i just don't think it's illegal to have an affair a very puritanical

because um all the damage that it caused yeah of course it was billions of dollars of damage

one figure i read was 15 billion sandbags did he move well you only need you only need to remove one finger from the dam, and then everything goes.

That's true.

And you're going to be needing those fingers when you're conducting your illicit marital affair.

There are easier ways to have affairs, aren't there?

It feels like that.

Get a hedge.

Why not have those?

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

Okay, my fact this week is that one of the few historians to use the term term Dark Ages is Professor Ken Dark.

That's funny.

It's funny having a professor called Ken.

I think that's funny enough.

Why?

What?

My name's Ken Dark.

Ken!

Because Ken in Scots, Old Scots, means knowledge, like your Ken.

Beyond your Ken.

And he's a professor.

So is that what you found funny about that?

God, it does mean knowledge.

You're right.

And it makes me think that Ken of Barbie and Ken has sunk a long way, hasn't he, since the Kens of York.

Are they called the Dark Ages?

After Ken.

After Ken Dar.

I should call it the Ken Ages.

This is just

Ken Ages ago.

Very good.

This is just a complete coincidence, really, I think.

So it's an article that I read on the website of the University of Sheffield, and it's about English heritage.

So they decided to do a handbook and some websites, stuff like that, where they called the period between 400 AD and 1066 the dark ages and then there was a huge sort of campaign of a lot of Twitter historians saying and other historians but saying you know you can't call it the dark ages what it does is it makes people think it's a terrible time where people had an awful life and stuff like that and and it was you know that's not really what dark ages means but anyway English Heritage said that the reason that we're calling it that is because there is this professor called Professor Ken Dark and he calls it the dark ages he's a proper professor, so we should be able to call it that as well.

A lot of people pointed out that the article that Ken Dark wrote was slightly, you know, esoteric.

It was about the Byzantine era.

It wasn't about the British Dark Ages or the early modern period.

If you look at Ken Dark's work, which I have done quite a lot, you'll find that he's done something recently where he talks about illuminating the Dark Ages and trying to bring light into the Dark Ages.

And

he's not calling them the Dark Ages because his name is Ken Dark.

I just want to make that really clear.

That's what he wants you to think.

There's an argument that they basically just wanted to kind of shut down the argument and say, you know, here's some evidence.

This is why we did it.

And yet, if you asked any of those historians, would you like to go and live in 430 AD forever?

You can't come back.

It's not a cool history trip.

Well, you can take a look at the family.

You can take your family.

You can take your family.

Well, for instance, there's one historian called Charles West who said if the term dark ages really must be used, it should at least be reserved for periods of true inhumanity and barbarity, such as the 20th century.

God, slow.

I do think we've got very snowflake here about the dark ages.

Come on, it's the one group of people that we can still offend and they can never complain, all right?

It's people in history.

They can't do anything about it.

Just let's call them all ignorant.

Who cares?

They're not coming back.

Well, I think the point is that the word dark is not supposed to be ignorant, right?

It's not supposed to be barbarian.

It's supposed to be a time where we did not have much information about it.

And that's what it was originally.

But people have in the past, like popular historians have kind of in the you know 70s and 80s have said that the Dark Ages was a time of darkness and difficulty.

But I think they have, it has also been used since the concept kind of arose of the Dark Ages to be denigrating.

And

there has always been this idea that it's also a very uncultured time.

After the Romans.

After the Romans, before the Renaissance,

before the Normans.

They were doing buggerall then.

It was Francesco Petrarca, right?

Who caught that Petrarch?

Well, yeah, sorry.

No, you're just giving him his proper fancy names.

Proper fancy names, Petrarch.

Petrarch.

And yeah, basically complaining that there were no good books to read, which I find amazing.

Because then it did, as you say, it was.

He was just a guy, right?

Yeah, just a guy.

Definitely not one of the...

No, he's an Italian scholar.

I mean, he was big and

18th century.

He was a great poet.

Yeah, I haven't read it, but.

He wrote more than one.

Get out.

He was the official poet of the Tiber, wasn't he?

But it does, as you say, sort of mean like it was when science was being brushed away and religion was coming in.

Yeah.

And as a result, it was a dark age full of mind.

Yeah.

Yeah.

As well as there being no records.

It's been, yeah.

And let's be honest.

There aren't full records

going on.

I know.

I completely agree.

I agree with you.

There were other names given to the

early Middle Ages that were published in various books.

So they included the Barbarous Ages,

sounds pretty, you know, the Obscure Ages, which I quite like.

Makes them sound quite cool.

The Monkish Ages.

Absolutely no argument with that.

And the Muddy Ages.

Those are all very.

Really?

Because the Mississippi is known as the Old Muddy, isn't it?

I think.

This would have been.

Or the Big Muddy, I think, maybe.

Big Muddy.

No relation to the Muddy Ages?

I don't think so.

Also, the Dark Ages could be used to describe the period from 1100 BC to 750 BC, which was between the collapse of the Bronze Age civilization in Greece and the beginning of the Archaic Age in Greece.

Oh, yeah, the Great Dark Ages.

Or it could be from the start of the universe to 13.2 billion years ago, which was between the start of the universe and the creation of the first stars.

That's called the Dark Ages as well.

Oh, but people get offended, don't they?

Those little lumps of dust in the air get offended now if we call them the dark ages.

I just see that the little bits of dust in the air are going to be able to come back and get offended.

I just don't see it.

You guys are not taking into account that time travel will happen

one day.

And that bit for a bit of dust will jump down my throat.

Exactly.

I read in one book, this is a book called Europe a History, that the Middle Ages originally meant the time between the first coming of Jesus and the second coming of Jesus.

And since the second coming hasn't, as far as we know, happened, we're still technically in the middle ages now.

That's very exciting.

That's cool.

Yeah.

And thank God because I always get really anxious that we're in the modern time and there's nowhere to go after modern.

So that's good to know that we're actually still in the middle.

So if anyone says that I'm middle-aged, I could say, yes, well, technically I am middle-aged because the second coming of Christ hasn't been.

So are you.

We all are, yeah.

One thing that the Dark Ages, doing the finger quotes there, gave us, which is quite exciting just in reference to literature, was spaces in between words.

So every word, as we know, back in old literature, used to be bunged together.

No spaces, really hard to tell what's the next word.

And it was in that period the monks started going, let's put a little

space in between those two words.

What do you reckon?

So they didn't write books of their own, but they did at least introduce some spaces into the books that already existed.

Yeah.

It's funny because these days, you know, books have word counts, don't they?

You're like, oh, this book is 100,000 words.

Whereas I guess in those days, we're like, how long is your manuscript?

Well, it's one word, like

all the other books.

Yeah.

What a word.

It's one very specific word.

It's like a word with you.

Oh, God, here we go.

The Greek Dark Ages.

I love the Greek Dark Ages.

Are they called the Greek Ages?

Is that contentious as well?

Oh, probably.

I'm signing up with Team Adder on this one.

Got it.

Oh, God, I feel like I'm in bad company now.

So they're such a mystery.

They are, as James was saying, this period at the end of the Bronze Age.

But they, what I always loved about them is that they happened because of the invasion of the Sea Peoples.

Do you know about this?

And you will love the Sea Peoples, Diane.

They're so great.

I actually can't believe that we haven't discussed them before.

This was the class eight talk that I listened to.

Here we go.

Basically, they're a group of people.

We don't know if they existed, but they're currently historians' best explanation for why, in what was it, 1100 BC, civilization just collapsed.

So we had this amazing, like, big palace-based state, Mycenae empire.

Minerans, exactly.

And then it all just vanished.

And also ancient Egypt as well vanished overnight and didn't come back until the Greeks worked out how to write an alphabet and stuff 400 years later, got back on their feet.

And historians think it's because there was someone called the Sea Peoples waltzing around the Mediterranean, strange beings who went and invaded.

Go on.

So, okay,

were they of the sea or were they just living on boats?

Well, it's not.

You mean were they made of bottom?

What is the difference in your mind, Dan, between being of the sea?

Were they like Aquaman, or were they

a pirate on a boat?

The more serious historians, I think, discount the merman, mermaid explanation of sea peoples and say they're probably just boating.

What does Ken Dark say about that?

That's what I want to know about this.

They obviously, the dark ages that aren't called the dark ages, were whole of Europe.

And it was partly this whole mini-kingdoms thing, everyone is dog can be a king, that defined them because it was all so splintered.

And it was the Goths and the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths and the Norogoths and the Demigoths and stuff who were all fighting each other, weren't they, for hundreds of years.

And the Vandals and the Alans, which I think we've mentioned before,

the Alans tribe, who I didn't realise brought us Great Danes.

So that's something else the Dark Ages gave us.

The Alans, who were Iranian, were not.

So the Great Danes aren't Danish.

I think they must have taken a route via Denmark before before they got there, before they evolved into what they are today.

They brought the fighting dogs that led to Great Danes.

But then the person who saw, I would say, who kind of pressed the end of this non-Dark Ages, Dark Ages, was probably Charlemagne, do we think?

As in, he just unified Europe, so he did that.

It was a big deal.

And do you know how he was crowned emperor?

How, like, the ceremony or the

ceremony.

No.

Oh, is he one of those strange people who crowned themselves?

No, quite the opposite.

Apparently.

He was crowned by someone else.

There you go.

The end.

And in fact, he was crowned against his will, according to the court scribe who might have been trying to make him sound really nice.

So he was running away while someone was chasing him with a crown.

Exactly.

800 AD, Christmas Day,

he'd gone to Rome, and the Pope decided he's going to crown him emperor of this whole bunch of Western Europe.

And he sneaks up behind Charlemagne while Charlemagne's praying and pops a crown on his head.

Apparently Charlemagne just stood up and went, oh my gosh, no, what, me?

I couldn't.

I couldn't possibly.

And then he became, you know, the greatest.

It's a good story, isn't it?

It's a good story.

Because one of them's praying, so he's holy and he didn't really want it.

Well, actually, probably happened.

They both got really pissed one night.

Was it Charlemagne who supposedly had the asbestos table?

Oh, yeah, that is him.

Yeah, yeah, I think so.

That was this sort of like his dinner party trick, wasn't it?

He would throw it into a fire so you wouldn't have to clean it because asbestos doesn't burn so you put it in the fire it would kind of sterilize and then you pull it out again and you could use it again this was of course before they knew about mesothelioma and the terrible lung disease that they presumably all got but i think you only get that from little shards of asbestos if you have a full tablecloth you'll be fine

isn't it that the bits come off it and then you inhale them i mean i'm sure no one was living long enough to worry about the long-term effects of an asbestos tablecloth like there were more pressing health concerns in the age

yeah so they cleared the table I don't know if he, yes, I don't know if he did that trick where everything stayed underneath, but he would have kind of swipe.

Have you ever done that trick, by the way?

No, I've tried it once.

It's hard.

It is harder than you think.

It does actually work.

I think I've seen you do it.

Yeah, well, I used to be a waiter and I used to try it a lot.

And like, most of the time, you can't really do it.

And so there's a trick to it, but yeah.

You were the most fired waiter in the north of England for that, weren't you?

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

My fact this week is that the metal used to make Grammy Award trophies is called Gramium.

Amazing.

What a coincidence.

Well,

this is a trademarked metal alloy, a zinc alloy, that a guy called John Billings has patented, And he is the guy who makes the Grammy Awards, and he's made them for decades now.

And what I didn't realize was it's a little team that assembles every year the Grammys, and it's basically a one-shop operation where not only do they make these Grammys, but then they put them in a van and they drive 2,000 or something miles across the country to deliver it personally.

John Billings himself would be sitting in the car doing this, and he is is the Grammy man and it's they use it they use a strip map to get there it's very exciting one year they went off course it was a disaster there were no Grammys

yeah and it's um yeah so this guy he he joined when he was quite young there was a previous person making the Grammys and since he took over he changed the design of the Grammys which is what they are today and he also came up with this new stronger alloy because all of the other previous Grammys were quite flimsy and would break and he thought this needs to be you know did they actually break did people take Grammys home and then you put them down and it just crumbles they still do yeah

but they broke a lot more easy I think it was so the Grammys if you don't know what they are it is a gramophone that is the shape of the trophy and so obviously and I suppose it's a music award in America is the other yeah yeah it's the it's the biggest music award in America and the trophy is in the shape of a gramophone and it was the particularly the arm that was with the stylus on the end that was particularly flimsy and that was the bit when he redesigned it that he wanted to get stronger.

Adele, the singer, once snapped part of her Grammy on stage.

She dropped it on stage and broke part of it off.

And in 2010, Taylor Swift was carrying four Grammys, and she dropped one of them, and it broke into pieces.

And what happens is when it breaks into pieces, you send it back and they fix it for you.

Mr.

Billings fixed it for you.

But she wrote oops on the side of the one she broke, and he now has that on in his office on the side.

A Taylor Swift broken Grammy and he gave her a new one.

That's great.

I wonder if she broke the so the Grammys that we see stunt the stunt there are stunt Grammys so and that's what he drives across the country as well he drives the stunt ones across the country then drives them back as well before and after sorry what is a stunt Grammy a stunt Grammy it's one that can do amazing tricks so it throws itself skyscrapers heart rip walks so the idea is that the real Grammys that are going to be given to everyone who's won them need to be have their name put on it and so on and they can't do that on the night so he drives the fake grammys that you see them holding at the award ceremony and then they give them back and then the real quick so those are not real grammys well they're obviously well they use they're used every single year yeah the same ones are used every year

so if you get a grammy next year andy which i'm sure you're hoping for i'm trying

then um you will get one that might have been had by a dele a few years ago or by taylor swift or whatever because when he gets the stunt grammys home he cleans them with washing up liquid to get rid of any fingerprints or anything like that and then just puts them into storage and then the next year he takes them back.

Nice.

So he just every year drives a load of Grammys across America and then drives them back the other way.

Yeah, you would think he would have a storage unit where he could just leave them.

It does seem like that would be sensitive.

It would be indeficient, wouldn't it?

Yeah.

And then what does he do with the actual one?

Sorry, does he then post them out first class?

I think he might also drive those ones as well.

But then does he has to drive around every single home of every single Grammy?

Why not?

No, I'm sure he takes them to Mr.

Grammy, who then hands them over to the people.

There's a distribution network you think.

Yeah yeah I think so.

There will be a GDPR issue if he knows where all these people live as well.

That would be an amazing bit of information to have.

Just all the addresses of all the most famous musicians in the world.

So the Grammys,

this is a thing that started in the late 1950s and the idea behind it was that they wanted to have something that represented the output of musicians.

It was called the Grammy because they had a competition where they asked the Americans, what do you want to call this?

And I think it it was a girl who wrote in and said, These

trophies are made out of Grammyum, so why don't we call it Grammy?

A bunch of people suggested it, but she was the first person whose letter got read with the suggestion of Grammy.

I think she was a New Orleans secretary called Rose J.

Elizabeth Danner, and she was given 25 free LPs as a gift because lots of people wrote into Dustin Grammy, but her letter was opened first.

But she lived until February 2014, so she could have seen Robin Thickie performing Glared Lions.

Robin Thicky.

Robin Thicky.

Yeah, I used to call him that, and I now, on principle, refuse to call him Robin by any other name.

I reckon if you were at school with Robin Thicky, that's what you would call him.

Oh, what a thicky.

There have been some pretty hideous decisions from the Grammy board over the years, haven't they?

Sounds like you've got a few up your sleeve there, Anna.

Well, I was reading an article written in 1993, so some of these wrongs have been corrected now.

But even so, a New York Times article written in 1993 about how they just never seemed to pick the right people.

So, by 1993, here are people who hadn't won a Grammy: Eric Clapton, the Beach Boys, the Supremes, the Grateful Dead, the Jackson 5, Led Zeppelin, Etta James, the Queen, Van Morrison,

the Queen, the Queen has won the Grammys every year, of course.

Lovely voice.

Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones, the only Grammy they ever won was Lifetime Achievement at that point.

Because they sometimes do this thing where I think the judges think years afterwards, oh shit, they did turn out to be really good.

So then they toss a light.

Those were busy years, though.

We're talking about in terms of rock, you know, Hendrix would have been up against the Beatles, up against that.

Was a crowd.

They didn't like rock, though.

That was always the thing with the Grammys.

They were almost set up as an antidote to what they considered was, I think, was called anti-music by the people who wanted the Grammys to come about.

They wanted to celebrate quality music, not anti-music like RB and rock, which it was like, this is a flash in the pan.

The Most Grammys is by George Salty.

And Salty's Ring actually has been twice voted the greatest recording ever made.

I don't know if you know Salty's Ring.

Salty's

his cycle?

His ring cycle?

It's Wagner, yeah.

He's a conductor, and so he's conducted lots and lots of things, won loads and loads of Grammys, won 31 as a recording artist.

And yeah, Salty's Ring is one of the greatest musical pieces ever made, and it's not funny in any way.

And he was the conductor at the Covent Garden Opera House and when he first came here because obviously we're in Covent Garden at the moment there was a like a clique in Covent Garden that really really hated him because they didn't like when new musical directors came in they really hated it and so when he first arrived people threw rotten vegetables at him in the street and his car was vandalized outside Covent Garden theatre with the word salty must go scratched into his paintwork.

Wow, that doesn't sound like the actions of opera fans.

Ah, it's just cliques, isn't it?

You know, it's just groups of people don't like outsiders coming in with their salty ways.

They called him the screaming skull.

Yeah, really.

But I don't know if that was a criticism.

I think that was more like he was quite a vigorous man and he was bald.

Oh, yeah.

But, you know, conductors, they do a lot of like shouting and gesticulating.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So screaming skull.

I really like the non-famous, the non-televised Grammy categories.

I just think they're great because there are so many.

I didn't didn't realize there are dozens and dozens of categories.

But things like best tropical Latin album or best contemporary Christian music performance slash song.

Yeah.

And

there's a screening committee which assesses whether or not you are actually fitting into that category or not, because it would be much easier, I think, to get a Grammy for some of these things where

you can't put Led Zeppelin in the Christian.

No, but we, the four of us, could

make a tropical Latin album.

We could.

Oh, I see.

Just game the system that way by entering some of the less popular categories.

And would that be part of our Mississippi River Oeuvre, or is the Tropical Latin album like the follow-up?

I don't think New Orleans even is in the tropics, is it?

I don't think, no, I don't think it could be.

I suspect not.

But okay, here's what we could win.

Best album notes.

Oh, yeah.

Which really feels like it.

Do you know a winner of that?

Not personally, but I know someone who has won that award.

Who?

What are the album notes?

Are they like the lyrics that you're writing?

Do you know like sleeve notes that you used to get in a CD or in an LP?

And young listeners have written excellently.

Yeah, I do.

Where you write like Beyoncé used to.

I remember in Destiny's Child, they all wrote how much they loved God.

I found it so boring reading those things.

Yeah.

Well, they might not have won that year's best album notes category.

Dan, who do you know who's been that?

Steve Martin, the comedian, has

written some really good album notes, yeah.

Yeah, for his banjo albums, not for his comedy albums, but he feels like it played with strengths.

Do you know Steve Martin?

No, that's when I said I know someone, and then I qualified it by saying I don't know them.

Right.

So who was the laughter statement was true?

Yeah,

is aware of.

I know Robin Thickey, although I don't know how to say his name.

It's very controversial the way they vote in the Grammys.

Oh, yeah.

Because it's, well, until this year, it was super secret.

It sounds quite exciting.

And I think

what used to happen was winners were decided by this like 12,000 strong Recording Academy bunch of voters who

are like...

They all stand in a room and put their hands up and stuff, right?

Yeah, they crush in.

And yeah, someone has to count them.

They, I guess, it's probably done by post, and their musicians and music makers.

Probably email these days.

It was in the 90s that it changed.

John Billings goes around, gets them in the back of the bag, and picks up the next one.

But that's just the fake ones that he brings.

So, yeah, it used to be done by this 12,000-strong bunch of voters.

But then, I think partly because the wars just kept going so wrong and they just kept giving it to weird people, they had to change the rules and I think the straw that broke the camel's back came in the early 90s when over at Album of the Year was up and Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA was released and Princess Purple Reign was released and Lionel Ritchie's Can't Slow Down won and everyone said we didn't like that.

That's not as good as the other two.

And so they formed a secret committee which basically goes through all the 12,000 votes and takes out the duds.

Because actually you would think that having a larger group, 12,000, would be more likely to give you a democratic answer, right?

Yeah.

But a democratic answer isn't necessarily the best answer, James.

Is that not right?

That's

my cue.

My one-way ticket to Russia has just come through.

And you know, people got quite pissed off by the secret committee because no one knew how they voted or why they voted.

And there's someone called The Weakened, I think.

By the weekend.

The weekend.

Oh, right.

Well,

it spells the weakened.

Yeah, yeah.

He's friend of Robin Pookie.

That show has certainly weakened over the years, hasn't it?

Yeah, so it smelled like weekend.

Anyway, but without an E.

So he...

He felt with two E's.

But not three.

Anyway, The Weekend got annoyed that he hadn't got a nomination.

Ladies and gentlemen, The Weekend.

I want a new podcast where we give Anna the name of all the bads that are in the charts and see if she can pronounce them.

They've asked me to read out the nominations next year.

I'm quite nervous now.

Lil Nas the tens?

I didn't know there were nine other Lil Nazes.

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, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M, James, at James Harkin, and Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

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

All of our previous episodes up there, so do check them out.

And come back again next week.

We'll be here with another batch of facts.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.