240: No Such Thing As An Easy Tweet

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Hi, everyone.

Before we start this week's show, I want to introduce to you our special guest, and that is...

Hello.

No, not you, Dan.

I want to introduce our special guest.

His name is Paul Smith, and he is the lead singer of one of my very, very most favorite bands in the whole world, Maximo Park.

And actually, he has an album out this very day.

Yes, it's called Diagrams.

You can get it at PaulSmithMusic.eu.

It's an awesome album.

And we actually know Paul because we did his podcast last year to promote our book, The Book of the Year.

And our new book has come out exactly the same time as his album.

So we thought, why not reunite?

Let's make it an annual thing.

We'll make it an annual thing.

So, if you want to buy that book to help us get another one so we can meet Paul again, do go to amazon or no such thingasafish.com.

There's links there.

We'd love it if you'd get our book as well.

On with the podcast.

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

My name is Dan Schreiber, and I am sitting here with Anna Chaczynski, Andrew Hunter-Murray, James Harkin, and special guest: it's the lead singer of Maximo Park, Paul Smith.

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

Starting with fact number one, and that is Paul.

The studio that made A Hard Day's Night demanded the Beatles' voices be dubbed because they thought Americans wouldn't understand their accents.

So good.

And just for context, they were massive at that point, weren't they, in America?

They were, and that's why the film was actually commissioned.

United Artists gave them, I think it was...

£200,000.

And I don't know what the equivalent of that is these days, but it's still not a great deal to make a feature film.

And they thought, well, we'll sell loads of records off the back of this terrible movie that will probably bomb.

And it ended up being one of the biggest movies ever.

Yeah, so it was a loophole, wasn't it?

It was a loophole for the movie company because it meant that they were able to release a Beatles album outside of the recording studio contract.

So they actually bought a Beatles album for an incredibly low sum of money.

Yeah.

And it wasn't dubbed in the end.

It wasn't dubbed in the end.

You don't hear Deep South accents, do you, in Hard Days Night?

Not that I know of.

So, Paul, you must sell records in America, right?

Just about.

Can they understand anything that you say?

I'm very charming abroad, apparently.

Right, okay.

After the shows, you know, you get the usual, oh, I love your British accent, and that kind of thing.

And it's, it's, you know, I don't have a traditional British accent, so around America, I get a lot of, hey, you're, you sound really Scottish.

And I go, well, I'm nearly in Scotland.

I live in Newcastle, it's the last big city before you get to Scotland.

Yeah, you get people, I think Americans sometimes will, you know, say a scouser is an Australian or Liverpodlin's, you know, from South Africa.

They're pretty wacky with where they guess we're from.

But Scouser's accent is particularly hard for people to get, isn't it?

It's like a really hard accent for non-Liverpudlians to understand.

So, for instance, Jamie Carragher did a documentary, so he's Liverpool footballer.

He did a documentary a few years ago called Being Liverpool, and they even subtitled that for the UK audience.

That's amazing.

No way.

I'm afraid so.

Wow.

So on the accent thing, so the Beatles, they did have, I didn't know this, their own cartoon, which ran for about four years in the mid-sixties, but none of the Beatles had any part in it whatsoever.

So none of them sounded like themselves because they were all voiced by other people.

So apparently George sounded Irish, or maybe Scottish.

John Leonard sounded American.

Paul sounded like a PG Woodhouse character.

They just bore no relation to what they were like.

Wow.

Well, they did sing in American accents, didn't they?

Like a lot of bands.

But like, if you listen to early Beatles, they sound American.

And then in later Beatles albums, they go more British sounding.

More liver puddling sounding, they go.

More liver puddle and sounding, exactly.

And I think because American is A, it's a bit easier to understand the words because Americans drag their words out more and they have the like rhotic saying they're R's.

And also it was just where all the rock and roll was at.

Yeah,

all their influences were American.

There were no.

But also it was a good way to sell to a market that was used to listening to American music.

Whereas once they were well established enough, by the time they got to Sergeant Pepper's, then they'd have things like, you know, it's getting better all the time.

Gutting butter all the time.

Does that go the W, that?

That's what the song sounds like.

So, in the first studio album, they pronounced their R's 47% of the time, and by the time they were doing Let It Be, it was 3% of the time.

But statistics.

And then they went around the other side where now Ringo sounds like he lives somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Yeah.

Because he's lived in America for a long time and has obviously lives in a celebrity bubble, which is fine.

That's no criticism.

I would probably probably be living in that bubble as well if I was Ringo.

But yeah, it's like little.

Yeah, I had a little

D's instead of T's kind of thing.

Yes.

Just out of curiosity, because I know sometimes words are missed out.

So there's a song fixing a hole.

Would that have been fixing hole?

What?

What?

Like

using internet or not

fixing R.

So you know how I would say using internet or something.

That's not a Liverpuddlian thing.

No, I know.

I'm just thinking northern accent.

I think in Liverpool they tend to pronounce all of the words.

Do they?

But not the R's.

Not the R's.

Although, I'm thinking, you said they didn't pronounce the R's in Let It Be.

I'm thinking of the lyrics of Let It Be, and it's mostly the word Let It Be over and over and over and over again.

I don't know R's.

You used to be called Let It Beer.

None of us pronounces R's though, we should say.

I do.

Sorry, you do.

I usually insert R's into words that don't have them.

You pronounce far too many R's.

You collect up all of our dropped R's and say them all.

But yeah, do you know why the Scala's accent is so singular and kind kind of odd?

No.

So I didn't quite know.

So it does sound really different to places quite nearby.

So linguists say that actually

if you

take sort of a Manchester accent and a Newcastle accent maybe, they can be seen as different variations of the same kind of pattern.

Whereas Scalse is really totally different and it's because when it became this really important port, there was so much Irish and Welsh emigration.

And so there's quite a lot of Welsh in the Scalse accent, isn't there?

Irish, definitely.

And Irish, yeah.

Which makes it completely standout.

But there is a theory that the Scales accent is changing and softening as the air gets cleaner.

So

there's an odd gag that it's, what is it?

It's one-third Irish, one-third Manchester, and one-third Qatar.

And that's not the country of Qatar, is it?

No.

But so the industrial economy obviously is not as big as it was.

It started changing to service, and so clean air legislation has cleaned the air up.

So there is a theory that this will have an effect.

I wish I'd written down more of the details of how exactly it's affected.

Well, the idea is that because people spoke more adenoidally or nasally, because the air was so bad, you would kind of close your airways while you were talking.

Yeah, like a camel.

Like a camel.

Yeah.

Do they do that?

Well, they can close their nostrils, can't they?

They can close their eyelids as well, yeah.

I can close my eyelids.

You're right.

Am I a camel?

The other thing about the pollution in Liverpool is you used to be able to tell a true Liverpudlian in Liverpool by his dirty raincoat.

Because

if they had a clean raincoat, it meant it was a sailor who just arrived from sea.

Whereas if you were living in Liverpool all the time, the pollution was so bad that your raincoat would be dirty.

Oh, so if the inside of the raincoat flashing at you is clean, that's a newly arrived sail.

That's not true of all Liverpudlians.

Have you ever?

I was reading a lot about in music how when a redubb needs to happen lyrically because of a different country where the where the song is being done in France or in Italy.

And so either they bring someone else in to sing a dubbed version or the lead singer of the band.

So I don't know if Maximo Park has ever, or with your solo stuff.

Yes.

Have you ever done a different language?

Yes, I did German for on my last record, Contradictions by Paul Smith and the Intimations, which is just a made-up band name.

Really?

I've got to confess it's just me.

And yeah, I did a version of this song called People on Sunday.

Obviously, it's called something different.

It's called Menschen am Zontag in German.

And when I was about to play my German tour, I got a friend of my wife's who's German to translate it for me.

But I was, obviously, I'd honed it for the recording.

But when I did it live, I had all of the words pasted in front of me on the mic stand.

And it was, it's, it's, obviously, there's quite awkward translations.

Yeah, so do you speak German?

A little.

A little bit.

Einbischen.

Einbischen.

Sorry, go ahead.

I would just say it's quite trusting

with your friends that they tell you that this is the right words.

But she's German, so she's quite serious.

Okay.

so this is the thing, you know, stereotypically she's very straight down the line and so I thought she won't have me on.

But yeah, I could cross-check it with my little bit of German that I knew.

That must,

because you have a singing style, which is your accent plays into the tone and the style of singing.

And I always think that must just scramble what your identity as a vocalist is all of a sudden when it's a language you don't know.

How does your accent play into it?

It can't really.

In some ways it does because

when we first started, one of the first songs that was put on it, it was put on a German magazine on a CD that you get on the front of the front cover.

And so lots of people knew this song, The Coast Is Always Changing.

And in this particular song, I say, I am young and I am lost.

And they love the Jung

in Germany.

They were going, I love the way you pronounce the word Jung.

Yeah, yeah.

It's really great.

Does it think it's about the psychologist, Jung?

Well, this is the thing.

I was going to work it out.

I didn't go further, but it's, yeah, like Jungen is a German verb, I think.

And anyway.

There's a great recording of Ian Dury playing in Germany, and he's just shouting at the audience in Cockney German for at least half the album.

It's amazing.

And he translates blockheads into Dumkopf, and he just keeps getting the audio to shout Dumkopf.

It's great.

Yeah, when things went wrong in Germany, I had a little bit of German, so our keyboard used to break all the time, and I would go, Das Klavier icht icht kaput.

And people would go, yeah.

And then I'd get, it goes down so well in Germany, just that little sprinkling of GCSE German gone wrong.

Yeah, but it's appreciated.

My German isn't good enough.

I'm sure it was.

I just assumed that was funny and gave you the laugh.

Our small German listenership would have gone absolutely crazy for that.

Speaking of dubbing, in Russia, you would not have subtitles very often for movies, and they would just dub it into Russian.

These days, they kind of do have subtitles, but in Poland, they don't.

Still they don't.

And both countries have a thing called a Lector, and that was

one person who would dub all the parts for everyone in a movie.

They still have that in Poland.

In Poland they do.

In Russia they do a little bit, but not as much as they used to.

And basically these are extremely professional people who would just read all these different things out.

And they're so professional they're not allowed to swear.

So you would say rude word.

whenever you came up to a swear word and stuff like that.

Are they doing all the voices?

No, they don't even get into character.

They're just reading it almost like you would read Shakespeare or something like that.

In a monotone.

Yeah, in a monotone.

So, if the example that

some angry person gave on a forum, because I think some, like, more modern polls, get a bit annoyed that this ridiculous system, was that you're watching Sex in the City and all the voices are just this 65-year-old man speaking in the monotone.

It is true.

Like, the younger people don't like it, but there was a poll in 2008 saying that only 19% of polls supported the switch to subtitling and television.

I don't think we can trust one poll to represent the entire nation, can we, James?

Just on the Beatles, I have a fact about...

So

even in 1963, Paul McCartney was still signing his name, Paul McCartney brackets, the Beatles.

Even in 63.

And they were quite famous by 1963.

There must be another one.

Yeah, there must be a lost Paul McCartney who is super famous.

Well, I was trying to find out about Beatle Mania because your fact, Paul, was about, you know, when they were...

becoming huge in America and they did the Ed Sullivan show and something like 37% of all American people watched that live, which is just, you know, mind-blowing.

Anyway, I got from there onto One Direction Mania.

I'm just trying to talk you through my process

after all.

One fan.

They're always trying to bring it around to One Direction.

So, one One Direction fan hid in a bin for four hours to try and meet the band

and didn't even get to meet them.

No, because they couldn't see them.

They're in a bin.

No, but I think they were planning to burst out of the bin when One Direction came into the room.

Did they miss the queue?

What did they do?

Is it like when it was bin day?

Who's someone from One Direction?

Harry Styles' Harry Styles.

Yeah, it's Bin Day at Harry Styles' house.

He's taken the bin out, it's been emptied, and then you hide in the bin and hope that he drags it back to his house.

Is that it?

I think it was in a hotel or something.

But they're known for being really tidy.

They're bound to use the bound, the frequency of One Direction using litter bins is very high.

But a source told the mirror, admittedly, the boys' minders won't be letting any of these tricks get past them.

They'll look in every bin if they have to.

Oh, the intern that gets that job.

A really important job for you to do for one direction.

It's very exciting.

So even the small bathroom, the bathroom bins, you're saying.

Yep, even the small bathroom bins.

Even the ashtrays in the cars.

You've got to look everywhere.

We need to move on to our next fact.

Can I just, do you guys know Cher's first ever song

that she released?

The first single she ever released was when she was 18.

It was under the pseudonym Bonnie Jo Mason because her real name, Cheryline Napier, wasn't thought to be American enough.

And it was called Ringo, I Love You.

And it's a song about how much she loves Ringo Starr.

She recorded it in a Ben, didn't she?

It's so weird.

It was a massive flop.

Have you heard it?

I have, yes.

If you listen to it, it is a complete rip-off of, or it's like a splurging together of She Loves You, yeah, yeah, yeah, and another Beatles song.

I can't believe they didn't get sued for it.

I think the fact that no one heard it at the time did help.

help.

She did pick the drummer as well.

She could have picked a more popular member, exactly.

Yeah, I know.

Although I actually went to the British Embassy in Washington on our last tour and played there, and they said, well, you know, it's great that you've come and played here.

This is really exciting.

But one of the bands that we had before was the Beatles.

Obviously, nothing to live up to there.

And they said the Beatles came and did a gig in the embassy, but they never did anything like that again.

It was one of the last live things they did because somebody came with a pair of scissors into the British Embassy, which I can attest to it being fairly security-conscious.

I went to the toilet, and it's got on the back of the door in the toilet in the British Embassy, a sort of secure, really heavy, it's like you can lock yourself in if something goes down, something really horrific.

So, it's quite serious.

But yes, when you say sorry, something really horrific goes down in the toilet.

If you've been in a band, band members are just notoriously stinky.

Yeah, so They've been locked in there for hours.

Yeah, you don't want to get locked in there when something like that goes down in an adjacent toilet.

Anyway, so somebody got into the British Embassy in whatever, 1965, with a pair of scissors and cut a lock of Ringo's hair off.

So perhaps Cher wasn't actually that, you know, going in the wrong direction.

You're saying that maybe was Cher?

It might have been.

It may have been.

Maybe.

That's a long time between booking bands, isn't it?

For a.

It is.

It is.

Beatles, Maximo Park.

You could say that you were headlighting for the Beatles, but there was just a long gang between.

Exactly.

They supported us able.

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

My fact is that monkeys in Melbourne Zoo are no longer allowed to eat bananas because humans have bred them to have so much sugar that the monkeys were getting obese.

It's a funny story, but it's quite a sad story, I think.

It's funny answer.

It's got everything.

It's got everything.

It's going to be a movie.

Yeah, so it's bizarre.

And it's not just Melbourne Zoo.

Loads of zoos have done this.

So there are zoos in, there's one in Devon called Paynton Zoo.

There's Bristol Zoo.

They've done the same thing.

And it's because humans are great at breeding bananas, sweeter and sweeter and sweeter.

And in the wild, monkeys wouldn't get anywhere near this kind of sugar.

They don't even eat bananas.

I try to to find proof that monkeys do eat bananas.

You think to Catherine Milton, who studied the diets of primates for decades,

I'll buy that, yeah.

The entire wild-monkey-banana connection is a total fabrication.

That's great.

Yeah.

That should be a channel.

Where did it come from then, with this obsession with monkeys and bananas?

I think it must be the circus.

Because the thing is, like, you don't get bananas in the wild.

These kind of bananas that we eat, you just don't get them in the wild.

So unless they're breaking into farms and eating them.

Are we saying that no monkey in the wild...

Is Dr.

Catherine saying that no monkey in the wild has ever eaten a plantain or a...

Oh, a plantain, yeah, but the kind of bananas that we eat, they don't eat.

Because the wild bananas you get are rubbish, like round and have loads of seeds in them and taste terrible, apparently.

So monkeys probably just don't want them.

But the thing is, they love bananas.

Oh, yeah.

I'm not saying they don't like bananas, and nor is Catherine Milton.

I'm just saying that they would never get them.

The ones that you get in wait rolls, they wouldn't get them in the wild.

It's basically like having an all-crack diet.

Yeah.

Which is not healthy.

What have we done to them?

Or sort of cake or chocolate.

It's like eating only cake or chocolate.

So they get instead they're just fed leafy vegetables these days.

And they only get a banana if they have to have some medication.

And then they hide the medication inside the banana.

It sounds so rubbish.

They're getting kind of kale and lettuce, aren't they?

Yeah.

How awful.

It's the only time we ever let you have a pint, we put some valium in it or something.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'd claim I need a valium

very often.

Their favourite food though, not banana, that's number two.

Apparently, this is according to a study that was done in 1936, but has never been disproved.

A monkey's favourite food is grape,

apparently.

Grape is number one, and then banana is number two.

They go absolutely nuts for grape.

So that's kind of the heroine, I think, and the banana is the cocaine.

So

this was the thing about monkeys and grapes.

If you make a monkey do a job,

and I'm talking a simple, simple job.

Not like civil engineer or something.

No, it was to take a rock and put it in the experimenter's hands.

So it's a basic task.

But if you make a monkey do that task for a reward, like a bit of cucumber, but then you let it see another monkey doing the same task and being given a grape, then the first monkey will start to slack off and it will do the job with less enthusiasm and it will get a right less of the time.

It will care less.

Fair enough.

Why are you trying to drive these two monkeys apart and make them hate each other

by preferring one over the other things?

Bananas are weird, though, aren't they?

And

in what context?

They're weird because whenever you cross-breed the subspecies, they don't create seeds.

So that's why we've got this brilliant seedless banana.

But we're going to lose it.

So people are worried.

There was the main banana that people ate was the Gro-Michelle banana until the 50s or 60s.

And then that was wiped out.

And now this Panama disease that wiped out that banana has come back to wipe out the only variety we have left.

And so we're in serious trouble.

And scientists are trying to breed a new banana to get around this, and they can't get it to taste right.

You know the Gro-Michel is even sweeter than the current one.

Really?

Yeah.

You know like banana candies, like little sweets, look like bananas and taste like bananas.

But actually when you think about it, they don't really taste like bananas, do they?

No.

Well they taste like Gro-Michel bananas.

They're a bit gross.

No, just way sweeter.

Yeah.

And people, there's a theory that, or actually it's a myth, that the reason that they taste differently to bananas is because we made them when Gro-Michel bananas were around and we made them taste like those.

But actually, we just made the candies taste like very sweet bananas, and it just happens to be the same.

I wonder if we were in Melbourne Zoo and we were fed those candy bananas, whether or not that would be more hurtful to us than an actual banana is to monkey.

Yeah, it would be bad, yeah.

Would it be worse, do you think?

Like, I'm trying to see the equivalence of how bad that would be.

Well, effectively, you're just eating sugar and food colouring and sweetener.

I mean, how long do you think you could survive on just a diet of those candy bananas?

A few years?

No.

Like, for instance, if you only eat rabbits, you can't last for more than a year.

So you eat rabbits.

Yeah.

Where are you in this scenario?

You're in a desert island and it's just you and two rabbits, and you think, I won't eat them for now, I'll let them hate until there's loads of them.

And then, but by the time that happens, you're fine.

But then you eat them and then there's something in them that you don't get enough of.

Oh, it's one of the vitamins, isn't it?

It's one of the vitamins.

It's always a beat.

It's always yours.

Yeah.

Bananas are good, though.

They've got almost everything that you need in them for a while.

So if you only ate bananas and rabbits.

You were fucking weird eye.

If you only ate rabbit splits.

There was a theory that I remember reading once.

Was this about Peter Andre?

Peter Andre collapsed after eating too many bananas because he was.

Because he was obviously a very, very muscular chap, especially when he first started out, he was known for being

Mr.

Muscles.

This is the rock star kind of anecdote I like.

And he's maintained a good physique,

but

in his early days, that was his selling USP.

There was a selling point always.

Also,

always, you know, any waterfall that was nearby, he'd be underneath.

We've seen the mysterious girl.

Exactly.

We've seen it.

We know the score.

Sad is it like the bananas.

So that, yeah, before some sort of show that he was doing, which, you know, would probably be, you know, in a record shop or something, not necessarily an actual stage show.

Okay.

I think it was like some sort of in-store appearance.

Peter Andre collapsed.

And the rumor had it that he'd eaten too many bananas because he ate like seven or eight bananas in a row just to keep his potassium levels up because he was, you you know, it felt, or his dietician felt that he needed this to maintain his stunning physique.

And then

I'm now getting into digression sketchy territory.

I then read a few years later that he'd, that, you know, he had collapsed, but he was, you know, he was ill or something, blah, blah, blah.

But he was eating a very large amount of bananas at the time.

You think his rider, because Ryder now says no bananas in every gig.

His manager says, what the fuck is this?

Keep me away from the bananas.

The bag check on the way into gigs is just for bananas.

If Peter sees one of those, he collapses on stage.

I think that's true.

Do you know who else used to have loads of bananas?

Gordon Brown.

That's the one link between Gordon Brown and Peter Andre.

Gordon Brown used to have nine bananas every day.

Gordon Brown has a very nice physique, too.

So there's two quite good links.

Nine bananas a day.

He was trying to give up smoking.

Now he started me thinking about smoking bananas.

Not that I've ever done anything like that, but in the 60s, Mello Yellow, the Donovan song,

people believed it to be about smoking bananas as an alternative to cannabis.

Yeah, that's it.

A very cheap alternative, which apparently has no effect.

I see a big book of Paul Smith banana pop anecdotes.

Where's my contract?

Where's the book contract?

I actually read about the Donovan song, and Donovan has since, I believe, done an interview where he said that that was the story that came out in the myth at the time that it was to do with smoking the insides of bananas.

In fact, inside the in the lyrics of the song, he talks about an electric banana which was a vibrator and Mellow Yellow supposedly is a vibrator.

You know bananas skins.

Are they slippy?

They're slippy.

Yes, they are super slippy.

They've got a good natural lubricant on them.

And actually if you look up banana skin lubricants, trying to find cool scientific stuff, there is so much weird sex advice out there about what to do with banana skins.

But that is not what I'm going to mention.

Slipping on a banana skin has been been a comedy trope since the mid-19th century

and actually it was a genuine concern that it was a proper danger.

So this is at a time when from the mid-1800s then lots of bananas are suddenly being imported into America and I found a New York Times article from the 1890s where the president of the New York police force declared war on the banana skin.

So he said he was really worried because he he explained that the bad habits of banana skin, dwelling particularly on its tendency to toss people into the air and bring them down with terrific force onto the hard pavement.

And he introduced a new sort of law in New York saying that you get fined for dropping banana skins.

And that was president of the police force, Teddy Roosevelt.

So that's where he got his start in life.

Wow.

Stamping down on banana skin.

I remember reading around the same time.

No, I wasn't reading it around the same time, but I was reading about things that were happening.

This is really sketchy, but I think there was groups of people who would go around

railway stations and they would deliberately kind of pretend to fall and they would drop banana skins on the ground and say, Oh, you didn't move that, I'm gonna sue you.

Oh, really?

I think we may have mentioned it briefly before, but it's worth mentioning again.

Yeah, sure.

And there were trained inspectors who were say who were trained to ask loads of questions, like, were there bananas for sale on the train?

Were there, you know, and like all these details that you could use to spot a fraudster.

Have we mentioned Sliding Billy Watson before?

No, but please.

He was a famous vaudeville act.

Huge deal, early 1900s.

And his sole gag was sliding on stage on a banana skin.

People were easily pleased.

There were loads of laughing records.

Some of the first ever recorded discs that

became popular and widely bought were just of people laughing.

Yeah, and the laughing policeman

is one of the most famous parts of that trend.

But it was a total thing where people just loved hearing people laughing out of these new gramophones.

People had never heard records.

And so they didn't think, let's put a song on it.

They thought, let's record people laughing.

And they made millions.

That was cool.

Yeah, it was.

The Laughing Policeman is a great song.

It's a classic.

And The Laughing Norm, not so much.

Have you heard that one?

No.

David Bowie.

Yeah, David Bowie's first, I think it's his first single, maybe.

The Laughing Norm.

It was the peace item to I Love Ringo Star, wasn't it?

Some of our most

famous stars have had inauspicious beginnings.

Yes.

In Korea, this is exciting.

They sell a one-a-day banana pack.

So it's five bananas underneath plastic, and they're all ripened.

One of them's really ripe.

One of them's almost ripe.

One of them's not that ripe.

One of them's not ripe at all.

And the other one's almost unripe.

Wow.

But then every day, at the end of the day, they're completely ripe.

Well,

in Japan, they have invented an edible banana peel.

So you now just eat the banana.

This is a big thing online.

People keep saying it's really really good for you.

Yeah, it's called the monkey banana.

It makes you healthy, it protects your heart, cures insomnia and depression, helps people.

Stop people slipping over.

Stop people slipping over.

There's no evidence for anything except it stopping people slipping over.

It's your body, even if there are nutrients in there, which there may be, your body won't be able to absorb them.

And also, if you don't wash it really carefully, you'll probably get pesticide.

Yeah.

So don't eat a banana peel.

I can't believe we're having to say this.

Imagine if, do you think, because that feels like the early kind of modern comedy, if we got rid of banana peels or started eating them and comedy died?

Oh wow.

I reckon it would.

I reckon that would trigger the end of all comedy if we lost the slapstick banana peel.

That's the moment in history where the universe is when yeah, there's a universe out there where comedy doesn't happen.

Yeah.

Because we ate our banana peels.

Right.

Wow.

Or maybe will be that moment in history.

I don't know.

Or maybe this podcast is that moment in history where comedy doesn't happen.

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

Yeah, my fact this week is that Nobel Prize winner Barry Marshall has developed a belt that senses stomach rumblings inspired by his son, who's a seismologist who makes devices that sense vibrations on the ocean floor, which I just find so cool as a kind of really random crossover of two totally different industries.

So he's just around the table with his son one day saying, oh, I've got to look into this stomach rumbling thing.

He's investigating IBS and he wants to know how to diagnose it quickly.

And, you you know, his son just says, well, I've got this instrument that senses vibrations on the floor of the sea.

You want to try that?

And he has, and he's made this belt.

So should you just first say who Barry Marshall is?

Because he's a bit of a hero, isn't he?

Yeah,

he's Nobel Prize is for an awesome reason.

Yes, so he got a Nobel Prize in 2005 because he proved that stomach ulcers, which everyone used to say was caused by stress, and I think a lot of people kind of still do say that, he proved they were caused by bacteria.

And he did that by swallowing a whole bunch of bacteria and giving himself himself a stomach ulcer, which I think we've said before.

And that proved that that did it.

And that means that you can cure stomach ulcers with antibiotics.

And then that has massively reduced stomach cancer in the Western world.

And he did it against the medical establishment, really, because you're not meant to self-experiment.

And he was desperately trying to get it experimented on subjects who had it, but the medical board said no, not possible.

So he went home and he was like, he put it on some toast or something.

It was like a broth, was it?

And it was against his wife as well, who was very, very upset about it.

Really?

And he said he never told her because it was one of the occasions when it would be easier to get forgiveness than get permission.

But she got really upset about it because she thought she believed him, of course, that it was a bacteria that caused it.

And she thought that by giving himself it, it would give it to the whole family and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, fair.

But you can't, you don't kiss with your stomach.

You don't smush stomachs together.

I'm sure there's some sort of exotic practice.

It's so interesting how everyone thought that bacteria couldn't couldn't live in the stomach.

So that's why it can't be a bacterial thing when you have a stomach ulcer.

But also, there was no incentive really to discover a cure because antacids, you know, things which neutralize the acid in your stomach, were very popular.

And also, you have to keep taking them for life.

Yeah, and also they do kind of help

quite a lot, don't they?

So it was almost like, like you're saying, not that much incentive because the industry was huge, but also it was kind of doing quite a good job.

And it deals with the symptoms.

It just doesn't deal with the ulcer.

Yeah.

Because at the start of the 20th century, 100% of mankind had this bacteria in their stomach.

Wow.

Wow.

That's great.

Yeah, it's impressive.

He deserved it.

He deserved the price.

Okay, can I just say, he also developed this, he did this, and he had tried it on a few patients, so it wasn't a complete shot in the dark, but he had to do it on himself.

I can't remember exactly why, but it was after six months of unsuccessfully trying to give piglets stomach ulcers.

Yes.

So maybe he's not a great dude after all.

He only did it to the evil piglets.

And the other thing is that that Heliobacter pylori, which is a bacteria, is kind of useful in the body.

So it modulates your immune system.

And a lot of people think it stops your immune system from being too hyperreactive.

And perhaps, and that this is really going out on a limb, now that we don't have as much of it, you're more likely to get allergies and stuff like that.

And IBS.

And IBS.

Which he's now trying to cure.

So there is an idea of reintroducing Heliobacter pylori.

If you could somehow make it so it doesn't give you ulcers, then you can put it back in your body if you could kind of genetically modify it.

So he's now frantically digging up the recipe for that broth he wants to make.

So he's now trying to cure IBS, which is possibly caused by the thing he cured.

That's what's his cure for IBS going to give us?

That's what I want to know.

He keeps keeping himself in work.

But IBS is a real problem, right?

That feels a bit like stomach ulcers were in that no one really knows what's causing it and it's very hard to diagnose and the diagnosis is quite invasive usually.

And so so what he's developed is this belt and it records what he calls the creaks and undulations of the gut and recognizes the sonic signature of IBS which it's so complicated because the gut's so long and so much is happening in it that the human ear can't do that you can't listen to someone's gut and know they've got IBS but by showing a sort of robotic belt former IBS sufferers and training it to recognize it, you can do that.

And yeah, he's done that.

And actually he was inspired first of all by his son who introduced him to the idea of these vibrations on the ocean floor.

And then a a colleague showed him a kind of shop-bought acoustic device that he was using for detecting termites under houses, and he used the design of that for the belt.

So he was using termites and seismology.

Well, listen, seismology has given us quite a lot of non-seismology-based inventions.

I think we have a lot to thank seismologists for.

So, for example, there was a guy called...

How did I know you had an example?

Andy Hildebrand.

Now, he was a research scientist in the oil industry, and he developed software for processing the data from reflection seismology.

So it was a method, I'm reading the sentence out basically from this article, a method of estimating properties of Earth's subsurface using reflective seismic waves.

So that was his job.

What he then invented off the back of that technology was auto-tuning for the music industry.

So when you hear auto-tuning, it is from Andy Hildebrand, who is a seismologist.

That is very cool.

That is very cool.

And also, I can't remember his name, but it was a seismologist whose technology for predicting earthquakes was then used for predicting who's going to win the American presidential election.

Oh, yeah.

Nate Silvo.

Not Nate Silvo.

It's a guy who's been doing it.

He's predicted the last five presidents, basically, of the United States using this technology.

I'm not using a seismology technology.

Well, it was quite a seismic event this last election, wasn't it, Andy?

I feel queasy.

It was a, I guess you could say it was a landslide, which is similar to an earthquake.

It wasn't really, because he didn't win the popular vote.

That's true, yeah.

But it was so interesting.

Paul's not saying anything, but you can see him regretting having got this podcast on the back of these last two bands.

Let's talk about auto-tune then.

Do you use auto-tune?

I would never use auto-tune.

But that massively changed music, didn't it, Auto-Tune?

For the better or for the worse, that's the question.

I don't know exactly what I'm saying.

Better if you're Cher.

Well, I've heard.

Yeah, well,

Cher used it in an inventive way.

In believe, right?

Yes.

Just so to get out of here.

That's auto-tune.

Why does she need to use that?

I just did it with my voice.

Well,

we're not all as talented as you.

Cher can't be expected to have the art kind of range.

That's fair.

But yeah, I think it's now overused.

It seems to be in a lot of R ⁇ B and rap songs when it doesn't necessarily need to be.

Is it a bit rude to accuse someone of using auto-tuned?

Not these days.

But yeah, it would have been.

And I heard a a few rumours about auto-tune um don't say peter andre please don't say peter andre

peter is of a of a higher caliber than that

surely not no one could hit those notes in mysterious goals i heard i heard gordon brown uses auto-tune a lot yeah

so who were the rumours about are you allowed to say or not well no

no

when when we were making our first record there was there were a few rumours going around that that our producer paul etworth at the time

said that there was some going on somebody that he'd worked with right yeah I won't say in Kiss and Kiss he was perhaps elaborating on

but someone who you wouldn't expect is it like no somebody you would expect somebody somebody who wasn't very good at singing essentially

a massive producer but this is it he's now Adele and you know whoever he's a good singer I'm just trying to get you to name people he's working with it's Adele

Adele can't really can't sing have you seen a live

it wasn't Adele it must be obvious when people sing live though right but this is the thing when yeah there are a few people who are pretty ropey live and in the studio they are using using the electronic help so is there no way of using see i really don't know about it is there no way of slightly tweaking your voice live on stage as in oh there will be

singing into your phone no well this is it there will be a way of doing it live as well because it's just an electronic feed going down into a mixer that then comes out of the because i've i've seen

those fun toys that you can get where you can make yourself sound like Darth Vader just by talking into that.

Chewbacca.

Yeah.

Yeah, but you don't get Britney Spears sounding like Chewbacca, do you, when she's singing?

Because they've got it on the wrong setting.

Yeah, that's an auto-tune cock-up and it's worse.

I know I would kickstart her career.

I think she's doing all right, Anna.

Britney.

Yeah, she's still massive in America.

She's on like X Factor and stuff.

She does Vegas now.

She does Vegas.

That's the thing after people lose that sort of, you know, the number ones start becoming number tens or whatever.

Yeah.

It feels like the graveyard slot of Popstars Vegas.

It's about 400 shows a year.

But this is it.

Yeah.

Then you've got successful.

So it's the graveyard slot critically.

People will dismiss you then, but obviously you're raking it in and it's true showbiz.

Can I just say to the people at Vegas, we're ready for that slot.

We're so ready.

So some stuff about digestion.

Yes, please.

I was reading.

Do you know that 95% of the body's serotonin is produced in the gut?

So you know we think of serotonin as the, you know, know, the hormone that's produced by the brain and it makes us really happy.

And if you're on antidepressants, it helps you to release it.

But 95% is produced in the gut.

And I just find actually this whole thing amazing because I don't think that medicine has at all come to terms with how the brain is connected to the rest of the body.

You basically have a second brain in your gut, don't you?

You've got a second brain in your gut.

And of course, it's interacting so much with how you feel.

So you get butterflies in your stomach.

That's you feeling nervous because you've got this whole nervous system.

And it's a completely independent nervous system.

So it's the enteric nervous system.

And they actually found something really recently which is the vagus nerve is the main nerve.

There's a nerve called the vagus nerve.

Yeah, no, it's the vagus nerve.

It's got Britney Spears playing halfway down it

in your spine.

I thought it was pronounced vagus.

It's the vagus.

I've heard of both actually, so I think it's fine both.

It's the vagus or the vagus nerve, and it's the main nerve that runs from your brain to your organs, basically carrying all the information there.

So we think that we think of stuff in our brain and then it's carried through the nerves to our various bits of our body to tell it what to do.

Scientists found out recently that 90% of the fibers that are in that nerve are actually carrying information from the gut back to the brain.

And so it's our gut is telling our brain what to do.

Like in a sense, I mean this is like an amazing thing that scientists have just realized.

Messages are being sent, nervous messages from our gut.

Because we've been saying that people have a gut feeling for things for all that time, but actually it turns out that that's a really

good thing.

Viva las vedres, that's what I say.

Don't say a joke that means I'm going to cut this out because it is quite interesting.

Just with the journey of how things are digested in the gut, there's a thing that we put in our latest book, which is a new app that scientists are working on, where you can track via your app

the creation of a fart inside your body.

So

it follows the fart from its beginnings all the the way to the exit.

And

is that what you call your backseat?

Hey, nice exit.

But yeah, so that's an app that's hopefully going to be available.

Well, I'd like to have it.

I'd just like to know when I need to leave a room, but like at the last minute.

Well, it's near the exit.

I can hang out here till then.

And the idea of that is that doctors might be able to use it to see what kind of foods cause gas and what causes gas.

It's not so that you can time watching a film thinking, right, I've got 96 minutes so we can watch these films before I need to fart.

I'm sorry, Andy, do you never fart during a movie?

Sorry, I can't watch this movie because it's two hours long.

I actually got one brewing that I need to

watch this till the intermission.

Yeah, I think that's reasonable.

What movies have an intermission?

Are you watching the sound of music over and over?

Lawrence will arrange.

Or you could use it in an alternative fashion if you were like a schoolboy prankster.

prankster.

You could go,

here's one coming, I'm going to time it for the the sort of the apex of this speech in assembly, which is what seemed to happen.

There seemed to be some people at my school who were extremely talented at breaking wind at the right time, just to undercut what was going on in the school assembly.

Andrew Bird,

and he had a particular tone as well.

You weren't named the auto-tuners, but you're drawing up Andrew Bird, aren't you?

I've heard that Andrew Bird auto-tunes his fast.

Andrew Bird is unlikely to be at the next festival about to lynch me

behind the

sue because he's not got music industry muscle behind him.

Exactly.

If he does come after you to lynch you, you'll hear him coming.

Do you know something really interesting?

So, you know, endoscopies, where you, I guess, it's a way of looking into your insides basically by getting a big tube down you and getting cameras to look around or up you.

The first endoscopies.

Who do you think?

You go through the exit

the first ever endoscopy uh where you have to shove something down through someone's mouth to try and look at their insides who do you think it was tried on oh it's not a specific person it's a type of person henry oh

someone with a child because they have a shorter oh yeah

right is it a oh i think i've I've worked it out and I know what it is.

It's a sword swallower.

Yeah.

So cool.

Yes.

So yeah, this was in 1868.

Adolf Kusmall made his patient, who was a sword swallower, swallow a 47cm tube because obviously they've got those big very

and it was used a bunch of times in future.

The first ECG ever in 1906 was done on a sword swallower.

Eventually they realized, oh, maybe we shouldn't put the camera at the end of a sword.

But they could do some surgery while they were in there, couldn't they?

We should move on to the final facts.

Just very quickly, Barry Marshall, what's he doing now?

Apart from his belt thing, he's also written a new book that comes out next year.

It's called How to Win a Nobel Prize.

And it's a middle-grade adventure about a girl who stumbles on a secret meeting of Nobel Prize winners, including Albert Einstein and Mary Curie.

And she travels through time learning the secrets behind some of the most...

world's most important scientific discoveries.

That sounds awesome.

Sounds good, though, doesn't it?

Middle grade, you mean the sort of the school years?

I actually don't know what that means.

I think so instead of like for elementary school kids, because the way you said it, it made it sound like it was of reasonable quality, but not great.

I haven't read it, so I don't know.

It's all right, but stick to belts.

That was your main job.

Oh, it sounds horrible.

It sounds like it's a way to try and convince kids that you're having fun, but actually, you're just obviously learning.

What?

I'd Skype that.

That's our whole job.

Yeah, good point.

I try to Skype this every week.

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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 one building that burned down in the Great Fire of London was a public toilet that could be used by 128 people at the same time.

Same time.

It's just as well.

I think that's what

you know.

If you're looking at pluses for the Great Fire of London,

there can't be many, but that might have been one of them.

Well, some people say about the Great Fire that it was a plus because they could rebuild those bits of London, don't they?

But I don't know.

I think

we don't have enough public toilets in the world and in the UK, definitely.

And I think one that could be used by 128 people will be quite a good thing.

When you say they use it at the same time, it's not like a 3-2-1, everyone unloads.

I mean, you could do it like that if you want, but it's basically it had 128 seats, 64 for men and 64 for women, which is quite progressive for the time, which you wouldn't get today, I'm sure.

And it would empty into the Thames.

It was on Cheapside in London.

I read that after the fire, it was replaced by

another public toilet, which instead of having 128 seats, had 12.

Yeah, so what I want to know is, does that mean that in the old one, everyone was really squished together?

Or in the new one, did people have loads and loads of space?

Well, I think the new one also had six flats on top of it.

Wow.

Yeah, but it was between two rivers, wasn't it?

Because they needed a lot of water flowing through.

Yeah, so it was between some two tributaries of the Thames.

How did the fire burn it down with all that water flowing through?

You would have thought that would be the perfect barrier.

Yes, you would think that, but it wasn't.

It was burnt down the structure, I think, like a lot of things did.

It was called Whittington's Longhouse, and it was named after Dick Whittington because it was money that he left after being mayor that built it.

And Dick Whittington, this is for people overseas, is, I hadn't heard of him personally, not coming from here.

He's Dick Whittington and his cat is a sort of famous story.

It's a pantomime that's done a lot in this country.

So he's a very known character who might not be known for his toilet.

Well, most people in britain i would say um would think that he was a fictional character yeah because it's like from a pantomime and stuff like that but it turns out that he's real he was the mayor of london quite a few times uh and he didn't have a cat to my knowledge i don't think he had a cat and but he left loads and loads of money behind and did all this great stuff about toilets and lots of really good um things that he built and they think that because of all those great things that he built that's why he became such a hero in london and that's why all the stories got written about him am i right in saying that dick whittington itself, not being Richard Whittington, is a sort of inspired by character, as opposed to it's meant to be literally the mayor?

Presumably, Nate.

Well, in the story, he is the mayor, isn't he?

Yeah, he becomes mayor of London at the end.

I think he gets called to be mayor or something like that.

He hears a voice saying

he goes to London to make his fortune because the streets are paved with gold.

And then I think I usually fell asleep or insisted on leaving at that point in the pantomime.

You missed the bit where it's paved with shit from his toilets.

I also left the pantomime at that point, but that's only because I could feel there was a fart on its way.

So, the Great Fire of London, I actually had my debunked myth rebunked, reading about this.

You rebunked something?

Yeah.

Okay, so what's the myth?

Is this the one about people dying, though?

Yeah.

Okay.

So, how many people died in the game?

I thought it was like four people died on that.

Yeah, so I think most people think now hardly anyone died.

Four or six people died in the Great Fire of London.

Actually, there was a historian who's written a book on it and done a lot of research on it who says loads of people probably died.

Is that right?

Yeah, but the censuses were very bad or the public records were very bad, parish records.

But there's evidence like the number of burials suddenly shot up.

So they went up by a third in the graveyard that was closest to it.

And the average age at death doubled in that month, which implies that older people are getting killed more easily, which makes sense.

If there's a bad fire, young people are going to scarper, whereas older people are going to be a bit buggered.

And basically, we think maybe

Lots of first-hand accounts say you talk about like bloodied bodies in the street and stuff, and once it was taken to France, which are probably exaggerated, but at the same time, it's plausible that we don't have all the records.

Wow, yeah.

I mean, we basically have to re-edit QI now for

I heard, is this a myth?

And sorry for bringing a depressing fact to the table, but as opposed to all those people who just died.

Well, yeah,

more people died than you think.

No, that just feels more, I think, historical.

This is a bit more recent.

The fire monument for the fire of London.

Oh, the monument.

The monument.

There's a fact, which I don't know if it's definitely true, is that they had to put a lot of netting and so forth around it because more people, if we're going for the original stat of four people dying and the more people have died from jumping off there than were said to have died in the Fire of London.

But now it seems like Anna has

re-debunked it.

Have you guys heard of Porcelain Palace?

Nope.

This is in Chongqing, China, and this is the city, Chongqing, and it is the world's largest public toilet complex in the world.

It's at Foreigners Street Amusement Park.

That's apparently what it's called.

And it's designed to look, it's got a sort of ancient Egyptian art theme to the whole thing, but it has a thousand toilets and urinals in it, so it is a palace of the toilet.

Yeah.

It's the largest in the world currently.

Can all a thousand people go at the same time, I guess?

I believe so, yeah.

Yeah.

The inventor of the first public toilets,

the ones at the Great Exhibition, he was.

The first public toilets in Britain, which is

apart from the long house, which was also a public toilet.

Yeah, that's right, yeah.

The first modern ones.

Yeah, alright.

Yeah, him, yeah.

He was called George Jennings, and he had 15 children.

Did he?

Wow.

I have a theory that he may have developed.

the public toilet just so that he could go to the loo somewhere because the bathroom was always busy because he had 15 children.

Okay.

That's not a strong theory.

If you paid a penny, you got to go to the loo, but you also got a towel, a comb, and a shoe shine.

A bargain.

A shoe shine.

Yeah.

I don't know if it was all while you were sitting on the loo that you were being having a shoe shined and.

So you don't get a shoe shine, do you?

Someone shines your shoes.

Exactly, yeah.

Do you get a comb?

I don't think someone would just comb your hair.

I think you get comb.

I think someone combs your hair.

That sounds like someone combs your hair.

Or you get to use the comb, maybe.

Maybe there's a communal comb.

What a disturbing time to spend on the loo with someone toweling you down, someone shining your shoes, and someone combing your hair.

You wouldn't be able to go.

The first she-wi was actually invented in 1898, or the first kind of one that I could find.

A she-wi is, I think women sometimes use them in festivals.

It's kind of like a cone, upside-down cone-shaped thing that women can wee into and use it like a urinal.

Yeah, so stand up to wee.

Yeah, so you can stand up to wee like men do.

But it was invented in 1898 and it was called the Euronet.

And it was cheaper, it was more space-efficient, and so a few local councils, especially quite a few in London, installed them, but women didn't want to use them because it was kind of improper.

So like there was one in Portsmouth, but women used to flee in horror when they saw it.

Apparently,

frightening things.

I'm sorry, because the modern shibi is something you carry around with you.

Yes, and you use it like a penis, not like a urinal.

Yes.

These ones.

These ones are more of a urinal than a penis.

So they were installed and there was a curtain that went around them and they were much close together.

Okay.

I hope my mother's not listening to this podcast.

Hang on, is it like a urinal with a very long sort of front-bottom bit, as it were?

And then

that doesn't sound hygienic.

I think I would run in horror if I saw one of those flee in terror.

So I looked up some other buildings that were in London at the time of the Great Fire.

Oh, yeah.

So one of the ones, actually, so this is one that survived, but it's just an incredible building that was in mid-17th century London.

It was called Nunsuch House, and it was on London Bridge.

So you know London Bridge used to be lined with shops and buildings, which I find incredible.

Yeah, so weird.

Nunsuch House was a Renaissance palace four stories high in the middle of the bridge.

It was massive.

You have to look up pictures of it, so good.

I'll try and put one up on my Twitter feed.

So it just lurched over the Thames, the whole Thames, you know.

Sorry, you'll try to put one up on your Twitter feed.

They successfully built a four-story house on London Beach, and you will try, if at all possible, to publish one on my Twitter.

But life's a lot harder now, isn't it?

What a slab.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Shreiberland, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

James, at James Harkin, Paul, at PaulSmithMusic, and Chaczynski, you can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account at no such thing, go to our Facebook page, no such thing as a fish, or our website, no such thingasafish.com.

We have everything from our previous episodes to upcoming tour dates to a link to our book, just everything's there.

All of it.

It's all there.

You can go there.

And you've got a website, presumably, Paul.

I have PaulSmithMusic.eu.

It's got videos and my new record.

You can buy my new record, and you see all my tour dates.

And you have a new record out now?

It is.

It's officially out today.

That's cool.

It's called Diagrams.

And yeah, I'll be playing a load of shows at the end of November.

So have a look from Glasgow down to London and somewhere in between.

Amazing.

Yeah.

We're going to be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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