129: No Such Thing As Jack The Stripper

Transcript

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Speaker 14 Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber.

Speaker 14 I am sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Chaczynski, and Alex Bell. And once again,

Speaker 14 no!

Speaker 14 No! I'm back from Edinburgh! I'm back from Edinburgh! It's Andy Murray!

Speaker 14 I don't recognize that name. And Andy Murray, and once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go.

Speaker 14 Starting with you, James Harkin.

Speaker 15 Okay, my fact this week is that Neanderthals wore capes.

Speaker 14 Hmm.

Speaker 14 Did they only wear capes?

Speaker 15 I think they kind of did, and it seems like...

Speaker 14 Is that a good look? Is that a sexy look? I'm just trying to picture it. It's extra obscene if you're only wearing a cape, I think.

Speaker 15 Do you think worse than nudity?

Speaker 14 I think it's worse than nudity. Well, no, it's worse than being naked with just socks on.
Like, that's what it is. That looks terrible.
Having one item is always just a bit embarrassing. Absolutely.

Speaker 16 No, a cape's quite a good look, because you can wrap it round yourself and then do the big reveal.

Speaker 14 So Neanderthals, they wore capes.

Speaker 15 They did, compared to early humans who wore more like parkers or hoodies.

Speaker 15 So the thing is, they found by looking at animal remains in early human settlements and Neanderthal settlements, and they found that the Neanderthals didn't really have the ability to make more complex clothing like the humans could.

Speaker 15 All they could really do is get an animal skin and just wrap it round the neck like a cape, whereas the humans could kind of make more proper clothing.

Speaker 15 And they reckon that this may be one of the reasons why the Neanderthals died out when the humans proliferated.

Speaker 16 Kind of ironic that they donned superhero gear in order to wipe themselves out.

Speaker 14 What a bunch of idiots.

Speaker 14 I read a thing about superhero capes, and it was a physicist who'd done an analysis on Batman's cape.

Speaker 14 He worked out that if, as in the film, he used the cape to help slow himself down, he would still have hit the building he was landing on at 50 miles an hour, which would have immediately killed him.

Speaker 16 I don't think, I mean, I think we're assuming when we watch that, that there's some magical force holding him up, as well as just the sheer force of his cape. But he is just a bloke.

Speaker 14 Let's not forget. Batman is a bloke.

Speaker 15 He's not like Superman with superpowers. He's just a guy with tons of money.

Speaker 16 Oh, I kind of thought he had a little bit of extra magic power as well.

Speaker 14 No, his sole superpower is material wealth.

Speaker 16 Just, I thought the really interesting thing about this new research that's been done was the idea that early humans, the real superheroes of this story, had fur-trim hoodies, it's thought, or fur-trim coats, because what the researchers found is that certain animals were found at human sites that weren't found at Neanderthal sites.

Speaker 16 So I think there were animals like weasels and wolverines that were found on the human sites, and they have like short hairs, and they're the kind of hair that you'd use to make a fur trim.

Speaker 16 So they've got this whole mixture of fur, and if it's added to sleeves and the hoods of clothes, then it insulates you better. How were they

Speaker 14 sewing or putting stuff together?

Speaker 15 Well, do you know that the oldest sewing needle was found around this time, around 40,000 years ago? Really? Actually, it was found more recently, but it was lost 40,000 years ago.

Speaker 14 No, no, no, sorry, it was found 40,000 years ago, but immediately dropped again.

Speaker 14 In a haystack.

Speaker 15 But weirdly, it wasn't early humans or Neanderthals, it was Denisovians, who were a third group of hominids who kind of lived around the same time.

Speaker 14 Were we the most clever of the bunch at that period?

Speaker 15 They definitely had bigger brains than we did.

Speaker 14 Ah, well, they had bigger brains, Neanderthals, but there is a theory that, because they had bigger bodies as well, and they had larger eyes too, so they had extremely good vision, but there's a theory that more of their brain would have had to to be given over to their visual cortex and to controlling their body as well.

Speaker 15 So they were great at kind of gymnastics or seeing things from a long distance.

Speaker 16 The Neanderthal Olympics were brilliant too.

Speaker 14 And all the audience were five miles away as well.

Speaker 15 But on the other hand, they couldn't do Rubik's cubes.

Speaker 14 And obviously that

Speaker 14 really got humans through the ice age when it was very boring to have entertainment.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I think scientists have come forward in the last year slightly

Speaker 16 not debunking, but saying there's no actual evidence to show that increased focus on your brain on eyesight or body size would mean that you had a less good higher cortex. But it's certainly a theory.

Speaker 14 That's the thing, it just changes all the time. Probably everything we're saying right now is just going to be disproved.
Particularly with Neanderthals.

Speaker 14 Every day there's a new story that says, oh, they were killed by bunnies or they loved.

Speaker 14 Have you not heard that theory? No, no. Oh, they were killed by rabbits.
All of them know. It has to do with the fact that they couldn't, I think, I'm gaining this in the sort of area of right.
Uh

Speaker 14 their um main source of food also became the main source of food that rabbits were eating, and rabbits were eating all the food, and so they just ran out of food effectively.

Speaker 14 So rabbits kind of took I don't know.

Speaker 15 Here's the thing. If you try to live off rabbits your whole life, you wouldn't be able to because they don't contain nearly enough uh nutrients.

Speaker 16 Unless they've eaten all of your other food, and so they contain all the food groups now inside of their bodies.

Speaker 14 Is this an all-you-can-eat rabbit situation?

Speaker 15 Yeah, if if the only thing you could ever eat was rabbits, you would die. No.
So you die quite quickly as well. I'm not sure exactly what it is that you're missing.

Speaker 15 I think it's a famous kind of thought experiment about rabbits in particular.

Speaker 16 Really? And lots of other things, presumably. Or a rabbit's the only ones trying to screw us over.

Speaker 15 Yeah, you could probably live just off Guinness.

Speaker 16 Yeah, okay, don't do it.

Speaker 15 They always say that, don't they? They say, like, two pints of Guinness and three Mars bars will get you through the rest of your life.

Speaker 14 But it doesn't sound

Speaker 14 Irish people.

Speaker 14 Did you know?

Speaker 16 Because people always used to say, oh, drinking a Guinness is the same as having seven roast dinners or something, that there's the same number number of calories in a pint of tenants or a pint of Fosters as there is in a pint of Guinness.

Speaker 14 Wow.

Speaker 16 Didn't you? I always thought there was way more in Guinness.

Speaker 15 Yeah. It feels like there's more when you drink it, doesn't there?

Speaker 14 Yeah, it does. Does it?

Speaker 14 It's thicker. I don't know.

Speaker 15 You had a full pint of beer for your birthday the other day, didn't you?

Speaker 14 Yeah, fruit beer.

Speaker 14 I really like this clothing thing because it's sort of interesting in the knock-on effects that things have. So if Neanderthals only had capes, as we're saying,

Speaker 14 then they might have only been able to hunt during the very warmest bits of the day. So that limits your hunting range time-wise.
It means you can't hunt in the morning or the evening.

Speaker 14 Or it might have stopped them foraging further north. Whereas if you've got humans in sort of parker-like fur things, they can hunt further north, that extends the range.

Speaker 14 Or in that part of Europe, ambush is quite a good means of killing prey because you use the landscape and you wait for animals to come along and then you jump out and kill them rather than chasing them as early humans did in Africa, for example.

Speaker 14 So if you're just just lying down in a cape all day, you can't do it. You'll freeze.
Do you remember that book that came out called The Singing Neanderthals? Yes.

Speaker 14 Yeah, so this is a professor from Reading University called Stephen Mithen, and he believes that they sung a lot and they liked to dance, dance and clap, and they used to do it in their caves together.

Speaker 14 They used to sing in groups.

Speaker 15 I have read that book quite a few years ago, and I think, is it not also that he thinks that language came originally from singing? Yes.

Speaker 15 So people would just kind of sing and get rhythm, and then that rhythm and noise would turn into meanings, and then that meaning would turn into language.

Speaker 14 I think that's what you're saying. Yeah, yeah.
So, for that reason as well, the language part, he says that he thinks that they would particularly have liked rap music.

Speaker 14 He says, I can see them rapping in my mind. He thinks a lot of stuff, this guy.

Speaker 14 Neanderthal males had one massive arm and one puny one. No.
Like Nadal. Like Nadal.
Exactly like Nadal.

Speaker 14 Athletes, cricket, and tennis players in particular have upper arm bones which are much stronger in their dominant arm.

Speaker 14 So all of us here, our dominant arm will be between 5 and 14% bigger.

Speaker 14 This is the arm bone, the upper arm bone. Bigger than on the other side, right? In Neanderthals, the upper arm bone is 50% bigger.
than on the other side.

Speaker 14 And this is only the case in cricket and tennis players in modern humans today. So when you say Nadal, it's absolutely right.

Speaker 14 And they thought that this was because they were doing spear thrusting, right, to hunt animals.

Speaker 14 But actually, they got modern humans to sort of practice thrusting spears and measured how much energy it used. And actually, that uses the non-dominant arm loads, too.

Speaker 14 So, they reckon that what it is is processing animal hides, i.e., scraping laboriously away at the inside of animal skins to make them suitable for wearing your capes.

Speaker 14 And we don't know if female Neanderthals had the same thing, because we haven't found female Neanderthal skeletons where both arms are present, but we have found male ones.

Speaker 15 Do we know that female Neanderthals had two arms?

Speaker 14 No, we don't. No.

Speaker 14 Which might be a reason why they died out.

Speaker 16 Just one thing on capes: that capes were quite big in the Aztec world, and Montezuma, particularly, was into them in that every year he collected a tribute from his people of 2,560 of them.

Speaker 15 The word escape comes from the word cape.

Speaker 14 Does it?

Speaker 15 Well, it's like when someone grabs your cape, but you could run away because you kind of leave them with the cape.

Speaker 16 Then you're just naked if you're a Neanderthal.

Speaker 14 That's actually. Yeah.

Speaker 15 According to the

Speaker 15 Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, to escape is to ex-cape oneself, to slip out of your cape and run away.

Speaker 14 Oh, that's cool. Isn't that great?

Speaker 14 Were there any famous villains that were known for that? Like, I mean, like Jack the Ripper. We've got his cape.

Speaker 16 You know, was there any like just with a cape done up by poppers at the front or something that they just whip off and leave?

Speaker 14 Well, just if that's Jack the Stripper, you're thinking.

Speaker 16 But another kind of cape in the Aztec world that only Aztec rulers were allowed to wear was the hummingbird cape.

Speaker 16 And so hummingbirds were sort of revered by Aztecs because I think of their tenacity and the fact that they'd attack things that were bigger than them and they wouldn't rest until they'd got what they wanted.

Speaker 16 And so Aztec kings could wear capes made entirely of hummingbird feathers.

Speaker 15 I think I've seen one of those.

Speaker 16 Yeah, they're pretty spectacular.

Speaker 15 I think there might be one in a museum in Hawaii or something.

Speaker 14 Oh, really?

Speaker 15 Like really yellow, amazing, kind of feathery cape.

Speaker 14 Wow. Hummingbirds, I think, are the are they the only bird that can fly backwards?

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 16 But yeah, one cape would take 8,000 hummingbirds.

Speaker 16 How many? It's quite impressive to catch, though, that many, though.

Speaker 14 It is. You'll probably see

Speaker 15 sneak up at them from the front.

Speaker 14 Elvis Presley famously used to wear a cape in the later years.

Speaker 14 And the very first time that they had the idea for the cape, because the idea was that it was going to be used to reveal himself, not in that way, on stage, to the audience.

Speaker 14 So it was a great way of hiding himself before they could see it. Because you can still see the cape, obviously.
Yeah, I guess, but you're like, who's buying the cape?

Speaker 14 I know they know they're at a Presley game.

Speaker 14 All right, the thing is, is that with the cape, so he commissioned it from this guy who was in another bit of America, and so they made the cape and they sent it over on a plane, and Elvis put it on, and it was so heavy that as he walked forward, he immediately got dragged back by the weight of it and crashed backwards onto the ground.

Speaker 15 Like, who did that in the VMAs last year or something? Was it Madonna?

Speaker 14 I think she just fell down forward.

Speaker 15 Did she not get dragged? No, she got dragged off by her cape.

Speaker 16 She did. Someone stepped on the back of her cape.
Maybe it was just a tribute to Elvis. No one got.

Speaker 15 Someone else who had a massive cape on stage was Liberace.

Speaker 14 Oh, yeah. Yes.

Speaker 15 Famously. He one time had such a massive cape.
He was brought on stage in a custom-made Rolls-Royce. And then he took off his cape, which was then taken off stage by a smaller Rolls-Royce.

Speaker 14 That is fantastic.

Speaker 16 That's ridiculous.

Speaker 14 I was looking at Sherlock Holmes because he wore a cape. Yes, he was described as wearing a cape, and that he was illustrated wearing a very sort of famous cape.

Speaker 16 I think it became famous because he'd worn it.

Speaker 14 I don't think it was a famous cape that Sherlock Holmes adopted.

Speaker 16 Who was this weird bloke inside my favourite cape?

Speaker 14 Sorry, you're absolutely right. He popularised that cape.
But

Speaker 14 there was something really bizarre about the stories in that the man who was commissioned to draw the stories ended up not drawing them. His brother sort of got the gig somehow instead.

Speaker 14 But then he drew the man who'd originally been commissioned to draw the cape was then the model for the cape, which his brother then ended up drawing for the stories.

Speaker 16 Was that a consolation prize thing? Kind of. His brother was like, oh, sorry he didn't get the gig.
Really weird.

Speaker 14 These Victorian. There was a coat with a cape built into it.
Yes. Yeah.
I don't really understand it. Is it just to protect you against rain? Or

Speaker 14 just fashion? Yeah. Must have been fashion.
Yeah, because I exactly. I was trying to work out: was there a purpose to Darth Vader's cape? And

Speaker 14 a lot of people. Because he's in space.
What's he doing with the cape? There's a lot of anti-gravity going on. That's not a useful garment to have.

Speaker 14 A lot of people say that it was because of his authority and that a cape would suggest a military kind of authority for somebody.

Speaker 15 But then, I don't really know much about star

Speaker 14 wars.

Speaker 14 But

Speaker 15 it doesn't seem like they have a lot of problem with anti-gravity at any stage.

Speaker 14 Which is, it's interesting, isn't it? The one scene where I think you should see that is when he's flying, when Vader's in his own ship, because I imagine that's where anti-gravity kicks in.

Speaker 14 But he must be sitting on the cape. That's what I thought, because you don't see it in shot.

Speaker 16 You're right, because they must have thought this through.

Speaker 14 Well, they have, because look, there's a description on Wikipedia about his entire outfit.

Speaker 14 So the outer cape was made so that it could block fire and acid jets,

Speaker 14 helping to protect the suit's electronics. Because remember, Darth Vader was part of robot.

Speaker 15 Yeah, but the cape was so heavy, get this.

Speaker 14 The cape was so heavy that it restricted movement, so he had difficulty lifting his arms over his head, which is why you rarely see that in the movies. Really?

Speaker 16 I can't really see a scene where that would have fitted in, is when he was the YMCA.

Speaker 14 It's when he's at that football match on the Mexican wave comes around this way.

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Speaker 14 Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Chaczynski.

Speaker 16 My fact this week is that when the first ballpoint pen was launched in the US, riot police had to be deployed to restrain the crowds.

Speaker 16 It was the new iPhone of its day. This was in 1945, and I actually read about this in a book I've just bought called Adventures in Stationery by James Ward.

Speaker 16 And this ballpoint pen was brought to America by a guy called Milton Reynolds. It was 29th of October 1945, and he launched it in a a department store called Gimbal's in New York.

Speaker 16 And thousands of people came.

Speaker 16 So I think 5,000 people swarmed Gimbal's department store, and 50 extra policemen had to be deployed as an emergency at the last minute because it was being swarmed so much.

Speaker 16 So they cost the equivalent of $160 now, which is a lot, but still

Speaker 16 they'd sold millions of

Speaker 14 amounts. Presumably they weren't the really crummy, cheap buyers that you were paying $160 for.
Well, even, I mean, that was a time of some hardship across the world.

Speaker 16 Well, what he was thinking, actually, you say of some hardship.

Speaker 16 A, they didn't work because he rushed them through, but B, I think he was thinking it's the end of the war, I need to launch it now, people want a treat.

Speaker 15 Well, that war was terrible, but at least we've got a barrel.

Speaker 14 It's almost worth having another war.

Speaker 14 It was called the Reynolds Rocket, though, so there was a little bit of militarization going on in there.

Speaker 14 He actually took out an ad uh in the New York Times to promote it, a full page ad. That's how big they were promoting the thing.

Speaker 14 And in it, he said that it was fantastic, miraculous pen, guaranteed to write for two years without refilling.

Speaker 16 Yeah, and you got your money back if it didn't.

Speaker 15 And a lot of people did, didn't they?

Speaker 16 Yeah, loads of people. Yes.

Speaker 15 104,643 had to be replaced in the first eight months.

Speaker 16 So I think, yeah, it had massive problems. It was really leaky, or it would stop writing altogether.
It just wasn't a very good design.

Speaker 16 And the reason was because he was a very competitive businessman. So there was this chap called Laszlo Biro, who a few years beforehand had invented the Byro in Europe and he brought it to Argentina.

Speaker 16 And word had reached America and this guy Milton Reynolds of the Byro.

Speaker 16 And he really wanted to patent the design, which was just this round tip and this capillary action, which meant that you could write in all directions and the ink wouldn't bleed out onto the page.

Speaker 16 Anyway, he tried to buy the patent for the design and it had already been sold. And so he was so pissed off, he decided to rush through his own design before Byro could get his out.

Speaker 16 So he knew that Byro in 1945, which was now run by a company called Evershard, I think, he knew that they were about to rush a design out, and so he put his out prematurely.

Speaker 15 But the thing was that his didn't use capillary action, his relied on gravity, so Darth Vader wouldn't have been able to use it, for instance.

Speaker 14 Indeed. That's why you never saw him signing papers.

Speaker 15 Actually, there is a theory which Andy was just pointing, so I bet he was about to say this, that there is no writing in the whole Star Wars universe.

Speaker 14 Theory is a post-literary universe.

Speaker 14 You just see people pointing at, you know, pressing buttons with little symbols on them. Right.

Speaker 15 Apparently, there are some scrolls that the Jedis.

Speaker 15 you can see it in the background occasionally that there's a scroll there, but whether they have writing on, we don't know.

Speaker 14 But also, you can see in this is getting too geeky now, but you can see in Raiders of the Lost Ark when they have the Ark of the Covenant, there are symbols on the Ark of the Covenant of R2D2 and C3PO.

Speaker 14 So they've now put that in a suggested LucasArts timeline of the universe. So a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, was remembered close enough on Earth that they knew about 3PO and R2D2.

Speaker 14 So it's not that long ago.

Speaker 15 So when you said this is too geeky, I was about to say, no, it can't be too geeky for this show, but

Speaker 15 you've managed to do it.

Speaker 14 So

Speaker 14 one of the first big orders for Byras was by the RAF

Speaker 14 actually during the Second World War. So this was by the Laszlo Biro

Speaker 14 inventor himself. What's he called Biro?

Speaker 14 I think it's originally pronounced Birru. We've been saying it wrong all these years.
Probably Lashlo as well, isn't it? Lashlo Biro, I think. I think it's Biro.

Speaker 16 Probably. He was Hungarian.
Well, he was born in Budapest. Right.

Speaker 14 He was Hungarian. Then he moved to Argentina.
So this is a really weird thing also about the way he invented it.

Speaker 14 I mean, he had to flee the Nazis, and he went to Argentina, partly because he'd had a chance encounter on a beach with a fellow holidaymaker and told him about this great invention he had.

Speaker 14 And the fellow holidaymaker said, oh, well, I'm the president of Argentina. So

Speaker 14 do you want to come and set up in my country? And he said, thank you very much, I will. And isn't that amazing? It's extraordinary.

Speaker 14 Yeah, they're on the beach and they're happy to be chatting to the Argentinian president.

Speaker 16 He was the former president.

Speaker 14 But then, really tragically, Biro never made much money from it because he had sold the patent to it very early on in the process because partly, I think, to get more of his family out of Europe.

Speaker 15 I think his last shares were sold to get his family to Argentina.

Speaker 14 Yeah. I really love

Speaker 15 the sound of this guy, Biro, because apparently, before he invented the Biro, he was a hypnotist, a race car driver, and a surrealist painter.

Speaker 14 Wow.

Speaker 14 That's awesome.

Speaker 15 Sounds amazing. And you'll like how he invented the ballpoint pen, Andy.

Speaker 15 He was just sat there looking out of a window and he saw a marble go through a puddle and then it left a line of water on the ground and he thought, wait a minute, I could make a pen like that.

Speaker 15 Did he now? Yeah. Because Andy, you really hate these ideas of serendipity in inventions.

Speaker 14 I hate it. I just think that often inventions are...

Speaker 14 It's so much nicer, the story of a Bureau seeing a child playing with marbles and the marble going through the puddle. And who knows, that may well be the case.
But often you get the whole...

Speaker 14 Oh, yes, he had invented a whole load of fountain pens, and then one of them was dropped and it created a weird ball on the end of it. And you thought, oh, I know.

Speaker 15 Yeah, because Barrow didn't actually invent the ballpoint pen, or he wasn't the first person to come up with a patent for it.

Speaker 14 No. I think it was John Lauder

Speaker 15 who had the first patent, and he wanted something that would be able to write on wrapping paper.

Speaker 15 And he invented this thing, but unfortunately, it was just a rubbish design.

Speaker 14 There were 350 ballpoint patents before Biro came out of the port. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah, from you're right, John Loud, in I think the 1880s all the way through to the 1930s.

Speaker 14 The idea had been thought of a lot, it's just no one had made it work properly.

Speaker 15 So it's weird that he had to wait for a marble to propel itself through a puddle.

Speaker 14 Yeah, it is a bit weird, isn't it?

Speaker 15 Considering there were 350 other inventions exactly the same as his.

Speaker 14 It's bizarre. It's almost as though that did not happen.

Speaker 16 Have we ever talked about, just speaking of riots and police having to be called unexpectedly, about the girl who put a Facebook invitation up and accidentally made it public, not private, the Dutch girl, in 2012.

Speaker 16 And she got 30,000 people responding saying that they would attend.

Speaker 14 It was about a party, was it?

Speaker 16 It was, yeah, it was about a party, but it meant to go to just her friends. And apparently, you have some private setting on Facebook.

Speaker 15 There's a movie about it, isn't there?

Speaker 14 Is there? Yeah, I can't remember what it's called.

Speaker 16 Oh, no, it was based on that film, so that's why people did it. And then they turned up in t-shirts saying Project X Haran, because it was in the town of Haaren.
And yeah, like

Speaker 16 up to 5,000 people turned up and 600 riot police had to be called and the girl fled her home to somewhere else because she'd accidentally put this invitation on private.

Speaker 14 It sounds absolutely terrifying. Yeah, it happens quite a lot.
What, 5,000 people rocking up to an invitation? My friend certainly doesn't mind partying.

Speaker 15 You did say up to 5,000 people. I mean, even at these parties is up to 5,000 people.

Speaker 14 Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that not only was Lady Chatterley's Lover banned from Australia, but a book about the ban was also banned.

Speaker 14 Yeah, so Lady Chatterley's Lover, famously a book that was banned in the UK, it was banned in Australia, many other countries.

Speaker 14 And what happened was in 1960, eventually after, I believe it was 1929, it was originally banned.

Speaker 14 So huge amount of time, and they finally got the ban lifted. And it was such a weird trial.

Speaker 14 Everyone who was at the trial reported about it at the time in 1960 because they had things like the fact that the jury who were forced to read the book weren't even allowed to bring the book out of the courtroom.

Speaker 14 So the jury had to just sit in the jury room and read the book. There was probably somebody really smug juror who got to the end of it first before everybody else.
Yeah, just did all the spoilers.

Speaker 14 She shacks him.

Speaker 15 That reminds me of something I read

Speaker 15 that

Speaker 15 in the 90s or late 80s, early 90s, um there was a pornographic T V channel called Red Hot Dutch, which came over to Britain because people could get it with their satellite dishes.

Speaker 15 And there was a big kind of moral crusade against it in the newspapers and stuff.

Speaker 15 And before the Parliament could debate it, they had to have a special viewing of the channel in the Houses of Parliament.

Speaker 15 And apparently it was one of the most well-attended viewings of anything that they ever had.

Speaker 14 I don't agree because oh, you're allowed to watch some really steamy hot hot Dutch pornography, but you have to watch it in a room full of MPs.

Speaker 14 I'm not sure I'd like attending.

Speaker 14 So, the really tricky thing when the book was going to be published is that this was all after a 1959 change in the law, which said that literary merit is a defence.

Speaker 14 So, it was an extremely sexually explicit book.

Speaker 14 It had been banned in 1929, but then this change in the law in 1959 meant that suddenly there is a possible defence, which means that it could be published legally.

Speaker 14 And Penguin then announced, you know, for uh Lawrence anniversary, we are going to publish a huge run of this.

Speaker 14 And they were intending to publish it for, I think, three shillings and sixpence, which is really cheap and would have put it well within the reach of working-class people.

Speaker 14 So that was why the authorities, if you like, were spooked. Yeah.

Speaker 15 Because there was still the thing in law, which was an old Victorian thing, which was

Speaker 15 it's all right for you to have something which is explicit and obscene and whatever, so long as only gentlemen can read it.

Speaker 15 But once you do it so that the poor people can read it, then it becomes becomes a problem. And it's called variable obscenity.

Speaker 14 Really?

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 15 And so there's a very famous part of that trial where the chief prosecutor, who's called Mervyn Griffith Jones, asked the jurors to consider if it was the kind of book that you would wish your wife or servants to read.

Speaker 15 And in the newspapers they all thought that was hilarious because, you know, this is the 1960s, we don't talk like that anymore.

Speaker 15 But of course he was referring to the old Victorian law, which was is it something that working class people or women or whatever can read as opposed to gentlemen like me?

Speaker 14 And so when they eventually lifted the ban and said it could be sold in shops, it's not dissimilar to the great Ballpoint Pen debut.

Speaker 14 The shops were packed. People were not writing, but it was chaotic, and it was mainly men who just heard so much about this book.

Speaker 14 And copies that had been bought were then being resold just the hour later in Soho.

Speaker 16 It's also a very quick read.

Speaker 14 Yes, yeah. But people were, it's almost like when a huge superstar comes into town, you know, scalpers buy up the tickets and resell them for a hiked price.

Speaker 14 So in Soho they were hiking the price of these unread books that had just been bought in the London bookshops.

Speaker 14 So just to just to bring it back quickly to the opening fact, so what ended up happening was that the ban was lifted and that was great and someone then went on to write a book called The Trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Speaker 14 And that book then got released here in the UK and it attempted to get released in Australia, but Australia had not lifted their own ban and so they decided to to continue to ban anything to do with Lady Chatterley and that was one of the books that wasn't allowed in.

Speaker 15 So did this book have like excerpts from the original do you think?

Speaker 14 Yeah, no, I'm not sure exactly what this book contains. It's actually quite hard to find it online.

Speaker 15 Well it's because you're part of Australian Dan.

Speaker 14 Yes, exactly.

Speaker 15 She's not allowed to read anything like this.

Speaker 14 And yeah, what's really nice about this is that a group of Australians actually decided that they were going to sneakily import it and start selling it in shops and they did.

Speaker 14 And that kind of created a a new conversation once they got caught because they were caught and the government attempted to prosecute them.

Speaker 14 And they said this shouldn't be done, and a lot of other politicians agreed.

Speaker 14 And as a result, that's what's kind of kick-started the whole thing about the relaxation laws of the obscenity laws in Australia. So it's interesting.

Speaker 14 Lady Chatterley itself did it here, and in Australia, a book about the trial did it in Australia.

Speaker 14 It's kind of amazing. You'd have customs officials taking banned books off people.

Speaker 15 Apparently, when trains used to go from Europe into the Soviet Union, when they stopped on the border they'd check your passports and there'd also be a guy going through going Bibles and pornography!

Speaker 14 Bibles and pornography!

Speaker 15 And so you had to give up your Bibles or pornography.

Speaker 14 Oh my god,

Speaker 14 I know what it looks like. It's just actually a very broadly interpreted Bible.

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Speaker 14 Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray. My fact is that Henry VIII contributed to NASA's spacesuit design.

Speaker 14 Go on, how?

Speaker 14 So he had a suit of armor, which was built for him in 1520 for a thing called the Field of the Cloth of Gold, this huge diplomatic jolly in France.

Speaker 14 And in 1962, one of the teams working on spacesuits for NASA, a firm called Garrett AI Research, they visited the suit and the Tower of London sent the firm data on it and they sent photos of it because they were trying to work out how to build better suits which could completely overlap and completely cover the body.

Speaker 14 And that was sort of something that went into their research. Yeah, so cool.

Speaker 15 So now you're going to have astronauts with massive cod pieces.

Speaker 14 Yeah,

Speaker 14 that'd be good, though, wouldn't it? Great.

Speaker 14 So good.

Speaker 16 He did have a bigger one than everyone else, didn't he? The king had to be shown with a bigger cod piece.

Speaker 14 Indeed.

Speaker 16 Women in subsequent centuries used to put little pinpricks in them, and it was hoped that that would make them fertile and bring them babies.

Speaker 14 That's the isn't that at the Tower of London?

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 15 Were you there? We were shown around the Tower of London.

Speaker 14 No, when was that?

Speaker 15 Oh, a good few years ago, I was shown around the Royal Armouries

Speaker 15 with Molly Oldfield, I think, for her book, The Secret Museum.

Speaker 15 And they have the copies there, and I think they have the actual one which the pins were pricked in.

Speaker 14 Oh, really? That's so cool.

Speaker 16 Henry VIII had regular enemas from a pig's bladder, didn't he?

Speaker 16 So I actually thought that this fact was going to be, I think I may have misread your email, that the spacesuit was designed on Henry VIII's bottom.

Speaker 16 And so I did quite a lot of research into Henry VIII's bottom.

Speaker 16 So I was also reading about his toilet, and they were really lavish, but I didn't really understand this. I think this was from Lucy Worsley, maybe.

Speaker 16 He said, Henry VIII's lavatory was lavishly covered in black velvet. Its lid opened to reveal inside a padded and beribboned interior covered with the same material.

Speaker 15 Oh, God. Those ribbons are going to be very nice for one use of the eye.

Speaker 14 That's a really good point. I mean...

Speaker 16 I think there must have been a hole in the middle, and maybe you had to aim well and just make sure you didn't catch the padding and the ribbons on the outside, maybe.

Speaker 14 No. Yeah.
It feels like with that many enemies, his aim wouldn't have been so good.

Speaker 14 How long after someone dies is it not treason anymore?

Speaker 15 So he got very fat later in life.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 15 He was quite athletic when he was young, wasn't he? But he got really fat later on. And I read this: that there was a 2009 study by the Royal Armories that found that his waist was 52 inches.

Speaker 15 Okay, that's by looking at one of his suits of armour. But brilliantly, by coincidence, Queen Victoria's bloomers that went on sale in 2012 were also a 52-inch waist.

Speaker 15 So they had exactly the same waistline, Queen Victoria and Henry VIII.

Speaker 14 So this fact is also about spacesuits and NASA. Did you know spacesuits these days are called emus? That's what modern spacesuits are referred to.
So, in space, you need to go and get into your emu.

Speaker 14 So, I bet you is unit. Not bad.

Speaker 14 Extra. Yep.

Speaker 14 What's it going to be?

Speaker 15 I'll leave the next one to you, Anna.

Speaker 16 Mission.

Speaker 16 Mammary. Nowhere near.

Speaker 14 I'm going to put us all out of all of our misery. It's extra vehicular mobility units.

Speaker 16 Where's the V?

Speaker 15 F Mu.

Speaker 14 Should be.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 14 Except there's not a bird.

Speaker 16 But that's not a lovable creature.

Speaker 15 If you want to study ants using an electron microscope,

Speaker 15 you would look at them in a vacuum.

Speaker 15 And to get them in a vacuum, you have to put them in a tiny little space suit.

Speaker 14 No. Well, they call it a tiny space suit.

Speaker 15 It's like you dip them in surfactant, which is a substance which causes like a tiny little nano suit basically that they go inside.

Speaker 15 And it actually can even repair itself if it gets broken. But yeah, they call it a tiny little ant

Speaker 14 is it individual ones for individual ants? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh my goodness.
I know. That is so

Speaker 14 incredible.

Speaker 16 Have you seen? I was looking at amusing-looking spacesuit designs from over the years, and NASA have tried some pretty wacky stuff. But have you seen the AX-5 hard shell spacesuit?

Speaker 14 We've seen the AX3, haven't we? Yeah, we have, yeah, sure.

Speaker 16 I knew you weren't up to date on this. So the AX-5, the point was that you wanted to be flexible inside it, so that's often a problem in spacesuits, that you can't move around enough.

Speaker 16 And it had a flexibility rating of 95%, which means that the wearer can move into 95% of the positions that you can if you were naked. But what this basically means is if you look at that,

Speaker 14 reverse cowgirl.

Speaker 15 What are the positions that you can't get into?

Speaker 16 I don't know actually. Maybe they don't tell you in case you try and break it.

Speaker 15 I'm not sure I can get into all that many positions, even when naked.

Speaker 14 You might only have a 75%

Speaker 14 thing even without the spacesuit on. Oh, God.

Speaker 15 And each year as I get older it gets less, doesn't it?

Speaker 16 Look, it's a funny spacesuit. It's not that morbid.
It looks like someone's inflated and

Speaker 15 if I wear this 95% space suit, does that mean I can now get into ball positions?

Speaker 14 No, certainly not.

Speaker 16 I'm afraid it's not 95% of the average person's, it's 95% of your positions naked. Your naked is 100%.

Speaker 15 You could barely do anything.5%.

Speaker 14 Don't buy it. If only you could transmute your consciousness into an AX-5 spacesuit, then you'd be able to do more than you could today.

Speaker 15 How many percentage do you think you could do wearing just a cape?

Speaker 14 That's over 100%. 110.

Speaker 14 I'm sorry.

Speaker 14 Have you finished this?

Speaker 14 I just need to to describe how this works.

Speaker 14 Because it's ridiculous. The AX5.
The AX-5, you know, we've got

Speaker 14 the AX-5.

Speaker 16 The AX-5 looks like a hugely inflated Michelin, man.

Speaker 16 So essentially, it's like being in a giant bubble where it seems like you can pull most of your limbs out of the sleeves and sort of your legs out of the legs and move around inside it.

Speaker 16 But it looks totally absurd, because it looks like you've put on a piece of clothing 20 sizes too big for you. So they decided not to let it go.

Speaker 16 But it's, you know, a good amount of roominess in there, just with your head hanging onto the helmet, and the rest of your body can swing around underneath it.

Speaker 14 That's a good idea, actually.

Speaker 14 Shall we wrap up? Yeah, yep.

Speaker 16 Oh, do you know what the French for cod piece is?

Speaker 14 Le Poisson.

Speaker 16 I thought you'd go down that road.

Speaker 14 Le Pièce de Poisson.

Speaker 16 It's not, it's brave, spelt the same as bragette, but with an R,

Speaker 14 which seems to have so much room for confusion. Braguettes for breakfast?

Speaker 15 Oh, that would look brilliant for a French 16th century sitcom, wouldn't it?

Speaker 16 Yeah, stupid bars. Just put a braquette over your penis and get on with it.

Speaker 14 Are you sure? Madame's halfway through eating it.

Speaker 15 Okay, that's it.

Speaker 14 That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 14 If you would 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.

Speaker 14 James at Egg Shapes. Andy at Andrew Hunter M.
And Jaczynski.

Speaker 16 You can email podcast at qi.com.

Speaker 14 Yep. Or you can go to our group Twitter account, which is at qi podcast, or go to no such thingasafish.com, which is where we have all of our previous episodes.
Also, why not go to iTunes?

Speaker 14 All of our first year of fish is up there now. You can buy that too.
And we will be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then.
Goodbye.

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