No Such Thing As A Fish - 182: No Such Thing As An Auction For Auction School

Episode Date: September 15, 2017

Dan, Anna, Andy and special guest Jason Hazeley discuss the British Lawnmover Museum, questionnaires for narcissists, how Christie's auctioneers get over their nerves....

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey everyone, welcome to this week's episode and no such thing as a fish. Before we begin, we just wanna let you in on the special guest that we have this week. He's called Jason Haseley, and he is one of the people behind all the funniest things you've probably seen on TV in the last however many years.
Starting point is 00:00:17 He is behind that Michelin web look as one of the writers for that. He also writes for Charlie Brooker's screen wipe. He's also the co-writer along with his buddy Joel of the Ladybird books. Those adult ones have come out of the hipster and the cat and the hangover and the midlife crisis. They got a whole new batch coming out this October,
Starting point is 00:00:35 October the fifth, so do get them. And he is on because he's a really good buddy of ours and he constantly sends us facts. And we just saw this guy is gonna be amazing on the show and he was as you're about to hear. So enjoy this week's app. Here we go. Hello and welcome to another episode
Starting point is 00:01:07 of 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 am sitting here with Anna Chazinski, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Jason Haseley. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days
Starting point is 00:01:24 and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Jason. My fact is the curator of the British Lawn Mower Museum is allergic to grass. So is it his mission to destroy all the grass in the world with the lawn mowers? By mowing it to work. Yeah, exactly, yeah.
Starting point is 00:01:44 So it's something very hateful back museum, isn't it? One act of revenge on a gigantic scale. This is a guy called Brian Radham who runs the British Lawn Mower Museum in Southport. He's an ex-lawn mower racing champion. Oh, does that mean he sits on lawn mowers? Yes, you ride them around and race them. But he had to give up racing
Starting point is 00:02:06 because it was making him sneeze so much. Oh, so sad. So he took his love of lawn mowers and turned it into the British Lawn Mower Museum, which is a place to behold, I have to say. Have you been to it? Yeah, I have. Oh, is it actually really good?
Starting point is 00:02:20 It's really good because it's one of those odd bits of the British Museum that you sometimes get where you just get lots and lots of iterations of the same thing, which just makes it so interesting. Yeah. So you're saying it's mainly lawn mowers? It is mainly lawn mowers, yeah. They do have what he calls grass cutters,
Starting point is 00:02:37 which are lawn mowers he doesn't like. Like the fly mower, for instance, because the fly mower doesn't have the helical blade that cuts the grass. It has a thing that spins around and just wax at it. So it leaves a very unsatisfactory cut. So those are grass cutters, according to him, not lawn mowers.
Starting point is 00:02:55 Right. So this, I know that you've been there because I've read a book that you wrote called Bollocks to Alton Towers. And that's a chapter in it, right? It is, yeah. So you did this as part of a big research mission. Yeah, it was the mission of the books
Starting point is 00:03:09 to try and find places to go for a day out that were unexpected, unusual, esoteric, non-commercial, that sort of thing. And there's lots and lots of little museums all over Britain. You know, there's a pencil museum in Keswick, famously. What's been there? Which is great. Oh, it is great.
Starting point is 00:03:24 But they had a terrible time. They were really badly flooded out. Oh, Keswick does flood, doesn't it? Yeah, and I think it was last year. I think they might have only just reopened after this terrible, terrible flooding that they had. Pencils can't survive flooding, can they? It was a pen museum.
Starting point is 00:03:37 That would have been a problem. Terrible. But you can latch the pencils together into a massive raft to escape. That's true. Now, if it was a blotting paper museum, it would be really weird, wouldn't it? Yeah. Disaster.
Starting point is 00:03:48 Did you see at the Lormo Museum the celebrity Lormo? Certainly did. They're rich. There is Brian May's Qualcast. Oh. They asked Nicholas Parsons for a donation of a Lormo, and he agreed. And then, unfortunately, his shed was broken into.
Starting point is 00:04:05 And his Lormo was stolen, so he gave them a pair of secateurs instead. But the crowning bit of the celebrity department is Joe Pasquale's Strimmer. Wow. What's so great about that? Well, because I think just those three words marking out as being possibly the finest museum exhibit
Starting point is 00:04:25 in the country, don't they? What I find really weird is that apparently they've got Albert Pierre points. Yeah. One of the really famous hangman who hanged over 400 people, which is kind of a morbid thing to have in the museum, and someone on Pinterest pointed out
Starting point is 00:04:42 when they went to the museum that it's actually hanging by a noose. No, is it? Yeah, so that's quite nice. That is in dubious taste. What? He just said the least. He didn't mow any of the condemned people to death.
Starting point is 00:04:55 Nor did he hang any Lormoes. You're right. That's been misrepresented. I forgot to mention the other significant thing about the Lormo Museum is that it's upstairs. So all those Lormoes must feel fairly, we're in an alien habitat, aren't we? That's so funny.
Starting point is 00:05:15 We're so far from the thing that we wish to cut. It's like a Dalek Museum being upstairs. It's great. They've got a couple of other quirky things there as well. They've got a two-inch Lormoa, which is a Lormoa that cuts a two-inch strip through the grass. And Brian Radham, when he came across this,
Starting point is 00:05:31 thought, what on earth could this possibly have been for? So he rang the manufacturer and said, why did you make a two-inch Lormoa? And they said, we deny ever making a two-inch Lormoa. So no one knows what this thing was for. Wow. Do you know about Finnish postmen and Lormoas? So postmen in Finland have started in the last year
Starting point is 00:05:50 mowing their customers' lawns for a small fee because they're trying to find extra things to do because it doesn't take them all their time. And maybe I think post is declining a little bit in terms of the amount of posts to be done. So on their quietest day, which is Tuesday, you can pay them, I think, about $60 a month and they'll mow your lawn.
Starting point is 00:06:06 Wow. But you have to provide the Lormoa. The very insistent about that. That's like in just on the postman, the lack of mail. In New Zealand now, there's one particular city that deliver KFC as well as your mail. Wrap it around the bucket with an elastic band. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:06:22 They're doing a thing in France where you can get a postman to go and check on your elderly relatives. If you don't want to, I presume, you can pay. And it's called Watch Over My Parents. And you can order them to call in and just check. No, just to check they're all right. Either two, four, or six times a week. So in pre-lawn mower days, when people
Starting point is 00:06:41 used to have to mow the lawn by hand by size, there would be tailor-made size, which would stay the same length. And if you wanted to cut your grass different lengths in like the 17th, 18th centuries, then you added wooden blocks to your shoes or took them off. So if you had a lawn that you needed to be a bit longer, rather than changing the length of the size,
Starting point is 00:06:59 or I guess the position where you held it, then you put some wooden planks under your shoes. What if you were really short and the size came in the same size? Wouldn't you end up just hacking into the earth? No, you'd just have to put very large wooden blocks under your shoes. Stilts? I understand. You're mowing stilts. I don't know the size of that long.
Starting point is 00:07:18 Were they an accessory that you bought with them? I'm not sure if they came as a package. I'm sure they did a two-for-one deal. But you'd have to have all your gardeners would have to have different size blocks, wouldn't they, depending on their height. And it's probably an amusing mix-up where two of the gardeners got the wrong block style and then, you know,
Starting point is 00:07:35 one bit of lawn was uneven. Yeah, that was comedy sketches in the 18th century. We're all about incorrectly mowing grass. Unless you had a very strict height policy when hiring gardeners. Yes. That would be the other thing. Like, you know, you must be this high to go on this ride. Yes.
Starting point is 00:07:52 You'd be one of those. I was trying to find other people who were, so lawn mower man, allergic to grass. I managed to find a journalist who's allergic to newspaper. Yeah, it's really unfortunate. He has to go, he still does his job, but he has to wear gloves now whenever he's at the office. And it's to do with the ink that they use inside.
Starting point is 00:08:12 His name is Michael Dresser. He's been with the paper 38 years, so he's had this allergy for a really long time. And it's the pine resin that they use in the newspaper ink. So yeah, so he can't touch the newspapers. So he's allergic to that. Found a marathon runner who's allergic to exercise. You can be allergic to exercise.
Starting point is 00:08:30 In what way? So as soon as she started running and doing any kind of exercise, she would just come out with puffiness and rashes and all sorts. Does she still run marathons? Yeah, she does. Yeah. On other allergies, I think, isn't Lisa Stansfield allergic to her own saliva?
Starting point is 00:08:49 What? How do you deal with that? Sorry, who is she? She was a singer. How do you deal with that? I guess get yourself a job which involves having your mouth open a lot of the time, like she did. Oh, yeah.
Starting point is 00:09:03 Wouldn't that provoke more saliva production? Good question. I haven't thought this through. Maybe she had one of those dentist things in her mouth the whole time. You know, when you're having any work done, they have that suction. Well, that would have showed up on her singles, though, wouldn't it? Yeah, but you might have mistaken that for that sort of Madonna style microphone.
Starting point is 00:09:19 Oh, that's true, yeah. She's one of the ones that goes into the mouth and there's a constant background harm on all of her singles. The dentist suction thing. That's incredible. Yeah. The other thing from the Lawn Mower Museum is they've got, there was a prototype of a robot lawn mower there
Starting point is 00:09:36 called it made by Husqvarna, I think I pronounced that right, which costs something like a million pounds to develop and had a retail price of £2,000 and was so expensive that obviously it didn't sell very well, which is a shame because it's got a brilliant anti-theft device built into it. If it detects it's being stolen, it starts screaming. So, Husqvarna developed a screaming robot lawn mower.
Starting point is 00:10:03 If only Nicholas Parsons had had one. OK, it's time for fact number two and that is Czysinski. My fact this week is that Jimmy Carter once gave a speech in Poland where he accidentally announced he wanted to have sex with all Polish people. So when he said we never fired a bullet, was he just talking about sexual frustration? This was his first trip abroad as president.
Starting point is 00:10:34 It was in 1977 and he had this translator called Stephen Seymour and he was a good translator, but Polish was his fourth language and he was having to translate into Polish and usually a translator is translating from the language into English if they're your translator. But Jimmy Carter asked him to translate his speech into Polish for the Polish people and he translated the phrase
Starting point is 00:10:57 I want to get to know the Polish people better as I want to have sex with the Polish. I want to have carnal sexual knowledge of the Polish people. So that's what he did and he made all these other mistakes in this speech as well. For instance, he opened it by trying to say I'd left the US just this morning to come here and he ended up saying I left the US never to return.
Starting point is 00:11:20 He was moving to Poland. That would be a major league defection coup for the Soviets. It would, wouldn't it? I read that another of the reasons was that Seymour, the original translator, was a really good translator of written Polish, but wasn't quite so good at simultaneous spoken translation. I see.
Starting point is 00:11:40 So maybe that was something to do with it too. So he should have been writing it down on a big screen behind people, yeah. So my favorite Jimmy Carter mistranslation in one of his speeches is that... We've all got one. He's got a greatest hits list. He was in Japan and he was giving a speech
Starting point is 00:11:57 and this is post him being president. When he started the speech with a joke and halfway through he realized, oh no, this is not going to translate. I'm telling a joke and the punchline is just going to come out all wrong through translation of this Japanese translator. So I'm just going to get this weird confused silence.
Starting point is 00:12:14 But he's like, I'm halfway through, got to do it. So he delivers the joke and then the Japanese translator translates and it gets this massive laugh, humongous laugh. And so afterwards he went up to the guy and said that is incredible that you managed to translate that joke. You must be an incredible translator.
Starting point is 00:12:30 And the translator said, ah, no, what I did actually was say, President Carter just told a joke. Everyone must laugh. That resulted in his ginormous laugh. What a dude. Is that translator still working? And does he do stand up gigs in the UK, please?
Starting point is 00:12:47 So did you know that Jimmy Carter set up a hotline that you could ring to report people for being too cool? This is true. He was, it was a big environmentalist Jimmy Carter who set up the Department of the Environment in the States and he put solar panels on the roof of the White House. And one of the things he did was that he, at some point, he passed a law saying that air conditioning
Starting point is 00:13:13 in government buildings and businesses couldn't go any lower than 26.7 degrees Celsius, which is 80 Fahrenheit. That is quite hard. It is quite hard, isn't it? And this affected 55 million people who had a very sweaty time. But he set up a hotline
Starting point is 00:13:30 so that you could ring and report people if they turned their air con lower than that. That's great. And they could be given a $10,000 fine. No. Of course, Reagan took the solar panel straight off, didn't he? When he went to the White House, it was up in the face.
Starting point is 00:13:46 He said they were a joke. Jimmy Carter has won three Grammys. Has he? Yeah. For what? Spoken word. So all the spoken word of his books that he keeps pumping out. He's written a lot of books and he's won three Grammys,
Starting point is 00:14:02 but he's been nominated a lot more times. I think he, looking through the list of spoken word Grammys, he has been nominated more than anyone else. Really? Yeah. He lost in 1999 to Christopher Reep. He lost in 2002 to Quincy Jones. In 2008, he lost to Obama, but he was up against Obama, as was Bill Clinton.
Starting point is 00:14:22 So three of the nominees were presidents of the United States of America, the Grammys. That was the big presidential race of 2008, wasn't it? That was the one I was watching. Yeah. Then he lost in 2010 to Michael J. Fox. Then he lost in 2015 to Joan Rivers, but then he won in 2016.
Starting point is 00:14:38 That feels like a pity win. After all that effort, that feels like. Yeah, exactly. Just give it to him, he'll go away. I love Jim Mikata. Do you? He's just the best guy. He's just the most principled, moral guy.
Starting point is 00:14:50 So he's the only president who doesn't really take speaking fees, and any speaking fee he has ever taken, which is always minimal, goes to charity. Do you think he stopped taking them because he keeps making such massive gas in every single corner? Insulting the audience by accident, by a translation.
Starting point is 00:15:06 Always just coming onto whoever's listening. He still gives, I was listening to a podcast, which is really good. It's the Washington Post presidential podcast, and they did about an hour on every president. So follow Jim Mikata from start to finish. You've got quite a esoteric taste. An hour, we've had 45 now.
Starting point is 00:15:26 I mean, I haven't listened to, like, rather for Bee Hayes or anything yet. I don't know how I'd fare there. But he still gives Sunday school classes, and people come from all over the world to listen, but, you know, he's an evangelical, born again Christian, so he just gives religious lessons
Starting point is 00:15:42 Sunday school every week. He's just such a decent guy. Claims to have seen a UFO, hasn't he? Yeah, he's also a bit weird. It's a very famous incident of Jimmy Carter claiming to have seen a UFO. One of the promises he made in his presidential campaign was that he would investigate
Starting point is 00:15:57 all extraterrestrial experiences or something, I think. And then when he got into power, he said he couldn't, because it was all too secret or something. He's too busy now to go around. Yeah, turns out so. With his Geiger counter for ectoplasm. He builds houses, doesn't he, as well?
Starting point is 00:16:12 Yeah, and amazing furniture. Does he? Come on, how good is the furniture? It sells for, I think I might have mentioned this before, but if I haven't, yeah, he builds like beds and chess drawers and... Did he sell it for a lot of money? Yeah, thousands.
Starting point is 00:16:27 Yeah, but how much would it sell for if he sold it under a suit in it? Which would have missed it if it had been an eccentric thing to do. Yeah, he sent his first text three years ago. Jimmy Carter. Oh, well done, Jimmy. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:16:41 And his second text, this was the message of his second text he ever sent. I did not mean to send that first text about wanting to have sex with you, I am sorry. I am still using Seymour to translate all this stuff. Yeah, no, his second text was, that was my first text message. Yeah, he was his first text,
Starting point is 00:17:01 this is my first text, is it? There was two, has it gone on like that since? Yeah, no, it was to his grandson, and it was, did you see Colbert last night? Pee, he ends it with Pee, which I think he's referred to as Papa. But his grandson is on Twitter, so he did a screen grab of it.
Starting point is 00:17:19 Well, he might be president. He might just be a real ass about it. Or patio furniture maker. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that narcissists don't like looking at themselves. Is that weird?
Starting point is 00:17:43 So this is a new study that's come out of Austria from the University of Graz, and the idea is that they took a pool of around 600 people and surveyed them to see whether or not they were narcissistic. And so out of that, they found 43 people that they selected, 21 who scored really highly as being narcissistic, and 22 with lower scores.
Starting point is 00:18:03 And they were shown pictures of themselves and close family friends and so on. And their brain activity, which was monitored, every time they saw the picture of themselves when their eyes locked onto themselves, it registered as not enjoying it. Yeah, which is... And that was not enjoying it more so than non-narcissists.
Starting point is 00:18:20 Or maybe just enjoying it the same amount, or not having this in a special surge of enjoyment, I guess. Yeah, which is, I've just realized, because obviously narcissists in the myth does like looking at himself. And you've just got this fact. Yeah. That says he likes it a lot.
Starting point is 00:18:35 To his detriment, it turns out. Does he die? He doesn't die, but he gets turned into a flower. I would say that is a kind of death. That is a plot twist I did not see coming. It's a daffodil, isn't it, that he was turned into? Well, we think it's a narcissist. It's like a daffodil.
Starting point is 00:18:50 There's a flower called narcissists, which is, yeah. And they sort of droop over the riverbank, Daniel, and they look like they're looking at themselves with their little trumpets. So that's why he was turned into one of those. Okay. By the gods. I think he starved to death first,
Starting point is 00:19:03 because he was so captivated by his reflection. And I should just say for the pedants out there, or anyone who's watched QI, that we don't know that the etymology of narcissists, the flower comes from narcissists, the person. To me, it seems so obvious that it definitely does. It's a flower that he was turned into and it drapes over lakes.
Starting point is 00:19:19 But some people say it's related to a word that means to poison or something. Okay. They might be totally unrelated to each other. Do you know how to tell us someone's a narcissist? You just ask them. Because they don't care. They'll say, yeah, I'm a narcissist.
Starting point is 00:19:35 Oh, that's true, yeah. Psychologists have developed a one-question test for narcissism. Wow. And it's a pretty good one. And then there's a more advanced one, which is a 40-question test, but it replicates pretty closely the one-question test.
Starting point is 00:19:49 Do you guys know about the Anna Face Facial Beauty Analysis? No. It's the thing you can do. I thought, okay, well, let's do something about looking at yourself. So I went on this website and it takes a photo of your face
Starting point is 00:20:01 and then it analyzes you and it gives you your facial beauty analysis. Sounds like the kind of thing a narcissist would do. It does, doesn't it? Yeah. So I was just, I was role-playing. So this is how my facial beauty analysis reads. Your nose is too long for your ears.
Starting point is 00:20:19 Your inner ocular distance is too big for your eyes. Your nose is too wide for your face width. Your face is too narrow. Your nose is too wide for your mouth. Wow. Look, only some of that is true. It's pretty brutal, isn't it? What I got stuck on though
Starting point is 00:20:35 is your nose is too long for your ears. How do those things correlate? How is it not that your ears are too short for your nose? Yeah. Why is there a nose to blame? What's with nose done? But I don't think you could fit it in your ears even if you wanted to.
Starting point is 00:20:52 No, I don't think so. God knows I've tried. So it's not, well, it's not that long then, is it? If you can't even fit it into your ears. So what was it trying to tell you? I think it succeeded in telling me exactly what it wanted to tell me. It may just be an exercise in, I don't know,
Starting point is 00:21:08 abuse, honesty, no idea. What's the URL for that? It's anaphase, A-N-A, face. Anaphase, definitely doing that. I was looking up stuff about looking in mirrors. Yeah. You know the thing about animals looking in mirrors? Which I think we must have mentioned before.
Starting point is 00:21:25 Don't they do it? But they do it. And the way to tell if they can tell that they are the animal in the mirror is by painting a dot on them. And then if they try and get rid of the dot, that's how they know. This was invented by a guy called Gordon Gallup, Jr.
Starting point is 00:21:41 This was his innovation experiment in the 1970s. Although one of the first people to do it was Charles Darwin, who in 1838 went to London Zoo and entered an orangutan's cage with a mirror to experiment. Wow. That's been done all this time. Yeah, wow. And the orangutans loved it.
Starting point is 00:21:59 He said she was astonished beyond measure. But did she know it was her reflection? Don't know. I don't think he did the dot test. Do you know about the 17th century fashion for having a mirror hanging on the wall of your drawing room and then next to it an oil painting of exactly the reflection in the mirror?
Starting point is 00:22:17 What? No. Really? Yeah. Why? I couldn't find out anything more about this. I came across this fact and couldn't get anywhere further with it. But I don't know whether it was
Starting point is 00:22:29 in order to show off the artist or in order to show off what the mirror can see. Yeah. Right. What a hassle, because if you ever wanted to redecorate, you always have to hang those two next to each other then. Yeah. And in the same position, actually, obviously,
Starting point is 00:22:43 because you can't move the mirror, can you? Otherwise, it's not going to reflect the same thing. And also, if you walk up to the wrong one, you might think you're a vampire. There was another weird fashion for the clawed glass, which was about the same time. I think the 18th century, which was a period of time where people decided that beautiful views and landscapes
Starting point is 00:23:03 actually looked more attractive in mirrors than they did in real life, just with the bare eyes. And so this clawed glass was invented and people would walk up mountains and they'd take a clawed glass with them. And the idea was that you got to the top of a mountain and then you get to take out this mirror and it would be a tinted mirror.
Starting point is 00:23:19 So it gave it a bit of a ethereal dreamlike quality and you'd get to look at the view in a mirror and then go down again. But you'd have to face away, wouldn't you? From the view, look into the mirror, see the view behind you. I don't know how best it's all that is. So you're facing away from the thing
Starting point is 00:23:34 you've come up with, the thing to see, so that you can look at it in the mirror, which is exactly like the selfie thing, where you get a lot of people facing away from the view with the camera held out in front of them. So that's the original selfie. That's it. It's sort of the original selfie.
Starting point is 00:23:49 Yes. Yeah, kind of. We all got quite excited about that for a minute. Yeah. So listen, Narcissus then was, because he was in love with his own reflection, he might not have liked seeing a picture of himself because that would have been the right way round.
Starting point is 00:24:05 Yeah. Ah, yes. Absolutely. Yes. So that's why people tend to much prefer their reflection to pictures, isn't it? Yeah. Because the image you're used to seeing
Starting point is 00:24:14 is the one in the mirror, but as soon as you see a photo, you think, oh, my face is pretty. Your nose is too long for your ears. OK, it is time for our final fact of the show. And that is Andy. My fact is that clenching one's buttocks is a technique Christie's auctioneers are taught
Starting point is 00:24:36 to stop their hands shaking. But it doesn't actually say where they're being told to put their hands while they're clenching their buttocks. Yeah, so this is a piece about extraordinary things that Christie's has found out over the years. It's by Christie's. And one of them was this amazing fact about how the auctioneers calm the sales down.
Starting point is 00:24:57 Wow. Is this them holding priceless bits of art, or is this when they're actually conducting the auction? I think when you're conducting an auction, because you're standing at the front in front of everyone and you're gesturing, so you have to look in control of the situation, I suppose. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:25:10 So that apparently comes, I don't know what the mechanism is, whether simply the focusing on another muscle in your body removes the tension from your hands. Yeah, it must do, right? I guess so. I don't know. I'm trying it now, and I think it makes you a bit more shaky. But so I guess the shaking is because they talk about
Starting point is 00:25:28 auctioneers as being sort of an acting gig almost. You get up on stage and you need to make the audience love you because that's going to make an auction successful. And on Christie's site, they were saying, with interviews of various auctioneers, that the first 10 seconds is where you need to grab them. Otherwise, you might not have a successful auction, which seems bizarre if you're there to buy things.
Starting point is 00:25:48 Do you know what I mean? Like, you're not buying off this guy's credibility. You're buying because there's... But you are. It's, I mean, I remember going to a, which is quite similar. What's it called when you go to a charity thing and... Raffle. No, the one that's above a raffle where you bid for...
Starting point is 00:26:05 Super raffle? What are those things where, like, you donate a holiday or you donate your mansion for a week? Oh, yeah, I've been to loads of things where people don't know to their mansion for a week. Where have I been? We mix in different circles. What is it called?
Starting point is 00:26:21 It's a charity auction. Yeah, so, you know, when you go to a charity auction, it's, you inspire people to buy stuff just by being that charming. I remember going to one recently and Clive Anderson was doing the auctioning and people definitely bid on stuff that they would absolutely not have, had he not kind of cajoled them a bit here and persuaded them a bit there. I think it makes such a difference
Starting point is 00:26:40 because it's in the moment, isn't it? That's what affects you in an auction. I did a gig not too long ago with a Christie's auctioneer and it was a very rowdy room and it was a charity night. It was raising money for this new university for brain studies and he was given a lot of stuff to auction off and the room was chaotic, as you would expect. It was in the V&A.
Starting point is 00:27:00 Everyone was just busy on roundtables eating. So he had to try and maintain their attention in order to sell all this stuff and he did this trick. When he felt like he lost the crowd, he went... He made that noise and every time the crowd would silence, look back to him and then he'd continue on with the auction. But he did it like 50 times during the night. Well, they're all ponies.
Starting point is 00:27:23 It was an amazing technique. Like that's how he shut up an entire room. Yeah, one of the things I didn't realise is that auctioneers will keep an eye on each other as well. So one of them, if they feel that, you know, if auctioneer A is up there and he doesn't think he's quite got the room, he's not inspiring them enough, he can nod to auctioneer B who'll come up and take his place
Starting point is 00:27:40 and try and raise the temperature of the room. And it works the other way round as well. Auctioneer B can just go up to him and tap him on the shoulder and go, you've lost him, mate, I'll do it. Wow. It's like a tag team. Imagine if that was true in all performing arts. Imagine Andy, if you were bombing one night and Dan just comes up behind you, taps you on the shoulder
Starting point is 00:27:55 and says, I'll take it from here, mate. What do you mean, imagine? Well, remember, I think it's the word you're looking for. And they used to, in the old days, have to do mock auctions. The auctioneers at Christie's, before the bosses of the company, to just make sure that their skills were good. The bosses would just sit around with a drink and then the auctioneers would have to do a mock auction.
Starting point is 00:28:17 It's all a bit more professional now. So they get voice actors and acting coaches in to teach them about engaging the voice and maybe also about posture and engaging the audience. I don't know. Well, Christie's does in house courses. If you want to get into it, you spend, you do a workshop with one of them.
Starting point is 00:28:32 Yeah, Wolverhampton actually has a two-year degree for auctioneering. Yeah, they teach you to auctioneer and to value things as well. But yeah. How much am I going to pay for this place on the Yorkshire University auction course? 9,000 pounds, 9,000 pounds. I mean, how do I get 10? Yeah, so did anybody look up buttock clenching?
Starting point is 00:28:52 No. No more than usual. So buttock clenching, you're all aware of the international penny-chuffing competition, are you? No. Right. Well, this takes place annually at the New Inn in Wedmore in Somerset where the contestants have to clench three two-pence coins
Starting point is 00:29:10 in between the cheeks of their buttocks, then walk, waddle, or hop four yards across the pub before depositing the coins in a pint glass. Wow. Oh, my God. You get one point for every coin you get in the glass. And the last report that I could find from 2015, three people scored nine points.
Starting point is 00:29:31 Is that the full? So they managed three journeys across the pub. Oh, wow. Do you have to pick them up with your buttocks? That isn't indicated. OK. Nor is what happens to the coins afterwards, whether they go into a particular till.
Starting point is 00:29:48 Is it a full pint and do you have to down it once you've finished? No, it's just a pint glass. Well, that's a shame. That would make the competition more fun, I think. It would, wouldn't it? 00:29:54,840 --> 00:29:54,840 00:29:54,840 --> 00:29:54,840
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Starting point is 00:00:00 00:30:05,800 --> 00:30:08,120 Here's the other thing, of course, right? If you put yourself in the room there, that's a lot of bum, isn't it? Yes. Now, what happens is apparently they have some sort of modesty blanket that they put around themselves while hopping, waddling, or walking four yards across the pub with some money up their arse. Didn't David Souchet, the Poirot actor, he did a lot of butt clenching as well?
Starting point is 00:30:32 Did he? Yeah, to get in together role. To get the waddle, right? He wanted to be as perked as an auctioneer, didn't he? Is it called the Souchet sachet? No. Have you made that up? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:30:44 Well, keep it. Trade market immediately, yeah. It feels like it's not mine to trademark, I don't think. But guys, Telegraph headline, David Souchet, I stuck coin in buttocks to walk like Poirot. And also to win this competition at the New Inn in Wedmore. He was caught in a pub in Somerset with a modesty blanket around him. This is the money up his arse.
Starting point is 00:31:04 And he said, oh, I was doing it for the role. Okay, that's it. That is 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 have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, Andy.
Starting point is 00:31:25 At Andrew Hunter M. Jason. At Jason Haseley. And Chazinsky. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing. Or you can go to our website, nosuchthingasafish.com, where we've got all of our previous episodes.
Starting point is 00:31:38 We've also got links to our tour in October and November, and also a link to our book coming out November 2nd, The Book of the Year. Okay, that's it. We'll be back again next week. We'll see you then. Goodbye.

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