390: No Such Thing As The Chronicles of Chelmsford

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

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

So James is away on holiday at the moment doing, you know, classic Jamesy things.

I'm sure you're going to hear about it on a future podcast when he's back.

He's probably eating, you know, weird testicles and living in a cave, that sort of stuff.

Classic Harkin holiday.

Anyway, in his place, we have the brilliant comedian, Chaparak Corsandi.

Chaparak's a really good friend of ours.

She's been on Phish before.

She did the the comic relief marathon and that video is up on YouTube if you want to watch it.

But she's here for an actual episode this time.

And she's not only a comedian, she's a brilliant author as well.

She's written three books.

Her latest book, which has just come out, is called Kissing Emma.

It's a novel for young adults, and it is a modern fable of the untold story of Emma Hamilton, who was Lord Nelson's mistress.

So if you have a young adult in your life, do get the book for them, but also do get it for yourself because it is for adults as well.

And Shaparak is such a great writer, so funny, so interesting.

It's going to be a great read.

Anyway, that book is available online and in stores now.

So do get a copy.

But until then, enjoy Shaparak on No Such Thing as a Fish.

Here we go.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray and special guest.

It's Shaparak Kosandi.

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

Here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that's Shaparak.

So, hello, and my fact is that a doctor in India, Ashokoswani, would prescribe DVDs of Charlie Chaplin to his patients to convince them that joy and laughter was the remedy to their malady.

Does he do it if he's run out of medicine for that day?

It's interesting.

I mean, look, we say doctor, but he was, and this is a new word that I've learned, uvedic medicine.

So it's hard.

That sounds like you've called him a dick.

Do you want to say that again?

Uvedic.

Ayurvedic.

Is it Ayurvedic?

Thank you very much.

I think so.

Is that homeopathy?

It's lots of different things.

It's traditional medicine.

There's breathing and there are dietary things and there's herbal treatments and that kind of stuff.

That's Ayurveda.

I think 80% of people in India roughly will practice Ayurvedic medicine.

Yeah.

But yeah, it's what we would say is alternative medicine.

Exactly.

Mindfulness, you know, I think that it's the practice of looking after the self and your body and being connected with yourself.

But let's be clear, if you're going for your COVID vaccination and they've run out of Pfizer, do not accept the Gold Rush as a substitute.

Absolutely.

Likewise, if you've broken your leg, the kid will do nothing for you.

Just to clarify, even though we're talking about Ayurveda medicine and how it is alternative, actually, Aswani prescribes chaplain for mood disorders, right?

And for psychological problems.

So it's people who come with anxiety or depression.

And that doesn't seem completely out of this world for some of those issues.

And there's a lot of science that says the old GSOH is associated with living longer.

I think there was a study in Norway that it took like 54,000 people and it looked at how good their senses of humor were.

Don't know how they did that.

And then it went back 15 years later and the ones with the best senses of humor were more likely to have survived.

So maybe this guy knows what he's into.

I think there is something to it.

I think, you know, we've spoken about this on the podcast before, where when people were put under pain and duress, when they put their, I think their hands were in ice buckets, listening to Billy Connolly made them feel the pain less they did show Charlie Chaplin films in hospital they used to screen it on hospital ceilings for the casualties of World War I because Chaplin was such a massive star that his very silhouette would make people feel overjoyed and happy how do you get the moustache into the silhouette you've got to oh you've got to do sideways on I suppose then it yeah no no he's iconic outside of you're not looking at the cane bent with the hat going who is that that?

Who is it?

Well, there is someone else it could have been because you know how he, one of his most famous films is called The Great Dictator, and he was satirizing Hitler.

I didn't know this.

He and Hitler were born four days apart.

That doesn't mean they have the same silhouette on the ceiling.

Well, some say that Hitler copied Chaplin's moustache.

But was that moustache the fashion back then, the way big beards are now amongst the young and her suit?

Yeah, I mean, Hitler was a fashionable guy.

And yeah, I don't think there's ever been evidence, but there is someone who did copy Chaplin's moustache overtly, and that is Marcel Proust.

Why did Marcel Proust copy it?

Was it a direct tribute to Charlie Chaplin?

Yes, and because he was the biggest thing ever.

I mean, at the time, people were saying he was the most famous person who had ever lived, which was probably true in about 1915, 16, wasn't it?

Because, you know, movies had just become this global thing.

He was the Mr.

Bean of his time.

He could transcend all language in that he did not rely on language.

And in fact, he resisted the talkies when they started to talk in films.

Chaplin was like, ah, no, no, no, no, no, this takes away the purity of what we do, and this is just a passing fad.

And it took him a good long time to make a talking film.

I think I've watched The Great Dictator even more times than I've watched Greece.

Wow.

Really?

One of those films I know off by heart.

But we do need to know how many times you've seen Greece in order for this fact to have true punch.

Oh, I think I watched Greece every Saturday for about four or five years.

Okay, now that

is the Great Dictator thing.

That throws it into an entirely new light.

That's amazing.

Well, you know how a lot of people during their sort of darker times in their teens will listen to music.

I would just watch The Great Dictator over and over again.

And I'd make my friends watch it.

And I lost quite a few friends with my obsession with that particular film.

That's amazing.

We should say The Great Dictator because this is a movie that a lot of listeners might not know the plot line of or aware of its impact.

This was a movie that Charlie Chaplin made in 1940.

This was a movie that basically satirized Adolf Hitler and showed exactly what his plans were and his hatred towards the Jewish people of the world and how he was putting them away and how he wanted global dictatorship.

And this was at a point where not everyone was really ready to say that that's what Hitler was doing.

And Charlie Chaplin got in a lot of trouble for it.

But this movie came out while Hitler was really at the beginning of what he was was about to do and it caused huge ruckus hitler saw it twice it's astonishing that this movie was made but how many times did he see grief

we need to know that for context

you better shape up was apparently one of his favorite songs it blows my mind that hitler saw this like how can you be hitler and watch that final speech don't fight for these machine men with machine hearts and machine minds you are not machines you are men you have the love of humanity in your heart.

How did that not cure Hitler?

He thought that was the satire.

That's the problem with satire.

It's too ambiguous.

That must have really hit home, interestingly, in your family as well, because your dad is a satirist and you effectively had to flee Iran because of his direct satire towards the power there, right?

Yeah, I think my father was a huge reason why I fell in love with Chaplin.

That scene in The Great Dictator when he's on the roof with Paulette Goddard and they're literally escaping with the shirts on their backs.

And then he sees his barbershop blow up because the Nazis have blown it up and he's like, there goes the barbershop.

And that simple little line, there goes the barbershop, there goes everything I have, everything I've worked for, just gone.

And now we have to flee everything we know because of these guys, which is exactly what happened, of course, to our family.

It's a horrible thing.

And Chaplin, of course, was exiled from America.

Yeah.

It was in McCarthyism, wasn't it?

And he was understandably criticised and then had to leave and move to Switzerland, I think.

Yeah.

Well, he didn't originally move back to Switzerland.

He was on his way back to England.

And then they told him on board the ship: by the way, you're not going to be allowed back into the States unless you appear in front of the immigration authorities on charges of political and moral turpitude.

So effectively, he couldn't go back.

I went to his house in Vive.

Did you, really?

The extraordinary thing about it is the Alps are just looking down at you.

Like, wherever you look, it's just this utter beauty.

And it was,

you know, for someone of his wealth, it wasn't an opulent place at all.

It was just a lovely family home.

Yeah, I mean, I would live there if I was en route to the UK, but I chanced to find

this place in Mibe.

There was this huge problem when he was on his way, which is he had a million dollars buried in his garden.

Really?

And the story is, and I think there's debate about how much of it is true, is that he asked his wife to get a spade, go to the garden, dig it up, convert it into $1,000 bills, sew them into her mink coat, and then just bring them to Switzerland.

And so.

That's a big ask, isn't it?

You've got to.

I think I got a divorce over there.

Did she make it?

Well, I mean, they lived together in Switzerland until his death.

So, yeah, she did.

Did she bring the millions with her?

I think that has been a veil has been drawn over that, so we don't know.

Let's dig up his old garden, for God's sake.

There might still be a lot of people.

So don't talk about digging up Charlie Chaplin because that's exactly what happened to him after his death.

This is the weirdest element of his story.

He was body snatched.

Yes, by these two guys who wanted to bury him under where he was buried, right?

His corpse was stolen really shortly after he died in the 1970s.

75, yeah.

75.

And it was these guys who wanted to basically extort Una, one of his last wife, and said, give us all this money because we've stolen your husband's body.

And they traced the cause and they caught the guys.

And the guys basically said, we didn't really mean anything by it.

We just wanted to dig him up, bury him a bit beneath where he had been buried before, so it looked like he was gone.

And then we had to leg it and bury him in a cornfield.

No, I mean, that is the worst alibi I've ever heard.

They wanted $600,000, or the equivalent of $600,000 today, for his return.

And

this incredible sting operation, they launched surveillance operations on 200 phone booths in the area when they were waiting for the call to be made, which is, you know, substantial effort, I would say.

They did never claim, to be fair to them, that they weren't trying to extort the wife.

They just said, look, we weren't going to steal the body.

We were just going to hide it.

And they did apologise to Una afterwards, and she did forgive them.

It's what he would have wanted.

He was a comic.

He would have got the joke.

It's just a bit of slapsick.

It's amazing that this happened in 1975 as well, isn't it?

Like, that's pretty extraordinary.

Why?

What do you mean?

Well, because he died in 1977.

Oh, my God.

I thought I sounded early enough.

I'm so sorry.

Why have I written that down?

Because I'm wrong.

Wait, what year did Greece come out?

What year did

Greece come out?

Oh, I don't know.

78.

Came out in 1978.

Are we pretending there's no connection here?

Are we really going to see it here?

Well, I didn't come to the UK until 79, so I missed Chaplin's.

The Stars of All Alif.

Yeah.

I came in time for Thatcher.

Well, Darling, if you timed it right.

Her films were rubbish.

Can we talk a bit more about the insane early popularity of Charlie Chaplin?

Because we've talked a lot about his later career with the great dictator, but his early films, when he moved to the USA, because he grew up in England, incredibly poor, moved to the USA.

In his first year there, he made 36 films in 1914.

So I read his obituary in the New York Times, and it's full of these unbelievable details about the Chaplin mania, the craze.

So, for example, I'm quoting directly here from his obituary.

One New York theatre played his films continuously from 1914 to 1923, stopping only because the building burned down.

That was how popular he was.

I know, I know.

But at one point, he went to the ballet in Los Angeles.

And again, I'm quoting directly: its dancers spotted Chaplin in the audience and halted the show for half an hour while they embraced him.

Wow.

Imagine that.

It was a disease.

You know, going back to the original theme, it was called Chaplinitis.

And literally from 1915, basically, as soon as he became famous, people reported Chaplinitis.

And he was everywhere, like from China, Africa, Russia.

In Japan, he was referred to as Professor Alcohol because of the way he swayed, which is like a mad level of global fame for that time.

But he always wanted it.

I hadn't realized he was so fame-crazed.

Yeah.

On the boat over to America, he basically said, I'm coming to conquer you.

Every man, woman, and child shall have my name on their lips.

And you know who he is on that boat with, who I believe witnessed that moment of him saying, I'm going to conquer America, was Stan Laurel.

Kim Kardashian.

Oh, Kanye.

Yeah, Stan Laurel, who was part of the British group of comedians that they were with.

They both went to America together.

They lived together for a while as well.

And he was like, yeah, this guy was insanely ambitious.

When they were living in America, obviously they weren't successful as soon as they arrived.

They lived in a flat together.

And apparently, they weren't allowed to cook in the flat.

That was one of the rules of the tenancy or whatever.

So when they were frying pork chops, Stan Laurel would fry the pork chops and Chaplin would play the violin incredibly loudly to mask the sound of sizzling meat.

My favourite Chaplin fact is that Jackie Coogan, who played the kid, I don't think I've ever sobbed so much as when I saw the kid being put on the cart and taken away from Chaplin and outstretching his arms.

And in that film, that line for all of his horrific treatment of women

in his life, that beginning line where he says, a woman,

I cry when I even say this out loud, loud a woman whose crime was motherhood

such a simple thing to say at a time when so many unmarried mothers had to abandon their kids or put them up for adoption yeah and that

that to me was such a

such a support early support of single motherhood of course his mother was a single mum so he had a lot of compassion for for women in in that predicament anyway jackie coogan went on to become Uncle Festa in the Addams family.

In the Addams family.

Yes.

What?

Yeah.

That cute, cute little kid that went around with the tramp smashing windows turned out to be the gruesome bald-headed Uncle Festival.

Can we quickly go back to the man of who this whole fact was born for?

Oh, yeah.

Doctor.

Doctor, Ashok Aswani.

He's such a great character, and it's wonderful when you have people championing other characters as their whole life's mission.

So he discovered Chaplin when he was very young and he fell in love with him and he tried to get into being a performer himself off the back of Chaplin and doing mime and so on, but it didn't work out for him.

And so he went to become this doctor.

And just while being a doctor, he continued his love.

So he used to dress up as chaplain in the streets.

He went on to set up a big festival.

And when I say big, I think there's something like 300 people go to it every year.

But it's a tiny town in Gujarat.

It's not a big place.

And people from around the world come to visit it and they dress up as chaplain and they cut a chaplain cake.

Imagine trying to find your friend in that crowd.

You're meeting your friend at the festival.

Hell.

Imagine, even worse, him being your doctor and you having a severe case of chaplainitis, booking in to see him.

He turns up dressed as chaplain and gives you a chaplain DVD.

Nightmare.

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

My fact this week is that no one really knows what order the Chronicles of Narnia should be read in.

Not even C.S.

Lewis knew.

Is it actually the wardrobe, the witch, and the lion?

And it's been in the wrong order all this time.

So basically, this is something that's been bubbling away in the background amongst academics who love C.S.

Lewis and just fans of the Chronicles of Narnia, where they don't actually know which order to read the book in because there's been various publications over the years that have them put in different orders.

So there's a book that appears quite late in the series called The Magician's Nephew, which is actually a prequel to what is thought to be the first book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

So when certain publishers have republished the book series, they'll make the Magician's Nephew book number one.

But people argue that, no, that should be later on in the series, like they were originally published.

And so the only thing that we really know about C.S.

Lewis's preference came from a letter that he wrote to an 11-year-old boy in 1957 who said that he thinks that it should be read in the chronological order, but his mother thought it should be in the original publication order, starting with the line Witch and Wardrobe.

So he wrote back, C.S.

Lewis, saying, I think I agree with your order for reading the books more than with your mother's.

The series was not planned beforehand, as she thinks.

When I wrote The Lion, I did not know I was going to write any more.

So perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone reads them.

So even he was like,

I'm not going to settle on a side.

And as a result, that letter has been analyzed so many times by different academics who use it as him with that final line saying it doesn't matter what order.

And then the other academics go to the top of the letter and say, no, he thinks he agrees with the boys' order.

And so we just don't know.

Christ, which academics are analyzing and re-analyzing this very brief letter from C.S.

Lewis?

It's not Don Dewan, is it?

Just, he said it doesn't matter.

Just accept it and move on.

Yeah, and also you don't know how busy he was when he was writing this letter.

Like, it might have been like, oh, honestly, it doesn't matter.

Leave me alone.

He just had a thing that he had to respond to letters and he just said something flippantly and didn't really analyse it himself.

Because they are standalone books, aren't they?

Yes.

Yeah.

So you're a fan, aren't you?

Have you read them all?

No, I haven't read them all, but I'm a massive fan of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which I've just started reading to my daughter, actually, as of last night.

I'm such a dipstick that years and years into my adult life,

having been obsessed with Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe all my life, I had to go on a television program and talk about it.

And there was a Q ⁇ A and someone asked me about the fact that it was a Christian allegory.

And I didn't realise

up until they asked that question.

I went, oh yeah.

That's brilliant.

Absolutely clueless.

There was very little religion in my life as a child.

And I just thought this resurrection was coincidental with what happened to Jesus.

But why would you?

I mean, there is no reason why you would know as a child.

And it must be interesting reading it as an adult because

I read all the books in the order that they came in the box set, Magician's Nephew First.

And

when you're seven or whatever, you're not really looking for the message.

And in fact, even if the message is round down your throat, you're likely to miss it because you're excited by the idea of going into a cupboard.

And there's a lot there.

C.S.

Lewis, he was a serious Christian in lots of ways.

And in fact, I think he was described in his obituary as more of a Christian thinker.

One of his main obituaries in the New York Times didn't even mention The Lie of the Witch of the Wardrobe, didn't mention Nania, described him as a Christian apologist.

Oh, come on, that is wantonly highbrow to a really pretentious extent.

It was his biggest hit by a long way.

It was his biggest hit, yeah.

But he converted to Christianity, I really like this fact, on a trip to Whipsnade Zoo, and specifically in a motorbike sidecar en route to Whipsnade Zoo.

What?

I think he went with his brother or brother-in-law, and he wrote later on, When we set out, I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.

And when we reached the zoo, I did.

And the journey was on a motorbike, and he was in the sidecar.

So he had a conversion to Christianity in a motorbike sidecar.

Oh, wow, what happened?

What possibly happened in that?

I don't know.

I mean, I think it was probably the culmination of a process.

It wasn't as though they saw a burning bush en route and he just thought, oh, okay.

Well, the parrot at the zoo told him.

Do you know that we know the population of Narnia?

Exactly.

It's 19,252.

Is that including the squirrels?

Oh, that's a good point.

Human population.

Oh, human population, okay.

Oh,

there's a real place called Narnia.

Narnia exists.

It's in Italy.

It's called Narnia these days, but in classical times, it was called Narnia.

And C.S.

Lewis saw it as a young man on a classical map, which was written in Latin.

And it just labelled it Narnia.

And the name just stuck with him.

Imagine it could have been Chelmsford.

I don't know if that would have caught his eye in quite the same way.

Maybe.

I looked into Narnia in Italy and it didn't look as if they had done anything specifically to capitalise on, you know,

you could quite easily turn yourself into a tourist town, couldn't you?

Yeah, I think they've probably got the dignity to resist it, is my hunch.

Do you think?

Yeah, it's Italy.

It's not some coastal town in the north of England.

This is the Italians were talking about.

They've got really nice places.

They don't need to

mix your slimicide.

I think they're missing a trick.

Yeah, because if that was in Britain they'd be selling little Mr.

Tumnis key rings.

Yeah, exactly.

Even just some sort of like carpentry cupboard shop that has a tie-in, you know, do something, use it.

What cupboards with a false back?

That's a good idea, actually.

That could be really fun.

Well, Dan, I know you're always looking for a pilgrimage to go on to see great places of associated with great people.

You can see the wardrobe.

The wardrobe is in Illinois for weird reasons.

It's the Lewis family wardrobe, which was at his family home in Belfast for years, and then it got moved to his adult home.

So it's definitely the wardrobe.

And it was auctioned off and taken to a place called Wheaton College.

And it's there these days with Tolkien's desk.

So they're united, even in death.

And I bet that's the place that's capitalizing on the connection.

But I suspect Illinois is making more of that.

You know, the first time walking through a cupboard, it wasn't in the Line, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

It was in a 1946 essay that he wrote called Different Tastes in Literature.

Wow.

Yeah.

And not as catchy a kid's book, Nate.

That's the, he uses it as an analogy of the experience of reading poetry.

You know, you walk through a wardrobe into another realm.

And he uses that in that book.

So, you know, recycled a lot of his ideas.

Did you ever try to get into Narnia as children?

Yes.

Oh my lord, yes.

Like pushing through the yeah, just going, if I, if I just do it, maybe this way, maybe if I just close my eyes, I'll be in Narnia.

Hours I spent in this book in a cupboard.

It was very controversial for him when he was writing it because he wrote about the cupboard, the wardrobe, and then he sent a draft of the book to his friend Owen Barfield, whose daughter was Lucy.

Lucy was C.S.

Lewis's goddaughter, after whom the character of Lucy is named.

And anyway, Lucy's mum, Owen Barfield's wife, said, Well, this is really dangerous.

You can't have this, Pete.

Kids will start locking themselves in cupboards.

That's really dangerous.

Poor little Lucy's going to lock herself in a cupboard.

And then, so you'll notice he added all these amendments to the text.

There are four or five references in the text to, yeah, do you remember that?

Absolutely.

He's saying, burnt in the cupboard, leaving it open just a bit because it is very foolish to shut oneself into a wardrobe.

And he said that repeatedly.

Exactly.

Very sort of like rammed in.

to make sure.

And that probably saved you from locking yourself in a wardrobe.

You know what?

To this day, whenever I climb into a wardrobe, I'm careful to leave it open just a little.

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

My fact is that the only dog to have been to both the north and south poles was not a husky, nor any kind of adventure dog, but a small Jack Russell Terrier.

Solo mission?

Solo mission.

No, slightly accompanied.

Slightly accompanied by being Ranolph Fiennes' dog, which did help the odds of getting there, sure.

Well, Ranolph and Virginia Fiennes' dog.

So we've spoken about Ranolph Fiennes before.

We haven't spoken about Lady Twistleton Wickham Fiennes, known to her friends as Ginny, who was his wife.

And the dog was called Bothy.

And this was the Transglobe expedition they were on, which we've mentioned so briefly in passing.

But basically, it was the mission to cross Antarctica and the Arctic Ocean and to go to both poles on the same trip, which had never been tried before.

With a dog.

Do we know?

I mean, why the dog?

Was the Jack Russell going to come in useful?

Was it a backup food supply was the jack russell pulling all the sleds do you know how expensive it would be to put it in kennels for all that time well exactly

i think that they just loved the dog and ginny said well this is going to take three years i'm not leaving the dog at home for three years and she and the dog were very very close because i think she'd lost her previous terrier i think it had some awful ending it sort of drowned in a slurry pit or something and it was really really traumatic she was absolutely inconsolable so then ranolph got her this new dog, Bothy, and they were inseparable.

And she said, right, we're going to take him all the way around the world.

And they did.

So up until this point, I've known Ranolph Fiennes as this extraordinary explorer.

But I have to say, Ginny Fiennes is the coolest person I've read about in years.

She is a legend, isn't she?

What's your favorite feature, your favourite Ginny feature?

She kind of ran the show and no one really ever acknowledged that.

She would organize the entire teams that would go along with him.

She would set up the camp and she would have the radio going where she would sit and monitor, listening out for Morse code for days on end, like listening and then having to organize whatever weird request.

I need a whaler ship to pick me up in two days.

Okay, I'll just do that then, shall I?

Sitting here in my cardboard box, which she did.

She sat in a cardboard box most of the time.

No, hang on, hang on, hang on, Dad.

Yeah, I've gone too far.

As always, your enthusiasm has carried you away.

She did, there were cardboard though.

She designed cardboard huts, laminated cardboard huts, which were for when they needed to stay for the winter in Antarctica.

It's not the first material you'd think of, is it?

When you're thinking, what am I going to build?

The wise man built his house out of cardboard.

That's not a that's not cardboard at all.

No, you're absolutely right.

And then they got covered in snow and I think that's what kept them warm.

I guess they were light and easily transportable, which is a good thing.

And they had tunnels in between the huts.

And the other little piggy built their hut out of ten.

Thank God there are no wolves in Antarctica.

That's all I can say.

No, just Bothy the dog.

Who apparently repeatedly.

Bothy was a terror.

Bothy shat in the snow tunnels between the huts.

Randall Fine said it's impossible to teach Bothy the difference between outside, outside, and outside, which is a snow tunnel between the huts.

And even on the ship, all the way down, Bothy was leaving little presents in everyone's cabins.

That's a nightmare.

But was very brave, according to Ginny, and all dog owners are biased.

But apparently was only afraid once.

And that was when he came across a bowl-shaped Antarctic sort of snow bowl.

and he barked into it and then it barks back because of the echo and freaks the hell out.

But aside from that, very brave tomb.

Yeah.

My dog is a bit of a hero and also I'm a little bit appalled at myself talking about Ginny in the Antarctic with her dog because all I thought about was I hope Ginny cleared up after her dog in the Antarctic and didn't leave little green bags of dog poo all over the snow.

No, it's a really that is a very good point.

I actually don't know if they did tidy up.

And they have banned dogs from the Antarctic now.

Because you see, ruined it for everyone.

Because Ginny left such a mess.

Exactly.

So it is the...

No, Bothy, not Ginny.

Still you can't tidy up after yourself.

We don't know about either.

So Bothy, Bothy the dog.

Yeah, no, but that probably means that no dog after Bothy will ever go to the Arctic and Antarctic again, if the rules don't change.

There might be a generation of kids in the UK that are aware of Bothy, even though they don't realise it.

Bothy used to appear on Blue Peter a lot, and there was a book that was written by Ranolph and Ginny about Bothy the dog.

Not by Bothy, I thought you were going to say.

Bothy won Pet of the Year, I believe, in 1982.

Yeah.

I think after the expedition.

And then he was also invited to present a prize at the 1983 Crufts.

I don't know how.

He turned it down on moral grounds, didn't he?

He doesn't agree.

She did win prizes as well.

Ginny, she got the polar medal in 1987.

I think she was the first woman to get it.

And that was because she did important scientific work in the Antarctic, mostly with her radio stuff.

She was pioneering.

And she was the first woman ever to be invited to join the Antarctic Club.

Shabrak, have you been part of any kind of expeditions?

I feel like it's a celebrity comedian thing you get invited to.

I would love to.

I would love to do that.

But no, I haven't.

I've only done I'm a celebrity, get me out of here, where we just really stayed put, apart from the occasional jumping out of a helicopter.

But no, the Arctic, I mean, who doesn't want to to go there?

It's like my dream to do a trip like that.

And just hearing you guys talking about Ginny and her tech work and how she pulled the whole show together makes me feel like such a knob for taking almost an hour to even get on this call with you guys and wasting all of your time.

So I think

that was

your equivalent of an intrepid journey.

Like, that was

persistence and grit.

And I think it shortened my life

in some ways

I mean Ginny also she definitely suffered for her work she once got in the Antarctic she got glued to a lavatory seat because it was minus 50 degrees Celsius outside once she went out into the snow and she had a cigarette lighter metal Zippo lighter in her pocket and it burned into her thigh it burned the shape of Zippo and the lighter into her thigh because of how cold it was out there I mean it's not the same but I had a similar experience and I'm a celebrity get me out of here because I got glued to the wooden toilet seat because I went in after several of the blokes and it wasn't the sort of seat that you can flip up.

It was horrific.

Yeah, because they would wee in the dunny.

You couldn't flip it up.

And then

you couldn't really wipe it either.

So their pee would just soak down into it.

And there was no getting away from it.

And there was a limited amount of loo paper.

It was horrific.

Oh, my God.

Did this fact make it to air?

Or is this you giving us exclusive pieces of it?

This is exclusive content about the unhygienic.

Who's P?

Who's P?

Name names.

God damn, no.

Legally, no.

But I will tell you that

Stanley Johnson and I had to share a towel for the entire time

because they wouldn't let us have fresh towels.

And my towel had got so full of debris, like there's so much wood chip, it was unusable.

And so we had this situation that we never talked of ever again, of just we were never sure whose towel was whose.

You see, I think that is hardship.

I think that does qualify for some kind of, not the Antarctic Club, but something.

I think you deserve a polar medal.

Thank you.

I mean, compare that to having a Zippo branded onto your thigh.

I think me having to share towels in Australia's Gold Coast was a lot worse.

With Boris Johnson's dad, we should say, for foreign listeners.

Just back to Ginny for a second.

Before she was doing these adventures with Ranolph, she had amazing adventures in her own right and one really bizarre one which is in 1972 she was commissioned by woman's own magazine to go and live with an Omani sheikh in a village for two months the idea being that she would be his third wife and there was a very very strict understanding between all parties that there was going to be no hanky panky that it was just purely her living the life to see what the life was like and she did it she went out there and she lived with them and she basically fell in love with the family to the point where she decided not to submit the article because she wanted to respect their privacy.

And then in that area, it's where she then, with Ranolph Fiennes, went and found a completely lost city to time.

Oh, yeah.

This is just amazing.

The lost city of Ubar.

They'd heard rumors about it.

No one could find it.

Ranolph and Ginny obsessed over it, spent years and years looking for it.

And eventually it was solved when we started getting aerial shots via satellite that they were able to spot something in the sand and they uncovered it and they found it.

Incredible.

This completely lost city of Uber.

Was it the frankincense city?

I think it was where they did all the frankincense trading.

So it must have been this incredible rich scented place.

Do you think they smelled it out?

I'm sure.

Probably Both.

Both

yeah, yeah.

And she did all this stuff without being, you know, she wasn't physically tough.

So, for example, she could do two laps of a running track and then she had to lie down.

She wasn't a strong woman, but she still went on this 35,000-mile transglobe expedition.

She had to take a hot water bottle to the Arctic because Ranolph liked sleeping with the windows open, which I find completely...

Jesus Christ.

I mean, what?

Yeah.

And sometimes when they were, you know, overwintering, this is at the other end of the planet on the Antarctic, she wouldn't answer the radio.

And twice, Ranolph came back to the cardboard hut and found that she was unconscious from carbon monoxide poisoning.

What?

And I know.

From what?

Oh, God knows, a bit of the equipment going wrong or

I don't know what exactly caused it.

But yeah, there were just so many moments of near total peril and failure on this expedition.

And she took it all pretty well, didn't she?

She was clearly very hardy.

She sounds formidable, I think is probably the word you would use.

So everyone was kind of terrified of her.

Like your most respected but strict headmistress is how I imagine her.

I think when she heard that Ranulf had had to have his fingers amputated, you know, he had to amputate the ends of his five fingers.

It was through Frostbright, right?

Yes.

But then he sawed them off himself at home.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Her first response was, oh, damn, we'll be shorthanded on the farm now.

Not a lot of sympathy.

Is that a shorthanded joke?

Because his fingers are literally shorter because he saw them off.

I don't think it was an intentional pun, but it obviously has that other layer that you can enjoy.

Great.

That's how good she was.

One kind of really amazing fact about Ginny is that she died, I think, in 2003.

Although, Dan, you may well tell me it was actually 2005.

It was 2004.

You're kidding.

Unbelievable.

you know what i'm gonna start writing dates down all right she died in 2004 i think she may have been diagnosed with cancer in 2003 she found out about her illness when ran off her husband was away he was running seven marathons on seven continents in seven days and she didn't mention it to him in case he abandoned the attempt and changed it if she wanted him to you know get on with it and finish it and i think that is a sign of the kind of woman she was you know completely that strong spousing yeah extremely brave guys can i tell you about the first all-female expedition to the North Pole?

Because it's a really fun story.

This was in the 90s.

And basically, this woman, Caroline Hamilton, who was a financier, she hated all forms of exercise, never done really any in her life, decided I'm going to take a bunch of women to the North Pole.

And she put an advert in the newspaper, in the Telegraph, I think, saying, Hey, are you a woman who has no hiking or exploring experience?

And do you want to come to the North Pole?

Get in touch.

And all these women did.

And it's the coolest story.

They went on a trial weekend somewhere in the UK, which was quite rough.

I think it was in Dartmoor on an induction weekend.

And there was like this woman called Anne Daniels, who was a mother to toddler triplets, who I think his marriage wasn't going that well.

She was not sporty or outdoorsy at all.

She cried her way through the induction weekend.

And it was all sorts of women like this.

And they did it.

It was five teams of four who were selected, just from ordinary women.

And it was sponsored by McVitties.

So they had 7,000 biscuits to get them through the trip.

7,000 biscuits.

7,000 biscuits.

Yeah.

Nothing else.

And yeah, they made it.

And now a bunch of them are explorers.

So Anne Daniels is one of Britain's leading explorers.

She's done 10 polars.

She's amazing, yeah.

When they got back from their first trip, they must have, you know, had a lot of diplomatic receptions and things to go to.

They must have done a lot of hobnobbing.

That has cured all my ailments.

Thank you.

Dr.

Murray.

I had mild eczema on my thumb and it's just disappeared.

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

My fact this week is that the character of Don Corleone in the novel The Godfather was based on the author's mother.

Which is great because when you watch The Godfather, it's Marlon Brando.

So it's a completely different character.

But this is the guy who wrote the book, Mario Puzzo, said that he'd never met a gangster.

A lot of people assumed, because it was kind of such a real portrayal that he'd been embedded in gang life for years.

Never met a gangster.

And so he said, whenever the godfather opened his mouth in my books, in my own mind, I heard the voice of my mother.

And he describes his mother as having the wisdom, the ruthlessness, the unconquerable love for her family and for for life itself.

But his mother, he was from an Italian immigrant family and lived in New York, and his father was committed for schizophrenia quite early on in his life.

So his mother raised seven children on her own and was clearly this another formidable woman.

The side that he relates as his mother being similar to is things like when the father was committed to the asylum, he could have returned.

But the mother made the decision not to let him out.

Puzzo said that she thought he'd be a burden on the family, and he says that's a very mafia decision that she was like, no, keep him away.

Puzo also said that whenever he heard Brando speak the lines, he could hear his mother's voice.

He was like, oh, it's mum again.

So like properly, even in the movie interpretation of it.

Yeah.

Okay, the other really, really weird thing about Mario Puzzo, The Godfather, was the second novel he wrote based on his mother.

He wrote one called The Fortunate Pilgrim.

That was his second book.

And the main character in that is a woman called Lucia Santa.

And he said that she is based on his mum as well.

Yeah, there was a publisher who read The Fortunate Pilgrim and said, Look, didn't really love the book, but that one tiny gangster character

was good.

Do you think you could expand that?

That's amazing.

And he just went away and wrote The Godfather because of that.

The amazing thing was just how successful it was because his first two novels in total had earned him $6,500.

So his lifetime earning from books at that point was $6,500.

I'm so glad things have changed with books.

Well, yeah.

It was really interesting his career because he had written these failed novels and he desperately wanted to be an author.

And it was only into his 40s that he then started writing The Godfather, and that's where his life changed.

And he knew that this was the last attempt, and if it didn't work, he was going to do something else.

And he tried to work for other people.

He worked for Stan Lee at one point when Stan Lee was doing comic books.

And he was almost a comic book writer, but he just couldn't make it work.

Really?

But we could have had Mario Puzzo Spider-Man.

I'm happy with Mario Puzzo Godfather.

I'll stick to that.

Yeah, I don't think being bitten by a radioactive horse's head is as thrilling.

We did have Mario Puzzo Superman because he is the screenwriter behind Superman 1 and Superman 2 with Christopher Reed.

Oh, is he?

Of course, yeah.

Yeah.

But

there's this great story that when he was writing screenplays post Godfather 1 and 2, he sort of got anxiety realizing, you know, I'm an author.

I've adapted my books into being screenplays, but I don't really know how to do this.

So he bought a book on screenwriting and he said he had to stop reading it because in the first chapter, the book said, study Godfather 1.

It's the model screenplay.

Nightmare.

Sheparak, with your novel, because he's used characters from real life in the latest one, Kissing Emma.

Are any family members going to look at that and go, hang on a sec?

No, I've written two novels and absolutely none of my characters or events have been based on any persons in real life.

Sheparak, why are you reading that off the card?

No, of course I have.

What is it?

They say that when there's a writer in the family, there's a traitor in the card.

There's a really grim part

in Puzo's book that didn't make the film that I read, you know, I can't remember how old I was when I read the book, but I was a kid or a young teenager that absolutely mortified and distressed me.

And it was a very early

clue of what the Hollywood scene was like, um, way before Harvey Weinstein and all that.

Do you know the part I mean where

there's a famous Hollywood producer, and it's it's it's a tiny little blink and you'll miss it detail where he sleeps with a very um young girl of about 12 or 13.

And it says, since his wife died, his heart's been so broken that he can only get aroused by very, very young girls who were taken to him to sleep with by their mothers in the hope that he'll put them in a film.

And it describes the scene where this young girl is being held up by her mum.

That then makes you feel better about the gruesome way that this producer is then treated.

And obviously they left that out of the film.

because it's not there.

But even in the book, that's a part of it that when I first read it as a young girl myself that really stuck with me.

It's like, is that what they do?

Is that what happens in Hollywood?

It's just really interesting how that bit was really bypassed.

But it was a massive clue.

And I wonder how much Puzo did know about the industry and how

common knowledge that was.

I think we've blown this open in that Puzo had some kind of amazing prescience or psychic powers because he was not involved in Hollywood at all.

So he would not have known.

But he could see, he could see into gangsters, he could see into Hollywood.

He saw this.

Yeah, it's the Nostradamus of the crime world.

Consider Nostradamus.

Nice.

They were pretty heavily involved in the filming of The Godfather, The Mafia.

It's this crazy story.

They only allowed The Godfather to be made on the grounds that the word mafia was never spoken.

So this was because they wanted to film in New York.

They had to film in New York.

They couldn't use a set.

It wouldn't look real.

And the mob boss in New York at the time was this guy called Joe Columbo Sr.

And he basically said to the producer, Albert Ruddy, okay, you can't mention the mafia because the mafia doesn't exist, mate.

We don't even, it's not a thing, and you're just going to give Italian immigrants a bad name.

This was while he was running at the head of one of the biggest gangs in New York.

So he said, Don't mention the mafia, and also we want all the proceeds from the film Premiere.

Just the premiere.

If we don't get them, something bad could happen.

Terrible.

Well,

it works.

It works on Albert Ruddy.

He actually promised all the premiere proceeds.

Oh my gosh.

And awfully, the studio then went back on that promise, which must have been a terrifying moment for Ruddy when they said, we're not actually going to pay them.

Him going, okay, oh, what's going to happen to me?

But good news is we no longer need die for the red carpet.

It's just going to be naturally red, actually.

The thing I love about the book as well is that Puzo wrote it from research, didn't know any gangsters, but he met gangsters through the success of the book who flat out refused to believe that he'd never been a gangster himself.

And then Mafiosi themselves, they started doing the cheek-to-cheek kisses based on the movie.

Like no one called each other a godfather before Buzo did, and then that became a mafia term.

The mafia basically are a tribute act to the novel The Godfather these days.

And if they've heard this, Andy, you are in serious trouble.

Tribute act to a movie.

Something else that came up in his book, which didn't make it in.

Did you guys read part of this?

Well, Well, you you will have read it, Charbrack.

This is the subplot about Connie's, so you know Connie, the daughter who has the wedding at the start, her maid of honour, Lucy Mancini, who

has a vagina that's too big.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Absolutely bizarre plot.

She's going out with Sonny, if you remember the character of Sonny, but he can go out with her and it works because he's quite well endowed.

And then he doesn't last the first film even.

And I think she struggles.

Anna, that's, I forgot about that bit until you just said.

And now, of course, the memories of how I felt reading that are coming flooding back to me.

And I'm thinking perhaps I was probably too young to read that book because

she was a gorgeous woman.

She's described as a gorgeous woman, but she had this big, baggy fanny.

And it's just,

it was so graphic.

It was like Bukowski style graphic.

How funny that as a bloke, he sat down and he created this character that needed

anything.

It's not a female author, is it?

Once you get to that book, it is not a female author.

Not a woman who's written that.

What a bizarre subplot.

Thank God it wasn't relevant to the storyline.

He didn't have to keep it in.

Doesn't sound like he could keep it in, frankly.

Do you know?

I really hope.

You know how his publisher read the previous book and spotted that tiny mafia character and went do a whole book about that.

I really hope he saw that character and went, that, that big fanny lady, that's the next book.

Okay, that's 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 have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy at Andrew Hunter M.

Shaparak at Shapiko Sandy.

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 you can go to our website, no such thingasoffish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

Do check them out.

Also, do go to the website to find tickets to our upcoming tour.

We start October this year.

We're going to do November and January.

It's going to be a big old UK tour.

See if we're coming to a city near you.

But most importantly of all, do go out and buy Shaparak's new book.

It is called Kissing Emma.

It is out now.

It is in shops.

It is online.

Okay, we'll be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.