No Such Thing As A Fish - 117: No Such Thing As Dr No Teeth

Episode Date: June 9, 2016

Dan, James, Anna, Andy and special guest Tim Minchin discuss performing racoons, blue hailstones, and the giant that provides constipation relief.

Hello, and welcome to another episode, and no such thing as a fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andy Murray, Anna Chazinski, and special guest Tim Minchin. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Tim.

Okay, my fact is that Bulgaria has an agency that shoots rockets to kill hail. To kill it. To kill it. Well, to minimize it. It's preemptive strikes, hail strikes. So I thought all this weather manipulation technology was bollocks, but apparently it's not. So Bulgaria has lots of agrarian, Bulgarian land, and they grow stuff, and hail damages

crops a lot. And because of its geography and its variable landscape, there's lots of hail. And so they use seeding techniques to, well, there are various ways you can lower hailstones by seeding. So do you want to know about it? It's really super boring. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's more boring than it actually is.

So you basically, they discovered in 1946 or something that if you put dry ice, solid carbon dioxide into clouds, you can increase precipitation, basically, and later they found out that something silver iodide and potassium iodide also do it. There's various techniques. You can drop them from a plane or shoot them up from a rocket, which is what the Bulgarians do. In terms of fighting too much hail, the main technique is basically that you shoot these chemicals up.

It changes the chemical structure of the stuff within the cloud, and it actually makes more small hailstones that compete for the available water. So by the time they hit the ground, they're no longer hailstones because they started too small. I think I've misunderstood the fact because I thought they were shooting rockets at falling hail. I assumed it was like there was an attack happening, and they were like when you shoot a missile at a plane to take it out of the water.

Like a game of space invaders. Like a game of space invaders. That would be amazing, with enough people and enough tiny rockets. That'd probably work, but it's like those meteor or disaster movies, you've basically got one massive hailstone coming towards Seineid Bruce Willis and that guy who sings Love in an Elevator or his daughter. Do you know that Armageddon fact about the fact that NASA, so they don't do it officially, but they unofficially show people who are being recruited for NASA, the movie of Armageddon,

and the job is to spot as many inaccuracies as possible. Oh good. I think the... It's over a hundred, isn't it? Yeah, I think it's over two hundred. So it's an icon of poor space fact. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

So that's actually a thing that they sit down and... So I can't get the song in my head. Don't wanna close. Oh, don't wanna. That's the guy. I'll sleep cause I miss you, baby. Oh, so good. That's not inaccurate.

That's perfect. Did I spot that? It was the only bit they didn't quibble with. How good the song is? But there's sort of dodgy technology. There's things called hail cannons. So in medieval times they used to ring church bells and fire cannons into the sky and to try and stop hail.

Oh, wow. But they have things that still in modern times called hail cannons, which basically make an explosion at the bottom of what looks like a large loud hailer. Ironically. And they send up a sound wave and it's meant to distribute hail and it doesn't work. And they essentially don't work, do they? No. But they're still marketed everywhere.

If you look up kind of wine growers tips and stuff in Europe, people will try to sell those things. And they are like gigantic ice cream cones a bit, aren't they? They're the same ones. Yeah, they look like huge cones. What you're saying about bell ringing, they used to do that to get rid of thunder. Oh, yeah. So they would send people up a massive tower with a bell in it to ring the bell to get

rid of the thunder. And they get electrocuted. Yeah. It's next to a massive metal thing really high up. Yeah. I was reading just the other day about a miracle in the Middle Ages, which was where the church bells started to ring by themselves because they were so happy. So windy.

They were really thrilled at a particular religious event. Do you know what my favorite thing about this fact is that the person who discovered that silver iodide works as well or better than solid carbon dioxide in cloud seeding was a guy called Bernard Vonnegut. Right. Any relation? None information. And I just, which is so weird and it's Kurt Vonnegut's brother.

Yeah. And the weird thing is whenever I think of cloud seeding, I think of Katz cradle. I think of us nine. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And Katz cradle is all about an isotope that freezes liquid on contact. And it's, so that's obviously what he was reading and thinking about. Yeah.

His big brother was, because he was a science nerd, but I didn't know. That's extraordinary. It's one of my favorite. It's a great book. That's incredible book. Yeah. It's a scary book. I'm glad for this hail fact.

So the thing that you were saying earlier about cloud seeding, not thinking that I had no idea that worked. And apparently it does. I was reading that. The Beijing Olympics for their opening ceremony. They made sure that they had no clouds by doing literally that firing rockets into the sky in order to knock them out. And is it proper science?

Well, there are all sorts of question marks over it. Okay. Sometimes it works. So it might have been a coincidence that there just was no clouds. Yeah. It's always hard to tell, basically. I mean, you know, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean,

there was no clouds. Yeah. It's always hard to tell, basically, because you can't say it definitely would have rained. There's no control group. Yeah. No. And because the data set of any weather is chaotic, not climate, but weather, is chaotic. You can always draw inference where there was an inference, you know?

Yeah. But there's no way. I mean, the Chinese government, of course, would say, like, we got rid of the cloud. That's a very character. Pleasant. But it's not pseudoscience because you can measure impact, but the impact is never from 100 to zero. It's percentages of manipulation.

Okay. Have you read the accounts of people going in and doing cloud seeding? No. It's so hardcore. People in planes, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. People go in the plane. So a Bloomberg journalist went up with a couple of cloud seeders who were doing cloud seeding

in Bangalore because India has drought problems. So they were trying to solve that by generating a bit of rain. And so what you do is you go under the huge storm cloud you can find, and there's a big updraft in the middle of it, and you fly underneath that in your little plane, and you let yourself get sucked up. And I think you get sucked up. You get sucked up at 800 feet per minute. And so this journalist was just like, I was in the back behind them, just vomiting the

whole time. Then what? Then what? Because you don't want to fly into clouds. Are you? Yeah. So they've got, I think he had eight rockets on each wing and it fires the substances off into the clouds and then allows them to seed.

But it sounds absolutely terrifying. Wow. That sounds terrifying. He said he couldn't lift his hands off his lap because you're going up so fast. There was a thing about, so when the USA was starting to get involved in a really serious way, because they tried it over Laos during the Vietnam War, but also the USA had a national research experiment in the 70s, and it lasted for four years. And I think they closed it down because they hadn't got the technology right.

But when they were doing it, some farmers were very angry about the idea because they thought that cloud seeding would reduce the rainfall and damage their crops the other way. And some of them fired shots at aircraft, which they thought were doing cloud seeding. Right. So adding to the risk of being a seeder. Do you know loud, this isn't very cheerful at all, but I haven't remembered it since I was there about 10 years ago. It was the most bombed country per square kilometer in the world because of during the Vietnam

War. It's good to have a record of some description. Yeah. Exactly. It's very proud of it. Yeah. It's on all their posters. The only other thing is they have all those jars, don't they?

They have the plain of jars. Plain of jars. Full of unexplained jars. We think they might have been for funeral uses. Yeah. The putting bodies in maybe. Or they might have been for storing grain. It's just hundreds and hundreds of massive human sized jars on a plane.

Wow. Fantastic. We don't know why there's jars on a plane coming this summer. Do you know the biggest hailstone? No. 2010. A hailstone larger than a bowling ball fell on Vivian during an exceptional hailstorm. Wow.

Vivian is a town in South Dakota. Thank goodness. It's going to say it didn't even get a surname, James. It's really disrespectful. She's like Madonna. The hailstone obliterated her surname on her name tag. Wow. Have you heard about the guy who had weird blue hail fall in his garden in 2012?

No. Did you think it was urine from a plane or something? He didn't because my urine isn't blue, James. Is yours? I am going to have to see a doctor. George III had blue urine, didn't he? This wasn't George III's urine being caspotted out of a plane. This was a guy called Steve Hornsby.

He lived in Bournemouth. It was in the middle of a hailstorm. These jelly-like three-centimeter diameter blue balls fell in his garden. I think about a dozen of them fell in his garden. He said they were squishy jelly-ish eggs. They don't know what they were. One of the researchers said that it might have been a bird's egg, like an undeveloped bird's egg. She said bird's eggs have been implicated in previous strange goo incidents.

Apparently, because birds hold their eggs in their claws when they're flying, but if they're hit by hail, then they let go of them in a panic. This guy just had 12. Birds hold their eggs in their claws when they're flying. Apparently. They'd better host the premise of my movie. The whole first scene is a bird flying with an egg in its claws. Is it actually?

That's a good spoiler. Thanks. We've got a scoop there. It's only the beginning. Do you think critics will walk out if it's actually an actuary to write on the music? I can just picture a little kid next door to that guy in Bournemouth just throwing blue jelly over him, watching the dude's face in one half. Watching the journalists show up.

Have I taken this too far? I have a couple of things on Bulgaria. Did anyone want to go to Bulgaria? No, but do it. First off, I try to find a famous Bulgarian, which is quite hard. There isn't really any. It's still Stochkov. OK, so we've got one.

Yeah. Any lead on one? I've got Simeon Saxokoba-Gotha. OK, so who's your football player? Football player, yeah. And yours? Mine was the prime minister of Bulgaria until 2005. But here's the cool thing.

He was... He is one of the only two... Who had blue urine. Who had blue urine. He's one of the only two people who's currently alive, who was ahead of state during the Second World War. Oh, wow. Yeah.

He was the Tsar of Bulgaria in 1943, when he was six years old, and the Soviets invaded, and he was exiled, and then he stayed alive, and stayed alive for a long time, and then won an election in his native country in 2001. Oh, wow.

That's so cool. How cool is that? That is cool. Imagine the six-year-old. I'll be back! So you've got no Bulgarians? No, I do. I should just qualify and say internationally famous Bulgarians.

But it turns out that the grandparents of Mark Zuckerberg are Bulgarian, and he's named after his Bulgarian grandfather, Marco. So he's there trying to claim him as Bulgarian. Also, I found one very good politician from Bulgaria who got fired in 2010, because he was playing too much Farmville, while they were trying to...

So Farmville's a game on an app, and he was fired and he was dismissed, and they added in his dismissal that he would now have more time to attend to his virtual farm with his hail cannons. I thought they'd send him down to be Minister for Agriculture. Yeah, you would think. And when he was dismissed, he came back and he basically tried to explain himself

and tried to say that he wasn't the worst. He said he'd only reached level 40, while his Daniele Zelokov had the counsellor from the rightist Democrats of the strong Bulgarian party, was already at level 46. So he was furious. Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is Chizinski.

My fact this week is that we judge music more on how it looks than how it sounds. What? What am I talking about? So this is an experiment that was done by researchers at UCL in 2013, and it was actually a sequence of seven experiments, and it involved over 800 participants, and some of them are musical experts,

and some of them are professional classical music judges, and some of them are just amateurs, just plebs like you and me, and they... I take exceptions to that. Accept you, James. Different types of plebs. And they got them to listen to recordings of people who'd been entered into classical music competitions,

and to tell the participants who they thought had won these competitions. And when the participants just heard a recording of the recitals, they had no better chance than just random chance at knowing who'd won the contest. And when they were watching the person performing at the same time as listening to them performing, they also had no better chance than just what would be random chance.

But if you muted the visuals, and they just watched the person on the piano doing the classical music recital, suddenly the chance of them guessing who'd won the competition went way up, and they got like... They were more than twice as likely to... Why do we think that's the case? I mean, like, 96% of the professionals

and 88% of the amateurs said that they would judge almost entirely on sound. But actually, they think that we use visual cues, so we don't quite realize it. But when they say what they appreciate in the music, they'll say something like passion. And actually, they're getting passion out of the way that a performer's moving.

And they're thinking, oh, I'm really enjoying hearing this piece. I'm really appreciating the nuances in the music, and how they're passionate. I just thought it was really interesting that... Yeah, that is interesting. So whenever I'm seeing a band play, the one that's coming to mind is Montpred & Sons. There's a guy on the keyboards, right?

If I ever see it at a festival, and he goes for it, and he's like, he's rocking on it, but you know he's just playing a G. Like, it's just a G over and over, and it's like, why are you putting... But if that was muted... So it's not an acoustic instrument, so you can't get more out of it by hitting it harder

but it's the same watching a pianist play a beautiful acoustic piano, and you'll watch some classical pianist sort of ease their body in, and their wrists down, and they'll just sort of place their finger on the key, and most of the cue you're getting from that, the reason that sounds like a beautiful note

is because of the approach. And you could go... You could get a robot to go... And it would sound exactly the same. Well, this is the thing, this is why they have blind auditions for orchestras these days, because they noticed that they were... Oh, and the gender bias is insane.

Yeah, and until the 70s or the 90s about 5% of an orchestra was with female musicians, which is obviously statistically surprising. Well, but of course the assumption was, ah well, you know, their brains are different and they're physically not as capable and so they can't cut it. And everyone just took that as given,

ah well, women aren't as good as men at music. And then they started blinding the auditions. And guess what, it's like 50-50. There's nothing to do with it. But they had blind auditions and still many more men were being chosen for the orchestra than women. And they worked out a possible explanation,

which was that the women were going and wearing high heels to the blind audition. Clip-clop, you heard the sound of their feet and that might have been subconsciously affecting people. Fools, they should have known. I mean, women are idiots, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have worn high heels. That was the point I was trying to make there, right?

Yes, that women are idiots, great. Yeah, it's pretty depressing. This reminds me, this is a digression but of blinding instrument tests because have you guys discussed this? No, no, I don't think we have. About the Stradivarius effect, you know, the knowledge that an instrument is,

I guess it is very related, the knowledge that an instrument is worth a million quid changes not only the audience's appreciation but the musicians. So a first chair or a soloist, classical violinist, will, you know, get on lease or buy if they're very lucky a Stradivarius worth a million bucks.

And they'll play it, and now everyone will swear black and blue that it sounds better. But if you, blinding this is quite hard because the wood smells different and it feels different and stuff, if you control as much as you can for those variables putting, you know, blocking their noses

and just get the players to play it and hear it, they can't pick a Stradivarius from a thousand dollar Chinese violin. And this has been true for about 200 years. I think they've been doing these studies and it always shows, no one can tell. But then every single year you get another thing saying, oh, it's because of the wood, it's a special kind of thing.

They try the special kind of that, yeah. Do you know what's valid though? I mean, I was thinking about this today with disease psychosomatic illness and stuff, that if you have someone with one of these umbrella diagnoses like chronic fatigue or they'll be this outrage if anyone suggests there's a psychological element

to their disease. But that assumes a dichotomy between neurology and physiology that is something that increasingly we don't, we realize is not true. So the fact that a disease has a psychological element or a neurological element, psychological and neurological are kind of indistinct.

If it does have a psychological element it doesn't mean you're not still sick. It's just you're not necessarily sick. These people want it desperately to be a tick or some kind of pathogen. But if you tell them it's neurological they're like, no, it's not all in my head and it's like it doesn't matter, it's all in your head in the end.

Pain and sickness and it's all interpreted. And so with this violin thing maybe it doesn't matter that it's bollocks because the musician feels more passionate about their music when they play it and maybe it changes their body language and changes the audience experience and the fact that it's psychological is fine.

It's part of our experience. It is, it's good stuff. We should keep lying. Let's re-label all violins. Let's just do it. I'd sell them all for 200,000 pounds. If we do it. If we do it and we cover it up 200 years from now

people will be enjoying music much more. There was this guide. He made thousands and thousands and thousands of bands. He's still making them. It's amazing. The quick thing about cognitive bias which this is kind of about but which this is about

which is how we convince ourselves of things that aren't true is that almost everyone thinks they're above average and if you present people with most skills and you do studies on how good they think they are at skills and then you test how good they are at skills people will think they're better than average at most things. I think some things are particularly high. There's a study in 1977 which is quite famous

where 94% of professors said they were above average in relation to their peers. So obviously this is people we are so good at convincing ourselves of certain things. With driving a lot as well isn't it? Is there a gender thing there? I bet men are worse. In driving I think actually it was gender equal

because I was expecting that as well and I was disappointed. I bet I'm above average thinking I'm better than you at things. Do you know about what you guys discussed the Dunning-Kruger effect? But there's also a correlation between how bad you are it's slightly a misinterpreted thing but the gap between how good you are and how good you think you are increases

as you get worse at a thing. It's sort of like the less you know about other things the less you know how bad you are at the thing. The thing that people make a mistake with this data which is very interesting data is they think those people are so dumb they don't know how dumb they are but it's actually all of us.

We have things where the Dunning-Kruger effect the point is it's the things we're shit at that we don't know we're so shit at. You've basically written a song about that haven't you? The first song in Matilda is basically like that. Oh yeah I guess. The idea that everyone thinks their kid is above average. Yeah.

Specialness is deregur above average as average go figure. It's one of my best rhymes. It's a children's musical. You've got to go see it here. Come on you people. Okay it's time to move on to fact number three and that is James. Okay my fact this week is that the BFG's

dream powder also helps against constipation. Aw bless. Is that an edited chapter? So this is not in the book. This is a thing that I read by Ophelia Dahl who was Roald Dahl's daughter.

She was talking about her childhood and before Roald Dahl wrote the BFG he kind of had this idea already and his kids couldn't sleep and he was like oh you know what there's a kind of a dream powder that people blow into your bedroom and it gives you good dreams

but it also helps for anything from maths problems to constipation. Okay and then the kids kind of went to sleep and then he ran outside, got his ladder, put it up against the wall ran up, put a bamboo pole into their bedroom and pretended to blow in sleep powder and then from there

that's where the idea from the book came. So supposedly they knew that it wasn't, that it was him but they pretended to him afterwards. And was there a lot of constipation in the Dahl family? Not after this. They all immediately shot themselves.

Oh my god. They did once get suspicious I think so they said how are we supposed to know that this is real daddy and so they went downstairs and confronted him and he said how dare you question my truthfulness and then the next day

they said they woke up and opened the curtains and they saw the letters B, F, G burned into their lawn and he loved his lawn so much and apparently he was very angry about this and that proved to them that the BFG existed. So they were very easily convinced. He sounds like a great dad. I was reading about the first movie of the BFG

the animation and the original voice was meant to be Spike Milligan and I'm very upset that it's not because I look at the BFG's face and I see Spike Milligan now. Right. And when he showed up to the audition they said he had to go home and shave.

I don't know why because it was a voice job. Well, Dahl hated beards. Oh really? Was he a poginophobe? Yeah, totally. That's what... I was at the twits. He hates Mr. Twit.

I mean that's real. I've talked to Lissy about that. He really didn't like beards. And he's saying they're a hairy smoke screen behind which people hide. And yeah, he really loathed them. But is this true about beards that this is difficult? Because he said that it was

a bad representation of male vanity and no man should be vain. But I would have thought that it's much more effort to shave but he said I think it must take at least twice as long to wash thoroughly a face that is matted with bristly vegetation so that no dirt or food remains among the hairs than simply to shave.

But I didn't realise beards required that level of cleaning. That does sound phobic, doesn't it? I mean I've never considered washing my beard. Do you have to clean like comb food up your beard every night before you go to sleep? No, should I?

That does sound phobic though, doesn't it? Sounds like a sort of fantasy version of what a beard might be like. Or maybe sort of just sort of thinking of big Dostoyevskian beards and I don't know. He had supposedly this cabinet of curiosities and sort of odd things in his shed

and I imagine he would have seen all of these. Yeah, I was actually one of the last people to see it before it moved. And now it's in the museum in Great Missinden. He had some of his spine in a jar because he had a terrible spinal injury when a plane crashed in the Libyan desert

during the Second World War. And he also had he had a draw on one of his filing cabinets and the handle of it was a bit of steel which had been put into his pelvis during an unsuccessful hip replacement. So he said well I'll just turn that into a handle for a filing cabinet.

He was medically, he was extremely unlucky I think in terms of people around him and himself, wasn't he? Sad. So he lost his daughter and that obviously just destroyed him but then Theo got, you know, his son got hit by a car

in New York when he was a little tiny infant in a pram but he invented this shunt. He got a model maker from down the road and a doctor who turned out bizarrely after I'd written Matilda I found out as a friend of my grandad's.

My mum was reading his biography and went Dave this is your father's friend. So that was very exciting when mum got to meet Lissy but yeah he just felt that he should be able to fix stuff, you know and such an interesting brain

this darkness and light and the darkness versus the fantastical you know, I just absolutely intriguing guy. And it did, you know, you hear about people patenting things and being a bit wacky but his invention genuinely did save thousands and thousands of children's lives

didn't it? It was superseded quite quickly but it was huge. I think it was, yeah, very effective in its time. 3,000 children I think had it fitted. And that is, you know, charity saves a whole lot more and it's pretty incredible. You know you had no teeth. Really? He had them all out in his 20s.

It would have been a spy because he was a spy briefly, a sort of military attaché in Washington in the war but he would have been a spy with no teeth. At that awesome time. That's a great book isn't it? A spy with no teeth. It's on Ian Fleming's backup list.

Doctor no teeth. They were friends actually, weren't they? Well done Ian Fleming. They worked together a fair bit. All they knew each other release and had mutual respect for each other and they both sort of worked for MI5 together at that time. And they worked on two movies as well.

Yes and they worked on films together afterwards. Did he do the spy who... No, he did. You only lived twice. And he also did Chilly Chilly Bang Bang. Dahl, this is a thing I found out that I had no idea is that he was buried with a power saw. Not that it was used to dig the grave.

I mean he was literally, he's got a power, in his coffin with him or sort of in the, I'm not sure whether, maybe it's a tomb, a snooker queues, some burgundy, chocolates, HB pencils and a power saw. We need to find that tomb and get that burgundy.

We are low on wine. He used to write for Playboy, didn't he? He did, yeah. Wrote Playboy stories. In fact Hugh Hefner did a thing where in one of the editions of Playboy he included 10 golden tickets and if you got a golden ticket in the Playboy

copy, you then got to go to the Playboy mansion to an exerated wonderland where you had a chocolate factory. Oh, that's great. Nine year old has the most traumatic day of his life. This is just one tiny fact about dreaming but because the BFG is about dreams,

am I right? Yeah, sure. So there was a study done in Germany about nightmares and five most common themes for nightmares are falling, being chased, being paralysed, the death of family or friends and being late.

Which is like, is that up there with all these other traumatic things that could possibly ever happen to you? Not knowing your lines is what I get. Really? Oh yeah. Having to go on, not knowing my lines. Often Shakespeare. Having to go on in a Shakespeare

and not knowing my lines. Would that be worse because a lot of people are just going to know all the lines anyway. Yeah, probably. Shouting it out. Or not to me. I have a fact about constipation. Oh please. This is from, you know the Guardian used to do notes and queries

and you sometimes find they're very old columns online basically. They have one question and a load of people answer. Have they stopped doing it now? I'm not sure but a lot of them look archived now basically. There was a thing about old books, right? And a couple of people wrote in and one person wrote in saying

the father of a friend of mine used to find that breathing in the atmosphere of a well-stocked secondhand bookshop, the mustier the better, was a certain cure for his acute constipation. That sounds like the Mariko Aoki phenomenon. Yes, exactly. There's a phenomenon we've talked about on this podcast

which is this woman, I think, Mariko Aoki where she was overwhelmed by the urge to have a poo when she was in a bookshop. I wonder, and there's another letter, another person second down wrote I first became aware of this little known side effect of my interest in old books some years ago

and have been plagued by it ever since I'm reassured to know there are other sufferers. I think we might have cracked the phenomenon. Well, you do get a lot of kind of not bacteria but fungal spars don't you in old books? So maybe it speeds up the process. It might do. Yeah, it must do.

I thought it might be associative. So these people are people who read their old books on the loo and their brain goes, oh, old book, poo time. That's an amazing theory. Can I just, there's one cure for constipation that I like that I didn't know about

which is the violet ray device and so I think this was kind of sort of invented by Tesla so it's an electrical device which was used to cure a whole bunch of stuff as late as the 1930s and it basically is a therapy to, and you put

the instrument that puts an electric current through whatever bit of your body is ailing you put it on that and it cures it and you're supposed to put it into your rectum and you saw an electric current up there and it relieves constipation. It feels like it would work. In the 1930s, if you look at newspaper adverts

it's all over it, the violet ray device or violet ray therapy. Electric kind of butt plugs to get semen from rhinos that happen to know. Oh yeah, yeah. I'll give you all my names. OK, it's time for a final fact of the show and that is Andrew Hunter Murray.

My fact is that Britain has only one performing circus raccoon. So I found this fact in the spectator it's from the House of Commons papers and there are not many animals performing in circuses left in the UK and elephants and big cats have both been banned from British circuses.

There are now two travelling circuses. They're turning up drunk. It does make us like they've misbehaved. They can't come to a circus drunk mate. There's raccoons on stage. They can't do their job. So there's the circus Mondeo who have horses, camels, llamas, mules,

donkeys, reindeer and one zebra. OK. And there's Peter's Jolly Circus which I phoned up both of these circuses. Did you? Yeah, they had a chat with them and Peter's Jolly Circus has horses, donkeys, ponies, a camel,

two zebras, llamas, a parrot and Reggie the raccoon. I spoke to the guy who keeps him. What does he do? Well, he does a lot of stuff. Firstly, he did an advert with Gary Linnaker. A crisp advert. I imagine it was a crisp advert.

Reggie salted. Very good. Very good. As you are. So I thought you guys might ask what does Reggie do? And I asked the keeper and he said he basically, I'm paraphrasing,

but he said he basically walks around the ring fence and goes up on a ramp onto a platform and goes in and out of poles like dogs do for there's agility things and then comes back down. So maybe that's why there's only one. Fantastic. But the keeper was at pains to point out

he's not the UK's only performing raccoon because there's a lady who did Britain's Got Talent with a raccoon. So raccoons have public toilets, they have their own latrine area, and we don't know why they do it, whether it's from a sense of cleanliness or one the article's reading said

maybe for communication purposes, but they have the group of raccoons will designate a toilet place and they will go and shit there and that's where they do that. Well, raccoon droppings are very poisonous. They have little nematode worms in them that can kill you.

Really? I think there's like even no cure or something. That's why I was wondering why quite a lot of the warnings are very alarmist about raccoons. That explains that. The government of the Bahamas were protecting the Bahaman raccoon

and then someone did some DNA test and found it was exactly the same as a North American common raccoon and so overnight they went from protecting them to setting up an eradication across. That's so good. It's such a horrible news to wake up to

as there's raccoons in their four poster beds darling, what's wrong? I have a few facts about circus things. Right. Okay. So I found an unbelievably good book called Beastly London

by Hannah Velton. It's so good. It's a history of almost every animal that's ever been in London and it's incredible. So just a few circus shows that happened. There was The Singing Mouse which appeared in 1843

at some private rooms in Regent Street and apparently it could warble incessantly for a quarter of an hour. Wow. Yeah. Even better on mute. And then a few years later there was a rival Singing Mouse which set up off the strand

which we're very near at the moment at a hairdresser's and tickets were sixpence but if you got a haircut it was free to see the mouse. Weird enough that a mouse can sing but sing and cut hair at the same time. That's incredible. I just remembered I went to a circus museum

in Florida. I can't remember if it's somewhere in Florida. I can't remember what it is. And then they had a load of weird people with things and one of them went downstairs on his head and that was his whole act. That's good. It was just like...

Without using his hands? Without using his hands he would just kind of get on the top step with his head and then I guess use his neck muscles or something. One of the first ever circus performers rode a horse standing on his head. Was he one of Astley's? I think he was pretty Astley so it wasn't

actually circus because Philip Astley's the guy who invented the circus. But he did a lot of weird kind of... Astley did incredible horse riding. There was a guy called Daniel Wildman who was so good. 1772 this is. He could ride a horse while standing up

right, pretty good, with a mask of bees on his face. That's awesome. Isn't that incredible? I'd like to see him riding a bee with a mask of horses on his face. So just one sentence about him. He rides standing up on the saddle

with the bridle in his mouth and by firing a pistol makes one part of the bees mount over the table and the other parts swarm in the air and return to their proper place. He was doing tricks, kind of show jumping with the bees while riding a horse

but apparently he held the queen bee in his hand so to sort of get them to follow along. That's amazing. That sounds ridiculous sort of level of imagination to work on the scale of a horse and the scale of a bee at the same time. Have you guys heard of the dog's toilet club? Have we?

I reckon I've accidentally stumbled into it. What is it? It was an establishment on Bond Street in the early 20th century. Unfortunately it's not quite as good as it sounds. It was where you could buy nice things for dogs like toilet in the sense of like toilet water. And it was incredibly lavish

because it was on Bond Street so you could get scented baths or hankies for your dog or dueled collars or fur coats. When was that? Early 20th century. That's weird that people have been doing that for so long. Yeah.

So that dog's toilet club is also in the beastly London book. I cannot recommend it enough. One of my favourite circus facts of recent times is that John Major's dad, former Prime Minister of England, John Major, his dad was in the circus. And by all accounts, I'm going to actually properly read about him.

Sounds like an extraordinary guy, Tom Major. And the idea that everyone says is fact, although I don't think David Bowie actually said it, is that he used to see the poster of Tom Major. That was Major Tom. And that was Major Tom, and that was in Brixton, and that was where Bowie was at the time.

This song originally went, This is Ground Control to Tom Major. Ah, I just can't believe it. Oh, the roar of John Major. You will be the Prime Minister. Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on Twitter. I'm on at Shriverland, James. At Egg Shaped. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M.

Tim. Tim Minchin. And Chazinsky. Podcast at qi.com. Yep. Or you can go to atqipodcast, which is where all of us exist as one unit, including Tim now.

And, or go to knowsuchthingasafish.com, which is our website. And we have all of our previous episodes up there. We will be back again next week with another episode. Goodbye. Thank you.