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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 Tashinsky, Andrew Hunter-Murray, and James Harkin.

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

And in a particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that US Marines are considered to be so stupid that members of the other armed forces call them crayon eaters.

This year, a Marine has invented an actual edible crayon.

Now, does that prove the Marines are not stupid?

I think so.

Does it prove that they are and that they haven't understood the joke?

This guy, he's invented something, so that makes you smart, doesn't it?

Yeah.

Does it draw?

It actually draws like a crayon.

It's not just an edible stick.

Of course it is.

It does draw.

He might have just taken a pepperami and

shoved a nib in it.

Does that count as a crayon or pepperami?

I mean, I suppose if you smeared it on the wall, you could get some kind of drawing out of it.

Yeah.

No.

So this is a guy called Frank Manteau and it was both him and his business partner who's called Cassandra Gordon and they decided in 2017 having heard of this thing about being called crayon eaters that they would decide to come up with an edible crayon and they've got these things called crayons ready to eat and they taste like delicious vanilla flavored chocolate

and anyone can eat them.

Don't give them to your pets because I think they have some chocolate in them and pets aren't allowed chocolate.

and actually this guy called frank manteau he was using some crayons to color in a project once uh when he was at a high school um and not when he was at high school he was i was gonna say i mean he's got the marine's reputation here

and what happened was he put a crayon in his mouth like to kind of because he only had two hands and he needed to hold one so he put it in his mouth and that was when he realized wait a minute are there any edible crayons actually and so then he got in touch with this lady called cassandra who's a pastry pastry chef, and she helped design this new product.

I bet that when he put the crayon in his mouth, immediately a Marines recruiting officer paid his hand around the door and said, You, you're the kind of guy we need.

So they're currently trying to crowdfund the crayons in order to go out these new edible crayons.

So if anyone wants to check it out, it's crayonsreadytoeat.com.

And they're looking to get $75,000.

At the moment, they've got $5,750 as of recording.

But you can go to their shop and buy a t-shirt.

So

that is available right now.

Is it an edible t-shirt?

It is not an edible t-shirt.

God damn it.

It would be a real shame if today, the day that we are doing a comic relief marathon asking people to donate money to the best causes in the world, if actually all of their funds were redirected to fund this edible crayon.

And I just want to say, if you have to choose one, just think really carefully.

Hey, look, comic relief are trying to feed the world, aren't they?

How better to do that than to send a load of edible crayons everywhere?

James, is it a pun on meals ready to eat?

Because that's what they call their U.S.

military supplies, isn't it?

MREs.

That's the kind of thing.

Meal rations you get in the field.

To be honest, I didn't know about that.

But now you've said it.

I mean, it definitely is, isn't it?

Yeah.

It must be.

It's even in the same packaging style, Andy.

So it's like a brown bag.

Yeah.

It's got the font on it.

And

it's the idea that they be given to children or to Marines.

Because obviously children tend to to use crayons more, but marines might need emergency supplies in the field.

They're not supposed to be emergency supplies, I don't think.

I don't think you

replace them with the usual crayons that Marines take in the field.

It's very boring.

A lot of it is waiting around.

They've got to have something to entertain them.

Yeah,

it's a funny product like funny.

I like it.

It's just

an in-your-face to the abusers, right?

To the insane.

Yeah, exactly.

And why do they call Marines crayon eaters?

It's like, this is quite a new thing.

The interview with Frank Manteau that I saw, he said that when he was in the Marine Corps, they never called them crayon eaters.

That was until 2002.

And they said they were known as jarheads, grunts, ground pounders, bullets, sponges, but they were never known as crayon eaters.

And I can only think, looking at those dates, that it's due to Ralph from The Simpsons, who was a regular crayon eater and famously supposed to be a bit dumb that they must have taken that.

It must be.

You're so right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There was a blog from another Marine about that nickname railing against it, not because it's insulting, but because it's just so shit.

And I couldn't tell if it was like the lady doth protest too much, but he was, it was a, it started out with him saying, you know, we always make fun of each other in the military.

So we call the Air Force the Chair Force.

Very funny.

The Coast Guard are puddle pirates.

The list goes on, apparently.

But he didn't, he didn't.

But then he said

that crayon eaters is just super lame.

Do you think that something as lame as crayon eater is going to offend a member of a tribe whose trainees are taught to yell kill during training?

Yeah, well, he makes a point.

Well, he makes a point, but I think, like you say, he makes it a bit too strongly, doesn't he?

The article is very, very funny.

Just a couple of extracts.

It's bullet point.

It's like point one.

First off, it's just kind of weak.

Maybe we're just too dumb to understand the insult here, but quite frankly, it sucks.

It's lame.

It's no better than a kindergarten insult.

You might as well say you poop your pants.

At least there's some truth for that for the Murids.

I mean, it's really...

I mean, that seems to be a self-off there, doesn't it?

At least we shit ourselves.

Should we be calling them pant poopers instead?

You're right.

He's shot himself in the foot with that article.

It's just more ammunition.

He shot himself in the pants.

It doesn't seem like they had a tremendous reputation before if they were known as jarheads, grunts, and bullet sponges.

It's not as though the fine...

nickname they had before has taken a bad thing.

I reckon they probably like ground pounders because that implies running, you know,

really, you know, strong runners, maybe.

That's true.

Bullet sponges makes you sound pretty damn hardcore.

Yeah.

Yes, that's true.

I guess so.

Or more like just people who are disposable in war.

That's what it sounds like to me.

Cannon bother.

Yeah.

Do you know, um, if you have chewed off a bunch of crayon, but you've left some over, do you know what those are called?

Those tiny little bits at the end that are sort of useless.

Um, no, I don't know.

They're called leftolas.

And

yeah, leftolas are very important because they can be collected and remolded into new crayons.

And that's a project that a guy called Brian Ware was doing.

So for hospitals in the US, he would collect all the endings, all those tiny little bits at the end, and he has a new mold and he would pour it in.

He would melt it up and he would remold crayons and they go to hospitals for free.

So that's pretty good.

God, I mean, I know hospital food is shit generally, but that is a bit beyond the pale, isn't it?

That's their offering.

What was the name of that,

the little end bits, Dan?

Leftolas.

Leftolas.

And that probably comes from the ola of Crayola, right?

That's right.

So the name Crayola, right, I think this is amazing, the etymology of this word.

It's so ridiculous.

It was coined by Alice Binney, who was the wife of Edwin Binney.

These two people kind of started the Crayola company.

And she got the word from the French word cray, meaning a stick of chalk, and the English word oleagidus, meaning oily.

so it means oily chalk but I just love that I mean oleaginous is such an unusual word to just think well I'm gonna make a kid's plaything out of this word it's a stupid name it's neither chalk nor oily and in fact the whole point of crayons crayola crayons is that it was the first type of crayon to not use oil it used wax instead So it does seem bizarre to me to then give it the oil name.

It's not oleaginous.

Well, exactly.

But the Binney family in general, they made, obviously, they made millions out of crayons.

And the really nice thing is what the money was spent on, because in 1986, the San Diego Museum of Art got a world-class collection of art bequeathed to them.

And that was the result of the Binney family millions.

I think it was Edwin Binney III, who must have been, I guess, grandson of the original Edwin Binney.

He had bought this wonderful art collection.

So crayons paid for a world-class art collection, which I think is a very...

All the arts are made of crayons.

Yeah, it was only crayon art.

It was really.

No, I can't remember exactly what was in it, but it was, it was really good stuff.

Although

we used to paint with proper crayons.

That's right.

Yeah.

Well, do you know 2012, up until 2012, the most expensive painting ever sold at auction was done by crayon or rather pastels, but you know, the you know the same, the same thing, really.

I know there's an oil and wax slight difference to it.

Yeah, and also reputationally, if you say I've done a lovely pastel drawing, then people think, ooh, you you must really know what you're doing if you say i've done a lovely crayon piece they think

five interesting though fruit pastels began as a painting tool

that tasted a fruit oh god poor guy it's already been invented we should tell him mate they've done it fruit pastels um the painting by the way was the scream by edvard munch and

he did one yeah because he did a bunch of versions of the scream and one of them was on cardboard and it was done with these crayon-y pastels and that sold for something like 119 million at the time.

It's now 23rd in the list of the most expensive pieces of art that have ever been sold, with a Da Vinci right at the top.

But yeah.

And also his name, Edward Munch, comes from the fact that he used to eat his drawing equipment as soon as he was done, didn't he?

Yeah.

Crayola, V-Good at PR, I would say, company.

When their latest new colour, Blutiful, came to be, the company said it beat four other finalists.

So the other finalists were Dreams Come Blue, Blue Moon Bliss, Reach for the Stars, Star Spangled Blue.

They're the four that it beat.

And they said that the company chose Blutiful from over 90,000 unique submissions.

Someone read through 90,000 names and then there were 400,000 votes to decide the winner.

It's insane that you could have 90,000 unique names when the public have no ability to think of anything new, do they?

Basically, if they've got 90,000 unique ones, then think of all the people who said

Blueface and add that to that number.

And you're in the millions.

So I think

they can't have meant unique names.

They must have meant unique submissions from people.

Some people must have been coming up with the same one.

They must have been.

There aren't 90,000 sounds in the world.

What?

But yeah, there's not 90,000 puns with the word blue in, that's for sure.

Even you couldn't generate.

No, but they probably just had people just sausage stick, you know, it was probably just random

random submissions.

90,000 is a lot of people.

That's really so many to be participating in kids, isn't it?

It'd be schools that are all submitting around America.

I think it's,

but it's crazy.

I was looking through, I read this amazing site that I want to give a shout out to, which is Jenny's crayon collection site.

And a woman called Jenny has gone through and catalogued every single crayon that's ever been and ever been retired.

I read through all the colours, obviously.

and they prioritise bizarre things.

So the initial ones are really obvious, like red, yellow, blue, brown.

But by the time you're in the 32 crayon box, you're getting Timberwolf as a colour.

In the 48 box, you've got macaroni and cheese as a colour.

And yet, maroon and navy blue, you don't get them to the 96 box.

Really?

Wow.

People in the navy must feel very bad about that.

Yeah, those puddle pirates.

But one other thing about that, the colour changes, is the famous thing when they changed the flesh colour.

So it used to be that

Crayola had this colour, which was flesh, which was very much the same color as a white person's skin.

But obviously, that is, you know, extremely unwoke and not the right thing to do.

And there was a woman called June Handler.

She was a scientist.

And she realized that when she was observing children, they would often bully each other, like the white kids would bully the non-white kids by saying, you don't have any flesh because you don't have the same color skin as this crayon.

She wrote to Crayola, and Crayola, to their credit, very, very quickly changed it, changed the colour to peach.

And now they have a colours of the world crayons where you can, you know, basically it's all the different skin type colors that you can get in one pack.

It's pretty cool, isn't it?

Yeah, good on you, Crayola.

Yeah.

Oh, good at PR.

I'm telling you.

Did you read the list of internet crayons that Crayon released in the 1990s?

I mean, it's just the same colours all over again, but they were called things like web surf in blue, circuit board green, green.com, just another green,

online orange, and my favorite, floppy yellow.

Oh, really?

Floppy yellow?

That used to be my nickname at school, but I don't know why they call me that because I used to shit myself all the time.

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

My fact this week is that the London Metropolitan Police used to have a van called Teapot One exclusively to deliver cups of tea to officers stuck at the scene of a crime.

Wow.

That's awesome.

Yeah, so this, this, sadly, I believe that Teapot One and its

brother or sister Teapot 2 are now decommissioned, tragically.

They're no longer running.

And it's a shame because Teapot 1 was this, it looked kind of like a burger van that went around, but it had also the sort of regalia of a classic police car.

And on the very front of it, written in capitals, was Teapot 1.

And it would be called for, say, example, if police were called to an area where they thought maybe a protest was, or if there was a big festival and they needed police on standby the whole time.

This was the catering truck that would come by and top them up with tea.

There would be other things like coffees and sandwiches and so on, but it was known as Teapot One.

Am I correct in thinking that behind Teapot One, you would also get the milk motorbike and that would bring the milk in the sidecar.

You had the sugar scooter behind that, didn't you?

Yeah.

Yeah, so it was basically the government privatized the catering of the Met Police after that and put it out to tender.

So this was the Met Police's own thing that they had, but then the government said, no, we'll be able to make it more efficient if we if we put it out to other companies if you ever want an argument against privatization the end teapot one

well i read one vlog about it where they said let's be honest in the main the food was shit but that's not the issue here

um

who else could give you a frozen pork pie a sandwich an apple and a cup of hot grey water at four o'clock in the morning and do it all with a smile So it's one of these things where everyone knew it was terrible, but it was their thing.

And that's why they were upset about it.

That is so

shame.

When Teapot was written across the front of it, Dan, was it written backwards so that if you were in a car and it was blowing up with its sirens behind you, you could see.

And the siren was the kettle just whistling.

I think from the photo that I've seen, unless they've reversed the photo, it looks like it was a normal reading for if you were standing in front of it.

So the correct way.

So before Teapot 1 existed officially on the front of a van, it used to just be a call sign.

So police have all sorts of different call signs for if they need certain types of units to come in.

So if there's rioting going on and they have a van full of riot police, that call sign might be gold or silver.

And they would know, okay, we need to send that van in.

It's good that they're quite different, isn't it?

You don't want to accidentally send the tea lady in.

Especially, James, if you say, right, we need to kettle everybody at the traitors.

Get the teapot.

So I actually spoke to a former police officer to ask, you know, do you know anything about where this came from?

And by an astonishing coincidence, the person I spoke to is the person who may have generated the call sign TPOT1.

His name is Stephen Colgan.

He's a buddy of ours.

He is a former QILF.

He's been on the show before.

And he told me that at the time when the call sign came out, he was an instructor at Met Telecom and Wireless School.

And one day he created a temporary call sign, Teapot 1, for the catering van.

And it started getting used and started, it got stuck.

And his colleagues started doing the same.

And then a second van came, which was Teapot 2.

He says it's quite possible that he wasn't the very first to use it, but he can't find any instances before where anyone had done that.

And it was years after he left the police that it became the call sign so much that they eventually turned it into the van itself.

Wicked.

I was on a Reddit thread, which asked a question that everyone's probably wondering: is it appropriate to offer police officers tea or coffee if they're outside or near your property?

Which there are most answers with American people saying this is the most British question I've ever heard being asked.

And not only are you offering the police tea, but you're asking if that's polite to do it.

But the answer seems to be from various police officers who responded: they love tea, always right to offer.

Please don't be offended if we turn it down.

Sometimes we're busy, even if we don't look busy.

But also, there are some instances where it may be considered a bribe.

And so they are going to be obliged to turn it down.

I was told, I was told when I worked in a hotel that when the police came for our regular fights and things that we had to call them for, that we weren't allowed to give them tea or biscuits or anything like that.

We were told we weren't allowed to because it was counted as a bribe.

And that was by the police.

But we still would ask them all the time because it's just polite, isn't it?

Which is like a cup of tea.

But then probably about half of them would say, no, we're not allowed.

And then the other half would say, oh, yeah, go on then.

And there was one time that I was working behind the bar and there was a massive fight, like a really, really massive fight going on.

And we called the police.

We kind of put all the shutters down and stuff.

And then eventually the police came.

I'll never forget it.

We gave him a cup of tea and he had like four massive guys who he was kind of corralling out of the building with a cup of tea.

on the saucer with a biscuit on the saucer all the way through and he didn't spill a single drop it was one of the greatest things i've ever seen no that's policing badass

I did spot that the St.

John ambulance Twitter does say as of 28th of June 2020 that they have a vehicle called the teapot, which seems to still be running.

And that is used to deliver refreshments to hospital staff and medics and volunteers, so on.

So it is possible that despite the police teapot one being down, we still might have a teapot on the road.

um helping out hospital staff thank god as long as britain has a teapot vehicle on the road somewhere Hey, look, tea is very important to our country, Anna.

It's like what we are built on.

Absolutely.

That's like the crows of Tower of London.

If there's not a teapot van on the streets of London, England will fall.

In wartime, especially, we get very possessive about tea.

In the Second World War, I don't think we've mentioned that.

Well, first of all, once the Blitz came, all British tea stock was moved out of London and it was dispersed through the country to 500 different locations.

Whoa, 500?

That's you're really making sure

they can't get all 500.

But also in 1942, Britain bought up the world's entire supply of black tea.

This is how much we realized we needed it to get through the war.

It was all the tea on the European market, and it was largely for the North Africa desert campaigns because apparently all their water was transported in fuel containers, so it tasted like oil.

So the only drink they would drink was tea.

But yeah, they bought up all the tea pretty much available.

That's so funny.

The suffragette movement, tea was very important in that.

There was a suffragette called Patricia Hall who once said that the promise of a cup of tea was a great inducement to get women to come to meetings.

And also a lot of the tea rooms in London was where they would meet.

So there was one in particular on Oxford Street called Alan's Tea Rooms, where a lot of the early suffragette plans got made.

And this was run by a guy called alan liddle but alan liddle was actually a pseudonym for the person who actually run it who was called marguerite liddle and her middle name was alan so she called it alan's tea rooms after her middle name because she was called marguerite alan liddle and i can't work out whether the alan as a middle name was fake completely or whether just by coincidence she had a male sounding middle name and she could use it for this tea shop but yeah that's hilarious was this sort of like how female authors in the 19th century had to have male pseudonyms?

Was it like you weren't allowed to establish a tea room unless you were a male?

I think that's what I think it was like to stop people from worrying that this was a place where women were going to hang out.

Um, because like Helen Gordon Liddle was one of the people who went to um Marguerite's tea room, and she was one of the very famous kind of suffragettes who wrote a book about I think uh about force feeding.

I think it was like the first account of women being force-fed in prisons and stuff.

So yeah, but they went on to found um little, didn't they?

Yeah,

pretty good.

Do you guys know uh who invented tea?

God,

uh, so close, so close it was Buddha.

Oh,

yeah,

there's an Indian legend that Buddha went to China, and when he was there, he said, Right, I'm going to meditate for nine years now.

Okay, he thought he was in for a long meditation, but he fell asleep.

And when he woke up from his nice sleep, halfway through his nine years of meditating, he was so annoyed at his own weakness that he cut off his own eyelids and he chucked them on the ground.

And where they fell, a tree with eyelid-shaped leaves sprang up in its place.

And that was the first ever tea tree.

Oh, wow.

I've never heard that.

Citation needed, but still, it's a nice story.

Teapots.

Yeah.

Original teapots came from China, where tea came from, and they became popular in the Ming Dynasty.

But apparently, I read one source that said that Chinese people would carry them around with them and just drink straight from the nozzle, which kind of sounds like that does make sense.

Well, it would burn, wouldn't it, if it was too hot?

Yeah.

I think that's the only thing that stops me from doing it, is that I'm worried that I've burned it.

Right, your lips are going to blister.

And was it known as the nozzle back in the day?

I'll be honest, in ancient China, I don't think they even called it a spoutandy.

They probably had their own word for it.

You're right.

Yeah, I don't think nozzle is a is a Mandarin etymology.

I read that on a lot of ships, so sort of military ships, that the teapots you get there, they are cube-shaped.

Are they?

And

they're rolling around and stuff.

Exactly.

Yeah.

The cube teapot.

So

it's, it's, yeah, it's just a really cool teapot shape.

It's sorry, cube shape.

It was invented by a guy called Robert Crawford Johnson.

And it's still going.

Like Like it's a big cube teapots limited as a big thing.

It's easy for storage as well because you can pack them up, you know, like those square watermelons that you get.

Yeah, but the nozzle is going to get in the way, but I do see that point.

But it's quite hard to make square ceramics, isn't it?

It's like, because you have the joins are really, really difficult to make them watertight.

Yeah, interestingly, it does not have a nozzle.

Does it not?

Which is interesting, which is why you can pack it.

Yeah.

Does it have a handle?

It does have a handle.

Yeah.

Because I was going to say, it's like I'm a little cubic teapot, short and stout.

I don't have an handle and I don't have a nozzle.

So it's just, it sounds like they're boxes.

Yeah, it's a cardboard box.

And you

write teapot on the side in crayon,

hung it on the ship.

Give it to the Marines.

They'll know what to do with it.

Do you know that the oldest petrol station in America is shaped like a teapot?

No.

So,

this is at least claimed to be the oldest petrol station in the country.

It's in Zilla, which is in Washington state, and it opened in around 1920s, 21, 22, something like that.

And the reason it's shaped like a teapot is it's based on the teapot dome scandal, which was a bribery scandal during the presidency of Warren Harding.

There was an oil field that was known as the Teapot Dome oil field, and someone had been paying to get their hands on this oil field.

And the Teapot Dome oil field was named after a teapot-shaped rock, which was in the middle of the field.

And then that became the name of the scandal, which became the name of the first petrol station.

Amazing.

You wouldn't guess a teapot-shaped petrol station was associated with mass government corruption.

That was what it was nodded towards.

You think they probably sell tea.

Yeah, they probably built it thinking, oh, this will be one in the eye for the government, won't it?

Everyone will see this for hundreds of years.

And the first thing they'll think is, what an asshole Warren Harding was.

But actually, what everyone thinks is, oh, that looks like a teapot.

Sorry, do they call the nozzle the spout?

I know a completely random thing about Zilla, just to chuck it, this very small town, which is that they've got a church there, the Church of God in Zilla.

And they have a giant 10-foot-tall T-Rex out the front of it, or they used to, which is dubbed and known to the locals as Godzilla.

Oh, no way.

Yeah, and so it's become an attraction.

You go and see Godzilla at the

Church of God.

And what kind of corruption was that a metaphor for?

It was lizard-selling scandals in the presidency of Taft.

Quite confusing because Godzilla, am I right,

is not a T-Rex.

Yep, you're raising a very obvious point.

T-Rex.

I'm saying what I mean is everyone was thinking it.

I speak for the people when I say,

I wonder what happened to the teasmaid.

Does anyone else ever wonder that?

Sorry.

You know, the teasmaids that our parents reminisce about.

2016 by the Metropolitan Police when they decided to outsource their...

That's that's the other.

I don't know what a teasmaid is.

So a teasmaid was what?

It's like a little thing that you have on the side of your bed that not only is an alarm clock, but it also makes your cup of tea in the morning.

Yeah, it's the thing that makes your tea.

Like they all, everyone sort of had them in the 50s, 60s, 70s.

And the first ones were actually in 1891.

The first one was made.

It was called The Early Riser's Friend, and it was basically an alarm clock.

But apparently, in the description of the patient, you replaced the spring of the clock with cat gut.

And when the alarm vibrated, the cat gut struck a match.

So it like pulled a match, it struck against a surface, which lit some, you know, a bit of a bit of wick, oiled wick, which boiled water.

And then the boiled water would tip itself into a cup of tea.

It sounds a little bit like, I don't know if any of you guys ever played mousetrap as a kid.

You know, that thing that just never works.

Sounds like an okay go video.

It's like a Heath Robinson machine or a, you know, whatever they're called.

We've all found a reference that fits us, apart from Anna here.

So

Anna said that Anna had mousetrap.

Mousetrap?

Okay, sorry.

I don't recall hearing anything from you, Andy.

You've been particularly silent for references on this one.

Oh, dear.

You disagree with the rest of us, haven't you, in this big old reference off?

But anyway, teasemaids, about a quarter of households had them in the 70s, and I've always wanted one.

And they were ruined, according to various articles, in the early 90s by Norma Major.

So Norma Major, in an interview, as in John Major.

Can you just say who?

Yeah, yeah.

Sorry, yes.

For international or younger listeners, Norma Major was John Major, Prime Minister John Major's wife.

And she she said in an interview that her teas maid was the pride and joy of her bedroom.

And almost immediately, sales of teasemaid plunged over.

I've got to say, that's a bit of a slam on John Major to say that your teas maid is the pride and joy of your bedroom.

He was normally downstairs enjoying a curry.

Good luck getting that one, international listeners.

Google it, and then you'll have a good old laugh.

It's very funny.

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

My fact is that the ninth longest running British soap ever was designed exclusively to sell soap.

Nice.

And you mean soap?

When I first read this fact, I genuinely forgot the other meaning of the word soap.

So I just thought you meant a bar of soap.

The ninth longest running bar of soap was designed to sell soap.

And I thought, of course it bloody was.

Great point.

Very good point.

I do mean a soap opera.

Yeah.

There you go.

So this is a spin-off because last week we we were talking about laundry.

And afterwards, I just, I remembered that we'd spoken about Daz briefly in the recording.

And I started reading about Daz.

And I found out that for 18 years from 2002 to 19 inclusive, they had a soap opera which was in advert form, which was about Daz.

And they got soap opera stars to be in the Daz adverts in similar roles to in the actual soaps they were in.

It's basically, you know, the Marvel cinematic universe where everyone kind of meets all these characters from all over the place.

This is like that because they've got people from Corrie, EastEnders, Brookside, Hollyoaks.

They're all in the same world mingling and interacting with each other.

Yeah.

It's very much the most ambitious crossover in television history, isn't it?

It is.

It absolutely is.

It's called Cleaner Close.

Does it count as a soap opera if it's actually an advert or not?

Well,

what a great point, James, and what a time to raise it.

The Wikipedia on it reports that episodes have a character who does not use Daz, which causes them problems, which are solved solved by a character who uses DAS.

So, I mean, I don't think anyone was

tuning in each week.

It wasn't like it ran for a thousand episodes or anything.

But you'd only get like a couple of episodes a year, wouldn't you?

Because they'd rerun the adverts and stuff.

Exactly.

Yeah.

But fortunately, I don't think that is the dividing line between soap and non-soap.

And so I'm claiming that this is

long-running soap.

And what do they do in the ad breaks of the DAS soap?

They have extremely short ad breaks in those where where they actually sell Purcell with another ad soap opera.

So it's like a little Russian doll.

Soap operas.

How come we've never seen this?

I've never seen this.

I know it quite well.

Yep.

A lot of people who listen to this podcast will be very familiar with this advertising campaign.

I reckon cleaner clothes.

More people will have known it than will have read Anna Karenina.

And we're not going to spoil her either this week.

But it's really pleasing because this is back to the original days of soap operas, which were sponsored by soap companies, soap manufacturers.

The very first ever soap opera, which started in 1930, was sponsored by Palm Olive, who wanted ads for their super suds attached.

And the reasoning was these are for women working at home, housewives, and what are they like?

Well, they probably like soap, so let's try and sell them soap while they listen.

and you know are at home.

Do you know how Palm Olive got their name just as an aside?

No.

No, you can guess probably.

All right.

it founded by a woman called Olive who had huge, sweaty palms

and always needed to wash them?

Yeah,

it's it's a good guess.

I reckon the people at home might have worked it out already.

But, um, the two oils that it was made from were palm oil and olive oil.

Oh, yeah, that makes more sense than the ham thing.

It doesn't make more sense, I'd need to say.

Just different,

truer.

But people hated soaps from the start, right?

There was never a heyday where soaps were considered considered a high culture thing.

They were railed against from that early 1930s.

They were 15 minutes long, and most newspaper articles, when they write about them, say basically about four to five of those 15 minutes of these blimmin' adverts, all of which start with, as you say, Andy, ladies, have you tried XYZ?

And

they were sometimes called washboard weepers.

That was an alternative name for soaps in the 40s.

But I think really it was snobbishness, wasn't it?

And also the fact that they were aimed towards women and often made by women.

So like one of the real first amazing writers for soap operas was someone called Anna Phillips.

And she was incredibly, incredible writer.

She wrote 2 million words a year at her best.

And she was often suggesting new colours for the Crayola Company, wasn't she?

She used up a lot of her word allowance.

She invented things like the cliffhanger ending.

That was her idea.

But she was kind of the queen of soap operas in the early, early days in the 30s.

Yeah, she had a show which was called Painted Dreams, which was the very first one that she did.

So that started airing in 1930.

And it was, she was asked, can you come up with a daily show that would show the sort of home life of people?

And as you say, it was sort of treated like, oh, what is this?

Lowbrow nonsense.

But actually, for the time, it was 1930.

The characters that she created were incredibly strong women on the show.

And there were virtually no regular male characters in it whatsoever.

So, she really pushed forward this idea that women were more than what society was saying they were, that they were much more, they were cleverer, they were more ambitious.

And so, that was sort of like a beautiful little secret movement to push women's rights.

Yeah.

But it must have made a difference because they were so popular straight away, weren't they?

I think by like the start of 1930, by 1940, 92% of programs on the radio were soaps, basically.

It was like 25 of the 30 top-rated programs were soaps.

So maybe they are the cause of

women's lip.

Well, they did have

a lot to say for society because the person who came after Erna Phillips was Agnes Nixon.

So she was in the 50s and 60s.

She was like the successor of Erna Phillips.

And she not only wrote very strong characters, but she also wrote about a lot of societal problems.

You know, these days in your soap operas, you'll have lots of, you know, echoing the problems of society.

They'll do that.

And she she was really the first one who decided to do that.

And there was one time where one of her characters had cervical cancer and they found it through a smear test.

And that really was the time that the taboo over smear tests really kind of was.

Obviously, it's still there a little bit, but it was like it was completely taboo before that.

And this really made a massive difference.

And loads more women got tested after that.

That's bad.

Who was that?

That was in 1962.

Wow.

Didn't know they had smear tests back then.

Yeah, early days.

Another thing that Erna Phillips innovated in the soap field was having an organ player.

And most soaps then just had an organ player as part of the regular employees whose job was just to give a

in between scenes.

Did they do that?

I don't know if they played that specific piece, but they did have, you know.

There's TV shows in Australia.

The soaps like Home and Away and Neighbors are quite famous for giving us a lot of big stars that are now, you know, Kylie Minot and so on, sort of all got, you know, cut their teeth on that show.

And I didn't really...

Sorry.

Kylie is massive.

She's also, her surname is Minogue.

What?

She's so big that most of us know what her surname is.

We might say her Minot.

Like the fish, the small fish.

She's literally not a Minot.

She's a big fish.

She is quite petite, though.

I have been saying Minot my whole life.

What's she nicknamed?

That might have been a good nickname for her at school because she's so petite.

For all I know, she was Minot, as in, like, that's technically the correct way to pronounce it, but that's not the way anyone in the world has pronounced it off the line.

You're right.

You're right.

Now that he points it out, I do know that every other person who's ever said the name to me in my entire life has said it with the G-U-E,

sort of really punctuated Mignot.

Migno.

Listen, whatever she's called,

neighbors gave her to us.

And

I've lost my place place now.

So basically, Corey, Coronation Street, the street, is responsible for quite a lot of big actors as well that we now have.

So people who sort of debuted on it include Sir Ben Kingsley.

He was a Coronation Street actor.

Yeah.

Davy Jones of the Monkeys.

He came out of Coronation Street.

He had a little role in that.

And so did Joanna Lumley.

So, you know, yeah, the soaps are responsible for some of our biggest highbrow actors as well, Kingsley and Lumley.

Yeah, David Jones, he doesn't doesn't slot into that academy, does he?

Not quite.

He's the wild card.

You can be promoted on soap operas.

So I really like this.

So there's a guy,

there's an actor called Bill Tarney who is very famous in soap world.

He played Jack Duckworth, right?

And he started out.

He's Corey, isn't he?

Yeah.

Yeah.

He started out as an extra and his job was to play someone who was just out of shot.

What?

you occasionally playing the dorgan or you'd see

you'd see one of his arms briefly and occasionally in a shot but you would never see anything else of him that was his role come on and then it's true that was what he was initially cast as was just someone else to show that someone else had a really attractive arm or something

he must have because when he was promoted he then spent 31 years as a full-body actor uh as they're owned in the biz and uh yeah that's a pleasing thing pleasing career progression so he was he was supposed to be just out of shot so is the idea that he's someone for the other actors who are in shot to sort of look at so it's realistic that I think in a in a crowd scene with a with a pub or whatever you don't you don't just have two people sitting there and you you have to imagine that there's everyone else in the pub you know you have maybe an establishing shot and then maybe you're next to someone at the pub so your arm's up against theirs so you occasionally see his arm but then he's in shot okay his his job was to be predominantly and almost always out of shot but then actually when he got the main role as um Duckworth, Jack Duckworth, whenever he walked into a room, you would see his arm come in first.

Here's Jack Duckworth.

Yeah.

What he'll have to say.

What's that sexy move that I think people do it in like sort of musicals in Chicago or something?

A woman in fishnet tights would project her leg in first and then her body would follow.

Does he enter like that?

Yeah, that's exactly how he does it.

He's always wearing a very nice watch.

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

My fact this week is that if you take an hour-long nap after listening to this show, you will remember five times as many facts from it.

Wow.

So do it.

Cool.

So five times more than we said on the show?

Or where are these extra facts coming from?

Not everyone remembers every single fact, as well you should know on this podcast.

Yes, five times as many as if you don't take a nap.

Yeah.

So, this, I really loved naps.

I really enjoyed reading about this study.

And generally, a lot of studies that have come out in the last couple of decades about how napping is great.

This one was from 2015.

It was quite a small cohort, but basically, it gave participants 90 words to remember and then 120 word pairs.

So, that's two random words paired together.

And so, like, milk taxi is the example they give in the study.

Is that random?

And

sorry?

Is that random?

Milk taxi.

You could make a link there.

Yeah, well, I mean, there is, of course, the milk taxi that follows the teapot water out.

In all subsequent studies, they're going to have to remove that word pair now.

We've ruined it for people because, yeah, they have to be so unrelated that you can't have a familiar connection, which sort of allows you to cheat and remember it.

Anyway, they gave these 120 word pairs to people, and then half the participants had to watch DVDs, and the other half took naps for it was an hour and a half, in fact.

And the nappers afterwards were five times better at remembering the word pairs than the ones who'd watched the DVD.

And in fact, I find this astonishing.

The people who'd had the nap remembered exactly as much as they would have if they'd just been asked immediately afterwards.

So you know how, you know, you're, as soon as a couple of hours have passed, then you forget the majority of stuff that you've immediately heard.

They remembered exactly the same amount as if they'd just been asked.

That's really good.

I wonder if...

So Fenella has a laptop that she was given by work, and it was formatted by the people at her work.

And the password to log into the computer is Catbus111.

I can say that.

It's lockdown.

No one's taking her computer.

It's fine.

But

immediately both of us went, cat bus?

What the hell is a cat bus?

Why would you ever use cat bus?

And both of us.

have never forgotten it.

Like

the conversation and the pairing of it was just so bizarre that it's a connection that's stuck in my mind.

Also, another thing that's interesting, Dad, is now everyone listening to this will never forget it.

So when we are out of lockdown in the not too distant future, we hope that everyone will be able to steal your wife's laptop.

And

I'll change it after this episode.

I'll reset the password.

Try bus cat, everyone.

2-2-2.

My password is coolguy, one, two, three, because

no one's ever caught me that.

Two totally unassociated concepts.

That's what you need.

I quite like this study also because of the choice of of DVDs that the participants were given.

So, like I said,

some got to go to sleep.

Some had to watch these DVDs.

And it was two DVDs that lasted in total two hours.

One was called Relaxing, the Most Beautiful Landscapes on Earth.

And it was just what it sounds like.

And both had only instrumental music.

And the other is called Power Catsy.

And it sounds like the maddest thing ever.

So it's only instrumental.

And it's this weird experimental film made in the 80s about the conflict in third world countries between traditional ways of life and the new ways of life introduced with industrialization but all shown in very surrealist instrumental form.

Oh my god.

And so I'm kind of amazed that they managed to stay awake through that two hours.

Yeah.

So yeah, I wonder if the study is about how good it is to nap to remember things or whether watching weird DVDs just really distracts you.

It could be that, couldn't it?

Yes.

If the DVD had been something else like Stop On My Mum will shoot or, you know, Grown-Ups 2 or something like that.

Stop on My Mummel's Shoot.

That's the second time you've ever referenced that extremely obscure Sylvester Salonika.

We finally found the only film James has actually seen.

I just watch it again and again and again.

And you guys know my memory for facts is extremely good.

So maybe if we'd given these guys Stop On My Mom will shoot to watch.

To be fair,

if that had been the first film you'd seen, I could understand why you didn't watch any other film shows until a few years ago.

Because there's no point.

You know,

why climb any other mountains when you started with Everest?

Yeah, you know?

By the way, I looked up whether there was a such thing as a milk taxi.

I don't know if any of the rest of you did.

And this is a new product.

Well, actually, it was made in 2005 by a company called Holm and Lau.

And they revolutionized bucket feeding for calves by the invention of the milk taxi.

And it's almost like a bucket that kind of drives around the farm and goes to the

to the calves and gives them exactly the right amount of feed and exactly the right amount of milk that they need.

It's a bit like a teas made but for cows.

Wow.

Is it like a robotic udder though?

Because obviously they want an udder to suckle at.

I don't, I didn't quite, I couldn't quite tell from the picture.

They look more like milk churns on wheels, but I couldn't quite tell.

But it is a thing, so you know.

Wow.

You could call it a tits made because it's flying around kipping your milk.

Yeah.

God, how bizarre.

Speaking of weird portmanteau words that I already regret saying,

have you guys heard of the napuccino?

I'm sure you have in the course of this research.

Napuccino.

What is that?

I haven't, actually.

I can guess what it is, but also it sounds too much like the word nappy and would put me off.

It's a practice.

It's a habit.

It's a behavior.

It's where you drink a coffee and then you have a nap.

And you have to take a brief nap because then you wake up supercharged just as you come out of the sleep.

The caffeine hits.

It takes about 20 minutes.

That's quite advanced, I think, because I'm a bit of a napper as well.

And I did read about the idea of having a coffee first and I tried it a few times.

But if you can't get straight to sleep, then the caffeine hits you just as you think you're about to fall asleep and you just have a massive high and you can't sleep anymore.

So I think you need to be tense.

Yeah, you need to be one of the nappers who can really kind of just go like a light immediately.

Whereas I'm not really one of those.

It takes me a few minutes to get in.

I've always thought that my dad invented that because I know.

So I've read about that concept before, but he always did it: car journeys when we were kids.

You'd stop in a service station, down a double espresso, and

you fall asleep when driving home, back by the wheel.

Yeah.

Look, you're parked.

It's actually incredibly boring for four children in the back.

You're in a parked car for 15 minutes, but it's just 15 solid minutes.

Wake up and it's like, you know,

a new woman.

Did it work?

It worked like a dream, he claimed.

But I'm with James.

I don't think I could fall asleep like that on command.

And then it's just annoying.

I can, I could, I think I could do that, but I don't drink coffee.

So, one way that I um, one way that I nap quite probably once a week is this is a good way of getting to sleep.

Is because I edit this podcast every week, I have to then listen back to it to kind of make sure that narratively it all makes sense from start to finish.

And I think a good way to do that is kind of lie down in bed while I'm listening to it.

And I usually get past about one fact and then I'm gone,

and then I have to go all the way back to the start and do it again.

But I think like nothing to podcasts is a thing, isn't it?

And I read an article about this.

This was a guy called Craig Richard from Shenandoah University.

He wrote a book called Brain Tingles, which is about ASMR stuff.

And he said that human voice podcasts are quite a good way of getting to sleep as long as they contain a calm host voice,

kindness, which means basically you're not just having a go at people all the time, and generally banal content.

that's the type of things that you need

well at least we've got one out of three

we're not kind and dad's always stressed but

hey do you guys know uh where you are allowed to nap at the wheel

um uh driverless car oh yeah no No, you're definitely not.

Oh, you know, okay.

So some kind of wheel,

a ship's wheel.

A ship's wheel?

Possibly.

I can actually look through all the possibilities.

The maybe at the roulette table.

Oh, yes,

refreshed.

Put it all on number 17.

Yeah.

Wake up three hours later and it's landed on 17 200 times and you own all the money in the world.

Bad gambling advice from no such thing as a fish.

Is it a water wheel?

Wake up and you've got a loaf of bread made.

Oh, Dan, Dan, Dan, Potter's wheel.

So you put your hands there and then you just drop off, but you've made a perfect vase, a perfect cubicle teapot.

Nope, No, okay.

Please put us out of our misery for God.

No, Anna, there are more.

I'm trying.

I'm trying.

For Christ's sake, try for five minutes.

Go on, Andy.

I didn't have anything.

I was just stalling so James could think of another wheel.

I know.

I'm thinking of one, the Wheel of Fortune, the TV game show.

It's not that either.

It is

in the cockpit as a pilot.

Having a stone.

A wheel at a plane?

Come on.

I know.

How are we supposed to guess that?

Well, you're at the wheel.

You're at the wheel.

Like, you said that you're at the wheel.

But wait, so we've talked about this before, pilots sleeping before, and it's a problem.

They're definitely not allowed to do it, are they?

Well, so that they're there, they're not really, because there have been some horrible incidences.

Like, for example, in 2008, both pilots fell asleep at the wheel.

And when they woke up, they'd just completely gone past where they were meant to land in Hawaii.

We're just like, where are we?

We're way past where we're meant to be.

But some countries,

like canada and australia allow for pilots to take naps in the cockpit

so basically it's really strict rules but what they call it is a controlled rest in position c-ri-ip

and the idea is that the pilot can sleep for no more than 40 minutes must wake up at least half an hour before the descent of landing and they have to sort of tell everyone like i'm gonna have a nap now and then then they can go down for a nap sitting in their position without worry that they might affect the controls as long as obviously they have a co-pilot next to them.

So, yeah.

Wow.

Controlled rest in position.

That's a very good euphemism for saying having a little ziz while you're at your seat.

It's clever.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There is another place where you used to be

able to have a nap and no one would mind or object.

And that was in the House of Lords in the UK.

So there was a convention.

until 2018, I believe, in the House of Lords that peers, members of the House of Lords, are never, they're not sleeping.

They are resting their eyes and they're closing their eyes and leaning back to really focus on the intellectual debate and the laws that they're debating.

And then that was a lovely convention.

And then in 2018, they were told off for sleeping in the chamber.

It kind of burst the bubble.

And then in 2019, they all ripped their eyelids off, didn't they?

That's right.

Did Buddha never have eyelids for the rest of his life?

Sorry, I've been thinking about this ever since he said it.

They must have grown back, eh?

Did they grow back?

It's a really good point, Dan.

I don't think the myth says, but it should.

But Buddha had all sorts of weird physical attributes that I think we've discussed before, didn't he?

Like some tentacles coming out of his earlobes or whatever.

I can't remember.

You have to refer back.

Yeah, exactly.

Super long tongue.

If they would have grown back, then that kind of defeats the gesture that he made.

If he's just got another pair of eyelids under there, then I think that's a less impressive gesture to repent you falling asleep in your work.

He probably didn't know he did at the time, though.

When you do do it for the first time, you can't be sure.

That's true.

I respect him for it.

The snooker player, Ronnie O'Sullivan, he has been seen napping even during competitive matches.

Yeah, he does.

And he said his doctor advised him to do it.

But I really like this because obviously the nap in snooker is the direction of the cloth, isn't it?

Yeah.

The bays.

So

that's kind of pleasing.

A lot of the other players think that he is doing it to try and out-psych them.

It's like, because when you play snooker, you're on the table or they're on the table.

And when they're playing, you're just kind of sat in your chair and there's nothing you can do.

But if you're sat there pretending to fall asleep and putting a flannel over your face like he does sometimes, then some people think that that's a bit bad form.

You know what I mean?

Got it.

Get an app while you can.

It's the perfect chance.

It's fucking boring, snooker.

And he knows it.

So might as well have a snooze.

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.

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

All of our previous episodes are up there.

Also, there is a chance that if you're listening to this on Friday the 12th of March or Saturday the 13th of March in the morning in the UK, that we're actually live right now doing a marathon-length version of our show in aid of Comic Relief.

Go to Comic Relief's YouTube page, and you'll be able to find us there talking to an amazing assortment of comedians, actors, and writers, and musicians.

They're all coming on, 35 of them.

So, tune into that.

We might be live right now.

If it's past that, well, you can watch it again on replay.

Try and find that on our YouTube page.

Anyway, we're going to be back again next week with another episode, and we will see you then.

Goodbye.

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