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Hi, everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of No Such Things A Fish, where we decided that we would help a new up-and-coming comedian who is our guest today, Andy.

Can you remember their name? I can't quite recall. Is he called Michael Paulin? Michael Paulin? Yeah, that's what I'm reading here.
Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, it's Michael Palin.
It's Michael Palin.

It's only bloody Michael Palin. From everything from Monty Python onwards, we are so excited to have Michael on the show.
We hope you'll enjoy this one.

We certainly did recording as you're about to hear. He's amazing.
It was such a fun episode. He has a new book out.

A lot of the facts that you hear at the start of this podcast will be recounted in that book, but there is so much more besides. And that book is called simply Michael Palin in Venezuela.

Michael Palin in Venezuela does exactly what it says on the tin. It's a brilliant book.
Dan has read it from cover to cover multiple times. And he tells us that it's an incredible book.

So you should definitely go out and get that and if you want to know anything more about michael then go to his website it's michaelpalin.com and there's so much on there yeah like you just can't you'll be on there for weeks absolutely and we have club fish which is our super secret private exclusive extraordinary members club you can get ad-free episodes of fish you can get bonus bits of fish there is a longer version of the episode with Michael Palin, as with every other one.

You can get fish XL. There's so much other stuff stuff and goodies on there.
Go and check it out. It's at patreon.com/slash no such thing as a fish.

But in the meantime, please do enjoy this episode of No Such Thing as a Fish with Michael Palin. And why not check out some of the other stuff he's done? I've heard it's quite good.
I think so.

I think so. On with the podcast.
On with the show.

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.

I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, and Michael Palin.

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

Starting with fact number one, and that is Michael. In the Venezuelan Andes, there's a town called Merida, and it has two entries in the Guinness Book of Records.

One is the tallest cable car in the world, and the other is the Eladoria Colomoto, which is an ice cream parlor, which has the record number of ice cream varieties on sale. 860,

including avocado, garlic, and trout.

Can you imagine that? A trout ice cream, please? Trout ice cream. Oh, daddy, can can I have a trout ice cream?

Mushroom and wine, gherkin, chili,

shellfishes of some type. You went to Venezuela.
Have you been to this town and to this specific ice cream parlour? Well, I haven't been to the ice cream parlour. We were doing various other things.

I haven't been up on the amazing cable car, which takes you right up into the mountains. But I know where it was, the Aladira.
Coromoto. And it's obviously fallen on hard times.

I think it may have been superseded superseded now by some other, probably in China, there's another place that's got more.

I really like the sound of, is it, I'm going to pronounce it wrong, pabellon criot, which is a traditional food, but it's five different kinds of ice cream, beef, rice,

plantain, cheese, and black beans. So five little scoops with a scoop of chili on top.
Well, on the flip side, they've got Viagra Hope, which is blue like the pills. So maybe, maybe those two.

Does it have any sort of natural ingredients, perhaps? It's only got honey and something else natural. They don't use it.
Well, we know that everything is an aphrodisiac, really, isn't it?

That's what they claim. Honey's an aphrodisiac for sure.
Kippers are the only things I know that aren't an aphrodisiac.

Are they not? Right. I don't think so.

I've had a lot of kippers in my time.

You know, my legs are

main crossed.

I think you're right, Michael, that it's now... It's now not selling 800 flavours anymore.
This was the glory days, when the original owner was still trading.

And it's also been overtaken, not by someone in China, it's actually Mig and Mutts Craft Creamery in Colorado.

Oh gosh. Well, how many do they do? And do they do garlic?

I think it's something they must have more than 860, so I can't imagine garlic isn't in there. Imagine if you walked in and you said, do you have Raspberry Ripple? And they go, oh, damn it.

Yes, exactly. Chocolate.

So you, but you did do the cable car. Yeah.
Which sounds, I mean, it looks, I mean, I don't really like cable cars where you're floating over and it looks terrifying

i i don't really and they're big gondolas and they take about 40 people so not only are you hanging from these very slim cables you've got 40 very large you know venezuelans also traveling with you yeah but it the thing is it's not a continuous ride you have to stop at various places and get into a another one and so there are four stages

but it is i mean it's amazing if you

imagine if you're a sort of geography teacher you take a class class up there and they could see all the different environments from the river valley with all its agriculture and all that and the city itself to the very top where it's all completely bleak and

you end up alongside the highest peak in the Venezuelan Andes. It's pretty amazing.
I read that chapter in your book.

I read your book, but in that chapter you talk about it and you say that it's an hour journey basically to get to the top. But in that time you're traveling basically half the height of Everest.

So when you get to the top, the oxygen level has changed vastly, and you're all giddy. And there's all these signs in the gondola that are sort of talking about, you know, how you feeling?

You know, how's the old ticker doing? Is it feeling okay?

Yeah. I mean, it's quite extraordinary that people get in downtown.
You know,

it seems like getting on a bus or something. And it's quite warm in Merida.
And you see these

people like partygoers and tiny little girls in slim dresses, you know, with sleeveless dresses and all that and short skirts. And they're going up to half the height of everyone

i read that it was there because originally there was a ski track there's ski slopes because there was a big old glacier there which you could see from the city but now it's gone the dassie is gone in the last two years wow and they thought well it may return but it's now gone for good so a lot of things in the cable car saying this is how we're the planet is changing you know everywhere you go

and venezuela has no snow anymore michael did you see i'm because i was reading about some of the amazing creatures that live, I mean, it's a huge country. Yes.
It's equatorial.

It's got a lot of amazing wild spaces. So there is the Merida cable car frog, which you might have seen.
What? What?

What lives in the cable car or whatever? It takes your tickets.

Hello.

Con you call me from please.

It just lives very near the stations of the cable car and it's been found nowhere else. So it's now called...
That's very interesting.

Sorry to say, is it found at the top and the bottom? So you can imagine that it travels from one place to the other to mate, maybe, or to migrate. Truth.
The male. 15,000 feet to mate.

You've got to really love somebody.

Everyone's all got their kippers ready.

Honestly, the Asambra, the great migration of the cable car frog, they're just all of them in one gondola just heading up.

Okay.

The oil bird? Oh. I don't know if you saw this.
Yes, actually,

I did hear about the oil birds.

I hope it's not, because in the olden days, they used to take oily birds and then use them as candles. I hope it's not that.

I'm really sorry to say it, James. It is.
They did use them as...

Yeah,

they had a very high fat content, and I'm afraid it's especially the baby oil birds. Oh, no.
And they basically were burnt down to make oil. But they're an amazing animal.

They're the only bird, or one of very, very few birds, which uses echolocation. Yeah.

So we're used to that in bats, but they make a stream of high-pitched calls to navigate because they live in very dark caves, and that's how they get around another animal they had in venezuela was a guinea pig the size of a fiat 500 just just one and did you see that did you see that when you were there michael

um i saw lots of fiat 500s none of them live did you check the whiskers yeah yeah yeah i didn't know they didn't have fur all over them i'm afraid it was many hundreds of thousands of years ago um we only know about them because of their teeth and we've extrapolated the size wow but they were 10 times the mass of the largest living rodent today go on which is

the largest living rodent also in Venezuela is the capybara, which is apparently the largest living rodent. Have you seen one? Yeah, yes.

You don't look very impressed. No, they're a bit sort of sad, really.
Like they were supposed to be a model for another kind of creature, but they didn't get the fitting. So it's just very basic.

Four legs and a sort of back and a nose. But there's nothing very distinguished about that.

When you went to Peru, did you eat a guinea pig?

Because that's like a big delicacy over there. And every market they sell guinea pig and stuff.
Yeah. Not knowingly.
No, I mean, seriously, you never know half the time what you're eating.

Are you one when you go to all these different countries that you like to try different foods that they have and stuff, or are you not really? You'd rather have your food.

No, I like to, because it's part of getting to know people and meeting people is, you know, hospitality offered has to be

has to be taken, otherwise, people get a bit offended. And also, there's this feeling, that, oh, you know, you're going abroad with the food at you,

horrible, you're going to have France.

And yet the people in these countries don't want to poison themselves. They're not making bad food.

And we're wishing there we had McDonald's or something like that. They make

strange ingredients sometimes, but always very, very well. well cooked.

I so wish you were the opposite, that you would go to the ice cream shop and just go, vanilla, please. Yes,

I think I might have said this before in this show.

One of my favourite Beatles facts is that when the Beatles went to India for their great, you know, spiritual awakening and all of this, Ringo Starr took a suitcase of baked beans with him, like full chock-a-block.

Yeah. Just so he didn't run out of baked beans.
I just, I love that. When we did Around the World in 80 Days, I remember that the soundman, Ron,

he didn't like foreign food and we'd got all these tins of canned food. We ended up on a Dow,

you know, which is very

basic. There's no cabins or anything like that.
You all sleep on deck together. It's a boat, sorry, a dow.
A boat, yes, a dhow.

So it's a big, the old sailing boat they use around the African coast and on the Gulf, Persian Gulf and all that.

So we got on the thing and,

you know, it comes to the evening and the guys are all fishermen from India, very, you know, not wealthy at all. And so we get our food out and they get their food out.

And the first thing that gets out is a tuna from Sainsbury's.

And it sort of comes out of the can like a sort of oily mass that goes boing

onto the plate and sort of wobbles there a bit.

And it's sweating slightly.

I said, right, we're going to have that. And these guys, these wonderful guys,

the fishermen said, you know, please, I could see that some of us didn't really like this. We're making a curry, we'll share it with you.
And they did.

And from then on, we always ate what they ate.

The tins were put to one side.

Did Ron stay with the tins? Ron, yeah, Ron, we threw him overboard

with a tin strapped to him. He sank immediately.
Yeah. I noticed, Michael, in your book, that Venezuela is your 100th country that you have visited

more or less, or you think that's...

No, I think that's right. I'm a bit of a list nerd, and I've kept a list.
So you've kept it. Ah, because that's what I was going to ask.

You can now do a top 100 of countries of the world that you've visited. So where does Venezuela, just off the top of your head, where does that rank? I was thinking about 93, really.

I'm full of positive thoughts about Venezuela at the moment. Oh, sorry.
See what you mean. Sorry.
Yeah. No.
Sorry.

Three. Three.
Or nine. Wow, okay.
Yeah, sorry. Maths is not quite a strong point.

Yeah, so there was an interesting point about the airport when you arrived, which is, I wondered if you were aware of this.

This might have stopped now, but you were paying tax in the airport, and one of the taxes that you would pay were for the air you were literally breathing

because they tax the air. It's a ventilation system that they have and they say we're providing clean air.
Wow, just for foreigners, I guess. Yeah, I'm guessing.
Must be. Just in the airport.

It's not the whole country. No, just in the airport.
There you go, breathe in and don't breathe out for three weeks, okay?

You save a lot of money.

Because they did have the world record for the lowest petrol price in 2016. Wow.
I was trying to look at some other records that Venezuela have had.

It was one cent per litre and at the time the price in the UK was 110.7 pence per litre.

I was trying to work out if I could do some kind of business where you know it offset the price of the flight but it feels like you're going to run into some legal difficulties I think if you can try and bring it back in hand luggage or whatever.

Well they do they've got I mean they've got a lot of oil. We need to rush this episode out basically before America invades.
So one of the things that Venezuela has is a lot of oil. Oh yeah.

But it's not really, it used to supply a lot more to the global market. I think it provides less now.

Well, it's sanctions. Due to sanctions and policies.
Sanctions also, oil price sort of fell. So other countries were producing a lot more oil.

But

there is more oil still in the ground in Venezuela than any other country. They're not just ringing out oil birds.
No, no, exactly.

That's what the oil birds are very pleased.

They're not needed. I found a couple of records that have held as well in Venezuela.
This is Guinness World Records. The living person with the largest feet.

Oh, really? Yes. The right foot measures at 40.55 centimeters and the left foot at 40.47 centimeters.
Now, Dan, did you Google Bigfoot Venezuela?

Are these their own feet? It's not someone who just has two extraordinarily large feet, which he's managed to... Yeah, no, it's one person with one foot.

I read an interview with this guy. Yeah.
He said that he realized he had big big feet when he and his friends would often compare their foot sizes and he would come out on top each time.

It's like, what are his mates doing? Surely it's always going to be him the winner.

Unless they're clowns and they're just naturally in oversized shoes. That's what you can't tell.
But does he do something for a living that's foot?

I don't know what advantage he would.

What is it?

What would you do if you've got very, very large feet? I suppose real life Monty Python opening credits.

Yeah, that's true.

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You look for deals. You wrote out a budget once a long time ago.

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Rocket Money shows you exactly what you're spending every month.

From there, the app helps you make a budget that meets your financial goals. The app even gives you real-time alerts when you're about to go over your budget so you don't spend too much.

With Rocket Money, you can also see all your subscriptions at a glance and cancel the ones you don't want right from the app.

Rocket Money can even try to get you a refund for some of the money you wasted. Plus, you can use the smart savings feature to start putting more money away.

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Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast.
Hi, everyone. We'd like to let you know that this episode is brought to you by Airbnb.
That's right. And James, you're a traveler.
I am, yeah.

I like a bit of traveling. I'll be going away this Christmas and New Year, probably.
Well, I tend to go away over the Christmas and New Year so that I can see my family abroad. That's very nice.

But what that means is my house is empty and loads of people want to come to London for New Year, don't they? Yeah, it's an exciting, it's one of the places to be. Absolutely.

So maybe I could help out by putting my house on Airbnb. That's right.
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and put that towards your trip.

Maybe put it towards some Christmas presents. What a good idea.
Yeah. I'm not saying who you have to give those presents to.
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okay it is now time for fact number two and that is my fact my fact this week is that in 1949 the bbc issued a company-wide ban on making any rude jokes about solicitors chambermaids and one very specific Irishman called Mr.

McGillicuddy. This one guy.

What was so funny about him?

There were people who continued to make jokes about this man, Ross McGillicuddy of the Reeks. Of the Reeks, yes, McGillicuddy's Reeks.
I've heard of that. Well, there you go.

And I imagine there was fun to be had. It is quite a funny name, isn't it?

If you're comedian, I'd got that.

So, what had happened was there was a comic called Leonard Henry, not Lenny Henry, Leonard Henry, and he'd found the name of McGillicuddy of the Reeks in an atlas and thought it was a place and then turned it into a comedy person.

And then this person who really existed said, Well, I never gave you permission to use my name. And the BBC had to apologise.
Yeah. And there's still a McGillicuddy of the Reeks to this day.
Yeah.

And the Reeks is a, I think, a range of, it's an ancestral territory in County Kerry. So there's a range of mountains which is called the Reeks.

And

the last evidence I have found of the current McGillicuddy of the Reeks is him writing to the Daily Telegraph in 2017 about the price of stamps.

He's about 85 now, and I believe he looks after the Ernum herd of cattle.

That's the latest. That's the latest news on McGillicuddy of the Reeks.

Do you ever laugh at someone like that? Is he a serious man? Does he have any administrative powers? I mean, is he like a sheriff or something like that?

He might do, because it's sort of... Honory.
It's an honorary thing. You're sort of a chief of family.
Chief of the name is the term that gets used. And this, like, senior McGillicuddy

of the 1930s and 40s was a big deal.

You know, he was an officer of the British Army, he was an Irish senator, he was, you know, all sorts of serious, and he just objected very strongly to being joked about.

And he did try, he complained. The BBC said, Come on, it's the name of a place.
It's a joke. Come on.
It's a joke. Just reeks of envy for me.

But then he said that he'd never appeared or contemplated appearing before the public for their amusement. So you must apologise immediately.
The BBC caved.

They did, and they produced this thing called the Green Book, unofficially called the Green Book.

It was a pamphlet that was sent internally, and it was largely sent to people kind of like Spike Milligan and comedians of that ilk who were writing topical, not topical shows necessarily, but shows that were going out live weekly.

And so it came with a long list of things, jokes about lavatories,

immorality of any kind. You couldn't make any suggestive references to honeymoon couples, fig leaves, ladies' underwear, baskets, because baskets could be used as innuendo in sexual relation.

You could, if you, a nicely placed basket in a sentence could suggest sex.

Yeah, it was used as

a replacement word, let's say. I'm sure Shakespeare used baskets in his vagina.
He must have been basically. Sainsbury's must have been a hotbed.

Did you ever come across the censors yourselves, Michael? Yeah, we had some censorship on Python. Yeah.

What did they object to? Where they objected to the word masturbation. Oh, yeah.
Waiters.

I'll give you the context.

So

if just come out and say, oh,

we love the latest sketch, Michael.

We're not sure.

It was cut out of the parrot sketch.

I'm not interested in masturbation.

No, the context was we did a sort of northern quiz show,

an on-stage thing where people came on stage. And

it was a very nice item.

People had to sum up Proust's.

It was officially called the All-England Summarised Proust competition. Summarised Proust competition.

They had 15 seconds to summarise Proust. Anyway, the ones that comes up and they get a little bit of cheery, Wilfred Pickle sort of, hello, how are you?

What are your hobbies? And this man's hobbies are strangling animals, golf and masturbating.

And

it was a huge laugh.

And anyway, very quickly, the sketch itself is one of my favourite bits because, all right, you've got 15 seconds now. Sunrise Proust in his masterwork.

And all the various volumes of Proust on a sort of thermometer.

So he goes, oh, ah, yeah, oh, ah,

a swan, swan,

swan,

swan comes along, swan songs, and bing, swam.

But

the BBC said you can't, they reviewed the tape and said you can't say masturbating. And so you'll have to cut it out.
And in those days, we recorded on tape, so you had to physically cut the tape.

So our director said he cut the thing out,

the word masturbating, but he left the gap, which is brilliant. So you hear,

what are your hobbies? Strangling animals, golf.

Huge laugh.

Never has golf got a laugh. Absolutely colossal laughs.
And that's a good summary of the life of Proust from what I remember.

Was that he spent a lot? He was in his bedroom for a long time. Long time.
Very true. He was.
With oil birds, possibly.

I think he was putting pins in mice or something, wasn't he, when he was a kid.

I think so.

I've never heard of him playing golf, and I would know. If Cruz played golf, I would know.
Yeah, that's a shame. I reckon.
I love that

there's a great story in your diaries, The Python Years, the first diaries, which is that you had obviously the most famous story of censorship and banning in comedy history, Life of Brian, and all the things that you guys had to do in order to say that this wasn't an attack on religion.

It was, you know, Jesus is not being mocked, and it was the big thing, right? And

you got banned in places like Norway. And in the diary, you point out that in Sweden, the posters read, so funny, it was banned in Norway.
Yes. And I just think that's fantastic.
Yeah.

And you, because it was a great moment because it did get banned in a lot of places from cinema altogether. And one of those places was in Wales.

And that was overturned by the mayor, Sue Jones Davies, who happened to be in the life of Brian.

She was Brian's girlfriend, skipping around naked. She was a revolutionary leader.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So she suddenly becomes mayor of Aberystwyth.

And for one night, she says, I'm going to overturn the ban.

And Terry and myself and her went to the local Odeon in Aberystwyth with arms linked, like you know, we were on a sort of Thelma march or something like that. And we saw one night of Life of Brian.

I think it was banned the night after that. Yeah.
I was looking at a few songs that maybe should have been banned because the BBC had a lot of rules about songs as well. Yeah.

So they banned things like My Generation by The Who? Really? 60s Classic. That was banned not because of any profanity.
It was banned because it has a stammer.

That was

a lot of fun.

Yeah, and that was just like people with a stammer will find that offensive.

Space Oddity by David Bowie was banned because it was, I think it was banned until Neil Armstrong had safely got back to Earth with Al and Armstrong and Collins because they thought, oh, it's a bit sensationalized absolutely lyrically he's yeah stuck in a tin can of course right yeah yeah um yeah that makes sense but there's this whole thing there's this whole genre of songs called dirty blues from the 20s and 30s which are all

sort of they're all black singers many women but it's

the the lyrics and the song titles are so extraordinarily rude that i can't believe the songs are released basically so i just want to give you a few of them go for it um please warm my wiener i mean they're

they're single entendres, basically. Yeah, but they were really popular.
But

get them from the peanut man, brackets, hot nuts.

Lil Johnson was one of the women singing these. Let me roll your lemon, sort of just about a double entendre.
My stove is in good condition.

Any news of her basket?

Anybody want to buy my cabbage? That's not rude. Well, the way she sings it, it's very.

It's like sort of Gordon Ramsey's songbook, really.

Margaret Carter, there were actually loads of cooking ones. So Margaret Carter had, I want plenty grease in my frying pan.
Yeah.

And Memphis Mini had, I'm selling my pork chops, but I'm giving my gravy away. Oh, right.
Which has lost me completely. It's not like my milkshake brings other boys to the yard.

I think it is, but with more pork. I think sort of, yeah.

More sex took place in the kitchen than anywhere else. That sounds like it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Do you know whose was the first song banned from the BBC? It's someone you've all heard of. So, okay.
1933. 1930.
Adolf Hitler. With his

73. Chancellor's Waltz.

33. Someone we've all heard of.
Someone you've all heard of. Someone from my part of the world.
George.

I was about to say George Foreman. George Foreman.
George Formby. Yeah.
Yeah.

His song with My Little Ukulelean Hand was banned, but he was a real double entendre,

wasn't he?

Like one of his songs, songs, My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock, goes, it may be sticky, but I never complain. It's nice to have a nibble of it now and again.

They're all double entendres all the way from very interesting. There was a number one hit in the UK, which was a very famous song, Jatem.
Oh, yeah. Serge Gainsburg, Jane Birkin.

That was banned as well.

I read this in the Monkey Diaries, Jane Birkin's diaries. Other diaries are available.

And

the problem that they had was it got too popular. It got so popular that it made it to number one.

And so, in order to be able to play it within the charts, they had to get an orchestral version of it and just play it completely without any voice at all.

Because it wasn't even the lyrics, it was the moaning.

That was the big problem of the song. It was a breathing, wasn't it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And all these, my generation, all this, this is why Radio Caroline became a big thing.
Was that pirates? Offshore pirate radio, because no one was playing any of these songs.

Yeah.

I've got one last one, which I find pretty amazing, which is King Charles. I didn't realize he was part of the reviews in Cambridge when he was there.

He did Footlight Smokers, and he was part of them. What does that mean? Sorry? So

people on stage do sort of funny things, don't you? Yeah, exactly. Okay, it's like comedy stuff.
It's comedy stuff. It's comedy, yeah, yeah.
It's a smoker. So smoking room.
Yeah.

You and Terry Jones were in Oxford, but Eric Idle and John Cleese and Graham Chapman would have been part of the Cambridge Footlights,

you know, Breon the Fringe, all that. And so he was part of the Cambridge Footlights.

And there's a story that goes that they were not allowed to make fun of him or his family while he was part of the Footlights, which is pretty amazing.

And he did, he did a few reviews. He was on stage quite a lot.

He was in the Magic Circle as well, wasn't he, when he was Prince Charles? Yeah. Were you guys with me when I did a tour of the Magic Circle? I can't remember who was there.

No, no, we weren't allowed anyway. Well, we went there and and they told us about when because you have to do a trick to get into the magic circle, and he did the balls trick, like the cups and bowls.

Apparently, not the best person who's ever done it, but they decided that it was good enough for him to join the magician.

The heir to the throne, yeah,

sorry, come again next week. Yeah, yeah, I can make your head disappear, actually.

So

yeah, so he took part in two reviews. One was called Revolution with a U instead of the O in the middle, and quietly flows the Don.

And so you weren't allowed to make any jokes about him or royalty, but also the first play got in a bit of trouble in 1969

because they were putting it on a Sunday. And the Lord's Day Observance Society got in touch and said, absolutely not.

So it's basically a society looking out for anything going on on a Sunday that shouldn't be. And I wrote a thing about them is they can only work on Sundays.

Can't do anything on a Sunday, right?

Exactly.

But yeah, apparently it was quite odd because, you know, when he was on stage, they would sell tickets to the smokers, as they were called, the performances that you could go to.

And they were fielding calls from Japan saying, how many tickets are available? We have a full plane load of tourists who are ready to fly over to see the prince in performance.

Well, there we are. He's still performing, isn't he, really?

He is, isn't he? What he learned for the footlights, probably very...

Very useful for public life.

And the magic circle, he made Prince Andrew disappear. Yes.

okay it is time for fact number three and that is andy my fact is the rescue team who tried to find the lost franklin expedition did so with rockets kites flashing lights gunshots horns drums and by putting collars on arctic foxes

wow it didn't work we should say

were the collars was this before they had sort of radio equipment so i mean you just put the collars on there was no recording device yeah 100 so what they did

this is in the 1840s and 50s this expedition uh which you've written about michael what went um went north over canada they were trying to find a shorter route through the arctic because that would be amazing for shipping this fabled thing called the northwest passage and it would cut thousands of miles so this is before the panama canal right yes so they previously had to go all the way down south america exactly and it's just a very very long route to sail from europe to asia basically so if you could find the if you could find the Northwest Passage, it would be a huge boon to mankind.

And this expedition went out, the Franklin Expedition, two ships, Terra and Erebus. They went missing, and a lot of search parties went out for them.

Some sources estimate more than 30 search missions went out.

Mostly financed by his wife,

absolutely determined that she could find him. And everyone was saying, no, it's too late now.
He's dead. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And one of them decided to put collars on foxes, Arctic foxes, wild fox cubs, which had the coordinates of where they were

saying, we are looking for you, this is where we are based.

And they just released the foxes into the wilds. And it was clever.
It didn't work. I mean, the foxes, I imagine, ate the survivors.

Nobody there to read them. No, exactly.
They were all Inuit, so they wouldn't say, you know, what does this mean? Sort of

read that. It simply did not work.
They were exciting fact, though. They did some very strange things at that time.

There was a kind of hysteria to try and find him and a refusal to admit that they might be dead because they basically

completely got it wrong.

The whole expedition was given enormous amounts of money.

They had lots of wine on board and libraries and all that sort of thing. And they just took a wrong turn and got stuck down a sort of

a fairly narrow stretch of water.

where it was quite an extreme winter then and that froze and they were stuck. So they drank all the wine and so, well, when the spring comes, it'll melt and we'll go off.
Spring didn't melt.

There was two or three years of the worst and coldest winters up in

the Northwest Passage. So basically, they were just stuck there for about two years, ran out of food, went out, try and get the trade with the Inuit, but they didn't do that very well

because no one had actually done the research and saying, well, how do we speak to Inuit, the people who live there? So when it came to wanting to be helped by those people, they couldn't do it.

Whereas later, Amundsen or someone like that was very much a sort of, you know, know the ground you're on sort of traveller. He always knew what to ask the local people.

So it was a bit arrogant really. Yeah.
Frankly next. But were they a bit unlucky with the weather? Like if they'd have gone a few years later.
Yeah, I mean, I think it was these two

very, very cold

winters. But they'd also, yeah, if they'd gone a slightly different route and not gone down, they took like a shortcut

and then it got trapped. And the ice is obviously stronger when you've got the confined space.
So if they'd gone a bit further ahead where there's more open water, they might have got through.

The absolute disappointment of the ice not melting that spring must have been

like, oh, it must be near the spring now. Yeah, yeah.
So you wrote a brilliant book about Erebus, and you went and visited a lot of these places as well.

I mean, it's pretty fascinating that it was lost for so long, only found in 2014. Yeah.
I mean, that's remarkable.

The Inuit at the time, in the late 19th century, people went out there, said they had seen a ship, the mast of a ship, they knew exactly where it was.

But there was sort of, because they only had an oral tradition, didn't write things down,

people thought, well, well, they're just saying that. And they didn't follow it up.
And in the end, Erebus was found almost exactly where they had said

100 years before. The local residents.

I'm afraid so. Yes.
It's a real sort of imperial sort of attitude you have. No, no, you don't know.

You just lived here for 500 years. We know.

I think we, the 31st Expedition, always wanted to find them without any help from you guys. Okay, collared wolves.

There you go.

I should say where I saw the, I've seen one of these collars in the flesh. It's so exciting.
Oh, wow. A few of us.
With words on it. Yeah.
And the coordinates.

And it's behind the scenes at the Royal Geographical Society, which I believe you have been president. I was president for three years.
Yeah.

And they have, in the back rooms, they have these amazing collections of extraordinary stuff, you know, because it was founded in 1830 and basically contributed to founding geography as a discipline.

Geography is a much newer area of study than many others. So it's an incredible place.
And they've got these collars there. It's amazing to say.
Very cool.

The thing is, which is quite interesting, I think, that one of the many attempts to sort of find out where they were was a ship called HMS Resolution.

That was about sort of five years after they left. And the desk from the captain's cabin, HMS Resolution, is the desk in the White House.
Oh,

in all the White House offices. Yeah, I have heard it called the Resolution Desk.
Yeah, I've not found that came from the search for Franklin.

Isn't Trump just trying to turn that into a solid gold desk? It'll be easier. He'll be guilting that right now.

I read that they took 8,000 tins of food for the voyage. Sounds like Ron.
Sounds like you're Ron.

And no bloody tin opener. Oh, come on.

We could ask the locals, no, no.

And 7,088 pounds of tobacco, which, according to my calculation, in today's money, would be enough for 3 million cigarettes.

Wow. Which is really enough, wouldn't it? But yeah, I think a lot of people thought that the tins were the problem.
Right.

So the men sort of, a lot of the men went away from the ship, maybe to try and find their way off somewhere, but they walked away with a load of stuff they wouldn't really need, like button polish and curtain rods and a writing desk and stuff.

Time tickets.

Yeah, exactly. And people thought, well, maybe they went mad.
And I think now we do think that there was some lead poisoning.

And for a long time, they thought it was the tins of food because they were soldered with lead.

Now I think we're not quite so sure. It might have been because the pipes in the boat had lead in them.

Because the levels of lead were so high that it couldn't just be bleached from the tins. How interesting.
Was it about 150 men in total? 129, I believe. Okay, right.

Like all hands on both ships. Not one of them survived.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And is this right, Michael?

I read this and it sounded too wild to be true to me, but is it the case that when you went out looking and writing the book that there's bits where in the snow their footprints are sort of fossilized, that you can see them in the ground?

I don't know. I mean, you can see their graves, the first people who died.
Right.

I'm not sure about the fossilized. Okay, yeah, it felt weird.
Yeah, I'd be surprised if a footprint, unless it was that Venezuelan guy with a massive foot sleeve

he'd have known that 24 yards across

died of large feet and unable to cut his toenails probably needed maybe some lumberjacks to get in there

but they did find a lot of very well-preserved bodies i believe and i don't know if they are i think they must have been dug up but bodies were found in 1984 incredibly well preserved and you could see they had blue eyes so there was a crew member called john torrington who was found 138 years after he died.

But he was put on People magazine's list of the most intriguing people of 1984. Really? Yeah, yeah.
Wow. Bit of posthumous recognition, which I suppose is nice.
So you are on ice.

You know, that's what they say about places like Everest. Cryogenic sort of

situation. Like when they found Mallory's body, Mallory's body was just still Mallory's body.
It was there. But they didn't get that many.
Not many that many were brought back,

actually.

We should say Lady Franklin as well. Yeah.
So John Franklin was the commander of the whole mission loss.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
And I think there were questions about whether he was suitable, whether he was the best man. Absolutely.
For a start, Franklin wasn't the first person they wanted to lead it.

They wanted James Clerk Ross to lead it because he'd had extraordinary success in Antarctica in 1841 and stood on places that no human being had ever been before.

But he didn't want to do it quite rightly.

And so they got Franklin because he was quite old at the time, he was nearly 60 but he everyone liked him he was all right he was pretty ineffectual nice bloke knew everybody yeah i want to do it and his wife who was very dynamic must have pushed him forward yeah right said my husband's available and here he is john come in

on the other hand i read that james ross one of the reasons he declined is because he promised his wife that he wouldn't go to any more polar expeditions

so it's all we're blaming the wives for the whole thing

such a great detail yeah no i promised my wife. No, I think I can't.
If he's just done four years into the Antarctic, it's reasonable. Where are you going?

Just to the Antarctic.

Lady Franklin was very smitten with James Clerk Ross.

Dashing character. Really? Tall.

Yeah, yeah. That's why the wife didn't want him to go anywhere.

Actually, it doesn't say that it was his wife who didn't want him to go anywhere.

Wow. That's really interesting.
So James Clark Ross led one of the expeditions and that was the one that put the collars on the foxes. Really? That was the...

And Lady Franklin did all the lobbying, didn't she? She said, we must send out search parties. It's quite moving.
She wrote him letters for eight years

after he departed. And, you know, the large majority of that time, he would have died.
No one knew for sure.

What would happen to those letters? Would they just be kept in her house or would she post them and send them to Canada, maybe?

she would have had them indexed yeah and looked after well yeah she had a an assistant a woman who worked with her and they organized the whole sort of rescue business down to the last detail you know so the letters I'm sure everything that she'd written would be would be kept that's the other thing right where they were going there was no post box right so they didn't take a post box with them they should have done in the true imperial spirit we're going to put the first post box in the north i can imagine a postman coming to collect those definitely wearing shots yes

that's right

no collection on sunday

yeah oh the lord's day observant society have been in touch

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

Okay, my fact this week is that in Bologna, there is a word ummerol, which describes a grumpy pensioner who stands stands with his hands behind his back complaining about road works.

Yeah, the dream. The dream life.
For me, the dream life. We'll all end up there eventually, Andy.

You a lot earlier than others, I'm sure. Andy's there.

So this is a term that was coined in 2005 by a writer called Danilo Masotti.

And he had noticed that there was a lot of people doing this in Bologna.

And they've decided that it's going to be a thing and they've really really embraced it.

And now, if you go to Bologna and they do roadworks, the people who are doing the work will talk to the Umaroles.

When they finish some works, they'll put a sign-up saying where they're going to be next week so that the Umaroles can go and see them. Wonderful.

And

it was a very good way of institutionalizing grumpiness.

Good way of dealing with it.

And there was a Burger King advert in 2016 about these guys. And in 2021, the word entered the official Italian dictionary.
Incredible. So this is a real proper thing there.
But isn't it?

Omaral sounds really nice.

It sounds a bit like a laxative, to be honest.

It's a very glamorous term for grumpy old men. Yeah, but also it doesn't sound very Italian, I think.
Omaral.

Omerale. Omerale.

I think, yeah.

That's the way you pronounce it. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. But it comes from a Bologna

regional dialect word meaning little guy.

So is it are they annoying to the builders? Are they looking through the fence and they're saying, I wouldn't put it there if I wouldn't put that RSJ there if I were you?

I think it all depends on the attitude of the builders. Okay.

I think some of the builders embrace it and like them, and it's someone to chat to, and you know, they use the knowledge of people who have maybe done this job before or know about it.

And then there are other builders who go

off my building site. Yeah, a lot of these guys will be retired.

Yeah, no, no, don't put it through to Houston.

Oh, all right. We've made the tunnels.
Well,

you should have asked us.

I just think a lot of these guys are going to be retired solicitors or people who are not

builders. They're not.
I've probably thought that they kind of stand with their arms behind their backs. You know,

like a sort of costume. In Villa Santa, which is near Monza in the north of Italy,

they have officially used these ummaroles and the local government have spoken to them and said, right, you can stand next to this bit of Worldworks and let us know if anything's wrong.

So they're like professional umarol that's helping the government. Yeah, the snitches as well, basically.
Yeah, that's true. That's why I would think of it like that.

But I found online, you can get a 3D printed model of an Umarol.

for your desk.

And the idea is you just pop him here and he will look there at the work you're doing.

And brilliant idea. You'll get a lot more done because you're so frightened that he's going to complain.

It's lovely. It's so sweet.
I feel like I would very happily, even if, because I don't speak the language, just listen to a live stream of just the old men.

Yeah. And I think the theory is a lot of these guys, well, they're all retired.
Yeah. And I think part of the theory is their wives do not want them around the house all day.

So very much like Lady Franklin, they've said, why don't you pop out? and discover the Northwest Passage.

Quite often what they'll do is they'll go in the morning, have their cappuccino, sit around, chat about the football scores or whatever. But then once it comes to mid-morning, what do you do then?

Right?

And there's a lot of roadworks happening, so you go and tut. They sort of sound a bit like superannuated train spotters, really.
Yeah. Rather more glamorous in an Italian way, you know.

They wouldn't be nerdy. Train spotters in Italian, but sort of they'd have seen all the Fellini movies.

I do really hope that you're just mentioning Franklin that there were a group of Inuit old men just standing around the Erebus.

I wouldn't go down that. I wouldn't go down that.
What are you going down that body of water.

Sorry, mate.

Back up.

Michael, you're doing a live show at the moment and one of the themes is aging disgracefully, right? As part of a

sort of this, yes.

Does that appeal, the idea of Omaro? To be.

Yeah, I mean, I'd like to be a bit more active.

But I think you just keep going. And there's two ways of approaching age.

One is to sit in a chair and the other is to become fanatically busy and just say, I've just got to have things to do all the time. So I can't, you know, otherwise it's completely boring.

But some people choose one, some people choose the other.

There's another term that I really like. The window side tribe, they're known as in Japan.
And it means an employee who at work is quite old and they can't really get them to do what they used to do.

So they sort of sideline them. They just give them a desk by the window and they don't really do anything anymore.
So it's apparently

It's quite big in Japan. They just, rather than firing or retiring someone, they just take away all their responsibilities, put them by the window, and just say, all right, just keep going.

That's called executive producer, isn't it?

But it's true that most other countries have a more enlightened attitude to aging. They think it's valuable that people get older.
I mean, most tribal societies, you're the top man.

The longer you live, the more you know, the more experience you can pass on to others.

So the idea of care homes here is quite sad, really.

Yeah, I quite like, like, you know, getting involved in a heist, for example,

in your older years. The fascinating story from a few years ago that the greatest, largest burglary in English history was committed by people in their 70s.
The oldest guy was 76

was the hat and guarded one, which is just pretty astonishing. They went down an elevator shaft, they drilled through, they stole millions of pounds worth of stuff.
I I didn't know they were that old.

They had a combined age of 500.

They're just old blokes from the pub, you know, just go out and do it for real. Yeah, and they had a history of having done quite a few heists in the past over a long career.

But they've been scripted by Richard Osmond. It just feels like quite

one of them got to the heist on a bus using his pensioner's pass.

Ironically, his freedom pass. Yes, yes, yeah.

But then what do you do with

the money, really? Well, we never got to find out because they have a lot less of your life to you know, you're going to a few years to spend it. Some of it's still missing, isn't it?

I think it is quite a lot of it, yeah. Really? So, and they're they're all going to come out at some stage.
We need to look for

we need to look for a care home that has installed you know

gold-tapped Vegas-style fountains. That'll be it, it's called the Trump home, yeah, exactly.

Well, there's there's one mystery man still missing who's called Basil, uh, and there's a £20,000 reward on his head.

Yeah, good,

Did you find in the course of this the word gongoozla? No.

That's

basically the British ummeral. It's someone who stands and watches activity on a canal, quite specifically.
Is this voyeuristic or just

the canal activities that happen near me? Yeah. Which is basically graffiti taking drugs.
Oh, really? Are they hotbeds of vice? I didn't know that. I think so.

Oh, well, I'm used to the genteel southern Kennett and Avon canals and places like that where it's just simply watching. Well, at least Liverpool I could tell you drug-free canal

and loads of joyriders on the Leeds Liverpool canal going at four miles an hour

I was reading a little about Britain's self-styled dullest man

because this is about standing around

yeah

anyway I'm very proud to have been nominated

actually

I think he's called Kev and he was featured in the Guardian a couple of years ago because he is the man behind Roundabouts of Redditch

and the calendar, which did enormously well about 20 years ago and has led to a number of other works. You know, Roundabouts of Great Britain, Car Parks of Britain.

Well, he's blown it, hasn't he? You can't be dull if you've been in The Guardian and you've got 12 books out.

I know.

He sort of has. He founded the Car Park Appreciation Society.
Claims to be the only member, but I did have a look and tried to join. And I think it's a closed shop.
So I'm not sure he's admitting.

and he said my three ex-wives found me dull not in the bedroom but in every other part of the house

hey apparently

the there's been a study done by a professor in Brighton who says the people that you shouldn't listen to about longevity if there's one group of people you shouldn't listen to oh I would guess centenarians yeah people age 100 and more why their advice is just terrible they're like I ate one boiled egg and nothing else for 70 years it's It's always detail that has no relevance.

What they have is probably very good genes

and they've managed to survive despite the vices that they've taken in. Despite that vice.
Despite

egg.

And the cocaine that goes with it. Sorry, I forgot to add.
I always find that the idea that people are 107 and they have, oh, I have three whiskeys every night.

And I think that's great. Is this really true? So, I mean, it's the only thing that's kept me drinking whiskey.

And I've got to 82. Oh!

All right, well, time to wrap up. Michael's died.

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

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 social media accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland on Instagram. James.
My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin. Andy.
Mine is at Andrew Hunter M. Michael.
Do you have one? Social media account of any kind?

You've got a great website.

I don't have a social media account, I don't think. What would it be?

Probably Michael Palin. Yeah.
Dahl Man.

Dalmanseekswork.org.

Yeah, no, but michaelpalin.com, I believe it is, if you go to your website. Venezuela is out now in hardback as a book.
It's also a TV series that you can find that was on Channel 5.

And if you want to get through to any of us on the show, podcast at qi.com, that's our email address.

Send us a message there. Tell us extra facts about Venezuela, about ice creams you've tasted, all that stuff.

And some of those messages are going to make their way to our bonus episode, Drop Us a Line, which is where we read out all of your facts and emails. You can find that as part of Club Fish.

That's our secret members' club. So just go to no suchthingasafish.com.
You'll find all the details there. And come back again next week because we'll be back with another episode.

We will see you then. Goodbye.

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