185: No Such Thing As Scottish Snow

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

My name is Andrew Hunter Murray, and I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Tozzinski, and our special guest this week is Carrie Ad Lloyd.

Carriead is a comedian we all know.

She's been on QI a load of times.

She's in an improvised show called Ostentatious, which is Jane Austen-based improvised comedy with me.

And she also is the presenter and host and producer and everything of the podcast Griefcast, which is about grief and about

people you've lost, but it's also very uplifting and charming and funny and wonderful.

So do give that a listen.

Okay, starting with fact number one this week and that is Carrie Ad Lloyd.

My fact is that Unity Mitford was the only person to be BFFs with Churchill and Hitler.

She was best friends forever, just

for any 80s kids in the room.

Yeah, she was definitely

busies with Hitler.

She was very busies with Hitler.

But she was also very old family friends with Churchill.

And at some point, just before war broke out, so she was living in Germany,

basically completely in Hitler's inner circle.

She was completely there.

And she used to write to her friend Winston and beg him very regularly to make peace with Hitler because she really believed in both countries.

Now, caveat: yes, she was a massive fascist, so obviously, not like saying I love her, but she did really believe that England and Germany could work together and become this incredible superpower.

And she always said, if they go to war, I'll kill myself.

I'll kill because these are my two greatest selves, my country.

And spoiler alert, the moment war broke out, she went into a park and she shot herself in the head.

But spoiler, spoiler alert, it didn't work.

She survived with the bullet in her head.

Wow.

But then she did also die due to an infection.

But much later, much, much later.

So Hitler, her BFF,

when she did shoot herself in the head, Hitler felt so bad.

Obviously, it was his fault.

Hashtag youcause the war.

He arranged for a train to take her to Switzerland.

And then her mother, and I think it was Debo, the young sister, came and got her.

But he, he, you know, war's breaking out, everyone's leaving countries.

Hitler made sure that she got out of Germany and he knew she was going back to Britain.

And he funded her healthcare and stuff, didn't he?

It's very easy to accidentally read read the story and go, oh, that's quite a bit.

I know, yes.

I know, again, Kager, he was a massive fascist, but also,

I think he was quite big into it.

He was one of the worst, I would say.

You know, there's a theory about Hitler funding all this.

So the theory is that her sister, Deborah, and her mother took her home after she tried to kill herself.

She then recuperated at a little

nursing home in a village called Wiggington in Oxfordshire.

The home was a maternity home.

and there is a story.

This is rubbish.

There is a story from the woman who ran the home that she may have had a baby and the baby had a tiny mustache and was a massive fascist.

Yeah, and so the journalist who wrote about this, she asked the woman who she thought the father might be and and she said, well, my mother always said it was Hitler's.

Although there is no record of this happening, so it's probable there is not a secret Hitler love child.

But they definitely copped off, didn't they?

No, also, that's okay.

Yeah, there's a lot of, like, it was very suspicious.

In the inner circle, all the Germans hated her.

They were like, there's this British woman who Hitler literally, she would like to advise him and wind him up on stuff.

And she was extremely jealous of Eva Braun as well.

And Eva Braun was very jealous of her, though.

Yeah, right.

And so Unity definitely was in love with him, but seem what I've read seems to be like that nothing happened.

Basically, he was kind of using her because she was extremely useful.

And the other weird thing about Unity is her middle name was Valkyrie, Unity Valkyrie Mitford, and she was born in the town of Swastika.

So weird.

So weird.

And so it is said that he was very superstitious.

And it was said when he found this stuff out about her, and she was a six-foot blonde, blue-eyed woman, that he kind of felt like she was very lucky.

But apparently they

apparently, there was no way they ever slept together, but she definitely would have.

And she used to kind of hang out with other fascists.

Did she sleep with Churchill?

No, but her sister, Decca, was married to Esmond Romilly, who the big rumor is that he was Churchill's secret son.

And it was all sort of hidden that he was actually a nephew but yeah I thought Churchill was quite happily married though not like that massive fascist Hitler so this town of Swastika is in Ontario yes and they wanted to change the name during the war to Winston

because of obvious reasons

and they even did it I think or at least they got pretty close but then everyone who was living there said no and so they took down all the new signs and they said no we were called swastika before hitler came along yeah we came up with the idea idea first.

Why should we change our names?

And they were named after the symbol, which was a good luck symbol in, is it Hindi or?

Hinduism, I think.

Yeah, Hinduism.

So that's, you know, things were there beforehand.

Doesn't Dan have a fact about that guy, I think possibly also in Canada, who was called Adolf Hitler.

Yeah.

And it was asked if you're going to change your name.

And he said, I'm not going to let one guy ruin the name.

And he didn't change his name.

Yeah, yeah.

They were an amazing family.

Yeah, there literally isn't one of them that wasn't somehow involved in something.

So Unity was,

well, they were all bizarre, but she was bizarre.

So she said that her and her sister grew up, her to be a fascist, her sister, one of her sisters, Decker to be a communist.

Yes.

And she said that they used to scratch, she would scratch a swastika and her sister would scratch a hammer and sickle into the window of the bedroom that they shared together and the scratches were still there.

And so they really pursued their dreams.

There was an article in The Guardian about how they're kind of inspiring in a twisted way because she was like, I'm in love with Hitler.

I'm going to go track him down.

And she did.

And she went to Germany and she sat in a cafe that he frequented.

She sat there every day.

Yeah, she sat there every single day until eventually he was like, who's that six-foot blonde woman that keeps staring at me?

And that's how she got to know him.

And apparently,

she wrote to Decca and said, this is my plan.

Like any good obsessed teenager.

This is how I'm going to get him.

And so her and Decker, Jessica Mitford, shared a room and they had a chalk line down the middle of the room.

And at one end was a bust of Lenin and the other end was a picture of Hitler.

Wow.

But they were obviously still sisters and loved each other very much, and then completely opposites, but obviously growing up in exactly the same household.

Do you think maybe like sometimes brothers and sisters go against their brothers and sisters, right?

Yeah, well, there's sort of, if you read any of the Mitford stuff, there's an amazing biography by Mary S.

Lovell, which is

the best Mitford S one to read, which says that they all of them had these incredibly obsessive personalities and filled them with, so either fascism or communism, or Pam, who was obsessed with farming.

She's so sad.

Pam is the one that...

Pam's the one that Pam's the one one everyone forgets, but she introduced a new breed of chicken into this country.

Yeah.

And Pam apparently was quite a wit, and like Evelyn Moore was in love with her.

But the only people who heard her jokes were the chickens.

That was sad.

Were the six so there was

and there's a brother who died in the war.

And then you have Nancy, who was a very famous writer.

Diana, who obviously also being of a fascist, they do not do well on the show.

Diana was the mistress of Oswald Mosley, head of the British.

Our wife, the wife, eventual wife of Oswald Mosley.

Well, I was just referring to the courting affair.

She was the one who famously said Hitler had beautiful blue eyes.

Oh, yeah.

Did she tell Stephen Fry this?

Well, Stephen definitely mentioned it on QI.

He says that Stephen Fry says that she said to him, Of course, you never met Hitler, did you?

She was an incredible woman, Diana.

She was said to be like the most beautiful woman of her age.

Like, men were literally falling over.

And then she married a Guinness and had an affair, not a pint of Guinness,

and then had an affair with Oswald Mosley and then ended up marrying him.

And then went to prison.

Went to prison.

And she was the only.

During the war, they were interred, and she and another woman were allowed their husbands in Holloway prison.

So she was in Holloway Women's Prison, and then Oswald was allowed to join her because Churchill said that was okay, because he was mates with the family.

Nancy Metford was famous for doing the upper class and lower class writing.

You and non-you was a famous essay she wrote about the Cretways.

What things show you off as being posh or not posh, right?

Yes.

Have you got a test for us?

I can do one.

How do you pronounce the word which refers to a large cat with a mane?

A lion?

Lion.

No, not posh, not posh.

No.

Lion?

Oh, you're pretty posh.

I'm putting it on, I'm putting it on it.

It rhymes with barn, apparently.

Barn.

How do you pronounce the game which I like to play where I hit little balls around with a stick in a field?

Golf.

Golf.

Goolf.

Goolf.

Goff.

Goff.

No.

Oh, yeah, golf.

Who said golf?

Like Darren Goff.

Going for a game of golf.

Oh, wow.

There was a study recently that found the queen has become less posh over the course of her reign.

As in, if you listen to her vows from 1953,

she's still quite posh.

She's still quite posh.

Not as posh, though.

If you listen to the old recordings, it's almost like it sounds almost like a fan.

But that's her accent is less posh.

She still lives in a massive family.

She hasn't kept it real recently, yeah.

But she talks quite straight, I think, think, is what we're saying.

She lives in a palace, but she talks pretty straight.

She says BFF.

Yeah.

Wasn't the non-you you thing part of it was about that thing where people who want to be posh put put on posh words.

So things like serviette instead of napkin.

So it wasn't about telling the posh from the working class, it was about telling the posh from the kind of middle class who wanted to be posh.

The really posh don't say the posh word,

they just call it a napkin.

Yeah, whereas the social climate says a serviette.

Exactly.

What if you call it a mouth face wiper?

You were just a plain old widow.

Yeah, it was just Nancy was very like Cerbic and witty about so she was sort of taking the piss out of people.

There was a lot of piss taking involved, wasn't there?

Yeah.

Apparently, a gentleman, when he's drunk, may become amorous or maudlin or vomit in public, but he would never become truculent.

That's how you know Andy's so common.

Regularly truculent.

Fighty-fighty.

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

My fact this week is that in the 1920s, doctors prescribed intentionally terrifying flights in aeroplanes to cure deafness.

Why did they think that that would what was their reason for that?

Well, I would think maybe because it makes your ears pop.

Yeah, but like

it was not that, no, it was the shock factor.

So it actually

started with someone who couldn't speak.

It was an army serviceman who I think lost the ability to speak during the First World War.

And this is in 1921.

This doctor called Charles McInerney said it was a psychological problem and that the solution would be going into a plane and being treated to a series of loop-the-loops and nose dives and spins and things that made him think he was going to die.

And lo and behold, he took this prescription, he did it, he stepped off the plane and he said, I don't know if I can speak anymore.

And it turned out he could because he said that.

And then it started being touted as a cure cure for everything including deafness so deaf flights were a thing that was quite commonly prescribed and Charles Lindbergh very famous obviously aviator on his business card he had deaf flights as one of the things that he often really take deaf people up the idea was that people might have suffered from these things for psychological reasons you were saying like shell shocky kind of thing yeah

so were they take yeah was it only if you develop deafness or was it more like oh i've been deaf since birth there were some people who were deaf since birth.

So, for example, in 1930, there was a boxer called Fred Mahon.

His nickname was Dummy, which was a cruel nickname because he'd been deaf since the age of eight months.

Oh, my God.

So, he took a flight in 1930.

It was designed to cure his hearing.

It was designed to cure his hearing with a parachute jump that he was going to take out of the plane, okay, in front of a crowd of thousands.

The parachute failed to open.

Oh, my God.

And he died.

Where's the happy ending, Andy?

Yeah,

probably in the next fact, I'm afraid.

And sometimes people did die.

The idea also was that it had to be a surprise, so the patients were told that.

Where are we going?

Don't worry, just put on this rucksack.

They were told they were just going in a flight because it was the altitude that cured the deafness.

And then they'd go up in the flight, and then it would be a horrible shock when you suddenly started nosediving towards the ground or spinning around in circles.

Because obviously, if you knew it was going to happen, then the cure wasn't going to be as effective.

Have you heard about this flight that happened in

1969 with Alan Funt?

Have you heard this before?

I don't think I've ever heard the word Alan Funte.

Alan Funt before.

I think I remember.

He was the host of a prank show in America that was like absolutely massive, kind of like Candid Camera, sort of you've been, you know, earlier you've been framed.

It was called Candid Camera.

I feel like a fuck.

What a fuck.

Alan Funt hosted Candid Camera, which is like the original You've Been Framed.

And he was hugely, hugely famous, as much as I would say, Jamie Beadle was in his day.

And he was on a flight with his family, and they had a camera crew because they were going to film like this new prank show and it got taken hostage.

So the plane, a guy stands up and it was at the time apparently there was loads of this happening and they were just constantly in 1969 being taken to Cuba.

It was like quite fashionable.

So everyone starts panicking.

Then some of the passengers see Alan Funt and go, oh, it's a prank.

And it wasn't a prank.

So Alan Funt standing up and he's like, it's not a prank, which obviously is what Alan Funt would do if it was a prank.

So the whole plane starts laughing and relaxing because they think it's a prank.

and i think they even got flown to cuba and they were on the ground for like five hours with everyone really relaxed thinking in a minute yeah it seems like the whole plane thinking in a minute the camera's gonna come out we're all gonna laugh and they were winding him up the whole time and he was with his wife and child and the the daughter has been accounted it and said like they just thought they just he was getting more and more frustrated and upset because no one would believe

no alan fund

eventually fund hijacked the plane himself yeah take me to anywhere apart from cuba it did did happen a lot.

I remember Andy had a fact where there was a guy who said, take me to Cuba, but the flight was already going to.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, my God.

That's a book of heroic failures, classic, that one.

Charles Lindbergh.

Oh, yeah.

One of his other specialities listed on his business card, which is an amazing business card, by the way, including death flights.

One of the other things he offered was plane change in mid-air.

Yeah.

And this was a trick in early aerial circuses where you would just climb out of the plane you were in or flying and climb into another plane next to you.

Would you do that if you're traveling and you'd do it for an exchange or is it a trick?

It's a trick.

Right.

I was going to say it wasn't what changing your flight was in the olden days.

If anyone from Ryanair is listening, they will be considering that.

He was a real daredevil in some ways.

So

Lindbergh, he did

New York to Paris in 1924.

I did not know this thing about it.

He had to get rid of all non-essential equipment, make the plane as light as possible.

So he took out all non-essential equipment and then he put a big fuel tank on the front of the the plane so he could get the have as much fuel as he needed.

Unfortunately, that meant he could not see out in front of him.

I'm not even kidding.

Oh my god.

To see out of the plane in front of him, he had a few options.

He installed a periscope in the cockpit.

Oh my god.

He also sometimes just had to open the right-hand door to peek out the front.

Oh my god.

His final option was just to turn the plane sideways for a bit.

That's how I drive.

It does work.

It does.

But yeah, aerial acrobatics was super popular in the 1920s.

It was this very specific phase because a lot of people learned to fly in the First World War and then they realised they could make a living out of it.

And barn storming, it was called, and it became this very popular thing.

And I can't tell if it was...

I think the etymology of it is vaguely unclear.

It's either because people would often do these amazing aerial acrobatics in like fields and people would stand by a barn and watch, but also quite a common trick they'd do is to fly through a barn.

So they'd open the doors of a barn and then you had to fly your plane through the barn and come out at the other end.

Isn't that where the trope of bursting into a barn and then you burst out the other end and all the chickens are flapping around matching?

You know, that happens in every show.

Seinfeld runs into a barn.

It happens less in the panet.

Look!

But is that obviously where the word barn storm is a real barn storm?

I think it is from the barn.

I think it is, yeah, yeah.

I've seen videos of them going flying through, and I'm sure that must be where it comes from.

Yeah, it must be.

I think they played some stunt games of tennis on planes.

No, oh my gosh.

On the wings.

On the wings, from one wing to another.

There are a few photos of people doing

wing walking.

You know, normally you're just sort of discreetly strapped to the plane.

You're not standing completely free because obviously you'd immediately fall off.

Does that mean you had to hit the ball ahead of where the person was at the time?

How does physics work, Andy?

I think the person who really suffers is the ball boy.

There's a guy called Ormer Locklear, who was a 20s stunt pilot.

He, I think, was the first person to fly from one plane to another in mid-air, possibly.

Sorry, fly from one plane to another plane.

Sorry, sorry, climb.

He launched a smaller plane out of the window of a jumbo jet.

It's incredible.

So Ormer Locklear was a stunt pilot in the 20s.

In a film called The Great Air Robbery, here's one stunt he did.

He climbed down from a plane to a speeding car, fought the baddie for a bit, kicked the baddie out of the car, then he grabbed the plane's undercarriage and climbed back into it as the car overturned and crashed.

You should never climb back into someone's undercarriage.

It's very rude.

Do you know another old cure for deafness around about this time in the 1920s and before was to make your own artificial eardrum or have an artificial eardrum inserted?

But you could order them, I was going to say online, and they sent you things that were often made of elk's claw or pig's bladder or fish bone or something called gold beater's skin, which I didn't know about, but your dad probably would, Andy, because it's used in the gold leaf-making process, and apparently it's animal intestine.

But anyway, you put this on a little stick and you put it in your ear, and it apparently replaced your eardrum.

It didn't work, but it was invented in 1853 or pioneered by a doctor called Joseph Toynbee, who is Polly Toynbee's great-grandfather.

Wow, is that right?

Isn't that weird?

That's good.

I read the other day, and I haven't looked into this, I just saw the headline, that your eardrum moves the same way as your eyes move.

So when your eyes kind of move to the left or right, your eardrums slightly move around.

Like cats' ears, you know, when they like cats are obviously just doing it themselves, our eardrums are obviously doing it.

Yeah.

Oh my god, I can kind of feel it.

If you move your eyes around.

You think that might be your earbones moving in your jaw.

Oh yeah.

Yeah, it might be.

All right.

The other thing with, you know, like, well.

No, I can feel it too.

Yes, it might be your ear bones.

You have earbones too.

And it's not just Anna who has.

No, I'm just moving my eyes.

There's something moving in there.

I think that's your jaw moving, which is connecting to your earbone.

But why would my jaw move when I'm just moving my eyes?

Because you're moving the muscles around your eyes to look that way.

Carrie, we're not really into logical facts-based explanations here.

So, this is kind of a psychological affliction that they thought could be cured by flying.

And there was another fashion for curing psychological afflictions in about the 1920s.

And this was pioneered by this doctor called Henry Cotton.

And I'd never heard of this, but he thought that all madness or depression or anxiety was caused by physical stuff and could all be cured by surgery.

And so he used to just pull more and more body parts out of people until they were cured.

So he'd start with the teeth.

So you'd go in and you'd pull out all of your teeth if you were mad.

And then if you were still, he'd go for another body part.

He'd keep on going.

So then he...

He'd play that game operation.

I bet he invented it.

He was like, I could...

This is fun.

It was a lot like operation.

He'd go tonsils next and then adenoids and then he'd remove your colon if you still weren't cured.

I feel like you need your colon, don't you?

What about the appendix?

No, he did acknowledge that.

I mean, once my stomach's gone, yes, my anxiety is going to go because I'm trying to deal with not having a stomach.

So I'm probably just going to be really upset.

Probably

well, platypuses don't have stomachs.

Don't they?

No, they used to be very anxious.

Don't they?

Don't.

They used to, this happened to my granny,

they used to pull out all your teeth as prevention for tooth decay.

So when you had a lot of fun.

Yeah, when you were like 18 or 21, and this was offered to her, she was an extremely poor working-class lady, and so they said, Well, to save you some money and worrying about your teeth, just take them all out.

Lose them out.

Did you go for it?

Yeah, she had

every single tooth removed.

My grandma was offered it, didn't take them out of the office.

Yeah, this guy did pull out his own children's and wife's teeth as soon as he had children and a wife.

At what point in the ceremony or the reception did he do it?

The christening, there's one in there.

Now, kiss the bride.

Well, just one thing before I do that: you may now fly the bride's mouth open.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that there is a patch of snow in Scotland that fell 11 years ago and has just melted this week.

That is amazing.

It's sad.

It's very sad.

I thought it was amazing, and then when I looked into it, I realized it was sad.

Super sad.

At first, I was like, wow.

Oh.

Sad.

Yeah, so there are these people who kind of always looking for the last bit of snow that's on the Scottish mountains and most years it's still there when it starts snowing again, so it's always gonna be there.

And actually it always melts from the top, so the bit at the bottom will have been there for the whole time.

But this week and I'm going on a bit of a limb because as we're doing this podcast, I think there might still be a tiny bit there, but it's like a bit the size of a rucksack or something.

There's hardly anything and it looks like it's on its last legs.

Probably we're recording this on September 29th and I think by the thirtieth of October it'll definitely be gone.

God but you're in trouble if there's an unexpected blizzard in Scotland over the next week.

Yeah exactly.

Yeah hasn't it only disappeared six times in the last 300 years or something mad like that?

So yeah I read it as in the last 300 years there have only been six times when there's been no snow on the ground in Britain.

God, yeah.

You know like every time you listen to the news at the moment you feel like it's end of days and then you read a story like that where you go and the snow has also gone and you think oh god.

But it's got a name.

Yeah.

There's a few of them.

I think the one that I'm talking about is called the Sphinx.

Yeah.

And it's because there's a rock above it that looks a bit like the Sphinx.

Oh, I didn't know that was the reason, though.

Yeah.

Were they like...

I think it was.

I thought it was like the patch of snow asked you a riddle when you get there.

And if you answer wrong, it folds you into its cold heart.

I don't know.

That's how it keeps going.

It keeps on absorbing.

But there's one more virgin to come and ask you the question.

Andy, whenever.

So these people are very interesting guys.

There's no patch hunters.

Yes.

And so we only know about this because of this guy, Ian Cameron.

Yeah, and he's like one of the main guys.

And he often goes and tries to find these patches and then we'll take photos of them.

And then eventually, pretty much if Ian Cameron says they're not there anymore, they're probably not there anymore.

And he's got a Facebook group which you can go on and, you know, every few days he posts and he's like, oh, there's still a little bit left here, but probably not tomorrow.

But and all of the data he gathers is really useful for climate scientists because he's got a record stretching back years and years now, which is very useful in terms of the temperature on the ground.

And this is what they think is climate change.

Is that what Clay thinks?

Well, he is quite circumspect about it.

He says, look, I'm just going to leave it to the scientists to decide this kind of stuff.

I wish more people would take that attitude.

I suppose it seems pretty likely that it's climate change, right?

Well, you know what?

I like Ian.

I'm going to leave it to the scientists.

Yeah, it clearly is.

But he told the new statesman when they spoke to him, he said, it might sound weird to say, but it's like seeing an elderly relative or an old friend.

You're slightly disappointed if it's not in as good a condition.

And you're really disappointed if you turn up and it's not there.

He is all about the snow, isn't he?

Yeah, I think he just only cares about these snow patches.

And he says he.

I'm sure he cares about other things.

His poor wife covering herself in snow.

Look at me, Ian, look at me.

His children wearing snow hats, eating snow.

Desperately putting carrots out in front of their noses.

Daddy, are we snow now?

No, you're hot.

You're hot and you're nothing to me.

I'm sorry if it's not like that being Ian's child.

i would like to counter it and say the f reported he is an enthusiast but he is not mad

so tell that to his poor melting wife i think ian cameron is a bit of a hero because you know he's like looking at this kind of thing and not no one else is but actually it's like you say really good data and no he's amazing it's amazing i love people recording people do seem to be taking notice there's a whole there's a whole wikipedia article called snow patches in scotland um which i suspect maybe ian cameron wrote this

There are things like it's so weird, it does seem to be a big thing based on this.

So it describes a relatively little known snow patch, which was Scotland's largest at the time of writing.

It said, This patch does not appear in the known literature on the subject, so it may be very under-recorded.

Only the hipsters know about that one.

It's really obscure.

You probably haven't heard of it.

Do you want some good news?

Sure.

Yeah.

Do you want to know about the world's tallest snow woman?

Of course.

Guys, I feel like.

So her name is Olympia, and she is 30 feet shorter than the Statue of Liberty.

Her arms consist of 27-foot-tall evergreens, and she has 16 skis for eyelashes and 2,000 feet of rope hair.

Like, she's amazing.

And five red auto-tyres for lips, which were painted by the Mahusuk Kids Association.

So basically, the whole town got together and made this.

Because there's obviously...

This is from the photo.

This absolute travesty of a snowpass.

I don't know what the carrot is made out of because presumably that's the size of a bus or something.

The carrot nose is made of muslin, chicken wire, and wood grain by the MSAD number 44 elementary school children.

Yeah, it's

in main.

If that magically came to life and approached me one night, I would run for the hills.

Andy, why is that my why would that happen?

Well, like in the snowman, you can see

Christmas thing.

I would not go walking in the air with that beast.

I would sit indoors with a hairdryer on full blast if it came near me.

I mean, it's not 100% clear, just looking at this from a bit of a distance that she is a woman.

They've given it eyelashes in the classic cartoon version of gender.

I think a snow vagina would be a bit much.

You don't see many snow penises on the old snowman, do you?

Dude,

maybe you don't, bro.

It's hanging down and walking in the air.

I didn't notice.

You see a lot of snow penises.

I have to say.

Have you guys heard about the oldest ever ice?

No.

Is it in Antarctica?

Yes, it is.

And it was discovered this year.

It dates back, guys, 2.7 million years.

Yeah.

Is that the one that Putin drank?

I sincerely hope not.

Do you not remember that?

He did that.

They drilled down to some really old ice and then melted it and Putin drank it.

What, just dropped it in a whiskey or something?

It's going to live forever.

He wasn't down at the bottom of the hole eating the ice and then they drilled down to him.

Yeah, no, so as a climate scientist, keep on drilling down because the snow that falls and then compacts in Antarctica obviously,

not obviously, but it has tiny bubbles of air which tell you a huge amount about the climate two million years ago.

And you can find out how much carbon dioxide there was and what that means for the temperature of the Earth, which is going to be very useful for us over the next century.

But

this year in April, there was a freezer in Canada where they had ice cores that dated back thousands and thousands of years.

Yeah, you're way ahead of me, Kerryad.

No.

There was a freezer malfunction.

No.

And they melted.

Guys.

I've had that with ice cream and it's really disappointing.

It is so disappointing.

Imagine if there was 22,000 years of history in your ice cream.

If it's a Queen of Black's chocolate, I'd be as upset as I would be.

And the director of the Canadian Ice Corps Archives, a guy called Martin Sharp, and he said, Fuck!

This is a bad day for Martin Sharp.

He said, I've had better days.

So you're not far off.

But by a massive stroke of luck, which sounds crazy, but there was a massive stroke of luck, 90% of it was saved.

solely because a camera crew had been filming a documentary about this ice core archive and they had said, can we move most of it into this other freezer which has better lighting?

No way.

So thank God, most of it was saved.

That's amazing.

Is it like ice cream where if it refreezes it's not quite as good?

I think that's right.

And then you still eat it, but you think, oh, I should have eaten this earlier.

Yeah.

It's hard to shove the little bubbles of ancient carbon dioxide back in at the right height.

I love them though, because they're like time capsules, but from literally millions of years ago, I I kind of find the fact that these bubbles are 2.7 million years old more exciting than the ice because it's like a little world even though it doesn't have the cool stuff like the Blue Peter badge or whatever inside it it's still like a little time capsule apparently you're not supposed to make snowmen in Antarctica really it's taboo according to the telegraph taboo they're so uptight

apparently um the rules are designed to prevent the Antarctic's animals from being disturbed right yeah that's fair enough animals penguins I don't know they might be like what the is that?

You know, hey, that's my snow.

Imagine I came into your house and rolled up all your cushions and made a giant cushion man and you woke up.

Yeah, it does sound like I'd wake up because that sounds like that happened in a dream, I think, the other day.

The penguins, they're like, just my known business, and suddenly someone's taken all their house.

Antarctica had no land animals, permanent land animals, apart from that tiny fly.

It's got penguins.

I think it says now.

Yeah, but they live in the sea.

We did this on QI.

The only permanent land animal

is a midge with no wings.

Hey, and what the midge doesn't have feelings?

It's even worse than a midge because it could be quite a small snowman, but to them it's going to look like that one from Maine.

The princess,

I now understand.

And you have the point, because what about like the Antarctic bases they've built and all the science stations?

Like, no one's like, hey, we're disturbing them, are they?

No, the penguins are fine with that.

Yeah, they're fine.

That must look like the death start of the midges.

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Okay, it's time for a final fact.

That is my fact this week.

My fact is that the first person ever to use the word sponge cake was Jane Austen.

Good old Jane.

Good old Jane.

Now we mentioned this because, Carrie Ed, you are in an improvised comedy group called Ostentatious, which is about Jane Austen.

Yeah, I am, AHM.

Great.

She's in that with me.

Joe Mapergo.

Jamal Pergo, yeah.

Joseph Monpergo is Rachel Paris.

He's a great comic, isn't he?

Jay Monpergo.

He's amazing.

Yeah, he does very well.

Andy is also in that group with me.

I am.

I'm in Austin, yes.

And you guys have got some big shows coming up.

We have.

We're going to the West End for three dates.

The Piccadilly Theatre.

We're going December 5th, January 23rd.

And special Valentine's Day, February 13th.

Go the day before.

That's what all the fashionable couples are doing.

And then on February the 14th, you can do something actually fun.

Yeah, yeah.

It is actually exactly.

At the Piccadilly Theatre at 7:30.

Yeah, Ostentatias are playing their biggest dates yet.

And we've both seen it, and it's amazing, isn't it?

It's fantastic, yeah.

So, Sponge Cake.

So we know our Jane Austen, right, Andy?

We know our Jane Austen.

But she coined the word sponge cake.

She's got a few citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

And this is, so it doesn't mean that she invented the sponge cake.

She's the first person just to write it down.

They called it something else before her.

Do they call it cake sponge?

Yeah.

So the first record of the word comes from her writings.

I'm not even convinced it's a word.

Well, is it two words or is it one word?

I thought she wrote it down hyphenated.

She wrote it down hyphenated in a letter to her sister.

She said, you know how interesting the purchase of a sponge cake is to me.

I'm like, oh, I think it was the famous Jane Austen sense of humour coming in there.

So it's interesting, the first mention of a sponge cake is it being given a sick burn in a letter by Jane Austen.

Which is a shame because sponge cake is a great thing.

But you know, are the words that she either coined or first usage, the first evidence of it comes from her?

I went through the OED and found as many as I could.

Did you read the whole thing?

Well, I've only started at the beginning, can be true.

Ah, the fuck no.

Anti-bilious.

They're all kind of very Austin-y words, the ones.

Like there's coddle, cousinly.

She invented coddle.

She didn't invent them, I suppose, but she's the first example we have of okay.

Don't you have a isn't there something you coddle an egg?

Yeah.

Ah, yeah.

So maybe it's coddle in just that specific term, as in to molly coddle.

Right, yeah, yeah.

Irrepressible, obtrusiveness, tit-uppy.

What's tit-uppy?

Tit-uppy.

It's the study of tits.

Titography country.

Sorry, I'm sorry.

Technology.

Photographing.

Oh, I'm getting confused.

Titopy, I think it means like a tit-up.

Oh, yes.

And I suppose a tit-up is a mistake or something.

Yeah,

Darcy's always tit-hopping, isn't he?

That ball went really titopy.

That's how Lizzie felt.

And gad as into gad about.

You're kidding.

The verbal use of gad.

I think that's better than sponge cake, to be honest.

Gad about.

They're quite niche words.

Yeah, that's what I think.

It's not like Shakespeare, who just invented the and and

all the main words.

Before that, we just literally left a gap.

I've got some mind-blowing news on that, Anna.

Oh, yeah.

So Shakespeare has always said that Shakespeare invented 1700 words, right?

And I'm always saying it.

And so the words include bump, hurry, road.

I mean,

it's nonsense.

So the reason that he gets all these citations is because the first team of people compiling the Oxford English Dictionary knew his works intimately because they were all lexicographers.

So when they were thinking, oh, well, where's the word critical?

You know, they'd say, oh, there is a critical in whatever play it was.

And then, now that we've got better technology, we're going back and we're finding way earlier ones.

So we thought that the word puke was a Shakespearean coinage.

Turns out it dates back to 1465.

It was almost two centuries before Shakespeare wrote it.

I bet Chaucer was saying the word road.

Come on.

Canterbury Tales have gone on a road.

Yeah, because it would be weird if Shakespeare's plays were just full of words that no one had heard of.

The audience would be baffled.

But imagine the reviews, you know.

But you know, people say now, oh, I find Shakespeare hard to understand.

Perhaps this was happening in the 16th century.

People are like, I don't know what it's all about.

I can't really see the road.

Did you see the amazing website writelikeaustin.com?

No.

So it tells you, you can type in a word and it will tell you how many times she used it.

So she only used the word swoon four times.

Wow.

Which for people who watch Ostentatious will know, we use that word quite a lot.

She used the word curtsy six times.

She never used the word Marvel.

So where's it?

She hadn't invented superheroes.

No, no.

She was mainly using the word DC.

She did.

There were things that I think that she may have invented.

Like, so the phrase Tom Dick or Harry, I think, comes from her.

And you can imagine her

thinking that up from her own head, right?

Or dog tired comes from Jane Austen again.

Like, that's the kind of thing maybe she had made up.

Good writing.

Yeah.

If I've told you once, I've told you a hundred times.

No, she came up with that.

Yeah, that was from her.

That is a biggie.

That's probably her.

I'd say that's her lasting achievement.

Yeah, but you're only saying that because you've been told that a lot of times by your audience.

I think it's above puke.

Yeah.

Jane Austen wrote not very

well, according to some, according to this professor.

This is really interesting.

I'm bristling.

I've gotten to a lot of people as well.

I've got to a lot of men throughout the years have written harsh reviews of her.

Well, Virginia Woolfe didn't like her much.

Oh, no, that is.

Well, Virginia Woolf was a man.

It's extremely interesting you raised Virginia Woolf.

So this is a study done by this professor called Catherine Sutherland.

And basically, what she was saying is Jane Austen didn't write like we think she wrote.

That was the work of an editor.

So I agree with Carrie and Andy that her novels are perfection in terms of the construction of the sentences in the English language.

But what this academic says is that that was all the editor.

And if you look at her works, her first drafts of works, she writes totally differently.

And actually

the daubings with Frey on the back of a mirror.

Big, nice man.

Came in the room, yeah, and he was like, so nice.

Well, she was more experimental.

So it actually sounds like she was more interesting.

And she said that she wrote a bit more like Virginia Woolf.

So for instance, when she had exchanges between characters, like speech exchanges, she wouldn't separate out one speaker from another.

So it would all be like blurred in a more stream of consciousness-y kind of way.

Which is yeah, keeping the idea of speech, which she's so good at.

Yeah, speech is so good.

Yeah.

Well the editor was the one who had to separate it out.

And she couldn't spell so she

didn't know which went first out of I and E.

She didn't know punctuation.

But also loads of people didn't spell.

Yeah, the rules hadn't been set.

You and non-you had not been set.

Yes, the rules hadn't been set.

I think maybe she was a little bit worse than other writers at the time.

And also she didn't separate things into paragraphs very well.

So to be fair, she was a woman in the like 19th century or the one before that, the 18th century, she hadn't had a lot of education, had she i'm not saying she didn't do very well

we're really bristling aren't we yeah could it be that she didn't try and write sponge cake she just misspelt like spongecock or something

what book is that in jane you know how interesting the purchase of a spongecock is to me that is a way more interesting letter to be fair to be fair um virginia wool said that um one of the reasons that she was so popular is there are 25 elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of london who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.

Wow.

That's a lovely sentence.

Equally brilliant writer, Virginia Woolf.

I know, it's so sad.

They're both so fantastic and yet didn't like each other.

Well, also didn't have many opinions on each other.

There will come in the years after my death a woman who is crap.

And I will call her Virginia the Wolf, but spell wolf wrong.

But didn't Charlotte Bronte hate her as well?

There's a quote from

Bronte that said, I read quite like, I read that and I I recognized no love that I've ever known.

I can imagine the Bronte's not getting along.

Yeah but they're all howling on a moor somewhere.

It's a very different vibe.

But wasn't it that when the Brontes came out they were really popular and Jane Austen went out of favour for all of them.

Completely out of favour and actually it's I think it's partly only due to cinema that she's back in.

So silent movies, very bad.

Improvised comedy.

Oh yeah, we have affected her sales quite heavily.

Silent movies I think would have been terrible for Austin because

it's all conversation.

I think the first adaptation was was 1940 of Pride and Press.

Yes, the amazing film, black and white film.

Starring Laurence Olivier as Lizzie Bennett.

Most versatile.

There's been some amazing spin-offs.

I don't know if anyone looked into this.

Like, I mean, obviously, the Austin industry, myself and Andy are employed by, is huge.

And there's lots of fan fiction and lots of people writing other books.

So I just looked up like the top 20 of other books.

There's just like, definitely not Mr.

Darcy, Prom and Prejudice, Colonel Brandon's diary, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Mr.

Darcy Takes a Wife, Pride and Prejudice continues.

They read like titles from our show.

Like they're incredible amounts.

I read that a lot of people do this fan fiction because there's not enough sex in the actual.

Yes, a lot of it is sexy.

Darcy's Passions, Pride and Prejudice Retold Through His Eyes by Regina Jeffers, I think is a little bit more sexy.

than her stuff because she doesn't really go into it, it has to be said.

Darcy and Elizabeth, Nights and Days at Pemberley.

These are all available to buy, guys.

More Nights and and days, I reckon.

Hot nights at Pemberley.

Mr.

Darcy's undoing, a pride and prejudice variation.

Do you know her sexiest line, maybe?

Or the line that most overtly refers to sex?

Nope.

It's pretty.

It's Spongecocks.

I would like to see Spongecock SquarePants, the kids' TV show.

Oh, my God.

This is just a real classic Jane Austen line.

It's in Mansfield Park.

Fanny Price is the main character.

Fanny Reza.

Is it Fanny Price?

Is the rude name?

It's Fanny.

It's Fanny.

No, it's a reference to her getting pregnant.

And the sentence is just about, it's one of the last sentences.

It's about how Fanny Price and her husband come into some money just after they had been married long enough to begin to want an increase of income.

That's not the rudest line in Mansfield Park.

It is an overt reference to sex, though.

Well, would you like an overt reference to something else?

You know I would.

It's in Mansfield Park as well, and there's a character called Mary Crawford, who's a bad, bad girl.

And she's talking about the Admiralty.

And she says she used to know a load of Admirals.

And she says, of Rears and Vices, I saw enough.

Of Rears and Vices.

Rear Admiral and Vice Admiral.

Which are both kinds of Admiral, but they're also both references to something else.

I don't get it.

Still vices as in woodwork.

Yes, okay.

Rears in the back of the room.

Yes.

Yeah, no, and that's an incredibly filthy line.

That is quite raunchy.

The academic community is divided over whether it refers to sodomy or spanking, but it's one of the two.

She's trying to hint that Mary Crawford is a very saucy, not

nice lady,

and that our main character is in trouble.

So that's what she's doing.

A good character study, which she could have said that she's known a lot of semen in her time.

And with her bad spelling, she could have made that quite obvious.

You can play a Jane Austen role-playing game now, which I really want to add life.

So if you don't want to fall out for ostentatious,

you could.

No, there's this online role-playing game, and it sounds really fun.

I think I saw that, the video game.

Yeah, and you get to pick a character and then you have all these interactions.

So, some a Guardian journalist went and played it and started out by making this character who lost her handkerchief and then found it and then went for a walk and bumped into a gentleman.

Although the the writer did say that while she was going on this virtual walk, she saw a a bunch of sheep stacked on top of each other.

So some of the algorithms in the game need some ironing out, she said.

Every Austin novel, there's a discrete sheep stack.

By my, Lord Willoughby, the sheep are stacked so fine today.

About 10 years ago,

an Austin Buff and an author sent off some of her manuscripts to various British publishers, seeing if he could get them published.

And he made very slight changes to the title and the characters.

And

the pseudonym he used was Alison Lady, as in A Lady, which was Austin's pseudonym.

It was not the world's greatest pseudonym, is it?

But you know, he's the guy who runs the Jane Austen Festival in Bath.

We know him well.

They all rejected the manuscripts,

and only one of them spotted the fact that it was almost identical to Austin's work.

He got one letter back from Penguin.

He just sent them Pride and Prejudice, and they wrote back saying, Thank you for your recent letter and chapters from your book, First Impressions.

It seems like a really original and interesting read.

I've got to say, I really do like Penguin, though, don't you?

Oh, sure.

Having read the pastor, an excellent publisher.

Oh gosh, yes.

Amazing.

And thank god they haven't spotted that our book is just a complete rip-up of Bleak House.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you very much indeed for listening.

We will be back again next week with another podcast.

But until then, you can check us out on Twitter.

We are at no such thing.

And we will have individual Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Andrew Hunter M, James.

At James Harkin.

Carriad.

At Lady Carriad.

And Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com yeah and if you want to come and see us on tour we've just announced a whole new bunch of tour days we're going all over the UK and you can see that at qi.com slash fish events you can also see our book we're publishing a book which is coming up very soon you can get that by going to qi.com slash fish.com slash fish or google the book of the year which is what it's called and if you want to see karyad uh and me in ostentatious you can go to the atg website or you can go to ostentatious impro.com forward slash shows and that has all the booking links for all our London shows and our UK tour as well.

Lovely.

Okay, we'll see you next week.

Thank you very much for listening.

Goodbye.

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