Answer Me This! - AMT391: Video Phones, Scrumping Apples, and Going Over Niagara Falls in a Barrel

Episode Date: November 5, 2020

Content warning: animal cruelty. In AMT391, we hear about eviscerated rabbits, I'm A Celebrity food-kills, and a zoo in a deadly stunt. But there's some mysterious dog magic to compensate. 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 Our new album Home Entertainment is available now for £paywhatyouwant for a limited period at , where you can also obtain our other special albums including the AMT Christmas; AMT episodes 1-200; and our Best Of compilations. 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 Four Thought at ; and Martin Austwick's music at his Tom Waits podcast Song By Song at , and his new music'n'science podcast Maddie's Sound Explorers, hosted by Maddie Moate, at . This episode is sponsored by: The Great Courses Plus, the streaming library of courses on topics from chess to mystery fiction to yoga to formal logic to dog training. AMT listeners get a free month at . 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

Last episode we were talking about what child actors go through in horror films and whether it's traumatic or not and here is a report from former child actor matthew amazing uh content warning dead animals matthew says i had a special guest star credit on growing pains an extravagantly turgid ill-conceived and occasionally quite racist horror drama about a scientist growing a fungus in his shed his son dies eating the fungus in a desperate bid to be noticed and later when the scientist adopts another boy of the same age played by me the spirit of boy one returns to possess boy two of course another desperate bid to be noticed very consistent for child one that's true that. That's what you do, isn't it? If you're a child that had chosen to eat a poisonous fungus and then died, you'd think, I'm going to

haunt the adopted child of the bereaved father that I've left behind. Make sense? Matthew says, I was 12 when we shot it. Was I exposed to unnecessary trauma? Well, in one scene, the scientist discovers that all his experimental rabbits have been savaged to death by a rottweiler scary dead-eyed boy played by me appears and we are led to believe the carnage was somehow brought about by his possessiveness for the earlier scenes the live lab rabbits had been played by some very cute white fluffy bunnies allegedly obtained from an actual research lab nearby i enjoyed playing with them in between takes. The cast assumed the props department was going to supply fake dead rabbits for this scene,

but here's the thing. Two dozen prop dead rabbits cost money. So, when I arrived on set the morning of the scene, guess what was strewn about the lab set? I don't think we need to. I think we're all there. Just going to confirm with Matthew's words. Two dozen eviscerated actual

rabbits with their guts hanging out which i then had to act in the midst of for the next couple of hours it turns out dead things start smelling pretty rank quickly under film lights and two actual gore is not yucky enough for the camera the spilled guts had to be augmented the props team used a combination of Kensington gore, which is a, well, it was a trademark for fake blood and now is sort of the generic term, and sweet corn to get the right effect. Well, the implication from that, Matthew,

might be that the animals died in vain because if you could fake their guts, then why bother killing them in the first place? But presumably the fake blood only worked because you had the real rabbits there. I can see why the crew came to that decision with the budget they had. Despicable though it seems to modern tastes.

Well, couldn't you go to the butcher and get some rabbit skins and then some like sausage skins and stuff like that and then your Kensington gore and your sweet corn? I guess they just thought we have some rabbits here.

Like we have rabbits. It was the point of going to the butcher and traumatizing some more rabbits these rabbits have already been traumatized under the lights because the butcher would already be peeling the rabbits you know it's waste let's be honest matthew what was the destiny for these rabbits in the first place they might have had a nice day camping it up on a hammer horror scene rather than you know just another day of having poisonous chemicals rubbed into their eyes matthew says did the experience warp me it certainly left an impression after the production wrapped i went vegetarian for a couple of decades and the scene still holds a prominent place in my memory 40 years on but it does still shock me how little care was paid to me i'm sure that's

very different now hey it was the 70s we didn't know my friend ben who is um a child psychologist and uh i know we'll be listening to this now because he listens when he runs hi ben hi ben he said that he was listening to our episode last month and then happened to watch labyrinths that evening with his daughter and said that we were wrong when we talked about all the precautions that are on set because it's very obvious if you watch labyrinths again, which I haven't for years, that the baby in that is obviously petrified and bawling his eyes out and screaming. And I said,

no, no, no. It's because, you know, I don't know, maybe they wanted him to cry because it's supposed to be scary because he's been kidnapped by the evil goblin prince,

whoever it is. So, you know, maybe they made his mom walk off set for a minute and he's crying for that reason. I'm sure he's not crying because the puppets are terrifying. And Ben was like, no, watch it. he's not crying because the puppets are terrifying and ben was like no watch it he's definitely crying because the puppets are terrifying and so i looked it up to see whether the now man that was the baby boy had talked about this and he has his name is toby frude and he's he's the son of brian frude who

was the designer on the movie and the reason that they used him as the baby was because the original casting of the baby was so petrified he couldn't even make it onto set, basically. Oh, no. They tried. He couldn't handle it. So then they got Toby to do it because Toby, growing up in a house full of Muppets and costume design,

wasn't as freaked out by some of the weird dismembered stuff flying around. But apparently he was really scared of David Bowie and did a piss in his lap. It's a great claim to fame, I think. But also that baby didn't consent to being in the film and couldn't consent. Too young to enunciate whether the baby wanted to be in a film or not.

Yes. So that feels a bit more messed up, even than Linda Blair, because Linda Blair or Jodie Foster would have at least been aware of what was happening on the sets they were acting in. But a baby... baby well the good news is he has followed his father's footsteps and now works with puppets professionally so he obviously got over it well either got over it or it predestined his entire life and in some weird Freudian way just constantly confronting that fear

here's a question from Christian from Richmond, Virginia, who says, I was recently out having an ideal fall afternoon with my wife and in-laws, apple picking at a local orchard. What a lovely scene. Between the four of us, we were filling two of the provider bags, which were weighed and purchased. While out picking, I found it pretty natural to sample the product. After all, I'd never had a Cortland apple before. Might as well make sure I like them before buying pounds of them. You're only a man, Christian. Who are you

to resist the lure of a Cortland? Old Testament. It was the Cortland that did for humanity. Christian says, it was later in the afternoon and I hadn't had lunch. So all this first apple did was wake up my appetite. Yeah, we've all been there. To that point, my wife hadn't tried any of the apples herself so i asked her if i could take her freebie right the freebie that christian has decreed they get my wife was adamant that i'd already had one free apple and it would not be right if i had a second i reasoned that everyone who goes to one of these pick your own orchards gets one freebie by christian rules and if someone doesn't use it it should be transferable to another member of the party. Yeah, I mean, as you say, Helen,

he hasn't actually said that this was decreed by anyone other than himself. He appears to have invented these rules. Everyone called Christian gets two free apples. Weird to then write into us and get us to adjudicate

on something that he's literally invented. So, Ollie, am I the arsehole? Yeah. Answer me this. Is it OK to eat more than one free apple when you're out at one of these pick your own orchards especially when someone else in your party isn't going to have one these orchards have to factor in a certain amount of waste into their prices and i'm happy to pay for other

products while i'm there cider donuts other produce etc in addition to the masses of apples i'm buying is it too much to have two apples je Geesh. Of course it's fine. You're on an orchard. I mean, the apples are profit for them. You are buying the apples. Eat 10 apples. It's fine. Like, you're not stealing, really.

Well, technically you are. Yeah, you are. Yeah. You're not! You're taking the thing for free that you would normally pay for. No, no, no, no. You've paid for the experience of picking and purchasing apples. And built into that is, as Christian suggests,

I would say not only that each apple picker picks a free apple on the sly but that actually probably they factored in two or three i mean it doesn't make any difference to their bottom line it's difference if you went to the road and then sold them outside for half the price of the apple orchard that's a bit different but for your own personal consumption i'd say, the unwritten rule is not as you say, but rather eat as many apples as you like. Well, I disagree. Although I think they probably know that this happens. Also that most people can't eat that many free apples.

Well, exactly. That's what I mean. Not free. Stolen apples is what I meant to say. If you had the capacity, if one had the capacity to eat 10, then OK, maybe I wouldn't be saying eat 10 apples. But what I mean facetiously is you're not going to eat 10. So it's fine. They know that you're going to eat 10, then okay, maybe I wouldn't be saying eat 10 apples. But what I mean facetiously is you're not going to eat 10.

So it's fine. They know that you're going to eat some apples. Your bulk discount. When I was little, we used to go strawberry picking and I would eat some strawberries and I still feel guilty about that decades later. So just because it's probably what the orchard expects doesn't mean it's right, Ollie.

Well, I mean, actually, having been quite so firm on this, I must say the closest experience I've had to this recently is we went to a pumpkin patch last week. I was actually really quite strict with my son. You can only eat one free pumpkin. We'd paid our five pounds to get in and that entitled him to pick a pumpkin

and we'd scoop it out and then we'd put the face on it. But it was not appropriate for us to go back and get another one. We'd only paid for one. And was like there's loads here just get them and i said no you we paid for one and in my head i had the counter argument that i'm sure there are people who do that but actually i guess the difference for me there is that i know that those pumpkins are only really worth that five pounds during that one week of half term when we were there pre-halloween so that is going to affect the farm's bottom line if we pick up two pumpkins where i do think for an apple orchard i mean they fall on the ground and get eaten by worms that is different well it's

like in the suit i mean a supermarket presumably accounts for both spoilage of goods that don't get sold and things that get nicked and that goes into the price that you pay for the goods that you buy but that doesn't mean that it's okay to steal things from a supermarket yeah well are you just going around the supermarket eating bits you're like well yeah i figure that one sausage in each pack is mine if christian's wife was so concerned maybe she could check out offer to pay for those two apples in addition to the ones they bought and they would probably be like no it's fine but that would assuage her conscience and allow christian to have the two apples yeah they'd all have a good laugh about it afterwards but yeah if it made you feel better

the thing that i disliked about the pumpkin patch was that this place we'd gone to had just laid all the pumpkins on the patch and they had grown there at the farm but you didn't get to pick them yourself you just went and got one no well that makes a lot of sense why because then you're gonna be tramping over their pumpkin patch. There's probably still pumpkins being grown. Yeah. And also there's a lot of vines for you to trip over. They have to be quite widely spaced. Isn't it quite hard to pick a pumpkin?

Like, is it quite a thick stalk? Well, I don't know because I didn't get to do it. That's what I'm annoyed about. You probably require a machete and I would not give you a machete. No. I'd envision myself with the pumpkin machete. Yes, I had. With your level of competence, Olly, they made the right decision.

Yeah. And now a question via voice from Nate. I'm just standing watching my dog have a shit in my garden. And he's actually spent the last, I would say, 30 seconds walking around the garden where he normally does his awfuls, sniffing around, clearly deciding where shall I plant today's produce, and then settled on an area. Bad looks a bit. Oh, now he's having a piss now as well.

Answer me this. What exactly is a dog doing when deciding where to do a shit because he does this every day i was sort of familiar with dogs marking territory yes or transmitting news to other dogs with their piss but are they doing that with their shits as well they are dogs have 300 million olfactory sensors in their noses so there are many many messages that they can send using urine and feces for example they could be leaving an olfactory bowl like wolves marking out their territory which basically means to other dogs fuck off or they could be saying i'm on heat smell my lovely heaty shit come and find me smell this sexy poo there's more where

that came from boys. Wow provocative. Or it could just be a habit that they learned as a puppy because as with humans you know very formative period for dogs if for example you know you got your dog from a rehoming centre but the dog had grown up at the coast then they're always going to be looking for something a bit like sand to do a crap in um so that that plays a role too do you think that humans also have just as many messages in our piss and shit but we have lost the ability to interpret them i think we've lost the interest certainly could be the new podcast oh god no it's very dangerous don't it's always been striking to me how indecisive dogs seem to be whilst choosing a shitting place because you do think well they they shit here every day they must know where the

good spots are but i wonder whether it's just seeing if their piss or shit messages are still as strong or whether some of them need to be topped up with a fresh batch or which direction they're facing in uh obviously helen you you have yet to catch up with all of your back issues of the scientific journal Frontiers in Zoology. How dare you say that? Back in 2014, they published the results of a study of 70 dogs, which they conducted over two years, watching 37 breeds shit 1,893 times. Wow, what a job. Imagine if you went to a party and someone was like, well, what do you do? I watch dog shit for science. And the scientists discovered that dogs prefer

to excrete with their body aligned along the north-south axis, avoiding east-west altogether. Isn't that fascinating? Wow. How do they know a dog's magnetic? This was in a free-roaming environment, so the dogs had the choice to go where they wanted. weren't leashed they weren't influenced by walls or roads that would influence linear movement but they don't know whether it's because they perceive

the direction of the compass as a kind of haptic stimulus you know innately or whether it's just possible they feel more comfortable they also do that thing where they go around in a little circle several times before tucking themselves in for a little sleep i wonder whether that's also so that they are correctly oriented i suppose as well if we take for granted that they are issuing a signal then obviously they're receiving messages too aren't they i mean all that sniffing around is like trying to see what other dogs have left it's their twitter explore tab If you've got a question, then email your question. If you've got a question, then email your question. Answer me this podcast at googlemail.com.

Answer me this podcast at googlemail.com Answer me this Podcast at googlemail.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. Ten minutes each weekday, wherever you get your podcasts. Here's a question from Mark who says, people used to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. So Ollie, answer me this. How did they survive? They didn't always. They used to die.

The first person to do it did survive. Her name was Annie Edson Taylor. She was 63 at the time. Wow. Although she always claimed to be in her 40s, but afterwards it was deemed that she was around 63. It was 1901, which just felt late to me. Like all of those Pat and the Brown pictures

of people in barrels at Niagara Falls, I had in my head as like 1850 something. Well, she wasn't the first one to try. I think she was just the first one to successfully do it in a barrel frankly i'm a bit bleak this but i do think she probably thought you know if i die what am i losing if i don't i'm gonna be i'm gonna be a millionaire that stunt is paved with gold yeah but she wasn't didn't work out for her no she died in a pauper's grave and uh her last years were spent as a street vendor in niagara

kind of clawing to that celebrity a bit like people who have worked for nasa walking around at cape canaveral talking to tourists but really you know she wasn't the Neil Armstrong of that scenario. She could have like been sponsored by Red Bull though in later times. Yeah that's right. So she had a wooden pickle barrel and she had a leather harness inside it and a load of cushions to break her fall. Yeah not high tech. And then there were all these copycats. So between her stunt in 1901 and 1995, 15 people went over the falls and 10 of them didn't die. But they used different modes of transport like jet skis and kayaks as well as barrels. Well, yeah, the jet ski and the kayak examples are the most recent ones and both those guys did die. Yeah.

Even if you go back to the 1900s when people were watching the tightrope walkers on niagara falls the the spectator psychology of that is basically they might die isn't it which i've always felt uncomfortable about even in circus and stuff like yeah it is amazing if someone achieves it but also i really don't like that jeopardy of you could be about to watch someone plummet to their death but there's a big spread isn't there like if you're watching a tightrope walker in the circus they've probably done it many many many many times and are really expert and they can be fairly confident that although it feels like mortal peril it's not i mean if you're watching so the guy who first did it was summer 1859 uh the great blondin a tightrope act who did a series of walks across the gorge at niagara falls and having survived the first one he then upped the stakes every time.

He first did it riding a bicycle, then pushing a wheelbarrow, then with his hands and legs bound in chains. Nope. This is the problem, that if you don't die, the stakes get higher for every next person that has to try and do it. So in 1867, there was a lady called Maria Speltarina, who crossed Niagara wearing woven baskets instead of shoes and with her head covered by a paper bag. Why?

Did she make it? She did make it, actually, yeah. But, you know, she equally could have not made it. And that's, I've always found that, don't you find that uncomfortable, that daredevil stuff? Like the real origin of the word daredevil is daring the devil to take your soul, right? It's a sort of quasi sport where

you are acknowledging it's likely you might die and i've always felt really uncomfortable watching that well none of us really have the uh daredevil instinct do we that is long proven but also i think crossing it on a tightrope whilst terrifying looking is not the same as throwing yourself off 175 foot tall fall no i don't understand it works because if you fell that distance even into water that would like definitely kill you right is it that if you're falling with the water and the water the flow of the water is somehow slowing you down is that how people survive it i don't even understand how that would work it's it doesn't appear to be the interior because my obvious answer to that question martin would be well it depends you know what you some of them have had rubber balls inside you know

some of them have had special breathing apparatus some of them have created special harnesses but actually if you go right back to that first woman who did it and actually came out basic with bruises she just had as helen said some cushions yeah so so i think it is just luck about how the water carries you isn't it like lots of weird things with water and gravity like if if you just hit the right bit, it's like surfing, isn't it? If you hit the right bit of the wave, presumably it's just not as intense. Annie Edson Taylor went over in a wooden pickle barrel, as aforementioned. In 1911, there was the first man to go over the falls. He was a stuntman from the circus.

And he went down in an eight foot long steel barrel, which I'm not sure I'd prefer that to a wood due to it being less buoyant. And he broke his jaw and both kneecaps and spent six months in hospital, although he did survive. But then he went on tour around the world with his barrel. But then in 1926, while in New Zealand, he slipped on an orange peel, broke his leg and he died from complications a couple of months later from the leg break and amputation I suppose that is the attitude of the daredevil isn't it you know yes this particular thing there's a 50 50 chance I'll live or die but

I'm also as likely at some point in my life to die of something completely seemingly inconsequential yeah have you seen the documentary free solo about the guy who free climbs up things like the half dome in Yosemite? No, I had a shitty row with my wife because she watched it on Netflix and I wanted to see it. So now I've got to try and find the time one evening to do it without her. So no, I haven't. I don't think it's a spoiler to say he has that kind of attitude

where it's like, yeah, I might die, whatever. But it's all the people that facilitate them that I don't understand. Because for one thing, whatever method you use nowadays, going over Niagara Falls is illegal. Yes, it's a huge fine. How much? It's 10,000 Canadian dollars or 25,000 US dollars. I suppose it depends on whether you go over on the Canada side or the US side. Well, also the people that drop you there, someone in most cases has to man a boat and then push you off the boat just before the falls so you're endangering someone by getting them close to the falls i mean that person effectively is sort of assisting suicide

really aren't they in the cases where the person doesn't live you could you could argue that's manslaughter like yes they wanted to but i mean a lot of these people if you look back through their biographies now you'd say they were not of sound mind when they did it. Wow. I was reading about Jean Lussier's big rubber ball that he went down in in 1928. It cost his life savings of $1,500. And it sounds like a swanky rubber ball. It's lined with steel bands, 32 inner tubes to act as shock absorbers. The bit in the middle where he sat had an air cushion and valves with air tanks. So he had 40 hours of oxygen

in case he was trapped underwater. And then 68 kilos of hard rubber in the bottom for ballast. He did live, didn't he, that one? He sold bits of the rubber ball as souvenirs. So that's very enterprising. A lot of entrepreneurs doing this. Well, you mentioned entrepreneurs, Helen.

I think my favourite example, although it's also the most depressing, is William Forsyth in 1827. He was the owner of the Pavilion Hotel in Niagara and came up with an idea for a terrific publicity stunt. Let's get people really talking about our hotel. Want to come to Niagara Falls. What we'll do, Helen, is we'll buy an old merchant ship called the Michigan.

We'll fill it with wild animals and then we'll send it over Niagara Falls. What? So you're basically sending a zoo over a waterfall. Death arc. That would be the hashtag now, wouldn't it? 10,000 tourists turned up to see two bears escape through the hole. Yes. And then the live deaths of numerous buffalo, raccoons and foxes.

And the survival of a single goose. Wow. Did the bears then go and fuck everyone up that was responsible? I hope so. Helen and Ollie, answer me this. I don't want you to dance or kiss but reveal your theories and take off your muzzle ponder my query and

solve this puzzle it's swell good golly you crazy kids oh Helen and Ollie answer me this. that they are publicizing a lot of cognitive behavioral therapy videos suddenly so i think they probably are taking the temperature of what people need if you want to do yeah meditation de-stress take up yoga all of that sort of stuff they've got learn about geology something that's

restful but also just take up a new hobby like if you want to learn how to make pasta you can do that with a lecture on there from a chef at the culinary institute of america for instance just boil it for 12 minutes oh professional lecturer here getting in on the acts what do you talk about for the other three hours martin anyway there is so much more on the great courses plus what have you been watching helen black capital african americans in washington dc it's a short course there's just three at the moment i was watching a great one with them nikisha direct who does public art, so like murals and things, sort of talking about her life in art as underrepresented in galleries and what

it means to have this art where people can publicly interact with it and who you feature in it. And I would take a full course from her, hint, hint, Great Courses Plus. Well, if you want to find a course that suits you, you should sign up with our special URL, thegreatcoursesplus.com answer when you go there you get an entire month of unlimited access for free so do that thegreat courses plus.com answer here's a question from uh meredith in galway who says i was recently reading the novel cold comfort farm uh remind us who's that who's that by? That is by Stella Gibbons, and it is a fun novel

that is kind of taking the piss out of the pastoral novels of the 20s and 30s when there was a real interwar trend for those where they were like, the land, the country is so wholesome and healthy as a response to the traumas of the war.

Okay, so actually written, what, in the 50s or something? It was written in 1931 and published in 1932 oh okay okay so contemporaneously taking the piss out of other novels that were that were doing the country thing and it's set in west sussex on a farm they're all quite 19th century and then there is a london interloper called flora post who's an orphan who's gone to live with these distant relatives who is sort of trying to bring them into more modern times that's the shtick well

meredith has enjoyed the book helen you'll be pleased to know uh although she says i was a bit let down by the ending were they in purgatory the whole time is that what happened well that's an interesting interpretation uh but there's one part that really threw me off two characters one in london one in sussex are having a phone conversation. I'll quote. Thanks. Claude twisted the television dial and amused himself by studying Flora's fair pensive face. She could not look at him because public telephones were not fitted with television dials. Okay, so just to recap, you've got someone called Claude on the phone who also has video access to flora who is on a public telephone who cannot see claude because no videos in public phones helen answer

me this what the hell there is no other indication that this book is science fiction or takes place in any other time than normal 1930s england and yet a video phone is just dropped in like everyone knows that video phones are a thing. So what's going on? You say there's no other indication, Meredith. And to be fair to you, I had read this book several times and not thought, oh, this isn't actually set at the time it's written. But it isn't.

Okay. It's set in the future. And there are a few little clues, like someone sort of refers to Clark Gable's peak as having been 20 years ago, whereas actually the 30s were his peak. There's the mention of the Anglo-Nicaraguan Wars of 46, even though the book was printed in 1932. And there are all these other things, like Mayfair is a slum, even though it was very posh then it still is now railways are in trouble because private citizens are taking air taxis everywhere and have their own little planes so it's subtly indicating that actually it's it is sort of science fiction so it's sort of like russell

davis's uh years and years isn't it the first few episodes of that where you sort of don't notice that it's the future and then suddenly something mad happens. And also like when you're reading it now, you're just like, oh, a period novel. And so you just picture them in 1930s garb because you don't have the context that video phones were uncommon at the time. Although in fact, ever since the phone was patented in 1876, video phones had also been in the conversation about phones.

And particularly in the 20s, there was a lot of research and development on them AT&T were really trying to get them started and by 1930 they had a two-way television phone system did they that was like in experimental use but the first public video phone wasn't till 1936 but the whole time that phones had existed there had been like a lot of public splashes about like video phones just around the corner you know how things are now like space tourism like in six months they'll be the first tourist space flights so it's like that so stella gibbons probably would have known about that concept and i guess the point of it was not only to be like this is the future but to make these

rural characters who lived in these like quite unmodernized ways and like still used a twig to do their washing up rather than even a sponge or a brush to make them seem even more backward in comparison. Yes. It's a fascinating thing to consider, particularly the portrayal of videophones in popular culture, because they are such an obvious concept. Whether it's Dick Tracy with his smartwatch or 2001 A Space Odyssey calling back back to earth it's an obvious thing that in the future people would want to be able to see as well as hear people and all of that popular culture was created at a time people could hear people telephonically so it's not a huge imaginative

leap and yet the realities of how the video phone has actually now arrived i.e in all our pockets on smartphones in the developed world, was never really portrayed. So if you watch 2001 A Space Odyssey, it looked futuristic in actual 2001. So Kubrick was ahead of it by 30 years. But now we have video phones in 2020, it looks incredibly dated because it's like a booth with physical buttons. But it's fascinating to think that it was

being considered as early as the 1930s. Well, it's fascinating to think that it was being considered as early as the 1930s what has been considered in the 1870s i mean i know because it's a bit of disney trivia actually that one of the first video phones was in 1964 um that was actually available for the public to use because it was at disneyland so you could you could call from disneyland to the world's fair um and that was hugely popular, as you'd expect, because the people that were in Disneyland and the World's Fair were there to see a kind of theme park or tourist attraction, and it was an amazing whiz-bang thing to see.

But then when, I think it was AT&T, then rolled it out into kind of places that weren't fun palaces. I think they put one in New York Grand Central Station and one in Chicago or something. But to actually do it was hugely unpopular because it was so fucking expensive. It cost something like, in modern cash, about 200 quid to make a two-minute call,

which you had to book in advance. And then the other person would be sitting in the train station waiting for it. And it was really just seen as a huge waste of money. There was a great BBC adaptation of Cold Comfort Farm in, I think, 1995, and it starred really just seen as a huge waste of money there was a great bbc adaptation of cold comfort farm in i think 1995 and it starred kate beckinsale in her breakout role and also just like all the british actors like ian mckellen has a five minute role and you think who would waste in mckellen these days rufus sewell's in it stephen fry the cast is really stacked and it's all

available on youtube and it is very comforting. It's pretty fun. But in that, they don't really make reference to the science fiction elements of the book. It just looks like the 30s, like people are dressed as flappers and stuff. I wonder if that's a good way to future-proof your book then. Yeah. Set it 20 years in the future so that people at the time think it's really cutting edge. And then if you get your predictions right, then in 20 years' time, people read it and they think, oh yeah still feels relevant and then in the future when

people do it as a period drama they've lost the distinction between the time that you wrote it and 20 years later anyway yeah maybe i suppose because technology does date really badly maybe that's why people hedge when iphones come out they don't necessarily explicitly show them in everyday dramas for several years but yeah maybe you're right but then in this it is like well if you're talking about this other war actually there was a much more plausible major war that they might have predicted at this time but not wanted to there's some casual anti-semitism that feels like significant of its time yeah probably not so popular in the 1950s that i wonder how many other things there are that people don't realise are science fiction. Yeah.

Oliver Twist. People don't realise, but Fagin was running a spaceship. Before you name your baby, have you bought their name.com? If you don't, their future digital brand will bomb. Or a spammy bastard will use their name to sell porn. Or some cheap off-brand Viagra. Every Squarespace account comes with a free URL. So until your child is old enough to rebel,

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you can get a 10% discount off your website or domain if you use our code answer. Here's a question left in voice form from Megan. So it's autumn, we're baking an apple pie and we're wondering why when you bake the pie crust with no filling in it, it's called blind baking. The closest thing we could find was that it's a mistranslation from a French term, but we couldn't find anything conclusive. Yeah, that mistranslation of French term seems purely speculative. The French phrase for blind baking is queer à blanc,

which literally means to bake white. And they're like, maybe they misheard blanc as blind, which I don't buy it. Blind baking is when you bake the bottom of a tart or pie where it's just the pastry, you haven't put the filling in yet. And usually you put a piece of paper in and weigh it down with dried beans coins stones from the beach or you can get these special little fake baking beans and does this process apply whether you're making savory or sweet pie well it's just so that the bottom of it isn't soggy the simplest explanation for why that

is called blind baking is that when you've covered the pastry with weights and paper, you can't see it. Yes. You can't tell whether it's cooked. I mean, you can't see whether it has turned a little bit golden. You just have to guess. And there's so much in baking that's so precise and quasi-scientific, isn't there, that I can imagine that practitioners of baking, of which I'm not one, would want to differentiate that skill because you're more of an artisan if you can do that you're not just following a recipe you have to use your innate abilities yeah well another explanation people have is that it's blind baking because if you're a professional pastry chef then you can tell from smell whether the pastry is done to the extent you need it to be done in the blind baking not with your eyes with your smell the last explanation

that i've seen that is plausible but less plausible than the other ones, is that there's another meaning of the word blind, which is like something being closed off or empty. So like in engineering, a blind hole is a hole that doesn't go all the way through something, like it will have a sealed end or something. Like a blind alley. Yeah.

So the pie is tenuously like that you're baking the base the thing that is blocking the pipe i'm not sold on it but i think it's better than the mishearing blanc here's another question of food from kate who says ollie answer me this why hasn't there been a vegetarian or vegan contestant on i'm a celebrity get me out of here they seem to all tuck into the jungle fair quite willingly. Are they starved to the point where they will eat anything? Or do they specify only meat eaters can apply? Well, interesting use of the word apply, isn't it? I imagine the process is you call around the agents of the people you really want, and then you end up with the people

that they fob you off on. I'm not sure it's an application as such. There have been vegetarian and vegan contestants on I'm a Celebrity. What's interesting though, Kate, is that, as you say, most of them end up eating the anus anyway. Is this programme available everywhere? Do a lot of people not know what we're talking about where celebrities have to live in a jungle for two weeks and eat grubs in order to win popularity? It's in Germany because I know they filmed that version straight after the British version on the same set. And it's also in the US, although only sporadically and has never really been a huge hit because they had... Is it Survivor that's basically the same?

Survivor's pretty big, yeah. Got Naked and Afraid as well, which is non-celebs. Right, but basically it's a game show where a load of celebrities go to a jungle, usually, although this year it's going to be in a castle in Wales because of COVID. What are they going to eat there? like mice just welsh delicacies i don't know they could end up in all kinds of trouble couldn't they if they're making a comparison sounds all right sounds like a group

holiday big brother but with no central heating essentially yeah or like a country house murder mystery it'd be like and then there were none that'd be fun but anyway, part of the crucial kind of DNA of the show's success is, I suppose there's supposed to be a kind of schadenfreude element. Like, you know, this person thinks they're a hoity-toity politician, but look, ho-ho, they have to eat a testicle. But also an element of kind of, once you get on side with the people because you've been following them for a week in reality TV format, there's an element of, oh, they're game for a laugh, really.

You know, they used to be a dictator but they're all right really um and part of that part of the process of winning yourself over to the british public apparently is by putting various revolting foods into your mouth grubs testicles fish eyes like kangaroo penis blended rat's tails that sort of stuff a lot of people eat grubs and fish eyes just for normal so is there a kind of english like yes i think so i think there's just a real snobbery about it now i mean actually i've eaten crickets i mean admittedly it was a part of an item on a podcast but i have eaten crickets and they tasted fine i've eaten crickets yeah also witch tea grubs that's a major protein source in indigenous australian food so british celebrities in australia eating them shouldn't be such a like

cause of upset but anyway so yes there have been for example fleur east is vegan uh sayer khan is vegan they both took part in 2018 but what's interesting is they did both eat these grubs and stuff as part of the show which sort of suggests to me and it's one of the things i don't like about watching it they don't really want to do this stuff they're doing because they're so desperate to be popular and they've identified that if they don't take part in that one of the things i don't like about watching it they don't really want to do this stuff they're doing because they're so desperate to be popular and they've identified that if they don't take part in that round of the show which is the most popular then they themselves may not be popular and that desperation is what i find really uncomfortable about watching it there are challenges as well where you don't have to eat stuff aren't there there are ones

where you can have like rats crawling all over your body that kind of thing yeah yeah and if you think about it actually there have been older celebrities that are excused from some of those physical ones they will say in the voiceover you know rick parfitt declined to dangle himself off the side of a camper van because of pre-existing medical conditions so that you know you are excused on medical grounds from certain challenges and theoretically the show's producers will allow vegans to do that but they actually haven't taken the option shappi korsandi is vegan and ditched her diet for the show and was then really really sick because she was eating meat not the not the kangaroo testicles but just the camping food just because she hadn't eaten meat for ages yeah are they

supposedly obtaining all of their own food as well as part of the exercise or is it supplied by crew no no they win the food so that's the again the horrible element of the format is you win the gold stars and then if you get enough gold stars, you feed the camp. But the drama comes from if you've underperformed in the task because you haven't put enough mouse legs down your trousers, then your camp mates will starve that night, you know, in inverted commas. So no, the food is supplied by the production team, apart from when they go rogue and then they get in trouble. So Gina DeCampo got in trouble for cooking and eating a rat that he found on the camp. They can't check whether he's going to get some diseases from the rat meat because they haven't supplied it. No, no, just RSPCA Australia were like, don't eat our wild animals because the animals that they eat on the set as part of the games are animals that are bred on set specifically for that purpose.

I mean, really, what's the distinction there? Like, if anything, it's the only part of the show that was authentic. It was like, okay, put a chef in the wilderness the wilderness yeah he gets to kill an animal and eat it yeah but I suppose you don't want him to kill and eat an animal that is either endangered or venomous I mean a rat is clearly neither right yeah but he might be like oh maybe this is an Australian rat and it's a platypus which has got a poisonous heel spur I think you'd have to be pretty bad at identifying animals to a platypus that the people uh going on i'm a celebrity martin are bright well they're maybe not that good at australian fauna we have a friend who used to produce come dine with me and she said

that often vegetarians would cook meat because they thought they had a better chance of winning so i was wondering whether it's similar there as well just um in reality tv vegetarians feel like things are weighted against their victory well it's a problematic show to do if you're a vegan for ethical reasons it's not just eating the animals is it there's like challenges where you have to like stamp on rodents to get through a mud tunnel or whatever or they'll just like drop things on your face you know and you're just supposed to bat them out the way. And obviously they get injured and hurt doing that. Like the animals probably don't die,

but it's not very nice for them. Are there challenges that don't involve other living creatures at all? Not really, no. I can't think of any because there's always a tank of crickets or something that gets, you know, up your pants is the joke. It's interesting the stuff about

the dedicated bug breeding factory on site though. On average, for each series of I'm a Celebrity, get me out of here, when it's in Australia, they breed 250,000 cockroaches, 153,000 crickets, 2.5 million mealworms, 400 spiders, 500 rats and 30 snakes. Breeding cockroaches feels counterintuitive. Right. What about the kangaroos whose penises and anuses they eat? Yeah, no, I think those are byproducts of kangaroos that have been slaughtered for me elsewhere.

I'd be very surprised if ITV was in the business of breeding a kangaroo so it could be killed for its anus to be eaten by Lisa Riley. But who knows? Maybe. My lords, ladies and gentlemen, I am the Crown Jewels. You might know me as a euphemism for a testes and wangpipe. But Helen, answer me this. Did you know that in my day job, I'm actually the Queen's hat? Fancy.

Here's a question from Aled and Beth from Bristol who say, a best friend of ours is getting married next month. Helen, answer me this. What on earth is the logic of having to post your wedding notice in the local town hall before you can get married? Do people ever complain? And if so, what happens next? Take your wedding license away.

We're intrigued as it feels like such a ludicrously outdated process. Yeah, it is. Like a lot of things to do with weddings. Yeah, particularly in England and Wales, where there are so many specific laws about where you can get married and by whom. They mean the civil wedding bands. It's like the wedding bands that they read out in church. You're going to have to talk me through it because you had to do that.

But actually, my wife and I, even though we got married in British territory, Gibraltar is different. So we didn't do this. So what do you have to do when you say you're going to get married? You have to go to your local register office. Bromley Registry Office. We went to Bromley, beautiful Bromley. And you have to have lived in that registration district for at least seven days before going. So you don't have to be a resident of the place,

but you still have to go and do it. It doesn't have to be the one where your marriage is taking place, but you do already have to have booked the ceremony in. And you have to go at least 29 days before your ceremony because that's when they post the marriage listings, basically. Think of it as a timeout for upcoming marriages. And you have to take with you documents to prove your identity. So you need passport or birth certificate. Now that bit makes sense by the way, doesn't it?

Yeah, you're not siblings. You need proof of address like a bill. If you've been married before you have to take proof of divorce or annulment or of your previous spouse's death. Fine. If you're not from here, you have to take immigration documents as well. But why do you have to post it outside on a board? So then if people are like, oh, I know that this person is a bigamist, or I know that this person is a blood relative, or this person is actually underage, they can say, I mean, I don't know who actually looks at them. No. When people get it done in a church, it's read out three services in a row. So it's a lot easier in a church to be like,

what, Ollie's getting married, but he's married to my sister. Yes. It feels like a sort of hangover from like the parish model of life, doesn't it? That you go and see someone's name on the church door and be like, well, that person's already married. Yeah. And that makes sense, I guess, still in small villages where the church is still at the centre of village life, even if you're not religious,

just because that's where you go for your playgroup and your coffee morning. Right. But I don't know who's going to Bromley Town Hall. If you're on a day out in Bromley and you want something to read, go to the register office. But why isn't it online, Helen? That's the obvious thing, isn't it? Like, OK, yes, do it on the Town Hall for tradition, fine,

but surely publish it somewhere where people might actually see it. An awful lot of things about weddings in england are surprisingly paper-based so like when we were getting married we had to get married outside even though that doesn't really happen in britain like outside venues are not licensed because they log your marriage in a book and they can't risk the book getting wet because that's the wedding book i also wonder, if you put it online, it would start to represent a privacy issue, wouldn't it? And then there's things like the electoral register, but generally that kind of information about our lives is not on the internet and in the public domain.

And does it have things like your address on it? I can't remember how much information is in the marriage announcement. No, it probably even says, like, son of so-and-so and so-and-so. Right. There's a lot of personal information there that you wouldn't want them just to shove it on Twitter. Yeah. And retweet if this is a lawful marriage kind of thing. Also could get a bit stalky. Exactly.

But I wonder, are there any examples in the 21st century of a wedding being scuppered as a result of a town hall notice being posted? Because if there aren't, then it's obviously just a ridiculous thing to do, isn't it? It's such a long time since I read Take a Break magazine, but probably. Because I've always really wanted to interview someone who's been jilted at the altar. I think that's fascinating. And you only ever hear the Take a Break version, but I wonder what it's like 20 years later when you look back on it. Probably still quite painful. Yeah. But wouldn't it be fascinating to hear that story? But I've tried a few times to find a case study and it's surprising, but but reassuring how relatively rarely that actually happens like it's in drama all the time but people generally

aren't jilted at the altar they cancel their wedding the day before that's a bit different and i wonder if in reality it just doesn't happen i've always wondered you know in that situation where the vicar says his phone anyone has any uh lawful impediments speak now or forever hold your peace and someone goes yes this person was married to me like how does that person like find out and get to the wedding and maybe it is through this process of like oh i'm not going to say anything to the registry office i'll just turn up on the day and create a lot of drama yeah exactly i'll max out my appearance in their wedding video i suppose also you you needed to give people the title. Like in Jane Eyre, it may have been a pretty slow journey

to get there in order to disrupt the wedding. Might have been a 29-day ride for... Yeah, exactly. I think it's okay to give a spoiler for a 200-year-old book. Well, that brings us to the end of this episode of Answer Me This. And we have one more episode left for this year. And if you have any festive questions get them in soon yes tinsel old saint nick three wise men brandy butter all that shit next episode christmas

episode your christmas questions please january too late for those no one wants them yeah now is the time to send them i've got to get them in by the end of november and our contact details are on our website answer me thisethispodcast.com. And if you want to send us a voicemail, then the best way is to record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us. And we have already covered a lot of pressing festive questions. You can hear them in the Answer Me This Christmas album, which is available at answermethistore.com,

along with our other five exclusive albums. And our first 200 episodes and our best of collections. But you can discover even more audio from us across the internet. So much. Yes, so much. I mean, Oli makes half the podcasts that exist. So that's a lot to keep you busy. Not sure that number's strictly accurate. 40%.

I do make five podcasts. You can discover them all at oliman.com. And on this month's edition of my magazine show, The Modern Man, I meet a couple whose lives were fucked by a technological error. They lost their house, they lost their business, and the husband went to prison for a crime he did not commit. Shit. The episode is called Justice by Numbers,

and you can find that at modernmanwith2ends.co.uk. Bloody hell. I'm just going to be having panic dreams about that kind of thing now. What's on the Zaltzometer this month? On The Illusionist, it's probably a bit late for November. Well, they're always relevant. We had a fun collection of Halloweeny words. Oh, yeah, yeah.

So words that you wouldn't necessarily know had scary origins like lemur and nickel. And Veronica Mars Investigations has just completed season two, and that's all at vmipod.com. And Martin? I've got a podcast called Song by Song, which is about the music of Tom Waits. We've just kicked off our Mule Variation season, which is an album that listeners might have heard, because it's quite a popular one. We've got some great guests coming up on that, including Chad Clark from the band Beauty Pill. Check that out at songbysongpodcast.com.

Or you can listen to my music. I've got some fairly new albums out at palebird.bandcamp.com Or and or. I mean, you can do both. Do both. Maybe not at the same time. That would be confusing because it's a music podcast and music and that could clash a little. We will be back halfway through the month with a Retro Answer Me

This episode plopped into your feed. With an all new commentary from us. Yes. But you do have to subscribe to hear it. So search for Answer Me This in your podcast app of choice and hit subscribe now. Our mutual friend Tommy says that he thinks the retro Answer Me This is a very important cultural artefact. I suppose it's people voicing their extreme regret at their previous online selves. And we will be back with our Christmas spectacular on the first

Thursday of December. Bye!