200: No Such Thing As A Jigsaw For The Queen

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Hi guys, just before we start this show, I want to celebrate the fact that this is our 200th episode of No Such Thing as a Fish.

Thanks for that, Dan.

A little woo-hoo.

Yep, and a second one.

And the way I've celebrated our 200th episode is by making a mistake.

Yep, last week's episode, there was an incorrect fact in it.

So we recorded the show live in Leicester, and my fact was about how the Walker's Crisp Factory can't tell the difference between golf balls and crisps.

And after we recorded this show, someone came up to me.

He was called Greg Hilliard, and he actually works in the Walker's Crisp Factory.

And he informed me that fact was out of date because they've now created a machine that can distinguish between the two.

It's in the last couple of years, so walkers can now tell the difference between golf balls and crisps.

Happy birthday, no such thing as a fish.

Hello

and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast.

Guys, I'm trying to do the intro here.

A weekly podcast coming to you from Birmingham!

My name is Dan Schreiber and I am sitting here with Anna Chaczynski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin.

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 my fact this week.

My fact this week is that in Brussels there is a commemorative statue to where Peter the Great once vomited.

Anyone else want to vomit at this stage?

Is it in the shape of vomit or what?

What do you mean?

Oh, the statue.

No, it's of Peter the Great.

Yeah, yeah.

But what it was is he was over in Brussels and he was out just having a big day and he had a bit too much of a big day and they pulled over to where this sort of little fountainy bit is and he vomited.

And it was established that that's what he did historically.

And then years later, it was in 1856, there was a prince who donated a statue to say, we need to commemorate this.

So it said, it had this little plaque on it, which says, as he sat on the edge of this fountain, he ennobled its waters with the wine of his libations.

Did I say any of the words right in that?

It's close enough.

His, I think, his.

Peter the Great was obviously, in one sense, this very grand historical figure, like probably the most influential czar Russia ever had,

you know, like early 18th century, influenced everything that came after him.

But also, he was an absolute lad.

So

he founded a drinking society called, it was originally called the Jolly Company, and then it was called the all-joking, all-drunken synod of fools and jesters.

And it had a few rules.

So there were rules like you were never allowed to go to bed sober, you always had to empty your cup when instructed to.

And they just did mad stuff all the time, just constantly fooling around.

So there was, I think there was something where his favourite jester got married.

He had this jester, and he decided he was czar by this time, so he could do whatever he wanted.

So he decided to make this wedding like a a massive royal deal.

And he gave his jester his czar's carriage.

And then him and his drinking society wore boots made of straw and they wore gloves in the sh like made of mice.

So they shoved their hands into mice.

And they wore...

What?

Sorry.

Do you mean like finger puppets?

No, it must be mouse skin, right?

They weren't putting the hand up at mouse's.

Oh, yeah, okay.

Well, I don't know, because they wore squirrels' tails and cats' paws just hanging off their clothes for fun.

And then they made the married couple enter Moscow on the back of a camel and then they just spent three days getting absolutely smashed and as one biographer put it the joke may have been carried too far because the groom died during the celebrations

may may have been carried too far that's a historian's way of looking at it isn't it he um he was a terrifying man so he was uh six foot seven He had a standing desk.

That's not terrifying, but

the standing desk he had, the writing surface, was five foot six inches off the floor.

Wow.

He was huge.

Yeah, and also the other thing about him, he was obsessed with dwarfs.

So when he was a baby, this is before he was...

To him, everyone would have been a dwarf.

Yeah.

But he had a retinue of dwarfs acting as his servants and playmates.

And he had a mini carriage, and he would ride in it, drawn by four dwarf ponies, with four dwarfs riding their own horses at the side.

And even in later life, he became obsessed with dwarfs in pies.

He loved a dwarf jumping out of a pie at a banquet.

Really?

He was obsessed with it.

Often naked.

Naked dwarves jumping out of pies.

He was really into, yeah.

So Simon C.

Montefiore wrote a really good biography and he basically said all of the parties they had had naked girls jumping out of pies, dwarves being tossed, dwarves dressed as old men, old men dressed as dwarves, all of them naked, except for the bishop who would be carrying dildos on a cushion.

But that's the thing about it is this thing that he did, this club, it was called a synod, wasn't it?

And so it was basically to take the piss out of the church.

And that's what he did the whole time.

So, instead of holy water, they would scatter vodka.

Wow.

And if you were ever caught being sober, you get excommunicated from his club.

But the worst thing was, if you got excommunicated, you were barred from all the pubs in the whole of Russia.

Wow.

No way.

No way.

Wow.

Imagine the horror, Anna.

Listening at home, you want to be able to imagine the horror on Anna's face right now.

He did another thing where, so he did a number of trips to Europe.

He was famous for these massive trips.

And one time he came back and he was so impressed by the clean-shavenness of the Europeans that he imposed a beard tax into Russia.

But the way he did it was he came back and they threw a massive reception for him.

And he was giving a sort of arousing speech.

And everyone said it was elation.

Everyone was so excited.

And then it turned to horror when he suddenly said, I don't want beards anymore.

And he pulls out a massive razor and he starts shaving the faces of people who were attending what they thought was just a pleasant talk of a homecoming hero, and they all left without their face hair.

But he did the tax to start off with, and then when people started paying the tax, he just went, Oh, I'm just gonna ban them then.

So he just didn't want beards at all because he saw that as an example of the old Russia.

And he was a great modernizer of Russia.

So he had a law that everyone had to dress as either a Hungarian, a Frenchman, or a German.

That was because he knew a very funny joke about a Hungarian, a Frenchman.

But with the beard tax, the thing was, with the tax, they gave you these coins, and I didn't realize these coins are still in existence.

This is from the 1700s, and you can see them.

There's pictures online where it's like a sort of a goatee and a little,

what's that bit control?

A soul patch.

Soul patch kind of thing, but like Satan would have, you know, the more pointy one.

A goatee.

Oh yeah, a goatee.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that would be on the coin, and you would carry your coin around with you.

So if you were seen in the streets with a beard, they'd go, where's your coin?

And you'd look around for the coin.

And if you didn't have your coin, they'd shave your face on the spot.

He took Russia back 5,000 years, as well as being a massive modernizer.

And you mean...

He left Russia in the year 7,206.

And he got back and he said, I don't want this anymore.

Because Russia used to have...

used to begin at 5508 BC.

And he left Russia for the West and he found, oh, it's 1700 here.

Well, I prefer this.

And so he came back and said, right, it's 1700.

Forget the 7,200 nonsense.

Changing it.

Beards don't exist in the future.

That's so cool.

So he just altered time.

Yeah.

And he trained as a shipbuilder.

Did he?

So when he was touring Europe,

he personally went to a shipyard and just worked there in Amsterdam for months.

And he cooked his own meals and he lit his own fires and he ignored anybody who called him Your Majesty.

He answered only to Carpenter Peter.

He was very eccentric, but an incredibly practical man in loads of ways.

He also really liked cutting something else off people.

So you would be actually thankful if he cut your beard off, because he loved cutting people's heads off himself.

So, usually, as a world leader at the time, people were beheaded, but you know, you'd get your executioner to do it.

But he really liked to be there in the thick of it.

And so he did lots of executions himself.

And he was really fascinated by anatomy.

Again, because I think he liked Europeans and they were maybe ahead in biology.

If he comes at you with a razor, at what stage do you know he's going to go for the beard and not cut your hair?

Yeah, that's got to be absolutely terrifying.

He comes out with a great big axe.

No, this is just my beard axe.

Don't worry.

He actually, he had a mistress called Mary Hamilton, and then she ended up being beheaded as lots of mistresses did.

And when she was beheaded, he was there, and as soon as she was beheaded, he lifted up her head in front of the crowds who were all watching.

And he gave them all a medical lesson on anatomy.

So he turned her neck side out and was like, This is the trachea.

This is, you know, her

carotid artery.

And then he gave her a big snog and then he dropped the head and walked away.

He gave her a snog.

Yeah, yeah, he gave her a big kiss on the list.

Oh, God.

So this fact was sent to me by a listener of our podcast called Carrie.

And

I loved it because there are amazing statues all over the world that represent very odd things.

I found one which I find I've been trying to track down whether or not the truth of this, which is George Washington in Trafalgar Square, very close to where we work in in Covent Garden, literally a walking distance.

There's a statue of George Washington there outside the National Portrait Gallery, and it was donated by the Americans.

However, there was a sentence that George Washington said just before he died, which is he said, I would never will stand on British soil again.

And as a result, it is said, and this is what tour guides tell everyone, that as they were putting down the statue of George Washington, they imported American soil, and sitting underneath it is American soil.

So he still is not standing.

Yeah, but what's under the American soil?

It's more British soil.

How far down does this go, basically?

On vomiting.

And on American presidents, actually.

Ulysses S.

Grant

was

president, and also he was prominent in the Civil War, in the American Civil War before that.

And so he was kind of a war hero, but at the same time, he was an alcoholic.

So he used to swig whiskey wherever he went, apparently.

And at one point in battle, he vomited into his horse's horse's mane.

Whoa

and just went on with it.

What about George W.

Bush?

Was it George W.

Bush?

No, it's George H.W.

Bush, wasn't it?

Who vomited on the lap of Japan's prime minister in 1992?

And as a result, the Japanese coined a phrase bushu suru, meaning embarrassing public vomiting,

or literally to do a bush.

Because that is frowned on, isn't it, in Japan?

Yeah, actually everywhere.

What?

Oh, I've got so many apologetic texts to send.

Do you know?

He was so good-natured about that moment, though.

So he kind of collapsed at this dinner.

He'd been feeling bad anyway, I think because he'd just played a tennis match against the Japanese Emperor and he'd lost.

So he was feeling really unwell after that.

And he collapsed onto the floor, vomited, passed out.

And as soon as he woke up, with the Japanese Prime Minister there above him saying, You're okay, he said, Why don't you just roll me under the table and I'll sleep it off while you finish dinner?

Really?

Which is quite cool.

Yeah.

One thing about Peter the Great is at his parties, he would train bears to serve alcohol and they would growl and harass at those who said no.

So I thought I'd look at some other awesome parties.

And I really like the engagement party of the newspaper magnate Gordon Bennett.

He turned up at his own engagement party so drunk that he immediately urinated into the living room fireplace in full view of his hosts.

And it's in the Guinness Book of Records as the greatest engagement faux pas.

And it's supposed to be where we get the phrase, Gordon Bennett.

Something bad, yeah.

Wow.

Supposed to be.

Wait, Guinness still accepting any advance on urinating into the fireplace?

Sure.

Okay, go for it.

I think we could smash that.

During the gin craze, there was quite a few good parties.

So this was in the 18th century, and a lot of people were drinking gin, especially in London.

There was an author called Henry Mackenzie who was at a drinking party, and he didn't want to drink anymore, so he fell to the floor to disguise himself as a drunken body.

Wow.

And then soon after, he felt a small hand around his neck, and he was like, What's going on?

and he confronted the boy who was doing it.

And apparently, the boy said it was his job to loosen the neckties of the guests to prevent them from choking on their own vomit.

Wow.

If you have to hire someone to do that.

Yeah.

I had at my stagdoo party.

Oh, are we really?

Yeah, just before I did my speech, my brother made me drink what in Australia is called a shoey, and they do it on the Formula One.

You fill a shoe full of beer and you have to drink the whole shoe of beer.

So I did that right after I decided I'd say a quick thank you to everyone that came.

And I did that.

passed out, woke up in the morning and thought, oh, I did a pretty good speech last night.

And my brother said I recorded it.

I thought it was like about two minutes?

45 minutes.

A 45-minute minutes feat whose shoe did you have to drink my brother's it was disgusting we did because he's a clown isn't he that was the problem

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Let's move on to our second fact of the show.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that only one study has ever found that men are better than women at recognizing faces.

It was a study looking at the recognition of the transformers.

And

I know that's bad, obviously, but internally I am thinking, yeah, I'm pretty good at recognizing Transformers.

It's true.

And they're robots in disguise, so that's even better, right?

So this is obviously like an on-average thing.

So you couldn't say, for instance, that Anna would be worse at recognizing Transformers than Dan.

Just on average, women are worse than men.

Although you know that I asked you earlier what Transformers were, so.

And that was having just read the Wikipedia page on Transformers, wasn't it?

I still understand it.

Conforming to stereotype.

And you couldn't say, for instance, that Andy would be worse than Anna at recognising Barbie faces, which is the other part of this study.

So they took Barbie faces and they took Transformer faces.

And they found that the women were better at recognising Barbie and the men were better at recognizing Transformers.

And what they think is this is a study about looking whether experience is important when it comes to recognising faces.

So they found these things where they thought women would have more experience in looking at Barbies and men would have more experience in looking at transformers.

And they found that maybe experience has something to do with it.

But actually overall women are a lot, lot better than men at looking at faces.

Yeah,'cause I I think I read a study and this is off memory so very risky right now but that also women because of the genetic maternal instinct then you kind of have to be primed to recognize people more often and you have to like take an interest in more people so you can form a bond with them and as soon as you form an emotional bond with people then you're more likely to recognize them next time you see them.

Yeah, it could be that.

Could be that.

Whereas men are not.

But it's probably the Barbie thing.

So you have these things called face patches in your brain.

And they're these little bits, they're about the size of a blueberry, and they are specifically for recognizing faces.

So

they don't respond if you get shown another body part, but they do respond if you get shown a face.

And they are so predictable, these face patches, that scientists tried it out with monkeys.

Monkeys also have face patches.

And they would measure the electrical activity of the face cells, and then they could recreate the face that the monkey had seen accurately.

You know what?

Yes.

From the activity in the brain cells.

Wow, that is magic.

But monkeys aren't very good at recognizing faces, I don't think, are they?

I think great apes are, but monkeys are quite bad.

They are good, though, at recognizing bottoms.

Monkeys recognize chimpanzees, especially recognize each other by their bottoms, the way that we recognise each other by the face.

Well, not exactly the same way.

Well, the same way, but upside down.

Yeah.

Does that mean they back into every social engagement?

They go arse first.

But then they can't because one of them has to be face first in order to see the arse.

Oh, yeah.

It's unbelievably embarrassing when one comes in arse first and another one comes in arse first.

Imagine that in an engagement.

But

do you know how they tested this?

They tested it by showing them...

They showed humans faces and then faces upside down.

And

humans are much slower to recognize faces when they're turned upside down.

They then showed the chimpanzees arses, chimpanzees' arses, and then arses upside down.

And the slowdown was the same.

Whereas humans did not slow down when they were shown a normal bottom and then an upside-down bottom, which they also did for this experiment.

But could the humans recognize the bottoms?

No.

They also could not recognize upside-down bottoms.

Okay, I got it.

Yeah.

I just thought maybe I'd have a quick game of Transformer or Barbie.

Oh, okay.

Great.

We can't do the images because this is a podcast.

Yeah, fine.

But what I can do is give you some names of either these are people from Transformers, not people, Transformers.

They're either Transformers from Transformers.

They're people to me, James.

Or toys from the Barbie universe.

Okay.

Okay.

So, dude.

Ken.

Friend of Ken.

Yeah, it must be a Barbie thing.

Transformer.

It is.

Everyone?

Barbie, they knew it.

Yeah, it's a friend of Jazzy.

What?

Slag.

Slag.

Barbie!

Is that a Barbie doll?

Or is it a transformer?

I think it's an incredibly ill-conceived Barbie.

It's a Triceratops Dinobot.

MC Hammer.

Barbie.

Barbie.

Barbie, yeah, he's got it.

Yeah.

He's got it.

Because they do celebrity Barbies, don't they?

There's an Angela Merkel as well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I tried to get one, and they'd said it was for sale, but then it turned out it was, they brought it just to an EU conference.

Barbie created an Angela Merkel Barbie, and so it's not for sale for the general public.

It should be.

It is if you pay 50 billion pounds.

Yes.

One more.

Alan.

Transformer.

Transformer.

Yeah, Transformer.

Well, that was a man who.

Who's the Transformer?

Who's the Barbie?

Who doesn't give a shit?

Okay, it's time for fact number three then.

Well, the answer is you were right not to give a shit because it's both.

It's a high-speed train and someone who's married to Barbie's friend Midge.

I beg your pardon.

I said Midge.

Oh, Midge.

Cool.

I mean, if her friend was called Midge, that would have been one of my

so you may well have heard of these guys called super recognizers.

Oh, yeah.

So they're they're police officers and uh they're incredibly good at recognizing uh criminals' faces based on really blurry CCTV.

So in the Metropolitan Police, they identify a quarter of all the criminals despite the fact that out of 32,000 Metropolitan Police officers, there are only six super recognizers.

Whoa.

And they get a quarter.

And they're so good that one officer was interviewed for The Guardian and he said, I was coming back from court and I saw someone who was wanted for seven offences, because they just spot, they remember the faces of people who are wanted and they just see them and they go that guy um i saw someone who was wanted for seven offences once i had to stop the car three times i would take one person in and then on the way to the station i saw someone else who was wanted so i picked them up and then as we were driving i saw someone else

yeah they're just constantly seeing crooks wow

do you know who was very bad at recognizing people was back to american president ronald reagen so he had to speak at a graduation ceremony in 1964 and he was giving you know the graduation certificates to students.

And a boy came up on stage and he shook the boy's hand, gave him a certificate, and said, My name's Ronald.

What's yours?

And the boy said, I'm Michael.

I'm your son.

Oh,

yeah.

It was his adoptive son.

They adopted him when he was a baby.

He was 19 by that point.

I mean, for an actor who has to recognise people, you would think that would be a flaw, not being able to recognise other humans.

You would think.

Yeah, that's your actors need to recognise people.

I mean, it helps if you're facing the right way.

We only have to recognise the camera then, no?

I guess so.

Do you know?

Just because I can't recognise people, so I'm just a bit worried I can't be an actor.

James has genuine face blindness.

He doesn't remember faces.

Kind of.

I have no imagination, so I can't.

Oh, James!

I thought those poems you showed me were wonderful.

And that whole Barbie Transformer game was top.

I can't imagine people's faces.

I can't imagine what my wife looks like, for instance.

So it's not proper face blindness.

It's aphantasia, it's called.

But it means that I can't really recognise people very well.

Aphantasia?

Yeah.

What a whimsical name for presumably a bad condition.

It's not

it's not that bad.

Whoever the fuck you are.

I'm your wife.

Just one quick thing about face recognition.

This year, there was a festival in Wales that used facial recognition technology to recognise evil Elvises.

Whoa.

They were trying to scan for people who were wanted, same as the police do, when they were on their way into the world's largest Elvis Festival in Bridge End in September.

35,000 people were going in, most of them dressed as Elvis.

And officers scanned their faces all.

And what they were looking for bad guys or...

Yeah.

Bad guys.

There's a thing as well in Barcelona, they've tested out this new thing at comedy clubs whereby they've put on the back of seats little cameras that stare directly into the face of the person sitting watching the comedy show.

And it's there to monitor laughter patterns.

So every time you laugh, it clicks and says you've laughed once.

So if people at the end of the show go up and say, I found that very disappointing, I would like a refund, they can go, well, actually, you've laughed 67 times this evening and you can't have your money back.

There's one.

Yeah.

Two.

Don't everyone fake laughs at a comedy show.

Don't think for a minute we genuinely think you're laughing.

Everyone puts on a fake laugh.

You could be laughing at how shit it is.

Yeah, yeah.

No, it's a test.

It's to see how it would work because what they do is they then they drop the price altogether of the ticket.

And so they clock up everyone's, it's a free gig.

You go to it, they clock up the laughter amount.

And then at the end of the gig, they say you've laughed.

And there's a cap on how much laughter is there.

Because then everyone's everyone's just going to go, I'm just going to enjoy this, but I'm not going to laugh, so I get it for free.

It's going to be awful.

Yeah.

Mouth closed, look straight ahead, think of death, think of old people, just think of sadness.

Some people don't laugh even when they're finding things really funny.

Do you keep telling yourself that after you're Edinburgh show?

I'd refer to the audiences at my solo show who had a wonderful time on the feedback forms.

I just explained a lot of them

were remembering something sad.

Can I quickly tell you my favorite headline that I've read recently?

This is about recognizing stuff.

The headline is that babies can see things that adults can't, but are unable to tell them.

They'll look at a picture and they'll notice differences that we won't have spotted, or maybe they haven't told us and we don't know.

That's what they think.

So, how do we know they can see the differences?

I don't know.

I didn't read the article.

I just read the headline.

That's going to go on your headstone, Dan.

Shall we move on to our next one?

Yeah.

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

Andy.

My fact is that there is a woman whose job for the last 30 years has been squatting above the Queen's throne so the TV cameras can get their angle right.

The Queen doesn't squat above the throne, does she?

Exactly.

Certainly not.

There's a woman who's called Ella Slack, and she's in her early 70s.

She is the official stand-in for the Queen at all events where there are going to be TV cameras because she's pretty much exactly the same size as the queen.

Yeah, and she doesn't look like the queen at all, but

she does it and she's done it 50 times for different state occasions.

Why the squatting thing?

That's what I want to know.

Well, she said she was interviewed about her life not quite being the queen by quite a long way not being the queen, but

she's not even in the line of succession, James.

That's what makes you famous these days, not being the queen.

But what she said about the ceremonies.

Why have you not been the queen

um she said about the ceremonies i've never been allowed to sit on the throne in the house of lords for the state opening twice

she said i have to lurk above it

yeah but she says it's a very strict rule and she does say if i'm in a carriage or a car i will wave

which is very sweet yeah she was employed yeah like over 30 years ago when it was realized that the queen had the sun in her eyes at some event and so or the queen might have the sun in her eyes when she was standing on a podium and so this woman was sent to check that the sun wouldn't be in her eyes and now she checks for that so whenever the queen has to stand up on a sunny day she goes and checks first that the sun won't be in her eyes um she checks that she'll be visible over podiums in case you've made a podium too high in case peter the great's desk is brought up

wow yeah she and she has her own queen costume which she's put together from charity shops So her queen handbag cost one quid.

Yeah.

And she got fake diamonds from Woolworths for the millennium.

I just love it.

I just think it's a very nice story.

She's not paid.

She refuses to accept any money for the work she does.

And she's been doing it for 30 years.

I think she's one of the great unsung heroes of this country.

It's weird that she doesn't accept any payment and she pays for a trampoline everything.

I mean, I agree.

She's a hero in a very small way.

Yeah.

Speaking of clothing, there is someone else who sort of does a stand-in job for the Queen as well.

And that is, it's someone specifically whose job is to break in the shoes of the Queen that are as of yet unworn.

So that's what they do.

The people who provide all the clothing for her, her fashion people, the queen's fashion people, they buy new shoes.

And obviously, when you're wearing new shoes, they're very painful.

And so someone is hired to just walk around in the new pair of shoes before she has a go at them.

That's cool.

So they must have the same size feet as the Queen, right?

Yeah, it would be very funny if they did not.

I was just thinking that

the audition for that job or the job interview would be just like Cinderella or something, wouldn't it?

you just have a load of people sat there.

They just need the right size feet.

Because there's no other skill there, is there?

No.

And it's probably a quick audition process.

Are you size eight?

No?

Okay, thank you.

Size eight.

The queen's got massive feet.

Size eight is not massive, by the way.

It's massive if you're five foot two.

Yeah, yeah, okay.

Do you know?

So I was looking at sort of the reason this lady, Ella Slack, is she called, the reason she does this, it's like to prepare for ceremonial events.

And the royal family, they have to rehearse all the royal ceremonies quite a lot.

And in fact, the Queen herself spent weeks rehearsing for her coronation in 1953.

So she was really nervous about it.

And she used to play recordings of her father's coronation over and over again.

Her father was George, you know, who had a stutter, and so it was quite difficult for him.

She used to play recordings of his coronation and she paraded up and down what was called the white drawing room because that had the same dimensions as the theater in the abbey where she was going to be coronated and she timed herself doing it to make sure she was going to walk the right you know distance at the right pace and she got all her ladies in waiting to walk alongside her and she used to wear her bed sheets as a robe as

her queenly robes which is so cool

that is really cool do you know in 2012 there was a queen shortage in the uk

sorry there was a queen shortage um it was due to all the jubilee stuff and they needed queen look-alikes and basically there's about, I don't know, there's about a couple of dozen people who can do queen look-alikes, and they needed them all the time.

And they said the main look-alike company, Susan Scott look-alike, said we could have done with double or triple the amount of queens.

That is amazing.

Imagine when the button was pressed, dispatch the queens.

What do you do?

What do you do?

What do you do?

What a room that do you think they've ever all been at the same place at the same time?

I don't know, but I did read an interview with a Kate Middleton look-alike, and she says that one of the queens, or one of the queen look-alikes, is like her honorary granny.

And the reason is because they all hang out together, all these look-alikes.

Of course, you do.

You would be, because you're all working in the same role.

You're kind of job.

The queen look-alikes and the Kate Middleton look-alikes will hang out with them.

Yeah, and the Pippa Middleton look-alikes, the Harry Potter look-alikes, the David Beckham look-alikes, they all hang out together.

Why is Harry Potter at that party?

That's breaking a wall of some sort.

Because then that's the only time they can truly be themselves because outside those circles everyone's always saying, oh, you look just like Camilla Parker Bowles.

What did the Harry Potter look alike?

Have you ever thought about changing your look-alike mate?

You don't look like Harry Potter.

They, they, just on that subject, they do often, if they're a couple who are celebrity couples in real life, they will fall in love with each other and get married.

I think there's examples of like a katie price and a peter andre uh lookalike when that was massive falling in love because they did so many events together when that was massive

yeah that was did you know by the a whole new world album

so on body doubles yep um general montgomery in the second world war monty had an impersonator who for spying purposes pretended to be him and would go to different places to so that german spies would think oh monty's over here actually monty wasn't over here.

Monty was over there, defeating the Germans.

So the only problem was that the look-alike had had a finger shot off in the First World War.

So you needed to count the fingers on the fake Monty.

Really?

He wore gloves or a prosthetic finger or something.

And the only thing was, there was another body double who was called Keith Deemer Banwell, who looked exactly like Montgomery.

So he was used as a look-alike.

The only problem was he was substantially taller than Monty, so he was never allowed on any account to get out of his car.

Was that Tex Banwell, or was that or Clifton James, I think?

It was part of something called October.

Clifton James was the first one with Clifton.

Clifton James, yeah, it was called Operation Copperhead, and basically it was when, you know, we were planning, the British were planning attacks on the Germans, and it was dispatched people who looked like him to all parts of the world to make sure.

But he was a drunk as well, so he was an absolute liability, I think.

It's so funny, the idea of dispatching these fake Monty's everywhere.

Well, we've had intelligence that he's he's in Antarctica.

Should we strengthen defenses in Antarctica?

Did you guys read about the Mexican politician who's actually looking for body doubles or who was looking for body doubles?

This is a guy called Renato Tronco Gomez, and this is in 2015.

He's a politician in the Mexican parliament, and he put out a call for body doubles because he wants to maintain his popularity.

And he's like, I'm so popular that I need to be in multiple places at once.

So he tried to.

There's an ego on the man.

I

He said, and he said, I'm not that fussy.

If you're short, then you can wear platform shoes.

If you're chubby, you can lose weight.

If you're thin, you can gain weight.

It's fine.

If you're tall, I'll cut your feet off.

He said they're banned from smoking and drinking because he doesn't smoke and drink and it has to be realistic.

Although at any public events, he stipulated that they would have to say, I'm the double, by the way.

You're not quite getting the real guy.

You're getting a lookalike.

And he said, most importantly, they will not be able to live in my home, sleep with my wife, or go to Congress.

So, no shagging as part of the job.

But yeah.

It was only second most important on his list, though, wasn't it?

In order of importance, between going to Congress and living in my house.

Yeah.

I can imagine his wife going, wait a minute, you've got no feet.

Hey, I read a thing, guys, which is that, so on the subject of body doubles, a lot of in movies, there's obviously stunt doubles and body doubles for the biggest actors in the world.

They all have them.

And I started looking into stunt doubles generally for this topic tonight, and I found this thing where there's a lot of anger amongst the Hollywood community

of stunt doubles because there's no Oscar for stunt doubling or body doubling.

And that is such a huge part of the movies.

What you see in there is making people believe that you've been blown out of a window or that you jumped to.

They have it for special events.

They have a special event, but they think they should have an Oscar for it.

And I found that there's actually a big petition that's been going on and as far as I could see as of last year they stopped pushing it to the public because they didn't get the hundred thousand votes that they needed so it's on a site uh where they've managed to get eighty seven thousand three hundred and ninety three supporters and they've not quite hit the uh the 100,000 that they need.

So I'm going to read out the the website for this here.

It's called the petition site.com.

You've got to look for stand-up for stunts and I reckon if enough people who are listening to this podcast can just go to that site very quickly and just give them a petition support, we could get to 100,000.

Maybe next year or the year after, stunt people can get an Oscar at the main awards.

How cool would that be?

They could abseil through the ceiling and pick up their award.

Yes, yes, yeah.

They're so close.

And the last update was a year ago, so they've given up.

And that's so sad because they're incredible.

I would love to see the stunt Oscars.

Everyone's constantly blowing shit up and smashing through the glass.

That would be incredible.

You'd be, as a member of the audience, you'd be constantly looking for the emergency exit before someone said, no, no, no, it's fine.

It's part of it.

But they're more

kind of omnipresent than you think, aren't they?

So, you know, that bit in Notting Hill where Julia Roberts talks about people having butt doubles.

I always thought that was a bit that had been scripted in and wasn't true, but they all have body doubles.

And in fact, really trashy piece of celebrity information.

But in Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts had a body double for that.

She was called Shelly Michelle.

And actually, in the really iconic poster of Pretty Woman, where, you know, she's kind of leaning against something and she's got something over her shoulder.

She's wearing some short leather skirt or something.

The only bit of her that's Julia Roberts is the head.

The rest of that is a body.

So it's just kind of so weird.

Someone else's body.

But there are a lot of monkeys looking at that picture going, that's not Julia Roberts' house.

Guys, we need to move on to our final facts.

James, you got something before we do?

So I was looking at Queen's jobs because this is a person who's employed to do something for the Queen.

The Queen has a keeper of the Queen's stamps.

Oh, okay.

Okay, because the Queen doesn't like stamp collecting, but she has a shitload of stamps.

And so she employs someone to be her official stamp collector.

You're kidding.

I am not kidding.

Does she go and say, how's my stamp collection doing?

I guess so.

Why doesn't she like it?

Does she not like the licking the back of her own?

You don't lick.

If you collect stamps, you don't lick them.

What?

That's surely one of the perks of stamp collecting.

You just go and get your stamps out and go, oh, just lick that one again.

I wouldn't lick the fronts of the stamps.

That is deranged.

No one's forcing her to collect stamps.

She has a collection that's already there, so she needs someone to look after it.

But this guy does go and get extra stamps for her collection.

Yeah.

So he is basically doing a hobby for her.

Yeah.

It's like having an official jigsaw maker.

Yes.

Oh, but she does collect jigsaws.

No, wait.

The fact is she doesn't collect jigsaws.

Sorry.

Hang on.

It's better than it sounds.

She doesn't collect jigsaws.

She does jigsaws.

She loves them.

But...

To save buying loads of jigsaws, she gets them out of a jigsaw library.

You can rent jigsaws?

Yeah.

It's just a library.

It's a free library for jigsaws.

Sorry, is she low on cash?

She is thrifty.

Well, I think they should put our taxes up.

If the Queen can't afford jigsaws, I'm not paying enough tax.

I'm Sean Ryan, showrunner of the Night Agent here with Eric Kripke, Showrunner of the Boys.

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

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

Hey, listen, let's move on to our final fact of the show, and that is Chaczynski.

My fact is that U.S.

President Jimmy Carter once sent the nuclear launch codes to his dry cleaner.

And not on purpose.

I read this article in Timeline, which is one of my favorite websites, timeline.com.

And it's about the fact that there's been an open secret in Washington since Jimmy Carter was president that he lost the nuclear biscuit, as it's known which is the little kind of credit card with the codes on it because he sent a suit to the dry cleaners and it was in the pocket because the president has to have it on him at all times and it's just it's it is amazing did it come back sort of slightly blurry and he was like oh is that a is that a six or a five i'll wing it i'll wing it

but isn't it true that basically all the presidents lose the codes all the time they're very scattery with we can only hope that they lose the codes all the time frankly at the moment.

One of the problems that they do have from George W.

Bush onwards is that the person carrying the football has to be by the president at all times.

But the president often forgets that.

So the president will finish what they're doing, hop in a car and drive off.

And then suddenly the guy with the nuclear codes is going, shit, what do I do?

And they have to chase after the president and try and get back to him in case he's needed.

I would constantly hide as president.

You actually would, wouldn't you?

Yeah.

You'd be deliberately all the time trying to sneak off.

Yeah, because they have to go even in the same lift as the president.

I don't, what happens when the president's asleep, though?

They sleep in the same bed as him.

Do they?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, no, you found a fact for our book, which is about the fact that if Trump goes to...

Yes.

Yeah.

If he goes to New York, the nuclear button has its own multi-million dollar flat in New York,

which he didn't, the flat didn't get used for the first eight months of the presidency because he didn't go to New York.

But they've hired a luxury apartment just for the button to sit in.

But I like the fact that it's for the button and it's also for the people who guard the button, so it's for his staff.

But I like the idea that it is mainly for the button, so the button's in the double bed and the staff are just standing to attention around the bed.

Are you comfortable, sir?

As you say, Clinton lost it?

He kept it

rubber-banded to his credit cards in a trouser pocket.

Imagine that.

That makes sense.

It doesn't make sense.

It's a very crazy thing to do.

What if you accidentally put in your nuclear button card into the machine at the till?

I don't think that's how it sets off stuff.

I don't know.

This is why they say contactless is a very dangerous technology.

And they only found out, didn't they, when I think Clinton's aide said, look, could you give me the biscuit back?

Because we need to give you an updated version.

This came out in an autobiography he wrote a short while ago.

I think it was someone called Patterson.

And so his aide said, give me the biscuit back because we need to swap it.

And Clinton said, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.

I I think it's upstairs.

I just left it upstairs.

I'll go and get it.

And he scurried around for a bit.

And then eventually he admitted that he hadn't seen it for months and he had no idea where he'd put it.

Oh, my God.

He must have known he hadn't seen it for months.

Oh, he would have been panicking.

Absolutely shitted.

So there was a lot of worry that a president with this kind of power could launch based on, let's say, even in our current climate, you know, you get too angry one day.

The president might suddenly get it.

Even in the current climate, that might happen.

Yeah, in the the current blissfully calm environment we're all living in at the moment, yeah.

But he might suddenly, you know, it's a very, it's quite an easy process to do.

And back in the day, there was a Harvard professor who thought about this and thought, actually, we need to make it a bit harder.

We need to make it a big decision for the president to do.

So this is what he suggested.

He said, my suggestion was quite simple.

Put the code that you needed to launch the nuclear warheads in a little capsule.

Implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer.

The volunteer volunteer would carry with him a big butcher's knife as he accompanied the president.

If the president ever wanted to fire the nuclear weapons, the only way he would do so would be with his own hands to kill the person and then to break it out of them in order to do it.

And that wasn't a popular suggestion.

In fact, I don't think they even went for it.

With Peter the Great, who would have absolutely loved to do that.

It's in here somewhere.

Although, interestingly, this is the carotid.

I think that's a very impractical suggestion.

It's a guy, Roger Fisher.

He was a Harvard professor.

He published it in the Bulletin of Atomic Science.

It was a real thing, and it was very talked about.

I just don't know.

The President constantly being accompanied by this man with a knife.

This absolutely terrified-looking man with a knife.

How?

But just to finish that off, because I found that as well, they suggested it to the Pentagon, didn't they?

Yeah.

And the Pentagon said, my God, that's terrible.

Having to kill someone would distort the president's judgment.

He might never push the button.

Really?

Wow.

Wow.

So like you said, there are two things, isn't there?

There's this card which is the biscuit, and then there's the briefcase, which is the football.

The briefcase is manufactured by a company called Zero Halliburton.

Okay, and Zero Halliburton, they're a Utah firm, and they do this, and the other thing is they do aluminium briefcases for Hollywood.

So they've made briefcases for 24, West Wing, Independence Day and Santa with Muscles.

That's the main ones.

Santa with Muscles is the 79th worst rated film in the whole of IMDb.

Wow.

No way.

In the whole thing.

The whole thing.

There must be billions in there.

But sorry, they make.

So they make this, they make, well they're not fake because they need to use them in the movies, but they're these really awesome kind of aluminium briefcases.

Because the guy who invented it realized that briefcases are not so good, and aluminium ones will be better.

And they're good for carrying nuclear codes.

The nuclear codes that they have, by the way, are pretty weird.

It's basically two lists, and they're pictorial.

And one list is

places to bomb, and the other one is how to bomb them.

So you basically go down, you go, I'll go for this one, Pyongyang, and this one, big fuck-off bomb.

Wow.

I can't believe.

I mean, the one thing keeping the world safe was the idea that Trump would have to read more than six words.

A military aid to Bill Clinton said it was like a Denny's breakfast menu.

He said, you picked one out of column A and two out of column B.

I wonder how seriously this, because it's obviously, you know, it scares you to hear that this thing exists generally, I think.

But I don't know how seriously they took it.

So the fact is about Jimmy Carter having sent it accidentally, the codes, to the dry cleaners.

When Jimmy Carter first got the nuclear football, it was given to him by the LBJ presidential administration.

And when it was brought to him, the guy looked inside the briefcase when he first opened it in the companionship of, in the companionship of, when he was with Jimmy Carter.

And inside it, when they opened it, they found that the previous administration was having a bit of a joke because they left inside it an empty beer can

and a condom, not for humans, for horses.

And that was inside the most deadly bag that a president could have next to them.

And he didn't tell Jimmy Carter, he closed it and he went, yep, it's all good.

And Jimmy Carter

never found out about that.

What?

Yeah.

Sorry, horses have condoms.

I didn't know that either.

No.

That for me is the headline from that story.

Yeah.

How do they put them on?

Yeah, I've not even thought about that.

Nobody knows.

On the US nukes.

Yeah.

So there is a secretive U.S.

agency, and their job is to transport all the nuclear material around America.

Because obviously you've got loads of missile silos, you've got loads of nuclear sites, and very few people know about this.

But they're called the Office of Secure Transportation.

And their vehicles sound absolutely insane.

So the defenses, obviously they've got convoys they go with, but the defenses include shock delivering systems, which basically means if you touch it, it electrocutes you.

They've got axles which explode, so you can't drive them away, even if you do manage to take over it.

And they also have thick walls which ooze immobilizing foam.

Wow.

So if you are wrong and you touch the lorry, it just oozes out at you and then catches you like you're on fly paper.

God, but it's so weird because foam isn't that immobilizing.

I've been in baths.

Think of how difficult it is to get out of the bath.

They have special stuff, don't they?

I think it's special.

Special foam.

Special foam.

It's immobilizing foam.

Call it not calm olive.

Black corn-flavoured bubble bars.

We're going to have to wrap up in a sec.

Anything before we do, guys?

I can tell you that we've been talking about American nuclear bombs.

We have nuclear bombs as well in the UK.

And it is technically legal for Prince Charles to set off a nuclear bomb.

No.

That's true.

Reassuring.

It's because he is the Duke of Cornwall.

And if you're Duke of Cornwall, there's a few laws that you technically don't have to follow.

One of them is the Nuclear Explosions Act.

Another one is the Data Protection Act.

And another one is the Wildlife and Countryside Act.

So it means, as well as being able to set off nuclear bombs, he can share your email address with third parties.

And technically, he's allowed to shoot a great crested newt with a machine gun.

That's amazing.

Okay, that is is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At James Harkin.

And Jaczinski.

You can email our podcast at qi.com.

Yep.

Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing.

Or you can go to our website, no such thingasafish.com, where we have all of our previous episodes.

Also got a link to our book, which we're about to give a copy away to one member of the audience here in Birmingham.

We asked you to send in your facts before the show started.

And here we go.

This is the fact.

Andy, what is it?

I got it.

I'm just taking the phone off airplane mode.

Unbelievable.

Okay, so this fact was sent in by a man called Stephen Connebert.

And his fact is that the game Cludo was invented by a Pratt from Birmingham.

Sorry, that's a Pratt from Birmingham.

Anthony Pratt from Birmingham specifically.

And it was called Murder at Tudor Close.

Wow.

Cool.

Okay.

Well, if you're here, come and grab a book from us at the end.

Guys, as I said at the beginning, we're going to be in the back.

We've got books.

If you want to get one, we'll be there signing them.

There's, hopefully, I don't know how much time we have, but we'll try and bang through as many of you as possible.

And then we'll...

Steady on, Dan.

I mean, in the current climate, Dan.

Bad choice of words.

But Birmingham, this has been awesome.

And by the way, just before we wrap up, because again, we're doing these bigger venues, we thought we'd end on something special.

We have here tonight, as I said, the singer and songwriter, Emperor Yes, Ash Gardner, is here.

And we're going to go out by playing our theme tune live for you guys tonight as we go.

Yeah.

So, please, welcome to the stage, ladies and gentlemen.

It is Ash Gardner.

Here he is, everybody.

And thank you so much, Birmingham.

That was awesome.

Thank you.

This time there's no escape.

Don't move from time to time,

even though I'm realizing

Show me it too.

You who love me,

and I will learn you.

The smile is better.

Show me it too.

You who love me,

and I will love you.

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