424: No Such Thing As An Ark For Peanuts
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Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covert Garden.
My name is Dan Schreiber.
I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Tashinski, 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 this week is that there was a job in the 19th century which just involved looking at the sea and being able to tell when there were pilchards under the surface.
Amazing.
So were they they weren't sticking their head under the sea?
No, don't be crazy James.
Okay.
A little bit of inside baseball.
Dan told us before we started recording recording that's what he thought the job was.
Yeah, and I told you before the recording specifically so it wouldn't get mentioned on the recording.
And look at us now.
That's an amazing job.
And it's not like they're sitting like a lifeguard on a boat looking down.
They're up on a hill.
They are.
They're not even in the sea.
So I should say where this comes from.
It comes from this brilliant blog called About 1816, which is by an author called James Hobson, who's written loads of books about George and Britain.
There's one about stagecoaches, which I was reading recently.
And he also writes about Cornish pilchard culture in the 18th century.
An obvious crossover
and well there were these it was this huge part of the Cornwall's economy in the in the 18th century was pilchard fishing because there were these fish that came to the coast by the million millions and millions of them this job was called being a hewer
literally like hew and cry you know shouting and they would stand on the high points along the coast and when they saw this moving patch of purpley oily colour on the surface they knew that was the sign that there was a huge um I was about to say flock, a shoal of pilchards underneath it, and maybe there were some seabirds hanging around it as well.
And then they would blow a special trumpet or they would wave their little flags and they would shout, go and get the pilchards to the fishermen.
And then the fishermen would go and
they would shout, Heather!
Yeah, Heather!
What does that mean, Heather?
It's an old word meaning fish in Cornish.
Fish!
But now you get Heather cake if you go to a Cornish bakery, but it's not fish cake.
It's just
related to
the cake that was baked for these fishermen when they would leave a day out.
Okay, yeah.
And the trumpet thing, by the way, hewing is an old word for trumpeting.
Acronymy OED.
Oh, apparently it is.
And this is not like your regular trumpet.
This was a four-foot trumpet.
Was it?
It's huge.
It's enormous.
Yeah, yeah.
And
they had these flags as well.
So they would wave semaphore flags which had special meanings to communicate to the boats, like go over there or come this way a bit or whatever.
Because then they directed the boats, didn't they?
Actually, they'd seen them.
Because Wilkie Collins, obviously, and I'm famous Victorian author, but he also wrote a bunch of essays, and one of them was about these hewers.
And he described them as feverishly waving two cloth-covered bushes, acting the part of a maniac of the most dangerous character.
Because they're just standing on a cliffside.
Cloth-covered bushes.
Like, before they had flags, they had to cover a bush in cloth and wave it.
It's weird.
Yeah.
They could have just waved around the cloth, you would think.
Yeah.
What would they presumably, if you had spotted, you've sounded your horn.
Yep.
You've got your semaphore flag out, Bush.
Presumably, you've sounded the horn because you've seen pilchers.
Yeah.
Okay.
You've seen them every long way.
You're going to lose your job.
You're going to lose your job.
If you're going to do an Eddie all time.
It's the main purpose of the job.
You've pointed your flag at the direction.
What semaphore needs to happen?
What are you trying to communicate with the semaphore?
You're telling the boat where they are specifically.
So you're saying, go to the right, go to the left, go out to sea, come closer.
Okay.
Right.
Or drop your nets there kind of thing.
Yeah.
It was probably less complex semaphore and more just pointing a flag to the right or to the left.
Well, I'm pretty sure it's proper.
It was proper.
I've looked up the signal.
Yeah, yeah, I've looked up the signals.
It wasn't just, you know, left to the left.
I mean, this is the worst possible medium to communicate what the semaphore signals are.
You can explain.
But it's just like you said, James.
There would be go east or go right off, which means go straight out.
It doesn't mean go right.
And cast net.
But they would also,
they could get messages to ships.
So they could signal to a man on board a ship that his wife had had a baby.
Ah.
Yeah.
I don't know know what the semaphore for that was.
They're seriously oily.
I'd never really understood when people talk about oily fish and the non-oily fish and the bang on about oily fish being really good for you.
What really the difference was, but that's why they were prized.
So in the 19th century, they were prized for their oil for lamps, weren't they?
And so that would just be sold and that would fund the whole industry.
Yeah.
And you'd have these piltered palaces
where they put all the fish in a barrel, put 6,000 fish in a huge hogshead barrel, and then I think you squeeze down on the fish, and all the oil comes out and drains off into the gutters, and then that's barreled up separately.
And you can use it for lamps and things like that.
Well, they used to just hand them out as well to anyone who was quite poor.
So as the boats would come back in, there's reports that you would have locals standing in the water just waiting for it to come in and say, Can you please just give me pilchards?
And the person who's on the ship would feel it was honor-bound to give the pilchards.
So they would just hand them out.
And then at the palaces as well, there would be the poor waiting outside, and they would be waiting for fish that had like broken backs or that were diseased or, you know, the ones that were being shot.
Imagine having to rifle through 30 million pilchards with little x-ray machines as if they've broken their spine.
Well, this one's got a bit of a cough.
That's the paw.
Cross the line.
But yeah, they didn't.
Kids used to go to the beaches with plastic bags and kind of scoop them out of the water.
But it's not just today.
Plastic bags.
But not plastic bags.
In the 19th century.
Cornwall is quite behind the times in some aspects, but in others, unbelievably advanced.
It had the Tesco plastic bags as early as the 1400s.
They had the oil to make it from, didn't they?
Because it was bloody pilches.
Exactly.
Sorry, not plastic bags, other bags, non-plastic bags.
But yeah, so it was back in the 1800s.
It was massive.
And in 1871, they were exporting roughly 16,000 tons
per year.
Now,
that declined massively in Cornwall, massively, massive, massively, to the point of the 90s where they were only landing about six tons in total.
So from 16,000 to six tons, and that's the early 90s.
But then that all changed when a man called Nutty Noah came along and he reinvigorated the whole thing by rebranding the pilchard.
I've seen Nutty Noah.
I think he's making some strong claims.
Huge claims.
Or is basically just a random fisherman.
Is he from the south coast?
Yes.
What's he claiming?
He's from Cadwith.
Oh, he's from Cadworth.
Okay, yeah, I go to Cadworth every year.
I've probably met him down the pub.
I don't know if he's a guy who's reformed the whole industry.
I mean, it's not like everyone's eating pilchers for every meal, right?
No, but I mean, a lot of people, when you read interviews, sort of claim that he called them Cornish sardines.
That suddenly was like, ooh, that sounds a bit posh.
Well, someone called them that.
They have had a rebrand.
Yeah, exactly.
It wasn't him, but it was in that.
Well, actually, no, it was him.
It wasn't him.
It was a guy called Nick Howell, I believe, in the 90s, who,
yeah, realised that pilchers had a bad reputation.
They're called sardines on the continent.
And so, yeah, they were called.
And pilchards are just adult sardines.
What we call sardines.
Pilchards are like adult versions of that aren't.
And they're all herring.
And they're all types of herring.
What was his connection then to Nutty Noah?
Because Nutty Noah was.
I was Nutty Noah.
Oh, Nutty Noah was a guy called Martin Ellis, and he was basically the only.
Why do you keep calling him Nutty Noah?
That's what he calls himself.
It's his nickname.
And he kind of.
He collected two of every nut, didn't he?
Saved them when there was a big flood.
Exactly.
Two peanuts.
Well, ironically, apparently his ship sank, so I don't think that's the story.
Did you read this?
No, no.
He took in too much pilchard.
It's got too heavy, and his ship went down and it had to be rescued.
And a helicopter had to come in to do it.
I was rescuing a whole ship.
I think him and the pilchards, possibly.
Not him.
Take the pilchards first.
But this one's got a broken back.
I don't care.
Women and pilchards first.
Yeah, he there's but the point is I can't find any record of a helicopter picking up a pilchered man called Nutty Noah.
So it's the story that's told.
It's not rescues out in Cornwall.
But they log them as well.
You log rescues.
You do have to log the rescues.
It's frowned on to just go around rescuing people and they're talking about it.
Nutty Noah and his actual name, Martin, whatever.
Good point.
I just did Nutty Noah.
I should go back and check Martin Ellis.
They wouldn't put it on the form, would they?
Like person rescued.
It was a massive list.
There were six tons of them pilchard that I had to get through before his name.
Every individual one.
Every pilchard.
Bobby, Billy, Sarah.
They are
elsewhere.
It's not just Cornwall that has a monopoly on them.
And I actually, when I was looking at my pilchard can and realized it came from South Africa, I thought, I wonder how many there are.
And there are shed loads in South Africa, and they've turned into a big tourist industry there.
And the sardine harvest, the pilchard harvest, is so massive that sometimes they don't need nets because the sea just dumps piles on the beach.
Right.
Wow.
The sea rises.
So just like get a tractor and a dump truck.
Exactly, scoop it up.
Wow.
And yeah,
they've got sort of festival days where they invite tourists to come and take part in various sardine marches and stuff like that.
No one knows why they go there.
It's kind of a mystery because the shores of like northern South Africa where they hang out are not very appealing to sardines.
And we know why they come to the to Carmel.
Are they mating or are they feeding or we don't know?
I think it's for feeding.
I think they're coming which way would they be coming?
I think it's for feeding.
But that African sardine run that you mentioned, Anna, that might be the biggest biological movement on the planet.
Because there's also the East African wildebeest herds.
Obviously your individual wildebeest, a lot bigger than your individual pilchard.
Yeah.
But there are so many pilchards that they might outweigh all the wildebeest.
It's hard to tell.
It's one of those classic classic would you rather fight one wildebeest or a thousand pilchards?
Yeah, yeah.
It depends where you're fighting them.
If you're in the sea, I'll take on the wildebeest.
And because they've challenged you, you are the one who gets to choose the location.
I would choose actually a hot air balloon for either, for either fight.
That's clever.
Playing it really safe.
Don't even back yourself against the pilchards on the desert.
Why take the risk?
They have a tendency of disappearing and reappearing.
So I think people keep blaming the decline of pilchard industry on people's declining tastes.
But they just bugger off sometimes.
This is the thing with oily fish.
It's why you can't depend on them because they slip through your fingers.
Because
of that, the reason they're oily is because they have to have loads of fat in their body because they're the fish that migrate huge distances in massive shoals.
So that's why you've got these oily fish.
They're fish that are pelagic that live in the middle part of the sea, as opposed to all your white fish which live at the bottom.
Good word.
Which I thank you very much.
I didn't make it up myself.
Thank you.
So these shoals somewhere migrate somewhere different.
So in 1820, we say the industry was massive.
In 1820, they all disappeared and went to Ireland.
And the Cornish were really furious.
And there were articles written in the 1820s saying, you know, this is a complete disaster.
The Irish don't like pilchers.
They're just flocking to Ireland.
And the Irish are saying, we think these are disgusting.
The Irish do have their own hewers, though, and they have their special laws for their hewers.
So I think it's got pilchered fancying has gone up and down.
So they have sometimes had a big hewering tradition, and then it just went out of fashion.
Okay, there's a special law in Ireland that if you're a hewer, you're allowed to stand on any private property to do your job.
No way.
Yes.
I mean, you can't go into the middle of Dublin.
Like, and just stand in someone's house.
I need to come into your bedroom now.
Presumably, it's someone's property that's on the coast.
I've got reason to believe
there are five million pilchards in this room.
Let me in.
Let me enter this bank vault right now.
Help me with my trumpet.
Can I just ask on the Hewers
that you said it was a job, but they, I mean, the pilchers just turn up at one stage in the autumn, right?
So what do they do for the rest?
It's very seasonal, this job, isn't it?
It is seasonal work.
You're absolutely right.
I imagine they had a kind of portfolio career.
They might be a trumpeter for the rest of the year.
Yeah, absolutely.
Or a Bush semaphore instructor.
I mean, there's all sorts of stuff they could do with their skills, you know.
But they had,
yeah, they did get paid a guinea a week during the good times.
So maybe it was one of those jobs where, much like a tourist season today, actually, you know, it's very big in the high season and then
just sort of, you know, could be a signalman,
a woman.
Yeah, on the railways.
On the railways, for example.
Airports.
At the airports?
At the airports, yep.
Could be a
plastic bag maker.
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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact.
My fact this week is that the sound designer for the movie King Richard is called Richard King.
So good.
Yeah, so good.
So great.
Did you just spot this?
No, this is coming out.
This was a buddy of mine, Ali Plum.
He's the BBC Radio 1 music reviewer and interviewer.
He spotted it and he told me about it.
And yeah, Richard King is, you know, he's actually quite...
famous as you can imagine.
He's part of this big movie.
He's won for Oscars.
He's won for Oscars.
And he's, you know, he's been the sound designer for movies like The Latest Wonder Woman, 1984, Tenet Dunkirk, so he's very tied in with Christopher Nolan.
He did Interstellar with him.
Do we know if Richard King only took the job because he enjoyed the symmetry of the name?
Oh, I've got a good reason why he might.
Tenet is all about things being backwards as well as forwards.
Palindromic.
Richard King.
It explains why he took the job, as well as him being a massively respected sound engineer and him needing the work.
But for Tenet, this is one specific thing.
So I haven't seen Tenet.
It sounds...
so some things happen backwards, even though the world is happening forwards, right?
They've kind of got two parallel things that happen in one goes forward and one goes backwards.
I haven't watched it.
But they had to make reverse gunshots.
But they tried playing all the sound effects they had.
You know, they have a sound effect of a gun, which is a
bang.
And then...
Why didn't they just use you for some sound effect?
But it sounded rubbish.
It sounded cheap and stupid when they just played the sounds backwards.
So they had to generate new sounds of what, you know a plane taking off might sound like backwards, but forwards.
That's interesting.
That's so weird.
Because they could have just taken the original one and made it go backwards, right?
Because they have that technology, but they didn't quite sound right.
They have the technology to make sound rewind.
You're kidding.
It's amazing.
How have they not shared this with us?
20 years ago they had that.
But the thing is that King Richard is about tennis and that movie is tennis.
So maybe he's just plugging his way through the
he's definitely got a word thing.
He's the Susie Dent of the sound engineer world, it sounds like.
I don't know.
I wonder if this movie does because they had a carpenter called James Crane.
Carpenters might use cranes, mightn't they?
If there was a carpenter in mind, it's 300 meters up.
Okay, look, this is.
This is the one I'm opening with.
They had an element safety manager called Guinevere Aid, like first aid.
Yeah, that's good.
That's good.
And the tennis racket stringer was called Jeffrey.
I bat you one.
That's the principal.
I bat you one.
How are you spelling it?
How much of a
IBA T U A N.
I bat you one.
Wow.
Yeah.
Okay,
that's extremely good.
I would definitely have opened with I Bat You One rather than James Crane the carpenter.
If he'd been called James Plain,
I'd have been absolutely on board.
I'll be honest, like I was working on just basically all the people who worked on this show on IMDB and it was Slim Pickings.
Slim Pickings on it.
I love him.
So, sound design has a nickname which is used within the industry, which is called Foley.
So, you're a Foley artist.
Foley sounds within movies.
It's really amazing.
And particularly if you read interviews with Richard King, he can make something that is quite a boring sound, suddenly seem like, wow, what a day that must have been of picking the sound for this tiny thing that I would never think about.
If you're in a room and a door needs to be opened, right, you would think, okay, there's probably just this bank of sound where it's just door opens.
And he talks about it saying no the variety is endless you have doors that are opened because maybe they're open because there's a baby sleeping in the room So it's a soft opening So he's like you don't only have just the creaks of a door speed opening you have emotional content to the to the opening of the door and he's like so I have like you know, he's got thousands of doors these collectors
Terminator 2 I was reading about the opening scene of Terminator 2.
There's a sort of exoskeleton Terminator walking in an apocalypse over all these skulls and stuff.
So the ambient sound that you hear in that scene, if you watch that scene next time, is you've got someone having put a microphone just next to the crack in a door at George Lucas's Skywalker ranch and just getting the ambience of the outside.
And that's mixed with someone going whoosh with their mouth.
Whoosh.
So that's what you're hearing in the background.
And then when this exoskeleton is standing on all of these human skulls, that's pistachio nuts being crushed.
So So, those are the elements that you see in that scene.
And just how they get to thinking a pistachio nut can be a better sound than a real skull being crushed.
It's sometimes easier to access pistachio nut shells than actual skulls, isn't it?
If you get a pistachio nut, you know how they're like slightly open on one end.
If you just squeeze the slightly open end, then the lever mechanism will open the other end and you can just pull the top shell off and then just get to the inside without kind of breaking.
Are you sure that actually works?
Yeah, I don't.
You would have been fired by Richard King immediately when you handed in your sound effects.
What the fuck is this, James?
What I'm just thinking is when you watch actual tennis, right,
someone does a serve and you hear the noise of the serve, and it's quite, you know, you would know that noise if you heard it right.
But I remember reading that sometimes in sports on TV, they add the sounds in later, right?
I don't know if this is true, but I remember reading that, like, when a dart hits a dartboard, if you imagine yourself playing darts, they don't make that whenever it hits it, right?
But then some people do that.
And I remember reading that in horse racing, there's no microphones on the far side, so there's no way you could make that sound.
So I thought that they use wildebeest.
They do.
They absolutely do.
They play that in.
It's the sound of a stampeding wildebeest.
Well, they play it.
They don't play it for the audience and the, you know, obviously live, but they play it over TV.
Yeah.
So this is insane.
I was reading about a guy called Dennis Baxter, who was the sound designer for the Olympics in 2012.
And in fact, multiple Olympic games.
And this is exactly the problem, James, because loads of places they don't have microphones for the whole thing.
But they have to add microphones wherever they can and then sometimes cheat a bit.
So for the balanced beams, they would put microphones on the beam.
So no audience would ever hear the creaking and the movement of the beam, but you do on TV.
And then for the archery, they had a microphone on the target.
They had a microphone next to the archer for the launch.
and they also put one in between on the arrow's path to capture the swoosh.
Oh no, so that one they're catching the actual sound there, they're not, because for me, I would probably get like a ruler on the side of a table and twang it.
That's genius.
But you're right, they fake it sometimes.
So Dennis Baxter, he did the boat race for a while.
Oh, was this in an interview with him?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've heard this.
It's amazing.
The boat race, if you're actually in the boats or on the bank, what it sounds like is the engines of the support support boats and the helicopters flying overhead.
And if you play that on TV, it would be an incredibly weird experience.
So he went out before the boat race, he recorded clean, swooshing rowing sounds.
And that's what you're hearing.
I'm hearing Dennis Baxter rowing or someone recording.
Live.
That's amazing.
How cool is that?
And it is with tennis as well.
It's a really precise job working out when to up the volume of the ball hitting sound and when to decrease it.
And it depends completely on the tension and also the crowd sound.
And I think he does ground sounds as well.
And yeah, he talks about you have to sense how tense a moment it is, and then reduce the crowd sound, or sense that you know everyone's getting really excited, and then you bring up the crowd sound, and then you make the sound of the tennis ball hitting the ground a bit less, the crowd a bit higher.
Is there someone doing the moaning as well?
That's his wife, actually.
I was reading about Foley, and there was actually a film made about Foley art itself.
And it's called Barbarian Sound Studio.
It was a horror film that was made in about 2012, had some famous actors in it.
It was meant to be okay.
Anyway, it was partly about Foliar.
So the main character is working in a movie studio and he's coming up with sound effects.
And in this film, he has to come up with the sound effects for these really gory horror scenes.
And he has to come up with these sound effects by smashing up pieces of fruit.
The classic.
So he's shown in this film smashing up watermelons or mangoes or whatever it takes.
But they realised when making this film that the sound of fruit smashing up
does not actually sound enough like the sound of fruit smashing up.
So they had to find some skulls and break them in, didn't they?
They couldn't get the skulls, but the sound of the fruit smashing up is made with pieces of wet cloth and bits of wood being bashed around.
That's amazing.
So funny.
How messy is that?
We keep saying Foley.
Jack Foley was a real person as well.
This was the person who created the idea that you could overdub within the sort of behind the scenes of the the movie, the post-production.
And
his first job when he did it was he was working on a movie which was Showboat.
And
his first, I think one of his first things that he did for it was he walked as three people.
So he had a cane and he had his own footsteps and he managed to match the footsteps of three people walking using both just his feet and a cane.
And that was the moment when they went, oh my God, this is, what is this?
And he started experimenting more.
Was it three one-legged people?
No, I guess you can move your feet quite fast to be in time with all of the feet, can't you?
So, did he get people to close their eyes and say
three people are going to come in and out of this room?
And then, you know, did the three gates
and then said, It was all me.
Oh, I see.
No, I think he just showed them the product of the recording match with the film.
He could have been an incredible master criminal, you know.
Make it look like a burglary was five people, but actually it was one.
It didn't sound like a burglary was five people.
You know, that's a good idea.
surely no good with an eyewitness.
No, he could only operate under conditions of pitch black darkness.
But
they would, you know, afterwards, the security guard who'd been blindfolded.
They would rob spec savers.
Exactly.
Again, everyone would have to be blindfolded and in the area as well.
But then they would say afterwards, oh yeah, 15 large
wildebeest came in to the shop and took all the glasses.
Or herring, we're not sure which.
But he could do them so accurately.
And then then because they'd never look for Jack Foley.
So he died when he was 76 years old and he reckoned he had a long career in movies.
Or did he?
Did he just make it sound like he died to continue his crime spree?
Good call.
Yeah.
That's a cold case.
We don't know.
But he reckons he did 5,000 miles of walking in the time of his career for films.
He doesn't say whether or not that was like I was walking to buy some pistachios, or I assume it's the footsteps that have appeared on our screens.
I would assume so.
I don't know.
But also he's he's his voice was on movies.
He is responsible for the first ever, we believe, Tarzan call.
The very first, yeah, Tarzan the Tiger in 1929 was the first movie and it wasn't that though.
Was it?
No, it was just him going, eeeee ah,
and that was supposedly Jack Foley.
It's sort of a bit lost whether or not it was him because I think the footage has itself been lost.
It's one of those lost things.
Cole, the one that we know that goes, ah,
it's like a palindrome, isn't it?
That's
fun facts about that.
And it's trademarked.
It's owned by the Edgar Rice Burroughs family.
And they've got the exact, it's like nine calls or ten calls, isn't it?
And it's an exhale and a well, after tennis and tennis, Richard King can do Tarzan next.
The film just about the Tarzan call.
How would you, what would the title of that film be?
If it was just about the call.
Yeah.
I'm just wondering how you'd spell the film name.
Just loads of of AS.
E-R-E-R-E-R-E-R, I think.
You'd think it was a hospital drama.
Shall we talk about the Williams sisters?
So, this movie,
King Richard, the King Richard in the title is the father of Venus and Serena Williams.
And he, I don't think it gives anything away for the movie to say he was a very hot housing father who really wanted his children to be tennis players at a very, very young age.
He'd never had any training, but he taught them how to become great tennis players, and they were the greatest of all time.
I read an interview with Venus from 1991, this was in Sports Illustrated, and even then, she knew she wanted to be a tennis player.
She was a brilliant tennis player.
They said, What would you like to be when you grow up?
She's like, I want to be a tennis player or an archaeologist or an astronaut who travels to Jupiter.
Cool, wow.
So that was her three possible things she wanted to be.
And I looked it up because I wondered, and this is true, both Venus and Serena now own properties in the town of Jupiter, Florida.
So they kind of went, because a lot of sports people live in Jupiter, so, and they, yeah.
Very nice.
Right, isn't it?
It's not the Jupiter she meant when she was five or whatever.
Just happens to be an astronaut, but lives in this tennis village.
Venus Williams,
one of the two Williams sisters.
That's right.
Yeah.
Owns a quarter of a dolphin.
A Miami Dolphin?
A Miami Dolphin, the American football team.
She has a stake in the Miami Dolphins, and it's quite a small stake.
With Serena.
Yeah, but I think
so it's about it's less than 1% that sh they own or that she owns.
But anyway, if you include all the spare players they would have, it would work out at one quarter of one dolphin.
Amazing.
Wow.
That's really good.
And it's both of them that own it then, isn't it?
It it's quite hard to find the exact chapter of verse on how much they own or whether they own it together.
You can understand why that that hasn't been too extensively reported on, I guess, with all the stuff out there about the Williams sisters.
In 1995, Serena was 14 and she wanted to go pro and she was too young by the rules.
And so she filed a lawsuit, an antitrust lawsuit against the WTA, I think.
Really?
Saying I should be able to play.
And actually, their dad had a bit of a vault fash in their early teens because he suddenly realised that tennis can really screw you up.
And the junior tennis circuit all the parents were just awful there was a little bit of racism around and he actually said to I think Venus I don't think you should become a tennis player but she must have thought well thanks a lot Daniel nothing else for 12 years
but yeah Serena tries to do this lawsuit to say that you have to let me in even though I'm 12 years old so that was Serena was it sorry Serena Serena did this lawsuit saying how you have to let me in even so at that stage Venus will have already become pro right so maybe that was the reason because yeah in the movie a lot of it is about how he doesn't want them to become pros
He doesn't want them to play any matches until they become professional, really.
They play when they're like 10 years old and then they don't play again until they're professional.
Except they play with him, don't they?
They're lucky to practice.
They practice, yeah.
How do you never touch the market again?
But how do you go pro without going up a system to get to the?
Well, they were so good.
They basically had a pro
they had a trainer and they were really, really good.
And there was one game, one of her first ever games, Venus, she lost against Aranchi Sanchez Ficario.
And this is part of the movie, and they kind of slightly change what happened in the movie.
But anyway, she lost this game, and then they interviewed her afterwards and said, well, you know, how is this loss against one of the best players in the world?
How is it compared to the other times when you've lost in other games?
And she went, well, I've never lost before.
She'd never lost a match in any of her junior things.
And then she stopped playing and then she became pro.
And so, yeah, she'd never ever lost a match before at that same game.
Yeah, so Richard the dad, he basically decided that he was going to turn his two girls and he had a family before this was his second marriage and a new um two new kids to the family he was watching tv and he saw that a tennis player could earn forty thousand dollars a week and he thought my god that sounds amazing i'm gonna train my girls up to do that and he wrote up this 78 page training manual for serena and venus that he had you know everything that he'd learned in there and how he needed them to be he did a really interesting thing and i say interesting it's it's terrible uh he had his kids play venus and serena out in the public public, and he would pay local kids to come and jeer at them, to yell at them as they were playing, so that they could get used to the idea of crowds being against them and having to push through it.
Oh my god, there are people out there right now who have an anecdote, which is,
I was paid as a child to jeer Serena.
I think my family might have been doing that
at fish gigs.
What kind of prodigy were they attempting to turn you into, and where did it go wrong?
okay it is time for fact number three and that is james okay my fact this week is that there is a tree in pakistan that has been under arrest for more than 120 years
and still no charges brought no
that's tony blair levels of um you know what's it what's it called the thing that talked about the habeas corpus suspension such an obscure reference to blair era home office policy guys we all remember it and we're all still outraged.
Yep, sorry.
Anyway, yes,
apparently, no hebeous corpus when it comes to trees in Pakistan.
This is...
Well, is this true?
I mean, there is a tree.
There's a tree in Pakistan.
That is undoubtedly true.
It's a banyan tree.
It's undoubtedly true that the tree is chained up.
And it's undoubtedly true that there is a board on the tree that says, I am under arrest.
One evening, a British officer, heavily drunk thought i was moving from my original location and ordered mess sergeant to arrest me and since then i am under arrest all that is true
um this officer is supposedly called james squid i have no evidence that there was ever anyone called james squid i looked as well i couldn't find nothing in the newspaper archives nothing on nothing in old books nothing like also it just feels like squid wasn't anyone's surname.
Well, it is.
There are people called Squid.
I looked on one of of those genealogy websites where you can see families.
Squid was a surname back in the day, but there's no notable squids.
If you go to Wikipedia, notable squids.
Notable squids, empty page.
Empty page.
Wow.
Sorted it out.
The squid.
Jimmy Wales.
Well, he's only interested in the larger marine level.
Wow, James.
Yeah, and this is a thing that certainly the people who live in Landi Katal, which is the place where this tree is, which is in the Khyber region of northern Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan, the people there, it's the story, the local story is that this happened.
And I think one reason possibly that it's still there is they wanted to remind people of the, you know, the colonial times and
the bad things that the British colonists brought to the area.
And yeah, remember the bad times.
I've got a question.
Yeah.
Was it chained to?
The ground.
The ground.
I see.
And the reason it's chained to the ground is because so that it can't run away.
Yeah.
Because the reason James Squid had it arrested is while he was riding home one night, it leapt at him,
it made a sudden movement, and he goes, Whoa, there, and it was quite a windy night, wasn't it?
So he claims drunkenly, supposedly, drunkenly, and I say supposedly, it's about a possible fictional human.
Um, it's a possible fictional human.
We don't even believe the fictional human's drunk stories.
Sounds like James Squid has a lot of questions to answer himself, but can't answer them.
But yeah, it's said to have
they can walk, can't they?
They can trees, yeah, so yeah, and they do walk quite slowly.
Sorry, can we unpack this a a bit?
Yeah, so they possibly don't walk fast enough to jump out at you on a dark night, but they are an extraordinary tree.
They're known as strangler figs because the way they grow is they start out as a seed that's pooed out of a bird or whatever or blown onto the branch of another tree and then they drop their roots from that branch.
That's the crate.
Have you guys heard that before?
I'd never heard of that.
That is extraordinary.
It just takes over a tree from the outside.
It's very cool.
Yeah.
And it kills, yes,
And then it kills the inner tree.
The banyan then becomes what's called a columnar tree.
So there's a hollow column in the middle of it where the previous tree was.
And then all sorts of animals get to live inside that hollow bit.
It's like the magic faraway tree.
What are the walking?
I still don't believe they walk.
So the walking is if you've got your original root that's been dropped from the, you know, from the branch of a tree, and that embeds itself, and that's essentially the trunk, and then it's rooted into the ground, and then it grows up again from the roots and it grows out so you have these things that look like forests of lots of trees that are just one tree because it keeps on growing up from the roots and then dropping roots down again and then going up again and then often the original trunk will get diseased and have to be removed and then I say that that's walking because it's lifted up that leg and taken it out of that position and moved it to the next position.
It hasn't moved it to the next position.
It's just been removed.
It's just died a bit amputated.
It's a new trunk.
It's grown another leg.
Yeah, the roots that come down, one of those will become the major trunk.
Yes, it's like
forgetting that definition of walking, where I have my leg amputated, but then I grow a new leg, which I put somewhere slightly different, and then do this
a series of times over a century and end up going about 10 feet.
Ah, yes, walking.
Love to go for a walk.
Look, when you're a tree, you have to take everything you get, right?
That's true.
That's true.
It's not running.
Certainly.
I saw a massive banyan tree this morning.
Yeah.
It's humongous.
It's in India.
How big?
We're talking about 4.7 acres.
But this is how big it is with what Anna was mentioning about the idea that these roots grow back out through the ground.
So they're called aerial roots.
They look like their own trees.
This one has 2,800 of them.
That's how many it's grown.
And the original trunk, like Anna was mentioning about the other one, also has been diseased and chopped away.
So even the original leg is no longer there.
They're pretty amazing.
They're so big that these trees, these really, really massive ones, I read can shelter 20,000 people.
So let's say it's raining and you're with 19,999 friends and you all need to keep dry.
You can just all slip underneath one of these trees.
Or you're Jack Foley, you've just pulled off a job and you need to make it sound like there are 20,000 of you hiding under a tree.
Yep.
Yeah.
I understand.
Yeah, yeah.
20,000 people, though.
That is a lot of people.
So that's like, if you think of most
lower division football stadiums, Tramir Rovers, who I support, like, that's twice as many, more than twice as many of people who go and watch Tramere every week.
So, all so people could leave Tremere one week and all hide under the same tree, and the next week a completely different crowd of fans could turn up, join the initial crowd under the previous tree.
The other crowd are like, what was the scar?
Because we just missed the match because we're hiding under this tree.
Or, in fact, because I think the biggest one is about three football pitches.
So, you could all crowd around the outside of the tree, and then three teams could play three different matches underneath it.
Although there have shed loads of branches in the way, so actually, that wouldn't work.
Hang on, three football pitchers, you can get six teams on there can't you that's such good football i'm not a football expert but i think you can have two teams on the same pitch and it's a really exciting match
so there's a story that there's a prison in the shabakwadar area and it's called shabakwadar fort and in the 1800s 1840 there was a group of warriors that attacked it and they went inside and there was a big clash and um it went on all night long and the Sikh people who were in there fought back and they managed to get them out.
But there was this huge thing going, how the hell did they get in here?
Someone's responsible for this.
They need to pay.
And so they had a big court case, as it were, like a big inquisition into working out who did this.
And they came up with a verdict.
And the verdict was it was the fault of the wooden doors that let them in.
And as a result, the wooden doors have been arrested and have been hanging in the tower, chained up, much like this tree, ever since the 1840s, and they're still chained up.
That wow,
it's the escape go, isn't it?
The escape door.
Yes.
Not the escape door.
That's awful if you try and get out through the escape door and you just walk into the wall easily.
So, wow, this might be a thing, like a trend of chaining up
trees or wood.
Yes.
I've not heard of it happening anywhere else.
I did look for arrested trees, and you don't find any others.
No.
No.
And it slightly predates your tree as well by about 40 40 years or so.
And also, these are wooden doors, so they were trees a lot before that.
Yeah.
We don't know how old the doors were.
No.
We don't.
No.
Food for thought.
Do you know some banyan trees have bells hanging off them so you can ring the bell to access the spirit at the top of them?
Cool, do they?
Yeah.
Is it a helpful spirit?
A goddess.
Well, they're very sacred, so yeah, it's a positive thing.
There's lots of mythology around them because they are quite extraordinary trees.
They feature quite heavily in Hindu mythology, in fact.
I think
there's Hindu texts from like 500 BC that say the entire universe is an upside-down banyan tree.
And so it's growing from the heavens down to us.
And then it leaves a little aphorisms, little bits of wisdom.
And there's, I mean, women wrap threads around them, don't they?
There's a festival in India,
Vat Per Nima, which I think means banyan full moon.
And married women go for three days and hang out with banyan trees wrapping threads around them as a way of
because they love their husbands so much.
It's really gross.
There is, yeah.
A lot of it is a bit like
a hindu almost, right?
Because all the women go together.
But a married woman goes together.
But they're only married, yeah.
That's an in.
I reckon that's the next place for the Hindu market to go.
The banyan trees?
No, just like married Hindus.
I think that could be a huge thing.
So what are you celebrating then?
I'm getting away from your husband for a bit more.
Yeah, nice.
How much you you love him.
Oh, sorry, yeah, yeah.
Well, that's how it's sold.
But everyone who goes on it knows we're going for a fun.
Well, if we love our husband so much, why we go to a strip club in Blackpool?
Sometimes.
There's a tree in the middle of it.
You need it.
Stop tying ribbons to that.
To that guy's trunk.
Oh, my God.
He's got an aerial root.
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Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is Anna.
My fact this week is that pad thai was invented as part of a fascist government initiative.
Wow.
And every time you eat it, you are supporting fascism.
Oh, shit.
Yeah, I know.
Awkward because it's delicious.
When is this the last time you all had pad thai?
I reckon that I had it this weekend.
About two weeks ago.
Yeah, same.
Yeah.
I'm not sure I've ever had.
Well, you're very liberal, aren't you?
Yeah, because of my principles.
This is an amazing thing.
It's from Thailand, hence the name.
And it was essentially invented, sort of, by the leader of Thailand, a guy called Phibun, full name Luang Phibun Songkram.
And he was a big populist leader in the 1930s, that era of big populist leaders who became fascists.
I thought we got out of that era.
Indeed.
How times have changed.
And he became essentially dictator of Thailand in 1938 and he was very anti-China, very nationalist as was the way with sort of fascist leaning dictators and he wanted to stamp Thainess onto everything and make everything very Thai.
There were loads of Chinese people in Thailand at the time.
They tended to sell most of the street food for instance so all the food had Chinese influences.
He wanted to scratch that and create this new dish and it's not totally clear who invented it.
His son claims that it was in their household that it was invented and they used to have it as a family together.
Other people say maybe he ran a competition to invent it.
But essentially, he published and promoted this recipe for Pad Thai to incorporate lots of nice Thai tweaks and made everyone eat it.
That's interesting.
I did read that it's not Thai, that it's that it's a Chinese meal which has been sort of adopted.
Did you see that?
It is.
Because China and Thailand are all kind of like noodle or rice-based stuff, it does use, yeah, like Chinese noodles.
It basically took Chinese noodle dishes and added lots of Thainess to it So the Thai bits are things like the palm sugar That real nice sweet sugariness the chili tamarind flavor that you get that was all Thai also bean sprouts you don't really is very Thai
dishes on top But yeah, it wasn't like a pizza They couldn't they had to work with what they had and what they had was the same ingredients as Chinese food.
Yeah, actually you were saying about the food vendors all being Chinese any foreign food vendors were banned by Phibun.
They said you're not allowed to do that and the government kind of bought a load of food carts and then got people to run them and said, right, you've got to sell Pad Thai from these food carts.
They made it so that everyone had to eat at certain times every day and you were allowed no more than four meals a day because this was the Thai way as opposed to the Chinese way.
You were supposed to be
mandated no more than how many meals
a day.
You're like, well, are snacks allowed?
I think
I have some pretty hefty snacks.
You know, I I only have three meals a day, but if you add in snacks, I'm shading snacks.
I think you're not allowed.
You wouldn't be allowed in 1930s Thailand.
He was the one who changed the name to Thailand from Siam.
Yes.
He mandated that everyone had to sleep six to eight hours a day, which apparently was also a Thai thing as opposed to a Chinese thing.
And he said that everyone had to wear hats.
How long were the Chinese eating 15 meals a day and sleeping for 21 hours?
It appears that way.
It wasn't even just hats.
You had to make sure you wore shoes.
If there were photos of people without hats and and shoes in them, they were painted on onto the actual photo itself.
Yeah, there were all these like he made sure that, and this was an order that you had to kiss.
This is if you were a male worker, you had to kiss your wife before you left for work.
That was part of the mandate.
I do think that's nice.
Yeah, but it's not like you have to, it takes the meaning off it, doesn't it?
If you go to work and give your wife a kiss, and she's she knows that if you don't do it, you're going to be arrested.
I think it takes
and sometimes you've had a tiff and you actually want to make make a point.
Yeah, well, then you can.
And you're like, I hate you so much.
I'm willing to be arrested by the fascist government of Thailand.
That actually really makes the point much more effectively.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Than just saying, sorry, train,
gotta go.
Well, the reason we all think it's nice is because we are Westerners, and that's why he was trying to.
Yeah, it was just absolutely bang on classic,
like desperately trying to Westernise and modernise, partly because, partly our fault, he came about
because
Thailand or Siam had never been conquered, never really been colonised by the West, unlike pretty much everywhere else.
Sounds like it was explicitly not our fault.
No, but wait for it.
Oh, no.
It felt like they were in danger of being colonised because we weren't over that phase of history at the time.
And they were like, the reason we haven't been colonised is because we're really cultured, we're civilized.
You know, Westerners think that we don't need to be colonised.
And we need to kind of persuade the West not to invade us by Westernizing and modernising massively.
And that's going to mean kissing our wives.
And that's why the Brits didn't invade Thailand.
We saw they were kissing their wives as they left and
that was the idea.
And wearing hats.
And wearing hats.
Yeah.
You can't possibly arrest all these good chaps who are going around wearing hats and kissing their wives.
Precisely.
You've got the British mentality of the 1930s.
Yeah, it's not the first time I've heard that either.
He banned listening to American and European music though.
Why would he do that?
Well again he wanted to get the Thai nature.
He ordered every single household to have a picture of him in their homes.
Classic fascist behaviour.
That's vintage stuff.
And also
theatre and cinema audiences had to bow to an image of him before each viewing of the screening of the film or performance of the play.
Well, that's fine, because
1930s were a little bit different.
You're going to battle Boris Johnson before you see one man, two governors.
You've got to stand up and sing God Save the Queen in the cinemas before a movie and at the end of a movie.
That's what happened here.
Like, it's not any different.
That's the same thing, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He had to use forks and spoons.
National cutlery, got rid of chopsticks.
Again, it's this weird hybrid of persuading the West that we're westernized and modern, but also keeping real Thainess, Thai food with forks and spoons.
And also, they went through all these popular songs and they took out if any like popular folk songs mentioned other ethnicities that weren't Thai, they were rewritten.
So like Lao, if you were Lao or if you were Burmese, because there were lots of different ethnicities in Thailand at the time,
then couldn't sing it anymore.
Really?
Wow.
So if you had like the song The Irish Rover, did they rewrite it as The Tie Rover?
Yeah, and that was one of the most popular songs at the time.
I couldn't think of any other songs which had an ethnicity on them.
See, but so they would send the artist back into the studio.
It wouldn't be like the DJ at the radio station would just come in and just say a new word over a song playing.
Well, this is where Andy's Foley artist comes in, isn't it?
They employed Jack Foley to say the word tie over everything else.
Actually, it doesn't sound like Thai.
If you say the word Thai, you have to say the word Swiss because that better creates the sound of the word Thai.
Anyway, he was a fascist bad guy.
Yeah.
They had a noodles song as well.
Did they?
Yeah, yeah.
Thai.
Do you want to hear it?
Yes, please.
It sounds good.
I want two, three, four.
Noodles, noodles, noodles is how it starts.
Thai vegetables are wealth in the ground.
You can find it anywhere.
Keep buying and selling as Thai people always help each other.
Noodles, noodles.
I imagine something's been lost in translation, but
the tune.
Do you know we've only just worked out how to break a noodle in half?
Not true.
Scientists have, well,
okay, 2018.
Okay.
Four years ago, this is like a straight noodle or a bit of spaghetti, and it's just impossible to snap it in half.
Yeah.
If you try doing it,
it's really interesting.
If you're at home now, like get a piece of long piece of spaghetti, a long spaghetti,
you hold both ends of it and then start to bend, right, until it snaps, you'll find that the two bits in your hand stay in your hand and then the bit in the middle comes out so it doesn't break into two pieces, it always breaks into three.
It's really interesting.
That is interesting.
Although if you hold it in the middle, you can snap it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's what they learned in 2018.
Andy, if only you'd been there.
I mean, you could have saved thousands of pounds worth of circumstances.
I think a really famous scientist like Richard Feynman was obsessed with this problem, so he used to stay up all night repeatedly snapping strands of spaghetti.
Incredibly famous physicist, Richard Feynman.
And he died in what the 80s or 90s, so he never
knew.
He's not alive to
see the 2018 innovation.
What happened?
Well, he died clutching a noodle.
It flew into his eye and
threw to his brain.
We figured out why you can't do it in 2006, and that's to do with this kickback wave that travels through the spaghetti when you snap it and smashes it up.
But it then took another 12 years to figure out how to overcome it.
The way you overcome it is you twist the spaghetti 280 degrees, so almost a full all the way around.
And then you break it gently, slowly
and that solves your problem.
Yeah.
I think if you are at home and you do try that, sometimes you break it and it does go into two and you're really disappointed.
But I think that might be because you've got either too much or too little moisture in your spaghetti.
Yeah, well when if you try it just without if you try I'm just saying don't don't write in.
If you break your spaghetti and it breaks its tooth straight away, then don't write it.
It's your fault, is what we're saying.
So
are there any, it feels like a stupid question.
Are there any applications for this?
Yeah, loads.
Yeah, yeah.
That's
probably military.
PAE systems have probably bought it.
We make drones out of snap spaghetti now.
Yeah.
Is it the same principle for anything that is one big long stick as in I'm trying to think of someone doing a low vault?
No, sorry, um a pole vaulting
pole.
Yeah, yeah, a vaulting pole.
They're at one end,
and we do see them snap and they tend to snap in two, I think.
Do they snap?
Yeah, um, they have snapped from time to time.
Uh, no, I think it's because the spaghetti has got a certain tensile strength that it works particularly well with that.
Okay, I think.
Um, okay, how about in uh last year a woman was burgled in um a helicopter was dispatched to the scene of this burglary.
Right.
So it wasn't in Britain then.
Night.
What?
Because of police funding.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And the only thing.
We were allowed to make references to Tony Blair's Home Office heavy and corpus policies, but I'm not allowed to comment on police cuts.
Can I just say, how many police cuts do you think you would not have to have before we could get a helicopter going to every burglary that happens?
All I'm saying is, James, when I stand for election, that's going to be one of my flagship policies.
Chopper at your house within seven minutes of the burglary happening.
Well this actually
this story does weak of an overfunded police force because the only things that were stolen were eight pot noodles and
not just individual noodles, pot noodles like you know they dispatched a helicopter buckets.
I don't think they knew at the time that it was just pot noodles that had been taken.
A woman just saw.
Was this woman the queen?
Yeah, she was.
Didn't we learn earlier that they were using helicopters to lift up pilchards from the water?
Not I know.
So you know it's like...
What are you saying?
We've We've got spare helicopters cutting out of our own.
It seems like it.
Yeah.
I think she didn't know at the time she just saw this burglar in her garden having leapt out of her house, I guess.
Called the police.
They were like, oh God, emergency.
And it was only later when they interviewed her, they said, what's been taken?
And she said, well, actually, ate pot noodles.
And she said they took all the beef and tomato flavoured ones, but didn't take the chicken and mushroom ones.
Ah.
Really?
That.
Yeah.
I understand that.
I was going to say, yeah.
Have you heard of What and a Panic?
Say it again.
What an apanic.
No, no.
Watana.
It's in Thailand.
It's a noodle soup joint.
Maybe the Watana family, I don't know.
But it's a place where you can buy noodle soup.
And they're one of these places where every day they take the last bit of the previous soup and put it into the next soup.
Like a perpetual soup.
And so
whatever you buy, if you get some of this beef noodles, you might be having stuff from, you know, 50 years ago isn't it cool do we know how long it's been going on uh it's been going three generations
uh we think 45 years and counting um but i was reading about these perpetual soups and there's some claims um
one of them apparently there was there's one story that there was a perpetual stew in purpignon in france um that was going from the 15th century until world war ii
what then the nazis bombed it they ran out of ingredients due to the German occupation and had to stop their stew.
You could just water it down.
I would have thought you could just water it down until it's basically water, but keep the stew.
Technically, it's still the stew.
But you've got bigger things on your mind when the Nazis are rolling in, so that's fair enough.
Yeah, you do.
There was one in Normandy that apparently was over 300 years old.
This is an article in a newspaper called the Navin Times, which is from Goa.
And I couldn't find it anywhere else, so God knows if this is true.
They've got an unbelievably good Normandy correspondent.
Wait till I tell you what it is, because it's so unlikely.
But also, what a weird thing to make up.
They said that in Normandy, they had
a pot which had been bubbling away for over 300 years.
It was in a Cistercian abbey.
And researchers went into this soup and took some tests.
And they said that there were still some ingredients.
in there that had been in the stew for 350 years.
What?
James, what you're reading is the Indian equivalent of the daily expression.
It is like that thing, isn't it?
Where if you every glass of water you drink has been through a dinosaur.
Yeah.
Okay.
And Hitler.
And Hitler, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which is why I've stopped drinking water actually.
Yeah.
Is there a filter for that?
Fitler, it's called.
It hasn't been through.
I mean, Hitler didn't drink that much.
I don't think every glass of water was drinking.
I think he was teetotal.
Or is it a thing that there's enough?
There's enough molecule here.
Sorry, sorry.
I just remembered it's not the whole glass of water.
It's one molecule.
Okay, that's it.
That is all of our facts.
Thank you so much for listening.
If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our Twitter accounts.
I'm on at Schreiberland, 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 thingasafish.com.
All the previous episodes are up there, so do check them out.
And we will be back again next week with another episode.
We'll see you then.
Goodbye.
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