Answer Me This! - AMT384: Leopard Print, Badger Repellent, and a Fortress of Toasters

Episode Date: April 2, 2020

Welcome! We hope you're doing OK. We're keeping AMT a pandemic-free pod, so if you're looking for content to take your mind off things for a bit, AMT384 can provide, with questioneers wondering why leopard print is considered sexy, how ghostwriters get paid, and what to do with their father's huge collection of old buildings and toasters. Find out more about this episode at . Send us questions for future episodes: email written words or voice recordings to [e-mail]. Tweet us Facebook Hear AMT episodes 1-200, all five of our special albums, and our Best Of compilations at . Hear our other work: Helen Zaltzman's podcasts The Allusionist at and Veronica Mars Investigations at ; Olly Mann's five podcasts including , The Week Unwrapped, and The Media Podcast at ; and Martin Austwick's music at and his Tom Waits podcast 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'. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Can I run around my whole living room without touching the floor? How silly it is, how silly it is Can I get a VIP pass to the grocery store? How silly it is, how silly it is Heaven and lonely, how silly it is Hi listeners, hi, are you okay? You okay? You alright? How you doing? Oh no, we're gonna be like one of those stay-at-home meditation apps now.

We're here to unburden you from all the questions you have on your mind. Relax all your muscles except for your vital sphincters. We've made the decision to essentially, apart from this perhaps opening 90 seconds or so, not talk about the thing everyone else is talking about at all. We know that people come to listen to this podcast to soothe their anxious minds and take your minds off things that are difficult to deal with. And so we don't want to ruin that

with current affairs chat. Yes, we're going to give you the usual shit we do, which is, you know, interesting details about the real world, but not the same details everyone else is talking about. And so also we're not likely to be addressing questions specifically about current events.

But if you do have questions about what to do during current events, we might do some of those. You know, how to keep yourself busy during the lockdown. For instance, I've been making crumpets with Martin's discarded sourdough starter, which is how he's keeping himself busy on lockdown. Well, I've always been worried about the responsibility of having a starter. It's essentially like having a pet, isn't it? You've got to feed it every week and make sure it's got what it needs doesn't get too hot doesn't get too cold got to take it

out for walks i'm committed to a stretch of time now where i can look after a sourdough starter but sure it's too cold it's not growing it's not starting no but it's making great crumpets every day it is so would recommend we tried making a homemade pizza basically from scratch flour and water and whatever else you put in it. I wasn't really watching. But my wife didn't have the right flour, so it came out a bit doughy. I'm not saying that's a classic anecdote, but it is true. I would say we've got all the time to experiment. We don't have the flour to experiment. That's right. Can't afford flour experiments to go wrong.

Also, I've been eating a lot more from the garden, which is quite nice. Soil. Quite nice, apart from the fact that the main fertilizer that's being used is cocoa's craps. Have you managed to turn them into a pizza or something? I did cut out loads of spinach the other day. I thought I was being efficient. When I went to the garden, I put it in the colander to be washed and prepared, you would think, right? Obviously.

I would think, but I'm guessing this anecdote is going in a different direction. Well, there was a marital miscommunication. My wife thought she was being helpful by putting the spinach on herself later that evening, but she didn't wash it because she saw it in the colander and thought I'd already washed it. And then I knew that we had a bowl of steaming cat shit. I was like, I don't think we should eat this, even though it is everything that you've just grown for the last three weeks. Right, well, we're going to kick uh this month with an example of something that is uh contextually valuable to you listeners but essentially entirely

irrelevant to the world at large it is from brock in tamworth australia tamworth did you know there was a tamworth in australia martin do you want to do that bit of material now is it famous for pigs there we go do they have a snow dome all of that. Tannery. Very good leather museum in Tannery. There we go. Yeah, get it all out now, Martin. Oh, my God. I can't go back to the Tannery material. Oh, no. Not to be confused with Bilston, where the glassworks were.

Martin. Brock says, in your last episode, Helen, you talked about the face cutouts attractions that you find at the seaside. Yes. It just so happens that I am making one of these for a local bowling alley. Wow. Having never made one of these cutouts before, I went to do some research. By the way, that's a bold commission, isn't it? If you've never made one before, the bowling alley says come and make it. How do you learn that you can make one of these until you make one of these?

It's like so many things in life, isn't it? Yep. You and the pizza. I ran, he he says into the same problem you did helen as to what these things are called it's a universal problem but more importantly what could be more important than that brock i could not find any information on how big the cutouts should be if they're too big then the illusion doesn't work but if they're too small drunken idiots will get their head stuck. It's like a stocks, isn't it? So Helen, answer me this. Is there a guideline for how big the holes should be? Well, how naive of me to have just thought the guideline

was the human face, because I'd imagine the difference between a big face and a small face is still like not enormous. it's a difference of like a few centimeters right not a yard i would imagine it would be the average human face size plus maybe an inch of slack well i think for safety you'd want to go bigger wouldn't you my inch of slack was actually more for like difficult hairdos and beards and stuff like that um i was kind of i suppose disallowing people with enormous heads like Helen. Have you ever put your head through one of those and not been able to get your head through?

Because if you haven't, obviously they do err on the side of large. I think when you're little, you can get your whole head through fairly regularly. And then as an adult, you more just sort of press your face up and the perimeter of your face is hidden from the photo rather than your whole head going through.

But given that Brock has said that a problem, if they they're too small is drunken idiots getting their head stuck i would say err on the side of a bit too large because i think the illusion will still work it might seem to you like oh there's a bit too much breathing space around a human head but in the context of a photo it's not such a huge proportion is it there's also an an element of comedy isn't there for example if you have someone with a bald head and they put their head through the space under uh say for example in the classic seaside tradition a kind of bosomy lady in a stripy swimming costumes fuzzy hairdo yeah uh that's funny because you see the fuzzy hairdo then you see the gap of the baldness before the face even

though the illusion doesn't work in the sense you could ever believe that was as painted that's sort of the joke yeah part of the fun is them not working perfectly right have you ever got your head stuck in anything yeah that's such regret i remember going to sleep over at a friend's when i was i would guess seven or eight and um it was a room with twin beds and i woke up in the night with my head wedged under my bed i don't know how that happened i remember being very uncomfortable oh that's so humiliating because you're at the friend's house be bad enough in your own house it wasn't humiliating because no one else knew right okay fine i thought it was a case of like everyone's up for their breakfast,

out their pyjamas and you've still got your head wedged under the bed. No, I was just upset at myself for having betrayed myself in my sleep. How Helen? Exactly. Why, what have you got your head stuck in? Cat flap. What, last week? No, I was eight years old.

I was filming a comedy action sequence on my home camcorder. Of course you were. But I'd watched a lot of crappy like kids comedy films,order of course you were but i'd watched a lot of crappy like kids comedy films you know so this was kind of like a disney star that darn cat turner and hooch style caper i guess that i was making at home with my pet cats because that's what i did because i was an only child and the plot was i was chasing the cat it led me to follow it through the cat flap and get stuck so i was deliberately putting my head through the cat flap in the in the concept that the character i was playing had their head stuck in the cat flap and get stuck. So I was deliberately putting my head through the cat flap in the concept that the character I was playing

had their head stuck in the cat flap because they'd been stupid enough to follow the cat through the cat flap like in a crap Disney comedy. But then I really did get my head stuck. Verite. Yeah. Of course, later I then had the rushes of me realising my head was stuck

with like 10 minutes of awkwardness, not knowing what to do. I didn't want to ask for help. I was old enough to know that it was embarrassing. And also I was aware I was on camera and I was kind of half thinking, is this Jeremy Beadle material? Is this good enough to send to someone? I don't want to mess this up by being weird now. So yeah, I did have it all on camera, but I think I must have thrown it, literally thrown it in the bin in shame. Hi, Helen and Ollie. This is Sarah from El Cerrito, California, and I am a fast talker. I recently took a job where I frequently talk to clients on the phone and have gotten some

feedback that I need to slow down. I can manage it for short periods when I'm really concentrating on it like this, but when I'm thinking on my feet or having a regular conversation, I speed back up again. It's not nerves, I just talk fast. So Helen and Ollie, answer me this. How do I train myself to speak more slowly? I don't know if the same is true of you, Ollie, but I am pretty sure judging by old recordings of myself from the retro episodes of this, for instance, amongst other things that I have slowed down my talking pace a great deal. Yeah, I mean, it's not I mean, of course, once you kind of make the leap from being a hobbyist, basically, which is what we were when we started to this being our full time jobs. Obviously, we've now had over a decade of listening to our own voices. I think once anyone does that,

you become much more aware of your voice as an instrument, don't you? So you think much more carefully about what words you can emphasize in a sentence when you've been talking too much, whether there's an end to your story and all that stuff. It's not just speed. But yeah, definitely listening back to your own voice regularly is one of the ways to help you modulate how you talk. We're not saying, Sarah, that you need to do a podcast for 13 years. I think just record a few phone voice memos of yourself and listen back to them a few times. You could gamify it in a very simple way. Like, so find a paragraph of text and literally time it and then challenge yourself to add five seconds each time you read it until when you listen back to that voice memo, it doesn't sound like you're talking to first. Oh, I love that plan.

I usually allow, as a rule of thumb, about 130 words per minute if I'm looking at a script and thinking, how long is this going to take to say? That's good. I've never been that precise mathematically myself. That's interesting that you actually have a metric for it. I wonder whether there's something you could do with your hand where you're basically conducting yourself. Metronoming yourself. Right, you're setting the pace with your hand. Watch your hand as you speak. Well also the good news Sarah is that you've got a job on the phone so you're not face to face so um there are tips from radio hosts that could probably help you here because obviously that's i mean i used to host a radio phone in one of the things that i always did is i had in front of me on a little postcard the word you written on it

just to remind me because it takes years to really get into the habit of referring to the listener as you as an individual which is important in all forms of audio but particularly in phoning where you're trying to get someone to phone and and talk to you about you want them to feel you are talking to them and asking them a question um so i used to have that in front of me but that technique of having a thing written in front of you i know that amal rajan the bbc's media editor he has the word slow down written on the postcard in front of him because he naturally speak he does speak very very fast so either the word slow down or maybe a serene scene i know that sounds kind of naff but you are calling from california sarah so maybe people around there are more into this sort of stuff but you know

something meditative something calm a picture of an ocean something that makes you just feel a bit more chilled out maybe a desk toy that is one of those things that moves very slowly like i used to have a sort of egg timer that was filled with a very viscous liquid that would very slowly kind of blob down yeah yeah yeah train yourself to breathe slowly and then incorporate that into the speaking i also think that one of the reasons that i speak more slowly now is a confidence yes as i get older i particularly noticed when i went into my 30s that i became more confident in various ways and i think my voice slowed down because it's kind of a power move in a way like often you're rushing to speak because you're expecting people to interrupt you

and the other thing is my brain is just slower and i need the thinking time i'm just curious to know what she does for a job now and what she's actually advising people about she commentates on greyhound racing she's an auctioneer here is a question from katie who says i'll start by explaining that while me and my neighbors do get along and we'll hold small conversations with each other if we accidentally make eye contact over the fence i wouldn't say we're close no shit well you're you're close by uh proximity right just not emotionally we have not yet gone out of our way to spend time together or do anything overly nice for one another now one of my neighbors has recently had a problem with badgers digging up the garden and has bought one of those deterrent things that plays high-pitched noises intermittently to scare them away i think my dad had one of those forrent things that plays high-pitched noises intermittently to scare them away.

I think my dad had one of those for moles. He used to have a lot of problems with moles in his field. I think eventually he poisoned them. These are supposed to be inaudible to the human ear. However, both myself and my husband, maybe being on the younger side, can clearly hear it going all night the noise isn't loud but since it is so high pitched it is jarring and maddening all the same and stops us from sleeping oh that's horrible that actually is that yeah this started as like it seemed like a light-hearted thing about badger deterrence but actually stopping you sleeping that is quite a big deal yeah and those

high-pitched noises are really painful. I have quite high-end hearing, so often I can hear things that Martin can't. I remember once he was testing a piece of audio equipment and really amusing himself. If he twisted a knob, I would be like, and no effect for him. What a prick. I mean, this is what they do to get secrets out of people,

play them painful noises. To make matters worse says katie i think my neighbors have been so impressed with the effect that they are spreading the good word to others that are having the same problem and now we fear that more are going to start springing up so please answer me this how do we tell our neighbors that this thing is driving us bonkers i know they've already tried a few things that haven't worked and so i don't think they're going to give it up without a fight. I mean actually I think if they're reasonable people and you haven't given us any reason to think that they're not, it's a reasonable thing to not want badgers to eat your lawn and it's a humane thing to not kill them but to scare them

away with noise. Then I'd imagine that most reasonable people, especially now we're in this scenario, they know you're in the house next door all the time. I think they are not going to fight you about this. It's about you going to them, fronting up and saying, look, be nice about it. I'm really sorry to bother you about this. I know it's really helping with your badges, but actually we can't get to sleep because we can hear the high pitch noise coming from your lawn. I think I'd be devastated if someone came to me and said that. I would turn it off immediately.

Maybe give them a gift wrapped other form of badger repellent which is what i mean it is poison that's the problem isn't it well my dad's one of the other things he tried i can't remember which pest this was for maybe for foxes he had this spray that allegedly contains lion poo that supposedly keeps other animals out certainly contained a certain kind of shit. I have, though, in researching this question, found an absolutely fascinating side article on the internet which enlightened me into a period of history that I just did not know about in 2005. A chap in Bari in Wales invented a gadget that emits a frequency of 17.4 kilohertz.

Now that's a rate that isn't like really, really high, but is high enough that it can only be heard generally by young-ish people. So like teenagers and up to about 25. Oh, so it's the kind of teenage dispersant. Yeah. Did you know you're saying that like it's a normal thing? Did you know that that was a thing? I couldn't remember what hair was actually used but the stories were like you put it in a public place and stopped yeah goths congregating or some yeah which is just ridiculous

i just but it's beyond ridiculous i mean there's complete i i'm not the kind of person who normally gets animated about civil liberties because i'm i often think there's a reason for that and you know it's it's a payoff But that is just like complete discrimination. I just couldn't believe what I was reading. Yeah, that's just like young people should not be allowed to use public space. Yeah, but not just public spaces. It was like the bloke who invented it, he did it for a grocery store. So it wasn't fair enough.

They had a problem with, you know, youths hanging outside. And that must have been difficult. But that means any young person is tarred by the same brush, cannot go into the grocery store because it hurts their ears. And also young people have to exist somewhere exactly yeah uh it was anyway it was a big story in kind of 2006 2007 ish and they sold i think about 3 000 of these devices that's not that many well you say that but that's every big town in the country isn't it they just put some noise to counseling headphones the way that the uh the youth had their rebellion on this martin and again i don't know if this is just a tabloid story and it didn't really happen that often but um someone turned the sound into a ring

tone right so that um teenagers could install it on their mobile phones this is in the days before smartphones kids yeah and when they were in the class at school and they weren't supposed to be looking at their phones they'd get a text and the teacher wouldn't know that they'd got it so that was kind of a funny uh take on the story but i just i i genuinely was outraged reading it and i don't get outraged by tabloid stories i'm very familiar with how they work but i was just like can this really have happened but it i read into it and it did happen and the gadget is still technically available it's 495 pounds it is still legal evil there have been a few like attempted lawsuits and the threat of the lawsuit has has uh forced you know shop owners and people

like that shopping mall owners to take them down because you can say this is causing discrimination against the young by having it yeah but i don't think it's ever actually had a legal judgment. So you can still go out and buy the things. And I just, I couldn't believe what I was reading. Can you imagine if there was a device which did the same for old people? Only people over 60 can hear this. Like there would be an outcry. But I also learned, Helen, along the way, that there is a word for the thing that you've got,

being able to hear high frequencies. Oh, really? And the science of it is called ultrasonics. Is there a benefit? Because it hurts. Well, not only is there not really a benefit there's not really any scientific research into it and it is that classic thing of the world being designed for men unfortunately yeah i read this paper by one of the acoustical researchers who goes around with special microphones listening for ultrasonics

and what he said was the two reasons essentially why there isn't much research into it and therefore no one's really looking for a cure to it or trying to lower the frequencies of sounds that are all around office blocks and things incidentally is one because most people can't hear it so they're not aware that it's a problem but two more specifically the people that can almost never hear it are adult men so the people that are affected by it are infants young people and some adult women like you and just reading some alternative badger repellent measures and thinking which are going to cause you, Katie, the least disruption because apparently they're scared away by light.

So if you get motion triggered lights in the garden, that might help. But then that might also wake you up if your bedroom faces the garden or you can get these scarers, which is like a little statue that you put in the garden a scare badger their eyes light up if a badger comes near and that will scare them off but you need quite a lot to cover all the corners of your garden so it might be a bit like your neighbor's garden has all these glowing eyed sentries like evil gnomes they could install an electric fence i mean it depends how close you want to get to chat to them over the fence that you've mentioned.

Yeah, true. Also, that's expensive. I mean, I know it's not super expensive, but that's gonna be hundreds of pounds versus the 20 quid and the badger repellent, isn't it? Apparently badgers hate the smell of scotch bonnet peppers and of citronella. There we go. It's always citronella, isn't it? It's always the answer.

I love the smell of citronella. I know, who doesn't? I mean, everyone in nature. They could anoint the perimeter with citronella and chop some's always i love the smell of citronella i know who doesn't i mean everyone in nature they could anoint the perimeter with citronella and chop some scotch bonnet around although i suppose if they have pets that they don't want to eat scotch bonnet that would be a problem or and i'd imagine this is how my dad dispersed the animal threat in the end spray the garden with diluted male human piss okay now that is something you could make at home at the moment give them a gift wrapped badger repellent you could give them one of like

the gnome with the scary eyes and a big jar of diluted piss if you've got a question Then email your question to answer me this podcast at googlemail.com Answer me this podcast at googlemail.com Answer me this podcast at googlemail.com Answer me this podcast at googleail.com Answer me this Podcast at BugleMail.com So retrospectives, what historical events are we ticking off on this week's run 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. From Sheffield has been in touch with multiple questions helen about ghost writers she says helen answer me these how do they get paid is it a lump sum or depending on sales

if it's a lump sum where is their motivation to do a really good job if they did a really good job and sold more than expected could they get more money etc etc so that question money do the authors choose their ghost writers or do the publishers and who is the most famous ghost writer let's go through the questions and answer them all right well i'd say famous ghost writers include mozart if you're including composers writing works that other people get credit for and i mean tons of songwriters and singers started out as pop song ghostwriters hp lovecraft was a ghostwriter and a famous i didn't know that novelist in his own right who did he he wrote a thing for houdini wow yep was it a very racist piece of houdini's work there's lots of kinds of ghostwriters like i think people forget there's

medical and academic ghostwriters those are very controversial hip. Hip-hop ghostwriters, also very controversial. And I wonder whether that's because it's supposed to be like a personal art. And same with stand-ups as well. Tons of stand-ups have ghostwriters. There's a bunch of really influential French philosophers like Bourdieu and Latour. And apparently they dictated their work. And they had like several dictation secretaries, supposedly, in different rooms. So they would walk

from room to room like espaising their brilliant thoughts so there's this sort of theory that their ideas were pretty incoherent and it was actually these dictation secretaries that kind of synthesized the work into the great philosophy that people know today but in the case of books it is much more simple isn't it if you're a a pop star or a politician and you either don't have the time or the skill to be a professional writer over a number of months, but you do want the hefty advance from the big publisher to write your memoirs. It is a commercial relationship that struck up. How does it work? It works differently, depending on the publisher and the author. I think generally,

the publishers will choose the ghostwriters. And I would imagine a publisher has a better idea of what a ghostwriter needs to do than, say, a celebrity who is going to partially dictate their memoir to them. Well, they're going to know the context as well, aren't they? They're going to know, you know, this person's from reality TV, so let's give them Jade Goody's ghostwriter. Yeah, right. Or they might have authors that have worked on their own books and they're like, well, this person would be good to ghost write this other thing i thought it was really interesting a few months ago when demi moore's memoir came out it was ghost written by ariel levy who's a very well-known writer in her own right and her publisher had read

one of ariel levy's books about miscarriage and gave it to demi moore and said look i think you have a lot in common and so they chose her to ghost write and what i thought was unusual about it is even though her name is not on the cover of the book, she was mentioned a lot in the press for the book and in interviews about it, and she was even interviewed herself about it, and I think that is rare. Yeah, I think it's partly the internet

that's making people be more honest because the details come out anyway. Like, you know, in five years' time, you'll type in the name of the book and the Wikipedia article will come up saying who it was written by. So I just kind of think, in a way, get on top of it and get a get a credible high caliber name if you can afford it anyway it's a bit like with um elton john's memoir that was

ghost written by alexis petridis wasn't it oh wow a well-known guardian music journalist yeah in that case too i saw alexis petridis did interviews about writing with elton john because people were interested in that process and yeah i think that is a positive thing, isn't it? But not everyone is famous. Most people who are ghostwriters are professional ghostwriters and their job is to be anonymous. There was a company that was called something syndicates that actually set up syndicates of ghostwriters to churn out kids book franchises like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. So just for decades, they would have writers turning out because they would turn out more books than it's possible really for one person to write or the Sweet Valley High books,

which all have Francine Pascal on the cover, but it's famously a team of writers churning them out. But I've kind of been a ghostwriter a couple of times and I was just paid by the hour or the day. I wasn't given royalties or a percentage of the publishing deal. And I think getting a percentage of a book that sells well is uncommon for a ghostwriter. I think usually they're either paid like a wage or they're given a lump sum at the start of the project and then a lump sum upon completion. So when Samantha is asking about what's their motivation to do a good job is to get the second half of their payment basically at the end end but also getting hired again by the publisher to ghostwrite more books but i guess it also depends on the relationship that the writer has with the subject so in the case i understand if you're

being evasive about who you did your ghostwriting for that's fine but in that case i know you were writing for essentially a brand basically it was a companion book for a tv show but if you're writing in someone's voice where you're representing their life story, if you've had to go and interview them, spend time with them, perhaps spend a couple of months with living in their house or whatever, I imagine then you do build up a personal relationship with that person and they'll feel a responsibility to you, maybe not to have credit, but to have a bit more of an equal share of the funds. You would hope. Also, ghostwriters do a hell of a lot of research they might spend a year doing research and writing this thing and the person whose name

is much bigger on the cover or the only name on the cover might not put in much time apparently there are celebrity cookbooks where the chef in question has never even read the book that i can believe it was lazy i was interested to see that on Gwyneth Paltrow's cookbook it's all good her name is on it but then under that it says and Julia Tertian in smaller writing but Julia Tertian is a famous cookbook author in her own right when she was doing the publicity for that Gwyneth Paltrow had to keep saying no she's not a ghost writer like we developed the recipes together but I wrote everything yeah so people are still really touchy about the idea of things being ghostwritten like it seems to be a bit of a source of shame for some and that is again why I thought it was interesting where Demi Moore was like I couldn't

have done a good job so I found someone who could do a good job yeah that is interesting I think that's a positive change I've actually been offered a ghostwriter before to write something with my name on it um it was only an insignificant corporate article in a business to business thing. I can't remember what it was about. You know, I had an offer come through and it was like decent money. It was, I don't know, 500 quid for, you know, a thousand words or something. And I thought, okay, I could do that. I don't really want to. And I was about to refuse. And then the person said, it's fine, just take it. We'll put your name on it. We'll get someone else to write it. You can have final copy and then we'll just put your name and face on it. And I just felt

really uncomfortable about it. And then I insisted on writing it, even though I didn't want to. Because, I don't know, it's odd, isn't it? Because if it was, if I was presenting a TV show, and people would assume I was reading a script that had been collaborated on by myself and the producer and other people, but there's something about your name and face being put on a piece of print, where it's only words on a page. Like you didn't write it what have you done like yeah the words are the words it's acknowledging that point that it's your brand isn't it it's your face or like whatever small you know smear of celebrity that is what people are coming for not the quality of the writing or the yeah opinions and that's kind of a little sad for most people who have self-respect i guess exactly yeah it's just not a world that i

particularly like but then i i can write i'm not an amazing writer but i don't need a ghost writer so that's why it would feel like copping out i suppose well i always think about that about artists those artists who essentially don't do their own works they like go oh this is what it's supposed to be like and they have a bunch of assistants who actually make the work of art and i get that if you're like sawing a shark in half you probably not be able to do that on your own but isn't the point of art that you enjoy the process that you want to be making the thing if what you're doing is like at that point you're admitting that you're a brand and really kind of going yeah i'll give people the general idea when they do that the actual work and that seems really strange to me wouldn't you want to be involved with the all the aspects of

the process otherwise why are you doing it in the first place apart from for the money well for money yeah that's the answer in that particular instance that you just gave i mean damien hearst was quite open it was for the money i remember my dad being really pissed off that um an art teacher at my school who was a more successful sculptor than my dad had people in the studio building the stuff for him but then it's like the idea versus the manufacturer of the idea but I think with words there isn't such a big distinction is there also I guess you know if you're a writer at all and we both are writers a bit that you have the ultimate control on those words when you're the writer. And so actually, even though there are editors involved,

and there's perhaps the person in question whose book it's supposed to be, really the control lies with the person who's typing the words. And I just wouldn't want to give that up, I think. I remember years ago, I really needed money at the time. And I went to be interviewed by a guy who was very very rich and wanted someone to ghost write an enormous book of short stories he basically wanted a book of short stories where it was hundreds of them and you would open it and read one every day but he didn't want to write the stories or he just wanted some help he no he wanted just to

like give me a load of anecdotes and for me to turn them into witty stories and i read one of the anecdotes and it was just like someone complaining about a parking ticket and i was like this is an impossible job i need the money but not i can't do it i've been asked to ghost write a book actually once which was really it came out of nowhere because the only book i've ever written is our book which i co-wrote with you i've never actually written a book and i've certainly never ghost written a book but um i met a guy it was a it was a bloke i interviewed for the modern man we tracked him down because we'd heard gossip about him but he'd never spoken on the record before our interview on the podcast and he's a gay porn star called trojan rock he'd had a very successful career as a tv producer when he was in his 30s

um his real name's gavin the episode is called there's something about gavin if you want to find the episode of the modern man and the story was about when he sold his company for loads of money, and he was still only like 41 or something. He decided, rather than let's set up a new project, or let's retire, or let's buy a yacht, he decided to move to Brazil and become a porn star. And I just thought it was a really interesting story, because it's rare that you hear someone say, yeah, I had loads of money. And so I decided the thing I really wanted to do the most was be a portland star so it was an interesting conversation and i guess he just i don't know he just must have felt a connection with me or thought that i because i was interested in his story and and people hadn't asked him about it before and i

was open-minded he then wrote to me afterwards said really nice to meet you i want to write my autobiography would you write it for me wow and uh i thought about it because i thought it is a really interesting story but a why me apart from the fact that i've shown some interest and b why me because i've never written i've never written a memoir before and i'm not a writer so i just said look i'm trying to focus on my broadcasting work at the moment but it was an interesting opportunity to be offered i once had to review freddie flintoff's autobiography i'm sorry in fact i think i may have had to review it twice once in paperback and once in hardback and apparently freddie flintoff's autobiography i'm sorry in fact i think i may have had to review it twice once in paperback and once in hardback and apparently freddie flintoff is a pretty funny guy yeah this was a very boring book even given that it's about a subject i'm not hugely invested

in so it's like all the zaltzman genes went to the other side there didn't they exactly but it was just so plainly bashed out by someone else and i thought like if you're him how are you going to feel about the final product here where it's just tonally not really like you at all well obviously fine because it made it into paperback didn't it yeah he's probably quite happy with the check quite happy to do the book tours i mean some people i guess if you're not like a literary person it just doesn't matter it probably matters more to us than the conversation we're having now because we've got english degrees and we care about that sort of thing i'm not even a big reader, but I can read a book. And so it would concern me if the book was shit.

Other people, I guess, just use them as coffee table ornaments. Or you buy them for someone as a present because you're like, that person likes Freddy Flintoff. Yeah, exactly. Safe bet. It's essentially a big card, isn't it?

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hours and you can, of course, like any of these platforms, it does involve kind of learning the intricacies of how it works. And therefore, if you do have a week to spend designing it, it's going to be great or maybe 12 weeks if you need a project right now genuinely it's a really good idea to build a website at the moment it will take your mind off other things yeah indoors fun that's something people can look at as well when they're bored yes if you want to reach beyond the walls in which you're quarantined and they do make it easy everything's there in templates so you can do a gallery you can do a blog you can do a store you can do a contact page integrate your social media embed media players go to

squarespace.com answer use the two-week free trial to see what squarespace is all about and 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 okay here's a question from james in canra who says, Helen, answer me this. Why is leopard print sexy? I'm not sure that he's saying that he finds it sexy because he then goes on to say, what is it about this tan and black combination that implies sexiness? So I think the question is more motivated by, I've seen a lot of videos from the 80s. Leopard print appears to be be considered sexy i don't understand why that would be because i don't want to fuck a leopard enlighten me we don't know that james doesn't want to fuck a leopard he's not saying i'm interpreting i'm interpreting a lot between his words is that what that netflix documentary is about i think leopard print has managed to really hang on to a lot of connotations of what it meant to wear the skin of a very dangerous and somewhat rare animal. So apparently leopard print was first known to be garbing goddesses of ancient Egypt and Greece

because the skins were so precious. And also to get one without dying yourself was really quite a feat. Of course it was, yeah. So there's a lot of cachet attached to these pelts, and understandably. And also people now are like, oh, how disgusting, like skinning an animal and, you know, just for display.

But to be fair, you know, thousands of years ago, there was no internet, there were no zoos. There was no peta. Yeah, there was, it certainly wasn't. If you lived in a place that had never seen a leopard short of an artist drawing it which of course was popular too you know the only way to see it would be to bring back the skin you're not going to bring a leopard back on a boat so i mean i can sort of see that i mean it would have been an amazing material to witness wouldn't

it if you'd never seen an animal like that before so i think the first time it was sort of a particularly prized thing for a human to wear was like 1700s, but it would have been very decadent. But then the first known leopard print fabric was from, I think, the late 1700s. And do you remember we had a question, and answered me this quite a while ago, about Yankee Doodle, why is it stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni and we talked about how macaronis were these dandyish young men quite effeminate they were known for their over-the-top dress they wore leopards and they were ridiculed for it but at the same time

they were trendsetters influencers if you must around then the print became fashionable and then like 19th century not so much but then in the 20th century it came back in and like it's basically stayed in fashion ever since so early 20th century it had that status symbol thing like real fur was still like expensive and flash but also you had these like women's liberation movements that often wore leopard print fabrics in the 20s it was a thing and then in the 1940s because you had women somewhat liberated by war and fabrics in the 20s it was a thing and then in the 1940s because you had women somewhat liberated by war and then in the 60s the whole youth quake thing they wore leopard but then by the 70s it was thought to be trashy so in the 70s then punks

co-opted it because they wanted things that other people thought were a bit disgusting in the 80s it had that whole like bet lynch vibe and i think that was probably people who were young in the 80s it had that whole like bet lynch vibe and i think that was probably people who were young in the 60s wearing what they felt sexy in in the 60s but they're now middle-aged so in the 80s i think people were a bit like and then in the early 90s the designer elia did like this very famous collection which was just like all these supermodels wearing leopard print all over and i think since then it's always been quite a fun print that's been in fashion but that doesn't quite say sex though James is saying I mean we have to agree with his contention that leopard print is considered sexy but I know what he means I think it's a bit cheap and trashy but it does have a red light vibe doesn't it so where does that come from well I think that partly comes from

the attraction of it being expensive and exotic would then trickle down into other garments. So if someone was wearing like a leopard print bra, people would have thought, oh, that visual clue to these other things. But in 1947, Christian Dior did this like very famous collection because it was like post-war and it's the first collection where it's like, oh, rationing no more and all of that. And he did this like tight leopard print silk dress and he said if you're fair and sweet don't wear leopard print so i think he was really trying to like reinforce this impression that it was for sexy women come on shaggers the war's over let's get on it they were selling it as a very seductive fabric and then like rita hayworth and marilyn wanro would wear it to look like bombshells yeah i guess also i mean i don't know if leopards are great shaggers particularly but um i would say along with like tigers jaguars pumas they're on

the sexier spectrum of the big cats aren't they whereas you know like lions are actually you know they're very mighty and powerful and everything but they're a bit straggly if you actually see a lion like he's got flies buzzing around its face loads of poo around its bottom like i say very powerful but it's power rather than sex, I would say, a lion. Well, also just the lion doesn't have a snazzy print. With the lion, it's about the silhouette rather than the fur pattern that people would recognise. And also less sleekness as well, generally. Obviously, they can, at certain times of the year, when they're not getting enough prey, then they look thin.

But obviously, when they are getting enough prey, they eat a lot, don't they? So they're quite fat. Whereas, again, the leopard is a bit more lithe and athletic maybe when a leopard's killed something it also is fat and surrounded by flies with poos all over its bum so quite possibly but it's not the image that comes to mind as readily you know that's all i'm saying i'm just saying if you were to divide if you if one wanted uh in an andrew lloyd weber way to divide the cat kingdom into fuckable and non-fuckable cats, I would say that leopards are in the top half. That's all.

But is it just you've been conditioned by this idea that leopard print is a sexy fabric? No, I've not been conditioned. I'm genuinely making an aesthetic judgment on the sexiness of leopards. I think it's just also been a shorthand on screen for such a long time, probably coming from the Marilyn era of bombshells, where it's like put someone in leopard, and that is immediately indicating that they're a sexual person. Exotic. It's just fast track, isn't it, to that?

Or if there's someone old and wearing it, then you're like, that's a past it delusional person. Jackie Kennedy wore a coat in 1961 made of real leopard, and it was such a trend-setting coat that then nearly quarter of a million leopards were killed for their skins that decade and that's why in 1969 they introduced the endangered species act because of jackie kennedy wow that's almost too good a fact for me to really believe it's true i can believe that there was legislation in place before then and it tipped it over but that's still a fascinating little tidbit.

It's like if something from LK Bennett that Kate Middleton wears leads to like an endangered boring shoe act in seven years time. Find the time, I can always send a question to the question line Inquiries are wanted as a part of the plan I'll a Helen or Holly or Martin A sound man Answer me this podcast Podcast at Googlemail.com Answer me this podcast Podcast at Googlemail.com

Podcast at Googlemail.com If you want more stuff to listen to while you are in confinement and i don't mean in the sort of like medieval pregnancy sort of confinement just mean the quarantine times then why don't you head over to answer me this store.com where you can buy all five of the answer me this exclusive albums although i'd imagine the christmas one right now is not the right one no i disagree there's actually been a trend that i've spotted i think the hallmark channel in the us has started running a whole load of christmas movies because it makes people feel nostalgic and reassured so actually now might be the perfect time to listen to the answer me this christmas

album okay i'm not judging if you do fine why don't you get our christmas album only 200 and something sleeps to go and you can also get answer me this episodes one to two hundred that's right so we've got 183 additional episodes to this one which you can hear for free i hope you agree that is a reasonable and proportionate freemium offer but if you want to hear the first 200 episodes you can only get them from well you can get them from apple and amazon but the links are at answer me this store dot com and if you buy them from us directly, we get more money than if you click on the Apple or Amazon links. And if you buy them and listen to Answer Me This

from end to end, that will take up every waking hour for at least a couple of weeks. Yeah. I'm not recommending you listen to them all end to end. I'm just saying it's a possible thing to do. Absolutely. Here's a question from Sybrand in New Zealand, who says, bear with me, this question takes some setting up. We've got time. We do have time and I have deemed the setting up to be curious and entertaining. So just drift along with us. Sybrand says, my dad lives in a small town in the north of Canada that is well and truly remote. It's surrounded by all the lovely and picturesque canadian stuff you could want mountains glaciers rivers and such

cardboard cutouts of bears but the town itself is pretty bleak it's a typical boom bust mining area that hasn't seen much of a boom for a couple of decades and as such the population has dwindled to a few hundred colorful locals my dad being one of them. This sounds like a pitch for a Netflix series. I feel like this is Northern Exposure 2.0 ready to happen. Over the course of 40 years, my dad has been slowly collecting the heritage buildings from around town and restoring them in an effort to keep some of the area's history alive.

As in literally buying the buildings? More than that, Ollie. He doesn't actually get on with most of the other town's residents, though, so has taken to moving entire buildings to his corner of town. Wow. Like a shit life-size game of Monopoly, he even has a genuine opponent. They each own their own hotel, restaurant, grocery store and gas station in order to avoid having to patronise each other's businesses.

This is the opening 10 minutes of that pilot episode, isn't it? But I'm in it and I'm enjoying it. God, it's great. The result of this competition is that Dad's corner of town looks like a Gold Rush era postcard that's been tinted with watermelon pinks, bright blues and lime greens, while the rest of town is made up of lifeless grey buildings, many of which are empty and most in a state of disrepair.

Anyhow, Dad is a bit of a collector and not just of old buildings and rivals. He likes old stuff in general, particularly old electrical appliances and, most specifically, old toasters. He loves toasters. That's right right it's a question about toasters it's not even about the buildings you idiot sigh when my brother and i were kids and lived in a more populated place my dad and my stepmom would travel down the province and under the guise of

visiting us drag us to all the dusty antique shops within a hundred kilometer radius then dad discovered ebay to date he's the proud owner of thousands yes thousands of antique toasters okay so shit town shit ton of toasters that's the strapline for the series yes one day this will all potentially be passed down to my brother and me so ollie answer me this what the hell are we supposed to do with it were the buildings or the toasters or both both neither of us has any desire to live in the town nor in a fortress of toasters did i mention there are thousands of toasters i suppose if you divide them up between you equally at least there's half the amount of toasters that's right the good news obviously is that property has value, regardless of whether it's an antique collectible or bricks and mortar. So I mean, you know, you shouldn't

feel like it's a burden. I'm assuming that the property doesn't have a great deal of value, which is why his dad has so much of it. Of course, clearly in a remote part of Canada, it's cheaper to buy a gas station than it would be in London, for example. But nonetheless, just because it's more affordable, that doesn't mean it doesn't have value. Someone might be willing to buy it. I would suggest killing two birds with one stone and opening a toaster museum inside one of the buildings. People love a novelty museum. That's true. I love a novelty museum. Depends how remote this town is, though. Like if it's literally the only thing to do in like a 500 mile radius, I'm not sure I'd go to the toaster museum.

Parts of Florida were considered like desolated swamp land before they put disney world there you know it was of interest to environmentalists but no one else now it's the world's biggest tourist destination i do think it is possible to turn things around with global warming maybe northern canada will be very popular soonish if he's got all these buildings why doesn't he turn them into some kind of living museum but a museum of what if not toasters though but what's a living museum how would that work a living museum would be of like oldie mining era gold rush northern canada so you'd have to pay actors to work there and say hello i work down the mine and i have this toaster disney had to pay some people to populate the original disney right using your example yeah i still think

quirky toaster museum takes up less floor space yeah but rent the rest out it's not really solving the problem i'm dealing with the big problem first which is the buildings i think either that or period film set yes because you've got this like candy colored restored town that is old and no one's really using it so you don't have to block off a functional town, which is difficult. You need a lot of permits. Yes. And if your father's rival has outlasted your father,

he will then build his own film set to compete. Yeah, but his will be all drab and grey. Fine. I mean, that will attract filmmakers from around the world who can film in both drab and grey and historical exteriors in the same location and get a tax break from the Canadian government. I don't think it's a bad idea.

And then I think with the toasters either you find the toaster equivalent of the shop all saints that will buy them for their window displays or you sell them to a props house because it's often really difficult to get yes period appliances that are boring but they need them to build up houses for films and tv and stuff but they don't have them yeah it helps with the issue of value as well because i've looked a little bit into the um antique toaster market and the ones that are like the original electric toast you have to remember like there wasn't electricity uh you know until the turn of the last century um and it took many decades for people to find wires that were safe to heat up

within a toaster and make domestically on a wide scale basis so there were many prototypes and there were important developments along the way and so the ones that are collectible aren't the ones that are necessarily the best looking or the ones that had the most mainstream appeal when they were successful the ones that are collectible are like the first attempt to do it and they only made a limited run but they've got that kind of steampunk look about them those are the ones people really want so like an original general electric d12 model toaster can go for four thousand dollars whoa what does it have to be functional or just looking nice that's a really good question i haven't checked but i imagine that of course if it's functional it's going to be worth more but i know i thinkically, you'd be happy with a collectible

toaster if you're a toaster collector and getting your hands on the crown jewels. They tried lots of different materials before they settled on the ones that are now mass produced. So there are ones made of wires and porcelain and copper. So those are the ones that are worth, not all of them, $4,000, but certainly, you know, let's say $500 to the the four thousand dollar mark um so i think when you inherit the toaster collection keep the one you really love sell the ones that are worth a lot on ebay you will get you know it's a reasonable investment you'll get back whatever your dad paid for them at least but the ones that are actually not the valuable ones are the ones basically that you're talking about helen because the ones that were mass produced and therefore a prop maker would want in the background of a film set to

indicate a normal family house those are the ones that aren't worth very much they're only worth like 40 each but you've got loads of them so it's not a bad suggestion but the problem is the difficulty if you have to sort through the toasters figure out which have value all from new zealand by the way then it's a lot of overhead for anyone inheriting it. So I suppose the thing would be to try and encourage some of the sorting of the collection while your dad is alive to do it. Have you ever met a collector, Helen? Yeah.

I mean, of course he's got a very precise archive, I would imagine, of exactly what he's got, surely. But if he could begin the dispersal, maybe you could say, you know, this would be a great collection to donate to the Toaster Museum of South Korea or whatever, you know. It doesn't exist. I looked, there isn't, as far as I can tell,

anywhere in the world, a Toaster Museum, which is why I suggested it as a proposition so that there is no existing collection to sell to, as far as I can tell. But do take heart from the fact that a collection is always going to be worth more than any individual item. So, I mean, you know, when you find the right buyer, someone in the world will be building a rival Toaster collection they may take all of it off your hands well listeners if you are in the market for a few thousand toasters

or a town in northern canada and you're willing to wait a while then get in touch or if you have any ideas as to how to dispose of a parental collection of some size but we need your questions to make more episodes of answer me this so do send them via email or voice memo if you'd like to record your own voice because we love hearing your voices and our email address is on our website answer me this podcast.com and we have numerous other entertainment provisions available for you to download across the internet so much auditory amusement the illusionist is on a break at the moment so i've been making tranquil illusionist special episodes to help lull you to sleep or to calm anxiety

oh that's novel so i did one where the listeners selected their favorite soothing words and when the celebrity imagine video came out i did the lyrics of Imagine but with the words arranged in reverse alphabetical order. And I played the chords in alphabetical order. Well, you made something fun out of something truly horrendous. I tried to make it as pretentious as possible, but I still couldn't get close. Couldn't approximate the original. No, I'll have to work on it.

So there are going to be more of those while the Illusionist is on a break. And also my show, Veronica Mars Investigations, is back with season two of Veronica Mars, which is a stressful show, but doesn't have illnesses in it. So that's at vmipod.com and The Illusionist is at theillusionist.org.

And in Oli World, four out of my five podcasts are still currently on air. Fuck that. Is there an Oli World theme park in the making? Although one of those podcasts is this one. And I shall shortly be starting the ollie world theme park companion podcast yes yes you can discover all of them at ollie man.com the one i would like to highlight in particular this episode is the week unwrapped uh which is a

recent award-winning current affairs podcast of mine but we don't talk about the same current affairs as everyone else that is our mo all year round. In recent weeks, we've discussed the conservation of rhinos, the boom in black market cannabis in territories where it is legal, which is a really fascinating story. And also the return of skywriting. I bet you didn't even know that skywriting was banned in the UK, did you? I didn't know. Coming back.

It's just too cloudy, really, to be pointful. Absolutely. Basically, it turns out Grant Chaps is an aviation nerd. That's why it might be coming back.'s just too cloudy really to be pointful absolutely basically it turns out Grant Chaps is an aviation nerd that's why it might be coming back oh god so if you're interested in that sort of thing fun facts like you might learn in Answer Me This delivered in slightly more somber tones than the Olly man you know and love from Answer Me This

but it's still recognisably me it's just me with the tie on then head to theweekunwrapped.com Martin well as of today when this episode comes out, there are 236 episodes of Song by Song, a podcast about Tom Waits. Oh, they're fucking hell!

Yeah, they're tons. How did you manage to accrue that? I thought you were on, if I had to guess, I'd have said like 70 or something. And we've been doing it for nearly five years, and it's a weekly podcast about the music of Tom Waits. Tom Waits has done a lot of songs. This is a great time to catch up, And if you really just want to listen to music and hear people talking about music

and it's very enjoyable, listen to that. I've also been involved with a podcast which has just come out called Down to a Sunless Sea, which is a memoir. Dave Pickering talking about his dad's journey into old age. So slightly heavy subject matter, but really wonderful storytelling.

Excellent. Right, well, that is it from us for this episode but please remember there's also more answer me this answer me this store.com we'll be back halfway through the month with a retro episode but you have to subscribe to hear that so make sure you press subscribe on your podcast app of choice and in the meantime keep well and look after yourselves and we hope you're all okay bye