244: No Such Thing As A Fishman

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Hi guys, just before we start this show, we wanted to let you know we've got a really exciting guest on today.

We were really looking forward to recording with this person.

It's a new up-and-coming comic and creative talent called Stephen Fry.

Ooh, yeah.

I've not heard of him.

Well, I think you will have in a couple of years.

You know, he's new on the scene.

Cool.

Okay, well, that's very exciting.

And he has this new book out, which is called Heroes.

It's a fantastic book.

It's all about the Greek heroes.

So Jason and Hercules/slash Heracles and Pegasus, all these familiar characters, but written in the incredible comic wit and stylings of Stephen Fry.

Really funny, it's fantastic for kids.

And if you're an adult who just wants to revisit these stories, I highly recommend it.

There you go.

That's Heroes by Stephen Fry, and then please do also buy Book of the Year by us.

And we should just say this is a special extended version of the podcast because Stephen had so much to say and we wanted to hear it.

We figured you guys would want to hear it.

And so, enjoy this episode of No Such Things as a Fish Plus.

Okay, on with the show.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Anna Chaczynski, Andrew Hunter-Murray, James Harkind, and a special guest and the man who gave us the name the QI Elves.

It's Stephen Fry.

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

Here we go.

Starting with you, Stephen.

All right, yes, I have a fact here.

There was a make-of-toilet paper in Victorian England that was so posh, every sheet had a watermark to deter counterfeiters.

In fact, it was so posh, it wouldn't have been called toilet paper, it would have been called lavatory paper.

If you remember, toilet is deeply non-U.

As is the word posh.

So, in fact, it was probably a make of lavatory paper that was so classy that every sheet had a watermark.

But anyway, that's the point.

And what does that tell us about Victorians and their bathroom habits, I wonder?

Their evolutionary customs.

Well, this was on the first toilet papers, or lavatory papers, wasn't it?

What was used before that then?

Well, we know all the stories of swans' necks and goose necks and deer necks.

Yeah, corn colts?

I think we mentioned before, yeah.

I just wonder what...

So, for example, this is in the 19th century.

So, this was well after, for example, Jane Austen died.

So, what are the Regency gentry, or just the middle classes?

I mean, I can't imagine Jane Austen using a corn cob is all I'm trying to say.

Like a corn dolly.

Lace.

I know the French used lace.

No.

Which is weird because it's got holes in it, but apparently they did.

I know that in many Middle Eastern customs, the hand was always used, and that's why you don't use the cack-hand, literally the shit hand, if I may say so.

Yeah,

cack-handed.

And it's interesting, I don't know, many people have watched Peter Jackson's reconstruction, you know, recolourization of some of that extraordinary Imperial War Museum, First World War footage, and they may remember seeing those men perched on a bar having a poo with their bottoms sort of hanging over.

Yes.

It sort of reminded one, obviously, of the very everyday nature of war, includes naturally the very everyday nature of emptying the bowels.

And there, I think one of the comments was from a veteran speaking, there was no paper so

so our grandfathers and great-grandfathers who fought in that war and survived would have all had that same experience and we don't talk about it was the wipers times was that that's a good point yeah that wasn't designed for it wasn't no it was just a classic tommy mispronunciation of ypres oh it's not that did you think that i thought you would read it and then wipe it but then

shortly a fool ame as they say but a very happy one yes um so there is a first world war toilet paper fact which is that both sides printed toilet paper with propaganda on it.

So the Germans issued sheets with a series of lying reports by our enemies, and British manufacturers did the same thing.

And slopped them on the other side?

No, just

for you to wipe your bottom with British propaganda.

I can offer a fact, because you know how when we were young, and I don't suppose cartoonists still do it, but escaping prisoners always used to have suits with arrows on them,

government property arrows.

Well, when I was a young and unfortunate criminal convicted and inside a prison, the lavatory paper there was in those sort of boxes with their rather crispy leaves intertwined and interleaved, in fact.

And they had those arrows on.

As

did the cigarette rolling papers that you got from the shop.

They all had those arrows.

Surely.

Prisons only plus the arrows.

Wouldn't that tempt you to take some when you left as a cigarette?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Exactly.

To show you'd done your bird.

Yeah.

In America, they get like little tattoos, don't they, to show what they've done.

Yes.

You just have a piece of arrow on toilet paper, it does the same job, doesn't it?

Well, have we mentioned that they used to,

so before toilet paper was invented, they used to wipe their bums on the farmer's almagnac, didn't they, in America famously, and the Sears catalogue, and they both used to come with a hole in them so you could hang it up and then use it as Lou Rolls.

Yeah, and I was actually listening to a podcast which was saying there are two reasons that suddenly Lou Roll was necessary and was taken on.

One was that we invented plumbing, so suddenly you can't flush a corner cob down the loo.

And the other was the Sears catalogue started coming laminated, started coming with glossy paper.

Oh, right.

It didn't work anymore.

It was absorbing, but not absorbent.

An important distinction.

That's true.

I find Whitrose Food Illustrated very uncomfortable every month.

But this does bring us to a sensitive point about the wiping bottoms.

Most people are never taught how to wipe a bottom, I assume, unless there's some dim memory of a mother during potty training actually explaining it.

But there there was a news story just the other day about the fact that women are being told how to wipe their bottoms and some people on social media were very angry at being told.

But the answer is, and you know, this is all too distressing to hear, turn away, but that

forwards to back is the correct female way.

As a woman, you just are told that.

You chant it, practically.

I think I'm right in saying Garise.

We don't do that, do we?

I go the other way.

Exactly.

You go back to for yeah.

It doesn't matter for you, obviously.

No, exactly.

We don't have the other, the little you'd have to really miss the target to get it up your width.

Whereas.

Oh, my God.

Here we are.

It's important to be frank and open about these things.

Absolutely.

So it's a health issue for women, obviously, you know.

I'm so glad you're here, Stephen.

Sorry.

Bring the levels up.

To educate the level of people.

But it's interesting.

We say bringing the levels up and everything.

To an alien species looking at us, they would be very puzzled at the fact that we have these very normal and necessary actions that are part of every day, like eating and drinking and having a poo and a pee,

and indeed making love in order to, whatever, or coetition or whatever one wants to call it, in order to propagate the species.

And those are the very things that have the taboos.

Whereas murder and cruelty, we can use those words.

We can say, I was in the traffic was active, it was cruel, oh God, it was murder.

You think, well, hang on, murder kills people.

That's the thing we should have a taboo about.

Whereas if you say it was shitting shitting bad traffic, but do swear.

Hang on.

Hang on.

Which frame of reference is the dangerous one?

Not the pooing.

And so I'm sure to

the very useful Martian watching that this should teach us something about how completely screwed up we are.

It's so wrong to be obsessed and...

Well, I think wasn't the people who invented Luroll on a roll for the first time, in fact, invented it in the 1890s and 1890, I think, and they didn't admit to it.

And they did it under a shell company.

They only admitted to it in 1902 because it was such a shameful thing to have invented.

Oh, I met someone who worked for Dalton, the porcelain company

in Staffordshire.

And I asked him at a party, and I said, oh, it was picturing.

He did Staffordshire dogs or something, the gold mantelpieces, you know, nice little sort of ornamental things.

I said, what sort of things do you specialise in?

He said rather coyly, heavyware.

I didn't quite know what heavyware was, and I sort of worked out what he meant was bathrooms and lavatories.

Heavyware.

Nice.

The The proper porcelain.

That's right.

Really?

Just speaking of the late 1800s and which way to wipe, I saw the patent for the first toilet roll,

and it sort of answers the question of which way you meant to hang the roll.

Does the paper come down underneath or does it go over?

So, which do you think it is?

Well, I was thought forward, so you can grab it, and that's the way hotels do it, because they do a little coy provocative peak to find it.

Yes.

Yes, new unused, yes.

Yep, that's correct.

It's that way in the patent.

That's not a great question, but I know.

But the thing about the little peak is supposed to be, having worked in a hotel, it's so that the housekeepers can tell if the room has been serviced.

So it's the last thing they do.

And so if that's done, it means they know that it's fine.

So if I was a housekeeper, I'd just do that.

Do the runes very quickly.

Yeah, yeah.

Exactly.

So if they got in and they saw that there were sort of swan toweled positioned in little mints, they'd be like, well, that could have just been the person staying here.

Let me check the bathroom.

So, there was a sorry, no, I was just thinking.

So, yes, the first company to make Lu Roll disclaimed it or hid it.

I wonder when it was first advertised then, when it was first allowed into magazines and then into television.

We're all familiar with Andrex and his puppy and everything.

And I'm old enough to remember the hullabaloo when it was allowed to have female sanitary products, as they call them, advertised on TV.

And everyone said that was the beginning of the end.

That's disgusting.

I don't want to see that.

But presumably, there may have been a similar moment when Lavita Paper was first empathy.

Well, but bizarrely, you never you still never see loo paper or sanitary pads with the thing on them that they're supposed to clear up.

I mean, I wonder if men think that we have blue periods.

Because the only thing you see is a drop of blue.

Well, Picasso has a blue period.

There is one that says for your bums, isn't there?

There was one that has a

but yes, I I thought remember my friend you and I, we we wanted to do women in when we were heavy voiceover performers in the eighties and doing all kinds of adverts and things.

We thought, why don't they do that?

It'd be brilliant.

Wipes your bottle beautifully.

It's all you need.

It just wipes your bottle.

Brilliant.

So, this company is Scott's, who did this role, and they couldn't advertise, I know that much at least.

And they sold it under the counter in the chemists.

So you'd have to go in and they would just kind of even put it on the shelves.

Well, technically, actually, it should have been placed over the counter according to the patent.

Yeah.

And the outside loo would be a string with newspaper in it, as you say, the holes in the Sears cut.

I found a man, this is two years ago, this is in 2016, it was a man who was fined in court after paying for a takeaway with a £10 note that he had printed onto some toilet paper.

It's incredible kutzpa.

He used his computer and he just used a desktop computer and a normal printer and he just put the Leroll into the printer feed.

Wow.

His defense barrister said this is going to be the most expensive takeaway of Mr.

Coburn's life.

Sad.

Is the great achievement of Peter Beseljet, and not Peter, but he's Joseph, I mean, don't I, that is the great achievement of Joseph Beseljet to be undone by the arrival of moist clammy paper?

Because this seems to be now considered unflushable and yet everybody uses it or lots of people use it.

Yes.

Yeah, and there was a report just recently saying there is they did tests, there is no style of moist paper or wipe that that is suitable for our for our sewers without creating blocks that cost millions.

The fat birds, yeah.

Everything, you know, everything has a Everything casts a shadow in this world.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, there is no such thing as a free bottom wipe.

It's got somewhere, hasn't it?

It was the number one cause, I think, they found of those big fat bergs that they were finding in the sewers, as in if you took percentages of what made it up,

the wet wipes, which were largely, I think, more for babies than they are for adults for cleaning nappies.

That's what they found.

And I read that we basically have KFC to blame for that.

Colonel Sanders is the person who took the wet wipe and first introduced it into restaurants, and that's spread around the world.

Yeah, so before we were.

I think that's what you mean.

Another voiceover's coming back to you.

They do make sense, though.

I mean, it is bizarre, and I think people in other countries think we're bizarre that we use dry paper to get rid of that when it makes no sense not to apply water.

I mean, we wash our hands if we think there might be one bacteria on it, and we cover our bottoms with water.

Forward the B-Day.

Well, indeed, yeah.

That's the answer, but not everyone has room for a B-Day.

But what they do have room for, and these are becoming more and more popular, are little installations that are now quite cheap of a Japanese style.

You know, the kind of thing that

you join into your plumbing, it's a seat and you have a remote control, and you press buttons, and it oscillates a jet up the jacksy.

And it has a female setting and a male setting, and it can also offer hot air to dry Sarah or Madam's backside.

And these are becoming more and more popular, considered very healthy.

And of course there is no, nothing goes into the sewer except once you've dropped in there

in nature's way.

So there is, obviously it costs energy because they're electric,

but those are going to be more and more popular.

It's so funny,

just because your voice is so perfect for talking and selling things as you did that, I thought your voice would be fantastic for that.

Would Sir or Madam enjoy

a jet of vagabonds?

There's a great story about one of my heroes, one of my cinematic heroes as well.

Many people's cinematic hero, Billy Wilder, the great

director.

You know, some like it hot.

Yeah.

Hello, Sunset Boulevard, whatever.

Many, many great films.

And I think he was in Paris with Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon and trying to keep control, particularly of Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe.

And his wife, Audrey, whom I met, funnily enough, she told me this story was true,

had said to him, Honey, I want you when you're in Paris to get a proper Parisian bidet.

Because the, you know, the Wolcotts have got one, or whoever whoever it was, some family that she sort of keeping up with the Jones with,

and she felt that they want.

And he said, Sure, honey, I get you, I get you, no problem, no problem.

Anyway, he was so busy, he was so busy in Paris that he just didn't get whole, he didn't even have time to look at a plumbing supply shop and have a bidet shipped over from Paris to Beverly Hills.

And on in the car, on the way to Wassey or whatever the airport was then in Paris, he suddenly remembered and he stopped off at a Bureau de Post to send a telegram

to prepare for disappointment.

He said, Honey, tried everywhere, no B-Days in Paris.

Suggest doing hand-stand-in-chauer.

So that would do it, mightn't it?

I love B-Day, which you might all know this, but is named after a small extinct donkey or horse.

How did you not?

Yeah, so a B-Day is French for this species of small horse and so small that the idea is with a bidet you'd be straddling it like this little

is it a real animal?

Yeah, it's a real animal.

In Italian, the word for bidet translates as hygienic little horse.

Same thing.

But I didn't think it was based on an extinct real animal which people

rode to clean

no like a burrito looks like a little donkey, but yeah, it doesn't mean people ate donkeys in the way they ate burritos.

God, time travelers, when you go back, open the toilet, and there's a corn of cob and there's a donkey.

What am I meant to do here?

This toilet paper that we were talking about, the main fact,

it was shown at the 1878 Paris Exposition and it won the highest prize.

It was seen as such an innovation in

anti-counterfeiting, in actual quality of Lavatri Lou roll.

So the watermark was the maker of the...

It wasn't that you could have it in your own family crest.

It was the watermark watermark of the manufacturer of the rollo that's promo exactly yeah that's who they were right yeah and there's

they made they might because they had amazing inventions in the victorian era i know the travelator i think was there sometimes yeah sometimes it's the simplest inventions that are the best though isn't it you're right yeah we do still all use luroll

we don't use there was a period when they were they called themselves medicated which is a i suspect not a legally enforceable meaningful word but izaw medicated we had at my prep school which was the hideously tissuey one and Bronco.

They claimed to be medicated.

What they were medicated with, I don't know.

DDT, probably.

The first packaged toilet paper was made by Gaieti, Joseph Gaieti, and he called it the therapeutic paper.

Some were named after Queen Victoria.

What an honour.

Victorian brands of toilet paper, I just found a list of a few, and they included things like Bulldog and Samson and Virilla, which is great.

But there were also others called Victoria and Queen and Gloria Victus.

Good.

Can I tell you about one?

Because this is a Victorian invention.

Oh, yeah.

And a Victorian invention that actually was made that I had never heard of before.

But bifocals for horses.

They got these?

So this was in the 1880s, 1887.

Someone went into a pharmacy and said, my horse has gone short-sighted.

I'm a cab driver.

And he's not in the chat.

But the thing is, he likes to read the paper.

Well, he kept walking into things.

He's not getting as many tips as he used to.

And it was actually tried out, and there are pictures of this horse.

There are photographs of this horse wearing these bifocals, which apparently it didn't like at first, but then it refused to go without them.

And it got taken up by handsome cab drivers because what they actually did was make the road seem like it was rising up in the horse's face.

And so they used to pick up their hooves much higher.

And that looked, you know, that was quite posh.

Elegant.

Exactly.

So they started wearing them.

So that actually happened.

It actually happened.

My focal stores, we know, were invented by Benjamin Franklin, weren't they?

Yes,

but not Equine ones.

That's rather splendid.

Another bit of a bizarre invention from the Victorian times.

They used to, if you went to a pub or any kind of restaurant, the opposite of today, smoking, the smell of smoke was actively encouraged and it made the place feel like somewhere you wanted to be, somewhere that was happening.

So a lot of the problem was if a restaurant started its day, it was not full of smoke.

So someone invented an automatic smoking machine.

The machine would have lit cigarettes.

Sort of bellows.

Exactly, and it would come out.

And so the idea is that it would sort of cover the restaurants in this mist of smoke.

And you'd go look in and go, oh, fantastic.

What a happening restaurant.

Wow.

Do we know if that got made?

No, I mean it got made, but I don't know if it was success.

I don't know if they made more than one.

Oh, but they made a a model of it.

That is amazing.

They used to have competitive smoking in pubs in the UK in the early 20th century.

Did they?

Yeah, and you would have a pipe and you'd have to keep it.

Oh, yes, that went on way, way into my lifetime.

To keep it in America, they had it too.

Yeah,

everyone had an identical clay pipe.

The whole point was it had to be sort of controlled.

The clay pipe, and an identical quantity of pipe tobacco.

And it was their job to light it and keep it going for as long as possible.

And staggering how long they, you know, you or I would have just gotten it, it would have gone out in seconds, but they would keep it going for hours and hours, putting their fingers over the top of the bowl and just loading it.

It's lost art.

It is.

I was the very last pipe smoker of the year ever.

Yes.

Yes.

It used to be a very popular thing.

Every year there's a big dinner at the Savoy Hotel, sponsored by Alfred Dunhill, who in those days were primarily tobacconists, now a fashion house, of course.

But their shop in German Street was filled with huge jars of tobacco and they were called your sort.

Snuff and tobacco were called a sort.

So you'd hear someone come in and they'd go, hello, your grace.

So I come in.

have you got any of my sort in at the moment?

Yes.

And their sort would be a mixture of Cavendish and these strange names that these particular types of tobacco had.

And anyway,

it was actually QI.

It was the very first QI.

I agreed to do an interview for the Independent, I think it was, to publicise QI as a new programme.

And I went to the Groucho Club and at the time I had decided to try and cut down cigarette smoking, but I always carried a pipe with me.

I'd always loved smoking, but the first pipe of the day I really enjoyed.

So I had a pipe, and I really felt like smoking, and those days you could smoke anywhere.

And so I lit the pipe, and the photographer was taking pictures of me, and it was on the front of the Independent that next day, or whatever the following week.

And immediately I got a letter from the Pipe Smoking Association.

Shows how desperate they were.

Finally!

Because in the old days, they had Harold Wilson and Eric Morcombe and all these kind of people who could be the pipe smokers of the year, but it was running thin on the ground, Russ Abbott.

And finally,

and I said, well, I don't really regularly smoke, but and they made me a special pipe, which I still have, which is in the shape of a BBC microphone that you can disassemble like the man with the golden gun and various apparatus and turn into a pipe.

And

yeah, it was really, really fun.

So are you technically the reigning?

I am.

Yeah, I am.

Yeah, I think they gave a very special Lifetime Pipe Award to the comedy writer Lawrence Marks, who was also on the board of the Pipe Smoking Association.

And obviously, we all deprecate smoking now, and I don't smoke anymore, and haven't for 12 years, I think it is.

But I sometimes think, you know, when I had a bit of a cancer scare earlier this year, I kind of think, well, if I got my death sentence, I would probably just order a pipe online and a great, you know, big great...

vat of

tobacco and just carry on again.

But I probably wouldn't actually.

It probably tastes awful in my mouth, but it's a memory of that.

But I'm old enough to remember smoking in cinemas, smoking in the tube, smoking on buses, smoking absolutely everywhere, even in church.

You know, there were grand families had their box pews with

brass ashtrays so the squire could have a cigar while listening to the sermon.

But it was short, it was really, I mean, apart from pipes, you know, we think of Walter Raleigh, it was really Oscar Wilde's generation that made cigarettes popular and they were considered very decadent and extraordinary.

And that was in the 1890s, but by 15 years later, virtually or 20 years later, it was in the middle of the First World War, everybody.

No one did it.

I mean, it was just everybody.

But we've only had about a century of it, basically.

Yeah, but now, of course, it looks weird.

You see people doing it in, you know, like, again, that Peter Jackson thing.

You just saw all those Tommies smoking away.

I love those things, which it's like throughout all of history, no one smoked, and then for 100 years, everyone smoked.

And then for the rest of time, no one will smoke again.

So it's just, even though to us it's a normal thing, it's completely unusual in the history of

there's that amazing moment as well that America experienced, and it's covered in an Adam Curtis documentary, Power of Nightmares, I think the documentary is called.

And the idea was that they realized in America that it was only men smoking.

They needed women to smoke as well.

Well, this is Freud's brother-in-law, isn't it?

Yes, it is, yeah.

And the idea was that they empowered the women of America to start smoking, saying that they were something like sticks of freedom or liberty, liberty torches.

There's a famous photograph of them.

He paid for them to walk down fifth avenue with cigarettes yes it's a very famous picture i think yes it's the same member of the freud family who invented bacon and eggs suppose that's right right

yeah he was he was the father of the advertising the father of healthy consumption

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

My fact is that in 1972, a Canadian DJ held a contest to choose a Canadian national simile like As American as apple pie.

The winning entry was as Canadian as possible under the circumstances.

So they don't know what similes are for a start.

Yeah, that's so sweet.

This was a DJ called Peter Zarski, and he was a great Canadian broadcaster, and he hosted shows for decades, and lots of aspects of Canadian life he analyzed and examined.

And he hosted this competition, and a 17-year-old student came up with that slogan as Canadian as possible and weirdly Zarski he just speaking about smoking he once wrote an essay called How to Quit Smoking in 50 Years or Less

Brilliant

I like that

yeah humorists and Canada lots of those Stephen Leacock obviously is famous writing humourist but all those comedians like Dan Aykroyd and Ray Moranis and all the so many of them

yeah they have an unfair reputation don't they for being dull given that they, which I'm not saying I believe, but it is a reputation they have.

Is it?

I think nice but a bit dull.

I remember when I first went to Toronto

years and years and years ago, and I called up my friend and colleague, we were working together all the time then, Hugh Laurie, and he had never been at that point to, and he asked what it was like.

And I said,

I think probably I can best describe how Toronto is by saying that I asked at the front desk what attractions there were to see, and they said, well, there's the Bally Footwear Museum down the street.

And we laughed at that.

And then two days later, I said, I can give you a clearer idea of Toronto now.

I had nothing better to do than go to the Bally Footwear Museum.

But

in fairness, to Toronto, it has improved enormously in that regard.

The foot museum or the whole city?

The whole city.

It won the World Series twice in a row, the Blue Jays, and it became a, you know, and now it's, yeah, it's pretty.

I just spent three months in Niger on the lake, which is a beautiful

town, just on the right on the American border.

Oh, really?

And uh that was that was stunning.

It's and they are very aware of how the world looks at them, and they know that they're a bit over polite and a bit

over s you know.

And do you find they are actually factually like that, aren't they?

I mean there was a study done uh looking at people's Twitter feeds and it was only comparing American and Canadian Twitter feeds, but the preponderance of words on American Twitter feeds were negative things, so like hate and damn and bored and annoying.

And then on Canadian feeds, they're all just saying words like favourite and gorgeous.

Who even says gorgeous anymore?

Great, amazing.

In Ontario, they have the Apology Act that came in in 2009, and that's because people apologise all the time.

And the law now is that an apology is not allowed to be considered an admission of guilt.

Because what would happen is you'd have a little car crash or something.

And the former goes, sorry, sorry.

And they go, well, he said sorry.

That's an admission of liability.

And of course, it isn't because it is just a natural instinct.

That's so good.

Just on the boredom thing, there is a town in Canada called Okatokes.

Has anyone been?

No.

No.

Well, they had a slogan, a tourist slogan, and it was, there are a number of things to do in Okatokes.

Very nice.

And that number is zero.

My friend John Sessions did his post-graduate doctorate at a university in Canada, and he waxes very, very lyrical on his contempt for some of the more dull sides of it.

Back then, in the 80s, I guess, or late 70s, even in his case.

And I happened to be in Oxford at the Oxford.

I was filming there, and there's the Oxford University Press shop on the high or the broad or whatever.

And

I was...

ordering the new Oxford English Dictionary,

the second edition of the whole thing, and

there was a special price

for an early buyer of it.

And it wasn't in the the shop, it was in the depository in Northampton, and they would send it to any address.

And it was, I don't know, £1,200 or something.

It's a huge number of volumes of this massive dictionary.

And I was terribly pleased with it.

And then I was looking round and I saw one of those Oxford books of, you know, you have Oxford books of quotations and so on.

This was the Oxford Book of Canadian Political Anecdotes.

And I thought I must send this to John Sessions.

It was

insane.

What?

How could you fill a book with Canadian political anecdotes?

Anyway, I thought it was most amusing, so I took it up to the front of the desk.

And then who should come into the shop but Jeremy Paxman, who'd been across the road at All Souls, having a lunch, because he was doing a book on the British establishment.

So we wattoed and said hello, and I sort of vaguely knew him.

And

I said, look at this book I've got here.

It's the Oxford Book of Canadian Political Adecdotes.

And he said,

and then the assistant behind the desk said, that'll be 1,217.

And Jeremy Paxman could only see that book.

What?

And I said, oh, yes, very rare book.

I mean, Canadian political owners, Jeremy, come on.

And he was going, are you mad?

And the assistant, bless him, he joined in.

He said, oh, yes, yes, very, very rare.

So I signed it.

And Baxman went off pulling at his hair, doing all those paximony what sort of expressions.

And then

it wasn't until two years later I was filming again in Oxford and I'd been asked to do this spectator diary, you know?

And so I told that story in the spectator diary, and about two days later, I got this furious letter from Jeremy Baxter.

I have been dining out on how mad you are.

Now I discover.

There's something else Canadians are very well known for: is saying A.

Oh, yeah.

Are you alright to nice weather today?

A, but not in that accent, in a Canadian accent.

The Canadian alphabet A, A, B, A.

Exactly.

So the University of British Columbia has an official A lab, which is their syntax of speech lab.

It's where you go if you want to study the linguistics of that kind of thing.

And it's called the A Lab.

That's very good.

Yes, and I think it's first, so it goes back a long time.

It goes back to before Canada was a country at all.

So 1773, it appeared in an Irish play, and you know, Irish people went to Canada, and then it appeared in a book in the 1830s that was completely littered with it.

But yeah, it's weird.

Do you know why they might do that.

So I think there's been a suggestion that there is a small bit of England where there's a similar inflection, and I can't remember where it is actually, but people took it from there.

Because the accent is not dissimilar as it creeps over the border into Wisconsin and North Dakota.

If you think of that movie Fargo and the wonderful Francis McDorman performance of the Gotta Question Your Police work there,

kind of it's got that similar kind of slight.

And there, the reason is supposedly the Scandiwegian input into Wisconsin and that part there.

They're all called Sorensen, in fact, the Bill Macy character was called Gunderson, I think, wasn't he?

They've all got names like that.

The other thing is just the size of the place.

I mean, Canada is big.

Think of America's big, but Canada fans out into greater width and up into the Arctic Circle.

There's a great story, isn't there, of the sort of like a gap year, where a woman writes to her sister, who's Canadian, and says,

My son, your nephew, has got his gap year, and he'll be landing in

Newfoundland.

I wonder if you could pick him up.

And her sister lived in British Columbia.

So she sent a reply back and said, why don't you?

You're nearer.

We are nearer here in Britain to that coast than to Labrador.

I was reading about lumberjacks, classic Canadian.

I love that a female lumberjack is a lumberjill.

I think that's a lovely term.

But I've discovered there's a thing,

clothing, I was reading about their clothing, and there have been lumberjack trousers trousers invented, which I've never seen before.

And the idea is that they are

chainsaw-proof.

You can't chainsaw through them.

And there are videos, yeah, on YouTube of lumberjacks showing you, and they all start the video by going, do not do this at home, do not do this at home, do not do this at home.

And they rev it up, and the chainsaw gets going, and they just slam it down onto their trousers.

And the fabric, it's eight layers of a plastic that are, there's a whole science video you can watch about the beauty of the science of how it works.

And you can watch it immediately get chewed up in the trousers and stall the chainsaw immediately.

It's extraordinary and scary.

You must be the first person to try.

And yet it can fell a true.

Yes, exactly.

You can imagine if accidentally, you know, you were going out and your also lumberjack wife had put out your other pair of trousers that morning.

Just after dinner filming, honey.

Oh, great.

Have fun.

So I was looking up other slogans in Canada and place name slogans.

So Ottawa launched a new slogan in 2001, and the slogan was technically beautiful.

So despite what you're looking at,

what they were trying to say is that it's technologically advanced, it's great, technology, sissy.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, they responded saying the response to the slogan might be described as technically mixed.

I do have to share with you, just on the basis of that, sorry to interrupt, but this thing of getting yourself a phrase, a logo,

a strap line, whatever you want to call it, as a country, a city, a state.

And when I was touring across all the American states for a BBC documentary a lot of years ago, you noticed every time you crossed a state line that they would say, welcome to Mississippi, and it would have its official name, the Magnolia State, and there'd be some phrase like, come play, or something like that, you know.

And the one that I really wanted to congratulate was Kentucky.

Kentucky is probably known for two things.

The bluegrass state is its official nickname, but they wanted a kind of one that expressed what it was to be a Kentuckian.

And you think of two things, you think of the Kentucky Derby and you think of bourbon.

And they came up with a two-word phrase that incorporated both that, both of those two things.

And it's beautiful.

Horse throat, because you'll have a horse throat if you drink bourbon and they have lots of horse notes.

It's unbridled spirit.

Isn't that great?

Isn't that genius?

Whoever thought of that?

Better than yours, Andy.

Did have the case of Maker's Mark.

Yours would have been runner-up, I believe.

Better than horse throat.

You're good.

You've got the idea.

They're weirdly interstate identity, aren't they, though?

And state slogans.

And it really took off in the 20s and 30s, I think.

And they've all got state symbols.

And in fact, I've put down here Mexico, but I think I meant to write New Mexico because Mexico is not a state of America.

New Mexico is the only US state that has, and it's legally enshrined,

a official state question.

And the state question is red or green.

And do you know why?

Is it a game show or something?

No, it's because chili is very important in their cuisine.

And apparently, you know, you ask in a restaurant red or green.

And that's what you go for.

So they've got a state question.

That's good.

We can have like tomato sauce or brown sauce as the first issue.

As Danny Baker does on his show every week.

And I embarrass embarrassed myself by saying I'm afraid I've never had brown sauce.

And I wasn't making a point.

I didn't don't disapprove of brown sauce.

Many of my very closest friends whom I admire in the world regularly buy it.

I just have never tried it.

Have you since tried?

You semi as I've never watched strictly condensing.

It's just one of those things that I've never got round to and I've a very strong feeling I never will.

But it does upset some people because they they get really excited.

Did they bring you brown sauce?

I have since tasted it and it's perfectly nice.

It's slightly vinegary from what it tastes, but it's it makes me cough a bit when you first breathe in, you know.

I think it's because that's two quintessentially British things: steven fry and brown sauce.

It feels like they should be together, hasn't it?

Well, you see, this is it.

Whenever there's a binary question, like tomato ketchup or brown sauce, I will immediately assume there isn't or say mustard.

Really annoy people.

Some more Canadian things, perhaps.

It's very cold in Canada.

Famously.

The coldest they've ever had is minus 62.8 degrees, and that was in a place called Snag in Yukon.

And the residents would walk around like zombies because if they walked too fast, they would get out of breath.

And something to do with the way that the air went meant that you could hear things from a massive distance.

So it's very, very dry air and very, very dense

at one point.

So like as in underwater travel.

Yeah, absolutely.

And it meant that you could hear people talking from five kilometers away.

You could overhear the conversations.

Oh no, with the lots of fallings out, neighbours bitching about people in the next town.

You're walking so slowly that you can't get to them to say, hey.

I have not put on winter weight, thanks very much.

I did a film in Winnipeg once, and that gets to minus 40, which is very, very cold.

I told my father that, and my brother, who was there, said, is that centigrade or Fahrenheit?

My father, who's a physicist, brilliantly came back straight away.

So it doesn't make any difference.

My brother was very cross about this.

He said, what do you mean it doesn't make any difference?

It doesn't make any difference.

He said, but that's ridiculous, of course it makes a difference.

And my father just happened to know and was not giving it away that minus 40 is exactly the same.

Fahrenheit is the one point where they're identical.

So it's when it's minus 40, it doesn't make any difference

which you're using, Celsius or Fahrenheit.

I hope he never revealed.

No, he was the kind of person who, if it got cold in the kitchen, would open the fridge, you know, like a true physicist

to warm the room.

And those of us who are superstitious about these things would go, but surely it's going to make the room colder.

He'd go, don't you know anything about thermodynamics?

It can only make it warmer.

I was wondering about national stereotypes and across the world and how old they are.

And partly because I'm reading Martin Chuzzlewit at the moment, which has amazing descriptions of Americans in it.

And it's just so interesting that his descriptions are hilarious and exactly what you'd describe.

Very satirical.

They're so satirical.

So it's brilliant.

So one of my favourite scenes is where Martin has just gone to America, spoiler, and he's hanging out with Americans for the first time and he's astonished at how much they eat and how fast they eat.

And I just loved his quote that said, the poultry,

there was a turkey at the top, a pair of ducks at the bottom and two fowls in the middle, disappeared as rapidly as if every bird had had the use of its wings and had flown in desperation down a human throat.

He was sadly disappointed in America, though, Dickens, wasn't he?

Inasmuch as there's that wonderful bit in Chuzzlewit, do you remember, have you come up to it yet?

The Water Toast Society.

Yes.

Which is really

the Watertoast Society is an American Fenian society,

a Home Rule for Ireland society.

And Chuzzlewit has invited him as someone who apparently believes in Home Rule for the Irish and all the Americans

say how cruel the lion of Albion with its paws and its claws tearing at the throat of the free Irish and the Watertoast Society exists to

spread the gospel of freedom for all people.

And Chuzzlewick got up and said, yes, and I know you must all feel the same about

your slaves and your Indians.

And there was a terrible silence.

And they burned the water toast meeting hall down to the ground, and the society is never heard of again.

And it's Dickens really having a go at the fact that Americans are all very good at saying how tut, tut, tut, look at you and Ireland, but the moment the torch was

back on them,

yeah, the hypocrisy of it is amazing.

And he as well, just speaking of in the first fact about anti-counterfeit measures of the watermark, wasn't a large part of his life dominated by stopping the copying of his books and the reselling and that took a huge part of his and a large part of his hatred for America again because that's where it was and he tried to get Twain and even his very first book when he was a young man who'd never been heard of and he was just doing the text to a famous illustrator and he did the text to the proceedings of the Pickwick Club and slowly it just took off and everyone said who is this writer the right yes the drawings are very nice but the writing.

Before it had even finished its syrupized form, there were the Pinklewick papers, the Piggyweek Chronicles.

There were so many of these

pirate versions floating around, and Dickens was always furious at that.

Yes, yeah.

I love the idea of sort of back alley editions of Dickens.

You think you're buying some uncut pickwick.

You get it home and open the papers, and it turns out you've got some Pinklewick.

If you read the diaries of the James family, for example, Henry James and his brother William, William, the famous psychiatrist or psychologist, I mean,

and the Alcotts and all the New England literary families, they would gather together on a Sunday

and the previous Saturday, one of them would have gone down to the docks to get the latest Dickens and they would arrive in bundles and they would be cut open and you would, you know, you race home with it, bring as many people around from, you know, who are of a similar literary bent or were excited and read the next chapter.

And it was like the most exciting thing.

And Henry James talks about remembering this as a boy sitting under the table.

And in particular, the one that we now most laugh at, or is probably least regarded as a great Dickens novel, is

The Old Curiosity Shop, partly because of Oscar Wilde's famous comment: that you have to have a heart of stone to read of the death of Little Nell without laughing.

But they were so excited about Little Nell that

there was a riot at the docks in Boston.

Everyone shouting, is Nell dead?

Is Nell dead?

And it was like,

you know, later on there was the JR in Dallas, and there have been such things, and I guess people want to know what the finale of this Game of Thrones episode is, but really nothing touched that extra extraordinary effect.

And am I right in saying they people on the ship actually announced it.

It wasn't even the point of taking it home and reading.

Someone said...

It's ultimate spoiler.

Yes, ultimate spoiler.

Yeah, Lil Nell die, yeah.

Bill Hayden is the mole.

Collar defect.

A horrible experience for our listeners.

Don't broadcast those.

Don't broadcast those.

We need to get a new captain of this ship.

This guy is really good at the narrator in the murderer of Roger Aykroyd, who does the murder.

Oh, God.

Policeman in Erkorporo's Christmas.

Steve Emma.

Somebody unwind him.

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

Yes, my fact this week is that the scholar who first discovered that the Noah's Ark story predates the Bible got so excited by it that he stripped off his clothes and ran naked around the British Museum.

And this was just how thrilling it was.

This was in 1853, and this amazing discovery was made, which was basically the palaces of

this great Assyrian king and the Library of Nineveh.

And this person found them, and then this scholar called George Smith back in the British Museum who was a very devout Christian translated this tablet and realized this is the Noah story and freaked out and apparently took some clothes off and ran around the museum.

But it was fair enough because it was a big deal.

Yeah, the excitement was so great for him.

That was his only way of expressing.

He wasn't a nudist, basically.

It was just

too much in the moment.

I'm certain he was completely stark as he may have.

I think he took off some clothes, some sources say.

You know, maybe you kept his willy in.

I tell you what, though, they get excited about things in very odd ways at the British Museum.

I have a friend who James and I know, and I think, Stephen, you might have met him.

He's called Irving Finkel.

Yeah, the great, the great, yeah, the great, the great wedge, the cuneiform.

The cuneiform, yeah.

And I was behind the scenes with him at the museum, and he showed me a sort of a cast of the tablet, the cuneiform Noah's Ark tablet, that he used to study because he actually studied it further, decoded certain aspects of it that had not been seen before, which was the actual measurements from Noah's Ark and they recreated it, which is amazing.

But while we were sitting there at the very beginning of our meeting, he suddenly got an email and jumped up from a seat and he went, quick, run.

And we ran through the corridor.

I was chasing him.

Were you naked at the time?

No,

all but I wasn't.

He was a magnificently bearded individual by the way.

But so he sort of ran down the corridor and then he cut into the kitchen and we stopped.

And I said, what happened?

And he said, There's just been an announcement: there's orange juice in the fridge for any member of staff.

And he said, You've got to be quick, everyone gets to it before I do.

And we quickly had two cups and went back into his room.

So that is classic academic.

When I first went to Cambridge to do an interview at Cambridge, I saw these two old dons in black gowns, and I thought, I'll follow them and I'll hear them talking about Aristotle or something really, really intellectual.

And one of them was saying, No, no, it comes in a small packet about the size of a single-play record, a 45 RPM record.

And it's full of comminuted little pieces that come to life when you pour boiling water in them.

And I assure you, it's singularly toothsome.

A chicken noodle.

The company is called Nor with a K, a silent K.

And that's what they were talking about.

I was thinking, wow, that's not what I expected.

But it was very pleasing.

But so this academic, what was his name?

Do you know his name?

George Smith.

George Smith.

And was it the

cognitive dissonance isn't quite the word?

Was it the shock that the Bible might not, story might not be true or that it is true, but

as the Bible says

it's confusing because he was pleased, whereas I would have thought, yes, how shocking, but I think it was almost like, good, this is verifying that the Bible was the truth, perhaps.

He was obsessed with these tablets.

Yes.

Because, of course, the Greeks also, around the same time, they had a flood myth, Deucalion and Pyrrhus.

Yes.

And the same thing, they had a wooden chest.

It's called in the way it's translated, but it might as well be called an ark, because an ark is a chest as much as it is anything else.

The Ark of the Covenant is a chest, after all.

It's a strange word.

And so the Deucalian Empyru, Pyrrha was the daughter of Pandora, the first woman.

So it's a very early thing that mankind displeased the gods and they sent the flood.

And Deucalion and Pyrrha survived because they were warned about it.

And then when they landed, it wasn't on, well, we think now Mount Ararat, supposedly the ark landed, don't they?

So many people believe Noah's Ark was on Mount Ararat.

But it landed somewhere

and they were told by Athena, I think it was, they were told to throw the bones of their mother over their shoulders.

And they didn't know what that meant, and they were very confused.

And they said, no, the bones of my mother, it's stones of Mother Earth.

So they threw stones, and wherever Pyrrha threw a stone over her shoulder, a woman sprang up out of the ground and wherever.

Teukeley and a man sprang up.

So it's one of those autochthonic stories.

But you don't want to take that literally, accidentally.

But it's a similar thing of

a punishment.

And the

Philemon and Baucis stories also, another flood.

So they exist, there are at least two versions in Greek myth, many others in other Mediterranean myths, Sumerian, Arcadian,

Babylonian, yes.

I mean, I think these guys stole a lot from the Babylonians, in fact, the Assyrians, so they probably got it.

But yeah, they all would have been passed down by the city.

Is it like that 5000 BC, was it, when there was all those civilizations, the Mayans and

all these cities suddenly were evacuated.

These great,

there seems to have been a plague that was common across early civilizations.

How amazing is that?

It's passed down.

Yes,

and of course, yeah, that's.

But this myth is particularly bizarre.

So this is how the Assyrian myth had it in the library at Nineveh when they found it.

And I didn't realize, this is in the epic of Gilgamesh, so the very famous discovery, most famous discovery that was made there.

And the belief, the story as it was told, was that there was this huge flood.

And before the flood, then

God had delivered all his messages to people via these fish, these weird fish creatures.

So they were right near the Persian Gulf, and the idea was these huge fish creatures used to come out of the Persian Gulf in the day, and they'd go and they'd tell the Assyrians what to do.

They'd be like, don't drink that, be nice to your mum, etc.

And then this huge flood came, and it basically poisoned the fish creatures, so they never came back.

And after the flood, there was lots of disease, because it, you know, floods will cause disease, and it was thought that was part of the gods' punishment.

And from that moment onward, the gods stopped visiting them with these fish creatures.

And so, yeah, that was the thing.

And that was why you had to have human scholars who were the ones who then received messages from the gods via strange treasures.

And in the Hebrew myth as well, it's the same thing.

God provides a rainbow at the end

as a covenant that he will not interfere again.

So it also marks the slight withdrawal of God from the people of Israel, his chosen people.

At that moment, he's slightly more distant, apart from a few prophets.

It's like a show creator handing over

Russell T.

Davis to Stephen Moffat in the Dom De Hoo series.

So is the vibe not, all right, fine, if that's how you want to do it, I'll leave you to it.

Is it a bitter kind of god saying, fine, whatever, get on with it then?

There's still some things that are punished, and in the same way that

the real punishment is a transgression of zenya in Greek mythology, which is the guest friendship and the honour you do as a host to a stranger who comes to your door.

And that's really what the story of Philemon and Baucis is about, and that's why they're visited with a flood, because everyone in the village turns away Zeus and Hermes, who appear as travellers, except this old couple who welcome them.

And that actually is closer to the story of Lotton, his wife, in the sins, you know, the city of the plain, Sodom and Gomorrah.

If you remember, angel, angels come, you know, looking puzzled as if you haven't read the Bible lately.

Front to back.

That front to back is the way to do it, isn't it?

You certainly have heard of Sodom and Gomorrah.

And what happens is angels come, go to, they hear about what a wicked city the cities of the plain are at the bottom of the Dead Sea.

They still see signs when you travel down the road there to Jordan saying Sodom that way.

Very pleasing.

But anyway, yeah, the angels arrived

and were treated very, very rudely, and even more rudely by one particular citizen of Sodom who wanted to know the angel.

And that is where the phrase to know them in the biblical sense comes from.

In other words, he tried to seduce this angel.

Hence, Sodomy, Sodomite, and the whole idea that Sodom was this place, because of that one reference in in the Bible of someone who wanted to know the angel

and they punished the city with fire and they and except for the holy couple just like Deucan and Berkis who were I mean

Philemon Baikus who were Lot and his wife and and they were allowed to but they mustn't look back and it was exactly the same in the Greek myth there's no new stories they're all boys sticking into each other well Stephen you said that they have the the rainbow at the end of Noah's yes he sends that as a covenant doesn't he yeah he then according to Genesis Genesis, he began to be a husbandman and planted a vineyard.

Noah's vineyard, yes.

He then drank the wine and was drunken, and he was uncovered within his tent.

So he basically, once he finished, he got drunk and got naked.

That's what you do.

Well, we see finally a story in the Bible to which everyone can relate.

Donna Noah.

You know the fish creature that you're talking about.

So I'm going off memory here, but depictions I've seen of it is it's a sort of reverse mermaid.

It's a fish head with legs.

So

it was a partial human-based thing, and it's used as those ancient alien kind of things that that was a higher knowledge that was coming to educate and create these amazing civilizations at the time.

Yeah, no one keen on that mind of chat.

Great, all right.

There's no such thing as a fish man.

It's interesting though, because of course all the evangelists who

became part of the temperance movement at the end of the 19th century

believed everything in the Bible, but

they had to rule out wine.

And wine is unquestionably approved of throughout the Bible.

Not only is Noah the first example of it, but Christ's first miracle is turning water into wine at the wedding of Canaan.

So it is clear, and indeed, obviously, the Last Supper and everything that becomes so it's quite difficult to

believe in all the Bible, but decide that alcohol is terrible because you clearly vindicate that.

Weren't there some translations where they changed it to grape juice and problems like that?

Yes,

imagine what kind of bore you'd have to be to make the Bible less sexy.

Very well.

Awful having to talk to these people.

This guy, George Smith, who deciphered the cuneiforms, so he's an amazing guy because he left education at the age of 14.

He became an engraver of banknotes at the Bank of England.

So as a result, he had an incredible eye.

He could detect incredible details in banknotes that he was engraving that other people couldn't spot.

And also, he was obsessed with these cuneiform tablets.

so he he firstly you know he delivered this lecture saying the Noah's Ark story is a Hebrew adaptation of a much older story which created huge controversy because it was quite soon after on the origin of species it was another way of you know it was another way geology was also doing its damnedest to undermine everything yeah what yes was it Ruskin called those damned hammers yeah chipping away at every truth that was understood so he was kind of a controversial figure but then the the amazing thing was in this tablet that he had translated uh of the Noah's Ark story there was a section that was missing there were about 17 lines that were missing from the the tablet just ended there and the Daily Telegraph offered a thousand guineas to whoever found this missing 11 lines of cuneiform tablet obviously with him in mind because he was the expert he knew all about it and he went there he went to what is now Mosul which is where the the library

and it was where the the mod the library had been of king sennakarib is that it?

Was it

where the library of King Ashurbanipal had been.

And he got to the site of the library.

It was a huge site.

It was about three miles across the whole city.

And so it was like looking for a, you know, it really was needle and haystack stuff.

He looked

and he went to the pit of the old library.

It's the likeliest place he'd find it.

And he found that it had been used as a quarry and it was a complete mess of rubble.

You know,

different fragments from all over, all different centuries.

But he started looking, and the amazing thing was, he found it.

He found a tiny.

He must have known it.

Only he could have found it.

Yeah, exactly.

He found the 17 lines which completed the Noah's Ark story, and he brought it back.

Let's see a naked man running back out of the quarry.

Wow, fabulous.

Yeah.

Imagine that feeling.

Wow.

Yeah.

And also, that's kind of a nice mirroring of actually what happened in terms of collecting the information for the library at the time.

So in the Assyrian culture.

So this is like 3,000 years ago, and Ashur Banipal wanted to collect all human knowledge ever at that point.

And he'd collect all these tablets and went and got scholars to write them.

And if there was something missing, he'd say, oh, there's this story that I've heard about and I don't have it.

He'd put a call out to everyone in his kingdom saying, everyone go hunting.

So all the Assyrians knew what he was looking for, and there'd be a reward.

And they'd just go scouting out for that.

And it's one of the biggest kind of kingdoms that had ever existed, right?

It was all of North Africa.

All of Middle East, all the way across.

Yeah, it was huge.

And Senegal was after him or before him?

Before him was his father.

He was destroyed.

There was that famous Byron poem, isn't there?

The destruction of Sennacherib.

The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold.

His curls were shining in scarlet and gold.

Oh, really?

How was he?

Well, he was killed.

It's called the destruction of Sennacherib, I think.

Oh, really?

Someone listening will know.

Aren't the Assyrians named after Noah's grandson?

Isn't Assyria?

Oh, Ashon, yeah.

Asher.

It's Asher.

One of the tribes, isn't it?

Yeah, Asher.

And that's where Assyria, or Assyrian, comes from.

So there's

staring us right in the front.

Semite.

So

and as in Hamshem and

if you're anti-Semitic, technically it means you don't like Arabs as as much as anything because they are before the split from A between Abraham and Ishmael, who were the t patriarchs of the two different peoples.

There was Abraham and Ishmael.

Ishmael went out and founded the Arab people as it were, and Abraham

was the patriarch of the Jewish people.

Wow.

So you're even more prejudiced than you actually thought.

They also had with the cuneiform tablets something interesting.

They were used constantly, so they wouldn't fire them and make them a solid because they wanted to reuse them.

So once a tablet had been read, they could remold it and make it better.

But what that meant was, if they were ever attacked, the Assyrians, and let's say their places were burnt down, by burning down their libraries, they were actually preserving their information because the clay would be fired up.

Baked, yeah.

Yeah.

So they would bake the information into

that's the whole reason.

The whole library at Innevar, the reason it survives, is because of that.

It's such a funny irony and it's such a good thing because the Assyrians were eventually taken down by the Babylonians and the, I think it's they're like from the Iranian area, current day Iranian, the Medes.

And the Babylonians, yes.

Medes, yeah.

The Medes.

Medes.

The Medes and Persians were the two groups that made up the

Medes.

As in Dorothy Parker's famous remark.

One man's Mede is another man's Persian.

Oh, well, maybe she'd argue with,

I think, I can't remember who was saying this, but the Medes weren't particularly cultured.

So the Babylonians would have taken these tablets and preserved them and gone, Oh my god, this is learning.

But the Medes just went, Soda, let's burn the whole thing down.

And then, ironically, they managed by doing that to completely preserve them forever.

So in your face.

And they're so revealing, aren't they, about what it is to be human, because like almost all ancient forms of writing, 95% of it is taxation and accounting

and storage of grain.

But then you get this fabulous bit, the bit that Irving Finkel is so excited by, the children's, the equivalent of the exercise book, where you have the little clay tablets that he has in the British Museum, which you can go and see, which are children writing insults about their teachers and things like that as they're practicing.

I mean, it's just delicious.

It's real insight.

It's just fabulous.

There is one story which I haven't found anyway.

I've found it in one source only, and it's, so I think it's not true, but it's of a clay bottle, and there was an apprentice at the British Museum who would not rest until he had deciphered this inscription on the bottle, and it turned out to read, please replace stopper in bottle.

90% sure it's a joke.

That's like that wooden post that had toti emul esto written on it.

Three

four letter words, toti emul E-M-U-L

Esto.

And but look, that's it.

Sort of looks Latin.

Simul, so why emul?

But esto is not quite right.

Late Latin, maybe pig Latin, might have esto, toti, all, something.

And at some point I said, no, that's to tie mules to.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that the rarest frog in England has a distinctive Norfolk accent.

Very pleasantly now.

I've heard of birds having local accents.

Yeah.

Frog.

Well, actually, there's a.

I'm sure you can tell us about the Californian Western literal frog.

Oh, the one which you hear in Holland.

Yeah, the only frog that actually goes ribbet.

Yes, yes.

Because it was used by sound recordists to do backgrounds for the jungle and everything, wasn't it?

Is that right?

I think I saw that on QI.

I think it was on QI.

That's my memory.

So this is the Northern Pool Frog.

It was extinct

England, in Norfolk, and they found out doing 10 years of research that they had this distinctive call,

which is common to the Norfolk area.

It's a unique accent, and that and some genetics made them realise that it was endemic to Norfolk, which meant that they could bring it back, and they've just recently put it back into some pools in Norfolk.

Wonderful in the broads or the fens, presumably.

Yeah, in the broads, yeah.

Very satisfying.

And does it bear any resemblance to the Huban Norfolk accent?

It's just a slightly deeper rivet, I think.

I have one single comment about it being fonder of its sister than most frogs, and I want it very cross indeed.

So humans can tell if frogs are excited or not.

This is a really interesting thing.

So

humans can tell basically if almost all vertebrates really are excited or not.

So this was an experiment done by a scientist.

They played recordings of aroused and non-aroused frogs.

And aroused just means

stimulated in some way.

It's Nervous.

Angry some people.

Exactly, yeah.

And this was people who spoke different languages as well.

So it was, I think, some English and some Mandarin and some of a third language.

And 90% of them could tell which the aroused ones were.

And the reason that we think this is, is because we think there are universal vocal elements.

So when we're excited or as it's, we speak higher and faster.

And frogs do the same thing.

So we think there are vocal signals that are the same, even in different taxa, which is very interesting thing.

Yeah, that's really interesting.

But frogs are a sort of index species for all kinds of the health of wetlands and everything.

Tens of thousands of...

And there's a rune,

whatever it is, a raniform virus at the moment that's threatening frogs everywhere.

Yeah,

they're terribly sad, yeah.

Yeah, they're all dying.

Like everything is.

And also, we're running out of ponds.

Yes, in the UK.

Let alone natural wetlands, the good old suburban ones, you mean?

Yeah, there are half as many ponds in the UK than there were 50 years ago.

Norfolk has lost 8,000 ponds since the 1950s.

I'll have you know my parents have a pond in Norfolk.

Excellent.

Does it have frogs?

It does have frogs and it frogspawn and it's always rather amazing and they try and protect the frog spawn from the various predators that like to eat it.

But if you combine two ponds into one larger pond you have technically destroyed a pond.

So is it possible there are

just one massive lake?

I know it seems unlikely.

I don't think that's what's happened.

I don't think Norfolk is now one huge lake and no other ponds.

Well, definitely, when I was a boy, you definitely, I mean, sort of virtually every day, my brother and I who had nothing better to do, would go and hunt for sticklebacks and newts and all those sort of creatures.

Well, every village would have a pond, and most farms would have a pond because it's where you would get your water from.

They don't really have a lot of money.

Yeah, like a chitty-jitty-bang-bang one, you know, the one that Trudy Scrumptious gets stuck in in her car.

That sort of one, you know, ducks.

Was it in Norfolk where there's that myth about a lake where the reflection of the moon is in it?

And the myth was that they used to tell visitors to the area that they'd been trying to catch that big white thing in the middle of the lake for years and they should have a go because they just couldn't get it.

And it was their trick they played.

Was that from Wiltshire?

And Wiltshire.

Somerset.

It's one of those ones.

It's in whichever county you happen to be talking about.

Don't confuse Norfolk with the language with Norfolk, which is N-O-R-F-U-K, which is a language spoken on Norfolk Island.

Oh, it's good.

Oh, just off Australia.

In In the Pacific, yeah.

And it's a blend of 18th century English and Tahitian.

That's it.

Yeah.

Don't confuse it.

Do you think people are showing up

going, hey, you got a light bulb?

No, that's the wrong accent for it.

On the Bald City.

Do you know where you can find a Norfolk accent, not in Norfolk, is in parts of New England.

Because so when the Pilgrim Fathers went over and say there, a lot of them are from East Anglia, a lot from Norfolk, and there are certain quirks of the accent, New England accent, that are only seen in Norfolk, so I think, and a few phrases.

One of them was good on you, apparently.

Good on ya.

Good on you.

Another one was how much did you give for it?

As opposed to how much did you pay for it, which apparently is a quintessentially Norfolk thing.

And the do you, the, I don't know whether sort of progressive present is really peculiar when the do you not not as a question but as a as an invitation or even a command do you sit down meaning sit down yeah that's weird do you come in do you come in or you must be cold do you come in

that just means come in

Or there's do meaning if, which is a very strange Norfolk thing.

Say, you want to come in, do you'll get cold?

Really?

The do means if you don't.

Oh, my goodness.

Oh, wow.

And yeah, my sister's nanny was from Norfolk, and I used to enrage her.

No, not really.

She was

but, you know, sort of tease her and things like that.

And she'd say, you stop behaving, do I'll tell your father?

Do I'll tell your father?

Really?

It's very, very extraordinary.

I read a really funny blog on the the British Library website.

So, the British Library have done this amazing thing, which is they want to preserve dialects before they all disappear.

So, they've got loads of volunteers over the last few years to go and record things that they say in their own local dialect.

And they've kept these recordings that you can go online, it's brilliant.

Go to it, it's called the Evolving English Word Bank.

Oh, wonderful.

But it's really great.

The only problem with it is the kind of people who are going around the British Library and volunteering stuff are, you can tell when you listen to the recordings, they're not the kind of people who are using the streak slang of the modern day.

So you have, I listened to one, it's so good.

It's this obviously really learned, nervous-sounding, nerdy old man that says,

I've got two examples of words I'd like preserved that are used by pupils at a school in Oxford where I'm from.

The first word is bear, spelled B-A-R-E, which now means a lot.

And the second word is jokes, that is jokes, which is now used as a word meaning fun.

And then he gave an example.

He said, so a pupil in school recently wrote, I am a seed.

He was learning about germination.

I am a seed.

And when it's winter, I don't sprout because there's bare snow on the ground.

But if I wait until it's warm, everything will be jokes.

And it's just if that's what's preserved as to how people are using bare and jokes in the future.

That's great.

There is an amazing book, which this is more just for people listening right now.

Susie Dent.

Oh, wonderful Susie.

Yeah, She wrote this book.

She wrote a fantastic book recently, which was she went to every sort of, she went to hang out with builders and

people who work in transport and the current slang being used by all of them she documented down in this book.

So it's sort of fresh slang, preserving a time.

It's a really beautiful book.

Very important that I was.

I love books on thieves, cant and those sort of slangs of the 17th century and onwards.

And

I want to just memorialise the great Dennis Norden, because you reminded me of a story he told.

You remember the great comic writer who died in his late 90s just recently.

He told me this famous story.

When he was at school, he had a very good English teacher, very advanced for his day.

I mean, this is way back in the 20s and 30s, 20s, I guess.

And

he said, right, we're going to do words that reinforce meaning class.

And they were going, reinforce what sentence is.

Londoner, it's a pretty poor ordinary school in the East End where Dennis grew up.

And he said,

I'll illustrate this by telling a story of these two road builders, navvis, you know, and one of them sees us a poster on the wall and it says, One man, one vote.

He goes, What's that about?

And his mate says, Well, I mean, it means one man, one vote, doesn't it?

He said, Well, I don't get it.

One man, one vote.

How does that

mean you've got one man?

You've got one vote.

No, no, I still don't get it.

One fucking man, one fucking vote.

Oh.

Oh!

That's what it sounds like.

Good way to seem cool in front of your pupils telling that story, I think.

As soon as you drop a swear word as a teacher, you've got their respect.

Well done.

Because every generation thinks they've invented it.

Yes.

That's the extraordinary thing.

You know, the idea that one's grandfather was saying the F-word all the time in the trenches.

Yeah.

Which I remember being so shocked by when I read Goodbye to All That, you know, the Robert graves uh and he he he thought he'd heard all the swearing he could ever hear at school you know in the showers as it were after the rugby game and he said the first moment he he he was you know training with with other uh cadets and listening to ncos and sergeants and he just never imagined people would swear that much grown-ups and uh and of course that's you don't see that

sanitized version just as you don't see them wiping their bottoms away

we've got better things to do obviously but it is important to remember because certainly someone of my generation thinks of the First World War as one's grandfather's generation.

Obviously, most people listening are far too young to that.

They'd be your great-grandfathers and possibly even great-great-grandfathers.

But I knew people.

At my school, there were people who fought in the First World War.

And to my eternal shame, I remember this man, Mr.

Sordon, who shook his hands all the time and slightly gaped with his mouth.

And he was the brother of the headmaster's wife.

And

we teased him mercilessly.

And then one day, one of the masters said to me, You do know he won a military cross in the First World War.

He was one of the bravest men you will ever meet.

And he was destroyed by watching a whole trench of his friends blown up in front of his eyes.

I just remember thinking, oh dear.

Mocking him and doing his own imitating him with his trembling hands.

So obviously we think of them as a very extraordinary generation, but you don't think of them as just like us.

It's so important.

We do think that.

They did swear, they did live colourful lives, as Peter Jackson shows, literally colourful in every sense.

Yeah, that that was brilliant, wasn't it?

The Peter Jackson thing.

If anyone didn't see it, it's amazing when you see war suddenly with a blue sky.

Yes, yes,

so

counterintuitive.

You just thought it's going to be mucky and dark, but yeah,

they fought on sunny days.

We should wrap up shortly.

We can.

We can do one last thing.

Go on, Andy.

It's got a frog, it's a cool frog, and I didn't want to mention the frog.

Have you heard of the Northern Spring Peeper?

Nope.

No.

Okay, so

it's very cool.

um

it lives in ponds and the temperature frequently drops below freezing.

Problem.

But the frog hibernates and it has a it has evolved a way to stay alive while it has frozen.

Um

the temperature inside it, if it gets to minus two or three Celsius, the frog can survive because the water inside it is super cooled, so it's still liquid.

If it gets any colder than that, it's still not a problem.

The water under the frog's skin freezes and its stomach becomes a solid ball of ice.

So about half the water inside the frog freezes.

It can survive for a week like this.

And it's because, so normally the problem is you get ice crystals inside your cells and the cells rupture and you die.

That's what happens.

As soon as the ice crystals start to form inside the frog, the frog's liver goes into an emergency rapid response action.

It produces a load of glucose in its crystal.

Yeah, it spreads it throughout the body and it prevents the crystals forming in the cells.

But the glucose levels in its core organs shoot up 50 times as much.

Wow.

As soon as the first ice crystal forms, the frog's liver goes, ah, we're freezing.

Wow.

React.

I wonder if you get an alcoholic frog who's got liver damage, whether it's less good.

Incipient diabetes as well, let me tell you.

Wow.

Well, I'll, I mean, I've got a story to tell about a frog, and if you've come to this, because it's really not very sound.

But it's

there's a librarian who's busy, and she, a hen comes in into the library and goes, boop!

and uh the librarian thinks okay and grabs a book and gives it to her

and and the hen goes off and and then the hen comes back really quite you know a few hours later and goes

and gives her three books and two under one wing and one under the other and off goes the hen and then the hen comes back and goes

and has dumps the three books that had been given and so she gives another six books and it's lunchtime the librarian thinks I've got to see this extraordinary literary hen

and follows it down the street down little alleyways and then

into a door, and the door's left open.

And so the librarian watches the hen with these books tucked under its wing, going all the way up to the top of the stairs and into a room.

The door's closed, but the librarian kneels down and looks through the keyhole.

And there on the bed is a frog with a little spotty bandage around its forehead and a thermometer in its mouth.

And the hen takes the thermometer out and reads it and then hands the book to the frog.

And the frog says, Read it.

Read it.

Oh, that's a fantastic fact to end on.

True story.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've 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.

Stephen.

At Stephen Cry.

Might get some followers off this.

I'm hoping.

And Chaczynski.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account at No Such Thing or go to our website, no such thingasoffish.com, where we have all of our previous episodes.

You should also go to bookshops and to Amazon and wherever you can get books to get Stephen's new book, which is Heroes.

It's the story of the Greek myths.

It's an amazing book.

And yeah, definitely get it for everyone for this Christmas.

That's all right.

Okay, that's it.

We'll be back again next week.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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