205: No Such Thing As The Number Six

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Hey, everyone, before we start this week's show, we just want to remind you that we have a little documentary on the internet, don't we?

We sure do.

It's not quite as hard-hitting as Louis Theroux, but there may be a couple more gags in it.

It's the behind-the-scenes look at our tour from last year when we were stalked with a camera and they filmed us doing japes and stuff.

Yeah, there's loads of behind-the-scenes bits and pieces.

There's loads of interviews with us, there's little bits from the show.

It's really, really fun.

You can get it on the internet.

It's called Behind the Gills.

You can get it on Apple, Google, Amazon, Ask Jeeves, MySpace, and all those places where you get stuff from.

Yep.

Okay, I'm 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 Andrew Hunter Murray and I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Tazhinsky and Alex Bell and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days starting with

James.

Okay, my fact this week is that if all the bacteria in the world disappeared we wouldn't notice for about a week.

Would scientists notice in a lab if they were studying bacteria?

Or would they just think, oh,

would they just think, oh, they must have be down the other end of the Petri dish.

But I think I'm talking more of the day-to-day

person going about their life.

So this anyway is from a paper.

It's called Life in a World Without Microbes by Jack A.

Gilbert and Josh D.

Neufeld.

And it's absolutely brilliant.

I love it.

In this paper, they say it would take us nearly a week to realize what had happened.

And then that they predict complete societal collapse only within a year or so.

So the first week you don't notice anything, and then 51 weeks later,

the whole of society collapses.

So that 51 weeks is really horrible.

I reckon it would be.

Probably get progressively worse.

Yeah, and you know the end is not I.

You know, yeah.

They say then annihilation of most humans and non-microscopic life on the planet would follow a prolonged period of starvation, disease, unrest, civil war, anarchy, and global biogeochemical asphyxiation.

But we're due for 90% of that already with the bacteria, that's true.

But for the first week, it's fine.

We're okay.

Yeah.

So the thing is, you have...

Let's think, what is there that we need microbes for and bacteria?

So they're in your stomach, right?

And they help you digest things.

Okay.

But I found it really weird that you don't need humans, don't actually need

unwell without them, or we could find it hard to digest things, but we can survive without bacteria.

I read that and I couldn't quite believe it because I thought, surely we must need them.

I think we'd just get constipated, wouldn't we?

Yeah, yeah.

But there are some animals which do need them, aren't they?

Or loads of of them.

Yeah, although now Anna said that, okay, for the first week we might be constipated.

Okay.

But at least it's not prolonged a period of starvation, disease, unrest, civil war, anarchy, and global biogeochemical asphyxiation.

It depends how bad your constipation is as well.

So yes, animals do need it.

So cows would need it, for instance, because they can't digest cellulose without microbes.

And a few other animals would as well.

But basically, eventually what would happen is all the nitrogen wouldn't be able to be fixed.

The nitrogen cycle cycle would stop, which is something that we need for life.

So all of the...

So what because that,

all plants use that, and then so the plants are going to die out.

Yeah.

Basically that life needs nitrogen and it goes around in the cycle like water does.

But without the microbes, that would stop, which means that the oceans would get full of nitrogen, which means all of the fish would die.

We'd struggle to make oxygen as well because a lot of microbes make oxygen.

So a lot of bad things would happen.

It's in week two, guys.

And this entire time, everything is dying, and so nitrogen isn't being produced, but all the dead things just stay there.

Well, yes,

it basically means that we need the mushrooms, and I hate to say this, but we need the fungi.

If all the microbes die and they can't break anything down, the only thing left to break things down is the mushrooms.

They step in and save us.

Who'd have thought it?

It's not an action film I especially want to see.

Would your poo stop smelling?

Well, and your sweat.

I think that's one of the real bonuses of week one is that the smell of sweat is just caused by all the bacteria.

So we would smell great from that.

We're constipated, so it doesn't really matter whether your poo smells or not.

No, that is true.

That would happen.

So Louis Pasteur, the famous guy, scientist guy,

he thought that we needed bacteria to live in microorganisms, otherwise we'd all die.

And then a bit after him, two guys came along, 10 years later, two guys came along called George Nuttall and Hans Thurfelder.

And they disproved it by getting a guinea pig and getting rid of all its bacteria and microbes, and the guinea pigs still managed to live.

How did they do that?

Well, I reckon there was probably a lot of antibiotics involved.

Oh.

They didn't just give it a shower.

I reckon there was a shower involved.

Yeah, you might as well soap it down.

There must have been, right?

Yeah.

And this is called nobiotic living.

G-N-O, nobiotic.

Get this.

There is a place in the world where this has kind of happened.

Your horror scenario, James.

So, it's in Chernobyl.

Lots of microbes and fungi got contamination and they died.

And as a result, there are loads of trees in this place called the Red Forest, which is where all the trees turned red and died, and they're not decaying.

So,

there's leaf litter, you know, the sort of leaf mulch on the ground, but it's three times thicker in the hottest bit of Chernobyl, radiation-wise, than it is in areas without radiation-like, it's quite cool, isn't it?

Because leaf litter is quite a nice thing to walk through and kick it up in the air.

Yeah, you can go for some really nice awesome walks.

Is it though?

Because it's still going to be raining, so it's still going to get wet and soggy and nasty.

It's just not going to break down to dust.

Yeah, he's right.

I reckon it's going to be really gross.

Yeah, it's going to be mulch, isn't it?

It is mulch, I'm afraid.

It's not a romantic walk through the woods, is it?

When you kick it up mulch.

So bacteria are really cool, right?

And you do actually, when you do our job, you get really bored actually of reading.

All the journalists are saying, you get bored of reading.

We have to do too much of it.

But all the journalists say, everyone thinks bacteria are just disease-causing bastards.

And actually, some of them are really great.

But some of them are really great, and some of them are just cool.

So, I learned about this one, which is the let's see if I can pronounce this, acidothiobaculus, and you find it in caves.

And it only comes like a lot of bacteria in kind of microbial mats, so they hang out together.

Bacteria often work together.

It comes in these microbial mats with you know, many millions of them all squashed up together, and it hangs off the ceiling, and it looks exactly like a stalic mite.

Tight scoop.

I always thought tight was off the ceiling, and then someone told me it was the other way around.

Tights come down.

Yeah.

That's what I always thought, and someone told me I was wrong.

We're telling you you're right.

Stalact tight, hold on tight.

Exactly, and stalactic might mighty because it grows up.

Or might poke you in the bum.

Or it might fall on your head.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Or tight to the ground.

It's hard, isn't it?

Mnemonics are hard.

Well, anyway, this stuff looks like a stalactite, and it hangs off the roof of caves, but it's got the exact consistency of bogeys.

And if you read about it, in

yeah because bogeys have lots of different consistencies of a healthy bogey James a country bogey not one of these horrible London polluted bogies what would happen to your bogeies if all the bacteria disappeared great question would they get stuck in your nose like your poo no um no

you quite would get stuck in your nose

um they would not be colourful like bogies are now.

I know your pink bogeys have always impressed me.

But the colours are the bacteria, aren't they?

Yeah.

So you would still have mucus, but it would be really cedric.

yeah.

But what would it gather around?

I thought the bacteria was the start of a mucus party.

Yes, well, you might have hairs in your nose.

I have got hairs in my nose.

And they could be used as a nucleus.

Yes, I see that now.

But I mean, it's cleaner.

That first week of your body, it's great.

You don't smell

pooing.

Like, all the disgusting stuff stops.

It's brilliant.

You've got glassy stars.

We've gone off topic.

Sorry, we haven't gone off.

We've strayed.

What I'm saying is, there's this stuff, it's lots of bacteria, which are basically bogies hanging from the ceiling.

And if you read journal articles about them, they're referred to snotites as encelactites.

So, you know, scientific journals, it's talking about the snotites.

And they're actually really cool because they excrete sulfuric acid, and that dissolves the limestone, and it makes the caves go sparkly.

So you get really sparkly caves because it creates gypsum, which is like, you know, gypsum crystals.

That is very cool.

They sparkle, but they are called snotites.

Basically, that sounds like an ancient people, the snotites.

It does, doesn't it?

Yeah.

That were fighting against the Hittites.

So I looked up a few other what-ifs.

Oh, good idea.

So this is a bit off topic, I know, but I just basically went into Google and started going through what if I just what if X happened.

And there are loads of amazing results.

So what would happen if there was no number six?

This is on 538.com.

Just go straight from five to seven.

Well, no, this is the thing.

I would.

You might, but basically, this was a question asked by a child who was five and a half years old and clearly interested in what happens next.

And they went to mathematics professors at Duke University and they said, well, everything would fall apart.

They said, I imagine they said, stop wasting my time.

I have more important research beginning on this.

They said it's really interesting because basically, if there's no six, there can't be any numbers higher than six.

You can't have a seven true, is it?

This is a maths professor who said all the other integers are out.

It's very detrimental.

If you think about it, how do you define six?

One more than five.

How do you define seven?

Two more than five, then you're fine.

Exactly.

So if you define it as one more than six, you're in trouble.

But if you define it as two more than five, you're absolutely fine.

Yeah.

But then if you start working that way, how do you define 11?

I call it.

Six more than five.

Yeah.

There's no six.

So now 11's in trouble.

Exactly.

This is an actual math professor who said, we are screwed if we lose six.

I think to reassure him, you just.

The risk is low.

The risk is low.

You just bump seven down, don't you?

And then you bump eight down.

Everyone gets bumped down once.

Or you could promote everyone from zero to five.

And you promote zero to one.

Zero's always wanted to be one.

Zero's just sitting there uselessly.

The concept of zero is a useless one, as established by

it didn't exist until, you know, wasn't it about the seventh century?

How did we get to the seventh century without zero?

It's impossible.

Exactly.

It was the sixth century then, or the eighth.

I don't know.

Anyway, I was looking at some what-if stuff as well, mainly because you said you were, and I thought, I'll copy Andy.

That's what I do.

So there's the what-if everyone thinks about if we all jumped at the same time, what would happen?

And if we all gathered together in the same place and jumped at the same time, then we would push the Earth in the opposite direction to the way we jumped by a hundredth the radius of a hydrogen atom, which I think is actually decent.

No, I think that's not bad.

Is it worth the organization required?

Yeah, that's not, I think that's not much, actually, either.

We could jump back.

Yeah.

Also, because

as soon as you come back down, the Earth comes back up to meet you, doesn't it?

Yeah, so it's not long last time.

It's a very rare circumstance in which we need the Earth to move that little distance for that short of time.

Would everyone at the other end of the Earth go, whoa, what was that?

No, we're all at the same end of the Earth.

No one's even there to experience it.

It would be amazing, Alex, if you were the only person on the other side of the Earth.

We just did it as an elaborate project.

It's like, where is everyone?

I must have missed a memo.

You're like, where is everyone?

And why have I just moved one half the diameter of a hedge?

The entire world's jumping on a party.

Check on Facebook.

Oh, that's where they are.

Seven billion attending.

One has not replied.

Can I give you one more what if?

Then I'm done.

I didn't know if you shot a powerful gun, like a sort of a cannon gun, but a gun that exists today, a modern gun, on the moon, you can shoot yourself in the back.

Silly.

It's an elaborate suicide method, isn't it?

If you want to fox the detectives.

One of Agatha Christie's later favorite stories that she ever wrote up.

A man is found dead alone on the moon.

I'm just saying.

So hang on.

Does the bullet go all the way around the moon?

It does.

So the moon's small enough that the gravitational pull isn't too much.

It basically goes, you have to be on top of a hill or something.

On a mountain, yeah.

And it kind of stays in very, very low orbit if you get the right velocity.

You obviously have to have a very precise shot

to make sure you do hit yourself.

Does it only work its way on once?

But

if you shot it and then you felt it go past your ear, would it go around again so you'd have time to stand one thing for that?

No, I think you've only got one chance, I reckon, because then you'd lose momentum, wouldn't you?

And then the gravity.

It does still have a gravitational.

It might still hit you, but it might hit you lower down, like in the testicles.

Aim high is getting better.

Man is found shot in the testicles on the moon alone.

That is a great what-if.

That's incredible.

It was probably all from Randall Monroe.

Who knows when you're looking up stuff, hypothetical stuff on the internet, how many of them were originally Randall Monroe.

So we should credit him just in case.

Randall Monroe Monroe basically invented the two words what and if.

He did, yeah.

No, that's ridiculous, Ain't he just invented putting them together?

Yeah, but what if he did?

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

My fact is, the world's largest wine cellar has tunnels 150 miles long, and it's so big it has to have traffic rules for people who drive through it.

That is very cool.

Yes, that's so cool.

It's in Moldova, and it's got streets, and all the streets are named after different grapes, and you can drive a car through it and a lot of employees there, they just cycle around all the time.

We should say what it's called.

It's called Milesti Michi and

it's near the capital of Chisnow.

Yeah.

It's incredible.

Yeah.

Who knew?

I mean James, obviously, but who knew of the rest of humanity about Moldova's wine industry?

I know because I've had Moldovan wine.

Yeah, you don't.

Well, I do not rate it very highly on my list of wines by country, I must say.

It's drunk drunk a lot in Russia.

They drink it a lot in Russia.

And the same way they drink Georgian wines.

I was reading that they really messed up the Moldovan wine trade.

In fact, I think it was about 2005 when Putin imposed some sanctions on Moldova and he banned all imports of their wine from going into Russia because they were a bit too pro-EU for him.

Or I think he said it was some other reason, but I think it was because they were too pro-EU.

And they're just loosening it.

So that really damaged their wine trade because about 40% of their exports went to Russia.

That's so weird because Vladimir Putin, he has his own cave in the second largest wine cellar in Moldova.

That must really piss him off.

No, no, no.

No, it's fine.

That's only 120 kilometres.

But he has his own cave there.

And lots of celebrities or wealthy people have their own special little zone.

Oh, it's like the Beverly Hills, but for wine.

Yeah, but he had his 50th birthday party in that second largest wine cellar.

It's in Krikova.

So cool.

The wine cellar at Crikova, have you heard about this?

They have a race there?

No.

So it hosts a 10-kilometre race around the wine cellar.

And you wear a headlamp, because obviously it's quite dark a lot of the place.

And at the end of it, you get a glass of mulled wine, but during the race, they hire someone to dress up as the Grim Reaper and chase you.

No way.

It sounds to me like the prize is getting the wine, right?

Yeah.

Kind of.

But you're running around next to a load of wine.

No one ever gets to the end.

They all realize that.

It's like building an Olympic stadium out of gold medals.

We should say that that second largest wine tunnel tunnel or cave or cellar in Moldova is also the second largest in the world.

It majors in this thing of having big wine cellars.

And this one, the biggest one, Milesti Mitsi,

two million bottles it has, which is more than the next 10 sellers combined.

Wow.

It's a big seller, mate.

Jesus.

That is really big.

Try some.

We are actually drinking wine now, aren't we, to celebrate this fact.

We are.

I was thinking it to celebrate.

Nice one, James.

You've earned yourself another glass that.

That's good.

That's really going to help my performance later on.

I'll cave in and have a glass too.

Very strong.

Alex, have you got a pun that will earn you a glass of this red wine?

I don't have to have one because I'm the banker.

I've got nothing.

Oh, well, never mind.

Well, we've got some beer here.

Yeah.

What else can we say?

So, in Moldova, you will find the world's largest building in the shape of a bottle.

And it is

hosts the Strong Drinks Museum.

Wow.

Sounds like an LSM museum right now.

Hello and welcome to this.

Would you like an audio guy?

The audio guide was the same guy as my wife.

Is it all the way to the bottom?

When you say the largest building shaped like a bottle, it's not that it's the largest building in the world and it's shaped like a bottle.

No, mate.

It's just that there are some buildings in the world shaped like bottles and Moldova has the biggest one.

Yeah, so the largest building in the world is somewhere in Dubai or something, isn't it?

Or Taipei.

And we would probably know if it was shaped like a wine bottle.

They kind of are.

Aren't skyscrapers all shaped a bit like wine bottles?

No.

It's a great philosophical point for another time.

The Gherkin isn't.

No, that's true.

That's shaped like a Gherkin, the walkie-talkie.

No, true.

The Empire State Building is shaped like a novelty liqueur bottle, I would say.

The Chard is shaped like a tiny bit of broken wine bottle.

But we didn't bottle wine until 1860, I think it was.

So it was illegal to sell wine by the bottle between 1636 and 1860.

And the reason was that people who were doing it before that, when glass first came in, it was really easy to cheat on the size.

So you could sell someone a bottle that wasn't enough wine.

So you sold it by the barrel and then you took it home and you put it in your own bottle.

There were bottles of wine if they existed.

Yeah, yeah, they had them at home.

I don't know how you siphon it in.

You couldn't buy a bottle.

Yeah.

Because I get a bit annoyed when there's not a reasonable size option at a bar.

And if I had to choose between a glass of wine and a barrel of wine, I'd be very annoyed.

I'd like a large glass, please.

No, we don't do that.

We've got 125 mils or a barrel.

I'll have a barrel, and I'll be like, have you heard about the government's wine cellar?

No.

So the government of this country has a wine cellar, and it's for when they host parties or receptions or dignitaries or big dinners.

You know, they do loads of official occasions.

And so they have to have a wine cellar.

And it's got about 34,000 bottles of wine in it, valued, I think, about £800,000.

But it's really clever.

They try and self-fund by selling off every year, or every few years, they sell off some really good wines.

You know, you sell one bottle of a great wine, which allows them to throw an entire party with rubbish wine.

And they've got, and during the Second World War, one of the first aggressive actions of Britain in the entire war was to requisition the wine from the German embassy.

Similarly, I didn't know about the Bolshevik Revolution and its running into wine problems.

So this was when the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace.

The Winter Palace obviously had this enormous wine cellar, which they all discovered, or the Red Guard had been sent in, and they got really drunk immediately.

Was there a Rose Guard as well, who were not as popular?

So, yeah, they went and got really drunk, and then they'd send others in.

So, the leaders, the Bolshevik leaders, your Lenins, they're quite annoyed because they really want to get on with the job.

And they keep sending in more guards and more people in their revolutionary lot, and they kept getting drunk.

I was reading an extract from this guy called Antonov Ovsiyenko, who was a Bolshevik commander, and he remembered repeatedly sending troops in and them succumbing.

Eventually, he said, We sent armoured cars to drive away other crowds, but the armoured cars started weaving suspiciously after a short amount of time.

And then he said, They tried to flood the cellars so that this wine issue was totally removed.

And the firemen they deployed to flood the cellars ended up getting drunk, so they failed to do that.

There was just havoc.

That is amazing.

Yeah, very undisciplined.

That's so funny.

Have you heard of Octavian Vaults?

No.

It's another mine, actually, and it's in Wiltshire, and it's got 5 million bottles of wine in it.

What?

No.

But this one, that's the world's biggest, has got 2 million.

No, you're right.

I'm looking at that and doubting it now.

But it's under Caucham in Wiltshire.

I mean, it's not.

Wait, Corsham's where the secret nuclear bunker is as well.

Well.

They've got a lot on the ground there.

It's basically for...

you know, wealthy people or famous people, but it's the size of 20 football pitches, and they hold a huge amount of wine there, which people have as investments and things like that.

I think I should go and check it out

for research purposes.

If I don't come out for a while, Anna come along, just make sure I'm okay.

I think they'll send me

Alex as well.

I'm gonna send Dan in an armored car.

Send it back and find that Anna's finished it all off.

That's the only way to end one of these things.

If Anna had been in the Russian Revolution, it would have all been over a lot faster.

What I quite like about wine is how French wine has just always been the best wine.

That's kind of the wankiest thing you've ever said on a podcast.

French wine Always the best wine.

When the Greeks first met the Gauls and tasted what the grapes were like, what the wine was like, they were like, This is obviously the only wine we're going to drink.

Same with the Romans from the start of the Roman Empire, the invasion of the Gauls in like the fifties BC, they immediately started making sure all their wine was imported from there.

To the extent that by 92 AD, the Emperor Domitian said that he wasn't going to allow any new planting in France.

So they had they possessed France and France by that point.

He said, You're not allowed to plant vines here because it's ruining the industry back home.

It's ruining the Roman industry because people only want to drink French wine.

So there must be

an objective quality to French wine that must be better.

Well, there's an objective quality to Moldovan wine that says it's not as good,

in my opinion.

They weren't banning any Moldovans from growing their own vines and exporting them.

Sure, feel free to try to sell us your wine.

Yeah.

So obviously wine sellers can have rat problems.

Can they?

Yeah, they they can, as in because they're sellers.

And a lot of French wine cellars have rat problems.

And you get populations of alcoholic rats.

To the extent where there is a traditional Bordeaux recipe for rat that you grill alcoholic rats.

It specifies alcoholic rats as part of the recipe because they've drunk rats.

How true?

How do you

identify whether a rat is an alcoholic or not?

If you notice the rat drinking in the morning, is that when you know that you can cook the rat?

Yeah, okay.

They've got shaky paws.

Can the rat identify that it's an alcoholic?

I think there's a lot of funny stage of denial.

Admitting you have a problem is the first step.

Admitting you are a rat is the first step.

Well, stage 12, the cooking,

is you skin them and eviscerate them, brush them with a thick sauce of olive oil and crushed shallots, and grill them over a fire of broken wine barrels.

So, I mean, there is a sort of element of romanticism about the wine included in there, because you have to buy the wine barrel as well.

But, like, that's kind of cool, right?

That's very

romanticism.

It does sound post-apocalyptic as well.

I think it's a shame Valentine's Day is over, otherwise, we'd all be serenading our partners with this.

What are we doing?

Okay, it's time for fact number three, and that is Anna.

Yep, my fact this week is that before they settled on the name Windsor, surnames that were considered for the royal family included Guelph, Whipper, Wettin, Tudor Stewart, and England.

I like Tudor Stewart because it's like a double barrel where they've taken both sides of the family.

I know, but I think they were worried it might sound a bit posh, and the royal family know how they like to not give that impression.

Yeah, they weren't really good old Windsor.

I like Guelph and Wetting, especially.

I've been in a lot of

first-idea brainstorming meetings where it's it's just there's no bad ideas, and that really sounds like it's from one of those.

What is Guelph?

How do you spell Guelph?

So it's G-U-E-L-P-H, so I don't know if that's the right pronunciation, actually.

Guelph.

Guelph?

The House of Guelph sounds so rubbish.

So there was reasoning for all of this.

This was in 1917.

So the royal family, descended from Queen Victoria, who'd married Albert, were really officially the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family, which had a bit of a German ring to it.

And in 1917, for obvious reasons, Germany wasn't everyone's favourite country.

And they decided to change their name and they changed it to Windsor and all of these other names genuinely were justified.

So Albert's house, the Saxon royal house, had the names Wettin and Whipper in it.

And then Guelph came from the Hanoverian royal house.

And then, yeah, people threw in Tudor Stewart.

Why not?

Everyone loved the Tudors, everyone loved the Stuarts.

The thing is, Hadalver is in Germany.

Right, so people would have picked up, that's probably why it was dismissed quite early on.

I think you've buried the most hilarious lead in the story in that they took the name from Windsor Windsor Castle, so the royal family is named after Windsor Castle rather than vice versa.

Oh yeah.

I think that's insane.

That is very weird.

That's so funny.

But nobody knew what the official surname was because it had never been used.

They didn't really know if they had a surname or not.

Yeah.

And when they got rid of the surname, it wasn't just the surname, it was the use of degrees, styles, dignitaries, titles, and honours of dukes and duchesses of Sa of Saxony and Princes and Princesses of the Saxe, Coburg and Gotha, and all other German degrees, styles, dignities, titles, honours, and appellations, because they have all this crap like at the beginning and the end of their name.

So they had had to completely rebrand themselves.

It's not just case of changing your name, it's not.

But isn't the Queen now Windsor Mountbatten?

Yes.

Because Philip took he wanted to.

No, it's her favourite cake.

Even a queen always orders it when she's used to it.

You'll think of Mount Battenberg.

Just like posh two normal Battenbergs on top of each other.

That is weird though, because the Mount Battens were the Battenbergs, but they changed.

So the Mount Battens are Philip's family, and at the same time, they thought we need to sound a bit less German, so they changed to Mountain Batten.

So get this.

Do you know the exact thing which prompted them to change?

Because we'd had three years of total war against Germany before they thought, oh, maybe we should be sounding extra German.

The thing which prompted it was that there was a bombing raid on London.

And before that, there were some bombs from Zeppelins, but this is the first time there was a heavy bomber plane dropping bombs on the British population.

June 1917.

And the bomber planes were called Gotha planes.

That was the name.

And people looked and thought, hang on, if they're called Gotha Planes, and those guys are called the Saxacoba Gothers, something's not right.

And it was within a month they changed the name.

That was how first the turnaround was, which is quite a speedy.

We still have Goths.

Yeah, that's true, yeah.

Why didn't they rebrand?

Is that what you're saying?

Imagine, oh look, there's a pack of Windsors over there on the street.

But the other thing is, why didn't the Germans then just rename their planes Windsors?

Every time the Queen changed her name, they just renamed the planes.

I don't think the priority of the German Luftgrapher was to gently troll the royal family

into submission.

I think they were trying to just blow up the whole country.

I agree with that, but then on the other hand, there is a certain kind of propaganda thing that they're trying to do all the time, isn't it?

So I reckon it would work that.

I do agree.

They missed the trick.

Do you know why Elizabeth is Windsor-Mountbatten rather than just Windsor, which was the suggestion?

No, is Mountbatten something to do with Prince Philip or something?

It certainly is, but they were the Windsor house, and actually, when they were born, Charles and Anne weren't born Windsor-Mountbatten.

but then a what's described as an expert amateur wrote to the royal family or wrote to the government and said if this Prince Andrew who was about to be born if this baby that the queen's pregnant with is born not with his father's name then he will have the badge of bastardry upon him because you know it's a bit embarrassing to not have your father it implies your parents might not be married and this caused this huge consternation and there was an official parliamentary investigation into it where they decided eventually that that they had to add Mountbatten to the name because otherwise people would just assume Prince Andrew was a bastard born out of wedlock.

I mean, and of course clearly people knew, didn't they?

Literally his parents were the Queen of Prince Philip.

You would have thought.

And long at that point on the royal family went on to avoid any controversies of heritage.

Thank God that lays down the line.

But Prince Charles calls himself Charles Wales, doesn't he?

Yeah, they still play pretty fast and loose with their surnames, don't they?

Which would have been even more embarrassing if they'd been called England.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, you're right.

Was he like hyphenated to England Wales?

Maybe it's like a football match.

What was that thing that you said they would have if the child was born with

the badge of bastardry?

That, weirdly, is my only Boy Scout achievement.

All the other lads clubbed together and got over me.

Pretty proud.

What wasn't that the guy was, what was he, an amateur or what was he called?

Expert amateur.

They just referred to him as an expert amateur.

I feel like we get quite a lot of those actually writing into QI and we love them by the way.

He was a real expert, wasn't it?

As in he'd I think he'd previously embarrassed the government on other occasions by pointing out actually if you do that then genealogically you're screwed.

So he was he was good.

Yeah and always in that tone of voice which I've quite enjoyed.

Did you know that another royal surname, Stuart,

way further back, like Mary Queen of Scots kind of thing,

was originally Steward, as in like an heir steward, as in Stuart.

That's where he got it from, yeah, yeah, exactly.

He used to work for Reiner, didn't he?

Yeah, yeah.

He would, after his coronation, he would push the royal trolley all the way down Westminster Abbey, offering duty free on the left and the right.

To the pews.

So Mary Queen of Scots changed her name from Stuard to Stuart, S-T-U-A-R-T,

because the French wouldn't have been able to pronounce it, and they would have pronounced the W as a V, and it would have been Stuford.

She would have been

Mary Stuford.

Are you serious?

That's why Stuart doesn't have a W now.

Yeah, and she just.

That's amazing.

And

it was just because people weren't pronouncing it correctly, so they were just like, well, fine.

But the French wouldn't pronounce the D or the T at the end of that word, would they?

Because they miss out the Stuart.

So it doesn't really matter if it's Stuard or Stuart.

No, it's weird that she changed the D to a T.

Yeah, that makes sense.

But then it should be Stuard.

It's the Stuart.

But maybe it was just those Reiner jokes that just got to her in the end.

I think there may be a change in the Royal Family's name coming up soon.

Oh, hello.

So I'm not certain about this.

Okay, but when...

Sorry.

You do say that.

I know I do.

Come on.

We do.

We were saying the other day that I use the word hello sometimes to mean...

Oh, hello.

Did you do that?

No, I didn't believe him.

I didn't believe it either.

Yeah, I do sometimes.

It's so weird.

But I think that that was the original meaning of the word hello, wasn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm not making a point.

It's just what I say.

No, I know.

I just didn't believe you.

And I'm really sorry for interrupting you anyway.

When you guys have quite finished.

So when the throne is inherited from a queen, i.e.

down a matrilineal line,

the royal house often changes to reflect the patrilineal descent of the new new monarch.

It's a bit knotty.

So Queen Elizabeth is in the Wettin dynasty, as you say, from a branch of the house of the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha line.

But Prince Charles, his father's line, is Prince Philip, obviously, and Prince Philip is a member of the house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg.

So genealogically...

We won't have the German problem again.

So Charles William, everybody down that line, because of that sort of ancient, slightly slightly sexist, you know, tradition of the patrilineal thing, they are all members of that dynasty.

They probably will not change to make themselves the Schledsville, Colstein, Sunderberg, Luxburgs, but there's an outside chance.

That's like all of the names they brainstormed put together, like into one big pseudonym.

It's really weird that they have a hype, like their surname is a hypothetical surname.

They're like, well, this is what I was learning would be if we ever really used it.

Yeah, because they don't use them, do they?

They don't because they have time, they literally never use them.

So

the whole thing is pointless.

Don't need them.

It's like Madonna.

Don't need a surname.

Yeah.

Same thing.

Chadon and Chicona, you mean?

Oh, sod off.

Hey, in Royal News,

this is the thing that's happened this week, which you probably read about: is the thing about Prince Henrik, who was the Danish Queen Margaret's husband who died this week or last week.

But it's just a thing that's in the news this week, so I was reminded of it.

But I find it really weird that Prince Henrik of Denmark has been annoyed his whole life that he hasn't been promoted to the same level as his wife.

Like, he has made no secret of the fact that he's furious that he's not king consort, he's prince consort.

He doesn't have the same status as his son or his wife.

So he's just died and he has refused to be buried next to his wife, the Danish Queen Margaret, because he's like, well, if you don't think we're equal in life, I guess we're not equal in death.

Wait, she's still alive.

Yeah.

I think she can make the decision for him now, can't she?

I'm sorry to be crude about it, but

she's done the graceful thing and allowed him not to be buried

in the grave.

I mean, you could have a compromise and he would just be buried facing away with his his arms crossed

clutching the TV remote.

Did you know all Spanish people have a secret surname?

I'm not even joking.

Is it the same for everyone?

No, it's different for everyone.

Right, okay.

Different for everyone.

Well, no, logically, I'll box myself into a corner there.

Do you know the Thai in Thailand?

Sorry to interrupt, we'll get back to that.

But in Thailand, every family has to have a different surname.

You just knocked Andy off the fact stool with your feet and then jumped on it.

No, no, no, this is it's extremely relevant.

Yeah.

Okay.

You don't know if it's relevant or not.

I haven't told you one fact.

I think that would have been a nice follow-on fact had Andy finished his.

No, it was irrelevant to the little stupid joke that I made in the middle of Andy's thing, which wasn't really relevant.

Yeah.

Yeah, but a single family has to have a given family name, but it's not allowed to be the same as anyone else.

Wait, so everyone's got a different surname.

How do you know if someone's your cousin?

You don't.

Oh.

One day they're going to run out.

Well, they're quite long tie names, aren't they?

They are.

That's probably why they're so long, yeah.

It's like your password for your computer.

If you make them long enough, no one else is going to have the same one.

We all live with this issue online every day.

We have to have unique codes for it.

But you then have to have a surname plus one two three and then your cat's name.

What's your name?

It's Andrew Smith, 1986.

Right.

Did you know that all Spanish people have a secret second surname that no one outside Spain knows about?

Oh,

yeah.

So children inherit two surnames, okay, one from their mother, one from their father.

So there are Spanish people who are called, you'll have heard of them, Rafael Nadell Pereira, Enrique Iglesias Presla, and Fernando Alonso Diaz.

These are all their actual names.

So those third ones, why aren't they?

Why don't we know about the third ones?

It's not reported.

And how did you get this scoop?

Who leaked this?

Okay, well, here's the interesting thing: is that until recently, automatically the first one would be from the husband, from the male parent, and the second one from the female parent, the mother.

And children would only inherit properly the first surname of each parent.

So there's over time there's a trend towards keeping male surnames and not female ones.

And as of last year, parents get to choose.

So that will now be balanced out a bit.

True in Russia as well.

They have secret surnames.

So

Vladimirovich Putin, that's his real name.

I can see why he cut the unnecessary,

basically.

Yeah, that's why Russian novels are so confusing to read.

Yes.

So many different bloody names.

The Spanish novel's quite interesting because it's kind of like natural selection through surnames because the nicest surname from now on, the nicest surname will will be picked, so you'll get lovely surnames.

That's true, actually.

Because it's unlikely you're going to be called, you know, tick face cockhead, and then like you're like, oh, two shit names to pick from, whichever they do.

Yeah, that is an unlikely name.

Rude names are dying out, so in 1881, there were 3,211 cocks in the UK, and now there are only 785.

And they're all in the House of Commons.

That's a joke, it's 650 capacity.

Sorry, it doesn't work.

It doesn't make any sense.

Wow, only 785.

Yeah, same with a lot of surnames like Shuffle Bottom.

That's massively declined.

Only 322 of those left.

Dafts are going down.

It's about a 75% decline in these names.

It's a shame.

I tell you a way to protect a name is by giving people money to have the name.

The University of Glasgow.

How much money would you need to be called Alex Coch?

That's a good point.

If I gave you £10,000, but you had to keep Alex Coch for the rest of your life.

No.

Are you serious?

Are you you kidding me?

James, I'll do it for a tenor.

Oh, I'm not going to bargain now for a tenor immediately.

We have a winner.

Okay.

Great.

I mean, to just the name Coch.

There's not even a colour.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Just Anna Coch.

Yeah, but that's still like Kim Bolton.

That's just a nice way of saying hello to Emma.

All right, Anna Coch.

Okay.

That sounds like the kind of thing you're telling me now.

Anyway,

the University of Glasgow offer a grant of up to £500 for anyone with the surname Graham.

It's called the Graham Trust.

And they offer it because traditionally Graham was a name for poor people a long time ago.

Are you joking?

I know.

Do you still get that?

It's just on their website, and there's just a paragraph saying that the original aim from 1759 was the distribution to persons of the name of Graham or descendants of persons of that name, such sums that they shall just requisite and to put poor boys of the same name or descendants of such blah blah blah blah to enable them.

But it's not a poor name now, is it?

No, but it's carried on.

You can still do it five times.

So it's for how much money?

£500.

Oh, it's not that much.

Well, Heather Graham, if you're listening, and we know you do,

your quid's in now.

Former Arsenal manager George Graham.

Yeah.

For another reference, in case you didn't get the Heather Graham one.

Do you know any of the Grahams?

I was trying to think of like a Rich Graham.

I can't really think of any

Graham's got to be worth a bobble too.

I don't know who that is.

Heather Graham.

Austin Powers.

She's in the second Austin Powers film.

She plays Felicity Shagwell.

That's an unusual sound, isn't it?

There aren't that many Shagwells these days.

Actually, if you're called Shagwell, you can get a £50 grant from the University of Kiel.

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Hey, I'm Eric Ripke, Showrunner of the Boys, here with my friend Sean Ryan, showrunner of the night agent.

And on this episode of Creator to Creator, we will talk about the madness of making a TV show.

Listen to Creator to Creator, wherever you get your podcasts.

Okay, it's time for fact number four, and that is Alex.

My fact this week is that in 2012, thieves stole an entire ski lift from the Czech Republic.

I'm glad that you specified it was thieves, because imagine if it was law-abiding people who stole, and it has to be thieves.

Yes, I'm sorry.

Yeah, that's amazing.

How, so one, sorry, just one of the things on the lift, or the entire lift.

So, all of the pylons, the cables, all of the gondola chairs on it, the whole thing

taken away overnight.

Yeah.

Overnight.

Isn't that crazy?

Was there another ski resort that opened its magical new lift two days later?

I reckon, but the thing is, okay, I reckon more than one person was involved in this theft, right?

Yeah, I would think

you should chuck around, James.

I just don't think so.

That's James walking around with his notepad and his pleasures carrying on.

I think this is the work of more than one person.

Certainly, I'm putting my Sherlock Holmes hat on, but I think, you know,

you can't do it on your own now.

that would be another great Agatha Christie, where Poirot calls them all together in the drawing room.

Actually, you all scroll the chello.

And where is the cello now?

On the moon.

That's incredible.

Yeah, I don't know how they did it.

Surely you'd need sort of like Jumbo Jet to take it away and stuff or huge lorries.

It's unbelievable.

Well, I think, because if you think about ski lifts, you can take them apart, especially if you have the right equipment and you're able to chop up all the pylons.

A lot of it, if you're not...

If you've got the right equipment, you you can take anything apart.

That's true, that's true.

But it is, it's all like, if you think about it, they're quite simply made things.

They're huge, just bit lots and lots and lots of metal.

It's not rumbly complicated, dense stuff.

You've got hollow pylons, you've got long, long strands of cable, and then you can do lots of individual stackable gondolas.

You can just wind up the cable onto a reel or something, can't you?

Well, I'd wind it around one of the gondolas.

I think that's probably using like when Christmas likes when you wind it up a bug.

But as soon as you put it away, it gets knotted and then you go.

Oh,

that's why they haven't set it up yet.

They're still trying to get it apart.

They sort of got all the pylons together and tied it together with a string.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that happens.

Are we going to talk about ski lifts or massive things that have been stolen?

Can I tell you my one favourite, amazing, my favourite fact about lifts?

And then that's the only thing I've got.

And then we can lift that on to.

Yeah.

Well, cable cars specifically, because there's no skiing involved in this one.

But this is potentially my favourite fact, if it's true.

And I rang TfL to find out today, and they haven't got back to me yet.

So Coco may yet run in with a note telling me it's true.

Although it's the last fact so

it's not looking good for this confirmation.

Well either way it's a cool idea and it's sort of half interesting anyway is that the Emirates cable car Emirates Airline the gondola which goes from Greenwich to the Docklands over the River Thames it's about 90 meters above the water.

The fact that I read was that that's tall enough for most ships to go under but you know just like with Tower Bridge they have the capability to lift the road for taller ships to get through.

The same capability exists with this cable car which is that if you take off all the gondolas off the cable car then the reduction in weight means that the cable raises by a few meters meaning that even ships that are taller than that can get through.

I would say if you're wanting to steal that cable car yeah then you turn up and you take all of the bits first don't you you take all of these bubbles first and you say oh no I'm just doing it because there's a ship on this way

and then after that all you have to do is wind up the rope and get that.

I think the easy way would be to put a hook on top of a 90 meter high ship and just drive it as fast as you can and then pull it.

And actually to be honest, if this is we're doing this in a cartoon universe then you probably would stretch and then you go brrrrriggs.

That's the old dog taking a string of sausages as a method.

Work all you need is one of the sausages to be in your mouth.

I googled biggest things ever stolen and the internet seems to think it's a mountain.

A mountain called Humter Pahad,

which is in eastern India.

And apparently what's happened is locals have just climbed up there and started chiseling bits off the top.

And so now if you go there, it's like got a flat top top, but it used to have a peaked top.

And so they've stolen the top.

It's different from stealing the whole mountain, though.

They've stolen some of them.

That's like stealing one gondola and saying, I've stolen the whole thing.

You've got to make a start somewhere, Alex.

Not all these things can be stolen overnight.

The dragon wasn't stolen in a day.

Actually, Scarfell Pike had a bit of a theft problem as well.

Speaking of stealing mountains, yeah, there was, this is in 2015, and an artist took the top of Scarfell Pike.

He took a bit of rock, which I think was about an inch squared.

It was in an art exhibition called The Intruder about how humans impose our own categories on nature.

And so he mounted this rock that he'd taken from the top of Scarfell Pike, and he got in loads of trouble for it.

And the head of Cumbria Tourism said, This is taking the Mickey, and we want the top of our mountain back.

Yeah, yeah.

What are you going to say if you're the head of Cumbria Tourism?

What are you going to say?

Yeah, come and have a bit more of Cumbria.

He's got to preserve Cumbria.

That's his job, isn't it, really?

That's his job.

He can't have a laissez-faire attitude to this.

His neck is on the the line.

And he's already.

He's got the DA busting his ass over losing the top of Scuffle Pike already.

That's the most important part of Cumbria.

The worst part of Cumber is a lose, to find in, we come into work and finding you're missing one bit.

It's not unreasonable to think that he's going to be pissed off with this.

Yes.

Headline from the Bomb Afeco in 2013.

Stolen prosthetic arm discovered in second-hand shop in Baltimore.

Jesus, no.

It's true.

It's true.

In 2012, police apprehended a woman after she hobbled to the exit from a shop in Oslo, in Norway, and she was wearing a long skirt covering a 42-inch television that she was carrying between her legs.

I think you go for a smaller TV, don't you?

I think her eyes are bigger than her groin in this case, aren't they?

In 2012, Jamie Oliver complained that 30,000 napkins were stolen from his restaurants every month.

And so I was looking at restaurant thefts, and people do steal stuff from restaurants.

So the Jamie Oliver ones, just to say, they have his branding on, don't they?

They're like, they're nice, kind of, they look a bit like tea towels, but they've got Jamie Oliver branding on.

So, the police should go for people who are also called Jamie Oliver.

They're not going to be aware of the name.

No, no, it's people who like Jamie Oliver, not people who are named Jamie Oliver.

People are called Jamie, you know.

It's not a name tag.

Jamie Oliver doesn't put that name on all his towels so that if he loses them, they get returned to him.

Do you put your name on all your napkins?

Yes.

I put it on all my tissues.

It takes ages to monograph it, and then you play those ones.

Have you heard of the South American endoscopy gangs?

Are they thieves?

They must be

in this section.

And what are they stealing with their endoscopes?

Well, no, they are stealing endoscopes.

This is a gang who go around hospitals in Europe stealing specifically endoscopy equipment, i.e., things that you put up people's bottoms to look inside them.

Are they really daring thefts, like while they're in use?

No, they're not.

That's weird.

I'm not getting a feed on the endoscopy.

Wait a second.

It's like when all the the lights go out, so all the feeds go down.

In the hospital, they've just got a massive bank of monitors and they're all going out one by one.

Massive bank of monitors all showing spotlighting cards.

Like, what's going on?

I mean, that is the worst security guard job in the world, isn't it?

2005 in York, £300,000 worth of endoscopes.

Leicester the same year, £250,000 worth.

How much are they, do you reckon?

I don't know.

They must be expensive.

But 2017, last year, a gang took 1.2 million, I think it was Canadian dollars worth of kit.

2014 to 17, 16 million

Euros worth of Germany.

Well, what they think is that it's so that you can check that drug mules have swallowed the drugs.

Got it.

Oh,

wow.

I know.

I was thinking, who's getting backstreet endoscopies in this decade?

Every endoscopies are back alley.

Should we wrap up?

Yeah.

John to know one amazing thing about a ski lift.

I would like to know that, yes, yes.

Okay, cool.

So one amazing thing thing about a ski lift, I learned, is that in the last couple of years, a snowboarder got stuck on a ski lift.

He was stuck for six hours, and this was in the Austrian Alps.

It was incredibly cold, it was minus 18 degrees.

He was going to be, he didn't know how long he was going to be stuck for.

They closed it for the night.

So, yeah, he's been there for six hours, and he's getting really, really cold.

He said he kept falling asleep into some cold-induced stupor.

And he realized that he had a lighter on him, so the only thing he could do was burn anything flammable on him.

And so, he started burning everything he had.

So, he burned, he had a bunch of tissues, he burned them, then he burned some business cards he had, and then

I'd like to give you a ring!

He must have had them in his wallet or something, right?

Yeah, yeah, but I mean, you probably will meet an executive, you're on a skiing holiday.

I agree, right?

You start off with tissues less important than business cards, yeah, right?

Both my tissues and my business cards have my name and phone number monogrammed on them.

Okay, so then what did he burn next?

Then he had about 100 euros in banknotes and he burned each banknote one by one.

And he was on the last banknote when someone on a snowmobile saw him.

The bad news is he was then stolen by some guys from the Czech Republic.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Andrew Hunter M, James, at James Harkin, Alex, At Alex Bell.

Anna.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

There's also our group account, which is at no such thing.

There are details there about our tour.

We're going all over the UK, the Republic of Ireland, and Australia and New Zealand in May.

There are details there of our book, and, of course, Behind the Gills documentary about us.

That's it for this week.

We will see you next time with another bunch of facts.

Until then, goodbye.

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