Global News Podcast - The Happy Pod: Model Maker Outmatches Guinness World Records

Episode Date: February 11, 2024

This week, the French model-maker celebrating a world record that he nearly missed out on due to a technicality. Also: a guide to the Lunar New Year celebrations. And can you tell the mood of a chicken by its cluck?

Hello, this is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service, with reports and analysis from across the world. The latest news seven days a week. BBC World Service podcasts are supported by advertising. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts. But did you know that you can listen to them without ads? Get current affairs podcasts like Thank you. Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC Podcasts. In 1969, a plan to show support for an anti-racism protest turned the lives of 14 promising black student-athletes upside down. Amazing Sports Stories from the BBC World Service tells their story.

Search for Amazing Sports Stories wherever you get your BBC Podcasts. Hi, my name is Judith from Uganda. Welcome to The Happy Pod. This is The Happy Pod from the BBC World Service. I'm Jackie Leonard and this edition is uploaded on Sunday the 11th of February. Yes, a day later than usual. it isn't you and this is why. We'll have our guide to the Lunar New Year festivities. The French model maker celebrating a record-breaking achievement after nearly missing out on a technicality. Richard's attempt truly is officially amazing. We're also celebrating the wonder of music

from this magnificent sound. To the 2024 Grammys. She does feel like she could be the next Rihanna. So that award almost felt like an anointing of a new star. Also in this podcast, if birdsong is your thing, we have the Uganda Women Birders Club. We get the ladies to learn how to do bird watching, and as such, they can earn a livelihood for their families. And can you tell the sound of a happy chicken?

We begin with an emotional roller coasteraster for French model maker Richard Plo. He dedicated eight years of his life to creating a huge matchstick Eiffel Tower, only to be initially denied the Guinness World Record for using the wrong kind of match. Now they have reversed the decision and awarded him the record after all. Hugh Schofield is in Paris. All is well that ends well. Richard Plo spent eight years building his 7.2 metre Eiffel Tower using 700,000 matches, only to be told earlier this week that it didn't qualify for the Guinness Book because he'd bulk bought the matchsticks without their red heads. According to the record keepers, that was not allowed.

Only commercially-bought matches were permitted, which the model-maker had to individually treat by scratching off the sulphur. But then came the good news. After Richard Plot filed an appeal, the authorities relented. It's an emotional rollercoaster. I mean, for eight years, I've always thought that I was building the tallest matchstick structure. And at the end of these eight years, the initial decision made by the Guinness Book of World Records, I found it too strict, cruel, and I felt it incomprehensible.

After all the media fuss, the Guinness Book people obviously felt that their rules needed updating. Mark McKinley is their Director of Central Records Services. We're really excited to be able to approve it. Like we say, when we were able to look at the amount of dedication that went into it and see the amount of work into it, eight years of toil just to get to where he was is incredible, absolutely incredible. We're happy to be able to admit that we were a little bit too harsh on the type of matches needed in this attempt.

And Richard's attempt truly is officially amazing. So effort has been properly rewarded. A fusty rule has been changed. And Richard Plough has made the biggest matchstick Eiffel Tower of all time. Well, he knew he had, but now it's official. Hugh Schofield in Paris. Now, some excellent news for music lovers and sports fans. Well, Scottish ones, anyway.

Because it's been confirmed that this magnificent sound will be reverberating around football pitches this June at the 2024 European Championships. Bagpipes, obviously, being played there at the start of a rugby international. The governing body of European football, UEFA, had issued guidelines barring mechanical sound-emitting devices from fixtures, but it's now relented and says the pipes will be permitted as long as they're registered with the Scottish Football Association. Piper and football fan Martin Brown is pretty pleased. Their initial rulings were anything that makes a mechanical noise. I think it was going back to the World Cup in South Africa with the Vuvuzelas, and that just annoyed absolutely everybody in the world.

So they brought it there feeling that there was no mechanical noise making machines to be allowed in. However, they've obviously looked at the bagpipes and it's a traditional part of Scotland and Scotland football matches. So they've said, yeah, as long as they're registered with the SFA, then that's absolutely fine to bring them. This might astonish you, yeah, as long as they're registered with SFA, then that's absolutely fine to bring them. This might astonish you, Martin, but not everybody appreciates bagpipes the way that you and I do.

And some people might find... I know that. I know, it's amazing, isn't it? Some people might find bagpipes annoying. But tell me about why bagpipes move you. What is it about bagpipes that you really love honestly it's just the traditional form the sound of them i mean if you hear certain tunes getting played on the bagpipes even still now you hear a certain tune getting played in the hairs on the back of my neck stand

up it's like it's hard to explain what it is and what sort of tunes would you play to get your team going, to give them a boost, to get them fired up? The most obvious one is the national anthem, the Flower of Scotland. I mean, as soon as you start playing that on the bagpipes at the football, the whole crowd joins in and it's just an incredible sound. Best example I could give you was when we were playing Norway and Oslo last year. And we were 1-0 down with about two, three minutes to go. I stood up and started playing for Lowry Scotland. The whole crowd joined in and the team obviously got a lift from it because we went on to score two goals in the last three, four minutes.

But it's just such an amazing sound. Martin Brown. Welcome to the Year of the Dragon. Millions of people are celebrating the Lunar New Year, and here's Kerry Allen, our China media analyst, with your guide to the festivities. It's traditionally a time when families get together and they exchange presents, often money in a red envelope. They will also sit down to have a big feast.

So in a way, it's quite similar to Christmas or Thanksgiving. Many cities will host firework or drone displays. This year is the Year of the Dragon, one of the 12 animals in the Chinese zodiac. If you were born in the years 1952, 1964, 1976, 1988, 2000 or 2012, you're a dragon. It's considered one of the luckiest zodiac signs and people born in the year of the dragon are seen as clever, charming, powerful and wise. Like with the 1st of January, the lunar new year is meant to symbolise a fresh start and there are some customs that people commonly observe to have a lucky year ahead So what can you do? Well, wearing red is considered to be lucky to see in the new year

It's not a day for cleaning Avoid cutting or washing your hair or using a broom You might brush away the new look that is coming your way And if you're thinking of having a meal noodles are considered lucky as they symbolise a long life. Dumplings symbolise wealth and fish symbolises abundance. To all our listeners, xin nian kuai le, gong hei fat choy, happy new year. And for a more in-depth examination of the Lunar New Year, Celia Hatton has her own podcast and you will find it wherever you found this one.

Still to come in this edition... The beat, the tempo, the melody, the singing your heart out. It's such a physical thing to do. The joy and power of music. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts. But did you know that you can listen to them without ads? Get current affairs podcasts like Global News, AmeriCast and The Global Story, plus other great BBC podcasts from history to comedy to true crime,

all ad-free. Simply subscribe to BBC Podcast Premium on Apple Podcasts or listen to Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC Podcasts. But something happened, not just to him, but to hundreds of artists in Hollywood. They were forced to leave, forced out. I'm Una Chaplin, and from CBC Podcasts and the BBC World Service, this is Hollywood Exiles. Search for Hollywood Exiles wherever you get your podcasts. Now let's hear about that huge celebration of music that is the Grammys.

All the biggest names in the music industry were there. There were moving and thrilling live performances. History was made and millions around the world watched, including our music correspondent Mark Savage. And let's start with the introduction of an award for the best African music performance and the question of why award for the best African music performance. And the question of why has it taken so long? I think one of the reasons is that Afrobeats and Amapiano, the two big genres in Africa at the moment, have really had a breakthrough couple of years on the global charts rather than being confined to Nigeria, where Afrobeats has a huge hold on the market and Amapiano, which comes from South Africa. And the Grammys just decided this was the moment when they had gone mainstream enough to be deserving of an award. But interestingly,

the first prize went to Tyla, who is brand new. She had this massive viral hit over last summer and towards the end of last year with a song called Water. Make me sweat, make me hotter Make me close my breath, make me water Make me sweat And she does feel like she could be the next Rihanna. So that award almost felt like an anointing of a new star rather than a recognition of the people who had paved the way for her. And we can't talk about the Grammys, Mark, without talking Taylor.

No, I mean, the Grammys just can't stop giving her prizes. It's like they're addicted to it. This was her fourth album of the year where nobody else has ever had that many prizes for album of the year where nobody else has ever had that many prizes for album of the year. Previously, Taylor was tied with Paul Simon, with Frank Sinatra and with Stevie Wonder. And, you know, she's the first woman to do this. You notice all those other three-time winners are men.

That's a really significant step, not just for the music industry, but for society in general. Let's talk a little bit about the actual Grammy night and something which moved so many people. Tracy Chapman singing Fast Car. This was incredible. Last year, the country singer Luke Combs had a massive hit just by covering Tracy Chapman's Fast Car, a song that originally came out in the late 1980s. And it's the story of essentially trying to escape poverty, wanting to flee the horrible situation that you are in. But she has been in semi-retirement since 2009, and it took five months of negotiation to get her to appear with Luke Combs at the Grammy Awards. And when she did, as the camera panned back from her, there was just this

absolutely gorgeous smile on her face. She played that iconic riff on an acoustic guitar. So I remember when we were driving, driving in your car, speed so fast I felt like I was drunk. And she looked so happy to be there. And you could see Luke Combs standing beside her, just kind of watching in awe as she delivered this song because he was so pleased to be sharing the stage with her. And you could see in the audience as well the reception to that moment. People just felt so pleased to have her back. It was a really heartwarming thing to see. Tracy Chapman, of course, not the only figure to come out of

semi-retirement for a performance. No, we had Joni Mitchell on stage at the age of 80. A hugely significant moment for the Grammys because she'd never performed there before, but also because about a decade ago, Joni Mitchell had a life-changing brain aneurysm. She lost the power of speech. She lost the ability to walk. There was a question over whether she would ever be able to perform again. And she's had an intense couple of years of rehabilitation. And she came out and she had a kind of comeback concert two years ago at the Newport Folk Festival, which is where she had her start.

The recording of that concert won a Grammy on Sunday night and she was tempted back on stage to play Both Sides Now, one of her most beautiful and affecting songs. I've looked at love from both sides now From give and take Love from both sides now From giving to you Still somehow But even more beautiful and affecting this time around because after everything that she's been through,

the lyrics of this song talk about taking stock of life, the highs and the lows, the things that have happened to you, the way that you've changed and how you emerge as a more rounded, a more contented person. And to hear her after that brutal and terrible 10 years, able to sing that song again, to see her smile and tapping her cane on the floor and enjoying that moment was one of the most moving musical performances I have ever seen. That was Mark Savage, our music correspondent. There was a time in Uganda when bird watching and careers in nature were considered masculine

occupations. But a determined band of women set out to enable their sisters to share in the beauty and career potential of their country's forests and wetlands and their number has steadily grown. Judith Mirembe is the pioneer chairperson of Uganda Women's Birders. We started as a small group of 10 people and over the years the group has bred across the country. So what we do is mentor young women into nature guiding, which has largely been a male-dominated profession. So we get the ladies to learn how to do bird watching, and as such, they can earn a livelihood for their families.

Obviously, you have an exciting and large bird population in Uganda. If people were to look up just one Ugandan bird, if they wanted to see one bird that you would really, really like them to know about, what would that bird be? The Shoebill. So the Shoebill is a globally threatened species. It's found in a few countries in Africa. And Uganda offers one of the best opportunities to see this prehistoric dinosaur-looking bird. It's awkward looking, but yet very intriguing to look at. And it sounds just like a machine gun. But considering the habitat it occupies, it's a bit cryptic, so you may not easily spot it among the papyrus.

But the minute you spot it, you feel like you have overcome a challenge, like you have won. Okay, I can't find the word. You've won a prize. Yes, more like it. Have you always loved birds when you were a little girl? Were you fascinated by them? What do you get out of observing them?

As a little girl, I love birds, but not the way I appreciate them now. As a little girl, I appreciated them because of the folk tales and the stories that our mothers and grandmothers told us about the birds so there's a bird called the pin-tailed wider it's a small black and white bird with a long tail and a reddish peel so oftentimes when you see a pin-tailed wider it's one male and then you have a bunch of females following it.

So growing up, we were told that if a boy plucks such a feather and keeps it in his pocket, all the girls will come flocking to him and following him. So it was really funny that, of course, at that age, you believed because it all seemed it all seemed true and then there's another bird called the long-crested eagle that we're told you can ask which direction you're going to marry it has a long crest on the head so depending on where the crest points if it points west it means you're going to get married in the west if If it points east, it means east.

So listening to all this over a fireplace or when you're in the garden, all this was interesting and it all seemed true because you hear it from the people you trust. Judith Merembe of the Uganda Women's Birders Club. And I will share a picture of the Shoebill online on far too many social media platforms. And speaking of our feathered friends, how do you think this chicken is feeling?

And what about this one? Now, you might not be able to tell the difference between a happy or a frustrated chicken from those clucks, but Victoria Gill has been speaking to someone who can. Enter Clive Phillips, Australia's first professor of animal welfare. We trained them to go through a special door and then to get a reward. And the rewarded chickens would get either some food or what they really liked was to have a mealworm. But some of the chickens didn't get anything. And they were the ones that

displayed these rather frustrated and unhappy calls. But how did you carry out the study? How did you test whether people could tell the difference? Well, we prepared a file which had six calls and it was sent around to close on a couple of hundred people. And we also asked the people whether they had experience with the chickens and asked them whether the calls they were hearing were from rewarded chickens or whether they felt they were unrewarded. What did you find? It didn't really matter whether people had experience or not, which was quite surprising. We asked them all sorts of questions about whether they kept chickens, whether they had any involvement in chickens, and that had no significant effect on whether they could tell the difference between happy and sad calls at all. And why for birds, for poultry,

is that particularly important? Is this measure using sound in this way, using listening to their calls, is welfare probably got 10, 20 or even 30,000 birds in one unit. And almost impossible to see from looking at individuals how happy they are. So we need to be able to determine that accurately and quickly. And what about how we can apply this then? You talked about sort of using sounds in an animal welfare setting for being able to assess animal welfare. How could you do that in practice? Well, it's not going to be easy, but assuming that all the chickens in these large chicken sheds are behaving in a fairly similar way, then it's likely that we could detect from the frequency whether they are happy or sad. And that could even be done automatically. And in this day and age of

artificial intelligence taking much stronger place in detecting welfare on farm, it may be that in the future we can do this automatically. And just briefly, any insights into what sort of stimulation, what enrichment are easily given to chickens that would make their lives a little bit richer and keep them sort of happily chatting away? One of the best things, of course, that chicken farmers can do is to have their chickens outside in fields. But if the farmer is stuck with a shed with thousands of birds in it

one thing he can do is hang choice bits of food from the ceiling which the birds have to jump up and get and the birds absolutely love it and they will jump off the ground to take these choice food items. Now the biggest question on my mind after that conversation was, do my chickens sound happy? So I spent some time doing a little taste test with them. Hello, ladies. Right, let's see what you think of all this. You quite like those. Well, I wanted to get the official expert opinion,

so I sent that little clip to Clive, our animal welfare and chicken cluck expert, and he very kindly sent this message in response. These are definitely happy chickens. They love having little treats. What a life they are having. That was Clive Phillips and he was talking to Victoria Gill. And just in case you hadn't worked it out already, the first clip that we played was a happy chicken and the second one wasn't. Now, some of the other things that caught our attention this week. This will interest you if you don't like needles.

Scientist Ji Hyun Lee and her colleagues at Sunggyun Gwan University in South Korea have taken some bio-inspiration from octopus tentacles and come up with a flexible patch covered in suction cups like the suckers on octopus limbs that can pucker the skin and enable drugs to get through without breaking the skin or causing irritation. After the delight we took in a fugitive monkey in Scotland last week, honourable mention to a Barbary macaque that crossed from Gibraltar into La Linea in Spain on Monday morning. He was picked up late

on Tuesday after a huge cooperative effort involving officers from the Spanish Civil Guards Conservation Unit, police officers, representatives from the Castellar Conservation Zoo and members of Gibraltar's macaque management team. And yes, as monkeys are wont to do, this one also prompted a flurry of jokes on social media. And our thanks to Vanessa, who told us about a bald-headed eagle called Jackie at Big Bear Lake in California. She and her mate Shadow have got three eggs now, and you can watch their nest on the Friends of Big Bear Lake website. And I am now strangely invested in this eagle. Now, we've had something of a musical theme in this edition.

Let's wrap up on a similar note. A study on the physical effects of music, on the way it can make us want to either curl up in a ball or get up and dance. Research conducted at the University of Turku in Finland maps out where different musical forms hit home. So sad music was felt physically by the study's participants in the chest and head, and happy music was felt in their legs, their hands and their arms. Gemma Kearney, a BBC DJ and a documentary maker, says it makes sense. I'm pretty sensitive to music and can definitely testify to its power,

having done so many different radio shows for over a decade. You can literally press play and change the mood of many, many humans. And change the mood that you feel in different parts of your body. That's the interesting thing that researchers have come up with. I'm really glad that there is more scientific research in the logic behind this because it's definitely something that I feel within my soul. I was thinking about genres personally. And for me, it's very much about soul music because I think developing a language for our emotions can be felt in our bodies. For example, the schmaltzy, lovely, romantic, heartfelt Adele can be felt in your heart. And I think that these components and music universally give us those anchors and that language to be able to speak more about how we do kind of live from a soul place and

can move emotions and feelings through our bodies and actual physical movement too. It's all so connected. Yeah, and connected in a way that can do us good. You think of the obvious ways in which music nourishes us, but also that actually can get you going physically. Definitely. I mean, when we associate our bodies with exercise, we understand that we can create endorphins. And if dancing is an exercise to upbeat music, then I don't know what is. You could definitely burn off some calories on a dance floor. And music is the aid for that, the beat, the tempo, the melody, the singing your heart out. It's such a physical thing to do and to immerse yourself in.

You wonder how universal it is, because, of course, different cultures around the world. You think of Eastern music and the way in which an atonal music and all sorts of things that kind of play into this, but may play on our bodies in ways that we haven't yet thought about. Absolutely. I've made many documentaries for the World Service about different music from a different perspective, whether that's ancient wisdom or religious practice or cultural exchange and share where you may have a language barrier between two musicians, but they can talk through an instrument and I can also physically remember for example learning about polyphonic choir singing throat singing in Georgia and hearing

it on repeat in quite a windowless building for an afternoon when I made a documentary there called The Sound Odyssey I felt pretty sleepy because the sound was so melancholic. It happens, it changes my body. And I think, you know, we can all relate to this depending on the tone of the music, the colour of the music. We feel it inside. Gemma Kearney, and she was talking to Justin Webb. And that's it from us for now.

If you would like to be part of the Happy Pod or you just want to say hello, really, please email globalpodcasts at bbc.co.uk. This edition was mixed by Callum McLean. The producer was Anna Murphy. Our editor is Karen Martin. I'm Jackie Leonard and until next time, goodbye. Get current affairs podcasts like Global News, Americast and The Global Story, plus other great BBC podcasts from history to comedy to true crime, all ad-free. Simply subscribe to BBC Podcast Premium on Apple Podcasts or listen to Amazon Music with a Prime membership.

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