335: No Such Thing As A Cardigan For Ginger Rogers

Hi everyone, before we begin this week's episode of Fish, we just want to let you know that we have a very special guest on today.

It is the mighty host of QI herself, Sandy Toxfig.

Finally, to have the supreme boss come and fight us with facts was

a wonderful honor.

Also, just to mention that this week, by coincidence, genuine coincidence, Sandy's book Between the Stops is coming out in paperback.

It's a memoir that collects all stories via a very interesting route, specifically a bus route of the number 12 bus, where she travels around london jumps off at the stops and explores her childhood and memories from her life i've read it it is absolutely brilliant it is packed with facts every single paragraph just has something that blows your mind i highly recommend reading it it's fantastic and um we hope you enjoy the show as well so let's do it on with the show

Hello, and welcome to another working from home 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'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and special guest.

It's Sandy Toxvig.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, Sandy.

So my fact is that Sloane Square Underground Station in London has a river running through it.

Well, actually, it doesn't just run through it.

It runs over the trains.

Yeah.

And I think this is a marvellous thing that you can actually go under a river, but be on a train in that way.

I love that.

It's astonishing.

I've been to Sloan Square Station a lot.

I've never noticed that.

I've looked up photos and I now understand what this giant metallic pipe that sort of sits above the track is.

I mean, that's the exciting thing about London: is that really nobody has a full map of it.

That's the extraordinary thing.

We don't really have a full map of where everything goes, where all the pipes are, where all the deserted tunnels and so on.

And that in Sloane Square is the Westbourne River.

It used to be called the Serpentine River.

And it was, they had to divert it when they built the underground.

And they diverted it into a massive pipe.

And it crosses between the platforms just above where the carriages travel.

And you can actually see it.

But it's not the only one.

There are just loads and loads and loads of rivers rivers that that that stop or or used to cause when i worked at the palace theatre years and years ago which is in the in the west end of london if you go right down into the sub sub sub-basement of the theatre you can open a large metal hatch and you can see the fleet river still cool oh my god i don't know i've seen that i've been there um it was our mutual friend chris buttle wasn't it oh there you go yeah yeah chris but yes he used to be the chief electrician there oh i can be on this tour am i the only person in this podcast recording who hasn't seen the fleet river through a hatch i'm afraid so yeah

probably probably the only person listening to this podcast who hasn't seen the hatch through a hatch

quite embarrassing yeah that's a very small club that you belong to

chris chris says please stop contacting him andy he just doesn't like you okay

so i love that i love that about london i love uh i i love that that you can find the the extraordinary bits of history do you guys know the thomas a beckett pub on the old Kent Road?

Do you know it?

Yeah.

So, what it used to be, I think it's closed down there, but it used to be a spot called St.

Thomas a Watering.

And it was a place where horses used to go and drink.

It was the last stop out of London.

It was also the sort of first into the capital.

And now there's a closed pub and then, I think, an ex-white goods store, which is what we all need.

But where the litter blows and the traffic steams past, that's where Chaucer's pilgrims set off

for Canterbury.

It's the very spot where Henry V returned from Agincourt.

It's the very spot

where Charles II processed with 20,000 people on his way in to reclaim the throne in 1660.

And it's a really important place.

But the stream that used to run there, the River Neckinger,

there's no sign of it now, I think,

whatsoever.

But it was a really important place for horses coming in.

And the water was

the thing that drew them there.

So I love all those.

If you look for those old rivers, then you'll find that tremendous history.

yeah i i really didn't know about these rivers as in i i'd heard that there was um the one in sloan square and so on but i didn't appreciate how much they were the fabric of london in in the old days in the 1700s and before and i it's extraordinary because all the names of the tube stations are a reflection of the rivers and their names so bayswater and knightsbridge where there was a bridge for knights and so on and it would be insane to bring someone from old london to new london and show that we've turned it into sort of metal rivers now like the robotic future yeah especially knightsbridge which was um also the westbourne river so the same one that goes through sloan square um that knightsbridge was the bridge over that river and it was where all the highwaymen would get you so if you were leaving uh london to the north uh west you would have to go over this bridge and they would always get captured by highwaymen and obviously now knightsbridge is

well obviously no highwaymen there now but there's still i think some highwaymen in knightsbridge and some of those shops if i'm honest with you yeah price of a handbag um apparently Apparently you can swim in the Westbourne River even these days a little bit of it.

So not very much because obviously it's in a tube and you can't go into the tube.

They're red hot on that.

But

it empties out into the Thames proper at Chelsea Embankment.

And if you go there at low tide the opening is visible where the pipe comes out basically.

And apparently you can get 20 meters in.

there and then there's a hatch.

So you could theoretically go, it's probably more paddling than swimming.

Yeah, and probably more dying of botulism than swimming.

But it is extraordinary when you think about all the stuff that's going on underground that we don't know about.

I'm reading a book at the moment called The Mole People, and it's about the number of people who live underground in New York City.

Oh, wow.

And they estimate there's about...

2,000 people who live full-time in the old tunnels that are now abandoned.

Do they not worry, isn't there supposed to be like an urban myth that there are crocodiles in the sewers in New York or something?

Alligators, alligators, alligators, yes.

Uh, when I was a child, uh, if you came up from Florida, there would be people at the side of the road selling baby alligators, it was perfectly allowable.

And children used to pester and say, Please, can I have a baby alligator?

Um, and uh, you would drive all the way to New York with this baby alligator, and then the baby alligator becomes very annoying thing and grow into a bigger alligator.

Um,

and uh, and people were said to flush them, flush them down the toilet.

Yeah, to this day, I still check the toilet to make sure that the angular set

isn't going to appear.

There was a trend for micro pigs, wasn't there?

Wasn't there,

I think this might be an urban myth too, that people bought micro pigs lots in the early 2000s, and it turns out they were just buying pigs.

Just small pigs, yeah, piglets are obviously tight.

There is, there's like a really old Russian joke where a guy walks into a pub with a massive bear and says, Where's that bastard that sold me a guinea pig?

Those Russians.

But about the pigs, Andy, the theory, the idea of there being alligators in New York, there was also an urban myth that there were wild hogs living in the sewers of London.

And

there was a group of people called Toshers who went through the sewers collecting like people's refuse, but they'd be able to find little bits and pieces and trinkets and make a load of money.

And they believed that there was a race of wild hogs that was down there that might get them.

So toshing was a full-time career for some people, particularly in the East End.

And the best thing that you could do is have some kind of accommodation where you had uh a manhole cover in your in your garden i mean i say garden it'd be more like a you know sort of a yard uh and any tosher who had their own manhole cover uh was simply able to go it was a very easy commute uh to go down into the sewers uh where they would find i don't know coins and uh things that the rich had dropped down open grates

and it was a living yeah it's a the the toshers were famous but they also kind of helped keep the sewage system moving.

You know, we now have these fat mountains and stuff down in the sewage systems, but the Toshes were busy making sure that areas were cleared because they wanted to get through the sewer system and see if anything of value had fallen down into the sewage system.

And I think they had a special bucket that they would keep the things they found in, and that was called a Toshpot.

And

very nice.

Yeah.

Come on, Lane.

If it's not true, I think we should spread the word that it is.

I believe the etymology of tosspot is to toss back a drink.

Like if you had a drink, you would toss it back.

And it was a word for people who drank a lot.

I think that's right.

Oh, no.

No, but Andy's is way better.

I think you're right.

Another river that goes into the Thames, which you can't see anymore, is the Ephra, which is in South London.

And it kind of bends around Stockwell and Oval.

And the reason that the Oval Cricket Ground is oval in shape is because it had to go where the river wasn't, basically.

So the river river went meandered around it, and so they put the cricket ground there, which was oval shaped.

And then all the other cricket grounds in the world were oval because of the oval in South London.

And that's why all cricket grounds are that shape is because of this particular river in London.

That's quite interesting.

I love that.

To just think, well, we've found a shape.

Let's stick with it.

That's square cricket grounds ain't not working for us.

We just stick with that.

I love that.

While I was looking into this, I found a couple of things about the London Underground, just actual, you know, general facts about it.

And I really wanted to mention this one.

I read about a train driver, a tube driver called Red Pepper.

I don't know if you guys have heard of Red Pepper, R-E-Double D Pepper.

So

he was a London Underground driver.

And his thing was anytime when a train was in the middle in between two stations and had to stop because they had to regulate the services, he would often, when they were sitting there, would turn the lights off inside the carriages of all the trains and go, this is your driver speaking or is it?

And

he was a real prankster and he used to love doing all these silly voices.

Anyway, one day he pulls into the station and someone comes and knocks on the, I believe this is the story, knocks on the window and hands him a card and says, I'm a voiceover exec.

Please get in contact.

So he gets in contact.

Red Pepper writes to him.

Red Pepper goes on to be a voiceover man who does the inner world

voices for trailers in Hollywood.

Yes, a London Underground driver did the Inner World voice for Independence Day, for Space Jam, for Armageddon, for the Blair Witch Project.

for Mr.

Bean's holiday.

His career kind of went a bit lower in the late 2000s.

In fact, the last thing I could find on IMDb where he did a Hollywood movie or a movie was, so he did the Blair Witch Project in 1999, but then in 2010, he did the Blair Bitch Project, which was a

very much a B movie.

Yeah, misogynistic.

Starring Linda Blair of The Exorcist, the girl in The Exorcist.

Wormhole there.

I was reading about one more train driver who was Hannah Datz.

Do you know about her, Sandy?

I bet you do.

Well, she was the first woman to become a tube driver, because what happened was...

When the war happened, when both wars happened, they needed to bring new people into the underground to do all the jobs.

And loads of women started doing those jobs.

And in fact, when Made Avail opened, it was staffed completely by women.

But there was one job that they basically didn't let women do all the way until the late 70s, and that was a tube driver for some reason.

Which is weird because it's not like you can get lost.

No, no,

no, of course.

Men are always so unwilling to ask for directions on the train.

All right, it's time for fact number two, and that is Andy.

My fact is that in 1992, Hoover ran a promotion which was so successful that the firm collapsed and had to be sold off.

What the heck happened?

So

they thought this is the European arm of Hoover we're talking about.

And in 1992, they thought of this brilliant promotion, and it was this.

If you spent 100 quid on any Hoover product, you would get two free return flights.

to somewhere in Europe.

And that was very exciting.

And they had worked out the maths of it.

They thought people will spend enough money on extra products.

And, you know, there were hoops to jump through and things like this.

It sold a lot of Hoovers.

Brilliant.

And then, so that kind of gone all right.

And then Hoover got a bit confident.

And they said, we're going to expand this deal and say, if you spend 100 quid on any Hoover product, you will get two return flights to America.

And they were advised by risk management people not to do this.

And they said, no, it's fine.

People will spend so much on Hoover products that it will completely offset the cost.

unfortunately they weren't reckoning on the british people who flocked to hoover shops bought the absolute cheapest thing they could which is about 120 quid and then sent off for 600 pounds worth of free flights and

it it was such a disaster 500 000 people applied for the promotion

oh my goodness i know and they weren't making much profit even on the cheap vacuum cleaners that they were selling at the time.

They made about 30 quid profit on the vacuum cleaner and then they they had to spend 600 pounds on plane tickets.

Amazing.

I read that people were buying a vacuum cleaner and they're just leaving it in the shop and then

literally didn't need a vacuum cleaner.

And Who started panicking, obviously, when they saw the numbers coming in.

So they started,

you know, being really finicky about the fine print.

It was a really complicated procedure you had to go through to get to return flights.

But they started saying people hadn't filled in the forms or

they would offer you the flights and you could accept them or say, oh, I can't do that.

So they started offering people people flights from airports, which were hundreds of miles from where they lived.

Or they would send out request forms on Christmas Eve in the hope that the post would be closed and people would miss the deadline to return them because it was Christmas.

They tried everything.

Yeah, it's an astonishing, even, but the first promotion that they did where it was the tickets to Europe, the complications of trying to actually be someone who actually receives it is extraordinary.

They would send you a registration form.

You had 14 days to fill it it out, send it back.

Then they sent you another form, which had three different destination airports and combinations and dates that you had to fill out and send back.

Then that came back.

If they rejected it and you had to pick three more, like they made it as hard as possible, but it worked out for them the first time.

The problem with the second time is...

they didn't send anyone to america.

They should have at least sent, you know, some in order to make it look like it was a genuine thing, but they just knocked it out so heavily that no one ended up going, as far as I could see.

Andy, you look like people did.

I don't think that's right.

I think about 220,000 people got their flights.

That might be really both promotions.

Yeah.

It was

absolutely huge.

I know one person who, in fact, we all know one person who got one of the flights and that's Stephen K.

Amos, the comedian.

Really?

Yeah.

And he says that it kind of started his career.

When he was 19 years old, he got these tickets.

He went to New York and he met a promoter called Delphine Manfield.

who said, hey, you're a really funny guy.

You should become a comedian.

And she set him up in a show in London when he got back.

And he said that was his big break.

So what happened to the Mandy?

They obviously went

a disaster.

Well, there was another problem.

So the company spent £50 million on airline tickets in the end.

And the other problem was that so many people had bought Hoovers.

that everyone now had a Hoover and people started selling them off cheaply and secondhand, which meant that no one was going into shops and buying new Hoovers because they were on every street corner as far as I could tell.

The Observer said if left uncontrolled, Britain could soon be knee-deep in Hoover turbo master uprights.

And just I'll tell you what, I'll tell you the final thing that happened, but the just one previous thing is that there was a kidnapping, or it's kind of slight kidnapping over this, which was that there was a Hoover customer who bought a washing machine.

That was his way of getting the free tickets.

And a repairman from the firm came around to fix it, some little problem with it.

And the guy said, yeah, I'm going to be getting these flights.

And the Hoover repairman called him an idiot for thinking he would get these flights.

And this customer, it was called David Dixon, he saw red and he blocked in the Hoover guy's repair van and he held it hostage in his front drive for 13 days.

He was a national hero.

Oh, the temptation.

The temptation.

I know.

I found one other promotion, which was by Tesco in 1997.

And I'm pretty sure this is niche enough that it'll be news to all of you.

This was a deal where if you bought three pounds of bananas,

you would get 25 points on your Tesco club card, all right?

And that was worth £1.25.

That's how I started my comedy career, I think.

I bought all those bananas and left them on the street so people slipped on them and videoed them.

You're still living off the You've Been Framed income, aren't you?

£250 a time.

No, so you'd get these things if you'd get £1.25 on your card if you bought these bananas.

And the bananas, three pounds at the time, only cost £1.17.

And a heroic shopper is probably still out there somewhere.

He's called Phil Colcott.

He said, I did a mental calculation and it seems like you couldn't lose.

Basically, they were paying shoppers eight pence to take away three pounds of bananas.

So he spent £367 on 942 pounds of bananas and took them away in his car.

He had to make a few trips.

He ended up with about 3,000 bananas and he just started giving them away.

He got the local nickname Banana Man because he was just constantly giving out bananas.

He ended up making £25 and £12 in profit thanks to the scheme.

Please, can you be asked?

That's the thing.

Can you be bothered to go and do that?

Is the real question.

That's amazing.

Phil, if you're out there, write in.

We want to know.

We want to hear from you.

Yeah, we need to track these people down.

One or two things on Hoover's?

Yeah, sure.

Yeah, sure.

Okay, so.

This is, I think, of no interest to anyone but me, but I want to say it anyway, which is that the lead singer of ACDC is a guy called Brian Johnson.

His final job before getting the gig as the lead singer of ACDC, the biggest heavy metal band in the world, was a Hoover advert, was singing the jingle on a Hoover advert.

Really?

Yeah.

I don't think you're alone in finding that interesting.

I love that.

I love that very much.

In fact, he got the, because he got the job because the previous singer, Bon Scott, had died and he was auditioning, but he made the band wait.

They were waiting in London for him to get to his callback, and he insisted on going off to record a Hoover Jingle first.

And then the very next thing he recorded after that was Back in Black, which was the second biggest album of all time.

Wow.

I know.

But on the way up, everybody's got to make a living.

You know what I'm saying?

But that's more extraordinary that I thought he had, you know, done the gig, and that was on TV.

And then he went to this audition.

He actually said to ACDC,

the most rock and roll band at that time, sorry guys, I got to do a corporate gig before auditioning for the band.

I think they were down in London saying, can you come by?

And he said, Yeah, I'll come by in a bit, but I have this thing I've got to do first.

Yeah, we've all done adverts where you think, I'm ashamed that that happened.

Years ago, I did an advert in Ireland for cottage cheese, which involved me being inside a giant pot of cottage cheese.

Wow.

Yeah.

So I'm just saying, I've never seen it, but it's out there somewhere.

Wow.

I mean, if anyone could find that video and send it to us, I would be very grateful.

That's so funny.

I want to hear more, Sunday.

Didn't so

you were in the pot.

Was there actual cottage cheese?

And also, was this before that people could do green screen and all these kind of technical tricks?

Oh, no, they didn't actually.

They actually made this enormous pot.

And I think they chose me because it seemed, you know, like they didn't have to make such a big pot with me

thing.

And they were wonderful, just the most glorious people to work with.

And I finished, we worked all day.

I was in cottage cheese all day.

And then

I went back to the hotel early because I needed to get get a flight first thing.

And at about six o'clock in the morning, I got a call from the director.

So we just wanted to wish you a good flight.

I said, oh, thank you very much.

I said, it's very sweet of you to get up at this time to wish me a good flight.

Ah, sure enough, we're all just going home now.

So they'd end up partying

around the cottage cheese for the entire night.

Sorry, Sandy, can I just check what the conceit was at the epoch?

Was it that this pot you were in was normal size?

Was there going to be a massive knife sort of diving in?

I never saw it, darling.

I feel really bad.

I never saw it.

I've done a few adverts in my time.

I did that, and I did an advert for a Torah beef suet once, which I played a small girl.

You had to get into a giant pudding for that.

Me and Imelda Staunton played schoolgirls wanting to eat

beef suet.

That's so funny.

Again, didn't get shown, I don't think.

That's very good.

Some more Hoover stuff, anyone?

Sure.

So the first upright Hoover or vacuum cleaner, you see, we call it Hoover in the UK, right?

But I think it's mostly because of this promotion, isn't it?

Because so many people own them because of this massive promotion.

They were completely ubiquitous.

And so that became the name for any vacuum cleaner.

Right.

But the first one was invented by James Murray Spangler in 1908.

And he had terrible asthma.

And he decided that the reason that it was is because it was the carpet sweeping that he was doing.

So he came up with a basic suction system and to start off with he could only make two machines a week to sell because he was doing all the designing his son was assembling them all and his daughter was assembling the dustbags and so it was like literally a cottage industry where that was all they could do two a week and it was only when they sold it i think to his brother-in-law the company that they managed to put some money behind it and make loads of them but yeah and he was he was an inventor throughout his whole life and this came very late in his career i think he'd just hit his 60s when he invented this Hoover.

But after he sold it to the Hoover family, William Hoover,

he worked as a superintendent for the company.

So he stayed on working for them.

And then finally, he decided he was going to go on his first ever holiday because he never had a holiday before.

And he was going to go to Florida.

And sadly, he passed away the night before going on his first ever holiday.

Yeah.

I know.

The tragic thing was, thanks to inventing the Hoover, he was actually given two free flights.

Which is a very good thing.

I've always wanted to be an inventor.

I just think it's a nice thing to say.

Actually, this is what I, what do you do for a living?

I'm an inventor.

My great-grandfather was an inventor.

His name was Field Trickett.

And he worked with

Sahiram Maxim, I'm embarrassed to say,

inventing the machine gun.

But he was also, which links us back to an earlier conversation,

he was the person who put electric light into the West End, and he put the lighting into the palace theatre where the River Fleet runs below and

where I once worked in the electrics department.

Wow.

Hang on, you worked in the lighting.

Was that nepotism?

Did you get that gig?

I don't know how I got the gig.

I was too small to operate any of the lights.

I had to, the chief electrician, Chris Buddle, had to make a special box for me to stand on in order to do it.

Well, also, you probably had cottage cheese till all over your house.

No, darling.

That was a sweet disaster on the decks.

Yeah.

Chris Buddle's a guy, Andy, that we know, really nice guy.

Yes, yes, you've named him before.

Yep, thank you.

Hi again, Chris, if you're listening, please write back.

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

My fact this week is that after he retired from dancing in his late 70s, Fred Astaire became a skateboarder.

Just a classic

career shift.

So when you say became a skateboarder,

he didn't become a pro-skateboarder.

It's very hard hard to skateboard But this is you know one of the most elegant dancers that we've ever committed to film an extraordinary human whose whole career was defined by his career largely with Ginger Rogers on screen and When he hit his late 70s he realized that the grace of his dancing wasn't gonna keep up so he thought better leave it on top he could still act so he thought I'll continue on with that but he retired from dancing and then he was hanging out with his grandkids when they introduced him to the skateboard And this is someone who danced on screen on roller skates.

You know, it's someone who was an innovator of dance.

And he saw this as another place to innovate dancing.

So he in his late 70s was reportedly doing handstands on his skateboard as he was going across his tennis court.

This is, this is, these are the reports.

And

he was just very good with it.

He was very obsessed with it.

If he went on a talk show like the Merv Griffin show, he would talk about how incredible the skateboard was and his fascination that if he had discovered it years before, how he definitely would have brought that into the films that he was doing.

But then unfortunately, one day he fell over and he ruined his

wrist in the process and had to be in a cast for weeks on end.

And that was the sort of end of his skateboarding career.

But, you know, he was made a member of the National Skateboard Society of America.

He featured in skateboard magazines.

He pushed it as a sport.

I think that counts as a skateboarder.

Dan, I read that he was given lifetime membership of the National Skateboard Society, but I can't find what the National Skateboard Society is.

There seems to be nothing online or anything like that.

I looked for it as well, couldn't find anything.

So I went, I found an old article in the British newspaper archives, and it was from actually the Irish Independent.

And it was an interview with Avra Stare, who was Fred's daughter.

And she said that after he broke his wrist, he got a plaque from the Skateboarding Association, which definitely does exist, for highlighting how dangerous a sport can be without proper protection.

So I wonder if that story's been slightly kind of boulderized.

Yeah.

Also,

he got an award for being crap.

That's not even a good, that's not even a good award.

I tell you, it is a very odd kind of six degrees of separation, but

I know his daughter, Arva.

Really?

Ireland.

I'll ask her.

Oh, Sandy, I was hoping you'd have a Fredericksaire connection somewhere.

I was banking.

I was crossing my fingers.

I thought she must do.

I'm so glad.

She's absolutely lovely.

Cool.

Yeah, she's a smashing person.

I've I've had dinner with her many times.

So I will see if I can ask her.

But I mean,

he was clearly somebody who was full of pep, as it were.

Because when he was 81, he married a woman jockey called Robin Smith, and she was 45 years younger than him.

I mean, he,

you know, and she's the one who looks pleased.

You know what I mean?

She's looking very thrilled in the photo.

So he clearly didn't lack vim and vigor, shall we call it.

Yeah.

We should put together a list of questions for you to ask his daughter because i've got so many things curious things so um

one thing that i wanted to know about uh was that he was in an episode of battlestar galactica was he playing what

uh

just a man i didn't know he was an alien he was he was an he was an alien that looked like a man as in oh you know he was a human-shaped alien but everyone in battlestar galactica are an alien well i've only seen the new series not the original but i just find that insane that i've have you watched it then that have you watched it i tried to find it no i didn't find it there are some clips on youtube and you know how you said he didn't dance anymore well he is dancing in this episode of battlestar galactica but he's just kind of swaying and moving his hands a little bit so it's not really it's not tap dancing

no but you're right he came out of retirement from the dancing um retirement in order to do one final dance to disco as an alien on battlestar galactica and um Yeah, and

I really want to see it.

I'm glad it's online.

And again, it was because his grandchildren loved the show, right?

And I think there was an interview afterwards, and he said it was the favourite thing that he did in his whole career, but only for the reason that it was something that his grandchildren really loved and were really proud of him.

I did bake off for the same reason.

My kids liked it.

For me, the most interesting thing is the success of the Freder

and Ginger Rogers films is extraordinary.

So Top Hat and Follow the Fleet and the Gate of Orson, Shall We Dance, and so on.

And

I discovered why they all seem so successful in such a, they're so beautifully shaped.

It's because the director Mark Sandrich, he did what he called minute for each film.

So he had this elaborate colour-coded chart and he detailed minute by minute everything that was going to happen in the film.

So there would be a blue section for music, there'd be a green section for singing, a red section for dancing, and a yellow section for sort of novelty and speaking and so on.

And he made all the films look roughly the same.

So you would have that much singing in that point in the film, you'd have that much dancing at that point in the film.

And actually, if you you look at the colour-coded charts, you can see them.

There's a book called The Frederiser and Ginger Rogers book, and they reproduce a panel from one of his colour-coded charts.

You can see that he used, it's almost Mozart-like in its mathematical calculation about what makes the perfect song and dance musical because

he'd worked it out.

So like the phrase to make a song and dance out of something, really, it should be, we've done this then, and then we'll pick it up.

But you wouldn't expect it to be so

prescriptive in a way.

When you're writing your plays or books or whatever, Sandy, would you do similar kind of things to that?

Would you try and have a...

Yeah, so I'm sitting in my office at the moment.

I'm writing an opera with my sister.

My sister and I write musicals and stuff together.

And we have different coloured post-it notes depending on whether

it's a particular kind of song or whether it's a light moment or a big moment in our.

And always our great moment, which we got to yesterday, is that we now know what the opening number is and we know what the closing number is.

So we know how we begin and we know how we end.

And then all we've got to do now is

and that's all there is to.

I'm sure Verdi had exactly the same technique.

Post-it notes all over his office.

So one thing I did read is that when Astair and Rogers were making these films, they had to be adjusted in part

because the films were almost too good.

So every routine they did, dancing, was followed by applause.

Live cinema audiences would applaud for a little while after

the dance ended.

So the producers had to follow in the movie, they had to put in some applause after the end of the dance, or some laughter or something, just to let the atmosphere in the cinema calm down.

You get those brilliant scenes with Edward Everett Horton doing gurning, you know, just basically doing a lot of silly, funny faces.

And that's really a sort of cover to

make sure that the audience has come back to the story.

Not that the story was ever so complicated, it was difficult to follow.

Yeah.

Ginger Rogers, speaking, Sandy, of your great-great-grandfather, who was an inventor,

Ginger Rogers' great-great-grandfather discovered something as well.

He was the person who discovered quinine for malaria.

Really?

Wow.

He's called John S.

Sappington, and he developed a sort of precursor to hydroxychloroquine, which is something we've been hearing a lot about from the President of the United States of America.

He is

stupidity.

Well, it hasn't yet.

Ginger Rogers, I mean, genius.

And as she said herself,

you know, I did all the same dances as Fred, but I did it backwards and in high heels.

And

there is something in that that was tougher for her, I think, than it was for him.

There's a wonderful early film called Stage Door with her in it and Lucille Ball and Catherine Hepburn.

Have you guys seen it?

It's a whole black and white movie with all of these incredible, it's a set in a boarding house of lots of young ingenuus who want to get into show business, but it is actually lots of women who became incredibly famous.

And the thing about Ginger Rogers, apart from being a brilliant dancer, is you can see what a phenomenal amount of comedy timing she had.

She just was a comedic genius.

I found out her first famous catchphrase, which I've never heard before.

So the first movie she was in was called Young Man of Manhattan.

And she said the line in it.

There's a line where she says, cigarette me, big boy.

And this became a popular catchphrase across America.

Cigarette me, big boy.

We should all take that on now.

I almost feel like taking up smoking.

I've never taken up smoking in my whole life, but just the chance to say, cigarette me, big boy.

Yeah,

I don't think vape me, big boy

has quite the same effect.

Is it true that he didn't really want to pair up with Ginger Rogers at the start because he'd had a duet with his sister?

Yeah, his sister

was his

partner for many, many years

in the years when he did live performances.

And his original name, I think, is Austerlitz, not Astare at all.

I think he's

Frederick Austerlitz.

But I think his sister married money and decided to give up show business.

And dear God, that's such a good idea.

I mean, I think anybody,

I thought my wife did have money, which is why I was on my way out.

But

what was she?

She was called Adele.

I think Adele Astaire.

Yeah, right.

One of the not charges, I mean, he was obviously pretty much the greatest dancer ever to live, but he was accused of being quite sexless, or that the dancers were not sensual in the way that maybe in his later career when he was dancing with Sid Cherracy, they were a bit sexier, actually.

But when he was younger, they weren't.

And that might be partly because he spent pretty much his entire early career dancing with his sister.

Yeah, and that would have been a bad look, darling.

Yeah.

And she was the one who was going to be successful.

This is a really fascinating thing.

But

one of the first dances they did was when he was about five years old when they were dancing together as a pair.

And they did a bride and groom dance on top of a wedding cake in the first half.

And in the second, yeah, it sounds amazing.

And in the second half, he played a lobster.

Wow.

Yeah.

Was that a vaudeville?

Was that a vaudeville thing, Andy?

Yeah, I think it was, yeah.

I think it was called Juvenile Artists Presenting an Electric Musical Toe Dancing Novelty.

It's not that

fishy, is it?

I don't often get professional jealousy, but I totally want to play a lobster.

I think in this weather we're all playing lobsters, aren't we?

Die in a heat, yeah.

His first wife sounds pretty

intimidating, actually.

So this is he, before he married the jockey, he was he married quite young and he and his first wife were together until 1954.

She died of

of cancer, unfortunately.

They've been married 21 years and he absolutely adored her.

Yeah, he was

inconsolable and then didn't marry for years and years and years afterwards.

It was a proper love match.

But she was very concerned about his leading ladies, I believe.

And she would turn up at the side of the set and knit

to make sure that there was no inappropriateness going on.

And I know.

This is the amazing thing that Frederick and Gendarsh, they made 10 films together.

They kissed once on screen, and even that kiss had to be.

It's behind a door, I think.

That kiss is.

Oh, was it?

Yeah, so I think it's not even, you don't even really see anything.

Because the thing I heard, oh, this might, well, maybe, maybe there's one behind a door and one on screen, I'm not sure.

But the one that was on screen was extended in slow-mo to make it seem longer than it actually had been.

So it was a pretty brief peck.

And they did have one scene in bed, but for that, they used a dummy instead of a real woman.

Really?

Instead of Ginger Rogers.

I like the idea of the wife knitting like the women at the guillotine.

I was just going to say the same thing.

It's like the intimidating knitters of history.

There is something quite intimidating about someone just sat there knitting, isn't there?

Yeah, definitely.

And if Ginger Roger comes on with a low-cut dress, she goes, I've knitted you a cardigan, darling.

Yes, here's a little bolero for you.

I was reading about some other dancers, actually.

National Tap Dancing Day is May the 25th.

And who hasn't celebrated that?

Well, it was designated that date because it was the birthday of Bill Robinson.

And Bill Robinson is a a very

highest paid black American entertainer in America during the first half of the 20th century.

One year he did 400 charity events in a single year.

This guy was absolutely amazing.

And whenever he did a show, he needed to get publicity for it.

There was no TV in those days.

How do you get publicity?

He would run backwards and have races running backwards against local athletes because apparently he held the world record for running backwards, which was 100 yards in 13.5 seconds.

Wow.

Wow.

I wonder who holds it now.

We should surely meet this person.

We need to find that out.

I think there would be.

I think it is a Guinness World Record thing.

But that's, I mean, 13.5 seconds or 100 yards is certainly faster than I've ever run that distance forwards in my entire life.

Even when I was a young man, I couldn't do that.

That's.

I haven't covered it that fast in a car.

There was another dancer who the name caught my eye, which was Anne Miller, obviously our colleague Anne Miller.

And she

was incredible.

She could dance 500 taps in a minute when she was tap dancing.

That's what she claimed.

No one doubted her.

500 taps in a minute.

And she was...

Stunning.

Yeah.

Oh, so you know about her, Sandy.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I'm a big musical theatre buff.

But what I like about Anne Miller is when she was very young, she suffered from rickets and she had to have her legs strengthened as a child.

And that seems to have been what made her a brilliant dancer as she got older.

And there's a lot of other people like that.

Like there's a soccer player called Garincha, a Brazilian, who had rickets as a child and then strengthened his legs and it made him a great player.

And last week we talked about Annette Kelleman.

Do you remember the swimmer?

It's an Australian swimmer.

Yeah, exactly.

And she was exactly the same.

She had this problem as a child, very weak legs, but they really strengthened them and it made her a brilliant swimmer when she got older.

She got into trouble, didn't she, for wearing a one-piece swimsuit,

exactly?

Yeah, she invented that.

um but and miller as well she was quite tall and she once danced with fred astair and she had to wear ballet slippers so that she wasn't taller than him

should have danced with me would have been all right

um i have a link a link fact

which is that fred astair 10 years after his death appeared in an advert for a vacuum cleaner oh

that's very good dancing with the vacuum cleaner yes because um as you'll know there's a bit where he's dancing with a mop in one of his films.

Yeah, and

I think they CGI'd it.

I think it's sort of been the 90s.

They CGI'd it so he was dancing with a vacuum cleaner instead.

And his widow, his second wife, Robin, the jockey, she said it was artistically suitable to use the vacuum cleaners as props.

But his daughter, Ava, was so angry about him being used in an ad without his permission, obviously, because he was dead.

She returned her dirt devil vacuum cleaner to the firm.

Well, that's told told them.

Yeah.

I'm not surprised.

I mean, I am surprised that it happened at all.

I'm not surprised his daughter was angry because one of the things he left very strict instructions about was that he was never to be portrayed after his death.

He didn't want his life story done.

He didn't want anybody to

do his autobiography on film, as it were, or portray him in any way.

So I suspect she wouldn't have been thrilled with that because actually it's a great story, him coming up, hoofing through vaudeville and working with his sister and coming to Hollywood and making it and so on and working with Giddy Rogers.

It's it seems like a natural biopic, but apparently, he left incredibly strict instructions saying that the estate would never give permission.

But he didn't mention vacuum.

Never mentioned the bloody hoover.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that the Icelandic word for museum is the same as the word for a flock of sheep.

I love this fact.

Yes, me too.

I think it's so Icelandic.

It's got two of the most Icelandic things, which is sheep and museums, because

they have so many museums in Iceland.

They have about 300, which is one for every thousand people, just about,

which is proportionally 25 times more common in Iceland than they are in Britain.

So this is from a book by someone called A.

Kendra Green, which is called The Museum of Wales You Will Never See.

And it's all about these museums in Iceland.

And the word is safen.

I'm sure I'm pronouncing that wrong.

It's S-A-F-N and that comes from Safna which is an old Norse word meaning to collect or assemble.

So it was a collection of things, became a museum and also a collection of sheep became like a flock of sheep became that word as well.

And there's a similar word in English which comes from the same root from thousands and thousands of years ago and that is the root sam which is where we get the word same or similar.

And the Russian toja samoya, which means the same.

It's like all these words all come from the same original from thousands and thousands of years.

What did you say?

S-A-F-N, did you say?

S-A-F-N in Icelandic, yeah.

Yeah, so S-A-V-N in Danish, son,

means means to save, means to, you know, save things together.

So exactly.

And then this word also, sama, became hammer in Greek, in ancient Greek, and that's where we get words like homeopathy, homosexual, meaning the same.

you know, things a homeopathy, it's where the same thing cures the same thing and like that.

But it's the same with the actual word, isn't it?

It's because it's it's a homograph, it's a

you know, it's the similar spelt the same, but it means two completely different.

So, really interesting stuff about etymology of words, which is what I love.

But really, I just want to talk about the amazing museums in Iceland because I've just been there.

You've just been there, yeah.

You just had a week.

With the what I did on my holidays section of the podcast,

I'm looking forward to it enormously.

Listen to everything James says now to be tax-deductible in the course of this chat.

So, James, which museums did you see?

Well, I mean, everyone's going to expect me to say the Penis Museum in Reykjavik, which of course I did go to.

I mean, it's brilliant.

It really is a good museum.

There's so many interesting things there.

And it was started by this guy who acquired his first penis in 1970.

Well, a second penis, but it's.

I was going to go for number two there.

He acquired it.

He must have been so thrilled that he acquired his first penis.

We should start a museum.

It's like a clip-on thing.

Yeah, it's like a potato head.

The curator, speaking of clip-ons, the curator does have a bow tie made from a sperm whale's penis, which he wears for the Christmas party every year, which is on display.

But he acquired his first or second penis in 1974 when he got a bull's pistol, which was being used by a local teacher as a blackboard pointer.

And then that was handed to him.

And he

later on, a few years later, thought, you know what, I could turn this into a collection.

Is that not a kind of child abuse to point things out with a penis?

I mean.

Depends what lesson it is, I guess.

I guess that's true.

So, James, I read that people started giving him more as a kind of joke.

Once he had the bulls one, sort of, you know, if someone's into something, you always give them a tourist bit of that.

And then he got sort of almost every mammal in Iceland, and he thought, actually, this is a proper collection now.

Yeah,

a bit like collecting like football cards or, you know, football stickers.

He wanted to get them all.

Oh, Pokemon.

He wanted to collect all of them.

So it was like, okay, well, we know all of these animals in Iceland.

I need one penis from every male animal.

He's like the Noah of

Iceland.

That's a weird calling from God.

Two of every animal.

Actually, just one of every animal.

Actually, just the penis of every animal.

And they have the penises of the 2008 Icelandic national handball team,

which are not the actual ones, but they're not the actual ones.

They're silver

casts.

They're silver casts because they won silver medal in that game.

Ow.

God, what a relief.

He must have been hugely relieved they didn't take gold because the cost would have been exorbitant.

Never mind that.

What about the molten metal on you?

Wow.

It's like Goldfinger, isn't it?

Where they cover that lady in gold all the way through.

They probably threw the match go, we can't win gold.

Have I remembered incorrectly, guys?

But in parts of the Arctic,

when people made wooden huts, they sometimes used to make windows out of stretched foreskins.

Is that right?

Or have I made that up?

No, I think you are right.

Yeah, you're right.

Yeah.

But stretch, not, I think they were walrus foreskins.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, obviously it's going to be a walrus foreskin if you're going to make a window.

Sorry, the windows are so tiny.

They'd be those mullioned sort of diamond-shaped windows you get in old houses.

It really worries me that that's in my head somewhere.

You guys are too young to remember play school, where they used to look through a different window every day.

But

let's look through the walrus forescreen window.

The other things he has in his museum are penises from various animals in folklore.

So they have an elf penis, a troll penis, and the testicles of a corpse-eating ghoul cat.

And again, what it is, it's like locals just give him these things and say, I'm pretty sure this is the testicles of a ghost-eating ghoul cat.

Yeah, and then they go home and sob with laughter.

Did he not go?

Sorry, the testicle museum's down the road.

We only accept penises.

Actually, the testicle museum den is on either side of the penis museum.

Well, we do have a vagina museum, don't we?

In London, yes, in Camden, the vagina museum, which was started by someone we all know, someone the elves know, anyway, Florence, who worked with us for a little while.

But yeah, they're, I think they're closed at the moment due to COVID, but they're still doing events online.

So it's worth searching Twitter for Vagina Museum and following those guys for sure.

Worrying about what the opening hours are for the vagina, please go.

Not something that had occurred to me until this moment.

I've always thought they'll open if you're that keen.

You know what I mean?

You have to buy them a drink first.

Obviously.

Did you swim in the Blue Lagoon?

Yeah, we went to the Blue Lagoon.

It was quite sad.

It's a hot water kind of spa.

area

because obviously Iceland, the land of ice and fire, they have a lot of geysers and hot water and stuff like that.

So yeah, it was really good.

It's amazing.

It has a sort of sulfur

coating on the bottom of the pool, which is white.

And people cover themselves all over.

But I've been there when it's deep snow and you have to...

run through the snow to get into the blue lagoon.

But then there's all this steam and you're covering yourself in this kind of white.

It's supposed to be incredibly good for you.

But it's a very surreal experience to be in a swimsuit in the freezing cold.

Yeah, I had a couple of facials of

the local mud and stuff, and I'm quite surprised you guys haven't noticed how young my skin looks.

Oh, it's just the quality of the Zoom, James.

I hardly recognised it,

if I'm honest with you.

But to those geezers, what it means is that, for example, the whole town of Reykjavik, nobody pays for central heating, even though you are talking about one of the coldest countries in the world, because there's enough natural heat underground, which they have

transferred into domestic heating.

So

you can have it as hot as you like, even though it's freezing cold outside, which is absolutely fantastic.

And there are restaurants where they cook, they have deep pits outside the restaurant, and the pits, they put the pots down into the steaming heat down into the ground and cook it and then bring it back up again.

So they're even using it for cooking.

That's so cool.

That's wonderful.

It's a fantastic country.

I really need to go.

I really want to visit.

James, did you go to this while you're there?

It's not in Reykjavik, but the Museum of Sorcery and Witchcraft.

Unfortunately, we got stuck behind a landslide, which meant that we lost half a day, which meant that we couldn't go.

But

I have always wanted to go there because I want to see the necropants.

The necropants?

They sound incredible.

The necropads.

So from the 17th century, they are a pair of trousers that are made of human skin, of a human corpse.

Yeah.

And they were supposedly used by, you'd have to have permission from a dead man to skin him afterwards and use his skin as the trousers.

And then the idea is that they were a money-making device.

They would provide money out of the trousers for you to become rich.

So you had to, in order to access the money, get a coin from a widow and put it in the front of the trousers.

But from then on in, it sort of produces more and more coins.

It's astonishing.

I don't know if it really worked.

You've got to match yourself up with...

a friend who's going to be the right size.

I mean,

if you're a big fat guy, you don't want a dead skinny guy to make trousers out of.

That's true.

And if you're meeting someone as a friend for the first time and they're kind of looking at your legs going, hmm,

sizing you up.

But it's a curious thing because traditionally, witches around the world, if you think about the Pendle witches in this country and you think about the Salem witches in the United States, it's traditionally it's been women, but I believe the Icelandic witches are predominantly male.

That's right.

Only one of all the, there were 21 Icelanders who were burnt alive for being witches in the 17th century and only one was a woman.

Quite surprising.

That's unusual.

It's unusual.

A blow for equality there.

I know, right?

Finally.

Yeah.

The first person to be executed for witchcraft was a guy called John Johnson, who admitted having used farting runes against a girl.

Sorry, farting

runes.

So you kind of toss them and

then you do a bit bit of magic, and then someone just starts farting all the time.

Ah, so you cause someone to fart.

Yeah, it's like a curse or a magic spell.

Death by farting.

Wow.

And then.

Is it okay, James, to suggest I feel you've lowered the tone

with your penises and you're farting?

I'm just going to say,

I think you might be right.

We had quite erudite conversations about underground rivers.

I saw a quite a fun thing that Iceland's doing at the moment as a a sort of global mental health incentive.

And it's that the tourist board has made it so that all of us, all four of us here, anyone listening over the world, can go to a website and scream at it as loud as we want.

And they will play your scream.

in one of seven locations in Iceland at the moment where they've parked these giant speakers into these vast empty quarters, either looking out to the ocean or inland.

And you just, it's a primal scream thing where they just want you to vent all this pented up anxiety and depression from the lockdown period out onto their website and they'll bung it out into the open airs of Iceland.

And that's the thing that if you go to their website, you can actually just record that scream and have it played out there.

I think a few of the locals aren't that sure about the shouting thing, though, Dan, because

let's say you have some nice puffins sort of living around the speaker and they're just hearing people yelling into them.

I went to this lagoon.

It's called the Iceberg Lagoon.

And the glacier, the biggest glacier in Europe, kind of comes to the edge of the sea and bits of it break off and you see these icebergs on the on the water.

It's quite amazing.

But a few years ago, do you remember there was a Bond movie where they drove cars on ice?

I can't remember.

I can't remember what it is it's Tomorrow Never Dies or something like that.

Dino,

it's one of the really bad Brosnan.

It's the last Brosnan one.

I think it's the Madonna, Diana.

It's a real stinker.

So they filmed that on that lagoon, but to do so, they needed it to be quite thick ice.

And so they dammed the lagoon so no seawater could go there.

And it froze to like about six feet deep or maybe even deeper.

And I was talking to the guy who was showing us around.

I said, was that not quite bad for the animals, the seals and birds that live here?

He's like, yeah, yeah, that was pretty bad.

And apparently it used to be owned, privately owned, that area.

And they dammed it off and so they could film this.

And then as soon as that happened, the government went, We're going to have to buy this off you because we can't be having this kind of thing happening in our country and you know, killing all our animals just so that you could get a good scene in a bad movie.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Not one seal's life is worth giving up for the film Die Another Day.

I think we can all agree with that.

Hyenas.

I'd have that on a t-shirt.

That's right.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James?

At James Harkin.

Andy?

At Andrew Hunter M.

And Sandy, you're on Twitter, aren't you?

I have absolutely no idea.

You are?

You have a big following?

And she's at Sandy Toxvic.

Or you could go to our group account at No Such Thing or our website, no such thingasafish.com.

We have all of our previous episodes up there.

Until then, we hope you're all safe.

We hope you're all doing well.

Do say hi to Sandy on Twitter.

and we will be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.