607: No Such Thing As Teletubby TikTok Tummies

Transcript

Speaker 2 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 2 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny, infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 2 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal. Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 2 Why is Adam after the Tanner family? What lengths will he go to? One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 2 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 3 A new phone for Billy, a necklace for Sam, all of the while on the lookout for scams. A swipe here and tap there.

Speaker 4 Better make it go far.

Speaker 3 Turns out mom didn't know she needs a new car.

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Speaker 3 Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Things as a Fish, where we were joined by the legend, Dan Schreiber.

Speaker 3 Another legend, Andrew Hudson-Murray. Thank you.
But the biggest legend of all, Ben Elton. Yeah, longtime listeners of the show will understand what a big deal this was for me in particular.

Speaker 3 He's my big, big hero and he didn't disappoint. You guys are going to absolutely love him.
The reason he was on the show is because he's just written his autobiography.

Speaker 3 It's out now to Sunday Times bestseller this week. It's called What Have I Done? And it's the full story, you know, as you as you do in an autobiography, childhood through to current day.

Speaker 3 That's the typo, isn't it? It should be called What I Have Done.

Speaker 3 Is it too late to change?

Speaker 3 I'll leave out this.

Speaker 3 There is a phrase, what have I done?

Speaker 3 That's what he's going for. I understand now.
I understand now

Speaker 3 one interesting thing about ben when he was on the show is he went on so many amazing big rambles especially one a bit about his journey to having a new child which was extremely explicit unbelievably funny but you will not hear it if you listen to this episode because it goes in the xl version it was a little bit rude for this episode if you want to hear that you're gonna have to go to club fish That's right.

Speaker 3 You may have heard on last week's show, we have just gussied up Club Fish.

Speaker 3 And if you want ad-free episodes and bonus content and all kinds of extra stuff, you can go to patreon.com slash no such thing as a fish and see what kind of extra stuff you can get and also see how you can support the show.

Speaker 3 That's right.

Speaker 3 But for now, enjoy Fish and one of the greatest sitcom writers in British comedy history, the guy behind the young ones, Black Adder, Upstart Crow, books like Popcorn, Maybe Baby, and again, his latest book, What Have I Done?

Speaker 3 On with the show.

Speaker 3 Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber.

Speaker 3 I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, and Ben Elton. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

Speaker 3 And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact fact number one, and that is Ben.

Speaker 3 My fact for this week is the actor who played Tinky Winky was removed from his role because his interpretation of the role was not acceptable.

Speaker 3 Which,

Speaker 3 I mean, how would they tell? I don't know. Well, yeah, this was Dave Thompson.
Yes, I mean,

Speaker 3 I'm bringing it out as my fact. It concerns a very dear friend of mine.

Speaker 3 In fact, I think, you know, my second oldest friend, I mean, not to go into abstract detail, but my oldest friend is Gabby Gleister, who played Bob in

Speaker 3 Black Adder. And my second oldest friend

Speaker 3 played Tinky Winky. I really only

Speaker 3 befriended people who would later play

Speaker 3 a pretty famous character. Yeah, A-Lester.

Speaker 3 Dave Thompson is a very, very, very great stand-up comic, very interesting comic muse in general.

Speaker 3 And he got a great break at one point in his career in that he auditioned for and was cast as Tinky Winky Winky because he did an enormous amount of

Speaker 3 physical theater in his day. He did a he was originally did a lot of teaching and working with kids with special needs using theatre etc.
So very good with his tall wonderful body.

Speaker 3 He got the job as Tinky Winky and gave a lot of thought to it. I mean it isn't actually as simple as you think.
Well surely they just all kind of go around in these enormous costumes.

Speaker 3 I think the reason it was a success was because there was character.

Speaker 3 But for some reason they sacked him and I don't I think some people say because I think it was Dave's idea to give Tinky Winky a handbag.

Speaker 3 Oh, and I think in those days, I don't know if that's a fact or not, but I think it might be. I think that's about as far as you get with facts these days.

Speaker 3 It might be.

Speaker 3 And I think there was some sort of weird idea that that might suggest he was gay, and a weird idea that that was a bad thing. It was numerous things.

Speaker 3 The handbag was one, which I read in one interview. Dave says it wasn't a handbag, it was like a magic bag.
It could do magical things. So that's why Tinky Winky had a bag.
It was a handbag.

Speaker 3 It was a handbag. Dave, come on.

Speaker 3 i think dave's had decades to talk about this now right so he's probably adding little bits purple supposedly was a colour to but this is just this this is all mad yeah it's all mad fake controversy it sounds really ice cold the way he got his like tubby bye-byes he was on his way to a rap party and he was just drawn to one side and handed a letter from the company and by rap you mean end of series rather than they were all going to get down and

Speaker 3 one of them was a jamaican um threw in a lot of jamaican dance moves I believe it's the one who played Dipsy, threw in a lot of dance hall stuff, interpretation.

Speaker 3 Anyway, no, but the rap end of series party, and he just got told that's it. But he has said since then, I'm proud of my work for them.
I was always the one to test out the limitations of the costume.

Speaker 3 I was the first to fall off my chair. I took all the risks.

Speaker 3 Good old Davey.

Speaker 3 He's a big physical comedian fan as well, right? Laurel and Hardy were his big influences and so on. That's what he thought he was doing inside the scene.
I don't, I have no idea what I said.

Speaker 3 I know he would, as I say, he's a friend of mine, and I know he was deeply upset. He was devastated.
I think since then, the notoriety, you know,

Speaker 3 it's in interest.

Speaker 3 I don't know whether you do better in a comedy career playing Tinky Winky or having been sacked from playing Tinky Winky. I kind of think maybe the latter.

Speaker 3 I don't know. But at the time, because he actually did invest...
as he does in all his work, a great deal of his, you know, artistry.

Speaker 3 And, you know, he took it very seriously, I think he felt, you know, very undermined.

Speaker 3 what is his voice like because i read he said that one of the reasons that he left might have been because they didn't use his voice they dubbed him over with another actor i've he doesn't have a very strong accent well like don't they all kind of go oh i mean but his he was revoiced and he's he's it's darth vader yeah that's david prouse all over it's one guy in the suit another guy some of them did their own voices but the other three did their own voices that i didn't know and he was the only one redoing i didn't really care until now but i mean

Speaker 3 and then his voice was done by a guy called Mark Heenahan who his other big role was playing Lyndon B Johnson in a TV series LB John literally the manner who's known really now finally for hey hey LBJ how many kids to kill today with the Vietnam War is was actually the voice of one of a children's favorite it's a there's a kind of irony stretching across the decades there as well another one I'm ditzy John Simmit he was a comedian as well so it's great knowing that there were comedians inside he's also a charmander on a pikachu and friends and cartoon yeah they've all got amazing credit this is all after our time yeah i mean the teletubbies are they still going is that yeah i watched it this morning did you have you got kids or are you just i have a three-year-old

Speaker 3 but it was after she'd gone to nursery that i put it on yeah you just skinned up a doobie

Speaker 3 because apparently that's what was originally the big thing was students sort of like getting sitting when it started i was a student and we used to get up at like 11 o'clock in the morning like students do and just put teletubbies on and watch that yeah every morning we used to do that.

Speaker 3 Really? Well, you know what they say, don't you? Eh oh

Speaker 3 it was a number one single. We actually pastiched that in

Speaker 3 We Will Rock You, My Queen musical, because it's about the future of the world in which rock and roll has been forgotten and that all music is kind of electro, it's pop, you know, computerized pop created and streamed directly from the sort of conglomerate, whatever.

Speaker 3 Anyway, one of the things was that people are trying to remember back to the age of rock, but they really don't get it. So they discover that you know, this song was a number one.

Speaker 3 Teletubbies say uh oh, and they treat it with the same reverence as sort of satisfaction. And I want to hold your hand.
Anyway, anyway,

Speaker 3 that's amazing. You know, it was created by a guy called Andrew Davenport.

Speaker 3 And the whole I didn't actually know that trippiness and spoken splits was associated with teletubbies because the one I associate that with, which is actually more LSD, is in the night garden, which is the trippiest of shows.

Speaker 3 And it's got iggle piggle and

Speaker 3 same creators as well as

Speaker 3 then Lala in the reboot of Teletubbies, the same actor plays Upsy Daisy in the garden. So there is like

Speaker 3 the same universe.

Speaker 3 It's a sort of universe. Was Tele Tubbies rebooted? I mean, what was the

Speaker 3 one that I watched this morning was very different than the one I watched when I was a student. Right.
Okay. It's different.

Speaker 3 And I mean, I don't want to bore your listeners, but I mean, I'm quite interested. What difficult? I mean, was the hill a different colour? No, the hill was the same.

Speaker 3 I think they just get into a few more scrapes and also more plot. Yeah, but how could there? I mean, it's literally tension-packed.
The VO is different as well. The voiceover is different.

Speaker 3 Like, immediately, I was like, this isn't what I grew up on. Do the screens in their tummies, are they now vertical to the edge of vertical video? Yeah, they're all TikToks.

Speaker 3 It's funny how you don't like change. One doesn't like change.

Speaker 3 I remember having, you know, watched an awful lot of Dumb as the Dankenji and goes round and round and round when my kids were very small.

Speaker 3 I happened to see one with, I don't know, a nephew or something, and they've gone all CGI, so they're not real, they're not real models anymore. And I just, I wanted to write to someone.
I did.

Speaker 3 I remember the Times or something. They're also run by Italian and French companies these days, aren't they? Like,

Speaker 3 do you see what he did? There you go. A little bit of politics, goodness gracious.
HS2 across Sodor is very, very slow.

Speaker 3 Can I tell you guys about Lala? Yeah.

Speaker 3 So Lala was Nikki Smedley. She has since done a one-woman show, Confessions of a Teletubby.

Speaker 3 And she found you couldn't say you were a teletubby at the time.

Speaker 3 I think in the early days, when she'd just been cast and the first things were going out, they all signed NDAs, so you couldn't confess it.

Speaker 3 But she had originally, her previous job, as far as I can tell, was fronting the Garage Rock girl group Psycho Pussy.

Speaker 3 And that doesn't get you sacked from the situation. And all Dave did was fall off his chair.

Speaker 3 Oh, my goodness. That's amazing.
That is a brilliant fact. That's amazing.

Speaker 3 But that doesn't seem to matter in children's entertainment. There's the biggest children's entertainer, it's called Blippy, and it's a huge character in America.

Speaker 3 It's sold, I think, for like a billion dollars in the States as a brand. The guy who plays Blippy, that's not his first career, similar sort of alternative career to begin with.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he was a prankster. There's a video online that you can see of Blippy taking a poo on his friend's chest just to.

Speaker 3 Well, that would make any child laugh.

Speaker 3 I think that's probably the best kids gaggy ever did. Look at the Barney character.

Speaker 3 He's now, he does tantric sex massage yeah um he's so interesting dave gina i read about him yeah dave jina so he wasn't the original barney he took over as barney and then and and he supposedly to get into the suit itself he said he used tantric he's a lube

Speaker 3 lube

Speaker 3 what is a tantric sex massage

Speaker 3 yes i think well is this where you thought today was going when you came into the office i don't know i have to bring out my personal stories but i'll tell you what it is it's um they effectively put you in a headspace where you can start feeling your energy growing to the point of culminating in an orgasm.

Speaker 3 So you don't necessarily have to have someone touching you. So it might be a verbal massage, somebody saying, you know.

Speaker 3 I mean, we all got the entire world learned the phrase tantric sex at exactly the same moment when Sting and Trudy announced that they spent a year shagging or something

Speaker 3 without pause. And everybody kind of heard this and everybody had a giggle about Sting and Trudy.
And I don't think anybody ever really asked, well, I certainly, I mean, what is tantric sex?

Speaker 3 I mean, is it a different position? Is it no, it's a slow process.

Speaker 3 I think with Sting and Trudy, it was them sitting across from each other, staring at each other's eyes for about four hours and slowly getting at tantric sex. So it's really terrible, boring sex.

Speaker 3 I mean, I think it's so much better when you shack, personally. And in five minutes is fine.
I mean, anyway,

Speaker 3 tantric sex is something mystery. I must look it up.
So you were saying about people sort of all learning things at the same time.

Speaker 3 Do you know Toy Story? There's this bit in Toy Story where Andy, the child, walks in and all the toys flop down. Okay.

Speaker 3 So in this. Which Toy Story? Is this the first one? I believe it's in all of them that this happens.

Speaker 3 I must admit, I haven't seen any of them, but I have read the transcripts of all of them.

Speaker 3 That is true. Sounds like Tantric watching the Toy Stories to me.

Speaker 3 It's just not as good.

Speaker 3 Yeah, they do.

Speaker 3 Whenever a trouble or an adult. So I get it.
In Disney theme parks, they had all these Toy Story characters. So it's people in costumes.

Speaker 3 And then whenever anyone shouted, Andy's coming, all the actors would just fall to the floor. It's like a cool little safety.
Safety Johnson would be great in one of those characters. Amazing.

Speaker 3 According to the pill.

Speaker 3 It was like a little sort of hidden thing, but then it went viral on the internet. And suddenly everyone learned it at the same time.

Speaker 3 And so there was one day when every single person who walked into the theme park just shouted, Andy's coming. And all the actors had to fall to the floor.

Speaker 3 and it was it lasted one more day and they just stopped doing the whole thing yeah yeah absolutely that's so fuzzy see people can't be trusted with a global fact you know they're just gonna spoil it for everyone by overdoing it um i read this amazing story i was reading about people trapped inside big costumes trying to see if there was anything else and i came across a kind of different story about a kid 12 year old called martens pistorius he had a mystery illness where he fell into a coma for years and years but he was conscious inside the coma so he was completely aware of what was going on yeah and he kept trying as hard as he could to break out of it nothing could happen and he is now out of it in fact he's like a wheelchair racer he's got kids he's got family and the thing that broke him out is that when he was 12 they put him into a hospital and they played non-stop reruns of barney to him and he got so annoyed with the song i love you that he went i can't i can't be in this coma anymore and he decided to train himself and it took him years but through anger of Barney he trained himself to know when it was daytime to know how to move the muscles of his lips lips when he was trying to smile at someone.

Speaker 3 And they slowly recognised it and they helped and coached him out of it. That I have to say, one of, you know, I'm sure everyone shares it.

Speaker 3 I mean, the terror of, I think it's called locked-in syndrome, isn't it? I remember reading about one person, is it something with butterflies or something, the story, a French bloke.

Speaker 3 And he, you know, he'd been, he was, they had the sports game on and the nurse just

Speaker 3 turned the telly off at night. And, you know, he'd been watching it.
And the anger, I'm afraid it didn't pop him out. But he also somehow managed to, because he's obviously told that story since.

Speaker 3 But goodness gracious, I mean, the idea, and you can't even ask them to kill you. You know, you literally can't do anything.
Yeah. Barney took a lot of flack.
Barney took a lot of flack.

Speaker 3 People hated Barney, I think, because of that repetitive song and all of this. But the guy who played Barney, as we say, David Joyner, he is a very interesting guy.

Speaker 3 Do you know what his previous job was? Go on. He was a mannequin in Shop Windows.
Oh. What? A live mannequin.
A live mannequin. He did it for a few dollars an hour.
Right.

Speaker 3 And he claimed that after a year, he was so good at it that he was charging $100 an hour.

Speaker 3 Wait a minute, how much? Surely for $100, you can buy a mannequin. I would have thought.
I know. Why would anybody?

Speaker 3 I just don't believe this story.

Speaker 3 You said he changed his clothes every hour. You know, so you've got a little fashion show.
So as you walk to work, the mannequin is wearing something.

Speaker 3 And then as you walk back, he's wearing something. Is he just holding? Is he holding still the whole time? I believe so.
I mean,

Speaker 3 Covent Garden is literally full of people with this skill. They paint themselves silver and stand there.
I'm afraid you obviously do facts at QI, but I don't think that's a fact. No, he claims it.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he claims it, right? That's from him.

Speaker 3 I think there was some political controversy. I mean, I know.
It's an American thing. I wouldn't even know what Barney looked like, or certainly not this.
irritating song.

Speaker 3 But I think there was some...

Speaker 3 Did it go woke or something?

Speaker 3 Did it annoy?

Speaker 3 Did it annoy the people who don't like things going woke?

Speaker 3 I think it's been cancelled too long to have gone woke. Barney's not been around for a long time.

Speaker 3 So it was cancelled in the old

Speaker 3 in the original edition. Imagine that.
Like we look back now and we say, oh, you know, what a shame. You know, they cancelled play for the day.
Oh, what did they do?

Speaker 3 Did they say something mean about

Speaker 2 Get Ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 2 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 2 Why is Adam after the Tanner family? What lengths will he go to? One thing's for sure: the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 3 This episode of Phish is brought to you by Airbnb. Ah, you've been away, Dan? Yeah.
Where'd you go? I went to a caravan park. You ever been to one of those?

Speaker 3 I have actually, yeah. It's pretty interesting.
You get AirCon. It's like one of the only places in the UK I've ever had AirCon in.
So that was pretty magic.

Speaker 3 Here's a weird thing about staying in a caravan park. You would think it would be part of like a big package system.

Speaker 3 I actually stayed in it via Airbnb. Did you? Yeah.
And it was a pretty phenomenal service. Wow.
Did you put your own place on Airbnb while you were away? No.

Speaker 3 Such a huge mistake. Could have done it.
Yeah. And it could have made it so easy because they have a co-host network on Airbnb.

Speaker 3 So you can actually have someone else come in and take care of all the practical stuff for your house. That's right.
They can create your listing.

Speaker 3 They can manage reservations, message guests, give you on-site support, do all of it. It's very easy.
While you're gone, you can hire a co-host from Airbnb's co-host network to do the work for you.

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All right, on with the show. On with the podcast.

Speaker 3 Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that the British Army used lances until 1927.

Speaker 3 Wow,

Speaker 3 that's...

Speaker 3 I'm surprised it was that

Speaker 3 that early that they got rid of it. Really? I mean...
I mean, if you think about it, we got, what, the nuclear bomb 20 years later and 20 years before that we were just using big sticks.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but it's insane.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I don't think they were using but you think about it and in fact after that I mean the poor Polish cavalry were slaughtered in 1939 because they also used lances. That's right yeah.

Speaker 3 It took a long time for armies to get over

Speaker 3 you know the the old ways. Who knew that soldiers might be reactionary old dickheads or

Speaker 3 some of them at least. Can I just say Ben that Andy is very very excited to talk about lances i'm so excited i could just see as you were talking he was like

Speaker 3 yeah yeah yeah right well i mean let's but i as i say i i i don't think the british army was well certainly wasn't the last because the poles you know right were using which a lance is a very sharp pole just

Speaker 3 but they were very sharp to use i'm listening i mean but we are actually talking about a military disaster and a human disaster of course uh but it is true to say i mean i think the last british charge since you've got me on it I like history yeah was what Churchill was involved in and so we've got lots of interesting links here wasn't it 189 on Omdurman or is it

Speaker 3 cartoon yes I think that was the last well it was one of the last this is the thing I can't believe the man who wrote Black Adder is saying well this was actually a military human disaster hang on we've got to get some comedy out of this well exactly

Speaker 3 my grandfather got annoyed with me because he thought we were laughing at the expense of the British Army and my grandfather my uncle who was a historian but also had served served in the British Army in the Second World War,

Speaker 3 but was also saved by the British Army because my uncle and my father's family were Jewish refugees from the Nazis.

Speaker 3 So they were very conscious of what we owed to Britain and also what we owed to the armed forces who in 1940, despite what the Americans might like to tell you, that they won the Second World War on their own, there was a year during which Britain stood alone,

Speaker 3 after which most of the Wehrmacht was involved with the Russians. But anyway, let's not get on to

Speaker 3 the whole of the Second World War. We're going to stick on it.
Let's go. So quick, go, Andy.
Love it, lost, lost it. All right.

Speaker 3 Sorry, I didn't even finish about what my uncle thought, and now you've moved on. It's like you're like mountain goats leaping from crag to crag.
I can't possibly follow this.

Speaker 3 I want to hear what your uncle thought first of all. Well, very briefly, he wrote to me when Black Adder Goes Forth came out.

Speaker 3 He was a bit of a sort of he had a slightly German accent, and he wrote, obviously,

Speaker 3 it wasn't a voicemail, but I could hear his voice in the letter.

Speaker 3 He said, I'm very disappointed to hear that you're you're making easy swipes at the at the army uh your father who sired you that's the phrase he used which which is you know that's that's that's come to my study boy uh it's a tautology really innit because your father obviously sired you and but anyway he said owed his freedom as do i to the british army etc you did very well with black added too but uh this is the i'm i don't approve and i wrote back and i said you this is just not the case i think you know it's a very respectful but obviously the humor that the Tommies themselves had, you know.

Speaker 3 Anyway, he watched a bit more of it and said,

Speaker 3 he said, what an old bastard. He said, he said, I've watched it since and I've decided perhaps I was too hasty with my criticism, but you shouldn't be so sensitive to it.
I thought, bloody hell.

Speaker 3 He's having it both ways, isn't he?

Speaker 3 Anyway, back to Lance's.

Speaker 3 Thank you, Ben. He must be the only person in history who thinks that the fourth black adder was the worst one.
Oh, no, as I say, he didn't. He leapt a bit quick.

Speaker 3 He said jokes about idiotic officers and things, you know, it wasn't that, it's not that cut and dry, et cetera.

Speaker 3 Although, actually, you know, the bloody-mindedness that, you know, I mean, Haig's inability to think outside the box. Churchill, again, you know,

Speaker 3 in trying to develop the tank, thinking outside the box, Gallipoli, for all that it was a disaster, the idea to break the deadlock in the Western Front. Look, I'm auditioning for the rest is history.

Speaker 3 I want everybody to know that this podcast is just a leap for me to an even bigger podcast, and that's that's really the only reason I'm here. So, please, right back to Lances.
Now,

Speaker 3 now

Speaker 3 I'm afraid we've run out of time.

Speaker 3 The Cavalry Lance.

Speaker 3 Okay, I'll tell you where I got this. First of all, I went recently to the Royal Armouries in Leeds, which is a ginormous museum of arms and armor and armaments.

Speaker 3 It's absolutely unbelievable, all the way from, I think they're having a sort of Roman exhibition at the moment, all the way to. I would like to live there.
It's so good. Oh, my God.
I'm going.

Speaker 3 It's incredible. And basically, I met some of the curators there.

Speaker 3 I just want to give a shout out to Henry Yallop. He is the keeper of edged weapons.
What a title. It's so cool.
Oh, I wish we'd had that when we were doing Black Adder.

Speaker 3 Every weapon has an edge. Well, that's true.
Do they?

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 they've got some blunt.

Speaker 3 I'm talking as a mathematician, sorry. Lances.
Lances. Do you have a round edge? I mean, has a club got an edge? Has a circle got an edge? Back to Lancing.
Thank you.

Speaker 3 Basically, the point is, so he told me me this amazing thing that the British Army kept them in service until 1927. And it was common among European armies, as someone just said.

Speaker 3 That's not actually very amazing. But anyway, carry on.
All right.

Speaker 3 I don't remember having a go at your fact, man.

Speaker 3 But basically, most European armies had it in service because

Speaker 3 this is the thing I love about it, is I think it might be the ancient world weapon that lasted the longest into modern military. As in, bows and arrows were not used in any mass way.

Speaker 3 What are the other ones? Swords were not used in a mass way this late. Lances stayed in service.

Speaker 3 And it's basically because one of the most effective things you can do is have a very long stick and poke it into someone else.

Speaker 3 Like it was from the I mean the Romans had a version of the lance called the Kontos. Or the Iranian cavalry, sorry.

Speaker 3 20th century it lasted to. That was the first century to the 20th.
I read another couple of theories as to why they lasted.

Speaker 3 Number one, that people in the army sort of fantasized of these cavalry charges, you know. And then another thing is that they like pig sticking.
So just it's like a sport where there's like a ball

Speaker 3 spearing pig stick.

Speaker 3 And that was really popular in the army. So people pet them for that reason.
But it was basically just a really successful thing as well.

Speaker 3 And it was, and it, it kind of, we should say, lance is a, just for anyone who's not familiar with it, a lance is a spear that you don't throw. You know, it's held mostly by heavy cavalry.

Speaker 3 If you're trying to break up an enemy formation or charge or sort of, it's a really disruptive weapon, you know. I imagine it in like a jousting competition.
You hold it out of your armpit.

Speaker 3 It's exactly, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 I mean, yeah, it was a successful weapon, but with the emergence of the machine gun, it became instantly a not successful weapon and it took them very much too long a time to notice.

Speaker 3 I mean, the fact that

Speaker 3 the military hierarchies worldwide were unable to sort of think beyond the horse because it had been so, you know, 2,000, 3,000 years.

Speaker 3 I mean, I think it's more the horse that they couldn't bear to get rid of because the idea of a cavalry charge remains such an exciting thing if you're of a military turn of mind.

Speaker 3 And militaries were still hugely reliant on horses for transport in general, you know, millions of horses in both world wars. Absolutely.

Speaker 3 But the Lance had this really weird thing where it went out of fashion in about the 17th and 18th century when pistols came in and then it came back. Yeah, what was the...

Speaker 3 I saw that, that it went gone around that time. What brought it back? Basically, Poland and Hungary had amazingly effective cavalry.
Right. And guns were not very good at the time.

Speaker 3 You know, they weren't, you know, they were slow to reload and they were not very accurate over very long distances.

Speaker 3 And it went so well for the Polish and Hungarian cavalries that Napoleon adopted it and then the British army. So the whole of the 19th century was this huge renaissance for the lance to win.

Speaker 3 It's more to do with colonialism.

Speaker 3 I think battles between Western armies, the lance, they may have used it, but I don't, I mean, if you've only got to read the charge of the light brigade, I mean, lanes against cannon.

Speaker 3 Even before the invention of the Gatling gun, what's that, the end of the 19th century? For me, the cavalry charges, you know, they were useful against an army that didn't have guns.

Speaker 3 It's against infantry. Waterloo.
Waterloo, it was a hugely used... As in Napoleon's usual city, no, you're right.
I mean, as long as you couldn't reload very quickly.

Speaker 3 Although, as we famously know, the British square with three ranks each reloading and firing in order. Anyway, back to the last.
Hey, Andy, I'm wondering, like, drones?

Speaker 3 Like, knocking a drone out with a big stick, maybe they're going to come back.

Speaker 3 Don't tease me.

Speaker 3 Sort of around the Cromwellian times, did they have very, very long lances? I got this idea there was a time when they got longer. They did.

Speaker 3 And there must have been a point when they became impractically long. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Pikes, which are basically the spears you stick in the ground to prevent enemy cavalry, those are about five meters long. I mean, they're really, really long.
They couldn't wield that. No, no, no, no.

Speaker 3 That's to stick in the ground and prevent a cavalry. They almost had an exciting comeback of their own back in World War II.

Speaker 3 Because Churchill, yeah, Churchill wrote a thing saying every man must have a weapon of some sort, be it only a mace or a pike. They took him at his word.

Speaker 3 They produced 250,000 of them to give out to all the soldiers. Yeah, and someone said, We can't give them pikes.
What are you doing?

Speaker 3 They've got machine guns out there.

Speaker 3 I want to know the provenance of this fact. I've read an awful lot of books on World War II.
I've never come across that one.

Speaker 3 Well, it was discussed by Godfrey Nicholson, the MP, known as Croft's Pike. We all know how much sense and how much truth we have.
Godfrey Nicholson, though, he was a man of honor, wasn't he?

Speaker 3 It was known as Croft's Pike because he was. I'm sure you're not not thinking of lance corporal pike

Speaker 3 i get all sounds all my facts from british circumstances yes um sounds to me like like like nicholson was a very stupid boy that's all

Speaker 3 can i tell you about mrs hertha ayrton go on then i love her she was a citizen scientist and she was aware that there was a problem with uh gas you know the first world war first you big use of poison gas on the on the western front so she invented the anti-gas fan and it's just a large fan.

Speaker 3 It's a handheld fan. It's one of those where you can't snap it out and flirt with it.
It's just like an open

Speaker 3 paddle. Oh, so it wasn't an electric fan.
It was a paddle. No, no.
This was the First World War.

Speaker 3 It was just a handheld. And they made 100,000 of these and distributed them along the Western Front.
Is that a weird idea, though? Like soldiers with their fans. Can we call it an invention?

Speaker 3 I mean, surely she just

Speaker 3 came up with a good use for something which already existed. I mean, she said, why don't we fan gas away? And nobody said, my goodness, what shall we use to fan the gas away?

Speaker 3 Ben, I like to acknowledge female inventors, especially. And so you...
Well,

Speaker 3 I'm with you on that. You know, as we all know, Mrs.
Orwell wrote 1984, apparently, according to a new biography. So yes, let's see.
She wrote another thing called 1984, didn't she?

Speaker 3 Which he might have based his slightly on. Well, just the title.
Just the title.

Speaker 3 It was a poem. Anyway, let's not start.
debunking history debunkers. It's a very good thing

Speaker 3 to find the influences of women women in history. So we certainly don't want to be poo-pooing that like a children's entertainer on a

Speaker 3 chest. On a chest.

Speaker 3 Just looping back.

Speaker 3 Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact.

Speaker 3 My fact this week is that in 1962, a baby was successfully conceived thanks to a new fertility drug that contained Pope-approved nuns urine.

Speaker 3 Pope approved. Yeah.
This is so this is the story of perganol. Perganol is a drug that has been used for decades and decades to help people who have got fertility problems.

Speaker 3 And back in the 1940s, there was a guy called Piero Donini. He was a scientist who was working on extracting and purifying FSH and LH.

Speaker 3 So these are hormones that we produce in our body to stimulate production of sperm and produce testosterone in men.

Speaker 3 They're used for women to grow and function their ovaries to produce a trigger ovulation. They're really important.
He's the person who isolated them and tried to work out what to do with them.

Speaker 3 So another guy comes along who is studying the exact same thing and finds out about Donini's discovery and says, we could change the whole system of people trying to get pregnant.

Speaker 3 And this was Bruno Lunenfeld. Yeah, exactly.
Bruno Lunenfeld. And so they approached this company, Serrano, where Donini worked, and they said, could we try this out?

Speaker 3 In order to try this out, we need gallons and gallons of urine and we need to find out where to get that from. And they said, it's a great idea, but we don't want to put our stuff into this.

Speaker 3 We can't do this. There was a guy on the board who happened to be the nephew of the current pope.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 3 And he said, the pope has approved that the nuns that the pope has access to will be the providers. Not that he has access to the province.
Not direct access.

Speaker 3 It's not a Tantric massage sort of situation. No.

Speaker 3 He has access to...

Speaker 3 Well, influence. He has influence, and he's approved the fact that if you ask them,

Speaker 3 the Pope says says he's okay. Because it's post-menopausal, large groups of older women, a nunnery, would certainly be able to.

Speaker 3 And they can't be pregnant. And they can't be pregnant.
That would spoil it.

Speaker 3 What medieval nuns wouldn't have done.

Speaker 3 No, naughty nuns wouldn't be.

Speaker 3 Well, that is very interesting. You say Pope approved as if that's kind of the big fact.
It's like, you know, a Pope,

Speaker 3 Pope approved nuns' urine.

Speaker 3 Whereas actually, I think nuns' urine is probably the more interesting part part of that sentence but which because it really is that for that what a sort of interesting way they arrived at finding the stuff they needed but i mean did he did he have to approve it like we by we or was it just a general is it a purple bull that he said you can

Speaker 3 anyone can use nuns we it's fine by me i don't think he was project manager no no

Speaker 3 i think he allowed the title to just get on with it

Speaker 3 okay

Speaker 3 it took 10 nuns 10 days to produce enough urine for one treatment If 10 nuns spend 10 days to get a gallon of urine, how long does it take five nuns

Speaker 3 or something like that? GCSE Italian. Yeah, it took nuns 10 days to produce it.
I mean, they weren't obviously spending all day. They basically, when they had a wee, they kept it.

Speaker 3 And they needed that much of it.

Speaker 3 I think it's less dramatic when you unpack that sentence.

Speaker 3 He's coming for yours too. He's coming for yours?

Speaker 3 I saw it covered. So don't worry.

Speaker 3 It's 100 nun days. It's 100 nun we's.
It's not a day. It's got nothing to do with a day.
But You don't only have one wee a day, though. No, you're right.
No, you're right. You're probably five.

Speaker 3 Actually, you're absolutely right. Well, well done.
I probably have these days. I'm 66.
I have one wee a minute. So you're right.
I have to knot it just to get through lunch. You know.

Speaker 3 But one part of this that you're missing out, Dan, is that the Vatican owned 25% of Serrano. Yeah.
This company. So that was the reason they were so interested in going for this.

Speaker 3 The Pope had a dog in the game. It's a stunning.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 the collection is insane. I mean, just because that was one treatment was 10 nuns, 10 days worth of urine for 10 nuns.

Speaker 3 But that's one treatment. And then the drug took off and it became successful.
And they started off with 100 nuns all donating their urine. And that gave them 30,000 liters a year.

Speaker 3 So that was enough for 450 treatments, right? And then that took off. But they had to fit special loos in the convents, obviously.
Because you need to

Speaker 3 wash it away. It's no use at all.
And so the first baby girl was born in 1962 thanks to this treatment yeah this was

Speaker 3 specifically this one and it took off and by the 1980s they needed 30,000 liters of urine a day

Speaker 3 so they had to expand beyond nuns yeah they had to synthesize it basically yeah they had to well no that took them a while to do to synthesize it so they looked for other groups of older and non-pregnant men and borders or women where did they find them they did prisons door they didn't do prisons I don't think there were urine collectors working for this company who did door-to-door door-knocking campaigns saying, Wow, hello, can we bring out, you know, can we bring out your piss, basically?

Speaker 3 And they had hundreds of that, they had a hundred thousand donors by the mid-90s. You would certainly, because of course, religion is kind of shrinking.

Speaker 3 I mean, I think I'll bet there's a lot less less nuns around now than there were 50 years ago. Yeah, that's peaked with the sound of music, and I think it's down, it's down ever since.

Speaker 3 So, gosh, but they did eventually learn how to like man-made nun piss or person-made human

Speaker 3 synthetic, yes, synthetic, but it was 1995 when they came up with that that's it was called gonel f gonel f crazily actually per gonel is similar word and they both come from the word for gonad

Speaker 3 i did two yes well i did two with my wife and i we we had we had our infertility journey and um we did three three cycles before we wonderfully got our beautiful twins uh and no one ever mentioned nuns piss uh synthetic or real there was literally i don't know whether they were trying to slip it past us Maybe they thought I'm sort of relatively publicly known as an atheist.

Speaker 3 Maybe they would have thought I wouldn't have wanted nuns piss involved.

Speaker 3 Would you have minded? No, I wouldn't have minded, actually.

Speaker 3 Of course I wouldn't.

Speaker 3 We were what's called non-specifically infertile, which is medical jargon for we do not have a clue.

Speaker 3 And I think a lot of people are. And, you know,

Speaker 3 everything seemed fine. They couldn't find a reason.

Speaker 3 And yet they say, in terms of facts, they do say if you're a couple trying to conceive, in the first year, nine out of ten will conceive. And by the second year, nine out of ten of the

Speaker 3 10% who didn't will have conceived. So by the time you get to the third year, you really are either infertile or fantastically unlucky.

Speaker 3 And we never found out, and it turned out we were fertile because our third and last child came as a very big surprise. Not born off the wrist, but in the conventional sense.

Speaker 3 Sired. Sired.
Sired.

Speaker 3 You're absolutely right.

Speaker 3 There's a really cool fact, which is, so you, you wrote this into a book, Inconceivable, which I absolutely love, and then made that into a movie called Maybe Baby.

Speaker 3 In Maybe Baby, Hugh Laurie, who's the lead role, is a TV maker and he's...

Speaker 3 in charge of this children's program and it's at the BBC and there's a there's a lead character who's a children's entertainer who wears a costume who's called Mr. Furblob in it.

Speaker 3 Guess who was inside that? Dave Thompson. Dave Thompson.

Speaker 3 Dave Thompson is in my movie, maybe, baby. He's a very funny physical comedian and a very good comic.
Yeah, I got a lot of good material out of

Speaker 3 that because

Speaker 3 that's what I do.

Speaker 3 I like to create comedy from what I know and what I feel and what I think.

Speaker 3 And obviously, that was a massive part of our lives. And we, over the years, read many lovely letters saying, you know, it was all very grim in our house.

Speaker 3 And your book or your movie was helpful because it is funny. People are funny.

Speaker 3 And the the nuns we story is enough to prove that a thousand fold yeah i always thought because you know in the movie the two people are constantly i'm ovulating come home now there's always like a rush and i always thought oh that's a that's just a good comic conceit cut to us on tour in europe where i'm finding myself on my day off flying back to the uk to shag

Speaker 3 yeah because my life is ovulating exactly it it is a part of it um you know there are certain times when you're more fertile and you and honestly it's not easy you need a bit of tantric get you going because

Speaker 3 you know, like to order.

Speaker 3 I mean, I'm sure there are some, but you know, you suddenly go, oh no, you know, anyway, this we did it long before any Viagra, so you know, anyway, look, we're going into TFI territory.

Speaker 3 Can I talk about the Vatican for a second? Yeah, yes, of course. So the Vatican owned 25% of this company.
I was looking into the Vatican's finances

Speaker 3 because I'm a former accountant.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 in World War II, they had a bank called the

Speaker 3 The Nazi Helping Bank? Effectively, yes. It was the Institute for Religious Works, and they brought it in as like a national bank, which wouldn't have to be overseen by any authority.

Speaker 3 And they were known as the world's best offshore bank. And indeed, they are alleged to have hidden billions of pounds from Nazi sources.
They were investigated by the Bank of Italy in 2010.

Speaker 3 and found that they were non-compliant in seven of the 16 core standards of the Italian banking industry. Is that related to the Second World War? That's how it began.

Speaker 3 It began, actually, it began pre-Second World War. But the investigation, it wasn't like a very good question.
The investigation is current. Oh, wow.

Speaker 3 I said current, it's 2010, so it's 50 years ago. Are they going to have to give some of the we back?

Speaker 3 We've all not made a taking the piss truck there, and I think that's very good of us. And the other thing they have in Rome is they have a tax break for any chapel.

Speaker 3 So if they own a chapel in Rome, they don't have to pay tax on it. And a chapel counts as any building that has a three-meter square place where you can pray.

Speaker 3 And so, they own all these buildings in Rome, and they just put a tiny little corner and put a little statue of the Virgin Mary or something, call it a chapel, they don't have to pay tax on it. Wow,

Speaker 3 it's all according to a book called God's Bankers by Gerald Posner.

Speaker 3 Well, you know,

Speaker 3 it doesn't surprise us that, you know, money and religion can produce corruption. There's no doubt about that.
But the pope in question on this one was

Speaker 3 pius 12th so he's a friend of the podcast yeah yeah uh we mentioned him a couple of weeks ago a couple of weeks ago so they had this doctor this really strange doctor called paul nihans who was a swiss surgeon and he'd offered this rejuvenation treatment so we're kind of in the realm of that already with the you know the fertility and the the essence and all of this stuff but uh nihans injected the buttocks of his famous patients like supposedly king george vI uh with the cells of fetal lambs and calves.

Speaker 3 And it was a kind of jujup, bucku-uppo treatment.

Speaker 3 And this is the Pope whose embalming went disastrously wrong, and who ended up

Speaker 3 being, you know, his other, he was very unlucky with his doctor, as the other doctor embalmed him supposedly in the traditional Aramaic style, and it went awfully, awfully wrong.

Speaker 3 And the other reason he's a friend of the podcast is he was the one who ruled in 1954 that anyone mentioning Jesus' foreskin will be automatically excommunicated. Oh, wow.

Speaker 3 Which is why I've been technically excommunicated.

Speaker 3 Jesus was Jewish, so is this some reason? I mean, is he thought to have had one or not? Well, he was thought to have had it removed as a child.

Speaker 3 Absolutely. And there are relics around the world of this supposed holy thing.

Speaker 3 Just get back this embalming. I didn't know about Pope embalming.
Do they keep all the popes? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 There's been thousands. I mean, well, I don't know about thousand, but an awful lot of popes.
Really, they're not. They're backed up.
They're on a hard drive.

Speaker 3 Is

Speaker 3 I mean, is there a big

Speaker 3 population?

Speaker 3 If you go to the Vatican, there's like the catacombs underneath, and they have loads of they're not all on display, I have to say, so I don't know if they're all still there, but definitely you can walk past loads of popes.

Speaker 3 How many popes do you think there have been? Oh, that's a good question. Can't be triple figures.
What? Yeah,

Speaker 3 what you mean, more than a hundred? Yeah, I think so. I mean, there have been popes for 2,000 years.
30 AD, yeah, and I think they've, yeah, let's have a let's suddenly have a gun.

Speaker 3 Okay, let's start Saint Peter, right?

Speaker 3 I mean, I think there's pious, there's about a hundred piouses. I mean, there's certainly a lot of X's and ones.
He was Pius XII. Yeah, I'm saying double figures.
I'm saying

Speaker 3 I'm saying it. I'm saying it.
I've got the answers. I've got one, two, three.
This is according to the

Speaker 3 pontifical yearbook. So that's a cool yearbook.

Speaker 3 365.

Speaker 3 There's 266. Right,

Speaker 3 according to this. Do you think they've got them all? I mean, they obviously haven't got the really early ones.
I mean, when how many pope

Speaker 3 popes are there? How many popes are still in physical?

Speaker 3 We don't fully know, apparently. There's lots of bits of popes that we have.
We've got lots of horse skins and

Speaker 3 stuff, but don't mention them.

Speaker 3 Don't bring up the horsekins.

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Speaker 3 Okay, it's time for a final fact of the show, and that is James.

Speaker 3 Okay, Ben, you've had a go at the other facts so far, but I think you'll be fine with this one. My fact this week is that Shakespeare's parents and his children were probably illiterate.

Speaker 3 Well, that's not a fact, is it?

Speaker 3 He strikes again.

Speaker 3 Right out the gates.

Speaker 3 The word probably does a lot of work there, doesn't it?

Speaker 3 Well, it does does a lot of damage i mean the fact that someone was probably something is about as far from being a fact as as you can get okay let me give you a trump level fact

Speaker 3 so let me give you a little bit of evidence but it is scant because what we know about them is very little but shakespeare's father and mother couldn't sign their names like when they signed they signed with images so his father chose that means that's how they signed their names absolutely that may have been how they chose to sign their names that's absolutely and actually now if you want to sign something now with an image rather than your name you are allowed to do that by law so you are allowed and actually in those days it was relatively common so craftspeople tradespeople guild members would often like draw things so john his father drew a picture of a pair of glovers compasses instead of his name and so some people point to this as evidence that he couldn't write

Speaker 3 and william shakespeare had three kids, I think, but one of them, Hamlet, his son, died very young.

Speaker 3 But then he had two daughters. And in those days girls would typically not be taught how to read and write or not how to write anyway

Speaker 3 and we have one sort of very quite scruffy signature of one of his daughters so it seems like she could write her name but the implication is maybe not much else well but again like the evidence is really really it's really so there's a actually we know more about Shakespeare than we do about any of the other great English poets of the English Reformation, considerably more.

Speaker 3 There are a lot of known facts, which is is why it's particularly galling that idiot conspiracy theorists choose to say, well, maybe it wasn't him,

Speaker 3 because they think a lot of people are... Darren Tunn's looking at his notes now.

Speaker 3 But let's just look at the issue rather than go to the Shakespeare conspiracies. Firstly, Shakespeare's own signatures

Speaker 3 are generally varied. He spelt his name differently.
The whole idea of what a signature was and what it meant, and indeed what correct spelling was,

Speaker 3 was viewed very differently in those days. Think about the evidence.
Mary was a daughter of the aristocracy. She's his mother.
Absolutely. Now, her husband, there's no doubt about it, John

Speaker 3 Shakespeare, came up. He was lower class to her, but he eventually was in court for cooking books, for various bits of dodgy accounting and things.

Speaker 3 So clearly, he certainly was mathematically literate. There's no doubt about that.
He became mayor of Stratford-on-Avon. It seems unlikely that he wasn't able to read.

Speaker 3 Don't forget, reading and writing were separate. I think that's another thing, isn't it? It's like in those days, a lot of people could read but couldn't write.

Speaker 3 Susannah Shakespeare, the elder daughter, was married to a very learned apothecary. She unquestionably worked in his business.
She was a very considerable herbalist and a gardener.

Speaker 3 It just seems unlikely that human curiosity, particularly if your father is the greatest dramatist of the age, they didn't realize he would become the greatest dramatist in English letters.

Speaker 3 Seems unlikely to me that they wouldn't have taught themselves to read, been taught to read. I know women were treated entirely differently.

Speaker 3 I personally think it more likely that they could read and probably write to a certain extent.

Speaker 3 It seems unlikely that little Hamlet, 11 years old, running home from school, his twin sister didn't take some interest in what he'd learned. I think they could read, but neither is a fact.

Speaker 3 It's this kid called Hamlet. Hamlet.
Hamnuts. Yeah, I know.
But this is all, I mean, irrelevant anyway, because it was all Francis Bacon, so it doesn't.

Speaker 3 Exactly. Exactly.
Or some other Porsche geezer.

Speaker 3 To to me Shakespeare denied do you want to know what is a fact

Speaker 3 because of course it's a it's a popular concert conspiracy particularly amongst lovies and and posh boys that that that that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare or my father had a good joke on that he'd say of course Shakespeare didn't write his plays it was another fellow with the same name because obviously in a way does it really matter but of course it it is a evidence of a corrosive snobbery in British culture because of course Shakespeare was famously the only poet of the English Renaissance who didn't go to either Oxford or Cambridge.

Speaker 3 I mean the grip those institutions had on British arts as indeed politics and sciences was as strong then as it is now.

Speaker 3 So I think it's a very unfortunate thing to say well he was educated he was chucked out of school when he was 13.

Speaker 3 Would he really well you know McCartney was a working class lad as was George Harrison you know Lennon slightly lesser the idea that you if you come from rough and ready roots mean you can't have the finest brain in the country is I think I gotta say Ben coming from Bolton myself I do agree yeah But anyway, just to get to my facts, because I'm waffling on and I can see you all want to get your facts.

Speaker 3 No one questioned Shakespeare's provenance,

Speaker 3 his reality, the reality of Shakespeare, starting with Ben Johnson, who wrote his

Speaker 3 obituary as his friend, Stephen Hemmings, who put together the first folio. Nobody mentioned, there is no recorded mention of doubt about Shakespeare until the middle of the 19th century.

Speaker 3 So 300 years passed before anybody decided, wouldn't it be interesting if I could start this? To to me, they're just like moon landing denialists, which is one step from Q and on.

Speaker 3 I think conspiracy theories are anti-science, anti-facts, and Shakespeare definitely wrote Shakespeare. I find it so interesting how this arose more than 200 years later.
300.

Speaker 3 So Delia Bacon was one of the... The name, the clue.

Speaker 3 I think no relation. American woman.
She was the first person to raise the possibility. She was clearly very intelligent in a lot of ways, but I think she was also quite unstable in other ways.
And

Speaker 3 she travelled to England to do research on, you know, the fact that Francis Bacon, who was a scientist and, you know, very learned guy and, you know, very gifted in lots of ways, probably quite busy, though.

Speaker 3 Probably too busy to write 37 plays as well. Anyway,

Speaker 3 and so lacking in any ego, as all, you know, boss boys from Cambridge are, that he didn't want any credit for them. How strange it was, finding any of the cash.

Speaker 3 And he allowed this bloke from Stratford to buy a lot of houses on the proceeds. But I think she travelled to England and she didn't really.

Speaker 3 She mostly stayed in her room when she was here, though, just sort of reading. She had a change room.

Speaker 3 She absorbed the atmospheres

Speaker 3 of the country. And then she wrote this 700-page book arguing the case.

Speaker 3 Anyway, I think it was Bill Bryson who found, he wrote a lovely short biography, Bill Bryson, finding various anti-Stratfordians who've included J. Thomas Looney, Sherwood E.

Speaker 3 Silly Man, and George Batty.

Speaker 3 And foe of the podcast, Mark Twain. Oh, was it? Really? Really? Mark Twain.

Speaker 3 He He said,

Speaker 3 so far as anybody actually knows and can prove, Shakespeare never wrote a play in his life. All the rest of his history is built up course upon course of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures.

Speaker 3 Classic Twain. Classic Twain, I'm afraid.
That's all. I find it genuinely mad that otherwise intelligent people continue to love the love.
And of course, it's because people love a conspiracy theory.

Speaker 3 But sadly, conspiracy theories are the enemy of the Enlightenment. You know, we're already moving into a post-truth age where

Speaker 3 we're coming back to an age of faith and superstition and anti-empirical evidence. And I think it's really dangerous.

Speaker 3 And it might seem harmless for a bunch of old lovedies to assemble every now and then and say, well, I think it was the Duke of Buckingham.

Speaker 3 But I actually think it's the thin end of an anti-science, anti-evidence wedge, which leads to, you know, vaccination, conspiracy theories,

Speaker 3 and a whole world where the president could say we like to choose alternative facts. Well, you might like this then, Ben.

Speaker 3 Have Have you read the Shakespeare play that he wrote in the year 1853?

Speaker 3 Now he collaborated with another famous writer, which is Victor Hugo.

Speaker 3 Once he was exiled from France to Jersey, he lived in Jersey for a while, someone came around to the house and showed him table tapping about the spirit world. He became obsessed with it.

Speaker 3 He spent a couple of years talking to, amongst others, Lord Byron, Jesus Christ, Joan of Arc, Mozart, Plato. Victor Hugo.
Oh, Mike did. Two years.

Speaker 3 And Mozart was using the table table to make original compositions that they wrote down.

Speaker 3 And one of the things that happened in those two years is that Victor Hugo and his son sat and channeled through Shakespeare a brand new Shakespeare play. They got the first act of a new comedy.

Speaker 3 It's in French because Shakespeare said, Shakespeare said to them, that is the superior language. Victor Hugo didn't speak English that well.
Yeah, exactly. And so that's out there.

Speaker 3 I don't think it's ever been performed. There's a one action.
It's sad because obviously he was a great, you know, he wrote Les Major.

Speaker 3 I mean, a great, great. Isn't it sad when you discover the feet of clay that everyone has concealed? You know, like apparently Newton dabbled in alchemy.
He went to the bottom.

Speaker 3 You know more alchemy than physics. Yeah.
He was very, he was very into, but from the off. Yeah.
Just quickly, you mentioned antivac theories as a result of this thin end of the wedge.

Speaker 3 Riddle me this, Ben. The second man who ever got the Pfizer jab in the UK against COVID was called Bill Shakespeare.

Speaker 3 No. Yes.
That's a loop. You've brought us all the way back, haven't you?

Speaker 3 You've stitched together so much. That's the famous image of, what's it called, Matt Hancock sort of pretending to cry was when someone told him that.
Is that so?

Speaker 3 Well, there were a lot of unbelievably good jokes as a result. Two gentlemen of corona,

Speaker 3 taming of the flu.

Speaker 3 Is this a jabber I see before me? I mean,

Speaker 3 there were some very good things. Yeah, but one of the most amazing things is that that Bill Shakespeare eventually died, not of COVID, of something else, not long after.

Speaker 3 And in Argentina, when the news announced his death, they said, we have lost one of the most important writers in the English language. Oh my goodness.

Speaker 3 For me, he is the master is what she said on TV.

Speaker 3 And she had to come back on and apologize and say, oh, no, no, that's not what I know. Well, linking vaccination back, I bet that newsreader felt a bit of a prick.

Speaker 3 One really good fact about Shakespeare I like, because we talked about his daughters before, is he had four grandchildren.

Speaker 3 Unfortunately, none of them had children afterwards, so that's where the line died out. But one of his grandchildren was called Shakespeare, as in the first name was Shakespeare.
Oh, really?

Speaker 3 Isn't that cool?

Speaker 3 It wasn't a surname, no, the surname was Quinny or Quinny. So, obviously, they wanted to pay tribute to the famous grandfather who sired them and wrote the canon of Shakespeare.

Speaker 3 But his lineage died out, right, with the granddaughter, except there are a few peoples who claim that it went on, including an American footballer who's called William Shakespeare. Oh, yeah,

Speaker 3 died in 1974, also known as the Merchant of Menace. And

Speaker 3 superb.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he was part of the Notre Dame Fighting irish football team and they claimed lineage direct lineage from shakespeare despite having no evidence um it was pointed out that he failed at english at college so

Speaker 3 it must be yeah yeah but there is a there is a descent from i think shakespeare's father or grandfather i think these days there is a baronet um of i think he's called thomas maybe shakespeare so that the the line the shakespeare family do have direct

Speaker 3 is that a claim that he's connected well i think it's not a claim i think he's descended from dad or there are i mean it is a surname I mean, there are other Shakespeareans.

Speaker 3 Well, we know from the bloke who got the second five of that scene. There are other Shakespeare.
And they're obviously always cursed with that name, you know.

Speaker 3 And like, poor, we occasionally get letters from black adders who

Speaker 3 hate Richard and me forever.

Speaker 3 And the other thing about Shakespeare, the surname, is we don't know what it means, but it might have been someone who uses a lance.

Speaker 3 Oh,

Speaker 3 honestly,

Speaker 3 some degrees of separation are shrinking. We're literally, we're huddling around these subjects.
Wait a second. Stratford is Warwickshire, right? Yeah.

Speaker 3 Do you know what else was filmed in Warwickshire? Teletubbies? The Teletubbies.

Speaker 3 And isn't a needle a very small lance?

Speaker 3 I mean, really.

Speaker 3 Time to wrap it up.

Speaker 3 We do actually need to wrap up.

Speaker 3 Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts.
Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 3 If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our online accounts. I'm on Instagram on at Schreiberland.

Speaker 3 James. My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin.
Andy. I'm at Andrew Hunter M.
Ben. I am not on any social media whatsoever, so you can't get me and say I ruined no such thing as fish.

Speaker 3 But if you want to send your furious letters to us, you can get us at podcast at qi.com.

Speaker 3 We'll forward them on to Ben or Andy will use them as part of our mailbag episode, which is called Drop Us a Line. If you want to to get access to Drop Us a Line, that's part of Club Fish.

Speaker 3 That's our secret members' club. So go to our website, no such thing as a fish.com, check it out there.
What's the book called?

Speaker 3 The book is called What Have I Done? And it's my autobiography. And it says it does exactly what it says on the tin.
It's about what I've done. It was brilliant.
I've read it.

Speaker 3 I've read the whole thing. And it's out now, right? The book is.
I don't know when this podcast goes. Yeah, it will be.
Yeah, in that case, it is.

Speaker 3 Otherwise, just come back next week. We'll be back with another episode.
We'll see you then. Goodbye.

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