93: No Such Thing As A Christmas Treenis

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

My name is Dan Shriver.

I'm sitting here with Anna Chaczynski, James Harkin, and Andy Murray.

And once again, we've gathered around the microphones, this time with our four favorite Christmas facts because this is our Christmas Day special.

And so, in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, James Harkin.

Okay, my fact this week is that the oldest turkey in the UK is called dinner.

That's great.

And yet, so cruel.

How old is he?

She?

It's a he and he is at least 16 years old.

Okay.

And they know that because for 16 years they haven't eaten it.

Does it get to a point where a bird is too old to eat?

You could eat it, but I think birds tend to be nicer when they're younger.

Right.

Yeah, because usually we eat turkeys when they're about really young, right?

12 weeks old or something.

Chickens, especially, very young indeed, yeah.

Yeah.

They just fatten them up straight away and kill them.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

On the farm that Dinner lives, there's a farmer called Mr.

Gee, who sort of manages the farm.

And he believes that Dinner has lived so long because he's got a girlfriend,

a turkey girlfriend, not a human.

And he said he's got a girlfriend about five years ago and it seems to have given him a new lease of life.

He's certainly become a bit more of a show-off.

Wow.

How old is she?

It doesn't say.

Presumably.

I think it's a bit of sugar daddy.

I think, isn't she also the only only other female turkey on the farm?

I think it sounds.

Wow, and she's gone for the old guy.

The oldest

chicken.

It was either an old guy or a chicken, I think.

Oh, wow.

I reckon that her choices were pretty slim.

They did say that one of the reason for his longevity is due to him being too aggressive to catch.

Wow.

You know, there are.

So turkey hunting is a thing, and turkey calling is a thing in America, isn't it?

And

they have this with a bunch of bird hunters, actually.

But I think turkeys can make 28 different distinct sounds with their voices that mean different things.

They basically have a vocabulary of 28.

Wow.

And turkey.

Dan, you sounded really impressed at that very large vocabulary.

Wow, that's really eight.

Well, I'm just wondering what...

So do you know what the words are?

Gobble is one of the

purr.

They do a soft purr.

They gobble in various ways to attract attention.

They've got gradations of alarm calls.

So I think a certain type of gobble is sort of a, I think there's a bit of danger around, but don't freak out too much of your mid-meal.

And then there's a different sound that says, Really, guys, get the hell out of here.

We're in trouble.

And people who hunt turkeys impersonate them, and it's a real skill.

If you go online, there's a in fact, I read a website online this morning that said something like 20 reasons why you continually fail to attract turkeys with your turkey calling, and then a list of reasons where people completely screw up turkey calls.

I was reading about turkey wishbones.

Oh, yeah.

So, turkeys are related, people think, to dinosaurs.

And if you look at the skeleton of a dinosaur, they have wishbones.

So imagine

T-Rex-sized wishbones.

God, and do we know if they broke them over dinner?

Yeah, who knows?

But time travelers are the future when they go back at Thanksgiving at Jurassic times.

That's very cool.

Yeah.

You know the thing about sparing turkeys?

So the president every year spares a turkey.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Of all the turkeys that President Obama has freed, only one has lived past its second birthday because of the farming practices, which mean they have very short lifespans now.

Oh, dear.

The last two that they pardoned.

Do you know the names?

No.

Mac and cheese.

So mac and cheese, they got pardoned and they got to stay in a $350 a-night suite the night before they were pardoned.

Did they enjoy that?

Well, I don't know, but the hotel broke the rules for them because there's usually a requirement that any pet over £40 is not allowed to stay, and they were £50 each.

So

let's hope they stayed it because some rules were bent.

Why is everyone naming turkeys after food?

It's so mean.

Yeah, I know.

Well, they are called turkey, to be fair.

I mean, they are named after food already.

Do you know what their Latin name means?

The Latin name that Linnaeus gave them in 1758 is Meleagris Galapavo Galapavo, which means guinea fowl, chicken, peacock, chicken, peacock.

He's judging his bet.

Yeah, I was reading The Economist thing about it, and it said it was wrong five different ways.

So, why is it called turkey?

Like the animal, not the country?

Because we thought it was from Turkey.

When they were brought over, they were brought over by Arab traders who, and at the time, we just thought all traders from that part of the world swore allegiance to the Ottoman Empire, and the capital of that was in Turkey.

Okay, so we just thought, yeah, Middle Eastern equals Turkish.

Yeah, okay, right.

Actually, something that we did do because we were so ignorant about where they'd come from.

When we decided to go back and properly colonize America in the early 1700s, we brought a whole bunch of turkeys with us on our ships, not we, the people who were going to colonize, colonise, to Jamestown, brought a bunch of turkeys from Britain to America, saying, Well, we better bring these turkeys so we can farm them in America.

And they got off the boat at the other end and we're like, this place is full of turkeys, guys.

That was a waste of space.

So farmers used to walk their turkeys to London all the way from Norfolk, because that's where turkey farming really took off and it's still there today, obviously.

And it would take months to get them along there because they walk quite slowly.

They walk at about one mile an hour.

So frustrating.

So in the weeks before, in the weeks leading up to christmas in the 18th and 19th centuries all the routes into london would just be clogged up with traffic with queues of turkeys walking along and the thing is it's such a long journey they're not meant to walk long distances or they're not really built for it so they had to have special little shoes made for them really yeah wow they would shoe them have you seen the shoes Did they not like put tar on their feet?

That is what they did with geese because geese refused to wear shoes.

Geese refused to wear shoes.

And that's apparently there's a saying to shoe a goose means something really, really difficult difficult to do.

Oh, really?

It's like shoeing a goose.

So they dipped their feet in tar and then they covered them in sand to give them some protection.

But the turkeys, they didn't do that, did they?

No.

Can I do a thing about old things?

Yeah, yeah, sure.

Yeah.

Okay, so there was an article in 2010 with Britain's oldest man.

They asked him what his secret for a long life is, and he said he has five secrets, but he could only remember four of them.

He said, good friends, a religion, looking for the best in people, and being a vegetarian.

There's one other, but I can't remember what it was.

Actually, I also found the elixir of life 200 years ago.

Yeah, I always forget that one.

Do you have more stuff?

Shall we move on to our next fact?

Can I just tell a quite a quick funny turkey story about a pet turkey?

Yeah, sure.

So this is about a pet turkey that went missing.

It's quite a happy Christmas tale.

A pet turkey that went missing for 10 days and then returned to its owner.

It was called Bernard, again after Bernard Matthews, because we only name turkeys after the fact that we eat them.

And it was kept as a pet by this family.

It was taken by a fox, so there was a trail of feathers and blood and stuff left in this woman's garden.

So she said, oh, bugger, it's obviously a goner.

Turned out he'd escaped from the fox himself, and he'd turned up, like, all beaten and battered, at someone else's door.

And this other person had taken him in in a nearby village and looked after him for a bit.

And then, after four or five days, he ran away from her shed again and ran, and someone else found him.

He was attacked by a dog, and the owner of that dog rescued him and took him in again.

And then she put out a Facebook thing, I think, and the original owner was like, oh, that's my turkey, you've got my turkey.

By the time she'd shown up, the turkey had run away again to a different person's farm.

And eventually, this different person put a message up on Facebook going, I think I got your turkey, mate.

And 10 days of just Oliver twisting it from one house to the other, it turned up back at home.

Isn't that nice?

That's a great story.

To end up on the dinner table.

I hope to know how it escaped the fox in the first place.

Me too.

Turkey versus fox.

I feel like I know how that goes mostly.

Oh, that's pretty big, though, you know.

Very big.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They flap and kick.

And yeah, they can be dangerous.

They've been described as fluffy velociraptors.

Have they been described by you just now?

Just the last thing.

They said about this turkey dinner.

One of the things they said was he normally keeps himself to himself.

That's the sort of thing you normally say about serial killers.

20 dead foxes were found.

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Okay, time for our second fact and that is Chaczynski.

My fact this week is that Kerry Grant and Clark Gable used to meet up once a year around Christmas to exchange unwanted monogrammed gifts they'd received.

That's so good.

It's so amazing.

I really hope that Jeremy Corbyn and Jeremy Clarkson have the same arrangement.

So I can't take credit for finding this.

This was sent in by another QI researcher called Lauren Gilbert, but she has given me permission to mention it out loud on this podcast.

So I am because it's so amazing.

Yeah, that's incredible.

And it just came out in this interview.

I think it was an interview with Clark Gable, and he said they'd call each other up after Christmas.

And Clark would say, Did you get any gifts with your initials on you?

Don't want?

And if he had, I'd immediately rush round to his house and claim them as my own.

And we'd do a swap.

That's fantastic.

Fantastic.

Yeah.

I find them really confusing.

I mean, they're very similar in a lot of ways.

Carrie Grant and Clark Gable, aren't they?

Yeah.

Big claim there.

Oh, yeah.

I'm only confused because I did all the research for them.

I forgot to put their names into each fact, so I had to re-research everything to work out which one was Gable.

Did you just put CG for each one?

You've made the same mistake a lot of other people have made.

They were both married five times, which, since that's an unusual number of times to be married, is quite a coincidence, I think.

Wow.

Did they swap wives

as well?

They did swapped monograms, happy fifth divorce cards.

Carrie Grant actually, weirdly, is quite responsible for a lot of pop culture without probably him knowing it.

So it's said that a large part of James Bond, the character, was based on.

Did Ian Fleming say that?

Yeah, Ian Fleming was a big Carrie Grant fan.

And Christopher Reeves said that he based a lot of his performance as Superman on Carrie Grant.

Apparently he turned down the role of James Bond.

I'm not sure to what extent that's true, but he, according to the story, he he was 58 at the time and he thought that's a bit old to be playing this sort of relatively young spine.

Not something that's held back other actors.

He once got a terrier and he named it after his own birth name because he was born Archibald Leach and he got a terrier called Archibald and he called it Archibald Leach.

He should have called it Archibald Leach.

Yes.

Carrie Grant also started the English Muffin Lovers Society.

Really?

Yep.

He was staying at a Hilton hotel in Istanbul and he only got one and a half English muffins for his breakfast.

And so he wrote to Conrad Hilton saying, where's my extra half plumping?

And they'd apparently done it as a kind of cost saving because most people only ate three quarters of their muffin halves.

But then he said, no, I want two, and they changed the rules.

And then he said, in the future, if anyone ever got only one and a half muffins for their breakfast, then they could become a member of his club.

Wow.

I would just wonder where my second half of the second muffin had gone.

It goes on someone else's.

It goes to someone's other one and a half.

I understand that, but but

I would go around the cafe trying to match up my other half with someone else's half.

Right, yes.

And that could end up being the love of your life or something.

Yeah, yeah.

That would be a bit like Kelly Hildebrandt, who in 2009 married Kelly Hildebrandt.

Wow.

They met each other on Facebook, found out they had the same name, met each other in real life, and then got married.

Well, just because they had the same name, they thought, that's enough.

I don't like you at all.

I find you repulsive.

We have at least one thing in common.

Clark Gable

said one of the most famous lines in movie history, which is from Gone with the Wind.

And the line being, frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

So there was a rumor that they were fined for saying damn at the time,

and no one is quite sure that that's true.

But they do have scripts of alternative lines that they had before they had that line.

And you can read them.

And so these are a few.

Frankly, my dear, I just don't care.

Frankly, my dear, it makes my gorge rise.

There we go.

Better alternative.

Frankly, my dear, I don't give a hoot.

And frankly, my dear, my indifference is boundless.

Oh, that's a nice one, isn't it?

I like that one.

You have to have a fun afternoon coming up with all those lines.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It also had very different names during the draft of the book when it was being written.

I don't know if we've mentioned this before.

Not in our stars.

And this is a weird one.

Barbara Black Sheep.

Yeah, one of the versions of the titles was Barbara Black Sheep.

Should have called the draft Gone with the Draft.

Do you know how Kerry Grant got his stage name?

Because,

as I said, he was originally called Archibald Leach.

No.

And he was an acrobat as a child, and

that's partly why he was so good at physical comedy.

It's because from the age of about five or six, he'd been walking on stilts.

He'd been doing trapeze stuff.

When he went for screen tests in America, somebody said to him, Archie just doesn't sound right in America.

And he replied, It doesn't sound particularly right in Britain either.

So they went through a load of names.

And he was almost going to be Kerry Lockwood, but then the studio executives didn't quite like Lockwood either.

And someone in this meeting just started reading out a list of names.

And when they got to Grant, he said, That's all right.

Did he say that's all right?

Because he was like, I heard Clark Gable gets a lot of really desirable monogram Christmas gifts.

That's going to work for me.

He used to do a lot of LSD.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Carrie Grant.

Now, he wasn't doing it

totally recreationally.

It It was a medical thing.

Doctors were trying to combat his depression and all sorts of things.

It was just impotence, wasn't it?

I think it was a cure for impotence.

Was it just impotence?

I mean, he took a hundred courses at least of LSD.

But isn't it true that Timothy Leary, who's like the great god of LSD, he decided to do it because he knew that Carrie Grant did it.

Really?

Really?

That's right, yeah.

Wow.

Groucho Marx did it as well.

Did he?

Yeah, when he was 78.

This guy, Paul Krasner, who's a writer, says that he did it with Groucho Marx.

And weirdly, I've spoken to a lot of people who knew Groucho Marx who said that they don't think it's true, but this guy has a really vivid account.

And he Groucho Marx turns out to be a collective psychosis.

Okay, time for our next fact, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray.

So, my fact this week is that when it gets really cold, Christmas trees can turn to glass.

Wow.

Bullshit.

It's true.

We've been doing 90 episodes.

This is the first time you decided to respond to a fact in that way.

And it's to one of mine.

I'm living.

It's the first time I've thought of facts as completely ridiculous.

Okay, I will explain.

So, lots of Christmas trees, as in coniferous trees, evergreens, you know, whether they're spruces or firs, whatever they are, they live in forests where temperatures get really, really cold, as in minus 60 degrees sometimes.

So that's a massive problem for organisms because if you have cells and the water in your cells freezes into ice crystals, they can burst through the walls of the cells and cause massive damage to whatever, to an animal or to a tree or whatever it might be.

So trees have this incredibly clever thing.

They turn to glass.

And when I say glass, I don't mean glass as in a glass of something like silica, which is what that's made of.

The molecules all freeze into this sort of glassy state where they don't move around.

Yeah, so it's a state of matter is glass, right?

Yeah, exactly.

So it's not quite a liquid and not quite a solid.

Yeah.

So the atoms can move around a little bit, but they're not kind of fluid like a liquid, but they're not really, really stuck together like a solid.

Yeah.

So it's sort of preemptive going into a frozen mode, except without that freezing, without the ice crystals.

But so afterwards it unglasses itself and becomes a normal tree again.

Yeah,

that's crazy.

It's pretty cool.

Yeah, yeah, that's amazing.

There are some animals that do similar things, aren't there?

The tardigrade, which is...

Have we ever spoken about tardigrades on this podcast?

No, sure, sure.

They are like one of our favorite animals at QI, aren't they?

These are little tiny things, also called water bears, which can survive massive heat, really, really cold temperatures, radiation.

They can survive all sorts.

They can go into space and still live.

And one way that they survive very cold temperatures is they get rid of almost all of the water in their cells and they kind of turn their cells into an almost kind of glassy state.

Wow.

And this kind of glassy state is something that hasn't really been seen much in nature or anywhere else.

And they think they might be able to make new kinds of glass by studying it.

Wow.

That's very cool.

They are amazing tardigrades.

Maybe that's the fifth secret of how to live for a really long time: is no water.

Just dry yourself into a husk.

Have we ever talked about the frog before?

Who, when it gets, I think we have on this podcast, haven't we?

What kind of frog is it where when it gets really cold, it just freezes solid and you assume it's dead because it can do that for months?

It's a blood frog.

Yes.

Yeah.

And then it can just thaw in summer.

It turns into like a little frogsicle.

Wow.

And

it has antifreeze antifreeze in its blood, and so it stops its blood from freezing.

And it can go into really, really, really cold temperatures.

There are some fish which have antifreeze in their blood because they're swimming in water, which is sub-zero temperatures.

Is that right?

Because the water isn't frozen because it's got salt in it?

I think that's right.

And so if they're swimming around in the Arctic, then that's how they do that.

It's either crocodiles or alligators.

when it becomes to a point where a river or lake or whatever is going to freeze over, they stick their head near the surface and and they let the uh they let it freeze over their head, except for their nostrils, which are sticking out, so that they can still breathe and survive.

But they effectively hibernate with a block of ice around their head and their body just flowing in the water below.

Wow, have I made that up?

It does sound like a made-up thing.

I really think it is.

I really think it's true.

It might be true.

If that is true, that's incredible.

And if it's not, then that's not surprising.

So you don't call bullshit on his stuff.

We should be saying it non-stop

every

episode.

I've only got so much breath.

In Antarctica, I was looking into their Christmas tree, and they obviously don't have a tree there.

So they created a tree which is made out of rubbish bits.

It's all iron bars and so on.

So it's in the shape of a Christmas tree, which looks really nice.

And I started looking into Christmas Day there generally.

Things like they often get quite drunk and they have a challenge whereby they have to get as many Christmas hats onto penguins as possible.

Yeah, yeah, that's what they get drunk on eggnog.

And the challenge is you have to use as many little Christmas hats, get them onto as many penguins, and the most penguins you get them on, you win the competition.

Right.

Yeah, and also, they don't have mistletoe there, so what they do instead is they hang a fish's head up, and you're meant to kiss under that very romantic image of a stinking rotting.

But mistletoe comes from the German for dung stick, so it's not that romantic in itself.

That's James's opening line: whenever he catches anyone under it.

Well, did you know that

he seduced his wife to kiss me under the dung stick?

There was a thing,

Christmas trees always used to catch on fire because before electric lights, you just stuck candles on the ends of the branches, and obviously that's an enormous fire risk.

So lots of people died in Christmas tree fires.

But as a result, loads of people in the 19th century, especially patented fire extinguishing systems, which you can then attach to your tree.

Oh, wow.

So there's a hose running all the way up the trunk and you just sort of secrete it up there.

And then

instead of a star at the top, or the star is actually a sprinkler in the shape of a star.

So when the tree catches fire, it's just crazy.

That happened to my Christmas tree one year.

Really?

Yeah, we came out after we told Santa who had just been, and my grandfather accidentally knocked a candle onto the tree, and the whole thing went up as we came out to get our presents.

And

it was a hard moment.

Whoa.

Did it properly burn?

That would ruin Christmas.

Oh, it did.

It was, yeah, it was petrifying.

Well, that's not petrifying, that's a completely different thing that happens to trees.

Here's something.

It's quite a scary little image that I hadn't never heard of.

Tarantulas live in Christmas trees.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

But not the big home alone guys.

Yeah, it's the tiniest of all the tarantulas, and they're only a quarter of a centimeter in length.

Yeah.

Where is that?

It's in Siberia.

Didn't they used to decorate trees in Germanic countries with little kind of spiders, Christmas spiders?

Did they?

And spider webs.

In Ukraine, I think they still do that.

Do they?

Yeah.

Christmas spider.

Yeah.

It's not very festive.

One thing that you get a lot in the newspapers every year is this is the worst Christmas tree in Britain.

They all love that story.

There's a few this year.

There's one in Stockport where the locals have said it's the worst Christmas tree in Britain.

One resident says it's a disgusting tree that looks like it was found in a tip.

and then the other one is in Kempston in Bedfordshire, which apparently is so weedy it has to be propped up by a lamppost.

But I just love these stories because you just see them and they're just like the weediest, rubbishiest tree ever.

But it's not as bad as one.

There's one in Noyabrusk in Russia, and their locals have demanded that they remove it because it has been nicknamed the penis fair because it has an extremely bulbous bottom and a shaft-like top.

One local said, Let's be honest, it looks more like a penis than a Christmas tree, which I've seen it, and I think that guy needs to see a doctor.

I call it my Christmas tree nice.

But presents are in the face.

The presents are my balls.

Jingle balls all the way.

That year that it's set alight was pretty terrific.

When Dan's granddad tripped on it.

Fortunately, it does have a sprinkler system ready installed in the top.

Okay, time for a final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that one of the contenders for this year's Christmas charts is a prog rock album by Pope Francis.

Yep.

Have you listened to it?

I have.

I've listened to the whole album.

It's weird, isn't it?

It's amazing.

The opening track sounds like a Pink Floyd track.

Yeah.

It's got all these amazing noises.

Is that anutio vobis gaudium magnum?

Yes, that is, yeah.

That means we announce with great joy.

Ah.

Or we announce with joy magnum, I think.

Said to be used in ice cream campaigns in the near future.

But it's the words that you use when you announce a new pope.

Oh, okay, right.

That word comes from.

So

the background of this album is that they've taken speeches that the pope has made over the course of his tenure, and he's been, it's usually you can hear the applause of crowds when he starts speaking, but they've hired an incredible team to make this prog rock meets just slash metal.

It's an amazing album full of incredible

slash metal.

There's shredding on it.

There is shredding guitar, particularly if you listen to the single that he released, which is the title of the album, Wake Up, Go, Go.

Forward.

That's the title of the single.

Now, check this out.

According to a number of sources,

this cannot be true, but the title track, which has been released as a single, has been downloaded over a billion times.

A billion.

Well, there are more than a billion Catholics in the world.

I looked into this, and according to the Guinness World Records, the best-selling single worldwide is White Christmas by Bing Crosby with 50 million copies.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

So 50 million to a billion is quite a bit.

Well, isn't the Pope just sitting there in the Vatican constantly downloading it trying to have these numbers

if you got a billion downloads you could probably afford to build another Vatican

a really classy one this time do you think it's cost that's stopping them from building a second Vatican

so I read an article about a formula for the ultimate Christmas single which is obviously always a bit dubious and it's from about 10 years ago it's from 2004 it was on the BBC and I don't know how many of these boxes the Pope's album ticks.

Okay.

But apparently, the recipe includes a reference to Father Christmas, sleigh bells, a children's choir, and a charity element.

Okay.

Okay.

So.

Charity element?

Tick?

Yeah, there's a charity element, I'm sure.

Okay, well, also, the song should include Christmas in the title, Wishes for Peace on Earth.

It's probably got those, and lots of airplay at office parties.

Well, at the QI Christmas party, I can guarantee you there's going to be Pope Francis and Rocket Adders.

True, we've downloaded it a billion times.

He has to play it a few times.

You said that he might have been on iTunes just constantly downloading his song.

He's never been on the internet in his life.

No.

So he couldn't do that really.

He does have 20 million Twitter followers despite never having been on the internet.

Well, he's got two accounts as well, right?

One in Latin and one in English.

He might even have a few more than that, but yeah.

20 million.

Wow.

That's impressive for someone who's never even turned up.

He's never watched TV since 1990 after making a promise to the Virgin Mary.

So he wouldn't have seen loads of episodes of catchphrase.

That's terrible.

He's probably waiting for the boxer.

A few years ago, didn't Two Minute Silence get into the top 20, into the charts?

I think in 2010,

on

November the 11th, the Two Minute Silence was in the top 20.

Really?

Downloaded singles.

Yeah.

Weird.

It was the Royal British Legion.

It was them in particular being silent.

It was those people in particular being silent.

I mean, we've got no evidence it was them because it was just silence, but they promised us when we downloaded the album that

because that always puts me in mind of the famous John Cage Four Minutes 33, which everyone thinks is silence but isn't really.

It's ambient noise, isn't it?

You always have to have an orchestra there not playing, and you need an audience there.

And it's the kind of little kind of cough and a little fart and a little kind of

giggle that's.

I'll never go into a concert with you.

Speaking of of weird singles that were unexpected hits,

The Singing Dogs, which was released in the 1950s, and I think it reached number 22 in the singles charts, but it was really sold over a million copies in its first year.

Anyway, so the idea came from this Danish recording engineer called Carl Weissman, and his job was actually recording bird sounds, and he kept getting annoyed because dogs kept, I don't know why he was keeping dogs in the studio, but dogs kept on barking and getting in the way of his recordings.

And then he thought, actually, I could put this to music and make them sing.

And if you look up the singing dogs, it was a hit at the time, and it's so good.

They sing jingle bells.

There's five dogs.

They were stars.

I've heard it.

It's really good.

It's so good.

I mean, it's okay.

I've only downloaded it 900 million times.

This is completely off topic, so I can mention it later.

But just while we're on Christmas, because I'm going to have another year until I can mention this,

I read an article last weekend about a Santa school that's being run.

It's the world's largest Santa school.

It's called the International University of Santa Claus set in America.

There's a guy called Tim Conahan who runs it.

And

the curriculum includes wardrobe, posing techniques, answering difficult questions, knowing the current toys and your ho-ho-hoes.

And y if you do one course, you get a Bachelor of Santa Clausology.

If you do two, you get a Masters of Santa Clausology.

And if you do more and you do a dissertation, then you get your doctorate of Santa Claus.

You don't get a ho-ho-ho level.

Oh,

any cracker manufacturers, you can have that one.

Um, yeah, that's very cool.

Has anyone heard the 1980s album by Anthony Daniels, who played C3PO?

No, no,

Christmas album.

Uh, it includes songs such as What Can You Get a Wookiee for Christmas When He Already Owns a Comb?

That is a great title, yeah.

And R2D2, We Wish You a Merry Christmas is another one.

But this is a weird thing.

There is a very famous rock star, and this album was the first time he was on anything.

Ooh.

Can you guess who it is?

Brian Ferry.

No.

Brian Adams.

What year?

What year are we talking?

1980.

1980.

John Bon Jovi.

Correct.

No.

Whoa.

What?

How did you get that?

I don't know.

I just went for an 80s.

Yeah, amazing.

His first ever recording on anything was on this R2D2 C3PO Christmas album.

That's amazing.

And that spring-boarded his career, did it?

That's weird that he did, because

the actors who played R2D2 and CB30 hated each other, didn't they?

No.

Yeah, I think they really hated each other.

And so they obviously set that aside in order to...

So you know when they're going beep beep beep beep beep beep is that like swearing?

They actually the beep beeps was just it was originally normal language They just had to beep over everything they said

so do you know the first number one single that was banned

in Britain?

Was it the Blobby, Mr.

Blobby Christmas single?

What do you mean banned?

Sorry, do you know the first one?

Banned by the BBC.

I mean banned by the BBC, yeah, the BBC wasn't playing.

Relaxed by Frankie Ghost to Hollywood.

It wasn't, although that was banned.

It was Jautem,

which no one was.

Isn't a family Christmas anyway?

Yeah.

It's not a Christmas single.

I don't think those were the grounds on which they banned it, though.

Oh, okay.

This is not Christmassy enough.

I'm not letting people listen to this.

Even though it's released in the middle of the year, I still think it should have a few sleigh bells.

But yeah, and apparently the Vatican hated it.

It was denounced by the Vatican.

There were rumours at the time that the Pope had excommunicated people who bought it, everyone in Italy who'd bought the single because it was so rude.

And then I think it was Jane Birkin, wasn't it, who sung it?

And she said that the Pope had been her greatest PR man because obviously that made it super popular.

Yeah, it's probably the best thing that can ever happen to a song.

Yeah.

It's been banned by the Pope.

Yeah, that's amazing.

Any word on whether the Pope likes no such thing as a fish?

Just one more thing on Pope Francis that I really like.

Have you guys heard of the politician Bob Brady in America?

So Pope Francis visited America and he did a speech.

And while he was on stage, he drank from a glass of water and put it back down.

And as the Pope was leaving, Bob Brady jumped onto stage and grabbed the glass of water and he started taking photos of himself drinking from the glass that the Pope had drunk from.

And he was really open about it, saying that he was going to keep the holy water because he said this is holy water and that he was going to use it for the blessing of his grandchildren right uh when they were when they were born and people pointed out to him that just because the pope drank it uh it doesn't necessarily mean that he's blessed the liquid so it's not technically holy water so that implies that every catholic church which has holy water in the font or whatever has had the pope come and lap at it it's all papal backwash that's why you're drinking holy water

but yeah bob brady go online and look at the photos they're hilarious and he is just so he doesn't care that he does it He's not embarrassed by it at all.

He offers to pay for the glass.

He offered to pay for the glass.

Yeah, he's wrote to them and said, I'll obviously...

Yeah, but we know the Pope can pay for a glass because he's had a billion downloads of his song.

They should call that scandal Watergate, shouldn't they?

Another one for the cracker manufacturers.

All right, and that's it.

That's all of our Christmas facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things we've said over the course of this podcast, you can do so by getting us on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, Andy at Andrew Hunter M, James at Egg Shaped, and Czaczynski.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

Yep, you can also go to no such thingasafish.com, our website where we have all of our previous episodes.

And have a Merry Christmas.

Have a happy new year.

We'll see you in 2016.

Goodbye.

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