198: No Such Thing As Cleopatra Movie Trivia

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

This week coming to you live from up the creek in Greenwich, London.

My name is Dan Schreiber, and I am sitting here with Anna Chacinski, 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 you, Andy.

My fact is that archaeologists have just dug up in the middle of the desert an enormous Sphinx statue.

It is believed to be anywhere up to 95 years old.

I think you're going to have to explain to me.

So there are now archaeologists looking at old film sets from the early days of Hollywood, and they're doing proper excavations on movie sets that were abandoned to the desert.

This is a real thing.

And there was a very famous film in the 20s called The Ten Commandments.

It was this massive biblical epic, and at the end of it, they didn't take the sets down.

There's a theory it would have been too expensive.

There's another theory that he didn't want anyone else to use the set because the director was Cecil B.

DeMille and he was a bit of a megalomaniac wasn't he and he thought he didn't want anyone else to use this so I'm going to bury it in the middle of the desert yeah and now he found it and they buried it and yeah there's this filmmaker who's been searching for it for years he's called Peter Brosnan and there's now a film about the finding of the original film

It's called Cecil B.

DeMille's Lost City or something very similar to that.

And it was this enormous set.

So it was 12 stories high, 800 feet wide.

There were 21 sphinxes.

The pharaoh's statues weighed four tons each, and they built an extra sphinx so that actors playing slaves could drag it around.

The effort they went to with this film is enormous.

That's awesome.

I read a thing that the idea that we have that slaves built the pyramids and so on is down largely to this movie.

Because that's not the case.

It wasn't.

It was people working, but they just,

as a representation, used slaves in the movie.

That's where we get that common myth.

They were kind of freelancers, as far as I understand it.

Yeah.

They were farmers outside the farming season, weren't they?

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah.

But this movie, when DeMille put it in the middle of the desert, he said, If 1,000 years from now, archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands, I hope they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilization extended all the way to the Pacific coast of North America.

So he actually saw the idea that people would be digging this up in the future and might think that it was real.

We've totally fucked up his plan.

That's so sad.

We knew as well that that's what he wanted.

No, he didn't want that.

That's what he said he specifically didn't want.

I think he was saying it.

He was saying it with a bit of a wink, wasn't he?

He was like, oh, I really hope they don't do that.

Yeah, that's how I interpreted it.

But I'm making that up.

I actually thought that's what he had said.

Some people who did do that is the website Ninegag.

Everyone knows the website Ninegag?

Yes, yeah, we all know that.

It sounds rude.

I know people laugh, but it's not a rude site, is it?

No, it's just like memes and stuff like that.

And what they did was they buried a huge pillar carved with internet memes deliberately to fuck with the archaeologists of the future.

So everyone had to vote for their favorite memes, and the ones that went in were such memes as Dick Butt,

Doge, who you probably all know, Shit Just Got Real, and Hardest Name in Africa.

Don't know what that one was, but they've buried this in there, and they're hoping that in thousands of years people will see it and think that it was some kind of religion or something.

Right.

Which I guess it is, in a way, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Iron Age, Bronze Age, Banter Age.

I was reading in the movie Cleopatra itself because it was a huge, a huge operation to get this movie made.

It was so ambitious.

They made all these incredible sets.

Wait, are you talking about the Ten Commandments or Cleopatra?

Sorry, sorry.

It's the Ten Commandments we're meant to be talking about.

I've researched Cleopatra.

Let's move on.

Cleopatra, they had a big set too.

It was, you know, a very expensive film.

There's your segue.

Yeah.

Yeah, thanks, guys.

No.

Okay.

I'll just comment on what you guys have to say for the rest of the evening.

Okay, so.

Has anyone got any Cleopatra material that we can help him out with?

I do have a fact related to Cleopatra, which is,

about the film The Ten Commandments.

Okay, so it was basically in 1922, Cecil B.

DeMille, he was already pretty famous, but he ran a competition for what his next film would be about.

So everyone submitted subjects, and the best subject won $1,000, and he would make the film.

And it went to a man who was called F.

C.

Nelson.

He was a lubricating oil manufacturer, and he just wrote on a bit of paper, make the Ten Commandments.

If only he'd written, Make Cleopatra.

But then beneath it, he had a little PS at the bottom of the page.

He then wrote, You cannot break the Ten Commandments or they will break you.

But he won.

He won the competition.

But it was a bit disastrous, right?

The Ten Commandments, in a sense, because Cecil B.

DeMille was so determined to get it working and it went so way over budget.

He r like didn't accept any profits from it.

Ev like his pr producers called him and were like, Come back now, give up.

This is a complete disaster.

And he refused to.

And he did things like he refused to use painted backgrounds at all.

So he refused to use normal scenery.

So that meant he just had to literally build everything.

So I think there was a wall that was miles and miles long that he had built.

It wasn't there.

And then at the end, did he dynamite the whole thing?

I'm just thinking: if Donald Trump digs around and finds that wall.

Yeah.

I don't think he did dynamite it.

So that's a room upstairs.

Cecile DeMille, sorry, just quickly,

great director.

Do you guys have any stuff on Joseph Mankowitz?

What did he direct then?

Just quickly, on Cecile B.

DeMille.

So

for the shooting of it, and this is just the incredible budgets of the day, he built a city which had 3,500 actors, technicians, and extras.

They were divided into 14 units of men and seven of women in a 24 square mile city.

And there were very strict rules about, you know, alcohol and gambling and stuff.

He hired 225 Orthodox Jews to look like their ancestors,

the Israelites.

And apparently during the filming, they kept missing their cues because they were so overwhelmed by the emotion of being in this thing.

And then he wrote to everyone on set.

He said, your skin will be cooked raw.

You will miss the comforts of home.

You will be asked to endure perhaps the most unpleasant location in cinema history.

I expect of you your supreme efforts.

It was so tough to do.

He was an ass, wasn't he?

I like him.

Do you?

Okay.

I do.

I'm checking it out.

This is someone who you could have, I think.

I'm not saying that you're a prima donna, Andy, but this, he had a chairboy.

who always walked three steps behind him carrying a chair.

He was never allowed to look his master in the eye.

and whenever DeMille stood still for more than a minute the chair boy had to put the chair behind him and then bang the back of his knees so that he sat down on the chair which was there.

Whoa!

Can you imagine having one of those?

Yes, I can.

And I'm frankly angry I had to sit down tonight.

Was Cecil B.

DeMille a puppet?

It sounds like he was one of those collapsing puppets.

He made loads of biblical films.

He made another biblical epic called The King of Kings.

Oh, yeah.

And he made, but he was mostly known for slightly saucy movies.

They always involved a naked woman in a bathtub at some point.

And then he made the Ten Commandments, which was a big switcheroo.

Cleopatra used to spend a lot of time in bathtubs, didn't she?

James, I don't have anything on that.

Actually, I got a different thing, which is just picking up on what James said earlier about him wanting to bury DeMille wanting to bury the set so no one else would use it.

There's a bit of logic behind that because people back in the day of early Hollywood did did used to do that.

So there's a very famous version of Dracula that was made with Bella Lugosi.

And the idea was you would pay for all these movies huge budgets for their sets to be made.

But because of workers unions and clocking off at the right time, it meant that you'd film in the day and in the evening the set was just sitting there.

So they thought, what if we film the foreign language version of the movie that we're now making in Spanish and Italian in the nighttime when they've abandoned the set?

And that's what they did.

And there's a very famous version of Dracula from 1931 where they made in the daytime the English version with Bela Lugowski.

And in the evening time, they made the Spanish version.

And the Spanish version, because they were able to sit at the end of the day of filming

of the American one, they would watch the dailies and so the rushes that they filmed that day.

And they would go, oh, that angle's no use.

Why don't we film from this direction?

And so they would re-angle everything.

They learned to make the movie by watching a different movie being made on the same set.

Yeah.

And as a result, result, it took something like seven weeks or something, sorry, a few months for them to make the American version.

But the Spanish version just got done it really quickly, and they made it way before the Americans finished and released it before the Americans released it.

And so people saw the Spanish version, and the reviews were, well, if the American version is as good as this, and it's probably better, it's going to be an amazing movie because it was awesome.

But the problem was, it was shit, the American version.

But one reason I think it would be shit is: doesn't Dracula die in the daytime?

Yeah.

Yes, you're right.

Yeah.

Yeah, well, the guy, the director was so bad, he didn't even capture Dracula's death on camera.

He failed to put the camera in the right position.

So it's just Bela Lugolski going,

off-screen.

You don't even see.

Yeah, but you can't, I mean, presumably Bela Lugoski didn't actually die, so you can just retake that

and have him in front of the camera.

Yeah, I know, but they didn't.

They just didn't.

I guess back then they were just like, oh, it's six o'clock.

The Spanish are coming in.

All right, let's.

We gotta go.

Bella's done.

But yeah, so they did used to double up on the sets.

And so that version of Dracula is more famous for the Spanish version that was copying the American than the American version.

Wow.

So you can understand why he wanted to bury sets.

It was probably a crew of Spaniards around the corner.

He was only out there avoiding Thomas Edison, wasn't he?

Who?

Cecil B.

DeMille.

Wasn't he?

Yeah, that's why he was out west.

That's why they went way out west, is because there were loads loads of

Edison thugs who would beat you up for using, was it film technology?

Yeah, and that's basically why Hollywood is where it is today and why they made all the movies out there because Edison was on the east coast, and if they went to the other side of America, they couldn't get them with all the patents and all things like that.

Yeah.

And so Cecil B.

DeMille owned 80 guns to protect himself.

80 guns.

And a wolf.

He had a wolf as well.

See, I'm serious.

I know it sounds like I just out of that spur of the moment.

Wow.

The Blues Brothers.

You know, when they filmed the Blues Brothers, again, went quite over budget.

The most impressive set of thing they did was they dropped a car from a helicopter.

I think there's a scene in it where they fly a helicopter like 1500 feet in the air and then they drop a car down on Chicago.

They got permission from the government, the state government, to do that.

They dropped a Pinto car down into like presumably an abandoned area of Chicago.

Presumably.

And the car, when it landed, it was 45 centimeters tall because of the

squat, that was the extent of the force.

Yeah.

That's pretty cool.

And they also had a cocaine budget.

They always used to say that about the Blues Brothers, didn't they?

That that film had its own cocaine budget.

There's a film with Dennis Hopper, Easy Rider, it was called.

And this is a book.

Yeah, awesome film.

But he was part of the creative team, and he was doing drugs every single day.

And he was doing all different kinds of drugs.

And it got to the point where they were like, we just have to give up and accept that he's on ecstasy in the morning, cocaine in the afternoon, and heroin in the evening, whatever he was doing, pot in the evening.

It got to the point that when he got the scripts for the next day for the film, they wrote on it the drug that he was on in the previous scene so he could match the energy that he was bringing to it.

So they're like, we're going to film the second half of the scene we did three days ago, and you were on cocaine then.

So if you could do three lines before we start shooting, we'll get the same vibe as what you were.

I'd love to see the movie where they mix them up and he's doing heroin and then suddenly he's doing cocaine halfway through the scene.

Yeah, it's true.

We need to move on shortly to our second fact.

Do you guys have anything before we go?

Apocalypse Now?

Yeah, sure.

The filming Apocalypse Now, one of the things that Francis Ford Acoppola demanded was that A, he was allowed to burn down a lot of jungle in Vietnam and because he was a big deal at that point they allowed him to.

So many acres of jungle were just burned down for it.

But also he used real military helicopters, but apparently he used to get really annoyed on set because they kept on having to fly off to fight in actual wars.

No, so he used to get really pissed off.

Wow.

Yeah.

I got one last thing.

It was a movie set problem.

It's a movie back in the day called Cleopatra, where

what happened was that Cleopatra's entrance scene was a huge, you know, you've been listening.

Okay, it is time for fact number two,

and that is me.

It's my fact.

Okay, my fact this week is that when British author William Hazlitt died, his landlady was so keen to re-let his room that she hid his body under the bed while she showed new tenants around.

This is extraordinary.

What a viewing that must have been.

Will he be here?

So Hazlitt.

He's not that famous now, is he?

No, but if we made this show back in the 1800s, you guys would be like, ah!

Hazlitt!

Hazlitt was huge.

He was a massive British author, not only an author, he was a literary critic.

He was a painter, social commentator philosopher he was he was a big deal he died in 1830 he was living in Soho and in fact there is a hotel now there which is called the Hazlitt House I believe and that is the location where he died so and he's still there under that bed isn't he still there yeah

but he was he was a big deal and people used to go just to the Hazlitt Hotel just because that's where he lived Seamus Heaney used to go there obsessed with him and they would they would have meetups there just to be able to be in the sort of presence of the location of this great person who everyone seems to have forgotten, except it turns out you, Anna.

People know William Hazard is, but I did happen to take a book of his essays on my gap here, which I know is, I just told these guys backstage.

One of those guys was going to mention it, so I thought I'd get in there.

Which drug were you taking when you were reading it?

The essays themselves were my drug, James.

What am I on?

I'm on chapter three.

I mean they didn't come in chapters, but whatever.

But he was unappreciated by his death, wasn't he?

Like when he died, he died in poverty.

It was on Frith Street and he'd been basically dissed by all of the people he'd been mates with.

So he was really good friends with Coleridge and Southey and Wordsworth, but he kind of also hated everyone.

Yeah, he kind of started it.

He did start it.

So, well, they embody these revolutionary ideals that he loved, and he thought that they didn't see them through properly.

He thought they'd all sold out.

So, he kind of loved Coleridge, but he wrote all these essays saying, I hate that you haven't lived up to your potential.

So, eventually, they just ruined his reputation and he died in poverty.

And it all started actually when he groped somebody.

Did you read this story?

Yeah.

Yeah, it was.

Yeah, boo, exactly.

Yeah.

Well,

Don't say it was a different time, Anna.

It was a different time.

They were staying in the Lake District.

It was him and Coleridge and Wordsworth all staying in the Lake District and writing together.

And he went away, Hazlitt went to the pub one night and a woman was flirting with him and sort of teasing him.

And he thought that she wanted to get off with him.

So he sort of leaned in or something or, you know, came onto her.

And then she laughed at him and said, no, don't be such a, you know, cad.

And so he lifted up her petticoats and slapped her on the bottom.

Look,

I'm with the lady on the second row here.

I'm not saying it's good behavior, but he'd been embarrassed.

And then he got chased by this mob who wanted to duck him, which apparently is a common thing.

They wanted to duck him in Derby.

That's an awful correct thing, I think.

I don't think so, but

yeah, and he ran back to Coleridge and said, please hide me, and they smothered him away over the mountains.

That's extreme.

They saved him, but then they spread all these rumours that he was a horrible, lascivious, sleazy

man.

And then he had an affair with someone half his age.

Yeah.

And then he sort of

had a...

So it was his landlady's daughter, not the landlady, I believe, who later

got vengeance

by hiding him under the bed.

He, yeah, she was half his age and he just fell completely in love with her.

And then he wrote this whole book saying that he had fallen in love with her and declaring it in public.

And

he sent his friend to test her by making advances and flirting with her and seeing how she reacted.

And she flirted back with his friend, although she drew the line at any serious stuff.

And then he asked his friend whether he could set Sarah, this girl, up as the friend's mistress and he would pay for it.

And the friend said, No, I would prefer a woman who can read and talk.

Very judgmental.

The girl was in love with someone else.

It was a complete disaster.

Anyway, he was a great literary figure.

Here's my favorite William Hazlick complete disaster story.

And that is his first lecture at the Russell Institution, where he turned up and they told him it had to be one hour long, but he prepared enough material for three hours.

And so instead of editing it, he just did the three-hour talk talk in one hour

and just put his head down and just read it as quickly as he sat.

Wow.

That's really funny, James, because it reminds me of another story about Hazlitt, which I've brought along, and I'm so glad you mentioned it.

I read actually, relatedly, something recently about Gordon Brown, which was, this is in the week, I think, and it was a story that goes around Westminster, which is that he was asked to give a talk at sort of a pensions dinner quite early on in his MPdom.

And

it was about pensions.

It was a talk about pensions to a bunch of pensioners and other people.

And he was asked to speak for 45 minutes, so he got up and he gave, and he really works really hard, you know, he's known for working hard on stuff.

So he thought really hard.

He delivered this 45-minute speech.

And at the end, the person who was comparing the event came on and apologized for the fact that he'd gone on so long, and they'd actually asked him to do a four to five-minute speech.

At what stage do you think I'm going to have to stop him here?

You can imagine on pensions.

Hazlitt invented, well, he coined a word that we all use today, gusto.

Yeah?

Yeah.

It's called gusto.

That's Hazlitt.

It existed before, didn't it?

But he sort of wrote an essay on it, sort of properly defining it.

Yep.

I thought he'd invented it, I must say.

No, it didn't exist before to mean like

life and.

He said it as something to do with arts, didn't he?

He was the first person to use it to describe art.

Yes.

Oh, well, anyone can use a word to mean a different thing.

I think we've all agreed it means.

Well, he also, according to the OED, coined the words newsmongering, modernising, and acorning.

Acorning apparently means collecting acorns.

And he was the first person to use that.

Unbelievable.

What a great contribution to the English language, and people don't appreciate it.

I can see why I took a massive brick of his essays on your gap, yeah.

Seeing you and customs, anything to declare?

No.

What's that in your bag, madam?

A book of essays and a bunch of acorns.

Problem?

Some stuff on dead bodies or estate agents?

Dead bodies, blue bags.

Dead bodies.

Dead bodies, and if we can, Cleopatra.

So here's the thing about the dead.

So a contemporary of Hazlitt's was Shelley, and there's an often repeated story about Shelley's heart being plucked from the funeral pyre he was being burned on.

So he drowned and he was at sea for several days, dead and bobbing around, and then he was retrieved and he was burned on the beach.

There's now a theory that it wasn't his heart which refused to burn, because it's a very nice romantic image that his heart refused refused to burn.

They now think it was his liver, which refused to burn because it was just soaked in seawater for days and days.

And it was the biggest organ, so it would have been less likely to burn.

And it was taken out, and a friend of his took it and then bequeathed it to another friend of his, who then gave it to Mary Shelley, who put it in a bag.

It's re-gifting, isn't it?

But actually, speaking of livers, and back on Hazlitt, he didn't drink.

But do you know why he didn't drink at the end of his life?

No.

Felt like you were going to guess then, Dylan.

Broke.

He was broke.

He was broke, but that's not why.

So it's said that he died of tannic acid poisoning from excessive tea drinking because he was obsessed with drinking tea.

He used to fill half a teapot with tea.

It can't be possible to send the other half.

I don't think so.

Half a Briton would be dead.

He was obsessed with it, though.

Apparently, he used to get up at one or two in the afternoon, never before that, and he would get up and pour himself a tea, half full of tea, like the tea leaves, and then half of water.

And then he would sit there for four to five hours staring into the distance.

Four to five hours?

Wow.

That was beautiful.

I can't survive.

God, when we put this podcast out, that's going to come in stereo in people's ears.

That's going to be the best hard-hitting punchline anyone's ever heard.

Anyway, no, for sorry, four to five hours

motionless, staring into the distance.

So he loved tea, but he didn't drink because the last time he drunk was when he went on a huge binge following the Battle of Waterloo.

So he was a massive Napoleon fan

and he loved Napoleon.

And he was devastated that Napoleon had been defeated.

He thought he epitomized the great revolutionary cause.

And so he went on this huge drinking binge and he spent weeks and weeks wandering London completely unwashed in a drunken haze.

And after that, he thought alcohol wasn't for him.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that UNICEF has a nutrition ambassador called Poopy.

So this is just a thing, this is just true.

She is called Jose Helihanta Ramahavi Lisoa and she is a singer from Madagascar and she's goes by the stage name Poopy.

And Lonely Planet has declared Poopy a national treasure

and she's been active in educating young mothers about breastfeeding their infants as a nutrition ambassador for UNICEF.

And that's basically her entire English language Wikipedia that I've just read out.

And there is nothing else on her, on the internet, really, that's in English anyway.

But she joins other UNICEF ambassadors such as Katie Perry, Serena Williams, Liam Neeson, the Wiggles, Dust in the Turkey, and the Vanuatu women's beach volleyball team.

Oh, cool.

God, that embassy must be a riot, mustn't it?

And yeah, so she's just a nutrition ambassador and she's got a funny name.

But we don't know why she's got, I mean, it's her stage name, right?

It's just her stage name, yeah.

We don't know why she got that name.

Okay.

I imagine it must mean something different in Malagasy, I guess.

Yeah.

You would hope.

I looked up a little bit on stage names.

Okay.

So

Stevie Wonder, he has a stage name.

Really?

Yes.

Because his real name, what do you think his full first name is?

Stephen Wonder.

Yeah.

His first name is Steveland.

No.

Wow.

Genuinely.

That is a theme park I want to go to.

Steveland.

No way.

He was christened Steveland.

Yeah.

What?

S-T-E-V-L-A-N-D.

Steveland.

Steveland, yeah.

That's amazing.

I know.

Yeah, that's really cool.

What's his surname?

I didn't write it down.

Oh, okay.

But it's not Wonder, no, it's not Wonder.

Wonderland.

Wonder was because he was a...

No, he was a boy Wonder, which is why he got the nickname Wonder.

Oh, okay.

Michael Keaton, the actor, his real name is Michael Douglas.

What's Michael Douglas' real name?

Steve Land Wonder.

I don't know Michael Douglas' real name.

Do you know what Wacken Phoenix's real name is?

Or born birth name was?

His surname is Bottom.

That's right.

Yeah.

So does he

wacken Bottom?

Wagon Bottom.

He's William Hazlitt.

It's a different time.

But his brother was

River.

So he was River Bottom.

He was River Bottom.

He was.

So he had a weirdest upbringing.

They were members of the, was it the Children of God cult?

The really famous cult?

Yeah, they were brought up in that.

And then they escaped that and decided it wasn't a good idea.

And the whole family decided to change their name to Phoenix, which does make sense.

They were all called Mr.

and Mrs.

Bottom, and they went with Phoenix instead.

Yeah.

I found out today what Michael J.

Fox's middle name is.

Go on.

Andrew.

Yeah.

With a silent J?

Yeah,

Andrew.

He basically, when he went to sign up for his the actors, you have to officially register yourself as an actor in America, and there was already a Michael Andrew Fox, so he just had to pick J as a random initial, but that's what the J stands for: Andrew.

It sort of stands for it.

I found a list of the 150 worst rapper names in the world

on the internet.

So just a few of those.

The Teabag Boys.

Yak Bowles.

These are all proper rappers, apparently.

Cecil Otter.

And Bus Driver.

Really?

That's so good.

Actually, our musicians, do you guys know the band NXS?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the bass guitarist for NXS is Gary Beers, and his middle name is Gary, but with a different number of R's.

Get out of here.

Gary!

His name is Gary!

Maybe that's right.

Exactly.

No way.

That's what it is.

It used to be William and he changed it to Gary, Gary

Beers.

Changed it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wow.

Can't get enough Garys.

So, yeah, the double R is in the middle name.

Wow.

If you're interested.

Joan Crawford, the actress, she was named by the public.

No way.

Joni McJoantha, she should be cool.

Her original name was Lucille.

This is a French surname, Le Seweur, S L E S U E U R.

But people thought, studio bosses thought, that sounds like Lucille the Sewer.

So they held a public competition to change her name, and Joan Crawford was the entry which won.

She didn't like it at first, but she had to be called that.

Wow.

It grew on her, apparently.

Okay.

Yeah.

So cool.

It's not that cool a name, really.

Or is it like just the time that makes it feel like that?

Joan Crawford doesn't feel like her.

When was it?

20th century.

Anyone?

47.

What a specific answer.

June 47.

June 47.

Any advance on June 47?

Do I have 48?

June 47 was one of the names that were put up.

I've got a thing on ambassadors.

Okay.

So the fact at the top, if you remember, UNICEF has a nutrition ambassador, and that's called Poopy.

So a lot of celebrities get asked to be ambassadors for certain things.

And very recently, Helen Mirren has been an ambassador for L'Oreal.

So she'll do panels and so on for their moisturizer.

It's so

paranoid about the ambassador.

Even if it's the brand ambassador, that's why I'm not.

It's not the same as UNICEF, though, is it?

Like, you don't set up in a massive building in the Middle East and say, I am the L'Oreal ambassador.

How can I?

Oh, where the fuck am I Ferrero Roche?

Where is the L'Oreal Embassy?

You're right, yeah.

No, she's a L'Oreal ambassador.

It's a real thing.

Yeah,

she's their brand ambassador and she's not a very good one because she did a talk, she did a panel talk in the south of France and they asked her about moisturizer and what it does and she said, probably fuck all.

That was her answer.

No.

I was looking at because Poopy, the ambassador, is a nutritionist, right?

And

and is from Malagaska.

So I was looking at some Malagasy nutrition stuff.

And so there are some groups in Madagascar that that will circumcision is a thing in some tribes and some of them eat the foreskin

but also I was reading a

sorry I didn't I got that three seconds after everyone else in the room

is that weird though I don't think that's weird you don't think that's weird

in Maddo in Madagascar this is a thing

And there was a journalist went to Madagascar and traveled around it a few years ago.

And it's specifically in certain regions, so it's in the Antamba Huaka region, and where they eat the foreskin.

And traditionally, you get circumcised, and then it's given to the grandfather, who then can either eat it or offer it to a very honoured guest.

Journalists,

they've got a little bit soft in the bag, but

anyway, it's very awkward.

If you're a guest in in specific Madagascar areas of Madagascar, then just look out for being offered foreskin.

And it is polite to accept it.

Wow.

There was another person who was interviewed from a different tribe

who said, we actually think that's weird.

This is someone from the...

This is someone from the Sakalava tribe.

This is a different anthropologist who went there.

And he said, we think that's weird.

It's only the guys in the mountains in the middle who do that.

No, we put the foreskin into a firework and send it into the sky

all right should we move on to our final fact yes please okay

it's time for our final fact of the show and that is chaczinski yes my fact this week is that the first ever sports bra was two jock straps

yeah this is i actually heard this on another podcast i don't know if if you're allowed to just like transmigrate a fact from one, but I'd heard it on 99% Invisible, which I assume a lot of you listen to, and if you don't, you should.

But this is, it was invented by someone called Lisa Lindahl in

the 1970s, 1977.

And it was when jogging became a really fashionable thing to do, and specifically for women to do.

And there was an issue because sports bras didn't exist, and there were various issues.

And she was in her sitting room one day, and she was saying, what are we going to do about the fact that every time we go running, there's all this rubbing and it hurts and it just doesn't work for us?

And then her husband started parading around their sitting room with his jock strap on his chest, saying, You should try one of these guys, they work really well.

And she actually thought, Yeah, what a great plan.

And she got her friend to sew together two jock straps, which, if I had to remind myself what a jock strap was, but it's like it's like tight wirefronts for men who are playing sports, right?

Yeah, yeah, cool.

And she said

she said,

I must be saying.

We need to wrap up soon, actually, because we've got to hit the gym in a second.

Hey, don't laugh so hard at that, guys.

But so these ladies, Lisa Lindhall and also Polly Smith, who did her designing, they get all the credit.

But surely the credit should go to her husband, who was prancing around his front room with Jock Scott.

Good point, James.

Behind every great woman is a great owner.

There's an unbelievably childish man dancing around his front room.

I didn't mean that, by the way.

That was

as a joke, they called it the jock bra.

And then that got changed into the drog bra,

which got changed into the sports bra.

And who knows what that will become next.

But do you know someone else who was responsible for inventing it?

So what she did, Lisa, was she sewed these two, or she got her assistant Polly to sew these two jog straps together and she ran around with it and it worked.

But the person who helped with the sewing was someone called Hinder Schreiber.

no yeah your surname so a distant relation of yours helped invent the sports bra

not that distant though because it's unbelievably recent right people are always surprised that the person who invented it is still alive and still doing interviews and stuff you're right it's so weird that it was literally 40 years ago she has a whole section on her website about i invented the sports bra well i would have thought that would be the main bit now yeah no no she does loads of other stuff because she she's not a you know one trick pony she now does loads of other stuff like well i didn't you know.

There's only so much reading time in the day.

I didn't read the whole thing.

She's an artist, I think, as well.

Does motivational speaking, possibly?

I would think so, yeah.

Yeah.

I heard that there was possibly a slightly earlier one called the Free Swing Tennis Bra.

Yes.

That was a rival, and that was a couple of years earlier, it was specifically for tennis, and it was not.

It wasn't really a sports bra, that was it.

It was just a bra.

They were just saying you can play sports in this if you want.

Yeah, okay, this was a specific kind of holding you in kind of thing, right?

Held you in, strapped you down, and also had thick straps because the rubbing.

But there were a few patents much earlier on.

This is the first commercial one, but actually, in 1909, a breast supporter was patented by someone called Madeleine Gabot, and that was actually the first thing that separated the breasts because breasts were thought of as one entity.

I remember researching this for QI once.

The bosom was what the word you would use to refer to, okay?

It's a singular bosom.

And it was singular.

They were just

one rectangular thing.

It was on the front of it.

Rectangular.

Yeah.

They were a different shape then.

But that was popular until

very late.

The monoboob, basically.

Yeah.

There was no lift and separate.

That was just the shelf.

Yeah.

The monoboob until the 20th century, basically, was the way to get it.

And that's why the French phrase for a woman having a large bosom is illia monde de du balcon.

There is a crowd on the balcony.

Is it still, though?

I don't think it's very.

It's already French people in.

That's not in use now, is it?

No, we know what it is.

Yeah, no, sorry.

I mean, you should use it.

It's a lovely metaphor.

It applies also to a royal wedding, for example.

There's a lot of amazing bras out there now.

Like, in Japan, they have a few which are sort of very technologically advanced.

There's one called the uplifting bra, and the uplifting bra basically plays you sort of motivational conversation.

So it will monitor your heart rate, and if it feels your heart rate going up, it might sense that you're scared, and your bra would be like, you got this.

You don't need to freak out.

You are going to own this.

And it's just messages that come out from someone's t-shirt.

Do they have this for pants as well?

I don't know.

Just asking for a friend.

Just calm down.

You've got all the time in the world.

Oh, that's a shave.

There's another Japanese bra that's also quite exciting which measures your heart rate, but this is the true love bra.

Oh, yeah.

And this will only spring open if you are truly in love with the person

that's trying to take it off.

And by truly in love, they mean if your heart rate does the stuff that they've made sure the heart rate does.

What if you're jogging?

Well,

that does feel like one of the major flaws of this bra, doesn't it?

Loads of things make your heart rate.

Like if you're on a roller coaster.

Or if you're really anxious about the fact that your bra might pop open.

I'm with you, some kinks need ironing out.

But that is a thing.

It measures your heart rate.

It sends it to an iPhone, which analyses your heart rate and tells if you're in love with someone based on how fast your heart's beating, which is not a super foolproof method.

And then springs open.

There's another bra in Japan, which is in its translation called Marriage Hunt.

And

the bra comes down with a countdown clock on your bra, which is set by the wearer of the bra.

So they go, I want to be mine.

I do mean by count that

you have a game show countdown.

No, it's so you go, I want to be married exactly a year from now.

I want to meet the right person, and I want to be married a year from now.

So you set on your bra the...

But doesn't that look like you're wearing a bomb?

I know.

Again, like Anna said about the previous one, there's a few kinks to sort out.

If this woman doesn't get married in 20 minutes, she's going to explode.

Have you heard of Mary Phelp Jacobs?

Yes, she is the person who supposedly invented the brain.

Well, she patented an early version of it, exactly, in 1914.

And there were versions of it before then,

but

she was a young woman.

She was quite a wealthy young woman.

She was going to a dance, and she didn't want to wear a corset because it's very, you know, it's hard to move, it's hard to dance.

But she had the most incredible life.

So we featured her on the podcast a few weeks ago.

An audience member won a fact by saying that the woman who invented the bra had a whippet whippet called Clitoris, and she did, but she was the most incredible woman.

So she changed her name to Careis Crosby, and she nearly named herself Clitoris Crosby, but then she said, No, that's for the dog.

And then she sold her patent for not very much money, but then she moved to Paris and became a publisher.

She and her husband Harry had this incredible publishing life.

They published everyone, D.H.

Lawrence and Charles Bukowski and Lewis Carroll, but they also had these raucous sex and drug-fueled parties in an abandoned mill,

which they owned.

And they had a they bought their own tombstones and then they kept them on the roof of their block of flats and sunbathed naked on them.

They just had this incredible life.

Sexy.

That's weird.

Yeah.

But the thing is about them, she sold the patent, like you say, for not much money.

It was her husband's idea.

He got fed up with the whole thing and said, oh, you should just sell the patent.

And she did sell it.

She sold it for $1,500.

And she did this in around 1915, 1916.

And then America joined the war in 1917, and corsets were banned because they had so much wire in them.

And suddenly, bras became massive.

Noel.

But bras became really, really, really popular.

And so she missed out by only a couple of years on making billions from that.

Wait, and presumably why they needed wire, they needed the metal for the war effort.

Yes,

I read that they got two battleships out of the steel they saved.

It was enough to build two battleships.

Oh, wow.

The fact about rubber pants in the second of the First World War.

Oh, yeah.

People used to have a rubber diet.

And the rubber diet was not an actual food diet.

It was just to wear rubber knickers and rubber corsets, which would rub against you and make you sweat, and then you would lose weight.

Oh, yeah.

It didn't work, and it just flayed your flesh.

But

that's like now people would put like cling film around them, wouldn't they?

Yeah, but the cling film diet.

We've all done it.

We've all, yeah.

But don't I think boxers do that, don't they?

They wrap themselves in cling film and then they exercise, they lose more weight through water.

Jockeys do, don't they?

Yeah, you're right.

But it didn't work.

And also.

It doesn't work because all you lose is water and then as soon as you drink some water, it goes back into you.

So it's very short term.

But then the First World War broke out and all the rubber was needed for the war.

Bouncy, bouncy ward.

What do you need rubber for in the water?

Lots of stuff, you know.

Wheels, wheels, I guess.

That's why they call it the bouncy war.

Hey, just speaking of boxers and fighting, there's been an innovation off the back of someone watching an MMA fight, that sort of Conor McGregor-style fighting that goes on.

And someone lost a match after being kicked in the testicles.

And he thought, ah, I wonder why that jock strap didn't protect him more.

So he's invented now a bulletproof jock strap, which is on the market.

It's called nutshells.

And

nutshells can withstand a bullet being fired at your groin.

I mean, who does those tests?

Yeah,

I'm pretty sure that the inventor who's called Rabber did do that.

And so the idea is it can be used for sports because if you're playing baseball and a fastball comes, or a tennis serve comes, or

someone's firing a bullet at you, at a.

I mean, an incredibly well-aimed bullet.

Yes, yeah.

But, but, I mean, it's now been picked up by the military.

It's not the size joke.

They need to be a pretty sharp shooter down to hit you.

Why does the military need that technology?

It has bulletproof technology.

It doesn't need a different kind of bulletproof for your penis.

It's just the same kind of bulletproof.

You should try surrounding the penis with 30 or 40 layers of toughened glass.

Well,

I think Imelda Marcos had a bulletproof bra, didn't she?

Did she?

I think so.

Yeah, made out of Kevlar.

Right.

But yeah, she did.

Cool.

Wow.

Do you know the jockstrap is, since you mention it, is from jockey, but it was invented for bicycle jockeys.

So this was in the 1880s.

I would have thought like American jocks, like just a.

No, the word jock comes from jockstrap.

So it was invented for cyclists in Boston in the 1880s because they were called jockeys and they delivered stuff, and they were cobbled streets, and so it was quite painful to cycle over the cobbled streets.

And so, the jockstrap was invented for that, and that's where the jock comes from.

It's a sporty thing now, but at the start, it was invented to stop your balls bumping over cobbles.

Wow, guys, we need to wrap up very shortly.

Yeah,

so the thing with bras is everyone thought they were invented about 100 years ago, but they found some really old ones from the Middle Ages, and they were found in a castle in Austria by a scientist or an archaeologist called Beatrix Nutz from the University of Innsbruck and she's found out basically that what happened was the bra came first and then the corset took over and then the bra came back again which no one believed until 2012 when she found this.

Wow.

And at the same time they found what looks like a pair of panties is kind of like a gusset and just some kind of string going round, but they turn out to be men's underwear because women didn't wear underwear at that time.

And according to to Beatrice, underpants were considered a symbol of male dominance and power.

Oh, really?

Well, because even when women started wearing underpants in Victorian times, they were crotchless.

And I read one historian said they were crotchless in order to distinguish them from men's underpants.

It must be another way.

God, it's amazing.

That's the only way you do it.

Name labels are the way.

Yeah.

Or, you know, the men's ones are the ones which constantly mutter things like, you're doing fine, really.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

You can also follow my other account at Cleopatra Movie Trivia.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

Yep, and James.

At James Harkin.

And finally, Chaczynski.

you can email podcast at qi.com yep or you can go to our group account which is at no such thing you can go to our website no such thingasoffish.com where we have links to a tour that's coming up in 2018.

Thanks so much for listening to us guys.

Thanks so much for being here tonight.

We'll see you again next week.

Goodbye.

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