139: No Such Thing As A Lobster Nappy

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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from the London Podcast Festival in King's Cross.

My name is Dan Schreiber and please welcome to the stage.

It's Anna Chaczynski, James Harkin and Andy Murray!

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, James Harkin.

Okay, my fact this week is that smooth fan lobsters travel around the sea inside jellyfish eating their rides as they go.

So they're in the jellyfish and they're eating the jellyfish.

Imagine you were to take an Uber home and it was made out of chocolate.

But a jellyfish is a living thing, so has a jellyfish eaten them before they eat the jellyfish?

No, these are kind of like baby lobsters and they manage to kind of swim up inside the bell of the jellyfish.

Now come on.

It's a bit early in the show to be laughing at the word bell.

Also it's a bit far out of the 90s to find the word bell.

So yeah he just eats it until the bell ends.

James's trap, which we all walked into tonight.

There was no jellyfish.

So, yeah, they get inside this thing which is called a moon jellyfish.

They eat it from the bottom to the top.

And actually, these jellyfish, you might have heard of these immortal jellyfish.

And actually, the moon jellyfish is one of these.

Theoretically, it could live forever, as far as we know, if it doesn't get eaten by a baby lobster.

Wow.

In the meantime.

So it just kind of does it mind because it's like, I'm not going anywhere, you can have a nibble.

That's cool.

They can be killed.

They're much like elves in the Lord of the Rings in that sense.

If it got half eaten, it probably would be okay, wouldn't it?

Because a lot of jellyfish can clone themselves.

And if you cut a jellyfish in half, I think that's like the myth about the worm, in that if you cut one in half, it will just become two clones.

But the jellyfish have a defence mechanism.

They fire mucus at the lobsters, don't they?

They do.

They fire mucus at the lobsters inside them.

And if they get enough mucus onto the lobster, then the lobster can die of like a bacterial infection.

So it's almost like an internal sneeze onto the lobster.

So disgusting.

But then the lobsters have a defense, don't they?

So the lobsters, what they do,

they have one of the five pairs of legs and they use one of their pairs of legs like a pair of windscreen wipers

and they just clear the mucus away.

It's amazing.

So lobsters, I had no idea, shed their shells.

So they molt and if they're missing a limb, Part of the shell regrowth period is also part of their limb regrowth period.

So if they lose an arm, they're just like, well, I'll just wait for the shedding and then I'll do my whole regrowth again.

And there are immortal lobsters.

So what if an immortal lobster gets inside an immortal jellyfish?

That's an X.

Sometimes when I say a fact and it sounds completely wrong, but then it kind of sounds right, Anna will join in and be like, yes, that's right.

And then she'll be like, it can't be right.

Dan, it can't be right.

No, lobsters grow to be extremely old and we're not sure how old they could get to be, I think.

And so there's this myth that lobsters might live forever because they don't really age,

so they don't go through senescence.

They don't get weaker and they don't get infertile.

In fact, they get stronger, so they get more fertile, they make better parents, they get stronger, and they keep growing as well, which is quite unusual.

They don't ever reach a limit of growth.

So, there are lobsters that have been found that the size of the ocean.

The size of the

limit.

There must be a limit.

Well, I think they get killed by their own bigness.

So, there's a limit.

This is just a theory, though.

We don't know.

There's a guy called Carl Wilson who studies them, and he says the reason they'll eventually die if humans don't kill them, so most of them get killed by humans, the reason they'll eventually die is that it takes so much energy to shed that exoskeleton constantly because they're always molting.

The bigger they get, the more energy it takes, and eventually it takes so much energy that they're just sapped and they die.

Wow.

What I like about lobsters is that they are Doctor Who.

They are the closest thing to Doctor Who that exists in reality, in that when they regenerate, so when they molt, molt, they turn into a middle-aged Scotsman.

Yes.

And also, Doctor Who doesn't get bigger and bigger and bigger.

He does, he does.

That's why the TARDIS is bigger and bigger at the same time.

There are tiny holes in my theory.

But essentially, it saps loads of energy when they molt.

So what they do is they lie on their side and they worm the way out of their shell and it takes about half an hour.

And like Doctor Who, you know, when he's regenerating, it's like really traumatic for a bit.

And then he does take a few days or a while to recover.

And they have to go into hiding for a few days to recover because they're so sapped of energy while they harden their new shells.

And they're all defenseless as well because they're all soft, so predators can take a bite out of them.

There is a thing, so female lobsters they have this little sack beneath their tails which they collect male sperm in and they can decide to use it whenever they like.

When they molt, they leave that behind.

And I have read that being described as basically them regaining their virginity, which I think is a stretch.

That's what they've claimed in women's lobster magazines.

I read that in actually a really good book called Sex in the Sea, which

does not make sufficiently plain that it's mostly about lobsters.

They're making diapers out of lobsters now.

So they're taking

this element to the skin of a lobster, which if you kind of break it down and you apply it with other more diaper-like substances,

you can use it because it sucks up more fluid.

So people are going to start be wearing lobster diapers and lobster tampons are on the way as well.

Yeah.

Do they cut the claws off or does that?

Sorry, this is so embarrassing.

It's jellyfish.

It's jellyfish.

Okay, do they cut the tentacles off?

Oh my goodness.

They are making golf balls out of lobsters.

Yes.

Do you remember that classic image you would see of super rich people on top of these huge ocean liners hitting golf balls off into the ocean?

When the idea of plastic ruining the ocean became a proper thing, they put in laws that you're not allowed to hit plastic into the ocean, golf balls immediately were on that list and no one could do it anymore.

So University of Maine has worked out how to make a lobster golf ball.

So that's made entirely of lobster shells.

Entirely.

Entirely.

And so now it's going to be legal again that you can do it.

But what's the point of it?

Sorry, what's this hobby that the rich have that we don't know about?

You get on the top of a boat and you just smack a ball into the ocean and you go, oh, how do you do it?

Andy,

I think you should be grateful that scientists at the University of Maine are devoting their time to making rich people playing golf on yachts have a better time.

That's a good point.

So actually back to what the original fact was,

lobster ride on jellyfish in order to get from one place to another, don't they?

And when they're in their larval stage, which is this really weird stage where it's called a phyllosoma and this is slipper or spiny lobster.

They look like a circular disc with like weird little spider legs coming off it and they cling onto this lobster to get transported somewhere

but then when they're when they're dropped off and they morph into an actual lobster they shed part of themselves in order to grow but what they do is they shed the front so lobsters grow from the sort of arse upwards.

So you would have thought that they would keep hold of their little larval head and their legs and all of that, but no, that just drops off and they start from the the bum.

The head and everything floats away and gets eaten by something, and then they grow up from the bum into a lobster.

Isn't that weird?

That is weird.

It's pretty cool.

That's very cool.

We need to move on very soon.

Someone else who has been killing lobsters recently is the Nazis.

What?

There was a lobster who became a belated casualty of the Second World War after they found an unexploded mine.

Okay, so the Navy divers went down to see the mine, they saw a lobster inside it, gave it a name, and then blew it up.

They called it Lionel the Lobster, and they tried to get him out, and then they went, Come on, come on, and he nipped their hand, and they went, Right, you're going.

And they blew him up.

Maybe he was a Nazi lobster.

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All right, let's move on.

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

My fact is that in 1892, France built a telescope which was so long it couldn't actually be pointed at the sky.

So

this was

for a sort of world's exposition, a universal exposition, which France was holding in 1900.

And they needed a sequel to the Eiffel Tower, basically, because the Eiffel Tower was a huge hit, and they said, We need another thing that's really big to be the kind of centerpiece of the exposition.

And there's an article all about this on Amusing Planet, which is a very good website, I recommend it.

And the tube which housed it was 60 meters long.

The lenses were one and a quarter meters across, and it was too long to move when they had built it.

So, they had to have a secondary system that they constructed to funnel light in from astronomical objects and then direct it with a series of mirrors into the actual telescope.

And also because it was at the World's Fair, there were lots of bright lights nearby and it was functionally useless as a telescope because it was in the middle of Paris.

So it was kind of useless and it was broken up for scrap.

It's kind of tragic, but I just think that's amazing.

It was quite an amazing exposition because they had

they debuted to the world, the Russians debuted Russian dolls for the first time there.

How cool is that?

Like so you have this big thing and then next door is like

and which one of the two do we know?

Yeah.

So,

egg on their face.

Would have been better if they'd had a smaller telescope inside that and a smaller one inside that and eventually they could.

Yeah, but so they had that, they had a ginormous Ferris wheel, I think it was the biggest of its time, and they eventually had to take it down.

And the compartments were so big that during the war they got taken and used as houses because people who lost their houses, people lived inside the compartment.

They also had, they debuted a travelator, the sort of moving escalators that go, you know, in the airport when you're walking on the flat surface one.

They were showing that for the first time.

They had three different speeds.

Yes,

there was a slow one, so you're going at a few miles an hour, and then you step onto the next one, which is only slightly different, but some of you are going at six miles an hour, and then whatever the speeds are.

Because the theory is you could do those for,

well, not forever, but you could do that until it gets up to about 30 or 40 miles an hour, just go three miles an hour each time.

And in that way, you could go on a moving walkway that would go 30 miles an hour.

Was it a good way of getting round town?

Weren't you proposing that as an idea for

trains?

So trains never have to stop, you just walk up to it in the speed it's going.

I'm not sure it was my proposal.

I think Japan's proposed that, but it's nice that you've attributed it to Japanese.

Yeah.

Sorry, I always mix up James with Japan.

Gotta stop doing that.

Have you guys heard of the Banquet of Mares?

No.

This was the thing that happened at the 1900 Paris Exposition.

This was a group meal where 20,777 mares from France, all over France, gathered in a massive tent and had a meal together.

Isn't that amazing?

My god, I thought you were talking about horses when you said mares.

And then I thought you were using a sexist term for women?

No.

I don't even know if that's a thing.

No, mare is in

major.

Sorry.

I should have pronounced it properly.

Mayor.

But at this meal, this is amazing.

So the waiters at this meal had bicycles to get up and down in between the tables.

Even there was one car driving up and down between the tables to take orders extra fast.

They got through 39,000 bottles of wine.

There were seven miles of tables, 1,200 litres of mayonnaise, 1,500 camemberts.

Mayonnaise.

Yeah.

Did someone just go, oh, dad?

Did I just do that?

Someone who's never seen the show before.

It was incredibly popular.

So it was visited by more people than the population of France at the time.

And it was only open for about six months, I think.

It was visited by 50 million people, and the French population was 38 million at the time.

So people were into it.

Yeah, and apparently the technology of it was genuinely astounding.

And I read about a guy, an artist, Italian artist, who went over for it called Giacomo Balla.

And he was so impressed by all the technology he saw that he named all his three daughters off the back of that one expo.

He named his daughters, the Italian words for it, but in English, light, electricity, and propeller.

Andy, you were talking about they wanted to kind of do something that was like the Eiffel Tower, but better.

Well, they asked for suggestions, and a lot of people decided, well, maybe you should just do something with the Eiffel Tower.

One of the suggestions was to turn the bottom half into a waterfall and the top half into kind of the shape of an enormous woman.

What?

What?

Well, it would have looked like she was wetting herself the whole time.

But that was a real suggestion.

And in the end, they had loads of different ideas of what they might do with the Eiffel Tower, but in the end, they just went for applying a fresh coat of paint to the spike.

On telescopes,

there was what I was looking at, other large telescopes,

and there was another too large telescope, actually.

The largest telescope in the world in 1935

was reported about in the Nottingham Evening Post, I discovered, in the British newspaper archive.

And it turned out it was too large to go through railway tunnels.

And so it was built in New York and it had to get to California, but they had to take it via the Panama Canal.

So that was rather than being a 2,900-mile journey, that was an 8,600-mile journey

because they couldn't get it through any railway tunnels.

They should have seen that coming.

Oh,

because they had an enormous telescope.

Yeah.

It was built to spot Martians, actually.

Really?

Yeah, it was built because they knew that there were indentations on Mars and they wanted to establish whether or not they were made by Martians, as in, were they Martian canals or were they just naturally formed?

What were they?

And we're still not sure, but we'll just spot Martians.

Martians.

The biggest telescope, which has just been built in China, and that's also supposedly for looking for aliens.

Although the US Defense Department thinks it might be for something else.

Right.

But that's a radio one, not

an optical one.

So it's a 500-metre aperture spherical telescope.

It's called FAST.

And it is 500 meters across, that's where the name comes from.

And I worked out that you would be able to get about three trillion bowls of cornflakes in there.

And so that would be enough for cornflakes for every person in the world to have a bowl every day for a year and it still wouldn't run out.

Wow.

So is that what it's going to be up to after they...

The really cool thing about it is you can probably see that it looks a bit different than normal telescopes.

It's spherical rather than a parabola.

In fact, if anyone's listening at home, it is a spitting image of the thing James Bond has to climb around in GoldenEye.

Is that right?

Yeah.

Okay.

Looks like a very big conflict bowl.

But what they do is a parabola normally the data would come in and it would all point to the focal point of the parabola, but they don't do that.

So what they have is these six towers and they have wires coming down on them and there's a little robot in there.

And you know if you watch a soccer game or an American football game or something and you have like the camera going around the top of the stadium and it's able to take all the shots, well the robot is there and they can move it around wherever they want, and they get it sort of to focus to wherever that robot is.

Wow, that's really cool.

That's very cool.

Apparently, 10,000 people had to move house for the telescope to be installed.

Yeah, yeah, because they wanted to be closer to get a good look.

And the people who stayed, the one condition is they have to have their mobile phone off.

That's the only condition.

Really?

Yeah, because it will interfere, so it will pick up.

And they'd better like conflicts.

Have you heard of the James Webb Space Telescope?

This is very cool.

So, Hubble is in space because it's much better for looking at the stars because there's no atmosphere in the way.

And the next incarnation is going to be called the James Webb Space Telescope.

It's going to be about a hundred times better, apparently.

Don't ask me in what metrics, but it will be.

They said that it's so powerful that when they turn it on, the heat

will be able to detect heat coming from a bumblebee as far away as the moon.

Wow.

Well there aren't that many bumblebees on the moon, are there?

Well Buzz Aldrin left a few.

Jesus.

We're actually getting a robot to put a telescope on the far side of the moon.

You know there actually is telescopes on the moon at the moment.

China has telescopes on some of their small rovers and they've been looking out into the universe as well.

But we only found this out a few years after they'd been doing it.

So they had secret telescopes on the moon.

Wow.

Yeah, pretty cool, eh?

One more big telescope?

Yeah, we need to move on and say.

Okay, Hevelius.

He was a guy who made a telescope and it was really big.

It was 150 feet long

and it was so long that he couldn't make a tube to fit it in because a metal tube would be too heavy and a paper tube would just fall apart.

And so he put it in like a trough.

It was like a trough where all the lenses went in.

And he had to have a team of men with ropes and pulleys and they were just there to kind of keep it steady because even the tiniest breeze would just rip the whole thing apart.

Yeah, so it didn't really work, did it?

It did not.

When was that?

That's amazing.

Renaissance, is it?

Or is it after that?

Well, it must be, it must be before the 18th century because one of the other things that Hevelius invented were side-looking opera glasses.

So you could have these glasses where I could look like I'm looking over here, but actually I'm looking at Andy.

And they were called polemoscopes.

Why, if you've gone to see the opera.

What's wrong with my face, Dan?

Well, he called them polemoscopes after the Greek for war, because he thought you'd be able to use it in military.

Good news, their entire army is facing 90 degrees away.

They will never see us coming.

When you'd see the person next to you, you'd be like, there's a traitor a missile.

They were never really used in the military, but the reason I know that he's pre-18th century is they were used in the 18th century for looking sideways at young women at balls.

But it's nice, Andy, that you didn't automatically assume that was what they were used for.

It shows you're a wholesome person.

That's immediately what I thought.

Don't get invited to many balls anymore.

I think we have one on the TV show.

We borrowed one from the Museum of Optical Instruments or something.

Yeah, they're very cool.

I've got one last thing, which is that the planet Neptune, when it was discovered, it was discovered within the hour of astronomers starting to look for it.

So literally, they went, I reckon it's about there.

Oh yeah, there it is.

Okay, it's time for our next fact, and that is Anna Chaczynski.

My fact is that the first gentleman's club in America was formed for the purpose of eating turtle soup.

So this is the Haboken Turtle Club.

Actually, I haven't looked up how to pronounce that.

Haboken Turtle Club.

There we go.

I just looked it up in my mind.

This was the brainchild of a guy called John Stevens, and he lived in New Jersey.

And he kept chickens, and he was plagued by turtles.

He discovered that these big turtles were jumping out of the river and grabbing his chickens and killing them.

So he declared that he would have vengeance on all the turtles.

Wow.

And actually, a lot of sources say it was Alexander Hamilton's idea, Hamilton Hamilton of hit Broadway musical fame,

to make this turtle club.

So Hamilton said to Stevens, look, you should make a turtle factory on your New Jersey farm and kill the turtles and we should eat them.

And so they decided to do that.

They created this club and they killed turtles, they ate them and a bunch of important people joined.

So Jefferson, Franklin, Burr, Hamilton, Washington, they were all members of the Habokan Turtle Club.

They hung out, they ate turtle soup, they had the best time.

And that was the first first members' club.

So, there's a bit of detail I just want to pick you up on quickly.

So, these turtles were eating his chickens, right?

So, okay, I've got, so two things: one, turtle's incredibly slow, as far as I know.

Two, I'm pretty sure that chickens are incredibly fast.

In fact, fast to the point that did anyone see Creed?

Like, Rocky Sylvester Sloan gets him to try and catch chickens.

That's part of the training for a lot of people.

So, they're really quick.

So, what

the fuck?

What's going on?

Yeah.

What kind of super speeds are yours?

You're citing the seventh Rocky film?

That's.

In the eighth Rocky film, they're actually going to have him beaten by a turtle.

For realism's sake.

Well, they can snap out with their drawers incredibly fast.

Turtle skin.

Right.

They can, they can, once they get close to you,

they're there.

So if you don't see them sneak up on you, then you are dead meat.

This is my theory, so don't quote me on it.

But it might have been a lie because the way that he found out was that one of his servant boys he sent down to the river to find out why his chickens kept disappearing.

And the servant boy came back and said, Look, I was lying by the riverside reading my book, apparently romance fiction, weirdly,

reading my book, and suddenly a turtle leapt out of the river and grabbed a chicken.

So maybe this servant boy was just stealing all of his chickens and didn't know who to blame it on.

Leapt out of the river.

Do you know what these things were called?

These parties were called turtle frolics.

That's what you'd have.

You'd have it, you'd say, I'm having a turtle frolic, come on over.

But what's really awkward about that is if you were a turtle and someone said, do you want to come to a turtle frolic, you'd say yes, because you'd assume the wrong thing.

Do you know mock turtle soup?

So turtle soup was hugely popular.

In fact, the only reason it's become far less popular in America is because they have eaten all the turtles in loads of states.

And they're really endangered now.

So in the 19th century, you had mock turtle soup, which is made with a calf's head.

Lovely.

This is Campbell's famously had mock turtle soup.

The slogan, you'll like its unusual flavour.

Sometimes, I found a book from 1821 with a load of recipes in, and it said that the fetus of the cow is regularly sold to pastry cooks for the purpose of making mock turtle soup.

Lovely.

Nixon banned soup from White House.

From America.

From White House state dinners, yeah.

Why?

So

this was according to Harry Bob Hadleman, who was his,

he was the chief of staff for Nixon.

And famously was the main perpetrator of

Vortegate.

And

he did jail time.

And he said that what happened was Nixon one day said, I don't want any soup at any of our dinners, okay?

And he said, why?

It's a perfect thing.

He says, no one likes soup.

No one's into soup.

Let's get it banned.

And then he spoke to someone who had dinner with Nixon the night before.

And Nixon was famously clumsy.

And apparently they were having soup and he got it over his shirt and he thought this is unacceptable and so he banned soup so no soup was ever served and

did he say waiter waiter there's a bug in my soup

because of the Watergate scandal

even I didn't like that

President Lincoln's last ever meal was mock turtle soup was it really yeah along with like six other dishes but it was it was it was a starter I think were they more lax on the last meal thing in those days?

Well, I don't think he knew he was going to die.

Yeah, I guess he wasn't on death row, actually.

This feels like a last meal.

I don't think I should go out tonight.

They actually, the Turtle Club meetings used to become eating competitions.

They morphed into that.

Yeah, so the famous soup maker for the Turtle Club meetings in the second half of the 19th century was a guy called John Tar Bell.

And he used to arrive two days before the club would have its meeting.

And a newspaper report from The Times said he'd arrive with turtles, flippers tied, and eyes a bulge with apprehension.

And two days later, they'd be in a suit, so it was justified apprehension.

And if you could eat more than three plates, then you automatically entered the eating competition.

And then I think the winner in 1894 had eaten seven main courses,

and you got presented with a vegetable bouquet at the end of it.

It's just classic boys' club stuff.

We need to move on to the next final fact.

So, just maybe one or two little kind of other clubs,

like gentlemen's clubs.

There was a 13 club, which was an anti-superstition club.

They wanted to say, okay, look, this idea of 13 being bad luck is just ridiculous.

So, let's go for dinner with 13 of us, and let's have 13 of this and 13 of that, and let's walk under some ladders and have some black hats and all that kind of stuff.

But at the first meeting, only 12 people turned up.

The 13th have been decapitated by a dropped mirror.

Well they drafted in a waiter to make up the numbers and unfortunately the waiter was extremely superstitious

so he spent the whole time howling and trembling like a leaf.

I'm going to move us on to our final fact.

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

My fact is that when Evil Knievel starred in the 1977 film Viva Knievel, he used a stunt double.

How cool is that?

Greatest supposed daredevil in the world using a stunt double.

Was it for insurance or something like that?

It was, yeah.

So they booked him and he plays himself in the movie.

And the idea was that he would make all these leaps.

And he was at one of the shows where they were going to test out.

And they did have a stunt double already, but he did a wheelie just to the crowd and he fell off.

And the insurance people came in and said, okay, that's it, you're done.

And he couldn't do anything else for the movie.

He fell off during a wheelie.

He was just, he was crap, wasn't he?

He was the worst.

He was the worst.

He just fell over all the time.

That's all he did.

All of his actual claims to fame are the mistakes that he made.

So there was a huge thing that put him on the map was when he failed to leap over the fountains at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas.

So he went over and he clipped right at the end of the ramp and he went right off.

And so the jump was 150 feet.

That's how far he was jumping.

When he flew off the bike, he went 165 feet.

He cleared the jump in a fall by 15 feet.

And that's what put him on the bottom.

But then the bike hit him.

It was really, it was horrible.

But do you know why he was there in the first place in Las Vegas?

No.

He was there to see a boxer whose name was Dick Tiger.

Why isn't this stuff on the national curriculum, guys?

I read a few obituaries of Evil Knivil, and one of the sentences was that he went into semi-retirement after a failed attempt to jump a pool full of sharks in Chicago in 1976.

He didn't fall in.

He didn't didn't fall in.

He came off the ramp again.

He had a real problem with ramps.

But he's a fascinating character because he was one of those guys who became one of the most famous people in America in his time, then disappeared for a very long time, then the revival of nostalgia came about and he came back big in the 90s again.

He did a revival tour.

Revival Canival.

Well, because that rhymes with his name.

He's trying to.

How many do I have to explain?

I would say far too many.

No, but so

he was a huge character and he led his life like he was the most famous man in the world.

He bought private jets, he had countless motorbikes.

He used to, because he'd injured himself so much, he used to walk around with a cane.

And the cane was really cool.

It could screw off at the top and he had vials of whiskey inside, six vials of whiskey, so he could have shots wherever he was going.

Yeah, he got incredibly drunk before his last famous jump, which was actually in the UK.

He was jumping over 13 buses,

and it was in the UK.

He got incredibly drunk the night before with this guy, Frank Gifford, who was the broadcaster who was going to show it.

And he woke up the next day and he went incredibly hungover to look at what he had to jump.

And he said, I can't do this, this is impossible.

It's going to fail.

And so Frank Gifford said, Okay, well, don't do it.

And he said, Well, I have to do it.

So, but it's just going to fail.

And so, it did indeed fail.

And he crashed and he ended up smashing into this wall.

And Frank Gifford said he landed almost at his feet and he was spewing blood from his mouth and his bones were sticking out of his hand.

And so Frank bent down to his new friend to see if he was still alive.

And he noticed that he was trying to say something.

And so he listened in, thinking these could be his last words.

And he said, Frank, get that broad out of my room.

Just get that lady out of my room.

I just want to be

sent back there on my own.

Oh my god.

When he was filming Viva Knievel,

because he didn't have to do the stunts, he just every night went off to the bars of LA and he frequented most.

It was his favorite bar.

It was called Filthy McNasty.

That was an actual place.

Very famous place.

Very famous bar.

And it shut down and it got brought up.

Yeah, hygiene regulations.

And no, but when he used to go there, if he got completely drunk, what the owners of the place would do is they would go outside and they had a huge sign and they'd change the words from whatever they had to now drunk inside, evil Knievel.

So he went to prison for beating up his PR with a baseball bat.

And I read one account that said that he did this, even though both his arms were in plaster at the time.

He also coined his name in prison,

didn't he?

So he obviously wasn't called Evil Knievel, but this was when he went to prison before he became famous.

And he did a lot of robberies, he committed a lot of crimes, he fell in with the wrong crowds.

And his soulmate in prison was called Arful Knoffle.

He was called William Knoffle, but people called him Auffel Knoffle.

The guards called him Awful Knoffle, yeah.

It's exactly that, yeah.

They were saying it's a fun pair of names to have if we name him Evil Knievel because we've got Auffel Knoffle.

And actually, it was Evil with an I originally, but I think he thought it would look too mean.

I looked into Knoffle and he looks like he was a murderer.

He escaped prison three times and eventually, this was in Montana because he was from Montana.

And they kicked him out of Montana and said, as long as you go to California, we won't chase you anymore.

And so they sent him off to California and he never came back.

And that's the last we know of him.

Evil Knievel's son is now also a daredevil.

And has recreated some of the jumps that Evil Knievel didn't make.

And I went to his website and it says, want Captain Knievel to jump something badass for your live event?

So you can get him to jump over anything you want.

I didn't actually ask for a quote.

I should have done.

We should get him to jump over our podcast while we're doing it.

Just book him just to.

But it won't make any sense in a future episode.

I should have booked him for this one.

So some things on stunt men generally.

Yeah.

So the Guinness World Record holder for most stunts in a movie, in a movie career as well, is Jackie Chan.

He holds the Guinness World Record for that.

He's actually got two Guinness World Records.

So one is for the most stunts in a movie career of a living person.

And the second one is that he has the most credits in a single film.

15.

He's got 15 credits, and that's what he's got that second one for.

It's called Chinese Zodiac.

And his credits include

obviously actor, writer, director, producer, exec producer, gaffer, stunt double.

So I looked into it because I thought, well, that doesn't count if you're just doing your own stunts.

It's not his stunts, he does the other characters' stunts.

Is it a fight suit?

Yeah.

Oh, he's punching himself.

He's punching himself.

Exactly.

Hey, why are you hitting yourself, Jiggy?

And lastly, probably my favorite one on that list of his credits: catering coordinator.

And you can see photos where he's behind, like going, lasagna, vegetarian?

So cool.

He's an amazing character, Jackie Chan.

Yeah, I said on the podcast ages ago, and he said this on The View in America, that he's not allowed to get into fights in America on the street because his hands are illegal weapons.

I would argue no one's allowed to get into a fight on the streets.

And so they say that if, okay, a normal fight, if you were having a fight on the street, a punch is a punch.

A punch from Jackie Chan, in the eyes of the law, according to Jackie Chan, is firing a gun.

What if he punches himself?

Suicide.

And also, he claims that his mother was pregnant with him for 12 months.

I've got a fact about one of your heroes who makes incredibly dubious claims.

Yeah, it's Brian Blessed.

This is from Brian Blessed's autobiography.

He says that when he was doing the show Zed Cars back in the, what was it, 60s, 70s, 70s?

He couldn't drive, so he had a stuntman under under his seat working all the pedals and the gears.

And the BBC then eventually paid for driving lessons after Blessed became overexcited by his performance and kicked his stuntman in the bollocks.

We're going to have to wrap up in literally a couple of minutes because we're going to shut the building.

Right, okay.

Just very quickly, there's a guy called Ron Cunningham, who was the, I think, the oldest stuntman ever working.

He did his final performance in Brighton at the age of 90 as a stuntman.

And this is the description of it.

He, surrounded by a bevy of Brazilian beauties, crushed broken bottles with his bare feet, set himself alight with lighter fuel, stabbed himself several times in the chest with a bendy knife, smashed a beer glass into his neck with a hammer, and rounded things off by telling his infamous chicken joke.

What a guy!

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for being here.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James.

Shapes.

Andy.

And Buhana M.

Anna.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

Yep.

And if you would like Robbie Knievel, son of evil, to jump over anything, you can head to robbieknievil.com.

We will be back again next week with another podcast thank you guys so much for being here tonight really appreciate it uh and we'll uh see you again next week goodbye