FACTORALY - E108 CHAIRS

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

There are so many different sorts of chairs. We use them every day, but how much do we really know about them? In this episode, we explore chairs, ranging from the earliest to the most recent, from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, Bruce. Hi, Simon. How are you today? I'm sitting comfortably, thank you very much. How are you? Well, if you're sitting comfortably, then I'll begin. What are you sitting on? I'm sitting on a stool. I record these things in a small voiceover booth and therefore I don't have room for the nice big, luxurious, ergonomic chair that you have. So I'm perched on the edge of a store. Yes, my wing-backed leather chair. Your chesterfield. My chest afield.

Yes. So this is, yeah, what? Well, exactly. That's what I was going to say. So before we get too much further Hello Hello everyone I'm Simon Wells

Yes you are And he's Bruce Fielding Am I? I think so Last time I checked anyway Hello Yeah And together we are

Wild Stallions Oh I love that you get that No together we are Factorally We are How would you define factorally For anyone who's here For the first time today Bruce

Okay. Factorally is 30 minutes of your life you'll never get back. Yes, very good. But you wouldn't want to, would you? Well, no, you wouldn't because in 30 minutes' time, you will have learned an awful lot of stuff about stuff that you didn't know before. Yes. And today, the stuff that you'll be learning about is chairs. That's correct. Today's stuff is chairs. There are an awful lot of things. of chairs, aren't there? Yes. Do you know, it's part of my research into this. I had a look at something.

Go on. There are 210 different sorts of chair that you can buy in IKEA. Just in IKEA. Just in IKEA. And as a voiceover, I would attempt their names. Oh, go on. But frankly, I'm not going to. Okay, fine. Because they've all got like odd little accents on the top of. Umlouts galore. Yes. Well, not just omelouts, but little little circles and all sorts. Oh, fun. But there's things like the Skogster, the Hager, the Tobias, the Ajan, the Vloxov. I mean, there are an awful lot of chairs. I found a list of chairs, which was more generic than specifically IKEA.

Okay. It attempted to list all the different types of chair that exist. There are around 250 individually named types of chair, which I thought was preposterous. A handful of the ones. that I'd actually heard of include Big Breath Dining chair, rocking chair, wing back chair, armchair, folding chair, stool, director's chair,

captain's chair, deck chair, dentists, chair, high chair, etc., etc. There are just a lot of different types of chairs with different purposes. Yes. So we won't be going into all of those. No, we're going to some of them. Yeah, yeah.

We'll poke at a few of them that catch our interest a bit. Yes. What's your favourite chair? Oh, I suppose my armchair. I have a fairly deep, comfy, squishy leather armchair that I sit in of an evening doing my research for factorily. Is it button-backed? It's not button-backed, no, it's just, I wouldn't know how to describe it. Soft and comfy.

Soft and comfy, yes. I would love a button-backed. I'd love one of those sort of gorgeous old red leather chairs that you find in a vintage pub one day. I inherited a pair of chairs from my mum, which are called salon chairs. Oh, lovely, yeah. and they were that sort of slightly faded green velvet. Yes. And I've had them completely restyed, recovered.

Oh, you have, haven't you? They're sort of a tweedy material now, aren't it? It's like a diamond-colored, I'll tell you what. We have a thing which we call our show notes, which is actually our blog. It is. And there's all sorts of stuff in the blog. I'll put a picture of my mum's salon chairs in the book. They're basically, I've had all the brown wood re-sprayed sort of silver and grey.

and it's got a very modern material on it. It looks great. Well, if you're going to do that, I'll put a photo of my brown leather armchair and matching footstool on there. Oh, there you go. Footstool. Ottoman.

Oh, an Ottoman, yes, from the Empire. Yes, I have an Ottoman. Do you? Yes. Oh, wonderful. So, chairs, let's start at the very beginning. For a start, what's a chair, Bruce, in its loosest terms? Okay, I think a chair is something that raises you off the floor.

A chair is probably something that raises a single person. Yes. Whereas there are chairs that hold more than one person, which are called things like sofas and cites. Yes, exactly. Shays long and all sorts of different things. Yes. But I think it's just something that raises you off the ground.

Yes, pretty much. It lifts you off the ground. It allows you to sit. They often have, unless we're talking about stools, they usually have a back for you to sort of recline against. Sometimes they have arms. Sometimes they don't. depending on their purpose.

But yes, it's an individual sitting implement. Yeah. Spike Milligan has a very good poem about it. Does he? He does. Would you care to recite it for us now? Yes. They chop down 100 foot trees to make chairs.

I bought one. I am 6 foot 1 inch. When I sit on the chair, I am 4 foot 2. Did they really chop down 100 foot tree to make me look shorter? that's very good that's very good oh well done spike i like that it's one of my favorite poems nice um so i had as as is my want i had a look at the etymology of the word chair it seems like a fairly simple word word that wouldn't have an interesting etymology but it does oh so the word chair comes from the old french cherey i assume that's the pronunciation and the old french chalet comes from latin i don't

quite see how this is connected. They're quite different, but the Latin cathedral eventually became the French chere. And a Latin cathedral specifically refers to a seat, a bishop sits on, in his cathedral. So a cathedral is a bishop's chair, you know, those sort of almost throne-like looking seats. And a cathedral is the building that has the seat of the bishop's authority within it. So those two are connected. So that's interesting. Interesting.

And then around the same time as the French chairae, came the French chaise, which literally means chair in order to denote, you know, make the difference between a chair for the every person and, you know, throny type, bishopy ones. Yep. And then the chaise, that's where you get chaise long, meaning a long chair.

And of course, the German for a chair isn't a chair at all. It's a stool. Oh, is that where we get a stool? Yes. Wonderful. There you go, then. But also a stool is a chair. Yes, a stool is a chair, but a chair.

isn't necessarily a stool yes so how old are chairs bruce do you know um i would say that they okay so i think i think we're not back with the dinosaurs on this one i think we're a bit further forward not quite that far back this time so i reckon it's usually either the romans the greeks or the egyptians isn't it okay i'm going i'm going of the three i'm going for egyptian very good well done. Yes? Yes, the Egyptians. The earliest records we've got of chairs come from around 2,700 BC in ancient Egypt. Okay. That's not the oldest chair we have, but, you know, there are engravings and hieroglyphs and all that sort of stuff picturing chairs, usually thrones. So what did people sit on before they had chairs? Just a mat on the floor.

But, well, I mean, I guess they would have sat on stones. Because if you look at places where people would watch a play or something like that, there would be tears of stone. That's true. Yeah, sort of in an amphitheatre type of situation, yeah. Yes, I think I sort of picture, you know, if you go back to that kind of era, I think everyone's just sitting around on the floor or, you know, reclining on the floor or whatever. In ancient Egypt, it seems to have only been the higher echelons who could have a chair

in order to elevate them, you know, figuratively and literally, elevate them above everyone else. Okay. Not terribly far. These ancient Egyptian chairs were only about 10 inches or so higher than the floor. So you could still put your legs out in front of you and kind of recline, you know. But still, yeah, they're very much chair looking. They're made of wood.

They've got four legs, a back, a couple of arms, quite clearly a chair. Interesting. I sort of had a look around just in the vast expanse of my memory and just sort of thought, What kind of chair sticks out when I hear the word chair? What do I instantly think of? Yes. And a couple of things popped out. One was something that I knew existed, but I didn't know it had a name until now.

It's called a hood chair. Okay. As in Robin. Yes. And I first discovered this chair several years ago at a pub in London called The Gun, which is out in the Docklands in the East End of London. And there's this chair, a beautiful sort of leather armchair with a little. bit of a roof.

The whole thing is sort of oval-backed. So it looks like half a scooped-out egg shell. Yes. On legs with arms. As opposed to one of those eggshell chairs that were very popular in the 60s. Which are impossible to get out of, yes. Not those. An armchair with a rounded back and a little bit of a roof.

It's called a hood chair. And apparently these used to be, they look lush. You know, they're sort of button-backed leather chairs. But apparently they were originally for servants who were attending the door at their master's house, castle, palace. So the quick, quick to get in and out of? Quick to get in and out of, but also sheltered from the wind. Because if you're sitting by the front door the whole time,

letting people in and out of the front door, you get a bit of a draft. So you sort of put yourself in a corner against the doorframe with this hooded chair and you nestle back into the hood of the chair and it kind of keeps you protected from the wind. And I hadn't realised that's what they were for, let alone that they had a name. Interesting. So that was the first kind of chair I thought of. See, when I think of a chair, I think of Vincent Van Gogh. Oh, do you now?

Yeah, he had a painting of a chair. I don't know. I'm sure everybody knows this painting. It's like a very simple, rustic, wooden chair with a woven straw seat on the tiled floor. Yeah, very square, very sort of kitchen table type chair. Yeah, and there's a pipe and some tobacco sitting on the, sitting on the chair. And that, to me, is the, that's the quintessence. of a chair.

Brilliant. And that's currently the National Gallery, I think you can go and see that. Oh, is it? Yeah. Similar to that, I found, again,

I hadn't realised this had a name, I just sort of accepted it as being a chair, but have you heard of a bentwood chair? Yes, I have. I used to have some.

Did you? What can you tell us of your personal experience of bentwood chairs then? They're very uncomfortable. You need to put cushion on them, otherwise your ass gets sort of numb after a while. Sure, yeah. But these are, gosh, it's hard to describe something so visual on an audio platform, isn't it? This is why we have show

notes. Exactly, there you go. Go and have a look whilst you're listening to this. Pause this right now. Go and have a look at the show notes and then you'll go, oh, that's what they're talking about. So a bentwood chair, essentially if you picture a Parisian cafe, those wooden chairs that have the back is entirely made out of a couple of pieces of bent wood. hence the name. So there's sort of a curved into an oval shape. The seat often has that sort of woven ratan cane seat to it. And these were invented by a particular person named Michael Thonet, T-H-O-N-E-T, who was a German cabinet maker, furniture maker, from the 1800s. And he and his sons made furniture together. And they were sort of looking for a novel and slightly interesting,

but also mass-producible, quite affordable chair. Yes. And they came up with this thing that I've just described, which apparently they titled the number 14 chair. So as with WD40 and PIMS number 7 or whatever, you can sort of a picture, they've gone through 13 previous models and thought, not quite. It's the same shape as like a Christine Keeler type share, isn't it?

Except rather than being solid, it's two bits of bent wood. Absolutely, yeah. So the back is very minimalist. It's just a couple of bent, bent bits of cane um and uh this thing was they they created this thing in 1859 um good looking inexpensive quite popular cafes and restaurants went absolutely mad for it just because of those things by 1930 they had sold 50 million of this number 14 chair yeah 50 million wow so in the space of 70 years they'd sold 50 million of these chairs and um yeah so never have to work again never no

they wouldn't absolutely um and so those ones with the hollow back the two strips of wood are yeah i totally associate those with parisian cafes or or things like that um the ones with the solid wood base they're still called a bent wood chair they sometimes the top of the back has a little curved piece to sort of nestle into your back slightly slightly more i associate those with english village halls and pubs and things like that i guess they stack really well don't they they stack well they're cheap they you can move them around easily you know you're in a pub and you go up to someone and say excuse me can i take that chair a nice light wooden chair you know does the job wow and they were ever so popular until about the the 50s and 60s when people started using

plastic and you know they they fell into decline a bit but um yes but that shape is very is so iconic it is isn't it yeah and the reason i picked up on this one uh our fellow voiceover artists and loyal listener, Debs Wardle, Hello Debs. Hello Debs. Has a history in theatre management and she told me a story of the fact that one day she went hunting high and low

for a bunch of Bentwood chairs for a stage show she was doing. Couldn't find one anywhere. As soon as the show was over, she suddenly started bumping into Bentwood chairs at every charity shop and corner store. Yeah, that's the way of the world. Yeah.

Oh, I'm not. I also have some Philippe Stark ghost chairs. So my dining table has Philippe Starke ghost chairs. Yes, it does. Tell us about ghost chairs. I saw that word written in the list, but I wasn't really sure what it was. So they're made of perspex, well, a sort of perspex. And he makes one which looks like a Louis Kahn's kind of chair, but out of plastic.

It's a very simple, stylish design. I have to say it slightly, just because I have one. No, they are, they're lovely. And the nice thing about them is that they don't take up any visual space. So when you're looking at your dining table, you just see the dining table, you don't see the chairs. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, of course, dining chairs. That's a whole category in itself, isn't it?

Yes. Dining chair and table. And then the difference between the ones with and without arms. Yes. I never quite got the hang of an armed dining chair. I quite like them, actually. I suppose you can sort of prop your elbows onto it whilst. you're using your cutlery, but it just...

I think as you get older as well, it's quite nice to have arms. Fair enough. What other chairs have you had a look at, Bruce? So I remember our episode on dentists. Hmm. When we talked about dentists inventing things. Oh, right.

And I vaguely remember that we had dentists inventing the electric chair. Oh, yes. Which a lot of things were invented by dentists. Yeah. But yeah, so... I don't remember if it was a form of punishment for his patience. Again, with a lot of these things, it's a bit like the guillotine. They're kind of invented to make, you know, snuffing out somebody's life who's done something bad,

less painful, technically. So the lecture show was made to be like a painless way of ending someone's life. That's not how I visualise them. No, me neither. Me neither. but then I don't visualise keyotines as painless either but they probably are. They're quick I suppose

aren't they? That's their benefit. So there was that Oh, I was a deck chair attendant on Eastbourne Beach. You were, weren't you? Yes, so deck chairs are fun. Yes. I can put up and take down four deck chairs in under 17 seconds.

Goodness me, can you? Yeah, I timed myself once. That's three seconds per chair. Yeah. Yes. Well done, Bruce. Time to contact Guinness. If you get to be a really good deck-chair attendant, you can probably do it quicker. I wasn't my calling.

Yeah. But yeah, I did it in about 17 seconds. Did you actually, because I sort of picture certain beaches, and I think Eastbourne still does it, you sort of have this absolute stack of deck chairs. Yes. There was a time, wasn't there, where you, presumably someone had to come up to you and ask for a deck chair. you'd take one off the stack and put it up and take their money. I think these days anyone is free to just sort of wander over and pick one up, aren't they?

Well, in my day, we used to put them out on the seafront in the morning. Oh, you actually put them out? And then pick them up at night and stack them away. Oh, right. So you had to be able to put out a lot of deck chairs very quickly. Yes. And also take them in when the rain started. Yeah.

Presumably deck chairs are so cool because they were popular on the deck of ships. Yes. Whereas now I think I just associate them with. the seaside. Yes. Or where I live, Royal Parks. There's a lot of deck chairs in parks. There are, aren't they? Often clustered around a bandstand. Yes. Yeah. In fact, there's even deck chairs down by the can't Island in Camden, which you can just sit in. Are there? I don't think they even charge you for those. I've never quite cottoned onto deck chairs. I find them very difficult to get in and out of. They seem a bit indecorous to me. In decorous? Yes. Very good. Thank you.

Thank you very much. I've been waiting for the right moment to use that. You mentioned other chairs as well. Did you mention the office chair? No, I did not, actually. Did you not? No. Because you know who invented the office chair, don't you? No, tell me. It was Joseph, Jesus' death.

No, it wasn't. It was Charles Darwin. No, it wasn't. So Charles Darwin had a lot of desks with stuff on them. Right. And he was always going between desks to look at things. and he realized that if he sort of nailed a few wheels onto the bottom of his office chair,

he would be able to get between desks faster and therefore invented the office chair. Wow. And not just getting from desk to desk, but how about if you were able to turn the chair around? Of course. For that, you need to turn to one of our well-known innovators, a chap called Thomas Jefferson.

Oh, right, yes. AKA president. Him, yeah. AKA in my mind, the guy who has half the songs in Hamilton but yes him yes so he invented the swivel chair did he yes so you had jefferson with the swivel and uh darwin with the wheels that's amazing and and there you go and off his chair wow that's um a very unlikely pairing yeah i think so i had a little look at uh the chaise long um i had one of those as well cricky we should just

put your entire home up on the website as a definition of chairs. Well, no, I had a bedroom, but I turned into a bathroom. So it was enormous. I had a bay window. Right. And in the bay window, I put this wicker chaise long. Great.

Very nice. Very nice, indeed. So a chaise long, they sort of came to prominence in 16th century France. And they just strike me as the most decadent piece of furniture. It's a chair, but it's elongated. And the arm is sort of on one end. So you can sort of recline sideways, leaning against white. end of it with your legs up at the other end.

Yes. Or if you're not particularly tall, I suppose you could technically lay out on it flat. And these were sort of invented as a halfway point for the nobility between a chair and a bed. You know, you're living the absolute life of luxury. You're a little bit sleepy after your afternoon feast. You don't really want to sit in a chair, but it's not quite time to go and retire to bed. So you go and lay on the chaise long as a somewhere in between the two. and I went on a little bit of a rabbit hole on this

purely because of the name Shea's Long which means long chair As soon as I tapped it into a particularly popular search engine to look up the history It gave me the term Shea's Lounge And I thought Oh that's interesting Is that why it's called that because the word lounge

And it isn't apparently There is a substantial proportion of people in the world who think that these thing is called a Shea's Lounge, not a Shea's Long, which I had never heard personally, but apparently it's quite a big thing. And, you know, they've taken the word long, which in French looks like, you know, it looks like a misspelling of lounge. So people have accidentally corrected it and given it a whole brand new name. And as a complete aside, I found that that process of misreading a word

and writing it in a new form until that becomes the more prevalent word, Yes. That's called an egg corn. An egg corn. An egg corn. Because in 2003, there was a particular professor of linguistics who was, you know, talking about the misunderstanding of words. And he knew a person who thought that acorns were called eggorns, just because they'd misheard it once in their youth. Yes.

They were convinced they were called eggorns. But at the same time, they said, oh, there must be lots of other examples of this. I wonder if that has a name. and this professor of linguistics said well why don't we just call it an acorn so an egg corn is now the word for a word that's been misheard or misspelled and is now pronounced or spelled a different way what a good idea not great some examples of this include the phrase beck and call beck and call yes people now say beckon call two words I'm at there beck and call because call is a bit like beckon yes I think that's what it means

a damp squid instead of a damp squib these are all eggorns Eggorns, yeah. Isn't that great? So whilst looking at chairs, I've discovered eggorns as a complete aside. Wonderful. That's the beauty of factorily, though, isn't it? That's not just. You just discover stuff that you never really thought about.

Totally, yeah. A rabbit hole leads to all sorts of things. There's another sort of a chair which looks a bit like a shazelon called a kissing chair. Oh, there is, yeah. Do you know those? So from above, it looks like a letter S. It does, yes. So they're like two chairs sort of back to back, but side by side.

Yes. So the idea is that you. You can both be sitting down. Yes. And you can both lean over and kiss each other. Isn't that lovely? Isn't that great? Very sweet.

And for some reason, those kind of remind me of telephone chairs. Just because of the sheer opulence. Well, you know who has one of those? Oh, don't tell me. No, I know you do. I've seen it. It's in your hall. It's in my hallway, yes.

So this is a lovely little, very ornate wooden chair, often with a velvet seat and back. But it is elongated. almost the size of a chaise long, but half of it is a table. Yes. To plop your telephone on it. With a drawer.

With a drawer for your phone book or notepad or whatever. Yes. At a time when telephones were very much tethered to the wall, you would sit on your telephone chair with the telephone on the table next to it. Yes. Isn't that great? Now, what a very, very specific piece of equipment. I know.

Another thing you can do with a bentwood chair, which we mentioned earlier, is make it into a rocking chair. Oh, of course, you can. Rocking chairs are really, I mean, I love a rocking chair. I don't know about you. I've never owned one. Have you not?

No. Have I owned one? I don't think I've ever owned an actual rocking chair. I've sat in loads. Yes, I've sat in a few. Because when I see one, I have to sit in one. You can't not. No, it's impossible.

I remember my grandfather having a rocking chair, so I used to sit in his rocking chair and get told off for rocking too vigorously. And a friend in Colorado, who I was on holiday with, They had such a stereotypically American thing. They had a rocking chair on their porch. Of course they did. Looking out over the view, hummingbirds coming and feeding off their hummingbird feeders on the balcony. It was just, you know, an American rocking chair is a very, very classic thing, isn't it?

They are absolutely brilliant. And they've been around for quite a long time. There is a credit, Benjamin Franklin, is sometimes credited with inventing the rocking chair. Is he really? Yes. I didn't know that. Although actually they were probably inventing. when Franklin was a kid.

No, no, I'm happy you've said it out loud now. I think it's set in stone now. But the production of Wicker Rocking Chairs reached its peak in America in the middle of the 18th century. And they were called Wicca Rockers. I just like that. I just like saying Wicca Rockers.

That's a great name. I mean, you know, Michael Fonit, who you mentioned before, he also created a rocking chair as well. Yeah. And they're just brilliant things. They are lovely, aren't they? Normally they have like a bent piece of wood so that you rock on a bent piece of wood.

but they're also rocking chairs that rely on the springiness of steel oh right so you can actually they're kind of like cantilevered yes so you so you kind of like you you lean back in the chair and it rocks backwards and forwards thanks to the strength of the steel yes and there are other ones which have springs inside them so that they actually look like their station like a solid chair but when you sit in them they rock backwards and forwards the other thing that instantly came to my mind as soon as we said chair is the recliner or lounger

oh yes you see that if you watch daytime television you will see them advertised quite a lot oh i'm sure especially the ones that you can stand up that help you to stand up yes they sort of electronically take you to a standing position yeah my mind instantly went to um joey and chandler in friends Oh, yes. Because they iconically sit in these two lounger chairs. Or Frasier's dad. Oh, yes, he did, didn't he? Yeah, that's right.

But, yes, thinking about Joey and Chandler in their reclining chairs, sent me on a little bit of a tour around that. And they had two brands of chair in the show. One was the lazy boy. I spelled L-A-Z. So it's just, it's L-A-Z, or Z, if you're American, yes boy so lazy

lazy okay yes but for us obviously that would be a laz boy yes which doesn't really work and you know it's just a very iconic thing at one point they were the biggest most profitable chair manufacturer

in the US they described the lazy boy recliner as nature's way of relaxing which seems a bit counterintuitive but there we go and the other brand of chair they had on the show was called a Barker Loungeer. So the Barkerlanger was named after its inventor

Edward Joel Barcalo. Barcalo. B-A-R-C-A-L-O. Okay. And apparently the Bar-C-A-L-O manufacturing company it's held in legend that they are the company that invented the coffee break. What? Apparently in 1902, stopping work mid-morning for a cup of coffee

wasn't a thing, but Barcalo made it a thing. Wow. So there's a Bauhaus sort of chair invented in the in the 1920s called the Wassily chair or the Vasily chair. Okay. Created by Marcel Breuer, who was head of the cabinet making workshop at Bauhaus. And if you see this chair, you will go, yep, I know that chair. So imagine like lots of chrome tubing and leather straps. They look like leather strap at the back, a leather, leather seat, leather straps sort of load down.

down and two leather straps by the arms. Yep, I've got you. Yep. It's a really famous chair and it was made for quite a long time. It was very popular in America. It's all now owned by Noll, like Parker Noll. Oh, right, okay. So that they own that now.

And there's artistic chairs like the Gerrit Rittfeldt, red and blue chair, which is like a very slabby chair made of black bits with a red back and a blue seat. This is going to be a visual delight on our show notes this week. It is. It is. There's one which I love, which looks like a woman walking along in a dress with a small train called a panton chair. Now, if you can imagine somebody like sort of sitting up, but that leaning with their feet behind them in a sort of like a dress, a train of a dress. It's very Danish and it's a stacking chair and it's invented in the 60s. It looks like a zigzag chair. It's a lovely thing. They're a really nice one.

In theatres and in cinemas, you basically had loose seating until people started throwing the chairs at the actors. So if you were upset, you could like pick your chair up and it's probably a bent-wood chair and you'd throw it at the actors. So they started to nail them down. Right. So then you've got sort of rows of chairs with a certain amount of leg room and you kind of you had like a set amount of seating.

And that's how you get sort of like 800-seater, 2,000-seater places. Because all the seats are fixed. Great. But obviously if the seats are fixed, you want to be able to get underneath them to clean them and things like that. Of course you do. So you want seats that tip up. Yes.

I don't know. I'm doing that with my hand. So in 1854, the cinema seat was invented with a tip-up, with a tip-up seat. Really, 1854. Yes. I would have thought they would turn of the century at the end. earliest. I know. Wow. So they've been around a long time. And I remember, you know, as a kid sort of going to the cinema or the theatre and just sort of spending the first couple of minutes bouncing up and down on

that flip-up seats, much to my parents dismay. And I remember, I think it was Richmond Theatre, used to have a little, little pair of binoculars on the back of the seat in front. So if you were right up in the gods far away from the stage, you had to, there was sort of kept in this little case. You put 20p into the mechanism and it flipped open and you could take out this little pair of binoculars so that you could see what was going on on the stage. That's interesting. So when you think of a cinema chair or a theatre chair, what colour do you see it? Oh, instantly red. Yes. Red velvet. Yes. They are usually red. And there's a reason why they're usually red. Is there other than the fact that it looks nice? Yes. Because red stands out in low light environments.

So it's easy to find your seat, and it's sort of contrast with the dark surroundings. I mean, it's quite good at concealing stains and wear. Red doesn't show up like spilled Coca-Cola and things like that. There's a tradition of having red seats, which is that red seats were a symbol of prestige and entertainment. Yes. I mean, if you look, there's always like a red curtain, isn't there? Of course there is just the safety curtain, or the red carpet. Or the red carpet, exactly.

So that colour red is like very sort of prestigious. Yes. And so that red seating says I'm somewhere, you know, nice and probably expensive. That's brilliant. There's a branding choice. You know, most theatres go for a red. But, you know, if you're opening a new theatre, you can put red seats in and it starts to have that retro feel to it. Yes, I suppose it would.

I mean, there's one at the, there's a viewing room at the Charlotte Street Hotel, which has a cinema in it. Oh, is it? And there are red seats, but they're red leather. And the claim is that they are Ferrari red leather seats in that particular viewing theatre. That's great. So theatre seats, they were not designed for people our height, were they? They were not, certainly not with our legs. They're not very roomy, some of them.

Well, they're not very comfy. Another seat that isn't very comfy, do you like burgers? I like a burger now and then. Mackie D's? Yeah, why not? If you go into McDonald's, this may be an urban myth, and it may not, but I think it's probably right, which is that McDonald's seats are designed specifically to make you uncomfortable after a set period of time, so you don't sit there all day long.

That's interesting. So the backrest is really straight, so your back is not really supported. Yeah, it is very straight. Yes. So you have to sit upright. Yes. And they're designed intentionally to make you leave after you've had. Burger. That's amazing. Brilliant. Yes, yeah, I wouldn't want to spend any longer than the

duration of a meal. No. Sitting on a McDonald's chair. So about 20 years ago, I was walking along Hampstead Heath on Parliament Hill. And bizarrely, I saw this chair, well, actually a table and chair on Hampstead Heath at the top. And it was 30 feet high. what it's so so this thing is a piece of art it's called the writer okay and it was created by a guy called jankarlo neri who's actually a former footballer who played for the new york apollos before becoming an artist oh and he created this enormous great thing people loved it it was one of the best things on the heath these people used to try and climb up it there's a there's a rumor that two people um ab sailed up to the top of it and um had to

an enjoyable time on the top of the table it's just an amazing thing they got lots of people from hampstead to come and because it's called the writer so they had loads of writers along sure yeah and they had sort of um zadie smith and sam and rushdie and all sorts of people there to for the opening of it it was a really lovely piece of artwork huh i i was convinced you were just going to say you went for a walk on hamstead heath you found a table and chair you took it home you sanded it down a bit but no no so i'll put a picture of it in the show notes it's just beautiful it's a lovely idea so that's the biggest chair i've ever seen have you come across any bigger chairs or any more more interesting chairs in your hunt through guinness i have actually

there is um this is a category of record that is so frequently updated it seems that people are mad for giant furniture okay so every year year on year on year they sort of get get trumped but um currently the current record for the world's biggest chair how big was your one on Hampstead Heath about 30 feet tall okay fine so the world's largest chair is 30 meters tall three times the height it's quite big and it was made by some unpronounceable people in Austria

okay a company called triple X Lutz and another company called Holzheim-Bowork Wehag and they made this 30 meter chair measured from the floor to the top of the backrest. Wow. And that was installed in Austria in 2009. And that still has the record for the world's largest chair.

There are then the world's largest armchair, world's largest office chair, world's largest, etc., etc. Of course there are. But that's the biggest chair overall. I found a Guinness record for the tallest stack of chairs. And this is held by a fellow called Jay Easton in Manchester who worked at a restaurant and he was stacking chairs away at the end of the shift. And, you know, this stack was getting taller and taller.

He eventually decided to see if he could make a world record. He made a stack of chairs 5.2 metres tall, 17 feet. How many chairs is that? It didn't actually say how many chairs about which I was really annoyed because I wanted to know. In various jobs, I've sort of, you know, stacked some chairs up and by the time they get about my head height, they become very unstable and a little bit wonky and a little bit dangerous. So the fact that he got this to 17 feet high is quite impressive. And then I found this is not quite a record, but it's an annual competition that has lots of sub records,

and I just find the concept of this thing interesting. In Lancaster, every year, there's something called the Georgian Legacy Festival. And it's just full of events and things that are slightly Georgian in their nature. One of which is the annual sedan chair carrying championship. Oh, sedan chairs, of course. So a sedan, if anyone doesn't know, picture a chair with walls under roof and then a couple of sticks put alongside it with a bloke in front and a bloke behind carrying it into form of transportation that was very popular during that sort of era.

And it was the precursor to the taxi. And there are these sedan race champion. championships every year. But there are so many records within that. There's the fastest one. There's the longest person in a sedan. The lightest person in the sedan. The most number of people in a sedan. The most number of people carrying a sedan, et cetera, et cetera. So I can't list them all, but I would invite you to go and look up the Georgian Legacy Festival annual sedan chair carrying championship because it's just hilarious. And of course, the place that you used to pick up your sedan chair was like a taxi

rank. Yes. And the taxi ranks were symbolized by blue posts. That's right. So that's why you have so many pubs in London especially called the blue posts. I'd actually written that down to say it and then I thought to myself, I bet Bruce will get that.

Very good. I used to have an office in Soho, which there are two blue posts in Soho that I know of. Oh, yeah. There are lots actually. There are quite a few around the city, yeah. But yes, there you go. Those are my chair-related records. Gosh. Brilliant. Thank you.

Pleasure. Well, I don't really have very much more about chairs. I think I need to go and have a sit down now. Yes, I think so. I think all of my chair-related facts have rocked off. Very good. So before you go, maybe we should ask people to do something for us. Oh, I think we should.

While they're sitting down, just get out your phone or go on to your phone. or go on to your podcast player and give us, I mean, a five-star review would be nice. It would be lovely. It would be a good thing. And another thing you could do is to tell your equally nerdy,

fact-loving, chair-loving friends about this podcast so that they can tune in and join in the fun. Three chairs. Hoor. And you can look us up on our Facebook page. You could send us an email. So send your, actually, I think you'll find email to hello at factorily.com.

You could even tell us about your favourite chairs. Do you have a particular armchair at home or an interesting chair-related story? Yes. And finally, if you would care to go and hit the subscribe button, then every Thursday morning you'll get a little notification saying that there's a brand new episode of Factorily ready for your listening pleasure. Goodness knows what they'll be next week. No idea. No idea.

We'll find out in due course. Well, thank you so much for coming along and listening to us chatting about chairs. Please come again next time for another fun-filled factual episode of... Factorily. Bye for now. Ovoa.