Answer Me This! - AMT371: Gladiator Shortages, 'Go West', and Cats for Students

Episode Date: March 7, 2019

In AMT371 we hear about letting a cat out of the bag and getting a peacock INTO the bag. Both sound very painful. Find out more about this episode at . Send us questions for future episodes: email written words or voice memos to [e-mail]. Tweet us http://twitter.com/helenandolly Facebook http://facebook.com/answermethis Subscribe on Apple Podcasts Hear AMT episodes 1-200, all five of our special albums, and our Best Of compilations at . Hear Helen Zaltzman's podcast The Allusionist at , Olly Mann's The Modern Mann at , and Martin Austwick's Song By Song at . This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Want to build a website? Go to , and get a 10% discount on your first purchase of a website or domain with the code 'answer'. Also! Get free audiobooks and half-price Audible subscriptions at - and while you're browsing around Audible, be sure to download Olly's new series . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Should British people call the Rotary Club the Roundabout Club? Did TLC succeed in abolishing scrubs? News you can use if you've been wondering how you can get some pee foul to decorate your property. And who hasn't? Here's Peacock Intel from Michael from New York and also Tasmania, who says, About 15 years ago, my parents decided it'd be nice to own peacocks, not knowing at the time how early they make a terrible noise,

nor how much they shit everywhere. I feel the same about children. My parents found a public park that was giving away four peacocks. That should have been a clue that... People don't want them. There's no such thing as a free peacock. So the saying famously goes. The peacocks were a mere four-hour drive away in Launceston, Tasmania.

They lived south of Hobart. That is a drive. My father drove to Launceston, put a burlap sack over each peacock, tied it off, then placed them in the boot of the car. Does your dad work for the CIA? Four hours later, aside from having shat quite a lot in the car, the peacock seemed no worse for wear.

It's hard to tell the psychological toll that this would have taken on peacocks. Strongly agree. But then some birds are soothed by having a bag put over their heads because they think it's sleepy time. That's the whole plot of Danny, Champion of the World, isn't it? To be be fair it's not the whole plot of danny

the champion of the world there's also that side plot about something in school michael says we kept the peacocks for several years until a lawsuit from a neighbor made giving them away seemed like a better idea wow the upshot is you can apparently just put your p file in a sack and chuck them in the boot of your car you should probably lay down a tarp first. I hope this information never comes in handy. I suspect that story is more Tasmanian than British though, Michael. I mean, thank you for sharing, but I can't imagine if you called up a peacock breeder in the UK, they'd say, sure, just turn up with a sack and let it loose in your Volvo.

No problem. I just don't think that would happen. But they're not covered by rules governing wild birds, as we said in the last episode. Well, you can do it, but that doesn't mean that I think you'd find a breeder who would acquiesce, that's all I'm saying. We've had the following question from Will,

who says, I had always thought letting wine breathe was bullshit, but now I wonder. And I wonder what seismic shift has occurred in Will to make him re-evaluate this. Ollie, answer me this. Is letting wine breathe a pretentious waste of time? Well, before I answer this question, Helen, I should, as a matter of public service, emphasise that if you're going to let some wine breathe, what you should do, apparently,

is decant it into a proper, well, I was going to say proper decanter, you probably don't have to buy a special thing, but certainly, you know, a jug or something, or even just the wine glasses you're going to put it in. Because if you just take the cork off and quote, let it breathe, which is what I was doing for literally 20 years, that apparently does fuck all.

Is that because there's such a narrow aperture that the oxygen exchange is minimal yeah exactly it was very elegantly put yes that is the reason it's not just a conspiracy by big decanter however um there is some justification to decanting some wines which is why decanters do exist um and those wines are the ones that have the highest level of tannins so reds the reds exactly whites do have some tannins apparently but not enough to benefit from allowing more oxygen in and that's why red wine glasses traditionally are wider because they have an increased surface area so there's more oxygen exposed to the wine whereas white wine

glasses you can use smaller ones so what does the oxygen do is it break down the tannins well yes but there's another reason they reckon the whole idea of decanting red wine in the first place the justification came around that it was to do with the tannins but actually it may have been and people were too polite to mention this in 1860 whatever the the sulfur dioxide they used to use was so strong that it smelt of eggs when you opened up a bottle of fine wine oh is that like a preservative is it yeah and they don't use so much sulfur these days well that's nice but then they did but apparently you are at risk of ruining a very old wine by giving it too much contact with oxygen why because it becomes vinegary yeah i mean you I mean you're going to lose some of those

tastes that have built up over the years because you're exposing it with oxygen now. That's what anyone knows if you've had to clean up the day after a party as well. Wine that's been left out in the air for 12 hours or so, it's no longer good. Basically the advice is, if you're buying a recent bottle of wine, don't bother decanting it

probably. If it's from a few years old and you want to do it properly and it's a posh bottle of red wine't bother decanting it probably if it's from a few years old and you want to do it properly and it's a posh bottle of red wine not white then do decant it if you know it's heavy in tannins but if it's too old don't bother because you might ruin it right so just poke a straw through the cork and suck away that's the one here's a question from chris who says sometimes i like to subject my housemate erin to the video for the pet shop boys version of go west because i enjoy the gay communist army and the wonderful 90s graphics is that the one where they've got the orange hats they were going through quite the hattie phase

at the time yeah but i remember it as being like pointy hats and glasses yes pointy hats and glasses yeah no the orange i think it's from the album very isn't it which had the orange the bright orange cover when i do says chris aaron often responds by playing me the song give thanks by don moen which is a christian worship song and bizarrely seems to have exactly the same melody as go west now i'm guessing that for many of our listeners this will be less familiar than go west this was a new number to me. It was. And to me too. Christian worship songs tend not to travel over here. So should we just dip in quickly and have a sample? to the Holy One Give thanks because He's given Jesus Christ

His Son Go where? What is peaceful there? Go where? In the open air Go where? Where the skies are blue This is what we're gonna do

Okay, so you can hear the resemblance there. So Ollie, answer me this. Which of these songs came first? And which was copying the other? Did the village people decide to turn a Christian song into a big gay anthem? Or did a Christian want to change Go West to make it more wholesome and godly? I wouldn't say that the tunes are exactly the same. I would say that the first

bit of the verse is very similar. But overall, I'd say they're 20% the same. Do you think that anyone else has noticed the resemblance? Or is there just no other overlap for these two songs, except for Chris and Aaron? Well, there is is actually and that's what intrigues me um because if you look superficially don mohan recorded the version we just listened to in 1986 that's kind of the one that everyone who knows their christian worship music knows and so it sounds like okay if anyone nicked off anyone then obviously don mohan nicked the song from the village people because the village people's go west came out in 1979 ah but the don mohan version is a cover and it was written by henry smith in 1978 a year before go west came out and it wasn't the kind of thing where there's a songwriter who begat the two songs secretly behind the scenes no No, definitely not. Henry Smith claims ownership of...

The full title, in fact, is Give Thanks with a Grateful Heart. And the Village People song was written by three songwriters, none of whom, I think, by the way, were the people dressed up in the costumes that we saw on Top of the Pops, but that's by the by. And, you know, very much from a different culture than Henry Smith, who I think was a pastor, or certainly, anyway, was on the circuit of, like, who I think was a pastor, or certainly anyway,

was on the circuit of like evangelical, I don't want to call them shows, but travelling around churches talking about Jesus, you know, one of those. Give Thanks was his only published song out of 300 unpublished compositions. And that does, to me, point towards a smelly rat a bit i do wonder whether it's possible that henry smith had heard go west because just because it came out in 1979 i'm not sure when it was written

yeah and i wonder whether i'm not alleging but if he was a secret frequenter of gay clubs in the late 1970s it's possible that he could have overheard that, or someone who overheard it relayed it to him, and he inadvertently adapted it into his song. Or equally, it's possible, possibly more likely, that one of the writers for the Village People was a Christian who saw him on his church tour around about the same time and it became go west so there is a suspicious overlap in the closeness of the dates but uh neither party has ever sued each other so basically we'll never know um i guess the pro the point is that the obvious reference for both songs is uh paschal bells canon yeah that's what it sounds like um which the pet shop boys played up in their version i'll tell you the thing that i enjoyed actually researching into this question as well, because I don't spend a lot of time in Christian YouTube,

but seeing the quality of commenters that you get. Normally, if you look beneath the fold on a YouTube video, the most popular comment is usually pretty rough, isn't it? It usually says something like, Oh, that guy's so fat, I'm going to barf. Hashtag kill everyone. That's why we don't go to YouTube to read. Exactly.

But it's quite sweet. If you look at the Don Moen YouTube video, all the comments say things like, if you're watching this video, that means you are blessed and safe under the presence of our Lord. God bless you. Oh.

I mean, I just thought, okay, well, that's nice. Maybe you could put comments on youtube videos that are just like have a nice day yes i've enjoyed this to counteract all the fuck off and die yeah exactly that seems to me like the 21st century way to interpret jesus's message actually you know dial down the kind of jesus will save you stuff have you heard the good news i mean we've all heard it but just just go for like well well done for finding this here's a question from ashley from adelaide south australia who says helen answer me this why are cat a nine tails called cat a nine i don't know what a cat a nine tail is it's a whip isn't it yeah it's a whip with the nine strands

okay well as in like a sex whip or a pain whip i mean i know they're the same sometimes a punishment whip so it was frequently used for punishing people at sea oh okay and it was called a cat of nine tails because it well you've just answered it haven't you because it had nine whips yeah well it doesn't explain the cat part but the reason why it had nine strands is because it was usually made of a piece of unraveled rope so like a thin rope was made out of three strands twisted together and then you could make a thicker rope by twisting three thin ropes together. So your cat and nine tails would be made by unravelling the little pieces of rope. So that's why you had nine strands in it.

But it wasn't made from cat. It wasn't, as far as I know, made of cat. Apparently the name could have been because it looked like cat scratches on your back, or because cat was nautical slang for those thin ropes. But was it already the case that people associated cats with having nine lives yeah it could have been i think maybe that goes back to ancient egypt that association i certainly don't think it would have hurt but they're not associated with having nine tails so it's a bit of a mishmash isn't it yeah when you say you don't think it would have hurt you mean the association with cats lives wouldn't hurt

the cat nine tails itself definitely would have hurt, you mean the association with cats' lives wouldn't have hurt? The cat and nine tails. The cat and nine tails itself. Definitely would have hurt. And often they would sentence people to like 500 lashes with a cat and nine tails or a thousand lashes, which is effectively like getting 9,000 lashes. And that was a death sentence because people would, if they didn't die from the pain, they would die of infected wounds. And also the cat and nine tails were still used

in British prisons midway through the 20th century excellent i'm enjoying this occasional series we're doing in grim facts about prison that lasted a surprisingly long time and i did not know that the cat and nine tails is the kind of cat that is being referred to in expressions such as letting the cat out of the bag because the cat in Nine Tails was kept in a special bag and not enough room to swing a cat because you'd need some clearance if you're flogging someone. Oh, wow. Isn't that depressing?

That makes a lot more sense of both of those phrases. Both of them make sense if you're thinking about an animal because you'd imagine that if you had a cat in a bag, when you let it out, it was going to go pretty berserk. Yeah, but you don't swing a cat in a bag when you let it out it was gonna go pretty berserk yeah but you don't swing a cat i hope not it seems generally you don't i can think of other animals you'd be more likely to swing than a cat what would you swing a snake i suppose anything with longer legs than a cat i mean you're just careful with a cat aren't you it's gonna scratch you in the face that's the point that's true i was thinking you mean you're careful with the

cats you don't want to damage them but it's because you don't want them to damage you because they're not afraid of retribution whereas if you already are holding a snake i'm not saying it feels like a natural thing to do to swing it around your head but more natural than a cat but then if you say not enough room to swing a snake people might be like what is it like a foot long grass snake or is it a 15 foot long big scary snake i can see why they shut your zoo down. If you've got a question, then email your question. Answer me this podcast at peoplemail.com Answer me this podcast at peoplemail.com That was a cover of our email jingle by listener Ben and his girlfriend Alex.

Ben says, Alex and I have tried and failed to make music together, or music that's good enough to leave the hard drive, except we did manage to finish and be proud of this cover of the Answer Me This email jingle. That's good enough, isn't it? I mean, it might not be the musical legacy you wanted to leave behind on this planet, but you've achieved something. You can't necessarily choose your legacy, can you can you exactly ben also makes music under the name band summers if you enjoyed that and want to check out more that's not uh answer me this podcast at

googlemail.com i love the fact that even in 2019 people are still recording any lyrical content that includes the words googlemail.com. I know, right? We get asked quite frequently why we have that as our email address. And it's because at the time in Britain, you couldn't sign up for Gmail as the extension. That's the reason. And that's why we don't talk about it on the show. Right. It's not entertaining.

It's just a fact. But then once you've got like 15 email jingles saying Google Mail, you're going to stick, aren't you? You're going to stick. Even though you're allowed Gmail in Britain now. So retrospectives, what historical events are we ticking off on this week's round of Today in History? On Monday, we bring you the real story of the mutiny on the bounty.

On Tuesday, the anniversary of the day somebody invented the meatball, but who? On Wednesday, the iconic British car that ripped off an iconic American car. On Thursday, how American airlines invented air miles. And on Friday, the UFO sighting that gripped colonial America. We discuss this and more on Today in History with The Retrospectors. 10 minutes each weekday, wherever you get your podcasts. Here's a question from Joe, Zoe and Rosie, who is two months old. So I'm wondering how much input Rosie has really had into this. I'm sure she's been crucial in writing this email.

Challenge TV have recently started showing reruns of the only primetime show where you can watch people whacking the shit out of each other with a giant earbud. Gladiators! Is it the only one? Well, I've not watched the revival of Blind Date with Paula Grady, but I assume so. It's just cleaning each other's ears out. Now that would be a great dating show, wouldn't't it they've tried every other spin on it joe zoe and rosie tokenistically say it amazes us how they managed to fill the birmingham national indoor arena every show so we came to the conclusion they must record multiple episodes in a day with all the foam-fingered friends and families

sat in different parts of the arena to help fill it. Whoa. I mean, before we go any further, I disagree with the premise of this question, I think. Absolutely. And what you're saying is it wasn't big news to go and watch Gladiators in 1994. What the fuck else were people doing? Waiting for my bar mitzvah? Apart from that, what else was going on?

There were four channels in this country. Only two of them would have potentially shown a show like gladiators and uh it was on the saturday night everyone watched it yep all the gladiators were hotties why wouldn't you want to be there it was free yeah right i'd never seen a foam finger until gladiators that's why the audience went helen can you feel the power of the foam finger? They're everywhere. Although, fun fact about the US version of Gladiators,

which was the original, in the first season, they didn't have much of an audience. So the set designer painted faces on plywood and put them around the arena and then dimmed the lights. But didn't have to do that in Britain. People were gagging for it. Absolutely gagging. Anyway, right.

I mean, let's carry on and presume that their premise that they couldn't fill the arena for some reason is accurate. Yeah. What's the question? I'm a little confused, to be honest, Ollie, because, okay, Joe, Zoe and Rosie, maybe Rosie did write this question and that's why it doesn't... I'm not following it.

They've posited that they film multiple episodes in a day. If that is the case, surely it makes sense that the crew set up each event and the Eliminator, film all the episodes with different sets of contestants and then edit the episodes together. Simple, no problem, right? Wrong.

In each episode, the hosts, Ulrika Johnson and John Fashanoo, consistently wear the same clothes at the start and after each event, which suggests they film each episode separately. So Olly answered me this, how do they film Gladiators? I'm not following this at all, Olly. Can you explain what's the matter with this? Okay, well, I mean, I'll answer the question, how do they film Gladiators first? Because then we'll go back to your inconsistencies so like i say it was a big deal to go and watch gladiators being filmed they had no problem filling that arena 7 000 people were sitting watching it but it was a big event it was a

big event for the people that were competing yeah you know the plebs because they'd been chosen from tens of thousands of competitors they were going to be on ITV. They had 22,000 applications per series for 36 contenders. Anyway, they did film two episodes per day, one in the afternoon, one in the evening. So I suspect they probably did use the same audience across two episodes because day out, isn't it, basically? And, you know, why find 14,000 audience when you've got 7,000? It's a bit of a long day though, isn't it? I mean, given why find 14 000 audience when you've got 7 000 it's a bit of a long day though isn't it i mean given how stoppy starty tv recording is like yeah but you're

thinking of as an entertainment thing it's sports basically people go to cricket for five days yeah that's true so if you're a fan of watching people run up a backwards escalator then you'll watch that go for lunch come back and watch some more i would imagine they also had um a compere called bobby brag who um it sounds like he was a pretty great warm-up act and um he would get people out the audience to dance with the cheerleaders or try out things like the wall wow that's fun wouldn't that be amazing that would be the most exciting thing that could have happened to you as a 12 year old, isn't it? Absolutely, unless you break your spine I'm going to say, yeah, both of us as children hated audience participation

And were not particularly sporty I would have been interested to watch another 12 year old be pulled out of the crowd willingly to do that Actually, of all audience participation, I'd imagine that would be young Helen Zaltzman's worst nightmare, wouldn't it? You could say the odd pithy thing when they put the microphone in your face Ultimately, 7,000 people are going to laugh at you falling over that would be young Helen Zaltzman's worst nightmare, wouldn't it? You could say the odd pithy thing when they put the microphone in your face. Ultimately, 7,000 people are going to laugh at you falling over. Yeah, hard no on even having the mic put in my face, but to be humiliated at a sport,

the running theme of my childhood in front of 7,000 people, certainly not. Yeah. But also, why wouldn't Ulrika Johnson and John Fashnew wear the same clothes and then change them for the next episode? All right, what they're getting at in the question is... Oh, is did they just film the wall on one day, get the whole series of contestants? Yes, exactly. Right. No, you can see on the long shots that they've got several events set up at the same time.

Exactly. Come on! Just like actual gymnastics, which it's based on. It's like watching an olympic day of gymnastics isn't it you've got four or five events all happening in the same building i think it is possibly the case i can't find any data on this but i think it is quite likely if you think about it because it's such a big build that they may have filmed the eliminator bit for both episodes the bit that is common for all episodes i could imagine that they may have filmed that for both the episodes they were filming on one day last everything else is

fairly straightforward to set up and take down so i think it's not a case of although let's be honest it's fairly easy for john fashion who to change his waistcoat as well well you don't know you don't know what he goes through nonetheless i think it's fairly easy to just film the episode in sequence apart from possibly the last bit let me blow your mind ollie go on the fastest time recorded for the gladiators crew to set out the eliminator course was nine and a half minutes wow that doesn't sound safe they used to film the whole series in five weeks so they would do two episodes a day and the international specials and celebrity special then the rest of the year i

guess they were recovering from injuries and touring there was a massive live tour of this so when you say god how did they fill the crowd with people going to a free recording people were paying also to go to see a live they did like 100 date tours wow it's like the x factor isn't it there was such a long waiting list to go and watch the thing live that there was just a built-in audience ready to get the tickets. I was interested to find that the original show was inspired by the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger film The Running Man, which I thought was a kind of dystopia thing. Is it the one where he gets sent to look after a kindergarten?

He's the PE teacher. I was interested to read about the origins of american gladiators that began to the british gladiators which i think apparently was more popular in higher budget the british version which is often not the case yeah i think it's fair to say almost always not the case in the mid 80s an elvis impersonator named john ferrero and an iron worker named Dan Carr put on a fundraiser for people in the town of Erie, Pennsylvania, in a high school gym. And it was their rethinking of the ancient Roman Colosseum. And it worked as a fundraiser because 5,000 people showed up. Bloody hell.

Yeah. And he filmed it and then tried to sell it as a scripted TV series. So it was a fictional one. What an American approach. Right. I mean filmed it and then tried to sell it as a scripted TV series. So as a fictional one. What an American approach. Right. I mean, all round. Dream big. Let's recreate the Coliseum in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Yeah. Then let's sell it as a TV format. I mean, no one organising a summer fate in a secondary school in Britain thinks like that. Right. Well, we had tug of war at school fates, didn't we? Sure. But no one said, let's sell this. Let's sell this to ITV.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. Britain's just not thinking. Coconut's could be prime time entertainment and eventually someone was like you know what not not a script just make it kind of like um sport i think what's great about it is the budget that was available to be poured into a tv format in the knowledge that there was nothing else i mean this basically it went into the baywatch slot didn't it so it was basically like like baywatch for 13-year-olds,

but also for their pervy parents watching the people in Lycra and Spandex. So they knew they had a win. And I think also the element of having members of the public, that was interesting, right? Because then, you know, you've really got some skin in the game as the audience. You can put yourself in that person's shoes. Also, quite a lot of the gladiators were people that had auditioned to be competitors. And then they often had gladiator shortages because of injuries.

So they would bring them in to be gladiators. Gladiator shortages. The ambition and the scale of the funding of the production is the thing that you look back on now and you just think there's such a paucity of that. Not on Amazon and Netflix and stuff, but on ITV. They just don't have those kinds of budgets

to do that kind of huge statement show now unless they absolutely know it's a bona fide hit. Like now, if someone said, let's do these sort of gymnastic games as primetime television, the way it would end up is being like fucking Tipping Point. Someone would say, no, let's do a

daytime quiz where we literally get a shopping mall escalator and someone has to run up it and that's a half hour show that's on every day and you can win three grand that would be the limit of the imagination on it now no because they had several years of total wipeout which is sort of like gladiators but without the gladiators yeah yeah but that required someone an american conglomerate to set that up in another country and then the bbc just bought a version of it and bring on to actually create it in Britain,

I just don't think it would happen. America also has this show that is called something like America's Next Top Ninja, which is like Total Wipeout that takes itself a lot more seriously. Hypermasculine. It's filmed in the darkness. Everything is like very kind of shiny.

Things are on fire. It's sort of like if Batman set up the Total Wipeout course. But it is like the Gladiators Eliminatorator challenge again and that seems like a big deal only so many ideas in the world i guess i bet they're reviving it again i know they revived gladiators about 10 years ago and for sky and it lasted a couple of series it never works on sky does it there's no point it needs to be cheesier than that they try and make it a bit cool i mean all these years later i find it extraordinary that my entire life no one's worked out

what Sky 1 is for apart from The Simpsons. Gosh. People still don't know. Like, if you'd have said to me in 2005, by 2019, will we know

what Sky 1 is for? You're going to have to come up with an answer because sometime Harvey's going to be old enough to say, Daddy, what is Sky One for?

What do you do when you want to drown out your incessant interior monologue? Sing opera loudly, try pneumatic drilling or bash your head against a log. Or go to answer me this podcast.com slash audible and get a free trial to download Miranda Hart

or Louis Theroux or Hunger Games or Jeremy Kyle that sounds preferable oh it's good to hear that again the audible offer is back yay spray it on walls all around town tell your friends don yay spray it on walls all around town tell your

friends don't spray it on walls all over town someone's gonna have to clean that up yeah i suppose what i meant was more like virtual walls hashtags that kind of thing don't do graffiti run to twitter right now and say good news everyone answer me this is doing their audible promotion again which means free audiobooks yippeeee! Yes, but crucially, unlike every other fucking audiobook trial offer on the internet, R1 isn't just for one free audiobook, folks. It's for two. Is it for 900? Okay, two.

Sorry, I guessed too high. Yeah, it's always your problem. Two's good, though, because that could take a whole month to listen to. That's right. And these are, you know, an audiobook from Audible costs the same at RRP as an actual hardback book. So this is a real saving, everybody. The deal is you get a free 30

day trial of audible.co.uk. And yes, sorry, this is just for UK listeners. Sorry, rest of the world. It's about time someone threw you a bone, Brits. Yeah. And even after Brexit, you get to keep not one, but two free audiobooks that you downloaded as part of your trial, even if you cancel your trial membership. You know, you do have to put in your Amazon user details so that you can sign up, but you do not have to pay a thing. You can cancel before paying anything after 30 days, and you still get to keep the books forever. But Oli, what if I've already taken out an Audible offer at answermethispodcast.com slash Audible at some previous point in the last decade? If you have tried the offer before,

but you're not currently an Audible member, then we do have an offer for you as well. And that is half price Audible membership for three months. Oh, brilliant. So it's $3.99 a month for three months. Yeah. And the reason, Helen, that you might want to sign up for audible at the moment is that i ollie man have a new audible original series out very exciting what's it called it's called tip the scales i didn't choose the title it's not about fish is it about dieting it is about dieting thank you martin yes so uh you can't hear it anywhere else you can only hear it on audible but it's free if you're an audible member so it doesn't use up your audiobook credit so this isn't instead of listening to tony blair's memoirs this is an addition to that uh there's a whole range of basically podcasts aren't they

they don't want to call them that because because you have to be a member to get them audibles original series and one of those is called tip the scales it's me and um a geneticist from cambridge university called dr giles yo so he's the science bit and i'm like the layman's person going oh so i can't just eat ice cream all day what that's basically the format the role you were born to play i'm the robin ince essentially um and we talk about weight loss and we're skeptical about the world of diet fads and exercise trends. And we get to the bottom of what is actually good for you. That's very interesting, the whole industry around it.

Absolutely. No, I learned quite a lot, actually, including why the advice is always given that you should exercise to lose weight, even though the science doesn't suggest that the two necessarily correlate at all. So yeah, there's of uh me talking about being fat and my yo-yoing weight and uh meeting uh other people like uh jack monroe this sounds very

interesting because also historically things about dieting have been aimed at women and in the last few years when men talk about it it's often with a kind of silicon valley bro thing where it's like yeah i've biohacked myself so i only need to eat one meal a day and that meal is made out of soylent yeah we did meet a couple of people like that um but yes i think you're right and because i'm the case study in it it's quite a weird feeling to be that person because you're absolutely right it would normally be a female role like the show starts with me having my body scanned wow and everybody looking at it um under an x-ray like a giant photocopier essentially for my body and yeah it is it is the

sound of two men talking about weight loss over three hours um so if that appeals to you um then that is yet another reason for you to take out the audible promotion uh or if you're an audible member just find it it's free uh tip the scales and if you want to take out the audible promotion and remember we get money for every single one of you who does no pressure then head over to answer me this podcast.com slash audible this is from christina in somerville who says helen answer me this of all the lowercase letters in the english alphabet why are only i and j topped with dots ah uh i did a ted talk about this very subject sure you can't be the only one in fact i'm fairly sure you probably are the only one it's not necessarily the optimal use of a global platform

but um people seemed into it i i put a slide up with the word minimum without dots and then put the dots on and they lost their shit so here's why christina when letters were formed by scribes using pens they mainly were formed out of straight vertical lines because it was difficult to do anything particularly curvaceous with a quill or whatever this is going back like a thousand years so you you've got most writing done by monks in monasteries. But back then they bothered using lowercase letters. Like in my mind, if it's that long ago, they're still in all caps. No, because they're not shouting. But God's words are kind of all shouting, aren't they? Well, it depends. Old Testament, yes. New Testament, Jesus is lowercase. Never thought

about that before. Interesting. It is interesting, isn't it? Along with empathy comes lowercasecase so letters were formed of these vertical strokes those were called minims and if you had two minims together that was uh that could be a u or an n or two letter i's and so it's just really hard to see what letters were which because yeah it's kind of just a row of lines so they put dots on the i's just to distinguish them from N and M and U and W and stuff. Okay, okay. But when she says Y of all of the letters, is it only I and J? Is it because they're the least distinguishable from just straight lines?

Because those are just a line. Yeah. So the others are two or more minims or other kinds of lines. But those ones, that's just a straight line. So you need some help yeah you don't need a dot on the z do you everyone can see what that is might be nice but don't need it here's a question from nigel in austin texas who says in both iris murdoch's under the net 1954 and muriel spark's memento mori 1959 there features a post office in leicester

square that was open all day and night since in my experience post offices are closed 95 of the time there must be a story here ollie asked me this is there i looked into this online um because that is my primary research method you'll be unsurprised great love the internet's got loads of stuff on it strongly recommend that's right yeah it's a little tip for anyone listening there um the internet and i noticed that last year actually a 24-hour post office counter launched on new oxford street in a convenience store some of the people in the comments were bemoaning the closure of a 24-hour post office that used to be in trafalgar square wow so i thought I thought, well, hold on. Has Nigel, being in Austin, Texas,

long way from the West End, has he confused Leicester Square for Trafalgar Square? Easy mistake to make. Because it seems really quite recently, there was a much loved branch of the post office in Trafalgar Square, you know, a proper one with rolls of bubble wrap and red sofas and stuff, not a counter in a newsagents, which is basically what this new 24 hour one is, which is why they were upset. So I thought maybe that one used to be 24 hours maybe that's the one that nigel's talking about because i couldn't find anything about a leicester square post office but helen then i found the following exchange from the parliamentary record hansard from the 31st of may 1949 lord gifford proposed a motion in the House of Lords

to ask His Majesty's Government whether they will arrange for a later collection from the All Night Post Office at Leicester Square than 6.30pm so as to improve the postal facilities for the public in the West End of London. It's worth bearing in mind that the Postmaster General was a government role at this point.

The Minister of State for Colonial Affairs then replied, My Lords, the minister of state for colonial affairs then replied my lords the question of a later collection from the leicester square post office is being considered by my right honorable friend the postmaster general who will inform the noble lord in the near future of his decision and then lord hawke chipped in somewhat snidely i feel saying my lords arising out of that will his majesty's government guarantee to pay as much attention to the needs of the consumers in this matter as they do to those of the post office employees wow I think we know where Lord Hawke was coming from politically yeah so um yeah it was a it was uh obviously a novel thing at the end of the 1940s if it was being discussed

in the house of lords this thing in Leicester Square. So there you are, no surprise that it made its way into two novels. And so what I'm interpreting from that is that probably as part of rebuilding London after the Blitz, you know, it was decimated by the war. It wanted to be a dynamic international city. I think the reason that this move by the Postmaster General to have a 24-hour post office was symbolic of london being a progressive positive modern city well also people were dependent on the post then and many decades after that which is why there was this now defunct minister role of postmaster general in government which by the way is not my favorite now defunct minister uh i prefer keeper of the king's conscience oh what happened to that role it became lord chancellor so it still exists amazingly that

seems like a different job yeah exactly i agree i think keeper of the king's conscience possibly never did their job as described which is why i got phased out um and then anyway believe it or not by digging around more for terms of postmaster General Lon Hansard, I did then find also a parliamentary question to the Postmaster General in 1947, asking whether he would consider extending the opening hours everywhere else because of the long queues that had been forming at Leicester Square. So it was obviously a bit of a sensation. So I think it was that this idea, this concept, was something that moved people. And I guess it was a laugh wasn't

it going along at two o'clock in the morning to post a package wasn't anything else to do in london yeah well um i assume that if you were in a business that ran during the night it could be quite expedient to be able to do that at two in the morning also it's like some it's a place to meet people i mean in a way when you think about it pre-internet chat rooms you know maybe a late night post office was the 1947 equivalent of being on snapchat i do love a late night slash 24-hour place like a diner or even a late night supermarket me too although i used to work overnights and i used to clock off at 4 a.m in leicester square itself in leicester square itself indeed yeah and i used to go to at 4am. In Leicester Square itself. In Leicester Square itself, indeed, yeah.

And I used to go to the supermarket at 5 in the morning. Have you ever actually been at 5 in the morning? You're saying you love the supermarket. You love 24-hour supermarkets. Have you actually been in at 5am? Oh, yeah. When they're, like, changing the shelves and stuff. You feel like you work there when you go there.

It doesn't feel like you're a customer. Like, there's no one there to help you. It's just a load of people stacking the shelves. There's cardboard boxes all over the floor. People yawning and sleeping. I think that's why i like it i like seeing behind the scenes of things and also i like people not paying me too much attention in service environments that makes me sound like i'm a thief i'm not i just don't i just don't like to have to interact with humans that much fair enough then that is a good choice do you happen

to know when this post office shut down because i'm wondering whether it coincided with a rise of people being piss heads in london or something which meant they were like oh there's too many people just coming into the post office at 3 a.m trying to smash the windows or abusing the staff i don't know when it closed down but i wonder if the post office tower you know which is now british telecom tower i wonder if that opening in the 70s might have heralded the era of all of the big post stuff being relocated to there. Right, change the centre of post. Yeah, why would you have a 24-hour office

in Leicester Square if a mile down the road you've got this massive Farkov Tower? So that was my guess, but it was around that time, late 60s, that it seemed to close. So the 60s swung, but not 24 hours for people who

like posting things no i know that my baby is the absolute best i put facebook photos up daily and my friends are impressed apart from ones who block me because they're jealous because their babies are so ugly. Well, why not build a gallery of your kid on Squarespace with special pages for its cute feet and cute hands and cute face so my Facebook feed won't have your kid all over the place. He looks like a scrotum.

Thanks very much to Squarespace for sponsoring this episode of Answer Me This and for allowing you to construct your own website very simply and very quickly using their drag-and-drop tools and award-winningly designed templates. Yeah, two of the nominees for Best Documentary Feature at the Oscars this year had Squarespace websites, apparently. Really? What were the other three using? I don't know.

I don't know, and we're contractually prevented from mentioning rival services anyway it's some inferior competitor some some inferior competitor is absolutely right in fact that sounds like the name of a film that would be nominated for best documentary feature um but anyway it goes to show doesn't it the big guns do it helen if you're a creative you really don't want to be looking anywhere else to create your website. Yeah, and you do want a website if you're doing any kind of project of your own. It feels like it doesn't really belong to you.

Like if you have a podcast and you're just using your host as your website. That's not a website. Get your own. Yes, I absolutely agree. And that's the thing. That's why it's not really a surprise that films use the website

because, you know, what is a film? It's not an ongoing project, is it? But it needs its own destination online. Right. So if you want to try out Squarespace, head to squarespace.com slash answer. There's a two-week free trial. But then if you want to sign up, you can get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain if you use our code answer. Here's a question from Aaron who says,

I'm a student at university in Aberoristwith and i really want to get a pet kitten right i know i can hide it from the university accommodation staff but next year i won't be allowed any pets in my house when presumably when he's living out of halls i'm unsure whether i'll be able to hide it from the letting agent and landlord for my next year's house i know it'll be a risk and i could be fined by the letting agent and landlord. Well, everyone would lose their deposits, so that would suck. Yeah. So Ali asked me this, is it worth risking getting a kitten now or should I wait another year and a half? Well, first of all, I'm not sure you can convincingly hide it from the university

accommodation staff this year. No. And you seem very confident that you can.'s it gonna shit what if it tears up the carpet what if it makes a load of noise erin why have you got a litter tray in your room yeah exactly just i like the look that's also a health risk for you you know i mean you can live next to a cat that's crapping in the same room as you but especially if you're trying to hide it um it's maybe not a good idea it's a lot of responsibility as well. It is. Like, you can't go away. Or you have to get someone else to be complicit

in looking after the cat. And actually, I also disagree with your premise that it would be worse somehow to be uncovered by the letting agent and landlord next year. I mean, as Helen says, yes, you could lose your deposit. That would be bad. But actually, I think it'd be far worse getting discovered by the university

if they took their terms and conditions seriously and kicked you off your course that'd be far worse than being discovered by the letting agent wouldn't it the implications could be much bigger they might not kick you off your course but they might kick you out of halls which would land you in the same problem of having to find accommodation that will accept your cat yes and unsubsidized accommodation you may not have the budget for that so thereby effectively kicking off your course so i'm going to say something that you're not going to like here erin i'm sorry i know you've asked the cat guy you probably wanted me to tell you that you should get a cat and how to do it yes move heaven and earth yeah exactly i think honestly even taking all your specific circumstances out of the equation if If you're moving regularly, you shouldn't have a cat anyway.

Cats don't like it. No. They're territorial. The only way around that, and it's really weird, is to make you the territory, like street cat named Bob. But then you're definitely not going to keep it quiet

around campus, are you, if you're walking around with a cat climbing on your back? So the cat is going to want to be attached to a property of some description. If you keep moving him or her around, that's going to be disturbing to the cat. you're being a bit irresponsible by having a kitten at all and finally i would say if you insist on having a cat of some description in these

suboptimal circumstances don't get a kitten right there's too much competition for kittens it's unfair to the kitten who's got its whole life ahead of it and also it's unfair on all the people who desperately want a kitten and can give it a good home. Get a cat no one else wants that's going to be put down otherwise. Or has cat AIDS or something. Right, so an elderly cat. Yeah. Where you're just going to give it a last few months of life.

And also that cat might not mind as much living in a single room. Because that's not a lot of room for a kitten to be stretching itself. Learning about the world. Agree. And also you'll be living in a room with the cat. You won't be to get away from the cat there could be quite a lot of mewing yeah and actually from a selfish point of view that might ruin your uh desire to have a cat in the future or your relationships with future cats if you have a bad kitten relationship now especially if you then feel obliged to own the cat for the rest of his life like start your relationship on a better

track that's my advice. Wait a year and a half. It seems a long time now, but it isn't. You could do some cat sitting for people in the interim, just to get yourself hyped. Well, funny you should say that, Helen, but our next question involves cat sitting, but also is a question of dog sitting.

And it's from Anne. She says, I recently signed up for a house sitting service that caters mostly to the UK.'s in the states i think typically the house sit includes pet sitting most often dogs and cats but sometimes pee foul i've noticed that the dog walking seems quite demanding nearly every advert requires a minimum of two walks a day for at least an hour each now i'm american i've owned dogs all my life and i've never taken my dogs for two hour long walks per day maybe i'm a terrible pet owner or maybe dogs in the uk are different or maybe pet owners in the uk don't have lives to attend to so they're free to walk their dogs all day yes that's right ann

helen answer me this for how long does the average dog need to be walked right well that really depends on breed because there's no average dog so like a beagle needs a lot more exercise than a dachshund there are some dogs as well that i've come across we were staying with a friend a couple of months ago and they've got this enormous dog that's like a polar bear and um they were like he doesn't walk at all, because it's basically so exhausting just to be such a big dog that he just lies in the garden all the time. So I think the range is usually 20 to 30 minutes

for a really small dog or an old dog, up to two hours for something very active. But I grew up with Labradors. You say there's no average dog. I would say from a British pet-sitting perspective, the Labrador probably is the average dog. So we walked the Labradors for an hour each day and they also had a pretty big garden to roam around in and to play fetch and stuff. But then recently I've been dog sitting for various friends' dogs and coincidentally, they all fucking hate going for walks.

Flower, who is a collie, which I thought is quite an active breed because they round up sheep and stuff i literally had to drag her across the floor and out of the house to get her to go on her walk but is that that they hate walks or do they hate going for walks with you because they don't know you no she i'd been primed she hates walks she's also scared of the dark doesn't like dogs. So we'd walk around the block and there were just some places where she would just stop and use all of her strength not to go any further. But then once you were halfway around, she was fine because she knew that then she was halfway to home. But she would literally just do one circuit of the block.

They would not have walked at all voluntarily. I wonder whether these adverts that Anne has spotted, she says nearly all of them require a minimum of two walks a day for at least an hour each she's quoting that strikes me as where maybe someone's just ticked a box on a website rather than writing it in themselves is it like you have the option of like half hour walk once a week

or two hours a day or maybe the psychology is over ask under deliver yeah if you ask for two hours a day maybe you will get one hour a day yeah exactly you're going to get a certain quality of responsible pet sitter who's prepared to put the legwork in um you know because a lot of people that do house sitting frankly they're on holiday which i mean it sounds like what ann wants to do if she's american and coming to britain to do some house sitting maybe you know people are concerned this person be using my house sitting around watching

netflix on my dime is not emotionally invested in my dog exactly i want someone who's prepared to walk them for two hours a day and then if they get an hour a day then that's good enough well that brings us to the end of this episode of answer me this if you have a question for us then you can record yourself saying it in a voice memo or you can send us an email our contact details are on our website answer me this podcast.com and listen to our other work my show the illusionist just put out a very entertaining episode about an amazing prank in 1992 that if you were into grunge music or pranks you will enjoy immensely that's at the illusionist.org oh and martin did some excellent fake grunge music for it thank Thank you. Yeah, I did.

Martin, promote yourself. I am in the middle of a year of songs, 40 songs in a year. And you can hear that at palebirdmusic.com. It's called The Year of the Bird. It's like Martin's musical diary of his gap year. But the gap year that he took at the age of 40. And remember as well to check out my new

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