182: No Such Thing As An Auction For Auction School

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Hey everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish.

Before we begin, we just want to let you in on the special guest that we have this week.

He's called Jason Haisley, and he is one of the people behind all the funniest things you've probably seen on TV in the last however many years.

He is behind that Mitchell and Webb look as one of the writers for that.

He also writes for Charlie Brooker's Screen Wipe.

He's also the co-writer, along with his buddy Joel, of the Ladybird books, those adult ones ones that have come out of the hipster and the cat and the hangover and the midlife crisis.

They've got a whole new batch coming out this October, October the 5th, so do get them.

And he is on because he's a really good buddy of ours and he constantly sends us facts.

And we just thought this guy is going to be amazing on the show.

And he was, as you're about to hear.

So enjoy this week's app.

Here we go.

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

My name is Dan Shriver.

I am sitting here with Anna Chaczynski, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Jason Haisley.

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

Here we go.

Starting with you, Jason.

My fact is, the curator of the British Lawnmower Museum is allergic to grass.

So is it his mission to destroy all the grass in the world with the lawnmowers?

By mowing it away.

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

So it's suddenly very hateful that museum, isn't it?

It's one act of revenge on a gigantic scale.

This is a guy called Brian Radham, who runs the British Lawnmower Museum in Southport.

He's an ex-lawnmower racing champion.

Does that mean he sits on lawnmowers?

Yes.

He'd ride them around and race them.

But he had to give up racing because it was making him sneeze so much.

So he took his love of lawnmowers and turned it into the British Lawnmower Museum, which is a place to behold, I have to say.

Have you been to it?

Yeah, I have.

Oh, is it actually really good?

It's really good because it's one of those odd bits of the British Museum that you sometimes get where you just get lots and lots of iterations of the same thing, which just makes it so interesting.

Yeah.

So you're saying it's mainly lawnmowers?

It is mainly lawnmowers, yeah.

They do have what he calls grass cutters, which are lawnmowers he doesn't like.

Like the flymow, for instance, because the flymow doesn't have the helical blade that cuts the grass.

It has a thing that spins around and just whacks at it.

So it leaves a very unsatisfactory cut.

So those are grass cutters, according to him, not lawnmowers.

Right.

So this, so I know that you've been there because I've read a book that you wrote called Bollocks to Alton Towers.

Yes.

And that's a chapter in it, right?

It is.

Yeah.

So you did this as part of a big research mission.

It was a, yeah, it was

the mission of the book was to try and find places to go for a day out that were unexpected, unusual, esoteric, uncommercial, that sort of thing.

And there's lots and lots of little museums all over Britain.

You know, there's a pencil museum in Keswick, famously.

Yeah.

Which is great.

Oh, it is great.

But they had a terrible time.

They were really badly flooded out.

Now, Keswick does flood, doesn't it?

Yeah, and I think it it was last year.

I think they might have only just reopened after this terrible, terrible flooding that they had.

Pencils can survive flooding, can't they?

If it was a pen museum, that would have been a problem.

Terrible.

But you can lash the pencils together into a massive raft to escape a strain.

Now, if it was a blotting paper museum, it would be ruined, wouldn't it?

Yeah.

Disaster.

Did you see at the Lawnmower Museum the celebrity lawnmowers?

Certainly did.

There is Brian May's Quolcast.

Oh.

They asked Nicholas Parsons for a donation of a lawnmower and he agreed and then unfortunately his shed was broken into and his lawnmower was stolen so he gave them a pair of secateurs instead.

But the crowning bit of the celebrity department is Joe Pasquale's Strimmer.

What's so great about that?

Well, because I think just those three words mark it out as being possibly the finest museum exhibit in the country, don't they?

What I find find really weird is that apparently they've got Albert Pierre points, one, the really famous hangman who hanged over 400 people, which is kind of a morbid thing to have in the museum.

And someone on Pinterest pointed out when they went to the museum that it's actually hanging by a noose.

No,

so that's quite nice.

That is in Dubia's taste.

Wow.

To say the least.

He didn't mow any of the

condemned people to death, nor did he hang any lawnmowers.

You're right, that's been misrepresented.

I forgot to mention the other significant thing about the lawnmower museum is that it's upstairs.

So all those lawnmowers must feel fairly like we're in an alien habitat here, aren't we?

That's so funny.

We're so far from the thing that we wish to cut.

Like a Dalek Museum being upstairs.

It's great.

They've got a couple of other quirky things there as well.

They've got a two-inch lawnmower, which is a lawnmower that cuts a two-inch strip through the grass.

Oh, wow.

and brian radham when he came across this thought what on earth could this possibly have been for so he rang the manufacturer and said why did you make a two inch lawn mower and they said we deny ever making a two inch lawn mower

so no one knows what this thing was for wow um do you know about finnish postmen and lawn mowers so postmen in finland have started in the last year mowing their customers lawns for a small fee because they're trying to find extra things to do because it doesn't take them all their time and maybe i think post is declining a little bit in terms of the amount of posts to be done.

So on their quietest day, which is Tuesday, you can pay them, I think, about 60 quid a month and they'll mow your lawn.

Wow.

But you have to provide the lawn mower.

They're very insistent about that.

That's like in just on the postman, the lack of mail.

In New Zealand now, there's one particular city that deliver KFC as well as your mail.

Wrap it around the bucket with an elastic band.

Yeah.

They're doing a thing in France where you can get postmen to go and check on your elderly relatives if you don't want to, I presume.

You can pay, and it's called watch over my parents.

And you can order them to call in and just check no, just to check they're all right, you know, either two, four or six times a week.

So in pre-lawn mower days, when people used to have to mow the lawn by hand, by scythe, there would be tailor-made scythes which would stay the same length, and if you wanted to cut your grass different lengths in like the 17th, 18th centuries, then you added wooden blocks to your shoes or took them off.

So if you had a lawn that you needed to be a bit longer, rather than changing the length of the scythe scythe or I guess the position where you held it, then you put some wooden planks under your shoes.

But what if you were really short and the scythe came in the same size?

Wouldn't you end up just hacking into the earth?

No, you just have to put very large wooden blocks under your shoes.

Stilts.

I understand.

Lawn mowing stilts.

Imagine the scythes were that long.

Were they an accessory that you bought with them?

I'm not sure if they came as a package.

I'm sure they did a two-for-one deal.

But you'd have to have, all your gardeners would have to have different size blocks, wouldn't they, depending on their height?

Yeah.

And if that's probably an amusing mix-up where two of the gardeners got the wrong blocks on, and then you know, one bit of lawn was uneven.

Yeah, that was comedy sketches in the 18th century were all about increasing home grass.

It was a better thing.

Unless you had a very strict height policy when hiring gardeners.

Yes.

That would be the other thing.

Like, you know, you must be this high to go on this ride.

Yes.

I was trying to find other people who were, so lawnmower man, allergic to grass.

grass I managed to find a journalist who's allergic to newspaper

yeah it's really unfortunate he has to go around he still does his job but he has to wear gloves now whenever he's at the office and it's to do with the ink that they use inside his name's Michael Dresser he's been with the paper 38 years so he's had this allergy for a really long time and it's the pine resin that they use in the newspaper ink

so yeah so he can't touch the newspaper so he's allergic to that.

Found a marathon runner who's allergic to exercise.

You can be allergic to exercise.

In what way?

So as soon as she started running and doing any kind of exercise, she would just come out with puffiness and

rashes and all sorts.

Does she still run marathons?

Yeah, she does.

Yeah.

On other allergies, I think, isn't Lisa Stansfield allergic to her own saliva?

Whoa.

How do you...

Pretty sure I've read that somewhere.

Sorry, who is it?

Who is she?

She was a singer.

How do you deal with that?

I guess get yourself a job which involves having your mouth open a lot of the time, like she did.

Oh, yeah.

Wouldn't that provoke more saliva production?

Good question.

I haven't thought this through.

Maybe she had one of those dentist things in her mouth the whole time.

You know, when you're having any work done, they have that suction.

Well, that would have showed up on her singles, though, wouldn't it?

Yeah, but you might have mistaken that for that sort of Madonna-style microphone on

true, yeah.

She's the ones that goes into the mouth, and there's a constant background hum on all of her singles.

It's just the dentist suction thing.

That's incredible.

Yeah.

The other thing from the Lawnmower Museum is they've got, there was a prototype of a robot lawnmower there

made by Husk Varna, I think I pronounced that right, which cost something like a million pounds to develop and had a retail price of £2,000 and was so expensive that obviously it didn't sell very well, which is a shame because it's got a brilliant anti-theft device built into it.

If it detects it's being stolen, it starts screaming.

So Husk Varna developed a screaming robot lawnmower.

If only Nicholas Parsons had had one

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

My fact this week is that Jimmy Carter once gave a speech in Poland where he accidentally announced he wanted to have sex with all Polish people.

So when he said we never fired a bullet, was he just talking about sexual frustration?

This was his first trip abroad as president.

It was in 1977, and he had this translator called Stephen Seymour.

He was a good translator, but Polish was his fourth language.

And he was having to translate into Polish.

And usually, a translator is translating from the language into English if they're your translator.

But Jimmy Carter asked him to translate his speech into Polish for the Polish people.

And he translated the phrase, I want to get to know the Polish people better, as I want to have sex with the Polish, or I want to have carnal sexual knowledge of the Polish people.

So that's what he did.

And he made all these other mistakes in this speech as well.

For instance, he opened it by trying to say, I left the US just this morning to come here.

And he ended up saying, I left the US never to return.

He was moving to Poland.

That would be a major league defection coup for the Soviets.

It would, would it?

Yeah.

I read that another of the reasons was that Seymour, the original translator, was a really good translator of written Polish, but wasn't quite so good at simultaneous spoken translation.

I see.

So maybe that was something to do with it too.

Okay.

Yeah.

So he should have been writing it down on a big screen behind people.

Yeah.

So my favorite Jimmy Carter mistranslation in one of his speeches is that we've all got one.

He's got a great assets list.

He was in Japan and he was giving a speech and this is post-im being president when he started the speech with a joke.

And halfway through, he realized, oh no, this is not going to translate.

I'm telling a joke and the punchline's just going to come out all wrong through translation of this Japanese translator.

So I'm just going to get this weird, confused silence.

But he's like, I'm halfway through, got to do it.

So he delivers the joke and then the Japanese translator.

translates and he gets this massive laugh, humongous laugh.

And so afterwards he went up to the guy and said, that is incredible that you managed to translate that joke.

You must be an incredible translator.

And the translator said, Ah, no, what I did actually was say, President Carter just told a joke, everyone must laugh.

That resulted in his ginormous laugh.

What a dude.

Is that translator still working?

And does he do stand-up gigs in the UK, please?

So, did you know that Jimmy Carter set up a hotline that you could ring to report people for being too cool?

This is true.

He was a big environmentalist, Jimmy Carter, who set up the Department of the Environment in the States and he put solar panels on the roof of the White House.

And one of the things he did was that he, at some point, he passed a law saying that air conditioning in government buildings and businesses couldn't go any lower than 26.7 degrees Celsius, which is 80 Fahrenheit.

That is quite hot.

It is quite hot, isn't it?

And this affected 55 million people who all had a very sweaty time.

But he set up a hotline so that you could ring and report to people if they turned their aircon lower than that.

That's crazy.

And they could be given a $10,000 fine.

No.

Of course, Reagan took the solar panel straight off, didn't he?

When he went to the White House, he was slap in the face.

He said they were a joke.

Jimmy Carter has won three Grammys.

Has he?

Yeah.

For what?

Spoken Word,

so all the spoken word of his books that he keeps pumping out.

He's written a lot of books and he's won three Grammys, but he's been nominated a lot more times.

I think he, looking through the list of spoken word Grammys, he has been nominated more than anyone else.

Really?

Yeah.

He lost in 1999 to Christopher Reeve.

He lost in 2002 to Quincy Jones.

In 2008, he lost to Obama, but he was up against Obama, as was Bill Clinton.

So three of the nominees were presidents of the United States of America, the Grammys.

That was the big presidential race of 2008, isn't it?

That was the one I was watching.

Yeah.

Then he lost in 2010 to Michael J.

Fox, then he lost in 2015 to Joan Rivers, but then he won in 2016.

That feels like a pity win after all that effort.

That feels like.

Oh god, just give it to him, he'll go away.

I love Jimmy Carter.

Do you?

He's just the best guy.

He's just the most principled, moral guy.

So he's the only president who doesn't really take speaking fees.

And any speaking fee he has ever taken, which is always minimal, goes to charity.

Do you think he stopped taking them because he keeps making such massive gas every single

insulting the audience by accident via translation?

Always just coming on to whoever's listening.

He still gives, I was listening to a podcast, which is really good.

It's the Washington Post presidential podcast, and they did about an hour on every president.

So it followed Jimmy Carter from start to finish.

You've got quite esoteric tastes.

An hour?

We've had 45 now.

I mean, I haven't listened to like Rutherford B.

Hayes or anything yet.

I don't know how I'd fare there.

But he still gives Sunday school classes, and people come from all over the world to listen.

But, you know, he's really an evangelical, born-again Christian, so he just gives religious lessons at Sunday school every week.

He's just such a decent guy.

Claims to have seen a UFO, hasn't he?

Yeah, he's also a bit weird.

It's a very famous incident of Jimmy Corridor claiming to have seen a UFO.

One of the promises he made in his presidential campaign was that he would investigate all extraterrestrial experiences or something, I think.

And then when he got into power, he said he couldn't because it was all too secret or something.

He's too busy now to go around with his Transgender counter for ectoplasm.

He builds houses, doesn't he, as well?

Yeah, and amazing furniture.

Does he?

Come on, how good is the furniture?

It sells for, I think I might have mentioned this before, but if I haven't, yeah, he builds like beds and chests of drawers.

Did you say it sells for a lot of money?

Yeah, thousands.

Yeah, but how much would it sell for if you sold it under a pseudonym?

Which would have basically been an eccentric thing to do.

Yeah, he sent his first text three years ago, Jimmy Carter.

Oh, well done, Jimmy.

Yeah.

And his second text, this was the message of his second text, yesterday.

This was, I did not mean to send that first text about wanting to have sex with you.

I am sorry.

I am still using Seymour to translate all my stuff.

Yeah, no, his second text was, that was my first text message.

Yeah, he.

It was his first text, this is my first text.

Has it gone on like that since?

Yeah, no, it was to his grandson, and it was, did you see Colbert last night?

P.

He ends it with P, which I think he should refer to as Papa.

But his grandson is on Twitter, so he did a screen grab of it.

He's a president.

I'd just be a real ass about it.

Patio furniture maker.

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

My fact this week is that narcissists don't like looking at themselves.

Is that weird?

So this is a new study that's come out of Austria from the University of Graz.

And the idea is that they took a pool of around 600 people and surveyed them to see whether or not they were narcissistic.

And so out of that, they found 43 people that they selected, 21 who scored really highly as being narcissistic, and 22 with lower scores.

And they were shown pictures of themselves and close family friends and so on.

And their brain activity, which was monitored every time they saw the picture of themselves, when their eyes locked onto themselves, it registered as not enjoying it.

Yeah, which is...

And that was not enjoying it more so than non-narcissists.

Or maybe just enjoying it the same amount or not having an especial surge of enjoyment, I guess.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which is, I've I've just realised because obviously Narcissus in the myth does like looking at himself.

And you've just got this fact.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's it.

He likes it a lot.

Yeah.

To his detriment, it turns out.

But does he die?

He doesn't die, but he gets turned into a flower.

I would say that is a kind of death.

That is a plot twist I did not see coming.

It's a daffodil, isn't it, that he was turned into?

Well, we think it's a Narcissus.

It's like a daffodil.

There's a flower called Narcissus, which is, yeah.

And they sort of droop over the riverbank, Daniel, and they look like they're looking at themselves with their little trumpets.

Yeah.

So that's why he was turned into one of those

by the gods.

I think he starved to death first because he was so captivated by his reflection.

And I should just say, for the pedants out there or anyone who's watched QI, that we don't know that the etymology of narcissist the flower comes from narcissist the person.

To me, it seems so obvious that it definitely does.

It's a flower that he was turned into and it drapes over lakes.

But some people say it's related to a word that means to poison or something.

Okay.

They might be totally unrelated to each other.

Do you know how to tell if someone's a narcissist?

You just ask them.

Because they don't care.

They'll say, yeah, I'm a narcissist.

Oh, that's true, yeah.

The psychologists have developed a one-question test for narcissism.

Wow.

And it's a pretty good one.

And then there's a more advanced one, which is a 40-question test, but it replicates pretty closely the one-question test.

Did you guys know about the Anaphace facial beauty analysis?

No.

No.

This is a thing you can do.

I thought, okay, well, let's do something about looking at yourself.

So I went on this website and it takes a photo of your face and then it analyzes you and it gives you your facial beauty analysis.

Sounds like the kind of thing a narcissist would do.

It does, doesn't it?

Yeah.

So I was just, I was, I was, I was role-playing.

So this is what my, this is how my facial beauty beauty analysis reads.

Your nose is too long for your ears.

Your inner ocular distance is too big for your eyes.

Your nose is too wide for your face width.

Your face is too narrow.

Your nose is too wide for your mouth.

Wow.

Look, only some of that is true.

It's pretty brutal, isn't it?

What I got stuck on, though, is your nose is too long for your ears.

How do those things correlate?

How is it not that your ears are too short for your nose?

Yeah.

Why is the nose to blame?

What's my nose down?

But I don't think you could fit it in your ears, even if you wanted to.

No, I don't think so.

God knows I've tried.

Well, it's not that long, then, is it?

If you can't even fit it into your head.

So what was it trying to tell you?

I think it succeeded in telling me exactly what it wanted to tell you, didn't it?

It may just be an exercise in, I don't know, abuse, honesty, no idea.

What's the URL for that?

It's Anna Face, A-N-A face.

Anaphace.

Definitely doing that.

I was looking up stuff about looking in mirrors.

Yeah.

You know the thing about animals looking in mirrors, which I think we must have mentioned before.

That they do it?

That they do it, and that the way to tell if they can tell that they are the animal in the mirror is by painting a dot on them.

And then

if they try and get rid of the dot, that's how they know.

This was invented by a guy called Gordon Gallup Jr.

This was his innovation experiment in the 1970s.

Although, one of the first people to do it was Charles Darwin, who in 1838 went to London Zoo and entered an orangutan's cage with a mirror to experiment.

Wow, wow, that's been done all this time.

Yeah, wow.

And the Euranga loved it.

He said she was astonished beyond measure.

But did she know it was her reflection?

Don't know.

I don't think he did the dot test.

Do you know about the 17th century fashion for having a mirror hanging on the wall of your drawing room and then next to it an oil painting of exactly the reflection in the mirror?

What?

No.

Really?

Yeah.

Why?

I couldn't find out anything more about this.

I just, I came across this fact and then couldn't get anywhere further with it.

But it was, I don't know whether it was in order to show off the artist or in order to show off what the mirror can see.

Yeah.

Right.

What a hassle, because if you ever wanted to redecorate, you always have to hang those two next to each other then.

Yeah.

And in the same position, actually, obviously, because you can't move the mirror, can you?

Otherwise, it's not going to reflect the same thing.

If you walk up to the wrong one, you might think you're a vampire.

There was another weird fashion for the clawed glass, which was about the same time, or I think the 18th century, which was a period of time where people decided that beautiful views and landscapes actually looked more attractive in mirrors than they did in real life, just with the bare eyes.

And so, this clawed glass was invented, and people would walk up mountains and they'd take a clawed glass with them.

And the idea was that you got to the top of a mountain, and then you get to take out this mirror, and it would be a tinted mirror, so it gave it a bit of an ethereal, dream-like quality.

And you'd get to look at the view in a mirror and then go down again.

But you'd have to face away, wouldn't you, from the the view?

Yeah.

Look into the mirror, see the view behind you.

Imagine how bizarre that is.

So you're facing away from the thing you've come up the thing to see, so that you can look at it in the mirror, which is exactly like the selfie thing, where you get a load of people facing away from the view

with the camera held out in front of them.

So that's the original selfie.

That's it.

It's sort of the original selfie.

Yes.

Yeah, kind of.

And we all got quite excited about that for a minute.

That was good.

So listen, narcissist then was, because he was in love with his own reflection, he might not have liked seeing a picture of himself because that would have been the right way round.

Yeah.

Ah, yes.

Absolutely.

So that's why people tend to much prefer their reflection to pictures, isn't it?

Yeah.

Because it's the image you're used to seeing is the one in the mirror, but as soon as you see a photo, you think, oh, my face is.

My nose is too long for your ears.

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Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy.

My fact is that clenching one's buttocks is a technique Christie's auctioneers are taught to stop their hands shaking.

But it doesn't actually say where they're being told to put their hands while they're clenching their buttocks.

Yeah, so this is a piece about extraordinary things that Christie's has found out over the years.

It's by Christie's.

And one of them was this amazing fact about how the auctioneers calm themselves down.

Wow.

Is this them holding priceless bits of art?

Or is this when they're actually conducting.

I think when you're conducting an auction, because you're standing at the front in front of everyone and you're gesturing, so you have to look in control of the situation, I suppose.

So that apparently comes to you down.

I don't know how, what the mechanism is, whether simply the focusing on another muscle in your body removes the tension from your hands.

Yeah, it must do, right?

I guess so.

I don't know.

I'm trying it now, and I think it makes you a bit more shaky.

But I'm so I guess the shaking is because they talk about auctioneers as being a sort of an acting gig almost.

You get up on stage and you need to make the audience love you because that's going to make an auction successful.

And on Christie's site, they were saying with interviews of various auctioneers that the first 10 seconds is where you need to grab them, otherwise, you might not have a successful auction, which seems bizarre if you're there to buy things.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, you're not buying off this guy's credibility.

You're buying because there's...

But you are.

I mean, I remember going to a, which is quite similar, what's it called when you go to a charity thing and...

Raffle.

Raffle.

No, the one that's above a raffle where you bid for...

Super raffle?

One of those things where you donate a holiday or you donate your mansion for a week.

Oh, yeah, I've been to loads of things where people have donated their mansion.

Where have I been?

We mix in different circles.

What's it called?

It's a charity auction.

Yeah, so you know when you go to a charity auction, it's you inspire people to buy stuff just by being that charming.

I remember going to one recently, and Clive Anderson was doing the auctioning, and people definitely bid on stuff that they would absolutely not have had he not kind of cajoled them a bit here and persuaded them a bit there.

I think it makes such a difference because it's in the moment, isn't it?

That's what affects you in an auction.

That's true.

I did a gig not too long ago with a Christie's auctioneer, and it was a very rowdy room, and it was a charity night.

It was raising money for

this new university for brain studies, and he was given a lot of stuff to auction off.

And the room was chaotic, as you would expect.

It was in the V ⁇ A.

Everyone was just busy on round tables eating.

So he had to try and maintain their attention in order to sell all this stuff.

And he did this trick.

When he felt like he lost the crowd, he went...

He made that noise.

And every time the crowd would silence, look back to him, and then he'd continue on with the auction.

But he did it like 50 times during the night.

Were they all ponies?

It was an amazing technique.

Like, that's how he shut up an entire room.

Yeah, and one of the things I didn't realise is that auctioneers will keep an eye on each other as well.

So, one of them, if they feel that, you know, if auctioneer A is up there and he doesn't think he's quite got the room, he's not inspiring them enough, he can nod to auctioneer B, who'll come up and take his place and try and raise the temperature of the room.

And it works the other way around as well.

Auctioneer B can just go up to him and tap him on the shoulder and go, you've lost a mate.

I'll do it.

Wow.

It's like a tag team.

Ouch, imagine if that was true in all performing arts.

Imagine, Andy, if you're bombing one night and Dan just comes up behind you, taps you on the shoulder and says, I'll take it from him.

What do you mean, imagine?

Remember, I think it's the word you're looking for.

They used to, in the old days, have to do mock auctions, the auctioneers at Christie's, before the bosses of the company to just make sure that their skills were good.

The bosses would just sit around with a drink and then the auctioneers would have to do a

lot.

It's all a bit more professional now, so they get voice actors and acting coaches in to teach them about engaging the voice and maybe also about posture and engaging the audience.

I don't know.

Well, Christie's does in-house courses if you want to get into it.

You spend, you do a workshop with one of their audience.

Yeah, Wolverhampton actually has a two-year degree for auctioneering.

They teach you to auctioneer and to value things as well.

How much do I pay for this place on the Yorkshire University Auction Course?

I got £9,000, £9,000 over here.

Do I hear £10,000?

Yeah, so did anybody look up buttock clenching?

No.

No more than usual.

So, buttock clenching, you're all aware of the international penny chuffing competition, are you?

Right.

Well, this takes place annually at the new inn in Wedmore in Somerset, where the contestants have to clench three two-pence coins in between the cheeks of their buttocks, then walk, waddle, or hop four yards across the pub before depositing the coins in a pint glass.

Wow.

Oh, my God.

You get one point for every coin you get in the glass.

And the last report that I could find from 2015, three people scored nine points.

Is that the full...

So they managed three journeys across the pub.

Do you have to pick them up with your buttocks?

That isn't indicated.

Okay.

Nor is what happens to the coins afterwards.

Whether they go into a particular till.

Is it a full point and do you have to down it once you've finished?

No, it's just a pint glass.

Oh, that's a shame.

That would make the competition more funny.

No, it would, wouldn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

That is fantastic.

I don't like to brag.

I think I could do that.

Well, there's only one way to find out.

To Somerset.

Here's the other thing, of course, right?

If you put yourself in the room there, that's a lot of bum, isn't it?

Yes.

Now, what happens is apparently they have some sort of modesty blanket that they put round themselves while hopping, waddling, or walking four yards across a path with some money up their ass.

Didn't

David Suchet, the Poirot actor, he did a lot of butt clenching as well.

Did he?

Yeah, to get into

the waddle, right?

He wanted to be as pert as an auctioneer, didn't he?

Yeah.

Is it called the Suchet Sachet?

No.

Oh, you made that up?

Yeah.

Well, trade garden.

Trade garden.

Watch the media, yeah.

Feels like it's not mine to trade garden, I don't think.

But guys, Telegraph headline: David Suchet, I stuck coin in buttocks to walk like Poirot.

And also to win this competition at the New Inn in Wedmore.

He was caught in a pub in Somerset with a modesty blade around him.

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.

Andy, at Andrew Hunter M, Jason, at Jason Haisley, and Chaczynski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or you can go to our website, no such thingasofish.com, where we've got all of our previous episodes.

We've also got links to our tour in October and November, and also a link to our book coming out November 2nd, the book of the year.

Okay, that's it.

We'll be back again next week.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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