301: No Such Thing As The Queen's Christmas Burlesque

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Has he been

who, James?

Father Christmas.

Has he been where?

To your house to give you presents, because it's Christmas Day.

It is Christmas Day.

Yes, he has.

He went down the chimney of my laptop to deliver me a new episode of no such thing as a fish.

Amazing.

Yes.

What we have got for you today, a little bit earlier than scheduled, is our Christmas special recorded live in the most Christmassy of places, Birmingham.

Oh, it was so Christmassy.

It was so Christmassy.

There was stuff outside, there were lights, there were German sausages.

So many German sausages.

It was like flipping Lapland.

It was.

It was Christmas.

It was Christmas city.

It was such a fun episode to do.

We enjoyed ourselves like we always do in Birmingham.

It's one of the best places that we go and visit.

Really, really hope you enjoy it.

It's full of Christmassy facts that you can tell all of your family over the Christmas table.

Over the Christmas table?

Over it.

Over the Christmas table.

Get over that table and tell them our facts.

Well, hey, this has been successful.

Enjoy your day.

That's the main thing.

Yeah, the main thing is that you have a really good day.

Enjoy your Christmas.

Hope you got lots of amazing presents.

And here is an extra early episode of No Such Thing as a Fish.

Or ho, ho, ho, Such Thing as a Fish.

Sure.

Okay, on with the podcast.

Let's go, guys.

Let's go.

On with the son of God, Castleg.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a Weekly Podcast.

This week, coming to you live from Birmingham.

My name is Dan Shriver.

I am sitting here with Anna Chaczynski, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin.

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, Andy.

My fact is that in 1958, the Queen's speech was lost on the day of delivery and then found by a nearby poodle.

It's a heartwarming Christmas story for the audience.

Although what it says to me is that the coggies are really shit at finding.

Yeah, that's true.

This was in 1958, so obviously she hadn't done many of these speeches before.

Pretty nerve-wracking, still live delivery.

And one of the most important copies of the speech, one with all the producers' notes on it, was lost and

then found by a poodle.

What was the poodle doing there?

I thought security was quite tight around the Queen.

It was not by the Queen.

So if it, if it, I mean, she would have found it if it would have been next to her.

But surely.

It must have been near the Queen.

I think it was at a nearby train station, wasn't it?

What?

So this poodle has no involvement in the story.

Well, no, he's the main protagonist in the story.

I don't know if you heard the story.

Sorry, no, so what I mean is it's not like the poodle was in Buckingham Palace going, lost script, I'm on it.

No, no, no, they didn't summon it in to find the script.

He was brought in to find the script.

No, no, they didn't summon it in to find Jesus.

You don't say I've lost a script somewhere in the United Kingdom.

I need one poodle.

The poodle at a train station noticed a bag, there was a bag, and the poodle went over and explored it.

I can't remember the name of the poodle.

I don't think I wrote it down.

How did he know it was the Queen's speech?

Well,

he

did a sort of series of mimes to his master.

The owner of the poodle was a guy called John Harvey, who then took it to the police.

The Queen's speech was saved, and things just carried on as normal.

Right.

Thank God, because where would we have been without that speech?

Right, right.

Everyone remembers the 1958, right?

I remember the 1959 speech, and when I say I remember, I'm not that old.

But I can tell you about the 1959 speech, because it was the first speech that had a joke in it, as far as I can see.

Because I read through the early ones and this one the queen said she explained all the places that they were going all these new countries in the Commonwealth and she said so between us we are going to many parts of the world we have no plans for space travel at the moment

I mean I'm not saying that was a great joke

It passes our bar for joke, but I'm not sure it passes many people's.

There was a good one in 1957,

a classic in 1957, I would say.

Again, it was still live, and the Queen was doing her speech.

And mid-speech,

there was interference in the signal for the speech itself on TV.

So while people were watching, suddenly they could hear American police officers coming over in place of the Queen speaking.

And the line that was heard most by most people was, Joe, I'm going to go grab a quick coffee.

That was suddenly just in the middle of the Queen's speech in 1957.

Was it so weird?

Some of them, they put them out on telly, but there was no picture.

Yeah, I think between 1952 and 1957 they realized they had television now and so they broadcast it on TV but she didn't have her makeup done or something so that because the first TV broadcast was 57 wasn't it where you could actually see her but before that you could just listen to her but watching a black TV screen wow

wait a minute so people might not have really known much about the queen what she looked like and stuff like that so when they heard someone saying Joe I'm gonna get a coffee did they maybe think it was the queen doing that no I think I think from all the money they knew what she looked like.

Yeah.

Okay, here's a challenge for you.

Can you guys guess one thing that she never does while she is recording the speech?

Burlesque.

That's fair.

That's technically the correct a correct.

It's a correct answer.

I've never seen her stuffing the turkey.

Yes.

Andy, you've got to reframe the question.

It's been gone for a long time.

She never takes a wee.

She never stands on her head.

She doesn't smile in a genuine way.

She does her kind of queen smile.

She doesn't do the sort of big friendly smile.

She has a kind of

controlled smile.

She's got a queen smile.

That's cool.

Yeah, but there is.

There was a time where the sound man decided, oh, she's got such a nice smile.

I've got to see if I can make her smile during a thing.

So he attached a sign saying smile to the camera boom arm, and he put a sprig of holly and some tinsel next to it and she saw it and she immediately frowned.

And he was the last victim of capital punishment in his country, wasn't he?

I discovered while reading about the Queen's Christmas broadcast that she is a podcast pioneer.

Is she?

Yeah.

The Queen's speech was released as a podcast in 2006.

Wow, wow.

We started in 2014.

Like, that's how distant it is.

And it's,

I haven't heard it, um, but I assume it's the same as the speech.

But yeah, it's not very long.

You know, she could have done a podcast slant.

One's father wrote a podo.

Stop the Queen's speech, stop the Queen's speech.

Hello, we're sponsored this week

by the Royal Mint.

By all of you.

Of course, before the Queen's speech was the Queen speech, it was the King's speech.

Right, so it started, I think the first one was 1932, although it only became a yearly thing in 1939.

And 1932, they'd actually, so John Reith, who was general manager of the BBC at the time, had been trying to persuade King George V to do a King's speech for years, and he really didn't want to.

He was sweetly shy and nervous and thought he wasn't a very good speaker and was a technophobe, so didn't really understand this newfangled radio thing.

And he finally was persuaded to do it when it turned out that Rudyard Kipling was going to write it for him.

And then he thought, okay, well, that sounds good.

He He wrote it for him.

Yeah, he wrote the speech for him.

Jungle Book Guy.

Jungle Book Guy, as some people

know him better.

What a speech.

The bare necessity is

the simple.

No, it wasn't.

He wrote some other stuff as well.

Okay, cool.

Yeah, so it was one of those other things.

But apparently, King George,

from his naval days, I read, felt most comfortable in small rooms.

And so he, even though they made a fake recording studio, which was one of the grand rooms in the palace he actually recorded it in a box room under the stairs at Sandringham House and yeah Harry Potter like it was like Harry Potter yeah

his hand was shaking if you listen to it you can hear the paper rustling because his hand was shaking so much wow and he said it ruined his Christmas

guess who produced the can you see I've got another Christmas challenge for you yeah see if you can guess who produced the messages between 1986 and 1991 was it Dita Vontees

Oh yeah.

I wish I hadn't got you that book about burlesque.

No, it was not Dieter Von Ties.

So a

BBC producer.

Yeah, but also a friend of the Queen's.

Friend of the Queen's.

Oh,

David Attenborough.

David Attenborough.

Great fact.

It's just not his normal thing, is it?

But he was, was he the guy, he was quite a famous producer before he did his other.

He was in the 60s.

Is he the guy who, I might get this wrong, but is he the guy who decided to put snooker on television to sell colour TVs?

Yes, yes.

Was that him?

Yeah, it was when he was controller of BBC One, I think, that he said to sell colour TV.

Can I say that's just a tiny bit worse than me saying, is that the jungle book guy?

To say David Attenborough, is he the snooker guy?

Well, coming from you, the queen, is that the woman off the money?

Oh, why do we always argue at Christmas?

Some more stuff about TV and movies around Christmas, something like that.

So there were four Flintstones Christmas specials, which how exactly they celebrate Christ's birth, I don't really know.

Oh yeah.

Oh yeah.

They were pioneers.

There is a YouTuber called Jake Roper, and he decided to look at that classic Christmas movie, Home Alone.

Oh yeah.

And he found out that he looked at all the tricks that Kevin played on the burglars and found out what what would happen in real life.

So, apparently, shame on me, I haven't seen this movie, but I believe this is what happened.

I know, I know.

James, that's a better fact than whatever you're about to tell us.

So, apparently, at one stage, he heats up a doorknob and they burn their hand.

And apparently, the temperatures needed to transfer enough heat to the outside knob would have melted the door or set the house on fire.

There is a crowbar that goes to the chest of one of the burglars.

That would have punctured his lungs and his heart.

But it wouldn't matter because Kevin would have already murdered both of them with the paint can trap.

Apparently the force of those paint cans would have killed both of them.

That would be a very different movie.

It would have been.

Yes.

How do you know?

You don't know.

I'm assuming.

Maybe they both die.

It is weird.

It's like watching you read a foreign language where you don't understand it.

You obviously don't quite know what

this is in reference to at all.

Look, I read the synopsis on Wikipedia.

Do you know?

There's such a weird thing about Home Alone.

So Joe Pesci, who was the bad guy in it who's not an idiot,

he obviously was more used to doing kind of gangster films.

He's in quite a lot of serious gangster films.

And I think he might have thought this was a similar thing.

So we went really method in Home Alone.

So

on the set of Home Alone, he refused to see Macaulay Corkin at all because he wanted Macaulay to be really, really terrified of him.

So, you know, he didn't want to kill the magic of him being this bad guy.

And in the scene where which you may remember, and I do remember and James doesn't remember where he's he's hung up on a coat hook at one point if you remember by his coat and Joe Petty says to him I'm gonna bite all your fingers off one at a time and in one of the rehearsals he actually bit Culkin really really hard and drew blood and he still has a scar really

yeah Apparently this little nine-year-old boy had to do a screaming fit and be like, I don't care how many Oscars you've got and don't go around biting nine-year-olds.

That's apparently in E.T.

when they were filming it.

Steven Spielberg needed Drew Barrymore to cry during a scene.

There's a scene where she really sobs.

And the behind the scenes of it is that apparently before the take was done, Steven Spielberg leaned into her, going, It's going to be a good scene.

You know, you'll be great.

You'll be great.

By the way, your dog just died.

And then walked back and she burst out crying, and that's her genuinely crying.

Wow.

Anyway, Merry Christmas.

So, what do this animal

and this animal

and this animal

have in common?

They all live on an organic valley farm.

Organic valley dairy comes from small organic family farms that protect the land and the plants and animals that live on it from toxic pesticides, which leads to a thriving ecosystem and delicious, nutritious milk and cheese.

Learn more at OV.coop and taste the difference.

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We need to move on to our next fact.

Time for fact number two and that is Chaczynski.

My fact this week is that as well as being the birthplace of Jesus, Bethlehem is also where we found the oldest known depiction of people having sex.

Yeah.

And which is very that's very ironic

because famously

that was a sex-free zone.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

I don't think it was a sex-free zone.

It was just they hadn't, two people of many people hadn't had sex, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it is related to non-sex.

They, Mary and Joseph, didn't have access to this piece of art, otherwise, they would have known what they didn't have instructions.

So, yeah, I think this is such a weird coincidence.

This is really quite a beautiful piece of art, it's made of calcite, it's from 11,000 years ago, so it's a stone-age piece of art, and it's kind of this couple of androgynous humans, sort of inside.

I don't know how sex works when they're that androgynous, but sort of intertwined like legs over each other.

Look it up, it's very nice.

Face-to-face, so the traditional way.

And

you've got to specify, but not missionary, I would say.

Well, when you look at it, it's quite hard to tell if it was meant to be upright or horizontal.

So that's sort of in the eye of the beholder.

Anyway.

I'm really looking forward to your BBC4 documentary on the history of art.

So this, it is, when I first looked at it, I thought it just looked like a rock.

Okay, maybe I'm just not into my art as much as Anna is.

It doesn't look like a rock.

It looks like two people gloriously intertwined.

Sure, okay.

But according to artist Mark Quinn, depending on the perspective and how you look at it, it also resembles a penis, breasts, or a vagina.

depending on which way you kind of move it around.

So it's like a bit of trick art.

Oh, cool.

It is very cool.

Because if you put it sort of sideways onto you, so it's at its widest, it looks like the couple, one next to each other, and then if you move it so it's sort of end on, it looks like a penis.

And then on the base, there's a cheeky vagina.

So it's a very

cheeky vagina.

It's a three for the price of one, isn't it?

Yeah, it is.

It's basically your porn hub of 10,000 years ago.

Yeah.

Because you could just search for any of three things and then you would get it.

Anyway, so it was found in the 1930s by some Bedouin Shepherd boys, and obviously it's now in the British Museum.

It's quite nice that it was shepherds.

That's cool.

Isn't it?

Just watching their flock.

Right.

Yeah.

No, because it's not while shepherds looked at their horny rock by night.

Is that a star in the sky?

Doesn't matter.

Keep looking at the rock.

We have no evidence they got any kind of arousal out of it.

They just they found it and then they gave it to an archaeologist.

It's in an area just sort of within a few miles of Bethlehem called Ein Sakri, and it's in a cave.

And yeah, made by the Natufians, who were

called a sedentary people, which isn't as insulting as it sounds.

It just means that they were not nomadic.

Very unusually for that time.

They weren't nomadic.

They probably are my favourite group of people from history, the Natufians.

Really?

Are they?

Yeah, because they're the first example we have of anyone who domesticated the dog.

They're the first examples we have of a big feast.

They were the first example we have of beer.

It might be just people are looking in that place and stuff like that.

But I think they sound like a really cool, you know, bunch of people.

The first known beer, I think, is from 13,000 years BP,

which

is not a petrol reference.

So I didn't know about this phrase, but it stands for before-present, and I don't know why we need it when we have BC.

But so it's 13,000 years BP, so I guess about 11,000 years BC.

And when do you think before-present

starts from?

As in this, well just when you said it a few seconds ago.

But no but not anymore.

No, it's now

and so and so forth.

Is it not that?

I'm gonna have to say your first answer

and it's not it's 1950.

Okay boomer

isn't that when archaeologists just decided the present is 1950.

That is so strange.

Is it because some people think it's like where there was atomic bombs

of it?

And so then then any rocks from then on have some kind of radioactivity, so you can't use carbon data.

Exactly.

Everything's kind of screwed up after 1950 because of all the nuclear shit, as you say.

There is a theory that it's the other Bethlehem.

This is the Bethlehem that we have, where there is a church and a cave and all the

tourism.

When you mean other Bethlehem, there's one in Wales, for instance.

It's not that one.

I know there's one in Pennsylvania.

It's not that one.

There's one in the Galilee.

And an Israeli archaeologist has said that, although there probably won't be any any proof due to modern building work

a lot of Jesus's life happened near the other Galilee or near the Galilee so it and also that one is only a few hours of a walk from Nazareth which is where Mary and Joseph traditionally came from so it's more reasonable that a pregnant heavily pregnant woman would have walked for a few hours but did they say that they spent like weeks in the desert walking from one place to the other.

They must have got really lost if it's this one right next to the other one.

That's true.

That's the thing they didn't though.

That's the weird thing.

So the nativity, nativity, the birth of Jesus, is only mentioned in two of the Gospels anyway, Luke and Matthew.

And it's only in Luke that they make the journey.

So in Matthew, they're already living in Bethlehem.

And even in Matthew, this is the extent of the whole journey that we have, the impression of the donkey and the long trip.

He just says,

you know, it was for a census.

So they both confirmed that they were going to Bethlehem for a census, and they sort of happened to have a child while they were there.

But it went, Joseph went to be registered with Mary, who was expecting a child.

While they were there, she gave birth and wrapped him in bounds of cloth and laid him in a manger because there was no place for him in the inn.

And that's it.

That's all we have.

And all the other stuff is from later: the donkey, the long journey, the cave.

It all comes from the proto-gospel of James.

Wait, you didn't say the keg, did you?

The cave.

Oh, the cave, sorry.

They cracked open a keg and had a whale of a time.

Traditional English Christmases used to have a mince pie in the shape of a manger.

And you would put a little Christ-child doll in the pie.

Not in the pie, sorry, not in the pie.

On the pie, on the pie, which was sort of shaped like a manger, like a kind of trough.

And then you would put the Christ child in it, and then at dinner time you would eat the pie.

So, sorry, did you eat the Jesus?

No, you didn't eat the Jesus.

The Jesus, I think, was an annual decoration to be got out every year.

The pie was just, the pie was the edible bit.

I see.

Just complain to the waiter.

I see.

Waiter, waiter, there's a Jesus in my pie.

And what comes next?

Is there an ending to that joke?

Are you joking?

With the fly.

Yeah, you are, but...

No, I'm not.

What's the end to the fly joke?

Oh, my God.

Should we set it together?

There's a fly in my soup.

Don't talk too loud.

Everyone will want one.

That's fucking good.

That's dated.

It's the way we told it.

Do you guys know where the animals come from in the Nativity?

You know where you usually have an ox and a kind of a donkey and a shot.

So they're not mentioned in the Bible either?

They're not mentioned in the Bible, but they come from the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, who appeared in the 8th century and claimed that he sort of remembered all this stuff.

So Pseudo-Matthew wrote the Gospel, which is where we get a lot of our Nativity ideas.

And he introduced the stable where Jesus was born and adds an ox and an ass.

But he also added to the scene lions, leopards, and dragons.

No.

That's so cool.

Yep, that's correct.

If you want to do the nativity properly, if you're having an ox, you might as well have a lion, a leopard, and a dragon.

He said they were all wagging their tails to show their devotion.

Have we spoken about nativity thefts?

I can't remember if we've ever talked about it before.

Is it people stealing nativity scenes?

Yeah, it is.

And it's so there's been a huge rash of this in lots of places in the last few years.

So there is another Bethlehem in Pennsylvania, and there, a woman stole the crib in 2016.

And it broke a bit, and the chief of police had to glue baby Jesus's leg back on.

It was very embarrassing.

So they had to put a security camera solely on the baby Jesus when they they reinstalled it but this keeps happening so there's a place in Wisconsin called West Bend where 2017 Jesus was stolen then they found it they replaced the Jesus then on Christmas Eve it was stolen again the baby Jesus and there was a police officer who saw a woman suspiciously cradling something I don't know how you do that

And it was the replacement baby Jesus they put back in.

And the officer yelled, police, stop.

And she dropped the Jesus and pegged it.

So now, in West Bend, everything is bolted literally everything is bolted down.

The baby Jesus is plastered to the manger

and there is a camera which has hunting technology where when someone leans in for a closer look a motion activated trail camera kicks in and starts recording their every move.

We need to move on in a sec to our next fact.

We could talk about some erotic art.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

Oh yeah, sure.

Well, I just wanted to quickly mention

another very old piece of art, which is all the statues of this Egyptian god called Min, who I didn't know existed, but he was the god of fertility.

And you see little sculptures of him from around the fourth millennium BC.

So, a bloody long time ago.

And he has a very close association with lettuce.

And that is because, so he's all, if you look at him, he's always seen standing with a very erect, very long penis, which he's cradling in his left hand, I think.

And then he's associated with lettuce.

Suspiciously cradling?

That's how you always suspiciously cradle something if it's a penis it is always suspicious how she was cradling the baby Jesus though was it no no it was not I'm sure but yeah he was the god of fertility and associated with lettuce and it was thought the lettuce was the most aphrodisiacal food stuff because it looks like a penis but also if you break a leaf off a lettuce it oozes kind of white substance and so this was really revered sorry i must say that these are old lettuces that you would get in ancient egypt if you go to sainsbury's and get an iceberg

one it doesn't look like a penis and two, it doesn't ooze white liquid.

It looks a tiny bit.

It's that Romaine long, Romaine, long phallic thing, but yeah, it looks less like a penis and doesn't do the oozing.

Wait a waiter, there's a penis in my lettuce.

That one actually doesn't have an ending.

Sorry, can I say one last thing about nativities?

Sorry.

It's just there was a nativity set available on Amazon.

I've read a lot of reviews of nativity sets that you can buy for yourself, and there is one set that is available on Amazon for £3.69.

So this is a very, you know,

cost.

Reasonably priced.

Reasonably priced nativity set.

And the main review for it says this.

Bearing in mind the price, I did not expect a work of art, but I did hope for something tasteful.

The three figurines were tatty and badly painted.

Joseph had white paint splattered all over his cloak and down his staff.

The bit the bit no, stop.

Are you sure that wasn't lettered too less?

It gets like this nativity gets worse.

The beard on the right side of his face was higher higher than the left and covered his whole nose.

Mary's paintwork was even tattier.

She has two left hands.

Baby Jesus has a right eye that is twice the size of his left eye and his mouth is on the right side of his face.

So it is an optimistic.

And there was no dragon.

We need to move on to our next fact.

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

My fact this week is the most likely time in the year to have a heart attack is during a family Christmas gathering.

This is absolutely true.

This was research that was done in Sweden.

They looked at DACER of 283,000 heart attacks that took place in the country between 1998 and 2013, and they found that at 10 p.m.

on December the 24th, which is when the Swedes celebrate, that's when the Christmas gatherings happen, that that's when it was most likely to happen.

37% more likely to happen on Christmas

than you know say 20% on New Year's Day or any other period of the year

Yeah, that's really good.

And they got this information from a database they have of 283,014 heart attacks and the database is called sweetheart

That's sweet.

It's very nice something that ruins lives

Do we know what is they think it's due to?

Is it due to Christmas arguments?

It's due to arguments stress of did I get the right present?

I've got all the family here.

We're suddenly, you know, we've got uncles and aunties and children who don't usually hang in one room necessarily or when they do.

Well, you say it's due to, obviously, we don't know why it is, but we're speculating that it's because of that.

It wasn't like they interviewed everyone mid-heart attack and said, what is it that you think has caused this?

And they said, well, my wife's being a real bitch in the kitchen.

Because people thought that it was the cold quite a lot.

But then they did a similar study in the southern hemisphere and found quite similar results, I think, didn't they?

Yeah.

I think it's Monopoly.

have you seen this about Monopoly this year they've released the longest ever game of Monopoly really yeah oh it's because they're always doing new additions and yeah so the newest edition they have um 66 properties that you can get instead of 28

There are 40 extra spaces, but you only have one dice, so it takes you way longer to get between each one.

And the game carries on until one player has absolutely everything on the board.

So you keep going into more and more and more debt.

And basically, you just keep going forever until one person wins all the money that's good isn't it because that's what i've always said about monopoly is that it's just over too fast

actually in 2016 hasbro ran they're very good at pr stuff they ran a monopoly helpline from the 24th to the 26th of december to stop literally because they said people always argue while playing this dreadful board game of ours yeah yeah and the idea was the person at the end of the hotline wouldn't solve this sort of like family dynamic argument it would be i will tell you what the official rule that you were disputing.

Because that's the main thing.

So

there would be people, so people in the list of why people would call would be, or why the arguments happen.

Free parking.

No one really knows officially what the rules are.

And that would be a big thing that they would argue about.

And then it would be stuff like people taking too long to take their turn, someone buying a property that you want when they definitely didn't need it.

On the top of the list, it was people being allowed.

I know it's allowed.

It's allowed best part of the game.

Exactly.

Well,

this is why your attitude is causing.

And yeah, the top being people being too cocky when winning.

So this is just to help my people who can't be asked to read the instructions, which are all of four pages long.

Is that what we're saying?

Yes.

Right.

Just checking who this was targeting.

There are theories about why people argue.

It's actual psychological theories about why people argue over Christmas.

And one theory that I really like is that there are things which are social allergens.

So you're not allergic the first time someone makes a tiresome joke to you over Christmas.

But by the fourth or fifth time, you're having a very much stronger reaction, even if it's someone completely different making that joke again.

I don't know, that don't talk too loud, everyone will want one, that never gets old.

There was a study done recently which asked people their main reasons for post-Christmas grumpiness.

So people get very depressed in January.

It's sort of kind of depressing things like suicides go up.

On New Year's Day is the biggest day for suicide, but happily Christmas Day is the smallest day for suicide, so people hang on.

But people get upset in January, and can I just apologize for my fact?

I've never.

I can't believe I did this to us today.

It's a depressing fact.

No, the main reason people get upset after Christmas, apparently, is because

there were a list of 20.

One of them was, our house is full of Christmas presents and I don't want most of them.

Which

is extremely ungrateful.

Apparently children become a complete nightmare because they get used to the indulgence of Christmas which I don't know if that's true but they become terrorists basically and

then people cited chocolate withdrawal symptoms.

That's not real.

Top 20 why I'm grumpy in January medical chocolate withdrawal.

One bad thing that in the olden days would happen just after Christmas, in the 1600s in Wales, they had a tradition where you would beat up the last person to get out of bed on Boxing Day.

Bring it back.

And is that why it's Boxing Day?

No.

They would also, around the same time, they would throw food at the wall on Christmas Day, and whatever it's spelled out on the wall, that's who you would marry.

I mean

did they have Alphabetti spaghetti in 16th century Wales?

What?

What can you hope to spell out?

I suppose

a trifle, it'll go, urrh.

Yeah, you're right.

I suppose maybe like spaghetti, they probably didn't have spaghetti in those days, did they?

Wow.

Have you guys heard the song?

An eel.

They would get an eel from the table and throw that at...

Again, their name had better begin with S.

Or.

Have you guys heard of this song from 2004 called The Twelve STIs of Christmas?

No.

This was an official...

It was a song written by the Department of Health as part of a public safety campaign.

And it was to teach people, especially young people, about the risks of unsafe sex.

And it started, it had all the verses.

So it started on the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me a bug that made it hard to pee.

Okay, so that's...

Right.

But they kept mixing up the verses all the way along.

So I just want to share verse nine with you.

On the ninth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me genital warts, trichomoniasis, herpertitis, pubic, lies, gonorrhea,

genital herpes, ciphy, lis, chlamydia, and sores that spread an early.

That's real!

That's an official thing!

I reckon no one has ever stood on this stage and sung the word gonorrhea quite as beautifully as you did.

There was a study in 2016, and it was a Christmas study, so it was quite light-hearted in its intent, but it said recent estimates show Santa has to travel 510 million kilometers at nearly the speed of light each night before Christmas while controlling the estimated 5.6 million reindeer necessary to pull his 2.3 million ton sleigh.

Considering one fatality in commercial aviation about every 23 billion passenger kilometers, and assuming that Santa's sleigh is not considerably safer than a standard aeroplane, Santa would die on duty every 45 years.

When's the next one due?

Do we know?

Well, it says statistically he should have died four times since his first appearance in the 18th century.

But he keeps on surviving.

He's fine.

He's fine.

He's okay.

They looked at some injuries in America between 2007 and 2016 over Christmas.

And these are just injuries, but 36,000 people just over died from electrical got injured from electrical decorations.

80,000 got injured from other types of decorations, 17,928 got injured from artificial trees, and 277 children were hurt during interactions with a Santa impersonator.

And apparently, according to the researchers, their examples they gave is by either falling off his lap or falling while running away in fear.

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Oh, we need to move on to our final fact of the show, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that Mariah Carey has three Christmas trees, one of which is decorated with pictures of herself.

Okay, so this is the modern-day Santa Claus, Mariah Carey,

and she has a main 19-foot tree in her living room.

She has a smaller one in her bedroom, and she has one in the family room area that they call the Charlie Brown tree.

And it's a really cute, kind of slightly scraggly looking one, but they put Polaroids of the family as well, not just her.

So it's a nice thing.

And she has told us all about what happens at her Christmas.

She always takes a plane to Aspen in Colorado, and she comes off the plane and she gets onto a sleigh pulled by reindeers while they play all I want for Christmas is you again and again and again.

Yeah, and she absolutely loves that.

Actually, she does really like her own music.

She likes to do stuff with her own music.

According to her ex-husband, Nick Channon, when she gave birth, as the babies came out, they were playing a Mariah Carey song.

And they didn't just want any old Mariah Carey song, they wanted a live version of Mariah Carey singing fantasy in Madison Square Garden so that when the babies came out, they came out to a round of applause.

Wow.

She is the absolute Moby Dick of pop divas.

She is just, yeah, the perfect.

Wait,

is the monkey one decorated with pictures of her?

Yes.

It's just like, like I said, Charlie Brown.

It's kind of a more traditionally kind of a small, small one.

Okay.

Yeah.

I think it's quite sweet, actually.

Yeah.

The thing is, Mariah Carey, I think we need a few people who exist in that diva land that we just celebrate as opposed to going there crazy.

It's so amazing to know that there's someone out there just living this insane life.

And all these rumors, we don't know which ones are true and which ones are false.

So the things like people say she never wears a watch she can whistle with her hands she never wears a watch it's not diva behavior

I mean you're not wearing a watch right now oh Dan Schreiber the Mariah Carey of no such thing as a fish

she she has supposedly an extreme aversion to overhead lighting and has she claims that elevator lighting is toxic And the thing is, some people sometimes pick her up on the fact that she has these big rumors about her and ask her about it.

And often the answer is crazier than the actual accusation.

She was interviewed by someone who said there's a rumor going around that you only bathe in bottled water, sort of sparkling water.

And she said, that is insane.

I bathe in milk.

I don't think that was actually with Mariah Carey though, that interview, because this was in The Guardian and he the description is so bizarre, but basically he's sort of led into this room where he says it's dimly lit and he can barely make her out.

She's sitting in a weird throne.

And then she asks to be moved to a different chair chair/slash throne, doesn't she?

And there's this sort of air throughout that all he can see is her glittering diamonds and sort of the red of her outfit in this weird, dimly lit space.

And I think she's just sending stand-ins around the world to repeat mad stuff about her.

But there are clues that it might have been her.

She wasn't wearing a watch, for instance.

She whistled to beckon him.

So the song, All I Want for Christmas is You, is I think it's just over 25 years old.

Really?

Yeah, it's now an oldie.

And when she was told, when Mariah Carey was told that the song was turning 25 years old, she had an amazing response.

She just said, I don't acknowledge time.

That's why she doesn't wear a watch.

She doesn't acknowledge time because she doesn't have birthdays.

We don't truly know when Mariah Kerry was born.

That's a real thing.

She was either born, I think it was in 19,

what are the two dates?

I think was it 59 or 1960?

Yeah, exactly.

And we don't fully know.

Oh, no, sorry, she was either born in 1969 or 1970.

She was either born in 1969, 1970.

We don't fully know because we haven't got the birth certificate to tell.

But she doesn't have birthdays.

She has anniversaries because she doesn't acknowledge time.

Well, it's still acknowledging time if it's an anniversary, isn't it?

You've just given it a different name.

Good point, yeah.

She hasn't thought this one through.

Yeah, no, I think she's a fascinating character.

And the amazing thing, All I Want for Christmas is You, she's expanded it into so many territories.

There's a movie that she made recently, an animated movie, All I Want for Christmas is You, the kids' cartoon, which I watched the other night.

She's made sorry, you watched

yeah, I saw it the other night.

Was it good?

It's fantastic.

Yeah, did your son enjoy it?

He doesn't watch that shit.

I put it on, he was like, I'm out.

He went to play with his Thomas the Tank Engine toys.

So I watched it on my own.

But it's.

That is so depressing.

Why?

It's a fantastic fantastic song, a fantastic movie.

She's a fantastic human who doesn't acknowledge that time exists.

How long is the film if time doesn't exist?

To be fair, it did feel like forever, but.

There is a whole article deconstructing the meaning of the song All I Want for Christmas Is You on The Atlantic, which is really good.

And it kind of does it slightly academically.

So it says, the author carefully sets out her premises.

There exists an entity, I, representing conscious selfhood.

This entity exists in relation to material space, a lot, and seasonal time for Christmas.

The entity expresses this relationality through the vocabulary of desire or want, and though its desires could theoretically be expansive, they are not.

Yet how could we understand the author's examination of Christmas as anything but an implicit critique of capitalism?

She doesn't want all the other stuff at Christmas, she just wants you.

They've plagiarized her notes when she was writing that song, haven't they?

Because she did write it, we should say.

She did.

I didn't quite realize that she wrote all of her songs.

I can't remember how many number one she said, but dozens.

She did write basically all of them.

She co-wrote that one, I think, right?

She co-wrote it.

I think as a co-writer, she is unique in that she has had one number one hit for every year of the 90s, and no one else has had that.

She's had, yeah, so she's...

Yeah, I heard she'd had about 19 and she'd written 18 of them.

Or at the very least, current of them.

And there is a theory, our colleague James Rawson, who is a big Murray Carey fan, he has a theory that all the diva stuff is actually to distract us and it's to not it doesn't draw attention to the fact she's a very good songwriter and she has a five octave range which is almost unheard of but you know if she goes on about that it might sound vain so she just does the fun diva stuff instead yeah although i don't want to suggest her career is going downhill but last year she was doing the tube announcements in london

she did the please mind the gap or she did she did uh please all i want for christmas is houston

Very, very strong.

The next train will be along at some point.

When?

No, she did.

She did a please stand clear of the yellow line, and also, have you heard my new album tube announcement?

Wow, cool.

Did she actually say the new album bit?

She did, yeah.

Oh, wow.

This year is a fight like every year for Christmas number one.

Last year it was won by We Built This City on Sausage Rolls by Lad Baby.

And as a kind of of comment against that, there is a couple called Gavin Chappell Bates and Giles Bryant, who are from Cambridge and Suffolk, respectively.

And they've recorded a single called Peace on Your Plate, which is the world's first vegan Christmas single.

The lyrics include, children are playing by the fireside, there's magic at Yuletide, but in a different land, it's a different scene.

In a factory shed, the animals scream.

That honestly makes your fact, Dan, look like it's a wonderful life.

I think it's unfair to call that the first vegan Christmas song when I think a lot of other Christmas songs haven't been rampantly carnivorous.

Do you know who invented Christmas songs?

Christmas carols.

Oh, it can't have been named after someone called Carol.

I wish it was.

No, it was a guy called Edward White Benson, who was the bishop of Truro in the 19th century, late 19th century.

And basically, carols were sung in pubs, and he wanted to move them to churches.

And he went on to be Archbishop of Canterbury.

It was quite a big deal.

But he had this extraordinary family life.

So he was married.

His wife had, she kept a diary of her lovers.

She had 39 lesbian lovers.

So she was gay.

She kept this diary.

She had this.

They had six children, four of whom were gay.

And two, so their two sons.

One went on to be a famous poet.

The other went on to be a famous novelist.

One of their two daughters, who was gay, stole her mother's girlfriend, and he was there being the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Wow.

She was brilliant, the mother.

She was called Mary Benson, and Gladstone, at the time, called Prime Minister, called her the cleverest woman in England.

Which, you know, she had 39 lovers.

That's pretty smart.

Yeah, but not when they count all those STDs she got money on.

We're going to have to wrap up very shortly.

Anything before we do?

Just some more Christmas song stuff.

So, for instance, the song song I Saw Mummy Kissing Santa Claus was condemned by the Roman Catholic Church in Boston because they said it was showing adultery because mummy is kissing another man.

And it was only when the guy who sang the song, Jimmy Boyd, met with the church leaders to explain that actually in this song the part of Santa is being played by the father in this,

and then they lifted their condemnation.

I think it makes sense to release Christmas songs.

So I was looking at the royalties that you get.

In 2016, Channel 5 did a review of all the biggest songs that gets the number one royalty.

So she came in at number three.

What do you think?

Number two and number one are.

They're Christmas songs.

Christmas songs.

I think it'll be Slade's Merry Christmas, everybody.

Number one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

How cool is that?

And

according to this report, they get one million pounds in royalties a year from that alone.

Slade.

Not all of them wrote it, though.

It's only Naughty Holder and maybe one of the bloats.

Yeah, so probably Noddy's getting most of it.

They get up between them, but the other bandmates get nothing.

Yeah.

No.

Yeah.

Wait.

I didn't even say no way.

I just said no.

But here's the thing: you don't even need to have written a good song that people have heard about.

In 1978, there was a guy called Randy Brooks who wrote a song called Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.

Sold 40 million copies.

It's been covered three times.

The family have just been pulling in royalties each year.

Yeah.

Why have we not heard of this?

Has anyone heard of that?

Oh, oh, really?

It's a famous song.

Famous song.

We just don't know anything.

There is a firm called Mood Media, which provides tunes to shops.

And 300,000 American shops have this music provided by this one firm.

And they have 30 different Christmas music channels.

That's how many different kinds of mood shopkeepers might want to evoke in their shops.

So if you run a small

Christian bookshop, you might not want to have the raunchy Lady Gaga Christmas songs.

Oh, yeah.

But if you're selling, if you've got a cool shop for young people, then you might want to play a song called Christmas in Harlem by someone called Kanye West.

Although some of the classic Christmas songs are raunchier than you might think.

So a lot of, I think Christmas carols didn't really start being sung in churches until the 19th century when they had to rewrite lots of them.

But Deck the Hall, the open Deck the Hall with Bowser Holly, that opening line used to be, Oh, how soft my fair one's bosom, fa la la la la la la la la.

Did it really?

Yeah, it was a Welsh song about how fit someone's girlfriend was.

Of course, oh, come, all you faithful.

Have you tried the lettuce?

Yeah.

Actually, you know, that song, Oh, Come, All Ye Faithful, if you sing that, you're technically pleading for the French to invade England.

At this stage, why not try it?

That feels like the big reset button that we need to hit at this point.

It was written by John Francis Wade, who was an English Catholic, and he fled the country during the 1745 rebellion, and he wrote this song.

And it was basically, oh, come the Catholics to England and save us from the Protestants.

That's weird because he must have screwed up the lyrics, Come ye, oh, come, ye do Bet Ethlehem.

Unless

he met Bethlehem in Wales, of course.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we 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 Shaczinski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, no such thingasafish.com.

We have everything up there from upcoming tour dates to all of our previous episodes and a link to buy our new books.

Thank you so much, Birmingham.

We'll see you again.

Good night.