610: No Such Thing As Lily Allen In The Hellespont

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Speaker 2 Hey, everyone, welcome to this week's episode of Fish. Dan and Andy here.
Hello, and we just want to quickly let you know before we launch into this week's episode about this week's guest.

Speaker 2 Yes, it's our friend and yours, Carrie Ad Lloyd.

Speaker 3 Yeah, she's brilliant.

Speaker 2 She's been on loads of times before. She's always fantastic.
Her fact this week is a really good one. And it's a brilliantly entertaining show.

Speaker 2 I've just listened to it and I've written it up for our archive. Have you? So you're in for a treat, I can tell you that much.
Oh, well, there we go.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and also, you should know that Carrie Add is not only a comedian, not only a podcaster, she's also an author. That's right.
Her new book is called Lydia Marmalade and the Christmas Wish.

Speaker 2 So it's a children's book. It's really funny.
It's charming. It's got a little Jane Austeny flavor to it.
A little Regency tinge. That's a terrible phrase, but it's really funny.
It's charming.

Speaker 2 It's about a girl called Lydia Marmalade, obviously.

Speaker 2 There's an amusing sausage dog. It's basically everything you could want for a kind of fun, classic, Christmassy romp.
Lydia Marmalade and and the Christmas wish. Perfect Christmas book.
It's out now.

Speaker 2 And if you love books generally and you like being part of book clubs, Sarah Pascoe and Carried Lloyd have a podcast. It's brilliant.
It's called Sarah and Carried's Weirdos Book Club.

Speaker 2 Weirdos, good name for a podcast. Yep.
Show it's not been used before.

Speaker 2 And there's plenty of episodes. One of your favorite authors, Mick Heron Andy, was a guest recently talking about his Slow Horses series.
It's great. Check it out, but get Carried's book.

Speaker 2 And one final bit of business before we start.

Speaker 2 You can get ad-free episodes of this show no such thing as a fish you can get bonus material you can get extra mad crazy fun stuff like shout outs on the show and video things and longer versions of the main show all of that is available at our secret super fantastic members club club fish you can join it by going to patreon.com slash no such thing as a fish it's been so much fun we've been making so much extra stuff for it over the last month uh it's been great and we're really enjoying it and if you would like to support the show it is a fantastic way of doing so that's right so just head to patreon.com slash no such thing as a fish.

Speaker 2 You can find all the details there. But for now, on with the show.
On with the show.

Speaker 2 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 2 I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Carrie Ad Lloyd. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

Speaker 2 And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Carrie Ad.
My fact is that Joseph Basiljet,

Speaker 2 the famous engineer who designed London Sewers, who was inspired by the Great Stink, his great-great-grandson was the lead guitarist of the band The Vapors,

Speaker 2 who are most famous for their single Turning Japanese. Yes, brilliant.
Brilliant. Now,

Speaker 2 it's a very famous song. A lot of people might know.
We've just discovered someone in the QI office does not know it, who's in their late 20s.

Speaker 2 I think it's an age thing because I recently was telling people this fact, and a lot of people were like, What song? And I was like, Come on, Turning Japanese. And they just stare at you.
Really?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I do think it's an age thing because it came out in 1980.

Speaker 2 It's an oldie. It's an oldie.
But a goodie. It's an effing classic.
It's a bangie. It's a brilliant song.
The reason I know this is I know Ed Buzzlejet. No.
Klang. Yes, Klang.

Speaker 2 Klang, because he is now, he left the Vapors and became a TV director. And he has directed Doctor Who, loads of different things.

Speaker 2 And I worked with him very recently on excellent Channel 5 police drama, Ellis, starring Sharon D. Clarke and Andrew Gower.
Wow.

Speaker 2 At what stage in your relationship did the great-great-grandfather come out?

Speaker 2 I am of a mind like yourself.

Speaker 2 I managed to keep it together for five days filming on Belfast, but the whole time I was like, I'm Baseljet, must be a Buzzlejet, must be related. That's such an unusual surname, can't be.

Speaker 2 And then we went for a drink in Belfast, beautiful, beautiful Belfast, after we'd finished our episode. And I think he was probably two pints of Guinness down.
I was probably one rum and ginger.

Speaker 2 And I was like, so are you related to the Baseljets? And he was like, oh, yeah. And then some young actors near me were like, who? Didn't know.
Didn't know.

Speaker 2 Whoa.

Speaker 2 And they're classic sewers. They're from the 1860s, but I think anyone should know them.
It's like the song Turning Japanese. You just think, imagine being Baseljet and you don't know my song.

Speaker 2 You don't know my family sewers.

Speaker 2 So Ed is now a very successful television director. And yeah, so then he said, oh, yes, I am related to that Baseljet.
And then someone else must, he must, or maybe he just came out with it.

Speaker 2 I can't remember now because we were in a pub in Belfast.

Speaker 2 Just said... oh yeah, and I was in the band the Vapors.
And I initially didn't recognize the name until he said Turning Japanese. And I was like,

Speaker 2 oh and it's curious as well, is the vapors, the name, you would think might have been Ed's suggestion, but it's not. They all smoke tea cigarettes.
That's exactly right.

Speaker 2 It was, yeah, before its time.

Speaker 2 Head of the game, yeah. Because Ed was the guitarist, and the main songwriter was someone else, wasn't it, I think?

Speaker 2 Fenton, Felton, yeah. Fenton, yeah.
Yeah, if it had been Ed Basildjet who came up with the name, he probably would have come up with the cholera epidemics of the 1850s. Yeah, they're still going.

Speaker 2 She says, do you know this? The vapors are still, they reformed.

Speaker 2 Ed was in it for a bit, and now he's gone off to do TV directing. How often do you think they play the song Turning Japanese in an average set?

Speaker 2 I think it's quite a lot. Yeah, because I once went to watch Junior Senior

Speaker 2 just after their song Move Your Feet had come out and been a big hit. Oh, yeah.
And they played it four times.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 That's, yeah. And if they could have played it five, and I would have loved it.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And it is a bit being your own tribute act, isn't it? Yeah. Tiny Japanese was like a global hit as well.
It was huge. And it was their biggest hit.
I like that they knew it at the time as well.

Speaker 2 So they had it ready and they went, we should hold this back.

Speaker 2 This is going to be a big song. And so they released it as a second single as opposed to a first single from their album.
Because they didn't want to be one-hit wonders. Yeah.
But then, yeah, sort of.

Speaker 2 They are.

Speaker 2 And that's no bad thing.

Speaker 2 Sorry, yeah, that's no bad thing. That's no bad thing.
That's no big thing. And the former drummer, Howard Smith, was recently elected mayor of Guildford.
No,

Speaker 2 cool. I thought that was a good idea.
Flang.

Speaker 2 Flang. I met the mayor no you haven't i haven't met the mayor guilford sorry

Speaker 2 the um one other thing about ed basiljet is as you say he was a tv director but one of the things he directed on his imdb is seven wonders of the industrial world

Speaker 2 in 2003 where robert lindsay looked at london's sewers

Speaker 2 what a compelling combination yeah

Speaker 2 that's great when do you think he bought did you think he went to production company with it or do you think they said

Speaker 2 i think because

Speaker 2 you know what there are like eight episodes in that series, and he only directed one of them, and it was about the sewers.

Speaker 2 They thought they'd get him in. We'd like you to do one about the phone network, please.
No,

Speaker 2 you sure, and that's good because Robert Lindsay, as star of my family, has been in a lot of old shit. And

Speaker 2 I love my family. I just couldn't resist.
I saw the opening. I'm sorry.
Yeah, yeah. Sometimes you've got to throw your heroes under the bus for the joke.

Speaker 2 It's really interesting because it's normally Dan who says, I love my family. I love my family being such a wife guy.
Brilliant. I do.
Let's go into sewers. Yes.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I said to Andy, I kind of thought that you guys would have sewers sewn up. So I thought I'd leave with more vapors stuff.

Speaker 2 And I thought that somebody who's literally exploding next to me to talk about Basiljet. Have you ever been in the sewers, Andy? No, I never have.

Speaker 2 I've been to the church where the Basiljet Mausoleum is, but I didn't know at the time that the Mausoleum's there. I'm absolutely gutted.
And I'm going to have to go back.

Speaker 2 Oh, you're going to have to go back. You should go soon because it's in trouble.
Is it? Yeah. It's being refurbished.
It's being refurbished. It's got a heritage grant.

Speaker 2 I'm all over this now. Ironically,

Speaker 2 water is destroying it.

Speaker 2 It's not as well contained. It's more ironic if shit was destroying it, I think.

Speaker 2 Very good point. It is underground, you know.
And he was responsible for a lot of underground stuff, not just the sewers, also a bit of the district line, was part of the tunnel. Let's get into it.

Speaker 2 Let's get into it.

Speaker 2 He was a bit forgotten for a while. I think he's not now, but I think there's one Baseljet family, because it's such an odd surname.

Speaker 2 There's one tiny place in France called La Baseljette and the Basiljet family came from France. Weirdly, they came via America.

Speaker 2 It was a strange route, but they migrated to Britain in, I think, the early 19th century. And one person who was a few generations above Joseph was the tailor of Prince of Wales, George.
Oh, yes.

Speaker 2 He was the first British Basiljette. He was the one who...

Speaker 2 Would you like a new suit? Would you like a new suit? I really think so.

Speaker 2 That's what it was. I can imagine it now.
Yeah, yeah. He was the grandfather of Joseph.
Wow.

Speaker 2 What a family.

Speaker 2 It's a stunning family.

Speaker 2 And then there was Joseph William, who we think might have been in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. It was amazing.
It's just like nepotism has been going through the ages of the English.

Speaker 2 It's like England is built on a feudal system.

Speaker 2 Stop it.

Speaker 2 Your grandfather was talented. Somehow you managed to still be fine.
It's amazing how they're all so talented. Yeah.
Just despite everything. French immigrants.
I will say that.

Speaker 2 But yeah, but when new arrivals. Yeah, 300 years ago.

Speaker 2 Anyway, I think this Joseph was a stunning man.

Speaker 2 Mr. Sewards is great.
Yeah, basically, what he did, Joseph Basiljet, this is born in 1819.

Speaker 2 He is responsible more than most other people, or maybe the biggest individual contribution to London turning from a medieval city into a modern one. Christopher Wren is the other one, I guess.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but what Basiljet was doing was, so before Basiljet, the... the city was open sewers, cesspools in people's back gardens.
You would have night soil men turning up to take away the poo.

Speaker 2 I mean, just, and that led to cholera, cholera, cholera like it was just it was cholera city the thames was disgusting the thames was basically just put it healthier now isn't it than it was then yeah so unimaginably healthier so basically you put all the poo in the thames the thames obviously flows out to sea that broadly broadly worked as a solution

Speaker 2 but it's a tidal river and it's so some so there would just be this mass in the water of poo that broadly is making its way out to sea but sometimes the tidal river would come back in

Speaker 2 and that normally is okay because it's normally in the water obviously it stinks and obviously it's very you cannot drink from the river. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 But the main problem comes when the river level goes down a bit.

Speaker 2 And the summer of 1858 was unbelievably hot and dry, and the water level dropped and there were piles of this

Speaker 2 matter on the banks of the Thames that were about six feet deep. Anyone who smelt it at the time just wrote these accounts saying, I cannot describe the smell.

Speaker 2 I will never forget the smell as long as I live. Yeah, it was awful.
And people were dying and dying and dying of cholera. Yeah.
So he then set in motion the building of the sewers. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Did a did a little thing where he sort of calculated that they should be double the size that they were planning on building, which means that we're largely using a lot of them 150 years later, right?

Speaker 2 We're still using them. But also, I mean, just as a on a tourist level, if you're walking around London, you're kind of walking largely in Baseljet's London.
All of the embankments.

Speaker 2 It's amazing that it just wasn't, the Thames was so much wider. Yeah, but those are basically to be described as sewer caps.
They are where the sewers are underneath. That was never there.

Speaker 2 So if you ever walk along the the Thames, that's Baseljet, basically. It's like 50 acres of new London that you created.

Speaker 2 And that thing about him doubling the capacity, some sources say he worked out the pooage of an average Londoner generously and then doubled it. And then some sources say he doubled it again.

Speaker 2 Because he said, look, we're only going to do this. I know Londoners.

Speaker 2 They're going to be pooing more than this. I tell you, we'll need triple this.
Exactly. And he basically said, look, we cannot do this a second time.
We have to do it once.

Speaker 2 And that meant, right, that as the population rose, you had either double or quadruple the capacity, which meant that when high-rise buildings started being built and the pooage, overall pooage

Speaker 2 did increase massively,

Speaker 2 like there is an alternate world in which he didn't double the capacity and in which 1960s London was overflowing with raw sewage. Like swinging London would have just smelt

Speaker 2 the worst, it would have been a nightmare. But because of his solution, it lasted until

Speaker 2 today. And now we've just built this huge new sewer, the Thames Tideway tunnel, which is designed to sort of solve the creaking of the system, which we built.

Speaker 2 He's buried in Wimbledon, I think. In St.
Mary's Church. Yes.
And the mausoleum is stunning because. Sorry, most people won't know what St.
Mary's Church. It's like you like.

Speaker 2 Yeah, like everyone knows what St. Mary's Church is.
Sorry.

Speaker 2 I've lived in London for 15 years. I don't know where that is.
I used to live in Wimbledon, sorry, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 It's where they do the overflow parking for the tennis tournament. Oh, right, right.

Speaker 2 Sorry to get away. Oh, you mean opposite the co-op? Right, okay.
You know, there's no co-op in Morning Village, James. It's near the second waitrose.

Speaker 2 But that church is, the mausoleum is really interesting because it wasn't built for him. Did you see this? I did, yeah.
It was built for a slave owner called John Anthony Rucker. Oh, no.

Speaker 2 Who died in 1804. And then his family did not want to be in the mausoleum with him for whatever reason.
So it's just... Figured out he was a terrible slave owner.
Yeah. Mother Rucker.

Speaker 2 And then his family didn't want to be in there. So it was just almost empty, just one grave filled.
So the Basiljets bought the mausoleum. Wow.

Speaker 2 But he is still in there. But Rucker's still in there? Yeah, yeah.
So it's Rucker and then half a dozen Baseljets around him. Wow.
Yeah,

Speaker 2 there's main Basiljet and then I think five children of this. And Mrs.
Basiljet and Mrs. Basiljet.
So he can fit nine, I read. So what are we up to? Seven, eight, one more space.

Speaker 2 Ed could go in that mausoleum, couldn't he? I mean, there's more in now. But then there's also Peter, who's his other.
Yeah, it's the other famous Basiljet, who's a television producer.

Speaker 2 Yeah, also I see TV and made Big Brother or something.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he was the creative head, I believe, of Endermol. And so he's the one who they brought in Big Brother because that was an international format.

Speaker 2 But really, the British one is what made it go global. And Deal or No Deal as well.
He's got his name. So just what I'm thinking is, obviously, he works in formatting.

Speaker 2 They've got one space in the Baseljet Mausoleum.

Speaker 2 And all these Baseljets who might decide.

Speaker 2 It's like reverse Deal or No Deal because it's who goes in the box. This is Davina.
I'm going into the big Baseljet Mausoleum. I'm coming in.

Speaker 2 So good. Let's ask Ed if he wants to direct it and Robert Lindsay wants to host it.
I think that would work. I should just say, Robert Lindsay is a great host.
I'll hold my family.

Speaker 2 And friend. Or no.

Speaker 2 And yeah.

Speaker 2 Boxes were all filled with gifts, big and small. But sharing pure love is the greatest gift of all.

Speaker 2 Stay cozy, my people, and have a boss here.

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Speaker 2 Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast.
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Speaker 2 On with the show.

Speaker 2 Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact.

Speaker 2 My fact this week is that this year, 26 new bacteria species were discovered in a room specifically designed to not have any bacteria in them. Brilliant.
So I got this story off a pop science writer.

Speaker 2 He's one of my favorite pop science writers, Dr. Robin George Andrews.
He wrote it for National Geographic. And this is a story about the clean rooms that they have at NASA.

Speaker 2 So we build all of these rocket instruments that are going to Mars, all the rovers and so forth, in these specific rooms because you don't want to bring any life to Mars.

Speaker 2 I just love the way he said we. It's heavily involved in it.
I was like, wow, did we have a great stuff? I'm glad that you were talking about the podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay, me. Sorry, I am heavily involved.
You have to own it. You did it.
Be proud.

Speaker 2 So basically, the idea of the clean rooms is that humans can't allow any form of life onto Mars because if we're looking for life there and we bring it there, we won't be able to tell if it was there.

Speaker 2 or if it was from us. So these rooms are made very specifically to make sure that the smallest of bacteria gets killed off.
And they have various different ways that they do that.

Speaker 2 They fill the room with ultraviolet lights, they have radioactive beams going through, they have prolonged periods of dry heating, and

Speaker 2 they get it to above water's boiling point, so it would kill anything that would be on the surface. They do basically everything they can to make sure nothing goes vinegar.
That's quite good.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Deto, yeah, that's good. Deto is good.
That only kills 99.9% of the bacteria.

Speaker 2 So that's the opening. Use another brand, I think, to get that fast.

Speaker 2 You just pour them into a bucket together dumb i'm gonna set up a bleach company that kills not pipe knot not one percent

Speaker 2 like an eat it feel like we need it you know so good

Speaker 2 yeah so um and a while ago they found a bacteria that did survive and did possibly go into space on various missions so it is possible that right now on mars there is a bacteria there that they didn't detect so life might be on mars right now that'd be good but what i loved was they weren't they saying that it's not that this bacteria are extremely good at like they're not like so small they couldn't find them this bacteria was playing dead.

Speaker 2 That's the thing. This is what's this bacteria knew to hide.
Come on. You know like when the Velociraptor figures out the door, like that's yes, that's what we've got, right?

Speaker 2 The bacteria was like guys goes shh, shh, they're just passing, they're passing, it won't lie down, it won't lie down. Yeah, it's basically

Speaker 2 like the ties in tie style.

Speaker 2 Okay, he's gone, he's gone, he's gone, go, go, go. It's learnt to sort of camouflage itself.
It goes into a hibernation that makes it seem as if it's dead.

Speaker 2 These are the because normally they're bright red, aren't they? And you say, Oh, guys, put the camo on, put the camo on, go down, go down, behind the bush, behind the bush.

Speaker 2 Okay, we've got we'll be in Mars in 14 years. We've just got to keep quiet.

Speaker 2 What I find really interesting is that because the rooms are cleaned so much, the microbes that are found there, it's almost like we are putting them through an accelerated breeding program to make sure they can withstand cleaning, drying, UV treatment, and lack of food.

Speaker 2 And, you know, all the sterilization methods we're using, actually, we're creating super bacteria.

Speaker 2 how do but what do they like swab the surfaces to see if it's there i guess they must do right yes i think and they the ones they find

Speaker 2 the really weird thing is sometimes they're found only in clean rooms so in 2013 scientists found a new microbe which had only been found in spacecraft clean rooms one in florida and one in french guy yeah was that the one where they found that they were actually eating the cleaning products that they were using

Speaker 2 this dead hog is delicious yum yum isn't that mad that that they found them in two different places? So then that's proof that it's us doing this, then. It's certainly a heavy implication, isn't it?

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 But that's right. They swab, James saying about swabbing, they do swab certain places and then they put them into solutions and test them.
And they're like, oh my God, yeah, this thing is still alive.

Speaker 2 That's how they've been discovering them. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Bacteria. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 And being discovered and so on. Sure.

Speaker 2 They've recently found, we've spoken a bit about the largest single-celled organisms, which is kind of algae, I think, and they get really big.

Speaker 2 But in 2022, the world's largest bacterium was found, and it's the size of an eyelash. It's 5,000 times bigger than the previous largest known bacterium.

Speaker 2 You can pick it up with a pair of tweezers. It's crazy.
It's called Theo Margarita Magnifica. And I've ordered that from Pizza Express.

Speaker 2 Disappointingly small. Yeah, yeah.
Disappointingly small. Like, very big for a bacterium.

Speaker 2 Tiny pizza. Tiny, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Waiter, there's a hair in my pizza.

Speaker 2 Actually, don't tell everyone.

Speaker 2 Apparently, it's the equivalent of us meeting a human being who's as tall as Mount Everest. What? That's how big it is in comparison to a normal bacteria.
To a normal bacteria,

Speaker 2 isn't that? I mean, crazy. That's funny in the clean room when you go hide and Mount Everest did

Speaker 2 leaning against the walls in awkward ways. Let me give you one more story about bacteria.
Oh, okay. Okay.
This starts off very bad, but it does have a happy ending. Okay.

Speaker 2 So there was a woman in 1984 she was in america and she was studying um gonorrhea

Speaker 2 and she was driving home from work and she picked up her son on the way who was like three years old

Speaker 2 and then left the son in the car while she went to the shops to buy some stuff oh no the gonorrhea was in a petri dish that contained something called chocolate agar which is like a type of jelly that you use to grow it's not sweet but you grow bacteria on it but it looks a bit like chocolate.

Speaker 2 Oh, no. Anyway, the child ate

Speaker 2 the agar. Oh, mom.
Love you, gonorrhea, mom. And tested positive for gonorrhea two days later.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 And so they took them to the centers of disease control and told them what had happened.

Speaker 2 And the happy ending is that the child was cured because they gave them antibiotics mixed in with ice cream. So you got some ice cream in the end.
He did some chocolate. Chocolate and ice cream.

Speaker 2 What a win for this kid.

Speaker 2 Oh, good lord. Imagine beating that gut when they get much older and being like trying to like, you know, STD chat and being like, oh, yeah, no, I have gonorrhea.

Speaker 2 It was a long time ago.

Speaker 2 I just think don't make your agar jelly look like ice cream.

Speaker 2 There are a few different barriers that have been that have been gone through there on the in the like it's a real get-me-henemore situation. Now Henimore,

Speaker 2 I've left the gonorrhea in this thing

Speaker 2 labeled chocolate.

Speaker 2 It's very 80s parenting as well it's very like left in a car with all the chemicals

Speaker 2 well it's like the marshmallow test except the marshmallows all contact

Speaker 2 um it's really interesting just to this weirdly sort of ties back a bit to the previous fact because bacteria were first discovered in the 17th century and we think maybe in the 1640s athanasius kircher

Speaker 2 uh he wrote that vinegar and milk abound with an innumerable multitude of worms so that might have been him observing with a primitive microscope the

Speaker 2 the microscopic life.

Speaker 2 But basically in 1900, so even 200 years after bacteria were discovered, the leading causes of death were influenza, tuberculosis and gastroenteritisis, right? These are all microorganism based.

Speaker 2 In 2000, 100 years later, the main causes of death were heart disease, cancer and stroke. It's just a massive shift in what does eventually

Speaker 2 end our lives. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It just, it was so bacterial before. Back in the day, yeah.
Yeah, and before things like penicillin as well. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Penicillin, I always think as one of those moments that we're so lucky happened because there was a real sliding doors moment there because Alexander Fleming was come back from holiday, so he was sitting inside his lab and he was going over all the Petri dishes that he had left before going off on a holiday.

Speaker 2 Chocolate, chocolate. He was having chocolate.

Speaker 2 And out of nowhere, sort of as he's looking, a man called Merlin,

Speaker 2 pops his head around the door and they used to be colleagues together.

Speaker 2 And he was looking for a new job i believe and he he sort of said hey fleming and had he'd said let's go to the pub which is why he was kind of coming in to have to have a chat with him and take him away from the work he would have not have seen what he saw in the petri dish in that moment so merlin said no no you keep looking and that was the moment when he went that's funny and he saw what would become the mold.

Speaker 2 The bacteria had disappeared and that some mold had presumably killed it and that was penicillin. And that was penicillinic.
How much do we believe that, Andy?

Speaker 2 Well, then the other thing he hasn't said is that then Merlin handed him a sword, which he pulled out of the stone, and he became the rightful king of England.

Speaker 2 And that, I think that's a pretty big part of Penicillin Journey. I don't know why I left that out.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 My grandpa was called Herbert Mervyn, but he told me as a child that his middle name was Merlin. That's because we were descended, as Welsh people, from Merlin.
And I was about 25

Speaker 2 before, you know, when you say a fact out loud to someone.

Speaker 2 And I was like, oh, yeah, because we're descended from

Speaker 2 Merlin.

Speaker 2 Oh, no, he lied. But so do we think that that's questionable if Merlin came in or not?

Speaker 2 Well, obviously Fleming was already a bacteriologist and you know, and he had made this discovery of lysozyme, which was a thing which it did inhibit bacterial growth, but against a few small numbers of bacteria.

Speaker 2 So it wasn't a game changer. He found that in about 1921 or two.
And then several years later, he left some Staphylococcus bacteria, a culture in the lab.

Speaker 2 And then he got back and he saw they'd been contaminated by a fungus which had destroyed the colonies of staph around it.

Speaker 2 So that was an accident, but obviously, he was very well placed to discover it. There is this story that it's only because he was in a rifle club at his local medical school.

Speaker 2 He was in medical school just doing general medicine, and the team captain really wanted to keep him in the team and said, Well, you'll stay in the team if you join the research department at St.

Speaker 2 Mary's Hospital Medical School in Paddington, and that's why he became a bacteriologist. He's also written up on collegiatewaterpolo.org as the most significant water polo player of all time.

Speaker 2 It's because

Speaker 2 who are the others? I mean, isn't it just him?

Speaker 2 He played water polo at age 16 for the London Scottish Regiment because he was in the army as a young man.

Speaker 2 And this is a great website, collegiatewaterpolo.org, which basically recentres the universe around water polo.

Speaker 2 I love it. That's very good.
And even after he discovered it, it wasn't rolled out until 15 years later.

Speaker 2 Well, because, yeah, so there was that thing where it didn't yield as much penicillin as they need, that particular mold that they were.

Speaker 2 So there became a global hunt in order to try and find a different mold that produced penicillin and i guess it's part you know there's a lot of legendary tales about this stuff but the story of moldy mary who's the person who often gets attributed to being the person i don't think i've heard that like you are there was a lab in illinois that was trying to find a new mold and they sent basically a calling out to soldiers around the world who were in the field trying to find mold and send it back to this lab she moldy mary the story of her was a lab assistant working there and one day when she was coming into work she passed a grocery store outside and she was buying a melon and she saw an interesting melon in the batch that had some mold on it.

Speaker 2 And she thought, that looks like the mold we might be looking for. I still remember the day in QI when someone came into the office.

Speaker 2 I think it was probably Justin Pollard and told us about Moldy Mary's melons. And we were just like, okay, well, that's 20 minutes of material.

Speaker 2 The episode writes itself.

Speaker 2 Also, isn't it funny? There's that other Mary, TB Mary, Moldy Mary. Oh, yeah, Typhoid Mary.
Typhoid Mary, Typhoid Mary.

Speaker 2 I'm like, don't call your kid Mary is the thing I'm getting, the wife I'm getting here. One thing about the olden days is a lot of people called their kids Mary.
Yes.

Speaker 2 We all have relatively young kids, so know how hard it is to get them to brush their teeth. Oh my god.
Oh my gosh. So here's bribery, begging, crying,

Speaker 2 just open, just let me, yeah. Awful.
Well, here's something we can say to them that might help them to do it.

Speaker 2 If you brush your teeth properly, your mouth becomes full of nice bacteria, whereas if you don't, it's full of evil bacteria. Don't get rid of bacteria.
James, come on to my house, please.

Speaker 2 Engage my five-year-old son with that argument. Let's see how far he is.
Yeah, I think you're raising your child a bit differently to how maybe Carrier than I am. That's not going to do much for us.

Speaker 2 Not give a shit about the good bacteria or the nice bacteria. Here's what I do.
If you clean your teeth, I'm going to give you five pounds.

Speaker 2 I say, if one's brushed their teeth, we put the telly on. That's the deal.
That's the deal. No one gets telly until the teeth.
I brush my teeth with yakled to get the friendly bacteria on there.

Speaker 2 Am I doing the right thing?

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's right. So the idea is that if you put a load of bacteria together in a petri dish and some are nice and some are nasty.
You've got a party.

Speaker 2 And the nasty ones, they love a party and they're going to kill all the nice ones, right?

Speaker 2 And that works in pretty much all situations.

Speaker 2 But if you keep cleaning somewhere, then everyone's energy is used up by the fact that they keep getting killed by the fact that they're being cleaned and it suddenly becomes no use anymore.

Speaker 2 to attack the other bacteria. Because they're fighting a bigger problem.
Exactly that.

Speaker 2 And so what you find is that the more the people brush their teeth, the more the bacteria that's in your mouth are the ones that don't attack the other bacteria.

Speaker 2 And there's lots of links, isn't there, to like plaque, bacteria, and gums, and dementia. Yeah, heart disease as well.

Speaker 2 Like, flossing is one of the biggest things you can do because they found this bacteria in the plaque. And then, I haven't read it, I can't remember, but there's some link to them finding the

Speaker 2 mold in the brain. And so, one of the biggest causes, they think, is in between the

Speaker 2 is interdental brushing okay?

Speaker 2 yeah so that's it's good as a floss yeah oh great because i it's not i use them as well in other words that's five pounds well spent done that's what i was saying yeah yeah yeah finally start cleaning my own teeth again

Speaker 2 i stopped when i moved out of home and that money dried up

Speaker 2 Okay, it's time for fact number three, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that Byron's Don Dewan, which Goethe called a work of boundless genius, was inspired by a pantomime.
Wow. Two wows.

Speaker 2 One for The Fact, the other for Don Juan. How do you think?

Speaker 2 I say Don Juan. Don Wow.
Well, if you read the poem, you would get very confused by some of the rhymes. Really, there's a tale.
Therein lies a tale, yeah. So Don Juan is a story, isn't it?

Speaker 2 A sort of classic. Is it Spanish? Spanish, yeah.
He's a noble Mithario. He's a dirty boy.
Yeah, Don Juan. And the devil drags him to hell.

Speaker 2 At the end. Sorry.
Spoiler for Don Juan. Does he? Yeah, sorry.
Oh, well. Don Jovani,

Speaker 2 opera. Right.
Same thing. There's a Johnny E.
Depp film, which Brian Adams did the song for. Called, Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman? We've all got connections.

Speaker 2 I was going to say Molly Air, but yeah.

Speaker 2 Don Juan.

Speaker 2 Have you ever really really, really ever loved a woman? Oh, I love that song. Carrier Edge.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 I've held back until now, but the number of copyright breaches you've made this show that are going to be a nightmare to edit around.

Speaker 2 Sorry, sorry, Pierre. All we have to do is review it.
That was beautiful singing, Kara. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 I call him donny johnny oh that's what byron called yeah i really like that in letters it was found that he was referring to him as donny johnny now this is not a byron story is it this is a story that goes further than yeah it goes all the way back but byron did his own version which was actually quite different than don juan uh but in his version he said he was inspired by a baudelerized version of shadwell's libertine and shadwell's libertine was a pantomime in those days pantomime wasn't he's behind you and stuff there was all sorts of different things they could be marionettes they could be, they're basically very popular plays that happened in the west end of London.

Speaker 2 And this one was made by Charles Anthony Del Pini at the Royal Theatre. Byron saw it and thought, I'm going to write something that slags off all my mates, but with this theme.

Speaker 2 So this is what Don Dewin is, basically. Do we know if it was, did you say, do we know if it was Panto or a Puppet Show or a...

Speaker 2 Well, I've really tried to find out. It was definitely a pantomime.
This was a pantomime, but some pantomimes did have marionettes in. And I think this one did.

Speaker 2 And I think it was also based a little bit on Punch and Judy Judy because that was very popular at the time as well. Right.

Speaker 2 It sounds like the poem itself, which has seemed to be Lord Byron's sort of masterpiece really, and which he published many years because they were written in cantos, right?

Speaker 2 So you they sort of were released. Yeah, you do a book at a time.
Yeah, it was about six years. He was they were coming in.
It's like Game of Thrones. Yeah, exactly right.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And like Game of Thrones, the final book was never written, I believe. Yeah.
I mean, we've still got a chance with George R.R. Martin, but...
Oh, it's the last seven were missing.

Speaker 2 He said it was meant to be 24-inch books in full, and there are sort of six. Has anyone around here read it? I've read the whole thing.
Have you? Oh, because I studied English.

Speaker 2 I brought in as a little prop for you all. Oh, nice.
My university edition of Lord Byron. And it's very.
You did read it, Byron, but at Sussex, you didn't ever read the text.

Speaker 2 You just had to talk about the historical context of what was after the fact that it was.

Speaker 2 Look, it's so... Look, so it's that.
It's about...

Speaker 2 It's nearly 500 pages of this book, and it's eight-line verses. It's really

Speaker 2 fantastic and finding it not quite hard to read. But the thing is, I think it's the most readable

Speaker 2 poem. Give us a random look at the

Speaker 2 you, gentlemen, by dint of long seclusion, from better company have kept your own at Keswick and through still continued fusion of one another's minds at last have grown.

Speaker 2 To deem as a most logical conclusion that poesy has reefs for you alone, there is a narrowness in such a notion, which makes me wish you'd change your lakes for ocean.

Speaker 2 It's a slam. It's an absolutely devastating slam.

Speaker 2 So he spends his time. Come on, it's like when a 10-year-old does a little rhyming poem with all these vibes about was Keswick that so is it about Wordsworth that? It's about the lake poets, is it?

Speaker 2 Wordsworth Coleridge, who were his big rivals. Southey, who was the poet laureate at the time, was very stodgy.

Speaker 2 He spends a lot of this epic poem about, supposedly, about Don Dewan slagging off Wordsworth et al. And he mentions Keswick, home of of the now world-famous pencil museum.

Speaker 2 Right. But, like, it's, I would say, Byron is probably the only one of those who's readily readable.

Speaker 2 Like, pretty much anyone can pick up. Mr.
Wordsworth. Wordsworth is so readable.

Speaker 2 It's much more readable. I think Don Juan is so, because it's so funny.
Oh, right. It's so clear.
And it's so entertaining. It's a brilliant story.

Speaker 2 It's all about this young nobleman, and it's the scrapes he gets into. And it starts with him, you know, accidentally getting into an adulterous situation with a married lady when he's a young man.

Speaker 2 And then Canto Canto 2 is all this massive shipwreck story, which is so exciting. Unlike Don Juan, he's not a Lothario.
He keeps finding himself with older women and stuff like that. Your honor.

Speaker 2 It's basically Byron. It's Byron slightly excusing his own

Speaker 2 Lothario-ish behavior by saying, look, it's not like that, Your Honor.

Speaker 2 It just happened a year later.

Speaker 2 I just fell into this room. But the second book of it is all about this big shipwreck, which Don Juan gets caught up in.

Speaker 2 And this is really cool because Byron's grandfather, Byron, again, very aristocratic family. He was Lord Byron.
His grandfather was a young man called John Byron,

Speaker 2 maybe 50 years earlier. So it's Joanne Byron.

Speaker 2 And he was in a shipwreck himself. There's this amazing book called The Wager, which is all about this English ship which got sunk in 1742.

Speaker 2 I've just finished it. And one of the main sources of how it all went down, and there was cannibalism, there was mutiny, there was murder.

Speaker 2 One of the main sources is John Byron, who later became an admiral and got nicknamed Foulweather Jack because everywhere he went, the worst storms in the world happened to him.

Speaker 2 But if you're on a ship with Lord Byron's grandfather, you're going to have terrible weather. That was his reputation.
So then, and then Foulweather Jack's son was Mad Jack Byron, who is Byron's dad.

Speaker 2 And then Byron didn't seem to carry on the nickname for this. He almost called Jack or Mary.

Speaker 2 That was what we're learning here.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but basically, Byron took a lot of the shipwreck stuff from his grandfather's own book about the shipwreck. Like there's a bit where they eat Don Dewan's dog, and it's a really sad story.

Speaker 2 And that had happened to his own grandfather.

Speaker 2 Well that did seem to be the thing about Byron was that his poetry, as you're saying, that's laced with autobiography in it and the Lothario stuff, which is what he was known for in his real world, people were sort of reading it almost, almost in the way that as we're talking, a new Lily Allen album has been released, which just lays out the life that she's recently experienced with her now ex-husband.

Speaker 2 It's just like, it's all the stories. It's like a gossip round.
Are we saying that Lily Allen is the modern day Lord Byron? You know what? Fuck yeah, we are. Because that is a piece of genius.

Speaker 2 That album, the writing on that is so beautiful. The lyrics are unbelievable.
And I'll take her as modern day Byron. Her dad was very famous.
Yeah,

Speaker 2 Mad Keith Allen. Mad Keith Allen's one.
I don't think he'd object to that title either. This is the most how do you do fellow kids way of describing Lord Byron's life in work? I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 And her brother was in Game of Thrones. So

Speaker 2 and they've slept together, haven't they? Lily Allen and her brother.

Speaker 2 No, no,

Speaker 2 brother, Your Your Honour.

Speaker 2 That was Alfie Allen and Gemma Whelan. So not actually Lily Allen.
Sorry, it is. It was Gemma playing her sister.
I know.

Speaker 2 I really like the Lord Byron as Lily Allen Theory. Oh, yeah.
Because he did have to flee England. Lily Allen's never had to flee England.
She's been living in New York. She fled New York.

Speaker 2 She went to America. She bought a big brownstone because he told her to buy it and encouraged her to get the mortgage.
These are the lyrics to the first song.

Speaker 2 We're continuing Carrie Ed's copyright corner here, but it's fine. Does she have a club fat? Do we know? She has a club.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 She swam the Hellespont, the Strait between Europe and Asia.

Speaker 2 She died into the canal in Venice, famously. Huge fan of Greek independence.

Speaker 2 But Byron sort of had to flee England after his marriage fell apart and he was accused of unnatural vices and of having appallingly mistreated his wife.

Speaker 2 And, you know, there was this thing about his half-sister. Did they have

Speaker 2 an affair? But also, he was the only poet who properly walked the walk. And he went to Greece and funded the Greek navy for a while because Greece was trying to win its independence from the Turks.

Speaker 2 That's track five on the Lily Allen.

Speaker 2 But like, will the Greeks try and keep Lily Allen's lungs after she dies because she used her breath to speak out for Greek independence?

Speaker 2 Byron died in Missolongi, which is this Greek town, promoting Greek independence, and he'd been there for years, like backing the Greek.

Speaker 2 He was this huge fan of the Greeks, and he wrote some very rude stuff about Lord Elgin and, you know, like nicking Greek treasures.

Speaker 2 And the Greeks kept his lungs, the source of his pneuma, the breath of the soul, and his larynx, and they were sort of put in an urn in Greece until, and they've disappeared.

Speaker 2 Give back those marbles, we might get the lungs back. I mean, that's a fair spot.

Speaker 2 Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast.
Hi, everyone. This episode is brought to you by Airbnb.

Speaker 2 Now, Dan, you're a holiday man. I am a holiday man.
Dan, Dan, the holiday man, we call you in the office. They do.
Yep. Yep.

Speaker 2 And when you go away, what are there any little travel rituals you have?

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 I try and not have a nervous breakdown as my children and wife insist of going to the toilet in the airport literally two minutes before final boarding is closing the doors on the airplane.

Speaker 2 That's a real skill, not to just break down and cry. I've really mastered it.
Really nice tradition to have in your family. That's lovely.

Speaker 2 I think one of the other traditions you might have is putting your home up on Airbnb. Am I right? Oh, yeah, definitely.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 That's my preferred tradition, I would say.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, it's an amazing thing because you're going away and with your house being listed and occupied, it means that you're earning extra cash for your holiday so you can do all those extra things, like pay for a psychologist when you get back to sort out the mental damage that your family have inflicted on you.

Speaker 2 So, I think what they're trying to say here is, if you're listening to this and you live in a home, you already have an Airbnb, so you may as well list it on Airbnb.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it really is an amazing thing to do. Do check it out: airbnb.co.uk/slash host do it now.
On with the podcast. On with the show.

Speaker 4 Hey, this is Sarah.

Speaker 5 Look, I'm standing out front of AMPM right now, and well, you're sweet and all, but I found something more fulfilling, even kind of cheesy, but I like it.

Speaker 4 Sure, you met some of my dietary needs, but they've just got it all.

Speaker 2 So farewell, oatmeal.

Speaker 4 So long, you strange soggy.

Speaker 6 Break up with bland breakfast and taste AMPM's bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit. Made with K-tree eggs, smoked smoked bacon and melty cheese on a buttery biscuit ampm too much good stuff

Speaker 2 okay it is time for our final fact of the show and that is andy my fact is for several years in the 1920s a beach in south wales was the fastest place on the planet

Speaker 2 how can a beach be fast well Good point.

Speaker 2 I'm not surprised as someone with South Walesian heritage.

Speaker 2 So you're Welsh, Karen. I'm half Welsh.
Yes. I've never fully understood the extent to which you're Welsh, but...
Well, my dad is Welsh. Well, there we go.

Speaker 2 So I was born there, and I am called Callian Lloyd. I thought that I know

Speaker 2 my clue. So have you ever been to the Pendine Sands in Carmarthenshire? Oh, Carmarthenshire, yeah, I have actually, yeah.
So it's this stunningly beautiful beach.

Speaker 2 The whole of the beaches of South Wales are the most beautiful beaches in the world. Sorry, Dan.

Speaker 2 I don't know whether you're going to interject there with the beaches that you may be from, but the Gower Peninsula, all of that bit, are stunning. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 I wasn't trying to raise up or lower the pendine sands if i want to below any of the other beaches of south wales all of which are 10 out of 10 or australia or australia

Speaker 2 sydney ones are terrible actually i'm sure they're fine yeah you know but oh the gower oh my gosh absolutely tell us more well there's this beach called the pendine sands and uh the interesting thing about it is it's very long and the sand is nice and compact and hard and it was traditionally used for foot races like you know um horse races bike races they started having motorbike races there in the early 20s and they realized that hang on in the 20s people were starting to get serious about breaking land speed records in a car

Speaker 2 and the early records have been broken at a track called Brooklyn's which is a which is circular ovoid yeah and

Speaker 2 What you really need to break a land speed record is a very very long straight track because you need a couple of miles to get up to top speed you need a mile at top speed and then you need another mile to slow down turning those carnivors is only going to slow you down Exactly.

Speaker 2 And so they realized this beach is perfect to drive on because it's seven miles of sand and you can drive along it.

Speaker 2 I went on it a few weeks ago. Yeah.
And it's absolutely, it's, it's amazing. Of course it is.
It's astunning. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 I thought that it's now property of the MOD. It is.
You can't walk on it during the week. I was there on a weekday and there are loud dystopian announcements saying, do not walk on the beach.
Right.

Speaker 2 You can go at the end by the cafe in the museum, which is where I went. What do they do on there? They test weapons.

Speaker 2 You know what the MD are like? They're testing weapons. Yeah.
They're not having cups of tea.

Speaker 2 Where's the most beautiful place in the country we can bomb?

Speaker 2 Unbelievable.

Speaker 2 But there is this bit which you can go on, which is open to the public. And they've just opened a new museum there about the land speed records.
And it's amazing.

Speaker 2 And they've got a brilliant display about the different kinds of sand and the diameter of the grains, which I found very interesting.

Speaker 2 How were your family waiting for you to read all those tiny bits of information next to the the pictures? Were they? Because you reminded me so much of my father on holiday.

Speaker 2 All of us being like...

Speaker 2 He's still reading it. He's still reading the information flags.
But it's been two hours. Don't touch the Petri dishes.

Speaker 2 That's exactly why I went to the website

Speaker 2 for the museum. And it said, if you rush, you can probably complete it in two hours.
So I imagine Andy's family were...

Speaker 2 No, I did a new land speed record in the museum because people were getting a bit impatient.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 people weren't getting a town impatient. But this is where Malcolm Campbell, who's

Speaker 2 the sort of head of this amazing speed-breaking family, I'm sure we'll talk about them. He broke the record at 146 miles an hour.
His friend and rival, J.G. Perry Thomas, broke it in his car.
Babs.

Speaker 2 Is that Welsh? No, Babs is not Welsh. It's just the name Babs.
Oh, sorry. Perry Thomas was Welsh.
Oh, Perry Thomas, yeah.

Speaker 2 And tragically was killed there during a land speed record attempt, instantly killed, and the action later moved to places like the Daytona Salt Flats. As a result of that crash, I think.
I really.

Speaker 2 Basically, he was trying to get over 200 miles an hour, really. He was trying to get there or thereabouts.

Speaker 2 And they realized that when he died in that crash, probably this isn't the best place to go that fast. Right.
You need somewhere even flatter. And then they went to the salt flats, didn't they? Yeah.

Speaker 2 And he got buried. And so did Babs.
His car was buried as well. Babs was buried in the exact spot where the crash happened.

Speaker 2 So they literally dug a hole, put it down there, and it was buried there for about about 42 years. And then someone petitioned to excavate it, to put it back together.

Speaker 2 And it now very occasionally sits in the museum, Andy. I have seen it.
Wow. You saw Babs.
Yeah. It's been lovingly restored.
Wow. It's so cool.
It's such a great museum. Yeah.
So good.

Speaker 2 But also, did you read about the heritage of Babs? It must have been there in the museum. Okay, so Babs went by a different name before.

Speaker 2 So that was a new name given to Babs because it was a new owner.

Speaker 2 It was originally called Chitty 4 because it was owned by a man called Count Zborovsky, who was the inspiration for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. What?

Speaker 2 This was one of the cars that was the inspiration for Chitty Chitty Bang. I'm sorry.
I see the PRS moment. Bang bang chitty chitty bang.
Bang,

Speaker 2 love you. Bang, bang, chitty, chitty, bang, bang, bang.
There was chitty one, chitty two, chitty three, and then chitty four. Chitty one, chitty two.

Speaker 2 Chitty one became the ownership of Arthur Conan Doyle's sons.

Speaker 2 They took ownership of that, and the other two went to other people. And number four.
Crazy. Yeah, so that's what you saw.
Do you know who has the current British land speed record? Bob Geldoff.

Speaker 2 Oh, actually, I think I might know it. Is it Freddie Flintoff? It's not.
Oh, is it someone from Topgear? It's not Idris Elbert. It's Idris Elbert.
Is it?

Speaker 2 Sorry, Bob Geldoff is far off from Idris Elber. They're both.

Speaker 2 They're both national treasures. Exactly.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 He broke it in 2015. He did 180 miles an hour for what they call the flying mile in a, in some kind of Bentley.
But he did it on that. On the Penn Band Sands.
Yeah, I know.

Speaker 2 it's the UK land speed record like okay the current world landspeed record is 760 something miles an hour it's very very fast okay

Speaker 2 but yeah Amy Johnson when she flew from South Wales to New York directly she took off from Pendine Sands Pendine Sands wow I know used to be a glamorous spot it's very it used to be glamorous and it lasted a very very brief time so we talked about Malcolm Campbell

Speaker 2 and then let's talk about some of the other family members so his son was Donald Campbell who was the only man to hold both the the land and water speed records at the same time. Wow.

Speaker 2 And he was the one who famously died on Coniston in a water accident. Lake District, Coniston Water, actually climbed the old man at Coniston.
Yeah. The same trip I went to the Keswick Panther Museum.

Speaker 2 Did you? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. And Donald has a daughter called Gina.
Yeah. And she has broken the women's world water speed record.
The Campbells just have this huge.

Speaker 2 We've done dynasties today, haven't we?

Speaker 2 Don Wales, Malcolm's grandson, has broken the record for the fastest lawn mower on the pendine sands who's who's who did that he's a guy called he's called don whales and he's malcolm campbell's grandson he loves whales so much he was like just call me don whales

Speaker 2 don whales don duan and don whales yeah

Speaker 2 i think that's like that is very british isn't it it's like our land speed record is so compared to the rest of the world we're gonna have to go lawn mowers we're gonna go novelty

Speaker 2 it's 87 miles an hour which is pretty good for a lawnmower just a sit-on lawnmower well you do have to take part in a public grass-cutting demonstration before the race. It has to be a proper.

Speaker 2 You can be a proper lawnmower. You have to prove.
But that's got to have a different engine, right? It's made from lawnmower parts. No, I get that.
I think it's different. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's quite a massive rocket strapped, but

Speaker 2 the bit where the grass normally collects is now a fuel tank. Yeah,

Speaker 2 you can't say that. Okay, so you can't be just getting up to 87 miles per hour on a normal...
Oh, people will be dying all over Surrey. Imagine if that was a setting.
What's the top speed?

Speaker 2 Let's try that.

Speaker 2 That'd be awful. fastest shed also broken on the Pendine Sands.
Okay, well, the Pendine Sands are doing their best to keep these records coming, aren't they?

Speaker 2 Do you think it's faster or slower than the fastest lawnmower? I think slower, slower because it's so bulky. Okay,

Speaker 2 well, I guess I'm going faster. Dan's correct.
100 miles an hour is the fastest shed record, which is pretty good. They put it on a lawnmower.
Did they build it around the lawnmower?

Speaker 2 I don't know, but there's no shed demonstration. Like, you don't have to get a side out of it.
Was the lawnmower guy trying to put the lawnmower back into the shed before he went that fast?

Speaker 2 I know.

Speaker 2 Oh my goodness. Wow.
Very good. Pendine Sands is

Speaker 2 making the best of their large flat surface.

Speaker 2 If you're nearby, the museum is wicked.

Speaker 2 Landspeed records are in a bit of a funk at the moment, I'd say. Yeah.
So the last time the Landspeed Record was broken was 1997.

Speaker 2 Oh, I guess as the world is being slowly destroyed, it feels a bit disingenuous to just go really fast.

Speaker 2 They have tried to find a a synthetic fuel for the the bloodhound project which is this massive rocket they're trying to fire across the ground and it's you know they they were going to try and do a thousand miles an hour with with a slightly more eco-friendly version of it but it's they just keep running out of money and they're you know it's sort of parked for the moment i mean literally it is parked but it's the era of like breaking records like guinness world record you know what i mean like i feel like we grew up with like that being a big thing that that was how fast you go and now maybe we're like you know we've stopped to think should we do this how many followers you have yeah yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Just should, is it worth this? Yeah, we should all slow down. Yeah.

Speaker 2 There was a bicycle record, really interesting one that was set there. Good, an eco record.
Thank you, Dan. Thank you.
This was in 2013. This was Guy Martin.
You know, Guy Martin?

Speaker 2 Yeah, this side of the easy. He's crazy.
Yeah, he's a motorbike guy, and he's written a bunch of best-selling books and TV shows and so on. And he set.
a record for a bicycle slipstream record. Okay.

Speaker 2 Isn't that amazing? So he was going behind another vehicle, and then he used the slip stream, and then that's when they started recording the tide. Is this faster or slower than, let's say, the shed?

Speaker 2 Give me the shed again? Shed was 100 miles an hour.

Speaker 2 Cycling. Well, what do you think then? In a slipstream.
It can't be 100 miles. Even in a slip stream.
On a bicycle as well. On a bicycle.
You've got to be slower than a shed. Not an e-bike.

Speaker 2 Was it a line bike? Because they can go

Speaker 2 too fast. They go really fast.
Yeah. A bit unnerving.

Speaker 2 I'll say slower than, but only just slower than the shed.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 I think this might be a minor annuity's buck, but I can't remember what it was. Right.

Speaker 2 I think it was like 120 odd miles an hour.

Speaker 2 112.9. Oh, faster than the shed.
Yeah. So it goes lawnmower, shed, guy Martin in a flip stream.
Yeah. You do have electric car speed records, don't you? I think we're talking about

Speaker 2 fundamental. Are they fast? I've got one from 1899.
It was the first electric car to go over 100 kilometers an hour. Wow.
It was called Le Jamais Content,

Speaker 2 meaning never satisfied. Oh, I really thought it was something to do with ham.
Sorry.

Speaker 2 I was like, oh, that's

Speaker 2 a happy ham. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I've seen a photo of that. It's insane.
It looks absolutely bananas there. Apparently,

Speaker 2 it was pretty tough to ride, and the muscles of his body and neck became completely rigid as he drove it because it was just all over the place.

Speaker 2 So obviously, they didn't have any stability or anything like that in those days. They have just launched the fastest e-scooter e-scooter on the planet.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And you please mind out on the pavements because they are driving those things like crazy people. Well, this one goes at 100 miles an hour.
Oh, God, watch out. Why do you need that?

Speaker 2 Watch out, Piccadilly Circus. Watch out.
It's not a good idea. It's a really bad idea.
And that feels like that's my daughter going to nursery in the market when I'm trying to catch up with her.

Speaker 2 Those micro scooters are fast. It's called the turbo.
It's made of aerospace grade aluminium and it has a range of 150 miles.

Speaker 2 And I bet you some fucker will still not wear a helmet and be on the road with that. Yeah.
Yeah. Imagine being overtaken in the fast lane.
You're driving in the fast lane.

Speaker 2 And someone behind you is on an e-scooter right up your backpunk. I've seen that.
I've learned it. I've seen people on e-scooters like going so fast on the road.
It's terrifying. This is the future.

Speaker 2 You'll be soon saying, honey, I think we were just overtaken by a shed.

Speaker 2 So some Welsh records. Great.

Speaker 2 The number of people skinny dipping in a single venue was beaten this year on the Gower Peninsula.

Speaker 2 Of course. What a lovely place to skinny dip.
Wonderful.

Speaker 2 Do you want to guess how many?

Speaker 2 130. Close? No, not close.
Oh, I'm going to say a thousand. I'm going to say four things.
Closer than that.

Speaker 2 495. 413.
What? 413. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And did they turn into an orgy afterwards? Or was it like? No, no, no, it didn't. It was very respectable.
They did it at 9 a.m. to stop any rubber neckers from turning up.

Speaker 2 They can still get up early.

Speaker 2 But the Burberts know what an alarm clock is. Hello.
Good morning, wood. They're ready.
They're primed. Oh, it's 8.30.
I simply cannot be leering at someone before nine o'clock.

Speaker 2 I haven't had my cappuccino.

Speaker 2 And recently, the longest ever tug-of-war game took place on a Welsh beach. Now, when you say longest,

Speaker 2 are we talking longest? Duration? No, it is. Stretches out.
It's the longest rope. So it doesn't have to be the most people.
It's just the longest rope. Here's the question.

Speaker 2 Was it longer or shorter than the longest suspension bridge in portugal oh no oh no

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 no because i know this one i know this one can i just say as well as part of club fish we're launching a quarterly quiz and i can tell you if you're listening now

Speaker 2 this is the kind of gold you're gonna get you're gonna love this

Speaker 2 you gotta think about it logically there's no way logic can apply here why have i found this suspension bridge because it's very short because it doesn't have any suspension bridges. No.

Speaker 2 Or because I know the length of the rope and I'm searching for other things. So they're the same.
They're the same. Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it was the largest suspension bridge in the world until quite recently. And then it got overtaken by one in Southeast Asia.
Wow.

Speaker 2 The rope was that long. How long? Do you have length? 20 meters.
No.

Speaker 2 It was 1,694 feet.

Speaker 2 Is that two very strong strong people? Two teams.

Speaker 2 Could you hold that rope in the air? Two teams of 50. Oh, okay, that's what I'm saying.
But they're Welsh, so they're going to be strong. They've got to be strong.
That's just a fact.

Speaker 2 There's nothing they can do about that.

Speaker 2 I always struggle to remember whether you're half Welsh or 150% Welsh.

Speaker 2 Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts.
Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 2 If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we're all online on various social media accounts.

Speaker 2 I'm on Instagram on at Schreiberland. Andy.
Instagram at Andrew Hunter M. James.
Come and add me on LinkedIn.

Speaker 2 And Carriead. You can find me on Instagram at Carriad Lloyd.
Yeah, you can also find her in bookshops now. You got your new book out.

Speaker 2 Yes, Lydia Marmalade and the Christmas Wish is available in paperback now.

Speaker 2 It's a book for ages eight and upset in Jane Austen Times featuring a mischievous winter sprite and a very hungry sausage dog.

Speaker 2 Nice. Lovely.
There you go. Well, listen, if you want to write in anything about what we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be reached via podcast at qi.com.

Speaker 2 Send your emails in there. They go to Andy.
Andy often cherry-picks those emails, which we then bring to our show. Drop us a line, which is part of our membership club, Club Fish.

Speaker 2 Go to our website, no such thingasafish.com, to check out that and more. We've got merch.
We've got an upcoming gig that you can get tickets to.

Speaker 2 Otherwise, just come back here next week because we'll be back with another episode. We'll see you then.
Goodbye.

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