63: No Such Thing As An Anti-German Sock

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Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish this week coming to you from the Hay Festival in Hay.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with three other QILs.

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

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

Starting with you, Czaczynski.

Yes, did you mention that these are specifically literary facts?

Absolutely.

You did mention it.

Shaking.

Yeah, because it's a literary festival.

Yeah.

And that's why I said it.

Yeah.

That's why I thought you said it.

So, my literary fact is that the first ever novel ended mid-sentence.

And this is a Japanese novel called The Tale of Genji.

It was written in the early 11th century, so probably 1008, I think.

And yeah, ended in the middle of a sentence.

Was it like a cliffhanger ending?

Kind of.

I mean, not as melodramatic, but she's in the a character's introducing another character to someone, and it ends saying Karu introduces him to the.

You never find out who.

And people don't know if that was intentional or if she just died in the middle of gay dog and got bored of it.

I think most critics think that it was intentional.

I heard another version, which is like

she just carried on.

She was going to carry on and carry on until she couldn't do it anymore.

Because it is quite a long book, isn't it?

Yeah, I think it's about 1100 pages.

Yeah, 1,100 pages.

Apparently, there's like 400 characters in there.

Yeah, and none of them have names.

No, none of them have names.

I read in one.

How do you do that?

Well, yeah, it must have have been so confusing.

So there are 400 characters, and apparently, at the time, it was rude in Japanese.

It's all about Japanese aristocratic society in the 12th century, and it was rude to refer to someone by name because it was thought as being unnecessarily familiar.

So it had 400 characters, none of them are allowed to be referred to by name.

So they're all like Your Excellency, Your Majesty, His Highness.

Oh, so they still had titles.

Okay.

Yeah, but I mean there are 75 His Highnesses.

So I saw it people like, oh, what's he doing here?

said him.

She knew what he meant about him.

That's a very cool way to end it.

I like it.

Yeah, it is.

So she's a bit like a precursor to Tristan Chandy.

She seemed to have interesting things she did with the form of the novel.

Good before the novel, which she had just invented.

It's a really bold, new kind of novel, actually.

She defied the convention that she created 400 pages earlier

by

there's one bit, so two-thirds of the way through she kills off the main character about whom the whole thing is written, the tale of Genji, just dies.

And also, it doesn't really explain that he's been killed off, it's just that there's a blank chapter called Vanished Into the Clouds with no text in it, and then in the next chapter it becomes apparent that the protagonist has died.

Wow,

yeah.

Does anyone know what the first e-book was?

No, that's a thing where it's like there's a few different claims, but probably the most likely it was a book called Uncle Roger by Judy Molloy.

And you you can still see it online.

It's like all hyperlinked.

And you go in there and it's like there's been a party and it has all the characters.

You can click on a character and it gives you their little story.

And then you click on the next character and you do that.

It's like

choose your own adventure books, those things that we used to have.

They were amazing, those books, weren't they?

Yeah, so yeah.

And so reading that this was like Choose Your Own Adventure, I thought I'd look into those.

And apparently you can get adults to choose your own adventure books.

Oh god.

Yeah.

The two bestsellers that I could find are called Beer, Women, and Bad Decisions.

That's great.

Sounds good, though, doesn't it?

It sounds like you're going to try and get the bad decisions to get it.

Yeah, it's like another pint or a protein tonight.

Is that how it works?

That's how most nights work.

And the other best-selling one I found is called Night of a Thousand Boyfriends.

Night with a K?

So the first novel in the English language is obviously a different thing because this the tale of Genji is not in English.

People often say it's Thomas Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur,

which I like the idea that the first novel written in English has a French title.

So I think it's actually this novel written in 1561 called Beware the Cat,

which

is, I think, the main content of the first novel written in English, is just by a printer's assistant called William Baldwin.

It's kind of a horror novel about evil cats, really.

It's about this, so this guy eavesdrops on a cat and he overhears a female cat on trial.

And the female cat's called Mouse Slayer for obvious reasons.

And

she's having to explain to this court of other cats that she hasn't broken the cat's code of sexual conduct, which dictates that a female cat is not allowed to say no to any fewer than ten male cats a night.

So if you reject, you know, the tenth guy, you're up in court on trial.

Anyway, here overhears this.

At another point in this story, this first novel ever written, a priest slips on a cat and falls into a crowd.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Does he slip on a hatch, or does he slip on a hat?

A cat.

Sorry.

Sorry.

And he's going to be googling a book called Beware of of the Hat.

Oh wait.

What can these guys do?

Because we're on trial.

This priest does slip on it and he ends up with his face in the bare arse of a boy who out of fear.

What?

What kind of an excuse is that?

I slipped on a cat.

I mean, they were the 15th century equipment of banana skins.

Ends up with his face in the bare arse of a boy who, out of fear, had to be shit himself.

First novel.

Wow.

Wow.

That's the first novel?

That's the first

novel in English.

Wow.

Yeah.

So I was seeing what was happening in Europe at the same time as this book was being written, this Japanese one.

And in 1008, Bishop Burchard of Worms was writing books on canon law.

a book that he called Corrector et Medicus.

And the idea was he would give it to the bishops and give it to the priests and it would give them the rules of the penance that they would give out to people.

So if you did something wrong, it would be like five Hail Marys or whatever.

But quite a lot of it seems to be very strange.

One of the things was: if a woman had smothered a live fish inside her vagina

and then served it to men,

a classic prank.

I really got him with the old vagina fish.

He won't put cling film under my toilet again.

Either that or kneading bread on her naked buttocks,

then she would get a penance of two to five years fasting on feast days, according to this book.

So we were on endings of books earlier.

So the first version of Hamlet has a happy ending.

Oh.

Which is nice.

And it's called Amleth, which is Hamlet with the H at the other end.

That's a sole change.

Was that some kind of like copyright?

Bad news, William.

We can't do anything with Amleth.

Wait a minute.

But look.

He's a genius.

And it's the same.

It's right down to stabbing someone who's hiding behind an arras, all of that stuff.

But then, at the end of it, he kills the usurper, so his father's brother, his uncle,

killed the usurper, goes to England, marries the sexy Queen of Scots, returns with an army, and then becomes king.

And then he has two queens.

One is his wife and one is his mother, who was queen before.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's how it ends originally.

I think they should redo it like that.

Do we have it, or we've just heard that it exists?

I don't know.

Just about

authors who sort of came up with something and then flipped it into something else.

Do you know how Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas started?

Hunter S.

Thompson's book.

It was meant to be, and this is what he handed in when he handed in the majority of the book.

It was actually originally meant to be a 250-word photo caption for sports illustration.

They wanted him to go cover a derby, and he started writing, and they were like, it's great, but we kind of needed a fit in here.

Can you say the same stuff, but in there?

Wow, that's amazing.

Well, so they said, bad news, we can't put that below as a caption, so we've had to just give you a book deal instead.

No, no, no, they didn't like it at all, and he had to take it elsewhere.

Of course, they didn't like it at all.

If you read the mail online articles, and there's a one-line description of the photo, you know, so-and-so turned up at a party looking nice.

You don't want a 60,000-word novel there.

Okay, why don't we move on to our second fact, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that J.R.R.

Tolkien and C.S.

Lewis went to a party dressed as polar bears.

It was not a fancy dress party.

What?

There's the added shame of turning up in the same thing as somebody else.

So Tolkien and Lewis, they were really good friends, of course.

Go on.

Well, not always.

No, not always.

You'll probably get onto that in a few seconds.

Please, go on.

Wait, sorry, do we know the circumstances of the fancy dress party?

Or is that just a grand party?

Well, not really.

It seems to...

I read it in a book.

It was a biography of Tolkien, and it was like, here's one of the funny things that he used to do.

He used to do antalising.

Yeah, I know.

But he used to like dressing up a lot.

Yeah, not even when it wasn't a fancy dress party, party, just in day-to-day life.

Really?

Yeah, yeah, like he apparently very famously dressed up as an axe-wielding Anglo-Saxon warrior and chased his neighbour down the road.

So after they met for the very first time, C.S.

Lewis wrote in his diary about Tolkien, no harm in him, only needs a smack or so.

So they did, they were very good friends for a long time, and then they had a rivalry later.

Tolkien eventually, they had meetings of a group called the the Inklings, which is a sort of famous literary salon in a pub in Oxford, and they would read out their stuff to each other.

And eventually, Tolkien didn't even go along to meetings when he knew that C.S.

Lewis was going to read out Nania's stuff.

That's how bad it got.

He really didn't like the allegory and Nania didn't.

He said that writing an allegory, which Narnia a lot of people say is, yeah, I think it is.

He said that allegory was a very lazy form of writing and he didn't really approve of it.

So that's what it was.

One of the things that the Inklings did

is they would hold competitions to see who could read a particular lady's work without laughing.

She was the worst writer in the world.

Wait, was this a particular writer, or just did they find any woman author?

Right, because the way you said it, it just sounded like they were all massive sexists.

Yeah, it's true, but it did sound that.

It still sounds pretty sexy.

It does sound like.

So, this lady was called Amanda McKittrick Ross.

She wrote

lots of fiction, and here's some examples of things that she said.

She refers to eyes as globes of glare,

she refers to legs as bony supports, and she refers to pants as sudden necessity.

Okay.

Well, that one's got assonance.

The first one had alliteration.

I mean, this is like ticking all the literary boxes, as far as I can tell.

Okay, she called sweat globules of liquid lava.

That's great.

This is a damn good simile.

Okay.

Well, absolutely.

One of the main reasons, in fact, I think the main reason actually that Tolkien objected to C.S.

Lewis's allegory, and I just think this is quite interesting.

It's not funny at all.

But Tolkien was a strict Catholic.

And he, so, for instance, he, when they started at the start of the 20th century, even in Catholic Mass, they would start saying that in English, he would say the Mass very loudly in Latin in the middle of church while they were saying it in English to make clear his thoughts.

But he didn't object so C.S.

Lewis was an Anglican, so Tolkien, so he didn't really believe that the word of God should only be spoken through priests and members of the clergy, whereas Tolkien did.

So Tolkien thought that it wasn't C.S.

Lewis's place to be telling people about religion because he wasn't a member of the clergy.

It was just, you know, it was quite interesting.

Also, Lewis nominated Tolkien for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961.

And the committee rejected him.

And they only recently have released the papers, which, because they have a sort of 50-year rule on the committee's decisions.

And they rejected Tolkien, saying that he was a bad storyteller.

No!

They said the storytelling here is just not up to scratch.

Wow.

You know, the Lord of the Rings, I don't know if this is really common knowledge, but the Beatles tried to option it to make it into a movie, and they approached Stanley Kubrick to make it.

What?

I think everyone decided it was a bad idea.

Once they all saw it, yeah, but

they were going to play all the characters, wasn't it?

They were going to play all the characters.

We would have characterized the Beatles, Lord of the Rings.

It would have been amazing.

I think I've read, like, there are so many theories about why it was rejected, and I don't even know why there needs to be a theory, it's quite obvious.

But

one was going to do it, and then they were like, no, he's such a terrible writer.

We love the Beatles, we love Kubrick and the Beatles, but you know.

The talking thing.

I read one theory that it was because Paul and John were fighting over who got to play Gandalf.

That's great.

Some things on fancy dress

while we're here.

There's a lady called Shani Christie who lives in Kent, and she has a phobia of people in costumes, which the newspaper article called Metam Physomyophobia.

And she works in theatre.

So she said, people think it's quite funny that

I'm working in something that means I'm around people in costume all the time.

I have to watch people get dressed in costume in order to reassure myself that I know who they are.

So she has to watch them get changed just so she knows it's not a that's a fantastic excuse for being a pervert I must say.

But also, so she's not only got a fear of people in costume, she suddenly recognises them as the character that they're playing.

Yeah, something like that.

So she's like at the Lion King, she'll be like, hey, Mike, have a good symbol?

Evacuate the thing!

There's a lion loose!

Is that the zoo?

It's me!

Yes, me again!

Every night the same!

Hello, Lemon Zoo!

There are a load of cats everywhere!

Do you say hats?

No, cats!

I want to know when people started dressing as as really crazy things, because they used to dress as

sort of you know aristocracy or people from different ancient Greeks who would dress up as ancient Greeks or Trojans and I think I've pinned down one early date in terms of dressing as crazy things, which was 1745 King Louis XV of France had a masked ball at Versailles and there were 15,000 guests.

And everyone was in nice dresses and with masks, but he and several of his courtiers turned up dressed as clipped you hedges.

And I

is that you?

I think that's the year zero for dressing as stupid stuff.

Sorry, just speaking of French fancy dress, do you know the Charles IV of France, the story of the dance of the burning man?

Burning Men, actually.

This was a fancy dress party, and Charles IV and a load of his courtiers came dressed as savages,

which meant they blacked up.

And they covered themselves in pitch tar

and they chained themselves together.

And then when they arrived at the party, one of the other guests wanted to see have a good look at their costumes, so he went up to them with a naked flame and they were all wearing pitch tar

and they and they were all chained together and they all went up.

And I think two people were burned alive, two people died within days of their injuries.

And it really um like he was pretty mad to start off with, but that really tipped him over.

Wow.

Fancy dress is a dangerous game.

You shouldn't do it.

Americans got really into fancy dress in the 19th century, didn't they?

And they would dress up as European aristocracy and wear.

So it was like, I think the general consensus is because people weren't really doing it in Europe, that America didn't really have at that time an aristocracy or a history of its own

in terms of, you know, it didn't have a great nobility, it didn't have all these big families.

And so it kind of, what was the quote quote?

It bought its own history.

And so people would buy like Marie Antoinette's genuine jewels and costumes and then go wearing them to parties.

And you'd go to a party with like 1,200 guests, like the Vanderbilts used to hold these amazing parties in the late 19th century.

And it would be a competition as to who had the most genuine artefacts that used to belong to a great British king or a great French ruler.

Yeah, so it used to be a bigger deal than just buying a £10 plastic witch's costume from the local Scotmid.

That's great.

Polar bears.

Oh, yeah.

Polar bears were in the original fact.

That's what I was saying.

Yes, they were.

Yeah, they dressed up as polar bears.

This is just because I discovered coincidentally last week that pollution in the sea and in the

seas at the poles is contaminating various wildlife there, and polar bears' penises are getting weaker.

Their penis bones are being shrunken.

Well, they say that, but it is cold up there.

Yeah.

They really don't need that extra excuse, do they?

It's getting warmer, though.

And then

the female polar bears are going, it's getting warmer, but still nothing.

Well, Bob, where is it?

You've been promising me for two million years.

It's the pollutants.

That's what they claim.

They don't know why polar bears have penis bones, but they are getting smaller and they think it's going to do some kind of damage.

Most animals have penis bones, don't they?

No, they don't.

Most of us on this panel.

No, lots of animals have penis bones.

Walruses.

Like in the Victorian times, they wore badger penis bones as typims.

Yeah.

Have you seen a walrus penis bone?

I've held one.

They're extraordinary.

Particularly the walrus at the time.

You've held.

When the walrus asks, just say no, Dan.

Just say no.

I was at a fancy dress costume.

This walrus.

Okay.

Hey, very quickly, this is just to bring it back to Tolkien and C.S.

Lewis.

C.S.

Lewis died the same day as Aldous Hotsley.

We lost two literary juggernauts that day, and it kind of really didn't register with anyone because someone else died that day, JFK.

And they just completely, no one actually knows they're dead yet as a result.

Apparently, in the Guinness Book of Records, the oldest writers.

We need to move on, because we're really running past our time here.

Okay, time for fact number three, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray.

My fact is about Agatha Christie, and it's that Agatha Christie thought that Hercule Poirot, her most famous creation, was a, quotes, detestable, bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep.

She hated him from quite early on as well in her career.

And she wrote an essay called Why I Got Fed Up with Poirot.

And she really, really didn't like him.

And

she wrote his death story in 1945, which was 30 years before she died.

So she wanted to write it quite early.

And she left instructions that when she died, that story should be published.

So she would take him down with her.

Genuinely.

And she even kept the manuscripts in a bank vault.

That's how much she disliked Poirot's character.

And then when she was 85, with her own health failing, she decided to publish it so that she would outlive him, I think.

That's what I think she wanted to do.

But when she did publish the story,

Poirot got a front-page obituary in the New York Times, which I think might be even more than she got.

Really?

Yeah.

I'm not sure.

I don't know whether she's World News Day, isn't it?

It's the only fictional obituary they've ever published.

Yeah.

And so even in death, he was really, really famous, and she, you know, couldn't get her way to properly knock him on the head.

Was it front page of the obituary section?

Nope.

It was front page of that section.

Of the paper.

Yeah.

Jesus.

We say they're dumbing down today.

That's

it is weird when you hear authors hating their central characters.

Yeah.

Like when you win, though, don't they?

Like who was

Sherlock Holmes guy?

Yeah, Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock and then had to.

Did you hear what chaos that created when he killed off Sherlock Holmes?

I've got yeah, I found a bunch of stuff.

Basically, he just got he so he killed him off and then all these letters came in which one began, you brute like they just treated it as if it was real.

Sounds like the trolling of its day.

Yeah, exactly.

To write a letter to someone saying, you brute.

Yeah.

Uh a lady picketed his house, fans wore black armbands, twenty thousand people cancelled their subscriptions to the Strand magazine, which in it was being published as a periodical.

Um And yeah, and then I guess he eventually brought it back.

But that must have been a confusing time for him, I guess.

So A.A.

Milne really hated Winnie the Pooh.

Yeah.

That's so cruel.

Everyone hated Winnie the Pooh, didn't they?

All of his creators, A.

A.

Milne hated Winnie the Pooh.

Christopher Robin.

I mean, his life was bound to ruin by the fact that he was Christopher Robin, and he always resented, I think that's a.

Wait, hang on, was Christopher Robin A.

A.

Milne's son?

Yes, yeah, resented that.

And the guy who did the illustrations,

who was, I can't remember his name, but he said it,

E.

H.

Shepherd, ruined his life as well, ruined his career.

Everyone defined it by winning the poo.

Did they all have meetings where they're going, not this shit again?

If only we could stop doing it somehow.

Another thing that Milne hated about it was that it made people think that he liked children.

And he said, I have never felt in the least sentimental about them.

But he did have a son

who was taking dictations when he was reading.

Take a note, kids are crap.

And he had a very difficult relationship with his son, which kind of, you know, it seems to be explained by this conversation.

So one thing you can do if you really dislike your character, this is something that Agatha Christie did.

I love this.

She put a version of herself in her own books, a mystery novelist called Ariadne Oliver.

And in the novels that Agatha Christie wrote, this fictional novelist, Ariadne Oliver, hates her most famous creation, who is a vegetarian Finnish detective called Sven Hirson.

She appears in six novels, this character who hates her main character.

And Oliver says, if I ever met that bony, gangling, vegetable-eating Finn in real life, I'd do a better murder than any I've ever invented.

That's a really good idea.

That's how much she disliked it.

It's a really good idea of putting yourself in novels, and then like, and then the guy said, Oh, easy jetter idiots.

Everything that you're annoyed with, you could put in your book.

Another person who hates your own creation now is Annie Prue, who wrote Breakback Mountain.

Oh, yeah.

Because of fanfiction.

So she hates the fact now.

So she was like nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

She wrote this brilliant short story.

And she says she wish she'd never done it because she's plagued by fan fiction now, by people writing either sequels to Breakback Mountain or alternative endings to Breakback Mountain.

And she said the vast majority of them are people who, so the majority of them are people who start their letters with, I'm not gay, but

and then go on to give an alternative ending where the two male characters end up together.

I've written an intense, searing, homoerotic series of, yeah, yeah, and I've never written anything before in my life, and that's not the point of it, yeah, yeah.

Isn't that weird?

Well, yeah, it's just every day a more homoerotic literature from people saying they're not gay.

But it does,

yeah.

There are, I think, more than a hundred sequels to Pride and Prejudice, and obviously it's been 200 years, so there's a lot.

But in one of them,

Elizabeth Darcy, as she becomes, is widowed.

Darcy is dead.

And then she has to defend England from invasion by Napoleon in a fleet of hot air balloons.

And I've never tracked down this book, but if I do, I am reading the hell out of it.

It sounds so good.

We need to move on, guys, by the way.

But if anyone, does anyone have anything else?

Nothing that's short enough.

Just one last thing, which is I really like when, as you're saying, Poirot goes on the front page of newspapers.

I love it when these characters seep into the real world.

And there's a thing I read which is the Met.

And all crime departments in Britain, all the police, they use a national computer system which is developed basically for major crime inquiries.

All the British forces use it, and it's called the Home Office Large Major Inquiry System, but everyone refers to it by its acronym Homes.

Is that quite nice?

Very nice.

And there as well, is a training program for it called Elementary.

Shall we move on to our final?

Yep.

Okay.

Time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

So we've been talking about books this whole time, so I thought I'd find a fact which was about the enemy of the books, the television.

So my fact is that before he invented the television, John Logie Baird invented a pair of socks to wear underneath your socks.

And who can say which history will judge the greater invention?

I'm not calling it.

I just love that fact because I just think that's, you know,

because if you look at the history of his inventions as well, prior to the television, he invented as well a

razor which was rust-proof.

You could never make it rust, but it never ended up selling because it was made of glass and it shattered on people's faces and ended up cutting it.

Okay.

Yeah,

he made a glass razor.

It doesn't rust.

Yeah.

But it slices your face off.

But it cuts your face off, yeah.

He made some pneumatic shoes that had balloons in them that he made.

They pull your feet off.

But just that's that's his history, and then suddenly the television.

It just makes no sense.

But the socks were actually quite good, weren't they?

They were amazing.

Yeah, how did they work?

So they have,

they're not designed to protect against moisture from the outside.

It's the moisture that your feet create when you're walking around all day.

So they were for soldiers in the First World War, and they're sprinkled with a chemical called borax, which

absorbs the moisture from your foot.

So you put it under your foot, facing upwards, as it were.

You put it on that way, then you put your sock over that, then your shoe over there.

And soldiers in the trenches swore by it, and it made him a huge amount of money.

It's what led him resign his job as an electrical engineer.

One soldier said, I find the bird undersocks keep my feet in splendid condition out here in France.

Foot trouble is one of our worst enemies, but thanks to the bird undersock, mine are in the pink.

I'm hoping you could just make an anti-German sock.

My other worst enemy, my boss,

that's rather, yeah, the worst enemy for you, foot trouble is.

That's a censored letter, I was

in through the officers.

But he advertised them in the newspaper and managed to sell one pair doing that.

So initially it was a complete failure.

And then he built a plywood tank and carried it around the streets of Glasgow with the the bared under sock written on the side.

And then he sold loads.

Yeah.

This was during the war though, wasn't it?

So like a big tank going through the streets in your town during the war.

People look it's scary.

Um so he he made these socks and then he got ill for a while, didn't he?

And then when he got better he suddenly realised he had loads of money in in his account because people had bought all these socks.

Well he went?

Didn't he go away?

Oh, gone away, yeah.

But when he got all this money, he went to Trinidad and he started up a jam factory.

Unfortunately,

the local insect life either ran off with the sugar or landed in the hot vats of boiling preserve

thing I read.

And so it never took off because it was just insects, just full of insects.

And so he lost a bit of money from that and then came back.

And then it was when he invented the television.

But when it when he came back before inventing the television, having the sock business and the razor, the jam and the razor, he then,

he then, he had 200 quid left.

He was really broke.

So he decided to buy two tons of Australian honey cheap and start and selling it to people.

And then he bought a ton of soap and he sold that.

Wow.

Then television.

Then television just got completely out of nowhere.

No, to be fair, the television thing was something that he really dreamed about making quite early on and he couldn't do it, so he had all these other businesses that went along the way.

So they were just kind of maybe a smokescreen, there's other inventions to throw people off the scent.

They absolutely were,

in that, as well as when he would just make these other things.

When he was making the TV, any time he had a photo where he was showing how he was making the T V, he would put in fake objects so that no one who saw the photo could go, okay, so he's got that and got that.

So he would misplace stuff.

Wait, so you need okay, so it looks like he needs two tons of cheap Australian honey

to get the TV to work.

Where do the socks go?

I don't know.

You're saying about the electricity.

When he was working in Glasgow, he decided to try and make artificial diamonds by passing electricity through a stick of graphite.

And he put so much electricity through the stick of graphite that he caused a blackout over the whole of Glasgow.

Wow.

There's a weird coincidence in his life as well, just one of those tiny things that's actually, it's quite nice when you discover it.

He went to school with a guy who was called, so this and this was his classmate, his actual classmate, he went to school with a guy called J.C.W.

Reith,

who we now know as Lord Reith.

So basically the inventor of the television went to school with the man who defined television for the BBC in England.

It's an absolutely insane coincidence.

And he got bullied by Lord Reith all the time.

He just bullied the hell out of him.

And Lord Reith's parents had to pull him out of school because he was just too much of a menace in that school.

Wow, really?

Yeah.

Lord Reith was a bit of a.

He was a bully, yeah.

He's a bully.

Yeah, that's amazing.

Did John Legobert think, I'll get back at him, I'll invent something that's so good he won't ever be able to take part in it?

He'll have nothing at all.

I read,

I cannot believe this is true, that originally, when the BBC sent out experimental transmissions, which was in 1929, that John Le Gubert had to pay the BBC to transmit his images.

Right.

Which is just so topsy-turvy.

Yeah, but like Lord Reith, for as much as he's done for TV, and if you haven't heard the name Lord Reith, in this country, most people have, I'm assuming.

He's the guy who absolutely defined how the BBC became the thing that it is.

He hated television.

Yeah, of course he did.

Yeah.

Because, you know, it was Wiener Baird who invented it.

His salary was £5,000 and a mean wedgie.

Just on authors' early inventions and early careers before they did the thing that we know them for, can I tell you very quickly about Daniel Defoe?

Yes, please.

Okay, his early jobs, and obviously Robinson Crusoe and a Journal of the Plague Year, all these incredible works.

Before that, his early jobs included selling hosiery, dealing wine, investing in a diving bell to recover sunken treasure, and harvesting musk from the anal glands of cats.

Did she say hats?

No!

No!

It really happened.

In 1692, he bought 70 civet cats for 850 quid because the Dutch made perfume using the musk, which they secrete as the base ingredient.

And he hated them.

And then to get the musk, an attendant had to put them in a special cage so they could only face one way, they couldn't turn around.

And then, I'm quoting here,

use a spatula to scrape out the butter-like secretion that gathered in a pouch between the tail and the anus.

And then he lost the cats because he didn't even own them.

He didn't pay for them properly.

He got the money by borrowing it, and then to keep them, he defrauded his own mother-in-law, who then sued him like he was a disaster.

But that was his, yeah.

So whose cats, they were just wandering cats.

No, they were owned by someone else, and he bought them with borrowed money and then someone else said, no, I want my cats back.

You can use them, but you don't own them.

And also, where's their anal butter?

You've been stealing that.

I can't believe it's not civet cat anal butter.

We're going to have to wrap up.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At Eggshakes.

Anna.

You can email podcast at ui.com.

And we will be back again next week.

By the way, thank you so much for being here tonight, guys.

This has been really fun.

For those listening at home, we'll be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.