366: No Such Thing As Listening To Your Marmalade

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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 Toshinsky, Andrew Hunter-Murray, and James Harkin.

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy.

My fact is that the prototype personal cassette player was a block of wood, which the inventor carried around in his pocket to make sure it would fit.

That was it.

He just wanted something.

He wanted to make sure that it would be the right size.

And so he did it the simplest way possible.

Yeah, so when you say prototype, he didn't think it was making any noise or anything i remember when i was in the school orchestra in primary school i was on the wooden block so you know that is a really it's an instrument isn't it it is an instrument yeah that's true that was the very early prototype the idea that was the only songs you could play the wooden block parts of um children's songs yeah it was a really early prototype and then he worked on it a lot before it became the walkman um

he was called lou ottins this guy and uh he passed away a couple of weeks ago aged 94 and in his working life, he worked at Phillips, the electronics firm, and he was the head of research and development.

So in the 1950s, he started working on an alternative for the, you know, the huge tape recorders that you had at the time.

And

he had this block made in the 60s to show him how big the first compact cassette should be.

So it was convenient.

And the really nice thing is we don't have it anymore.

This prototype has been lost in the midst of time because he used it to prop up his jack while he was replacing a flat tire in his car.

He just left it by the road at the end by mistake.

So it should be in his museum.

It was just a bit of wood.

I mean, you're actually behind a museum.

It belongs to him.

It was history.

I agree.

So we know where he broke down because if you're driving along the road, keep an eye open for a block of wood the same size as a Walkman because it could be worth billions.

Exactly.

I think he was Dutch.

So look around, Dutch listeners.

Yes.

That's very cool.

He was madly in love with electronics right from the beginning, wasn't he?

When he was a kid, he used to build radios.

And as a teen, he built radios during the war that meant that they could sort of listen in to illegal channels.

Him and his parents could listen to radio that shouldn't have been hurt.

And he built this weird directional antenna on top of one that he called the Germanin filter.

And the idea was it would jam any of the Nazis who were trying to work out who was getting illegal radio.

I think it was a thing that would stop the jammers, right?

It was as in the Nazis would put jammers out there to try and stop you from listening to certain radio stations.

And his thing stop the jammers rather than jamming other things, right?

The jam, the jam jammer, a jam jammer, jam avoider so he could listen to his jam, yeah.

Well, do you know what the radio station was called?

It was called radio oranger or orange, and oranges, what do you make out of them?

Marmalade,

yeah,

it's the literally the only fruit that if you turn it into a jam-like substance, it's not called jam.

Andy, I think it falls under the jam umbrella.

The jam umbrella, I think it's a subcategory of jam.

In later life, obviously, the personal cassettes he helped invent.

What can you listen to on them?

Your jams.

That's what I've just said.

That's what James

said.

James made that joke.

I'm so sorry.

I'm sorry.

James made the joke, and while you were not listening to it, you were busy coming up with your whole marmalade thing.

Don't know why that was in there at all.

I'm mortified.

The interesting thing about this block is he came up with the size and then had to fit everything inside it.

It's just kind of an interesting way of doing it, right?

You would think you would get everything that you need.

So, all your speakers and all your bits and where the batteries go and stuff, and then try and make it smaller.

But he thought this is the side it needs to be.

And in that size, we have to fit the cassette, we have to fit a loudspeaker, we have to fit batteries, we have to fit all the electronics, and we have to fit a few connectors.

And then, basically, that was the puzzle that he had to solve at Phillips to try and get all these amazing things into this tiny little block.

That's very interesting.

So, Lou Ottens, he actually didn't think much of the cassettes compared to CDs.

He thought that CDs were the absolute best quality of anything you could get.

He even thought CDs were better than vinyl.

Later on in life, he kind of reneged on the whole, aren't cassettes amazing?

And that's true.

I mean, cassettes don't, they do compress their audio quite a lot, don't they?

He helped to invent the CD.

Yeah, he wasn't just being selfless when he was saying the CD is so much better than my invention.

It was also his, wasn't it?

It was partly his, wasn't it?

He must have been absolutely bloody loaded.

Well, I don't know what kind of a stake he had, but 100 billion tapes were sold.

And then as soon as he invented the CD, 200 billion CDs were sold.

If he got one P for everything, he would be the richest man.

I don't know about numbers and stuff, but it feels like he would be the richest person in the world.

Maths graduate.

But, you know, when you say how much money Elon Musk has got, it's just the numbers just become crazy, don't they?

But it must be there or thereabouts.

I think he must have not made too much from it, right?

Otherwise, the obituary would have said, richest man ever died.

That wasn't really a sentence that featured in it.

That's right.

Do you know what the event was that the cassette player was launched at?

It was the International Funk Austellung,

which is,

yeah, and it sounds like it's the International Funk Exhibition, but it just means wireless in German.

It's the International Wireless Exhibition.

But it still happens to this day.

Every year they invent new stuff and release it.

Cool.

Yeah.

I mean, people still buy cassettes, don't they?

Yeah.

I think last year they sold more than they have since the 80s or 90s, didn't they?

There was one by Five Seconds of Summer, who's like an Australian boy band, and they sold tens and tens of thousands of them because they released a lot.

It was, I think it was Lady Gaga's last album was the biggest selling cassette for a long time

in the tens of thousands.

But there was this really odd thing where for quite a long time in the 2000s, they weren't selling anything.

So there's a fact that makes the round on the internet, which is that NSYNC was the top selling single for a cassette in 2010 and they'd sold 13 copies in 2010.

And in 11, they got the chart topper again with the same album by selling 11 copies in 2011.

So I suddenly thought.

I know the last time I bought a cassette.

The last time I bought a cassette was in 2012, and it was our theme tune, Wasps.

So I looked into it because in 2012 the top selling cassette was Borders by the band Feeder and they sold 480 cassettes out of all the cassettes that the UK registered which was 604 cassettes sold.

But Emperor Yes, the band who does our theme tune, they sold 50 cassettes definitely because they sold out, which must mean our theme tune was one of the top five best-selling cassettes of 2012.

Huge, we've got to get that on the press blurbs.

Yeah, have you not seen that before?

It was before we existed, wasn't it?

Yes, it was.

Yeah.

Two years, yeah.

It is mad how much it's gone up then, given that we were in the almost single figures.

And I think in 2020, 160,000 tapes were bought.

And that was three times what it was in 2018.

So something's happening.

And I think an industry person said it's actually slightly caught us off guard because we don't have enough of the magnetic tape.

We weren't really expecting tapes to come back into fashion and

started running out.

In 2012, so this was the year of the Emperor Yes release when it was still sort of like 400 copies being sold.

Is that how 2012 is going to go down in history now?

Just like the year of the dragon, the year of the dog, the year of the Emperor Yes release.

Yeah.

Yeah, Fuji and IBM built a prototype cassette which can hold more than, say, you know, the classic cassettes that we bought were 30 minutes, you could get onto it, 90 minutes was the top.

And then I think there was 120 120 and 180 minutes those really were pushing the limits um they've now built one which can store 185 terabytes on a single cassette tape wow single cassette tape so i was trying to look into how many songs that could fit onto it and some guys worked it out online he says you could fit on this a single cassette tape 47.3 million songs on a single

cassette yeah well it is no one needs that many songs surely we have more than that just on our spotify or whatever.

Yeah.

Spotify currently has 70 million songs.

So this is more than half of what Spotify has.

Wow.

Wait, sorry,

this is a kind of a massive tape.

No, it's the size of a cassette tape.

And what they've done is it's a process they've called sputter deposition.

And it shrinks the magnetic particles on the tape.

So it just drastically shrinks them down so that more information can be fed on.

Dan, why have they done that when we don't, none of us really care about tapes anymore?

I know.

I don't know i think they want it for storage because in the same article they were talking about how facebook has its whole backup on blu-ray discs this is back in 2012 and so i think they're just trying to find tiny spaces where they don't have to use these insanely large hard drives that are chewing up energy um to hold things yeah so it's like the just to show how obsolete it is the um word cassette tape was taken out of the concise Oxford English Dictionary.

So the concise Oxford English Dictionary doesn't have every word.

It has all the most useful ones.

And

cassette tape was taken out of it in 2011.

And that's

one year before the year of Emperor Yes's cassette tape.

That's outrageous.

They had no idea.

I think that's an oversight.

That is bad, bad word.

I think there's a lot of people listening to that, not a lot of people, but some people listen to this podcast who've got literally no idea what we're talking about.

Yeah.

Do you want to hear a cassette tape anecdote?

No.

Yeah.

Okay.

On we go.

Give us half a bit.

All right.

All right.

Look, there's a scientist called Barry Marshall, who I think we've mentioned before.

Oh, yeah.

He's the one who gave himself,

what's it called?

Stomach ulcer.

Stomach ulcer, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He won the prize.

Yeah, yeah.

He won the prize for suggesting that stomach ulcers were caused by bacteria and not by stress and diet.

And this was a revolutionary thing.

And he won, he and his colleague won the Nobel Prize in 2005.

Anyway, this is what I found in an online comment thread beneath an article about cassettes, which was when Marshall and Robin Warren submitted a paper concluding that blah, blah, blah, one of the reviewers of the paper sent back a cassette tape that was just 15 minutes of laughter.

Now, I wrote to Barry Marshall because I couldn't quite believe it because I thought 15 minutes is such a long time to be fake laughing to make a point.

And he said it was fake news.

He wrote back and said, no, this never happened.

Oh, right.

He was in contact with Barry Marshall.

That's incredible.

I wrote to him to ask him maybe the most pointless question ever.

Yeah.

And said, is it true that someone laughed at you for 15 minutes minutes on a cassette tape based on this one comment on an online thread?

And he said, no, it was about a four-word email he sent back.

Wow.

But then, like, because that would have been a pointless 15 minutes of laughter, but he has received a pointless email from you.

So in the way,

he's wasting that time in the end.

I know.

I've got one more story about cassette tapes.

Okay, in the 1990s, a woman called Stella Weddell was on holiday in Spain.

I think she might have just been a girl at the time.

Anyway, she lost her mixtape.

It It had some shaggy on it, some Bob Marley, and a few Disney songs.

So she lost her.

Yeah, right.

I mean, yeah,

proper mixtape stuff, really eclectic.

Anyway, in 2019, she was on holiday in Stockholm and she went to an exhibition by an artist called Mandy Barker who had been documenting plastic pollution and had put a tape on display.

She'd found a tape and had it professionally restored and showed the track listing.

And Stella Wentll saw the track listing and said, that's my mixtape, which I lost 30 years ago in Spain.

And then she got fined for littering?

Or what?

It doesn't relate.

I hope so.

She just spit her hands up and said, it wasn't me.

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Okay, it is time for fact number two.

That is Anna.

It's about baboons.

My fact this week is that baboons can take 45 minutes debating which direction to go in the morning.

Unlike Anna, who spends 45 seconds debating whether to say a fact.

I was on the wrong page, and you can just snip that silence right out.

Yes,

baboons are very indecisive, it turns out.

And so every day they wake up and they need to decide where to go to get food or water or shelter or fun.

And they have this amazing process whereby they decide which way to go.

So it's sort of democratic.

And it was looked at properly by a behavioural ecologist called Meg Crowfoot recently.

And she observed a number of things.

So one quite funny thing is that eventually everyone ends up following a leader to go in the right direction.

But there seems to be no rhyme or reason to which baboon they follow.

It's not the most dominant, it's not the biggest, it's not the males, it's not the sexiest.

The only thing that determines which one they follow is the style of walking.

So

if you walk...

It's a bit like, do you remember that Conservative Party conference where they all started doing an unbelievably stupid stance?

Where they kind of

would walk on stage and all stand with their legs like five feet apart.

Legs akimbo.

Yeah, it feels like that.

But then they all followed Theresa May doing her dance instead.

It's a robot.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Is it a different walk then every morning?

It's basically if you walk with extreme confidence.

So baboons that went off, but in a bit of a windy way or walked a bit slowly or did some pauses, they didn't get followed.

If you walk very straight and at a very steady pace, you're more likely to be followed.

That's really cool.

They are quite democratic in one way, but undemocratic in another way, which is basically the rank in

the pack, which is not deciding on who goes in which direction.

It just depends on who's in charge.

But that's very much in the females, depends on how strong your mother was.

And in males, it depends on how much you can beat up the other baboons.

And it's very much like, you know, if your mum was amazing, you're amazing.

If you can beat up all the other boys, you're amazing.

And everyone else just has to suck it up.

Right.

But they don't, but that's the one decisions are not based on that.

It's really weird.

It's really peculiar.

Everything else is.

Like you say, they're so hierarchical.

There was one quite endearing scene that Meg Crowfoot painted.

One baboon that she observed obviously tried to lead the group.

So they're all loitering around in the morning under a tree.

One baboon started wandering away, walked about 100 meters, looked back, no one's followed him.

And so he sort of like wanders around and like thrusts his chest out.

And he's like, you know, why aren't you following me?

And eventually he climbed up onto a tree stump and made it obviously trying to make himself more prominent.

And he stood there for 10 minutes trying to encourage them to follow and then gave up and returned to the group.

Oh, wow.

That rings a bell.

Trying to persuade people to make a decision on where to eat.

Yeah.

You think if I just start walking, they'll follow.

They never do, do they, Andy?

No.

Anna, did you say the thing about compromise?

That

when leading baboons go in opposite directions, the degree counts.

So if there is less than 90 degrees between the two leaders of the pack who are saying, let's go this way, if there's less than 90 degrees, they'll just find a direction in the middle and go that way.

But if they're going in opposite directions,

they side with each other.

Not a good plan.

Yeah.

It seems like a terrible plan.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because what if there's something in the way?

Yes.

Yeah.

Or a hippo or something.

Yeah.

Basically picking something that neither of the two main guys have picked.

You're just choosing something quite arbitrary, aren't you?

James, I would have thought as a libdem voter that you'd like to arbitrarily pick something roughly in the middle.

That's fair.

Yeah, and I don't understand if then, do they join the group?

I guess they do, the two who've picked the directions, or are they just now out on a limb?

I wonder, and everyone else, because it's about the whole group then picks the one in the middle, don't they?

But the root in the middle, yeah, yeah.

I guess the two who were leading it lead it, but I don't know.

Yeah, the two leading would, yeah, say, okay, we've we've come to a, yeah, yeah, I'm just seeing where my position is in this entire group and in the group of all of our fans now that everyone knows I'm a live Demfo.

I might have gone right down to the bottom of the group.

No one's following you anywhere, Ukraine.

You're standing on a tree stump on your own.

But they aren't, the democracy element is pretty fascinating.

So, as you said, if two baboons go in opposite directions,

then sometimes they'll just be a stalemate.

So, exactly the same number of baboons will follow each one.

And so, the rest who are still left in the middle are like, well, it's equal.

So, we just have to do a re-vote.

It's like the second stage of voting.

So, everyone comes back to the middle and then try again.

And eventually, slightly more baboons will follow one than the other.

And then they all go, okay, more have voted for that one.

Let's go with that.

Very cool.

You know, baboons have red bums.

Yes.

Do you know why they have red bums?

It's not so that when you're walking, people can follow you.

I don't think so.

Yeah, that would be good.

That would be useful.

Are they always slapping each other's bottoms?

That's just a bit of bruising.

No, not red bottoms.

They actually don't have red bottoms.

They just have a big bruise all of them.

Wow.

So you would think, I would have thought, that whoever has the reddest bum might have the most sex.

Yeah, it's the sexy bums.

You would think so, right?

But they've done some studies.

So it's a 2015, actually on my notes, it's a 2105 AD study, but I think it was in 2015.

And it was in the journal Animal Behavior.

And they looked at all the female baboons with the most swelling, and they found that the redder rumps didn't have more offspring and didn't have more sex.

And so they're like, well, why did they do that?

And they reckon that it's simply kind of a byproduct of ovulation.

So, when a female is the most fertile, various changes happen in her body, but one of them is that her bum gets redder, and there's actually not any particular reason, it doesn't seem to help or hinder them in any other way, it's just kind of a byproduct of that.

Interesting, isn't that weird?

It's just it's random.

It's like if women having periods, we were being studied by aliens, and they were like, I guess men must find this period thing attractive.

And then it's like, no, it just happened.

Just part of life.

Just part of life.

Yeah.

Wow.

I read that the way they do choose a mate is by how long it's been since the woman last had a baby, which

because apparently they're less fertile if they're nursing.

So it's best that they're not nursing young.

But I'm not sure how they, how do you have that conversation as a baboon?

Well, maybe it's obvious when you, you know, go back to their place and they've got a 17-year-old kid.

Yeah, I do.

You look at the quality of the drawings on the fridge is how you do it.

You're very basic, and she's had a baby recently.

Yeah.

So I really like this.

Baboons and impalas, you know, sort of antelope-like creatures, they make friends with each other.

Because this is in Tanzania.

There's a tree in Tanzania called the sausage tree, which I was immensely pleased to find out exists.

And they hang out under the sausage tree.

Annoyingly, it's not real sausages, but what a tree that would be.

It's just fruits which have these rough grey rinds on the outside, and they look like sausages.

It just looks like it's festooned with sausages.

But anyway, the Impalas are trying to eat their sausages under the tree, and the baboons are there looking out for predators.

And the Impalas are visibly more relaxed.

They spend half the time with their heads up and around looking for predators that they would do normally if they were,

you know, unaccompanied by their baboon friends.

I was reading about how baboons get their food.

And

this is probably a tip for anyone who's lost out in the wild as well.

But they scavenge through elephant dung.

So they come across a massive pile of dung and they head in there because elephants eat a lot of nuts and they eat a lot of fruit, but they don't digest it all.

So a lot of the stuff passes through their body completely undigested.

So if you see a giant pile of elephant dung and you're starving, stick a hand in and you might

style.

Quite far down the road of being starving before you get that far.

Don't do it.

If you're walking around Chester Zoo and you feel like a snack, don't do it.

I think that they're going, fuck, we voted for the wrong person this morning when they've done it.

Democracy doesn't always work.

We know that.

Oh, dear.

Baboons like to heavy pet each other.

quite a lot in a quite sweet way.

I read an article from 2003 in Nature, which i was surprised by the title of it because it is nature a very high respected journal and the article was titled risky diddling bonds baboons and

it's about the closer friends you are with someone as a baboon the more risky your diddling is so

diddling i love that phrase it's so nice isn't it so um they love to fondle each other they'll pull on each other's penises reciprocally um they uh sort of there are several forms of grasping of bums and genitals that they engage in apparently they sort of nibble each other they they mount each other when they meet but the closer they are to that other baboon the more the closer they'll get and the idea is that you'll only sort of how can you get closer than pulling each other's penises it feels like there's no closer you can get after that is there i guess it depends how hard you pull you know maybe it's a gentle tug for an acquaintance

a real you know heave got it

and the idea is that um if it's not a close friend then you maybe don't trust them well the way they put it it was:

for instance, if you're genital biting, which is something else they do,

if it's someone you don't know very well, an overenthusiastic bite can end a baboon's mating career.

So

I imagine

you probably just mistook it for a sausage from that tree.

Here's another penisy thing about baboons.

There was a baboon.

No, there wasn't a baboon called Babi

because this was like an ancient egyptian kind of god um i don't want to say that gods don't exist but this one is probably a story so there was a baboon called babi uh and it was kind of the the person who took you from the living world to the dead world uh in ancient egypt according to some stories And because baboons have such high libidos and having sex all the time and doing all this diddling, he's usually portrayed with a massive erection.

And sometimes when he would take the souls from the living world to the dead world, he would have to cross a river and he would use his penis as the mast of the ferry.

He would tie a sail to it and it would help him to get across the river sticks or whatever it was in each.

Wow.

That's more realistic than what I thought you were going to say, which is that he'd use it as a bridge for them to walk across.

Yeah.

I thought you were going to say you had to take him by the penis so he was your guide into the spirit world and you just have to follow his knob, you know.

But then he's walking backwards and so that would make him him a terrible guide wouldn't it that's a really good point yeah he knows the road though tour guides do walk backwards yeah exactly when we weren't you know in london when you see the tar guides and they've got a massive umbrella that they're holding up so everyone else can see them if that was a baboon's penis

would be very different yeah i reckon they'd get more custom that's an idea

ancient egyptian um life with baboons seems this did you guys read this story which again i think it's one of those ones that sits across a lot of those fact sites on on the internet.

But supposedly, baboons used to be part of the police force in ancient Egypt.

And yeah, and there's hieroglyphics and examples on walls that show baboons that have sort of been let off after a criminal who's trying to escape, taking them down.

And we do have examples of this.

So there's classical works where they would go around with the baboon on a leash.

And if the person was a thief escaping in a marketplace, let them off the leash.

And they would, you know, bite their leg and hold the criminal down.

If they They only bite your leg, then you've done okay, haven't you?

That's amazing, but can't be.

I mean, do you mean, were they used as sort of the um attack dogs, do we think?

Yeah, like attack dogs.

The police say, go get that guy, and then the three baboons have a 45-minute chat about the best route through the marketplace to pursue.

I love it.

Yeah, they're quite trainable.

There are baboons that herd goats, apparently, and have done

since

it's so cool.

This is like first recorded, it seems to be in Namibia specifically, but in the 1830s, then they were recorded of like that, you know, they'll herd goats out and make sure goats don't sort of wander off track and stuff.

At the end of the day, they'd herd them back into the compound.

They'd raise an alarm.

If there's like a wolf on the horizon, they'd make a big shrieky noise.

And in the 1960s, this was still happening.

And there was this such sweet account of a baboon called Arla.

Did you guys read about Ahla?

So this is in Namibia, and Allah's herding the goats of a farmer.

And she's obsessed, according to this article, with reuniting parents with children.

So sometimes the farmer will put the parent goats in one pen and the kids in another because you just shoved them all separately.

And Allah would leap into the kid's pen because there'll be a kid bleating out for its mum, would leap in, pick it up and jump over and return it to its mother.

To the extent that a farmer said, it's actually quite annoying because when a goat has twins, you tried to foster one out to a different mother.

But Allah would keep jumping in, picking it up and returning it to its birth mum.

Wow.

This is

so we're not believing that there were police forces in ancient Egypt, but we are capable of believing

Jimi Hendrix's recording career started.

There were goat herds doing family reunions.

That's right.

I mean, the bit I heard about was all these baboons of the herding goats that would often be seen riding the biggest of the goat back home as they were herding it, like a cowboy riding a horse.

Yeah,

there are photos of them riding, and we don't know if they chose the biggest, but there are certainly photos of them popping on the back.

You would, wouldn't you, after a tough day's herding?

Yeah, there are photos of dogs on surfboards, but I don't think that it's kind of a regular thing that they did.

This is the fun.

The farmer said that Arla would jump on top, pop on their backs.

They're quite fun-loving.

I think you would.

I don't know.

I think of all this story that you've just told, the Occam's razor is that one farmer is a massive liar.

That is the simplest explanation for that whole story, isn't it?

I have faith in the baboons.

Okay, it is time for fact number three.

That is my fact.

My fact this week is that Ella Fitzgerald's voice was so pitch perfect that musicians would tune their instruments to it.

Wow.

Amazing.

It's a good voice.

Yeah, this was this appeared in an NPR article that I was reading about Ella Fitzgerald's general voice technique and the love that people have for her voice, including all the band members that used to work with her.

And they all talk about her voice in this really sort of otherworldly kind of way.

There was one person in the band called Janice Siegel, who said that they were doing a few four-part harmonies.

And then, you know, Ella would scat a couple of choruses and then would turn to them and say, was that all right?

And she said it was like God asking angels after he created the world, you know, what did you think?

The Grand Canyon, could it use a little tweaking?

Like they were just so in awe of this instrument that she had inside of her um wow and she was extraordinary yeah i hadn't realized with ella fitzgerald that the thing seems to be how perfect her voice was there's a lot of um

i feel like sort of slight digs when people write about her like she didn't have the emotional depth and pain of a lot of blues and jazz singers but she could hit every note flawlessly right and her voice never ever failed or cracked Amazing.

Yeah, I sort of, I was interested in this fact because we had a really great conversation with Karen Gibson during our 20-hour marathon, who was the creator of the Kingdom Choir, who sang at Harry and Megan's wedding.

You should, everyone, go watch that chat on YouTube.

It's really cool about gospel.

But I suddenly realized I knew nothing about Ella Fitzgerald.

And her story is pretty remarkable, where she came from and how she became a big musician in the jazz era where segregation was still massive and where, at the height of her career, she was still having to come in through different doors to white people and not allowed to perform in certain places.

And what's fascinating as well is that her first mega hit was a nursery rhyme.

That gave her her first number one.

So weird.

And she had a number one hit with it before you could have Billboard number one hits.

And the way that you used to do that was sheet music.

So you would release the sheet music to your song, and that was judged to be the most popular song.

Also, I think it was that and jukebox plays, wasn't it?

I think they used to help those billboard.

Yeah.

Yes, yes.

It was so incredibly disappointing when you bought the sheet music, went home and remembered that you did not have Ella Fitzgerald's voice.

That's true.

Yeah.

So much worse.

Yeah,

she had an amazing start.

So I think she got that big hit in about 1938, but she sort of started, her big break came in 1934 at a thing called Amateur Night at Harlem Apollo Theatre.

And it was the first year that that was happening and it still goes on today, which is quite cool.

And it's just amateurs go up and sing.

And it was a bet.

She went with two friends and they put their names in this hat.

And you pick names out of a hat to choose who goes on stage.

And Ella's name was pulled out of a hat.

And she was really into dancing then, not nearly as much into singing.

And she'd planned to do some dancing on stage.

And there were some women called the Edwards sisters who danced amazingly before her.

And she lost confidence.

She's very shy.

And she got up on stage.

And so she thought, okay, I'll sing instead.

And I think she said at one point that it messed up first time.

She couldn't really sing it properly or she freaked out.

And the crowd started sort of jeering and booing.

MC paused, gave her another go.

She won first prize.

Someone who was there, danced called Norma Miller, said, She shut us up so quickly you could hear a rat piss on cotton.

Spong phrase.

That's a great phrase.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

Worth reusing.

Why didn't that catch on?

Why are we not using that in everyday language?

That's great.

Time to get it in circulation again.

Yeah.

But yeah, and she

won the prize.

That was a kind of job before.

Well, she was only a girl at the time, wasn't she?

But she tap-danced on the pavement busking.

And that's what gave her the idea to do the amateur night at the Harlem Theatre.

Although apparently that was only one of her jobs.

She also had a job doing errands for the mob, which

I don't know what kind of errands the mob needed doing.

Stuff running down to the post.

I think they have quite a lot of errands to do, don't they, the mob?

And she was also a lookout for a brothel, wasn't she?

I think I read that

she would stand outside the brothel and if the police were coming, she'd be like, get your trousers back on, everyone.

the police are coming.

Yeah, or something.

But she said it in such a beautiful voice that everyone, yeah.

One of Ella Fitzgerald's most famous recordings,

I'm sure you guys all read about this, was in Berlin, live in Berlin, which she won the best female vocal performance and best vocal performance for a single and an album at the Grammy Awards.

And it was mostly for this song, Mac the Knife, which everyone will know.

And halfway through, she at least pretends to, or actually forgets all the lyrics.

Right.

And if you listen to it, it's amazing.

She starts singing.

The first verse, she sings fine.

And then the second bit, she does a little bit.

And then she goes, oh, what's the next chorus to this song now?

This is the one now.

I don't know.

But it's a swinging tune and it's a hit tune.

So we try to do Mac the Knife.

And she's just like, literally, just like, she just completely made up the lyrics.

And then towards the end, she just does her normal scat singing where she's just like boobops away to the end.

But it, I mean, it is an incredible, incredible recording.

If anyone hasn't heard it, you've got to listen to it.

But she won a Grammy for that

recording.

Yeah, yeah.

Did she?

That is extraordinary.

Well, if you think about it, you've not just sung it, you've written a song on the fly as well, haven't you?

I know.

You've got a co-writer credit all of a sudden back to my thoughts.

It's like, hang on, mate.

What?

The lyrics sound like they could do with some work.

I mean, I appreciate that it sort of rhymes or whatever.

Well done her on the spot.

Well, she rhymes now with now, so I'm not sure.

It's yeah, good point.

Not perfect.

There you go.

That's what I'm saying.

I read her obituary in the Washington Post.

Well, I read a couple of different obituaries, but I love this.

This is not really a fact about Ella Fitzgerald per se.

It's more a fact about Washington Post obituaries in the 1990s.

Okay, because that's what most of my research is ending up.

I just found this amazing.

So there's the whole obituary, obviously.

And then at the end of it, there's this one paragraph which just says, to sample different aspects of Ella Fitzgerald's fitzgerald's music the post offers three sound bites they can be heard by calling post haste at 202 334 9000 and pressing the number listed after each selection to hear a tisket attasket press 8151 and you just had a kind of dial an obituary service which i think is brilliant why do we do that anymore that is that's such a amazing yeah a number of reasons why we don't do it anymore but it is amazing did you try calling the number i didn't know because it's in america and i thought i'll probably get charged loads it's not worth it there's a round of villa tv show of obituaries That feels like it would work, wouldn't it?

There's a Radio 4 show, which is called, I can't remember what it's called, it's called They're Dead or something.

It's all filmed last week.

And it's a really great show because it's several different nights each week.

I don't think there's a TV show.

There should be.

Feels like

it's brilliant.

Yeah.

Like, you would say you'd be celebrating the people's lives and then you would show clips of what they did and stuff.

I think that'd be fun.

But I think This Is Your Life.

The key emotional thing in This Is Your Life is that they get the famous person and then they bring out all the people from their life.

Whereas

you'd have them there in a coffin and then all the famous people they knew in life just

going out.

They'll be crying because it's a week later.

Maybe

you could do it a while after.

Yeah, like a year.

It's been a year since this person died or something.

Yeah.

You got the coffin still in the room?

No, no.

Oh, okay.

Sorry, right.

We're just dropping that.

Okay.

That was never planned to feel like a crucial format for me.

It was never part of my father, I think.

It's the centerpiece of the set.

I don't know what you're talking about.

It's the main desk that the host is on.

Maybe the big reveal is the person has died.

So everyone comes out.

and it's like you've got to work out what connects you all why are you all here oh who's not here who's not here yes

oh my god oh this has turned from heartwarming to macabre very quickly

oh dear me on ella yeah yeah

um Ella Fitzgerald, thing about her that I've wondered about before, so I was glad to have it confirmed in this fact, is that she really doesn't look how you expect her to look

based on the fact that she was the biggest star of her era.

And she never did.

So she always was kind of thought frumpy.

She was thought of as a bit too chubby.

She didn't look glamorous at all.

Even when she won that first prize in 1934, the prize was meant to be that the winner got to perform at the Apollo Theatre for the next week every day.

And they didn't let her because she looked so scruffy.

She was homeless at the time and she was wearing like men's work boots and like a really raggedy dress.

and she actually was spotted I think that night or at similar time by Chick Webb and it was Chick Webb was the band leader whose band she joined her first partner but when he first saw her he looked at her and said you're not putting that on my stage and his band said like she smelled like she hadn't bathed for a year and she was just so so scruffy that they thought we can't be

can't be doing that and then she sang and they went they decided they could put her on the stage but yeah she doesn't she hasn't got the look has she oh and that was, was the thing about Marilyn Monroe.

I read that

basically Marilyn Monroe said, this woman has the most amazing voice.

You need to put her on stage to some owner.

And he was like, no, I'm not doing it.

And she said, well, if you do, then I'll sit on the front row for the next, you know, two weeks or something.

And you'll guarantee that all the newspapers will be here because they'll want to see me sitting on the front row.

Yeah.

And they agreed to it.

Yeah.

That was, yeah, so that was, Ella Fitzgerald says that Marilyn Monroe was sort of responsible for her breaking through, and that was a mixture of things.

It was, it was her look, it was also you know, the fact she was black, the whole segregation thing.

They didn't want black performers headlining these big Las Vegas showcases.

And Marilyn was the person who said, Well, yeah, exactly, I'll sit in the front row.

And then, as soon as her voice got heard, Frank Sinatra was coming to the shows, and Judy Garland was coming to the shows.

And suddenly, it was, hang on, who's this woman that is pulling this A-list crowd to come and see her?

And yeah, Ella always said it was Marilyn Monroe.

She's a bit like Susan Boyle, wouldn't you say?

She's...

Is that not fair?

Because like, that's what, that was the point of Susan Boyle when she was first on the talent show, wasn't it?

That she didn't look like a singer, but then she had an amazing voice.

Yeah.

I saw Susan Boyle once.

Did you?

In Edinburgh.

She was just, she just walked past me.

Oh, yeah.

Or I walked past her.

memories may vary of the event.

We definitely walked past each other.

One of you was standing still then in that case, right?

No, we we were both moving.

I've mistold even this incredibly short story.

You are past each other.

We walk past each other, yeah.

I don't think memories vary of the event, Andy, because I'm fairly sure there's only one person who has a memory of the event.

She's always mentioning it at interviews, Anna.

How dare you?

Constantly saying.

One of her big inspirations when she was a child was a man called Earl Snake Hips Tucker.

This was when it's pretty sleazy laugh, James.

I was just thinking about snakes and whether they have hips or not.

Great point.

And I think they might have very, very small residual hips.

And I think some snakes, you can see, they have tiny little leg bones that come off them.

So did this man have an extremely small residual legs?

Yeah, he was named after the tiny hips of snakes.

No, he wasn't.

Well, why did they give him that name then?

I think he, okay, well, I can tell you he was also known as the human boa constrictor.

Oh, so he killed people by wrapping his legs around their neck.

Okay, you're really applying too much biological knowledge to what was a bit more of a casual nickname.

So he was a dance.

He was a boa constrictor because his Latin name was the same as his common name.

Right.

I think it sounds like he was hung like an ancient Egyptian baboon of the afterworld.

Okay, you've all got your very quintessentially you interpretations of the reason for this name.

None of them are correct, okay?

He did a dance where you wiggle your hips around and your body looks like a snake.

And it's where you sort of like you're standing with your feet together and then you move one knee forward and back after the other and it makes your hips rotate.

I was looking up some more of the great singers of the 20th century

just out of curiosity.

And did you know that in 1978, Dame Barbara Cartland released an album of love songs?

Did she?

Yeah.

Backed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

It was her singing.

And there's a spoken word intro to everyone.

Was she a good singer?

She wasn't great.

I haven't listened to the whole thing,

but the little bit I've heard does it like Ella Fitzgerald didn't need to worry about her crown being taken away by Dame Barbs.

I found one review on a quite obscure website, but a great review.

It said, with such a lushly orchestrated backing, her limited vocal abilities stick out like a bookmark in a well-thumbed novel.

Her feeble efforts to stay in a key entirely unsuitable for her result in a curious, strained whimper, not unlike the howl of her trademark lap dog when it's past dinner time.

Right, it's weird that that's where your search for greatest female singers of the 20th century is you.

Well, I searched for Barbara Cartland news a lot, so that's probably why Google knows me better.

So, she gave her last concert in 1991.

So, this is back on Ella now, right?

Sorry, back onto Ella.

Yeah, I'll save my Barbara Cartland material for another episode.

So, Ella Fitzgerald gave her last concert in 1991, and she had a bit of a sad ending.

She was sort of very ill near the end of her days.

But I do love in all the stories that you hear about her, she was relentless with wanting to sort of carry on singing.

Her voice was even getting worse and worse as she got older, but she still just wanted to be on stage.

And at one point, I think it was through diabetes, she had to have her legs amputated below the knees.

And when she had her first leg amputated, her friends thought, God, that's probably it.

And a friend said to her, you know, okay, you know, I guess we're pausing now.

And her response was, what?

There's nothing nothing wrong with my throat.

I'm not singing with my leg.

And I love that.

And she was back on the stage just doing her thing.

And yeah, just an astonishingly determined character who

earned the role of second best singer, just behind Barbara.

Yeah.

She married someone called Cigarette.

Well, she married someone whose nickname was Cigarette.

And he was called Benny Cornegay.

And she married him in 1941.

It was quite short-lived because her managers and bandmates thought he was a nasty piece of work, and so they hired private investigators to look into him.

And indeed, he did have a criminal past, and so they told her to divorce him or annul the marriage.

But one of the bandmates did remember they all called him cigarette, and he didn't know why.

He said he wasn't tall or thin or anything.

We just all called him cigarette.

He always wore a hat that was on fire, didn't he?

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

Okay, my fact this week is that as part of their rivalry, Arnold Schwarzenegger tricked Sylvester Stallone into making Stop or My Mom Will Shoot.

Stallone later described the movie as one of the worst films in the entire solar system.

I cannot believe we are talking about Stop or My Mom will Shoot.

What?

I mean, finally, dying for this.

Well, this is a fact.

It was sent to me by MK Chris on Twitter after we mentioned Stop or My Mom Will Shoot.

a couple of times over the last year or so.

It was my favorite film, which I've never actually seen.

And it's just like a go-to joke film.

And then yesterday I actually watched it.

I watched the film yesterday.

Did you?

Yeah.

James, how was it?

I thought it wasn't that bad, actually.

I mean, it was kind of fine.

It was kind of, I did laugh a couple of times.

There's some weird bits where some kind of funny thing happens and they have this kind of music in the background going

that is so strange.

I watched it yesterday too.

And that's one of the main features.

The best bit is where Sylvester Stallone actually says the name of the title.

He says, stop or my mum will shoot, which is like, I imagine if I was in the theater in the 80s or whenever it came out, I would have done a big cheer on the 90s.

And then the weirdest thing about it, I thought, was the very, very last joke, which kind of wraps the whole thing up, is Estelle Getty saying, oh, this guy, he shot his mother.

And that's the big joke at the end of the whole thing.

And then Stallone makes a face of like, oh, well, I can kind of see why he did because my mum's so annoying.

i can't believe james you've just anicored a stop on my mum's shoes

i think if you it's a it's a piece of classic work and if you haven't seen it by now you probably never will see it only got yourself to blame people would have invested 84 minutes of their life into this film and for you to just spoil it like that you're saying that assuming they watch the film if they read the novel it'll be even longer

but so short it's just so short so like isn't that's to be a redeeming feature?

I mean, they must have known when they made it.

Right, we've made a piece of shit here, but shall we at least be too long?

I think it's not that.

The first few minutes, I genuinely laughed a few times.

But can I just quickly say what it is first?

Like for people.

But the fact itself.

Yeah, I guess so.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So basically, Arna Schwarzniger and Sylvester Stallone had this big rivalry because they were the two main sort of strong men of Hollywood.

And

we might get to a few of the things that happened between them.

But Schwarzenegger apparently leaked out that he was really interested in doing this movie because he wanted Sylvester Stallone to do it instead.

And so he said, oh, I'm really interested.

He said in the press, yeah, I'm really interested.

I'm up for this.

I'm up for this.

And then he told the studio that he wanted loads and loads and loads of money.

So the studio then went to Sylvester Stallone and said, Arnold Schwarzenegger's really interested in this.

Would you be interested in maybe undercutting him?

And he said, yeah, absolutely.

I'd love to stick it to him.

And then he made this thing and he said that it's one of the worst films in the entire solar system, including alien productions we've never seen.

He said, a flat worm could write a better script.

And he said, in some countries, China, I believe, running the movie once a week on government television has lowered the birth rate to zero.

Oh, that's incredible.

Amazing lines.

He shouldn't have taken it.

He's only got himself to blame.

If he knew it was was a terrible script, then, you know,

that's where petty rivalry gets you.

You never know, though, right?

You never know what's going to hit.

It was that period of film where these things will either just be massive or.

I think a decent edit could have worked wonders with it.

I think the, you know, the Zack Snyder cut of Stop My Mum will shoot might really add sort of tension and drama and comedy.

But there are so many interesting things in it.

So there's, if you want to see Sylvester Stallone wearing a nappy, that features in the film halfway in.

But the best thing for me is James you'll remember this scene uh it's where his mum is trying to buy him the gun yes and she ends up accidentally buying him uh an Uzi basically anyway the gun store clerk is played by Richard Schiff

and if anyone listening is a fan of the West Wing Richard Schiff played Toby Ziegler um an incredibly prestigious role in maybe one of the most prestigious TV shows ever made this was just a few years after he'd done stop my mum will Shoot, but he brings such you know gravitas to the role of unnamed gunstore clerk after about 20 minutes of the movie that I don't think the film ever really recovers from his brilliant, quiet, five-line turn as in this role.

It's like he, oh, wow, he was so good as the gunstore clerk, but the rest of the film's kind of a bit of a disappointment.

Right.

Does he have the same sort of long-suffering, slightly misanthropic, but right?

He doesn't.

I really think it might be the same character, but you know, in between, there was some event which turned him into the press TV thing.

You think they live in the same universe then?

100%.

It's the same cinematic universe.

Wow.

That's exciting.

Also,

there's a moment where Estelle Getty is sitting on the plane and she holds up a black and white picture of Sylvester Stallone as a young boy.

And that exact same picture is used in Rocky.

So

it could be a suggestion that they're twins.

who are leading these different lives.

Well, that makes sense because one of the motivations for Sylvester Stallone taking this film was that he'd seen, apparently, this is what he said in an interview, that Arnold Schwarzenegger was branching out with, for instance, films like Kindergarten Cop and Twins.

And so he felt that he should branch out in the same way.

So maybe the twin thing was his way of emulating that.

Right.

Yeah.

Another one of the terrible movies he did was starring alongside podcast favourite Dolly Parton, of course, Rhinestone, which he was when he...

Who was this?

Sorry, Anna?

Sylvester Stallone, sorry.

So he was in Rhinestone, and when he did an interview where members of the public asked him questions, they said, Are there any films you wish you hadn't done?

And he sort of immediately had a very long list.

Top, of course, was Stop Why My Mum Will Shoot.

Get Carter, he did a remake of that, bad idea.

Oscar, Driven, Detox.

And then he said, Rhinestone, which I wish had been Romancing the Stone, which I thought strange thing to say.

But actually, he was offered that same year Romancing the Stone,

which he turned down in favor of the lesser stone film release, release, Rhinestone, and Romancing the Stone.

Do you think he was stereotyped as doing after he did Rocky?

Do you think we just have to plot him in stone-based movies from now on?

Yeah, and he's Sylvester's own,

so

it's kind of persuasive.

Yeah, I think that's right.

Someone else who worked on the film Software Mammal Shoot was the person who coordinated the action sequences.

Now, I haven't seen the film, guys, so are they quite...

Oh, they're pretty amazing.

Please.

Any questions?

Yeah, they're pretty.

They come thick and fast.

Great.

Okay, so we had a lot to do.

So he was a guy called Evan Luri, and he starred, Evan Lurie, or Lurie, starred in a film called American Kickboxer 2.

Great movie.

Have you actually seen that?

Of course.

Well, wait, so Dan, have you seen the prequel to American Kickboxer 2?

Yeah, it wouldn't make sense if I bumped straight into American Kickboxer 2.

Prequel to American Kickboxer 2.

Anna, just say American Kickboxer.

Incorrect.

I'm not going to say that, Andy, because it's not true.

Trained.

You've fallen right into my trap.

Right.

American Kickboxer 1 was released in 1991.

American Kickboxer 2 was released in 1993.

Two had nothing to do with one.

Although one did have a sequel, but that sequel was called To the Death.

What?

And then a totally different studio released a totally unrelated film called American Kickboxer 2.

That's weird.

So wait a minute.

So American Kickboxer 2 didn't have a prequel, it just went straight in as American 2.

Sorry, so it was a trick question.

You should have said, no, obviously not, Anna, because it didn't have a prequel.

Everyone knows that.

Estelle Getty, who plays

the other role in Stop On My Mom will shoot, alongside Sylvester Stallone,

she has played not just the mother of Sylvester Stallone, but also the mother of Cher and the mother of Barry Manilow in various films.

And she basically says that she always gets typecast as a mother in any single thing because that she was a mother in Golden Girls.

So she was a mother in the Golden Girls.

Um, and actually, I think she might have been younger than some of the people she was supposed to be the mother of, she was, yeah, but she like had this kind of character as just being this typical kind of Jewish, overbearing mother, um, which she then took into almost every play.

She says, She played mothers in plays by Neil Simon, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams.

Mother to everybody but Attila the Hun.

Wow,

do you think she was angling for the Attila the Hun rule?

Mrs.

Hun.

I want to complete the sentence.

Stop on my hunnel shoots.

I read Estelle Getty's book that she wrote when I was about 14 years old because I heard that she was a comedy actor in a big sitcom like Golden Girls.

So I assumed that she was like one of the hot comedians of America.

And this was a time when I was younger where I thought I just want to read everything.

So I read this whole book and it really was bizarre.

And I was kind of wondering, I guess it'll get good.

And it never quite

But I think I'm one of the few people in their 30s who can say they've read Estelle Getty's book.

I think that's a real sentence.

The thing is, Andy and James, you do mad things like watching Stop on Membership for the sake of research.

Dan actually just chooses to do this stuff for fun.

Yeah.

Her biography was called If I Know Then What I Know Now.

And it came out, I think, after she'd won her Golden Globe, maybe, or an ME or something like that.

And she said, after 50 years in the business, I'm an overnight success.

Yeah, she got her first named role when she was over 60.

Her first role where she was credited in a film.

And then she goes on to win Grammys and Emmys.

So there's hope for us.

She's very good in this film, I must say.

She was

overlooked by the Academy.

Yeah.

As the entire film was.

So should we mention this huge rivalry that happened between Stallone and Schwarzenegger?

The first moment where it properly became a thing was at the Golden Globes.

And Sylvester Stallone was nominated for a number of awards for Rocky.

And they were sat very near each other, I believe, on opposite ends of a table.

And Rocky just kept losing the awards through the night.

And every time they lost an award, Stallone would catch Schwarzenegger's eye, and Schwarzenegger would be pulling a sort of smug, aha, kind of face.

You shouldn't win it anyway.

And it got to the point where Stallone was so intimidated by by this that he picked up a giant bowl of flowers, a big vase, and he chucked it at Schwarzenegger.

And he said they had tulips and lilies and everything that went everywhere.

And

that was the start of it.

That was the moment that instigated what was a decade-long rivalry between the two of them, where they took every opportunity to get one up on each other.

Of all the, you know, things you want to throw to show off your testosterone and masculinity, a vase of tulips strikes me as not the first choice.

Especially as later down the road, they would deliberately have movies that would have a bigger gun than the previous guy's movie.

I love that idea.

Yeah.

Schwarzenegger would be in a film with a kind of a 12-inch gun, and then Stallone would come in with a 15-inch gun, and they get bigger and bigger and bigger until they had to mount all the guns on the helicopters and tanks so that they be able to.

Well, that was the thing I think one of them was saying in an interview, and this really resonated with me because I always wondered, oh, I've never seen something like that.

Rambo.

So if Schwarzenegger had a movie with a sword, he would make sure it was a massive sword.

And in Rambo, Rambo's knife is ginormous.

It's just way bigger than any kind of knife you would ever have.

And supposedly, that was made specifically at the request of Sylvester Stallone because he was like, well, I need the biggest knife.

I need to be bigger than Schwarzenegger.

And if you see it, it's a memory from childhood.

I'm always like, that's a ridiculously novelty-sized knife.

And it turns out it's the rivalry that led to it.

You know why?

Yeah.

You know, Rambo is named after an apple.

Really?

Yeah.

What?

Could be that the knife was just for costing the apple.

It was named after Rambo apples, which are apples in America, which in turn are named after a guy called Peter Gunnerson Rambo, who founded New Sweden, a colony in America, in 1637.

This guy, Peter Gunnerson Rambo, was named after Rambo Get, which is where he was from, which means Raven Mountain in Gothenburg.

And Rambo's code name in Rambo is Raven.

Wow.

That was a fact sent in by a listener who has too much time on their hands and spotted it.

This whole thing has been blown wide open.

And what, Stopping My Mama Shoots is in the same world as what was the thing, Gandy?

The West Wing.

West Wing?

Oh, this is all going crazy.

The other thing I thought, which is kind of weird, is, you know, how we were saying that if one of them had a gun which was a certain size, the other one had to to go one bigger.

Well, in Twins,

Schwarzenegger worked with Danny DeVito, who was 1.47 meters tall.

Whereas in Stop and My Monroe Shoot,

Stallone worked with Estelle Getty, who was 1.49 meters tall.

So he had to just go two centimeters taller in his supporting actor, didn't he?

I think that's what that was.

That's so funny.

That's a really good point because a lot of the comedy comes from the fact that Estelle Getty just looks so tiny next to Stallone.

Stallone, and it is hilarious when they

keep showing them next to each other.

It's hilarious, it stays hilarious all the way through throughout the 84 minutes of screen time.

He's a really fast writer, Stallone.

That's the other thing.

So he claimed to have written the first Rocky film in three days.

He wrote it and starred in it.

He wrote Rocky 2 in 29 hours, according to him.

And then later on, he claimed he wrote the cop thriller Cobra in 16 hours.

That's yeah.

Which can't

be fast.

That's amazing.

Wasn't it the thing with Rocky One, the first one, that he wrote it and he took it to a studio and they said, yeah, we'll buy it off you for the equivalent of like a million quid or something.

But we don't want you to be in it.

We want Bert Reynolds or someone to be in it.

I don't know who they said.

But he said, no, I need to be in it.

Otherwise, you're not having it.

And so he wouldn't take the money.

And at that time, he had like no money in the bank.

He had like $100 in the bank or something.

So that's the story.

But later on, it turned out that that was a bit bit of a PR thing to make him seem like this big underdog.

Really?

And actually, the studio had always accepted he was going to be in it.

They spent six months helping him to get the script of the film into shape.

And, like, they were on board for the, but it was such a compelling story.

That's such a nice idea that he stuck to his guns and said, I don't have any money, but I have to be in this.

But it doesn't work because why would they have to put so much time and effort into fixing a script that he'd already spent 16 hours writing?

Do you know what he later?

He later made an arm wrestling version of Movie called Over the Top, was it?

Yes, of course, Dan has seen it.

So that's a description of the movie, but what was it called?

And he doesn't know it in the course of his research.

This is the amazing thing.

He didn't need to research this fact at all.

Over the top.

The one-liner on IMDb, I'll say it just to save Dan's breath, but tough trucker Lincoln Hawke, he plays Lincoln Hawk, is determined to win back his son and triumph at the World Arm Wrestling Championships.

Wow.

The reason I know that movie so well is I used to work for the BBC for the quiz department developing shows.

And we'd managed to get to the boss of BBC.

We're in the room with the top dog of BBC, pitching the show, and he wasn't buying it.

And we needed a moment to sell it, like something big.

And the guy who was on our team, who we really hoped would not speak during the meeting, decided to speak.

And he said, can I tell you, Peter, Peter, it's like the last scene in Over the Top where you don't think.

And all of us just went, I cannot believe you are referencing the most obscure Sylvester Stallone movie ever made.

I want to know a golden moment.

We needed the hero moment, and you came up with that.

And I want to meet the person who can be sat in a room with you, and

he is the one who's making these obscure references to shit movies.

Yeah, stop referring to yourself in the third person.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sorry, yeah.

I shut him up.

I was like, sorry, Peter, Peter.

What he meant was, you know, the end scene of American Kickboxer 2.

We have enough guys.

So, yeah, whatever.

Yeah, okay, cool.

I've just got one last tiny thing.

This is an interview Bob Hoskins did with The Guardian in 2011.

They asked him three questions.

Here we go.

What is the worst job you've done?

He said, Super Mario Brothers.

They then said, what has been your biggest disappointment?

Super Mario Brothers.

If you could edit your past, what would you change?

He said, I wouldn't do Super Mario Brothers.

Oh, Dan, you must have seen that.

Is it any good?

Brilliant film.

Brilliant film.

What did he play?

Did he play like a mushroom or something?

No, he's Mario.

He's,

yeah, yeah, he's a plumber in New York, I think.

And they get taken down.

It's quite dark.

It's really sort of like Ninja Turtles style movie.

Wonderful.

Wonderful.

Yeah, that famously dark film Ninja Turtle.

Wow, wait till we show you Shindler's Less done.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

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 go to our website, no such thingasafish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

Check them out.

Also, you can head to our YouTube channel, the quite interesting channel, where you'll find extracts from the 20-hour marathon that we just did for Comic Relief a few weeks ago.

Most of it should be up there by now.

We'll be drift feeding them over the next few weeks as well, three a day.

Do check them out and please donate to the cause if you do have any money.

Go to comicrelief.com/slash fish.

We'd really appreciate it.

All right, guys, we will be back again next week with another episode.

We will see you then.

Goodbye.

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