412: No Such Thing As A John Lennon Statue in Svalbard

Hey everyone, welcome to this week's episode of Fish.

Before we begin, we just want to let you know that we have a very special guest on this week.

So we were doing a live show in Brighton and Anna Toshinsky could not make it to the show, unfortunately.

And so we had to find someone to fill those very big shoes.

And we did.

In fact, we went to the top.

We brought in the big gun, Deborah Frances White of the Guilty Feminist.

She is such a fun person.

She's a really good pal of ours.

We had so much fun on stage with her.

And you must check out, if you haven't already, the Guilty Feminist podcast.

It's a really important, really great show, comedy show, but always full of interesting and important issues.

And you can find all the information about it on guiltyfeminist.com.

Deborah tours like we do all the time.

So do go check out her live show.

In fact, this one recorded in Brighton, she'll be back in Brighton on March the 5th.

She's going to be playing at the pavilion and it is going to be a show that is tied in with International Women's Day.

So 5th of March.

Do get your tickets for that.

It will be an awesome show.

It always is with Deborah.

And we hope you enjoy her on this show.

Okay, let's do it.

On with the pod.

Hello

and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Brown.

My name is Dan Shriver.

I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, and special guest Deborah Frances White.

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

And in no particular order, here we go, starting with fact number one, and that is Deborah.

So my fact is that actress Tallulah Bankhead had a parrot which she taught to say, birds can't talk.

She also taught her to say, who'd want to talk to you?

Nice.

And who are you?

So sometimes someone will come in and say, who are you?

And the person would answer and it'd go, birds can't talk.

Which was a sort of gaslighting parrot, really, in a very real way.

It was actually, I think, a minor bird, which I'm assured is a sort of a parrot.

That might not be accurate, but if it isn't, email these guys.

She had a lot of pets, actually.

She had a lion cub called Winston Churchill.

She bought that when she was in Nevada, and she only went to Nevada so she could get a quick divorce.

And she used to take curtain calls with her on the stage.

She had a dog called Hitchcock given to her by Hitchcock.

Wow.

All her life, she had an incredible series of animals, but she was one of the great eccentrics.

No, she was completely amazing.

And she

so she's most famous as an actor, but only really took off.

She was from America.

She came to the UK in 1923, and she spent eight years here doing plays and becoming a real complete sensation.

And there was a group of fans called the Gallery Girls, who were a group of teenage cockney girls who would arrive and just wait in the gallery.

And whenever she came on stage, they would just scream and cheer.

And it was incredibly annoying, obviously, for anyone else who actually wanted to see the show.

And you know, they would applaud for about as long as she was on stage herself, as in that long again, you know.

Yeah, they used to

sing Tallulah, hallelujah, Tallulah, hallelujah, on and on and on.

And some of the other actors she'd vamp, and some of the other actors would be like, Are we even gonna get out of here?

Because she would let it go on.

But

the gallery girls were working, as you say, working-class women, many lesbians, and they knew that she was Tallulah, was what she called ambisextress.

And she famously said, My father warned me about men and booze, but never said a word about women and cocaine.

She was also said to have slept with 70% of the aristocracy,

but her, her, I mean, that was what she claimed.

I love that idea, like the battered old copy of De Brett's, just crossing off the Isle of Westminster.

There you go.

And in fact, the Duchess of Cleveland.

Like a football sticker album or something.

Yeah.

Can't tell us in Paris.

Come on.

Got to catch them all.

Well, she did catch quite a lot of things, actually, yeah.

She did, generally, yeah.

She was amazing.

She was so famous in London when she lived there that, according to Lord Beaverbrook, there were only two people in the whole of the UK who could be identified by just the first name from an average costa monger.

And that was Tallulah and Steve.

Steve?

Steve?

Steve.

Everyone knows Steve.

Let's try and guess it.

What,

1920s?

1920s, Steve?

I mean, good luck.

Because I can see the answer.

Okay.

Is this person still famous?

Oh, no.

Oh, okay.

It was Steve Donahue, the great English jockey.

Oh, that's awesome.

And she loved a bit at the races as well.

You'd see her photographed with the Prince of Wales at the races, and she was friends with the Aga Khan.

But she would often come to the door without any clothes on, just with a strand of pearls around her neck.

Even the stage door, she'd come without any clothes on.

And she once said to an aristocrat at a stuffy party who was there with his wife, who she had slept with many times, he looked away from her and she said, What's the matter, darling?

Don't you recognize me with my clothes on?

She was wonderful with those kind of quips.

And also the nudity thing, like she used to do that not just in sort of her personal life, but on sets of movies.

She would just get naked and start cartwheeling everywhere.

She loved a lot of cartwheels.

Loved a nude cartwheel.

Yeah, Pantsless cartwheels were her speciality.

So you'd think it was a normal cartwheel, and then she'd get to the top of the cartwheel.

Oh, it was a very special cartwheel, actually.

Yeah, so that might be the other thing.

She might have her clothes on, but she wouldn't have any underpants on.

And there was a thing with a movie she was on, that was an Alfred Hitchcock movie, where they did get complaints and they told Hitchcock, we've got to sort this out.

And Hitchcock reportedly said back that he didn't know if it was a matter for wardrobe or hairdressing.

She inspired amazing quits from everyone.

That's the thing, I do.

Do you want to hear another Tallulah line?

Yeah.

This is where she saw a former lover of hers and she saw him for the first time in years and she said to him, I thought I told you to wait in the car.

This is such a good.

She also, she used to say, I hate to go to bed, I hate to get up and I hate to be alone.

And so she employed in her later years, middle-aged and a bit later,

probably until she died, young gay men she called caddies to sit with her while she fell asleep.

And I mean, she was such a gay icon, you can imagine, because

they were happy to do it.

But she paid them to sit with her and they would hold her hand.

But they did other things for her as well.

They'd light her cigarettes, draw her baths, you know, just generally make her life more convenient.

She never liked being alone, even if she was asleep.

So if she wasn't sleeping with anyone that night, on the rare night she wasn't sleeping with anyone, she would hire a caddy.

That's it.

Which I might do in my older years what did they did they speak to her or anything or was it just holding the hand just there so she was felt comfortable going to sleep she just didn't like being alone so

yeah it's sweet but it has pathos absolutely yeah she was she was a rather tragic figure her last ever words were bourbon codeine

which talks about her life.

But in her book, in her autobiography, she denies being a cocaine addict.

And she absolutely was.

Yeah, in the book, she says that what happened was, and I agree that this is not true, but this is what she says.

She said, one time she got really, really, really drunk, and she decided she was going to give up drink for a few days.

And she said, okay, well, what I'm going to do is if anyone says, do you want to drink?

I'm going to say, oh, no, thank you.

I don't drink.

Have you got any cocaine?

Right.

And that would get people to stop her getting drunk.

The problem is that one day someone called her bluff.

According to her, and that's why she had some cocaine.

And then the next day, someone else did, and the next day, someone else did.

That's how it happens, gang.

It's a slippery, slippery slope.

Well, she had the sick, so it was alcohol, it was cocaine, it was sex, a lot of sex.

And she had this moment where she had to go to hospital to have an emergency hysterectomy brought on by gonorrhea, I believe.

And so she got really ill.

She was rendered infertile.

She was in hospital.

Her weight had gone down to 75 pounds.

And they were trying to say, you know, subtly that you've got to change your life.

And the thing that she used to say to the doctors as they were sort of leaving the room is she would yell at them, going, Don't think this has taught me a lesson.

She was

just pure badass.

There's no other way of putting it.

Yeah, she's sort of force of nature energy levels.

One of her friends followed her around for a day with a stopwatch timing her speech and estimated that she spoke 70,000 words a day, which is a lot.

That's a short novel.

Wow.

Deborah, you just gave me a look like, lightweight.

Yeah,

I could do that by lunchtime.

That's quite a weird thing to do with someone, estimate their word count.

I think there were a lot of sort of crazy people people in the 20s just going around being fabulous.

Around Closer.

She's like, this is my caddy, this is my word counter.

How many have you done so far?

Was that like the original?

Pedometer.

She had an amazing voice, didn't she?

That's what she's quite famous for.

She had a very deep, husky voice.

She said in her autobiography that her voice has been likened to the mating call of the caribou.

Gosh, I listened to her on Desert Island Discs.

That explains a lot, actually.

Explains why all the caribou ran into your front room.

if you heard her voice?

Because I haven't actually heard her voice.

You know, like that.

Well, darling.

See, I'm Panny, it's like

words.

Was that her dance?

I'll give you one of the things she actually said.

This is the thing she actually said.

She said, I'll come and make love to you at five o'clock.

If I'm late, start without me.

She said that on Desert Island List.

Broke probably did not know where to look.

We're going to move on to our next facts.

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

My fact this week is that this year, an invisible statue made of air went to auction with an estimate of £5,000.

The piece sold for £13,000,

and the winner went home with literally nothing.

Well, it's not quite true.

He had a certificate to prove he had nothing to go home with.

It's amazing.

It's incredible.

Yeah, so this is an artist called Salvatore Garao, and he's done a couple of art pieces where it's invisible.

This particular piece is...

Has he, has he really, or has he done, has he done fuck all, in fact?

Wow.

I have to say, I buy into it.

I'm probably in the minority, but I do like the idea that as soon as someone says, let's imagine we're saying right now in front of us is a hovering Yeti.

We now all know that I've said there's a a hovering invisible Yeti there.

It's there.

Would anyone like to buy it?

Okay, that didn't go well.

No, so this was an art piece that was called I Am, and that's the English translation.

It's actually, that's the short version.

The full title is, I am 13,000 pounds richer, thanks to you suckers.

So

the instructions for if someone was buying this was that you need a room that is five foot long and five foot wide.

So, you've got to buy all of the extras as well.

You've got to buy a room to put it in.

Lighting and environment are optional due to the fact that it doesn't exist.

Could you put it outdoors?

Or would the weather?

Yeah, you can put it in if you like it, but it wouldn't get weather damaged.

Is it fungible or non-fungible?

He does still let that be

tells anybody.

Does anybody?

This is very, very controversial, though, I should say,

because he is being sued by another artist who also created nothing.

Oh, interesting.

I know.

This is a guy called Tom Miller, who's a performance artist from Florida.

And he said that he was the first person to do an invisible sculpture.

We might go on to the fact that many other people have done that as well, but he says that he did it.

And what he did was he went into like a community area and he got a load of people to pretend they were moving blocks, like almost like building the pyramids or something.

So they just put some empty stuff here, and then so it's like a performance of making an invisible sculpture.

And he's currently suing Salvatore.

Yeah, wow.

And he said he easily could have found out that I had done this previous to him.

All he needed to do was Google Tom Miller, nothing, and that would have.

And you're like, I don't know.

Why would you ever do that?

Why would you ever do that?

But we should all, if any of us has any artistic endeavor going forward, should Google Tom Miller and then whatever it is, just to die.

Just in case.

Are you guys familiar with

Tom Friedman

is another artist?

He produced a piece of work, which again,

the idea of everyone buying into something and sort of investing something with meaning, I do think has a lot of merit, actually.

So Tom Friedman came up with this work of art, which is a sheet of paper, and it's called A Thousand Hours of Staring.

And it's a sheet of paper that he spent a thousand hours staring at

and then just displayed.

Still empty, still completely blank.

But it's called A Thousand Hours of Staring.

It took him five years.

It's just 1992 to 7.

To be fair, to be an expert at staring at a piece of paper, you'd have to do 10,000 hours with a year.

That's true.

As an amateur, as an amateur, paying for that.

Was that Tom Friedman, you said?

Yeah, that was Tom Friedman.

So Tom Friedman did another one called Untitled a Curse, which was, again, just an empty pedestal, but he had employed a professional witch to put a curse on an invisible sphere above it.

Similarly, on eBay, you can buy things that are not really things.

There was a man who sold a ghost in a jar, jar,

but he said, I will not be responsible for the black spook that comes out if you take the lid off.

And the bidding went up to $55,000.

Yeah.

But the final bidder didn't buy it,

didn't pay, just disappeared.

So I think the ghost was bidding against everyone else to stay in this man's house.

But there was also a haunted rubber duck sold on eBay.

A rubber duck that, according to its owner, had the power to possess children.

The seller said he would not be responsible for for the duck after shipping.

He will not field questions or help to explain its unusual mystique.

The duck sold after a week, making him a profit of $107.50.

So if you put just any old crap on eBay and say it's haunted, people will bid for it.

Everything you've said, I will have bid on.

Don't you remember we were in Newcastle a few weeks ago and we were chatting to the night porter after hours.

We were having a few drinks.

Oh, yeah.

And he said that the boxer chris eubank jr had been there the day before and he was outside and taking selfies and doing signatures and stuff like that and some jordy came up to him with a microwave and said will you sign my microwave please

and he signed his microwave and then it sold on ebay for 60 000 pounds yeah yeah yeah

there's video footage of it it's amazing Have you heard of Maurizio Catalan?

No.

I'd love we're on a roll with these great artists now.

So Maurizio Catalan, this was an exhibition.

In fact, in 2012, the Hayward Gallery in London, they hosted an exhibition of drawings of art about invisibility.

So,

there was a pedestal that Andy Warhol had stood on briefly to kind of create an anti-statue, whatever.

Maurizio Catalan produced a work of art based on a claim that he had made that in his car he had been keeping an invisible work of art.

The car was then broken into and the artwork stolen.

The work of art that he claimed had existed was not the work of art that he submitted.

What he submitted was the police report by the police who had to take it seriously and investigate his claim that the invisible work of art had been stolen.

Wow.

And you could see it in the museum, this police report, which he got a copy of.

And the police took that seriously?

I don't know how seriously.

I mean, I guess the car had been broken into, so that's breaking and entering, if nothing else.

I don't know how long they looked for it.

This must be nice to be a man, because when women commit report crimes, we just don't get the same sort of response.

We're going to move on very soon.

So let's get a few more couple of things in here.

I've got one about signing something.

Yeah, sure.

Okay.

And making something unvaluable, invaluable.

In 1922, all my facts are from the 20s, just by the way.

I just love and revel in the 20s.

It's where I belong.

And I'm back in them.

Oh, I've just realized.

This is amazing.

What a moment.

I'm in the 20s.

But Einstein was once at Tokyo's Imperial Hotel in 1922,

and he didn't have any money to tip the bellboy.

So instead, he wrote him two notes.

The first said, a calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness.

And the second said, where there's a will, there's a way.

In 2017, guess what that first tip sold for?

So the physical handwriting?

Yeah, it was the note, the calm and modest life one.

Guess what it sold for?

Two grand, I should think.

Signed by

Einstein?

Five grand.

I'll say many, I'll say 20 grand.

I'm going to go a million.

1.56 million.

Yeah.

Wow.

The second one got a mere quarter of a mil, but it's because it was a bit of a cliche.

He wasn't really trying it.

Well, there's a way.

Come on, Einstein.

You can do better than that.

There's a story, I don't know if it's true, but there's a story that Mozart, if he was passing someone on the street and they asked for money and he didn't have any change on him, that he would quickly grab a pen and a quill and would quickly write a quick little song

and give it to them and say, sell that and get...

Sell that to an ice cream bug.

It wasn't one of his famous ones, was it?

It was, well, I don't, because I don't know if this is true, but yeah, but he would just do that.

Would he do a new one bespoke for you?

Yeah, yeah, he would just go, oh, I'll skip it up, do Do you

sound

very good?

It doesn't matter if it's good or not.

It's Mozart.

Yeah, it's Mozart.

He could write.

He could do it.

I took my backhead impression.

Mozart.

He was really, really good.

No, but he was.

He's like, chunk change.

It's not going to do a symphony if he's just trying to give someone...

He'd be doing that for hours.

You know, this is like when you go to, when a famous person used to go to places where they would kind of think, is it possible that when I give them the check with my signature on, that they're going to keep the check and not bank it because it's worth more to them?

And me not.

So that would be a good idea.

Well, there is that story, I think it's supposed to be by Picasso, who was in a restaurant and he hadn't, he'd had his meal and they said, Can you, instead of paying, can you draw me a picture?

And he drew them a picture.

And then they said, oh, would you sign it, Mr.

Picasso?

And he said, no, I wanted to pay for the dinner, not for the entire building.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What a dick move to say that.

So, what you're saying is, Mozart basically invented the cameo app.

Yes, to an extent.

So, you'd say to your friend, oh, you know, you love that Mozart, don't you?

He just wrote me this.

He gives it to the guy, yeah.

And then the guy just sells it, saying, I've got an original Mozart.

Well, yeah, he goes then to a sort of

the Institution of Music and

they take it and they go, did it do?

Wow, yeah, okay.

Classic Armadeus.

Let's get this.

But

we do need to move on to our next fact.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that the doomsday vault in Svalbard, which keeps backups of more than a million of the world's seeds, gets regular requests by men who wish to deposit their own seed there.

I saw this on a YouTube clip by an account called Veritasium.

And they went to this doomsday vault in Svalbard, where they keep all of these seeds.

And the idea is that every country can put seeds in there.

And if they have any problems,

if there's disease that kind of kills off some plants, then they can bring the seeds back out and they can regrow the plants.

And hopefully it will help the diversity of the earth.

Now, there is a lady who manages a vault called Benta Nevadal.

And she

said lots of things that was happening there.

But one thing she said is they often get letters from men asking to deposit their semen.

And she says that they never answer those letters.

That's all I can really say about it, is that they never answer them.

But on a fairly regular basis, they get these requests.

Wow.

Okay.

Good to know why I didn't get a letter back.

It's like an extremely strange dick pic, isn't it, really?

Just saying, can I deliver my semen into your grain stores?

No,

it's one way of putting it.

It's a pretty uncompromisingly direct way of putting it.

I mean, I don't see that there's a more charming way to say it.

So, this seed vault is very important for mankind, we think.

The reason it's in Svalbard, so Svalbard is an island group, very, very far north.

It's owned by Norway.

We might get into the entire ownership later, but kind of owned by Norway.

It's way above the Arctic Circle.

And the reason that they've put it there is: number one, hardly any people there, so that's good.

Very little tectonic activity, so it won't get hit by earthquakes or anything like that.

It's also really cold, so it means that if the freezers kind of fail, it still won't defrost because it's so cold there.

But most of all, it's really, really high up.

And if all of the polarized caps completely melt, it will still be above sea level.

So that's why they put it right here at the top of this mountain.

Yeah, right.

I actually know a man who was raised there.

Really?

He was raised there.

Yeah, in Spitsbergen.

Sorry, I thought you meant in the vault.

Successful in semination at the back.

No,

in Spitsbergen,

which is the coldest place on earth.

And it's an extraordinary place, Spitsbergen.

You have to have a gun when you leave the house because of bears.

But weirdly,

the guy I know, Sven, he was raised, you know, you have to go out with a gun to shoot bears.

But when I was reading about it, it said, although that is true, it is also illegal to shoot a bear.

Oh, really?

Nightmare.

A nightmare.

But it's the lowest, apparently it's got the lowest crime rate in the whole world.

And anyone can live there.

You don't have to have a visa to go there.

But there's a reason why people don't go there.

It is all ice, all snow in every single direction.

And it is a very, very tricky old place to live.

It is a mad-sounding place.

The whole Svalbard sounds completely mad.

So what you just said about

crime there, very low in crime.

If you commit a crime, you can be sent home.

You can be sent away from the whole of Svalbard because they just don't have the facilities or the time to look after you.

There are six police officers, and there's one detention cell.

And in 2013, there was a crime wave where crime went up by 800%.

Wow.

Now, that sounds bad, but actually, what it meant was the year before, there was one bar brawl, and that year, there were nine bar brawls.

Right.

It's so weird.

Like, there's so many reasons that they send people away.

One is you can't die there.

So

you can technically die there, but then you get sent away.

So burials don't.

And let that be a lesson to you, they say, waving you off.

You are allowed to die, but you're not allowed to be buried there.

It's not illegal.

They won't, yeah, they won't jail you if you die there, but they will send you away.

You can't be buried there because, and for the reasons that James was saying about the fact that, you know, if all the ice melts and so on, if that happens at any point with burials, if the ice goes down, let's say flus or whatever that might be still in the bacteria in the body, that could spread.

And that's why I'm not sure.

So they found some bodies that still had the Spanish flu in them.

So they buried them in 1919, 1918, something like that.

And it's in permafrost, so it's really, really cold.

And they dug them up, and the bacterium was still alive in them.

It's like nature's cryogenics, really, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

And you can't be born there either.

Yeah, so did you see your friend was born there?

Well, he was raised there.

His parents were, in fact, Austrian.

I'm telling too many details about him now, but his parents were Austrian.

But I don't know if he was born there.

He's definitely not born there.

They may not have introduced the rule when he was being born, but basically they don't have any facilities to give birth.

So

if you're pregnant there, you'll be sent to the mainland a few weeks before your due date so that you can have the baby there and then bring it back.

Although there aren't many, I don't think there are many.

Are there any children there?

There are because I know it's the most northerly kindergarten in the whole world.

So there are very small children there at least.

Unless it's a very empty kindergarten.

They used to have one of the world's most northerly cats there.

Until this year, unfortunately, the cat died.

But the cat was brought to Svalbard.

You're not allowed cats on Svalbard.

And the reason is that they have lots of birds there.

It's like the ecosystem is really, really, you know, it's a real problem if cats come in and start killing things.

And so the only way it managed to get onto the islands was by pretending to be a fox.

And when I say pretending, it was the owners that pretended it was a fox.

They had to dress up their cat as a fox to smuggle it in.

I'll be be honest, I think they just filled in the form as a fox.

I want to think they dressed it up as a fox.

I mean, that's a much sweeter story.

Honestly, it's a really cute little ginger thing.

It looks fox-like, I reckon.

And people would come from miles around to stroke it because it was the only cat in the whole of the country.

The only cat in the pit.

And unfortunately, it died.

Although there are rumours of a few other cats in the area, so you never know.

Most things that are open there as shops and schools and so on, could you say of them that they are the most northernmost?

It's all the northernmost.

They've got the northernmost airport, they've got the northernmost fully serviced hotel, they've got the northernmost school, hospital, and they also have the world's two most northerly Lenin statues.

So,

John or the other one?

The other one.

I'm so sorry, Dan.

Sorry.

The other one.

Vladimir Ilyich, the other one.

Yeah.

But what I would like to see is no such thing as a fish donating a John Lennon statue to Spitsbergen.

Great idea.

I think we will do, but it'll be invisible.

Let me talk about the polar bears on Svalbard.

Yeah, sure.

So the polar bears are really interesting.

They found something quite recently about them in the last five or six years, and that is they eat dolphins.

Okay, not only do they eat dolphins, dolphins are pretty big, and the polar bear can't get through a whole one.

And so they freeze their leftovers.

And they come back to them later.

This is amazing.

There's a guy called John.

It looks like John Ars, but I think it's Ors.

It's A-A-R-S.

Well, let's call him John Ars.

He found out, he was watching these polar bears, and he found that they were going, getting these dolphins, eating some of them, and then digging a hole in the snow, putting them in there, covering it up, and going away, and then coming back and getting it later.

Wow.

John Ars also, by the way, gets emails every morning from several female polar bears.

What?

That's part of his job.

Hot gets emails.

Hot polar bears in your area.

Well, global warming, I get too hot.

Put them down.

Yeah, so what happens is they put a load of trackers on the female polar bears in the area, and every morning they are set so that they send him an email.

So he gets into work, turns on his computer, and he just gets a load of emails saying where all the polar bears are.

Obviously, because you're the scientist, you get to pick the subject line of the email.

He should absolutely make the subject line.

Yeah, yeah.

That just sounded like Tallulah Bankhead to me.

Oh, darling.

Imagine getting one, though, in the morning that just says subject line, I'm behind you.

We do need to move on to our final fact.

It is time for our final fact of the show and that is Andy.

My fact is that Tina Turner is currently suing a Tina Turner lookalike for looking too much like Tina Turner.

And there's an image on the screen here for those of you listening at home.

It's hard to tell the difference, but on the left is the impersonator, the tribute act.

She's called Dorothea Coco Fletcher.

To be fair, she looks pretty like Tina Turner, and she's an incredibly good singer, and she's been touring around Germany, Austria, and Switzerland with a Tina Turner show.

And Dorothea is 50 years younger than Tina Turner.

Nonetheless, Tina Turner's lawyers are maintaining that it's too hard to tell which of them is Tina Turner and which of them is not and that the average punter could be misled into booking tickets for Dorothea's show when they actually were hoping to see Tina Turner.

Despite the fact Tina Turner hasn't gigged for years,

this legislation has been going on and on and on.

And, you know,

it's been going on for about two years, actually.

These various legal tussles between the two camps.

And the lawyers for the show, the Tina Turner Tribute Show, say that only a chronically stupid person

could mix up the two.

I don't know.

I think they look kind of similar, don't they?

I mean, you know, this is that is.

I'm not saying I'm not chronically stupid, but...

That photo is, I think, Tina Turner in her 80s or 90s phase.

So she would have been a bit closer in age to Dorothea now.

She is in her 80s now.

She's an octogenarian.

And I sort of love her chutzpah, that she's like, no,

someone might think that 30-year-old.

It's me.

Yeah, it's me.

And I'm not having it.

Yeah, well, she had it from the get-go.

There was a story, and Tina Turner's not her real name.

Anna Bullock is her real name.

Anime Bullock, I think.

Yeah, Anna May Bullock.

And Tina Turner was a creation by Ike Turner, who was her husband at the time, abusive husband, a very famous story of how she broke free of that and sort of rose above.

But he at the time came up with the name, Tina Turner and he supposedly trademarked the name because he thought if Tina ever leaves, he can just swap in another singer

and use the name Tina Turner, kind of like the sugar babes, exactly.

Just continue

the

imagine doing that to your wife.

What a lovely fucking guy.

That is a level of evil.

It's beyond anything any normal human being could think up in my opinion.

I don't think he was a nice guy and I'm not sure if I'm alone in that, but...

I'm beginning to think he wasn't either.

But she's got the trademark for Tina Turner now, hasn't she?

I think in the divorce.

In the divorce, basically, she got nothing, but she did get the name, and that was literally the only thing she got.

But it did give her the freedom to be able to go on and do that.

What right to feminism to go, all I need is my fucking name.

I'll do it all on my own.

And 40 years from now, I'll be suing younger tribute

to oblivion.

But this happens a lot, doesn't it?

The acts suing tribute acts happens all the time.

It happens in so many cases.

One that I was reading about was a guy called Pete Rossi, who someone said to him, you seem very similar to Meatloaf.

Why don't you do an act?

Pete Rossi said yes.

So he started traveling around the UK as Pete Loaf.

And

you can't sue that guy.

He annoyingly spells it differently, P-E-A-T.

But

he faced a million-dollar lawsuit from Meatloaf for doing it.

And he eventually met Meatloaf and Meatloaf kind of then went, do you know what, you can do it.

And so he's able to still travel around doing it.

But yeah, for a while.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Because I guess sometimes it's just like the companies that are doing it, right?

Or the management that are doing it.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Bon Jovi had a very similar thing with an all-female Bon Jovi tribute act where even in the writing, you kind of sound like Bon Jovi were going,

we don't really want to do this, but...

Do you know what they were called?

I can't remember.

Do you?

No, I just, I love the names.

I love the names that people have.

Yeah, the names are amazing.

Because there's Rong Jovi, and then

there's a heavy metal ABBA tribute act called Abbottois, which I think is brilliant.

Wow!

There's an all-girl Led Zeppelin called Les Zeppelin.

I mean, there are so many girls on the bottom.

The Rolling Clones.

I really like Shirley Bassy's Looky Like is called Surely Bassey.

I like the Oasis Band.

Oasis isn't,

which is really nice.

And then they get a bit crap.

Favorite crap one is the Black Sabbath tribute act, which is just called Slack Babbath.

It's beautiful.

I really like that tribute act.

Is it Elbow the band have got a tribute act called Ass?

No.

Oh, that's fantastic.

Yeah.

1949, Procter and Gamble launched a radio advertising campaign for a shampoo.

Using a jingle and a character that they created called Tallulah the Tube.

They were sued by Tallulah Bankhead.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

for

closely being identified with her.

They were using her name.

It's a very unusual.

Like if it was Steve the Tube, for instance, you'd be exactly the same.

Yeah.

And they settled outside of court.

One thing on the celebrity lookalikes.

Yeah.

Or people working as look-alikes.

The thing is that you're really pegged to the person you're a lookalike for, obviously, and there's a risk that that person might have some reputational damage, okay?

So there was a piece in

The Guardian by a great journalist called Tom Lamont in 2016.

It was about look-alikes where the celebrity is then, as it were, cancelled.

So, a Tony Blair impersonator who started off in 1997, incredibly popular,

lost all his work.

And he used to work with, he was called John Brolly, and he would work with Cherie Blair, aka Caroline Bernstein.

They, you know, they went all over the place, being Tony and Cherie together, opened a ride at Alton Towers together.

They lived the high life.

And then when the Iraq War happened, nothing.

Korea completely, completely

dead.

I mean, they're the real victims of the Iraq War.

Look, I'm not putting them high on that list.

I'm just saying.

And anyway, don't worry.

They got lots of more work after 2007 when he came out of office.

We're going to have to wrap up soon, guys.

You don't want to end on that?

Not on that.

You were talking about Sherry Booth.

One of her relations or ancestors, the most famous one, probably, John Wilkes Booth.

Oh, yes.

So, John Wilkes Booth, who shot Lincoln, 1865, when that happened, there was a man who looked almost exactly like John Wilkes Booth.

And he went around America and basically was almost lynched on three separate occasions within a week.

He kept going to a pub.

He would go into a pub.

He was called Jacob Haas.

And he would just walk into a pub with his friends.

And everyone there would go, that's the guy.

And they would just rile on him.

And they had to convince him that he wasn't John Wilkes Booth.

And then he would would go to the next town, the same would happen, and the next town, the same would happen.

You'd get a label or something, wouldn't you?

Although it's suspicious, actually, wearing a big I am not John Wilkes Booth t-shirt.

More suspicious of anything.

A few final tribute act names.

I found the most northerly

look-alike in Svalbard.

Does Svalbard look alike?

Yeah, there's a cab driver who looks like Rod Stewart in Svalbard.

No!

His name is Nils Engen, and he's 65 years old.

He said he's constantly being mistaken as the singer.

Only like 500 people, it's Felmar.

They must be wise to the thing now.

What would you get in a cab,

in a town made of ice in the dark, and think, oh, Rod Stewart's not doing as well as he wants?

I mean, he gets paid a million a week just for Maggie May.

I just don't think.

He does it for the love, Deborah.

He does it.

He loves driving.

He's apparently the tightest man in show business.

Never buys a round.

Well, maybe people started tipping him more when they got out of the cab.

He could afford to.

I don't know.

Oh, sorry, I wasn't saying that taxi driver was tight.

I was saying Bron Stewart was tight.

I don't think we ever saw you saying the taxi driver's the tightest man in show business.

He knows really tight.

That fucking Norwegian cabby.

I know Brian Cox, the actor.

He's in succession.

So Brian Cox, the actor not the starvation.

He joined equity when he was a young man, and he found out there was another Brian Cox in equity.

Nightmare, can't use your own name.

But he hadn't worked for ages, this other Brian Cox.

Good news.

So Brian Cox sent the other Brian Cox a begging letter saying, you know, dear Brian Cox, I'm another actor with your name.

It seems like you haven't worked for a while.

I would be so grateful.

Could you please let me play under my own name?

I'm also Brian Cox, right?

Sent this off, okay?

Didn't hear back until he got a letter soon after that.

It was from another Brian Cox, and it said,

I really want your name.

I'm another Brian Cox.

And it turns out Brian Cox had forgotten that he had joined Equity many years before and had written a letter to himself begging for his own name.

Amazing.

Okay, we need to wrap up.

That is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Shriverland, Andy

Hunter, James, at James Harkin, and Deborah.

At Deborah FW.

And you can also go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, no such thingasoffish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

Brighton, that was awesome.

Thank you so much for having us.

That was really wicked.

We'll be back again for another gig.

And listeners at home, we'll be back again for another show next week.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.