1: No Such Thing As A Pilot Fish

33m
A new podcast from the writers of QI, who discuss the best facts they've found that week. The pilot episode features Dan Schreiber (@schreiberland), James Harkin (@eggshaped), Anna Ptaszynski (@nosuchthing) & Andrew Hunter Murray (@andrewhunterm)





For more check out www.qi.com/podcast




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Transcript

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We ran it on QI a few years ago.

Yeah.

Which was there's no such thing as a fish.

No, seriously, it's in the Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life.

It says it right there, first paragraph, no such thing as a fish.

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

My name is Dan, I'm sitting with three other QI elves, James, Andy, and Anna.

And each week we're going to get around this microphone and share our favorite facts from the last seven days.

So in no particular order, here are the best things we found out this week.

Okay, let's start with fact number one and that comes from you, James.

I went this weekend to the Collider Exhibition, the Large Hadron Collider exhibition at the Science Museum, which was very cool.

And I got fat there and the Large Hadron Collider was almost turned off.

I think it was turned off for a short amount of time.

For what reason?

What do you think?

Because rewiring or the need to maintenance.

Maintenance, yeah.

It is a lot more lo-fi than that.

Apparently they found a piece of baguette in the machinery and it made the temperature go up by seven degrees and they had to turn the whole thing off before they found the baguette.

If you work with the French this will happen.

I always throw my baguette into the machine.

They're actually a pest.

But what they actually think happened is that a bird somehow dropped it into

a vent or something like that, and it was found there.

But some of the physicists who were there at the time actually thought that maybe it was a time-travelling bird sent from the future to stop the experiment.

It's just pretty cool.

That would be the worst Terminator sequel ever.

Or when they first saw the baguette, they're like, whoa, the the Higgs boson is way bigger

mayonnaise

surely someone's marketing a Higgs baguette now in Paris

there was a guy wasn't there who um broke into CERN uh he broke in uh his name was uh how would you say this Andy Eloy

Eloi Cole a strangely dressed match man.

He said that he travelled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world.

So they've had a number of time travelling.

Yeah, well, that was one theory that the reason we hadn't had time travellers yet was we hadn't invented the Large Hadron Collider, which would presumably then be the machine that would get them back.

As in, you can't have time travellers until you build the machine, so that's why we haven't had them in the past.

Well, here's the final sentence of this story.

Mr.

Cole, as his name was, was taken to a secure mental health facility in Geneva, Geneva, but later disappeared from his cell.

Police are baffled, but not that bothered.

Wait a second.

I should point out that Dad is on davidike.com.

Because I just Googled it, that's the first thing that came on.

But this is the talkboards.

It looks like they've lifted this from...

They have it from Crave.

Okay.

So I don't know if that's any more reputable, but David Ikeke.

There was a bit of worry at the time that the whole universe was going to end, wasn't there?

Yeah.

They thought that...

Because what they were actually doing was making very, very, very tiny black holes and I think in people's minds they thought well what if they get bigger

yeah but I think what had happened I might be wrong about this because I'm going off memory a little bit but they um I think the scientists said that there was a chance of the world ending but it was something like 10,000 billion billion billion billion to one chance which is pretty much the chance of the world ending anyway in that kind of in that kind of time but I think they didn't help themselves by saying that and some all people hear is what the world's gonna end?

There was a big switch-on day.

Do you remember?

It was um, it was when the machine was first due to be switched on, and the BBC went to wall-to-wall coverage of it.

I had to write about it for private eyes, just everyone going crazy about it.

And when it didn't work for another nine months, they couldn't switch on it.

Oh, yeah, I remember that.

There was some slight problem in the workings.

There was a story in the news this week about the spaceship that had been.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a lot like that.

Is it called Atticus?

Can you check what's the

satellite that we sent up that's been asleep for three years and we sort of set an alarm on it to wake it up yesterday?

Yeah, and so there was a big thing where they're all waiting and they you could you could stream Mission Control in uh was it Russia maybe?

I'm not sure what country it was, was it America?

You could watch it, what do you mean?

You could watch Mission Control as they were waiting because it was gonna going to be switched on and there was an hour window where it didn't come on, so they were waiting and then tension started getting high.

Yeah, so they so it was actually it wasn't too long, but yeah, so there was 10 minutes where it was late waking up, and it hadn't sent any signals back.

Um, and then they started to get increasingly tense.

And if you watch the video, which I now have, they suddenly start to panic, and it all goes really silent.

And then it was actually 18 minutes late waking up because what they think happened is somehow the satellite put its alarm on snooze

and just postponed its wake-up call for 18 minutes, and then uh, which is fair enough, you know, if you've been asleep for three years, you can't be expected to just bounce out of bed.

I think it was Rosetta, wasn't it?

Rosetta, Rosetta, yes.

That's incredible.

And that has got an awesome solar system fact, haven't you?

Yes.

Okay.

Now, this is called.

Anna, you haven't heard this yet.

No, I haven't.

I'm prepared for your jaw to drop.

This has raised some controversy in the office, but let's go for it.

Okay.

In 2007, the largest object in the solar system was.

What do you think, Anna?

The sun.

No.

It was a comet called Comet Holmes, which was

the comet itself, the main body of it, is three kilometers across.

And it had this extraordinary explosion at the surface.

And the corona of dust, they call it the comet Coma, is the name for it, was bigger than the Sun.

It was 1.4 million kilometers.

Out of here!

It was!

It was 1.4 million kilometers across.

I think that's the...

And that all counted as part of the body of the comet.

Yep, it was 1% of the total mass of the comet.

It's a huge dust.

Because the sun is emptier than we think it is.

I think that's fair to say.

I mean, it depends on your definition of the sun, really, because there's an argument that the sun is actually the size of the solar system, because that's as far as the solar, as, you know, the energy gravity goes.

Exactly.

It's not like the solar wind goes all the way out to there.

There's still particles from the sun that are getting all the way out to Pluto and beyond.

So there is an argument that we all live inside the Sun at the moment.

Yeah.

Well, if that's true, then the comet thing is not.

If the Sun is the size that

everyone else says it is, this comet was bigger, briefly.

It's only me who says that.

What's the comet called?

Comet Holmes, as in

the world.

Big boy.

A scientist, Anna.

They're not just doing this for the naming reason.

That's what you would have called it.

That's what I would have called it, guess why I'm not a scientist.

There's actually a body, Alec told me to look this up because I can't remember what it's called, which is responsible for the official non-onculture of everything in the solar system.

And it has these most specific rules about what everything has to be called.

It's called like the internet, it's a branch of NASA.

So, for instance, one of its rules is that Martian craters that measure less than 60 kilometers in diameter have to be named after villages of the world with a population smaller than 100,000 people.

So, they have to, so, like, tooting, there's a crater called tooting because

the other one, and this is, I think, was the headline that James saw when he came around to my computer earlier: is there is to be no penis on Venus.

Venus.

This is your excuse.

I saw there is no penis on Venus and now you're making up a story.

And I was hopefully googling in case there was.

In case.

I've been through it.

There's nothing after me.

Come on guys.

Men are from Mars.

Women are from Venus.

And yet there's no like only male rule on Mars.

So you're not allowed to call anything on Venus after anything male.

So everything on Venus.

And you look at

everything.

All the craters.

Why?

All the mountains.

Just call Venuses.

I don't know.

No, because Venus was female.

Venus is female.

Except this was only introduced in the early 70s, and before that, they had named the highest mountain.

Malpenas.

Which is called Maxwell Montez, named after a male physicist.

But so he's sitting there on Venus, the only guy who has a mountain, surrounded by thousands and thousands of women.

He can't do that.

I don't even say that.

Because he's a mountain.

That's funny, isn't it?

That is brilliant.

That is amazing.

Alpha ladies for the L-series.

Alpha ladies, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that is a hell of a massive asses.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The only man on Venus.

Cool.

Okay, well, let's wrap up because we've got stuff.

Okay, before we go, I just gotta say: if anyone wants to see the Collider exhibition, it's pretty good.

Go down to the Science Museum.

On until the 6th of May, it costs about a tenner to get in.

I highly recommend it.

And what do you get to see?

Is it

just lots of facts about how it works and there's lots of interactive stories?

Yeah, and do us a favour, bring a baguette, leave it there,

take a photo of some baffled scientists trying to work out how we got in there.

Okay, fact number two, Anna, this one's yours.

Yeah, so for the last month of his life, US President James Garfield ate everything through his anus.

Big claim, Anna.

No.

We will get letters from a lot of people.

Yeah.

I mean, I wasn't there, but this is what the doctors tell me.

No, so James Garfield was, as everyone obviously knows, shot in July 1881, and he lived for a further 80 days.

He was shot

in the small of his back and once in the arm.

So doctors now say he would have been out of hospital about two or three days later.

But obviously, because

medicine was not quite as advanced as it is now, in 1881, they just invited like dozens of doctors to his bedside who all prodded around trying to find this bullet.

They didn't know where the bullet had gone in his body.

So they gathered around, prodded about, made him worse and worse.

He stopped being able to eat.

And obviously, if you stopped being able to consume food in those days, they just shoved it up your ass.

And so that's what they did.

So does that work?

It does not work, no.

It was widely discredited in the early 30s.

I think you get about an eighth of the nutrition from some of the food.

But there's some food that you can't absorb at all.

What I love is the list of foods that he was fed in this mill list.

Beef bouillon,

egg yolks, milk, egg yolks, egg yolks, wait milk.

Egg yolks was only true for a while because I was reading the doctor at the time, his report on it.

So, yeah, he was fed egg yolks for a bit of time, and then all the surgeons complained that it was causing annoying and offensive flatus.

And so they ceased feeding him egg yolks.

That did the treatment.

So they stopped it because it was annoying them,

not the other way around.

Guys, I'd be quite happy that egg

with my mouth.

That's all right by you guys.

That's the thing as well.

He mustn't shut his mouth.

Presumably his mouth still worked.

He could have still even...

Could he still talk?

Yeah, he could still talk.

The doctors were amazing.

The main doctor in charge of saving him was called Doctor.

Dr.

Willard Bliss, with two doctors.

His first name was Doctor.

It's really tragic.

You should go on with the litter, because they did forget.

Yeah, what else is it?

That's all I know about what he was fed in that time.

I think maybe that was the only food.

They were already into grinding beef, but he was also given whiskey and drops of opium and

stimulants.

Whiskey up his ass?

Yeah, because I mean, if you're in that sort of a state, I think at least you want a few drams.

Yeah.

It's terrible.

He was such a talented man that he could.

His party trick was he could write Latin in one hand and Greek with the other simultaneously.

Wow.

He campaigned for the presidency in more than one language.

Some places he campaigned campaigned in English, some places he spoke in German.

He was this immensely

matter.

He was president for four months and then he was shot and then he lingered for another three months.

So it's like no matter what, like you could write Greek with your left and Latin with your right.

The fact you could eat through your anus

will forever overshadow.

I actually looked up because I thought

I knew Andy'd said earlier that you had a list of things that he ate.

I thought it'd be interesting to look up of what his favorite foods were.

So that, if I was there, I'd be like, I'm going to try and get you a sneaky dish on the side, you know.

So his favorite food was squirrel soup.

Really?

Yeah, and actually,

there was a guy called Crook, and he really wanted to cook squirrel soup for the president, but they needed him to be a bit better.

I think to the point where he was eating again with his mouth.

That kind of good.

And they were given permission to shoot squirrels on the grounds of the soldiers' homes in order to get the squirrels in order to do it.

And he loved milk.

Really loved milk.

And there was a company called the Adams Express Company from Baltimore.

And they actually sent a cow to the White House so they could milk it every day so that he could get fresh milk while he was dying.

Well, he was.

He was shot.

He was given milk in the manner we've described.

Yeah, but yeah.

Well,

Anna, you were saying that Alexander Graham Bell was there while he was dying.

Yes, so I mean, I initially thought about phrasing this fact as Alexander Graham Bell actually killed President James Garfield, and then I felt like there might be lawsuits from his family.

But because they'd lost the bullet and because in his body, and because coincidentally, Alexander Graham Bell had been developing the metal detector at the time, they invited him along and he tried to find the bullet in his body but failed on account of the fact that he was on a bed with a lot of metal bed springs.

And so they obviously thought he'd been machine gunned down.

beep beep, beep beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.

They're everywhere.

There's nothing I can do.

It's just incredible that.

I mean, the genius of inventing a metal detector and then not thinking to remove the massive source of metal.

That's incredible.

You imagine, like, quietly, Alexander Graham Bow was like, I think the president is a robot.

That would have been his discovery while we were on the lake.

I'm not sure if James Guyfield was a robot.

He might have been a sea cucumber because they actually do do eat through their anuses.

Do they?

Yeah.

They found this out quite recently because you know that they breathe through, you know they breathe through their anuses.

They pull water in and then push it out and the oxygenated water helps them to breathe.

And they thought, well, maybe they take in food there as well.

And they found out that they have a gut in the middle and they eat through the mouth and through their anus.

So it comes in from both sides.

That's pretty cool, isn't it?

That is cool.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

And can't they taste it?

Do they have taste buds in their anus, do you think?

I don't know if they have taste buds in their anus.

Well James you found out what else you can taste with, didn't you?

Oh yeah you can taste with your testicles.

Well here's the thing.

You have taste receptors in your testicles.

No one's quite sure what they're for.

But you also have smell receptors in your lungs.

And the reason we do know why they're there because if you get a really terrible smell and your receptors in your lungs can smell it, then it'll close up your esophagus and stop anything poisonous from going into your body.

But as far as I know, no one's found out yet why we have taste receptors in their testicles.

Maybe someone will tweet me at egg shapes if you know why we can taste with our testicles.

Okay, let's move on to fact three.

That is James, your facts.

Yes.

So, my fact is, in 2013, six people in the US named their child mushroom.

I mean, I just love that.

I love the kind of thing which which we do on QI, which is sometimes just get a load of data and mine through it for the funny bits,

which is where this came from, which is a big list of all the baby names in America.

Mushroom.

I mean, it's what would possess you to...

I think it sounds quite nice.

It does sound cool, actually.

Mushroom.

Mushroom.

Hey, mushroom.

Shroom.

Shroom for sure.

It's better than fungus.

Fungus doesn't sound nice.

Because I like, I think it's weird because I have a mild mushroom phobia.

Yeah, I do, yeah.

I find them like very disgusting things.

Don't look over your shoulder now, Dre.

It's just the way that they reproduce with spas and they grow on dead things and stuff.

I just find that.

I think a lot of people don't.

Yeah.

Don't like mushrooms.

There's something dead about them.

Yeah.

And it's a weird one that you, I find, because my friend hates mushrooms as well.

And if I have a pizza with them, we have to remove friends.

Yeah.

Well, you know him, Ash,

who did the theme tune for our show and Pre-S.

But

you kind of have to respect a hatred of mushroom or a fear of mushroom in the same way you respect someone's religious beliefs

I really feel like like if someone doesn't like mushrooms I really have to be like oh, okay, I appreciate that

I will remove it from any of the foods that we will have in this house from here on in yeah that's true

they really hate it yeah they hate it with a passion like really it's a bit like vegetarianism because you're excluding an entire um area of the uh is mushrooms their own kingdom?

Yeah, yeah.

And fungi are a kingdom, aren't they?

Yeah, fungi are a kingdom in the same way that animals and plants are.

But if you think actually mushrooms are more closely related to animals than they are to plants.

Are they?

Yeah.

No.

Yeah, that's true.

How?

How?

As in they branched off.

What animal-like activities do they take part in?

Do you get packs of mushrooms hunting and unding a mushroom?

The mushroom approaches its growth

really slowly.

I love names.

I'm obsessed with because I always find them, particularly in pop culture.

I mean, it's definitely been the rise of the celebrity world that suddenly they just, it's like celebrities are going, I've called my child mushroom.

What are you going to do about it?

And everyone's like, well, nothing.

Good.

Catch you later.

We'll do the long chaisy's out.

Like, yeah.

Because my two favorite ones from recent times are: Jermaine Jackson of the Jackson 5 has changed his surname from Jackson to Jackson.

So he's taken an apostrophe now.

No, so it's instead of Jackson with an O-N at the end, it's U-N.

So it's Jackson's son.

Because he doesn't want to be associated anymore with the Jackson brand.

And he held a press conference because he was talking about his new album and he announced it as a press conference.

He said, by the way, I have changed my name from here on in.

I want to be be now known as Jermaine Jackson, not Jermaine Jackson.

And so they asked him, Why have you done this?

And he said, I don't want to talk about it.

So we don't know his actual proper reasoning.

Everyone just thinks that he wants to get away from it.

I have this big list of American people's names, like baby names from 2013.

And these are all male children with five people named these names

in America.

So Vader.

Darth Vader, yeah, that's a good name as well.

And also, Vader was a WWF wrestler.

Oh, yeah.

Of course.

Yeah.

Is there anyone called Garth Vader?

Garth Vader.

Just accidentally.

No, no, no.

No, no, no, with a G.

Don't worry, it happens all the time.

Anyway,

pick up my asthma pump.

Sorry, Vader.

Yeah, so five boys called Vader.

Five boys called Kestrel, which is quite a nice name.

Yeah, Kestrel's good.

Five boys named Lucifer.

Not as nice.

That's an odd one, yeah.

Yeah, not as nice.

It means light-bearing.

I mean, they could have said that he started out well.

He was an angel to start.

That is weird.

Five boys called Sophie.

And also Romance and Naomi.

They were boys with those names.

Isn't that nice?

Romance is quite nice.

Romance is very nice.

Oh, Obama's mum.

Do you know what her name was?

No.

This really shocked me when I read this.

I was reading his autobiography, and because remember the time when he was initially being nominated, everyone went on about his name.

Like, it was a big thing, his name.

And so I'm surprised no one picked up on this.

His mother's first name was Stanley.

Stanley Obama.

Wow.

She was called Stan the Man at school.

Actually, in the olden days, obviously, names sometimes do change sex.

If you I looked at the 1880 census, and there were 13 girls in America called Frank.

Roosevelt, oh, was it Roosevelt?

I had an aunt called Frank.

One of the American presidents had an aunt called Frank.

There were also 14 Cecils and 46 Johns.

There were female.

And in last year in America, there were 31 Jahons because they presumably

spelt it.

It's a tough word.

And also, there were

1,436 people called Israel and 64 called Israel.

Israel.

Israel, man.

I also,

I love people who have a name that kind of means that you can do a lot with it.

Like Mike Love of the Beach Boys.

So Love being his surname, he's obviously gone, great, I can put love onto everything.

So he's got four unreleased albums.

They're really bad.

So the first album was called First Love.

Second album was called

Second Love?

Country Love.

Oh, nice.

He missed a trick there.

Then there was Looking Back with Love.

This is great.

That one was released.

That one made it.

So the third unreleased one was Unleash the Love.

And then, this is the best one at all.

His fourth unreleased album.

Anyone ever bash?

What pun title you want to have?

Love Hurts.

Ooh, that's good, yeah.

15 Love.

Nice.

Nope.

Andy?

The Power of Love?

That's good, but no.

Where is the We're just naming other songs.

You can't steal other songs from his album.

Okay, it was Mike Love, not war.

That's amazing.

We know someone called Diamond Love, don't we?

We do know Diamond Love.

That's very good.

Oh, and you had your friend's dad.

I love this one.

Okay, yeah.

So this is Jenny Ryan, who's done a lot of work on QI in the past.

And her stepfather, I think, is called, he was called James Brown.

And he got so annoyed with people making jokes about him that he changed his name to Dan Brown.

Who then became the most famous author of all time.

That's so good.

I love that one.

It's great.

Fact number four.

Okay, fact number four is

I've was talking to this historian the other day on Twitter because I don't know if you saw on Friday last week week on Twitter, it just went nuts with people, historians, talking about Alfred the Great's bones being found.

Because we haven't found many monarchs, right?

Generally.

Yeah, well, we famously found Richard III.

Richard III about two years ago, and so they're really excited because they dug up an area where they thought Alfred the Great was meant to be buried.

Turns out he wasn't buried there.

And then they went to a museum storage where they had a bunch of other bones that they assumed to be animal bones and they found his pelvis bone now.

So we have Alfred the Great's pelvis bone.

Or do we?

They don't quite know.

Where's the rest of him?

are.

We're not sure, but we have a pelvis bone, which feels just really like, you know, all those like classic

Jesus's grandmother's head and all those relics of the past.

I have a fact about pelvis bones.

Are you hearing?

Yeah, weirdly enough.

Absolutely.

Okay, so

there's a department in the Natural History Museum that if you find something weird in your garden or wherever, you can give it to them and they'll tell you what it is.

And it's usually people who find what they think is like jelly from space or cryptozoology things.

Jelly from space.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, it's what people think, you know.

What is it, though?

Okay, that wasn't my fact, but so jelly from space is

whenever there is a meteorite, people seem to find this jelly on the floor, and there's been for hundreds of years people have thought that the two are to do with each other.

Yeah.

Nobody knows what it's from.

It's called star jelly,

and nobody really knows what it is.

There's lots of theories.

There's jelly that we don't know what it is?

I think, yeah.

i've heard of it i've heard of star jelly but i didn't i've never researched what it is you've not researched you know about this mysterious jelly sauce

i thought well i'll just leave that be i'm sure

there's a team working on you can't be curious about everything

okay so as well as getting weird jelly they also get what people think are jet uh dragon heads yeah and whenever they find a dragon head it is usually the pelvis of a seabird like a puffin because apparently a puffin's pelvis looks like a dragon's head

that's great so all my pelvis all claims of dragon heads turn out to be pelvis yeah the ones that these guys get yeah because do you know that this thing about um you find people thought that you would have one-eyed monsters so they're like what they what do you call these monsters with one eye psychosis yeah and the theory is that what they actually did was they would find the skulls of elephants and where the yeah

the elephant skulls actually look like they have a big hole in the middle like it would be one eye hole and that's where the theory sometimes comes from well the best thing that you've told me that i've been telling everyone for the past i know two weeks is that the majority of um sightings photos taken of sea monsters uh turn out not to be sea monsters but in most cases uh the penises of grey whales because they mate at the surface

grey whales they always mate at the surface and they always mate in threesomes two males and a female which means that there's always one spur penis floating around the surface sticking out at the top of the water yeah if people google this, if you're at home listening and you Google grey whale penis,

you will see it in a small whale.

It does

very true.

I've looked at it and the majority of photos that you will see of people claiming to have caught a sea monster on camera, they've just, they haven't.

But anyway, so on Twitter when I was talking to Greg Jenner, Francesca Stavropolo, all these historians, they started off by going, wow, Alfred the Great.

an interesting find potentially and then they're all now saying not so much an interesting find like it probably will turn out not to be.

But it got me, I just wanted to look into it because I don't know much about it, and it led me to the story of how Richard III's bones were found recently.

So they were found in a car park in Leicester.

They were found in a car park in Leicester.

So, what I didn't know, we all know that exactly, it was a very big find.

What I didn't know is the person who found it, Philippa Langley.

Do you, do you, does anyone here know about Philippa Langley?

So, you do, James.

Anna, do you know her?

Okay, what would you assume the person who found Richard III's bones does for a professor?

You assume she was an archaeologist, although I have read something about her that tells me she's not an Oswald.

I assume you wouldn't ask me if she were.

You're like Sherlock.

I'm going to Google archaeologists.

Yeah, so she's not an archaeologist, she's a screenwriter.

She's been writing for the last seven years a story, you know, a script about Richard III, and she got involved in research.

And so she started going to all the places where potentially Richard III was supposed to be buried.

She went to Leicester and she went to a spot where it was a loose end.

It didn't look like where they said he might be buried, where he was.

And as she was leaving from effectively a disappointing trip, another one over the course of seven years, she saw a car park on the side and got an uncontrollable urge to go inside.

So she went into the car park and she was like, I feel like the king is here.

But she left it.

She went off.

She came back a year later.

She felt the same urge and she saw on the ground a gigantic R

in red writing, just a huge R on the floor.

And she said, That's where he's buried.

Now, the R is a painted R for reserved on a car park.

She's not a crazy person.

Yeah, I know.

And so she said it's here.

No one believed her.

She raised £34,000 for them to dig it up.

She got Channel 4 to come and film it, and they dug in the spot, and Richard III was there.

And it was a psychic, what was the word that I said to you earlier?

A presentiment.

A psychic presentiment.

She just went,

this is where he is.

But what you don't know is that she's actually been going all over the country digging up holes for 20 years.

Doing exactly anything that had an R on it.

Every pothole you.

So does that mean, Dan, that you believe that psychic?

No, not at all.

I just think that's one of the most wonderful queries.

That story could not get any better.

A giant R, like an X, marks the spot, but with the initial of the king.

You know that the Ministry of Defence spent like £20,000 trying to prove that ESP existed.

Only, like, even in the last 20 years, they did that.

Really?

Yeah.

Why were they trying to prove that?

Well, I always think the reason they do it is because they think if it does, we want to be first.

And they think the Russians are probably going into this.

You know, so is everyone else.

We might as well have a go at it.

I could have told them that it didn't.

In fact, I tried to tell them really hard.

What was strange when they found Richard III, I thought, is we'd actually run on QI a few years ago whether Richard had a hunchback.

And we said, you know, he didn't.

It was all made up by Shakespeare and people who wanted to deface him after his death.

But then when they found him, they found that he did have like an arch to his

an S-shaped spine, is what they said.

But no,

I just find that fascinating because I love it when things are found by people who shouldn't be finding the thing in question but are convinced they're going to find it.

I mean, that's the only instance I've.

Is it maybe it's something to do with the fact that just like you usually do dig up ground, like either it's agricultural ground, so you dig it up, or you're like putting buildings in, so you dig it up.

So, car parks don't really need foundations, so they're just things that haven't been discovered yet.

Not sure.

Because, yeah, there are quite a lot of discoveries.

In fact, I think we should ask at some point

the question what vital archaeological discovery was made under a car park in Leicester last year?

I'm going to say that was the body of Richard III last year.

Oh James you fell right into the hole.

Last year, yeah.

Last year?

No, no I did.

Yeah, another car park in Leicester, same team who dug up the Richard III after the psychic woman pointed them in the right direction, dug up this ancient Roman cemetery which like revealed a whole bunch of stuff about how Romans used to bury pagans and religious people and Christians together and

yeah, just revealed this.

Another car park, let's say.

We just dig up all the car parks in the land.

So no that one had Romans.

Dig up the helipads, you'll find King Harold.

Cool, so that's our show.

Thanks so much for listening to No Such Thing as a Fish.

If you want to find out more about any of the things on this show, you can go to QI.com slash podcast, where we're going to have pictures, we're going to have extra bits of information and biographies of every single one of the elves who appeared on this show, and you'll find out about who's going to be appearing on our future episodes.

If you want to tweet us individually to ask us about something we said, you can get me on at Schreiberland.

James, you're on at eggshaped.

And Andy...

At Andrew HunterM.

And Anna isn't on Twitter, but we're going to try and get her on it at some point.

But until then, if you want to get to her, at Wikipedia.

So anyway, we'll see you again next week and hopefully you enjoyed the show and join us again next time.

Goodbye.