No Such Thing As A Fish - 185: No Such Thing As Scottish Snow

Episode Date: October 6, 2017

Andy, Anna, James and special guest Cariad Lloyd discuss Unity Mitford's BFFs, how planes (don't) cure deafness, and why you shouldn't eat Scottish show.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI office in Covent Garden. My name is Andrew Hunter Murray and I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Tijinski and our special guest this week is Cariad Lloyd. Cariad is a comedian we all know, she's been on QI a load of times, she's in an improvised show called Ostentatious which is Jane Austen based improvised comedy with me and she also is the presenter and host and producer and everything of the podcast Griefcast which is about grief and about people you've lost but it's also very uplifting and charming and funny and wonderful so do give that a listen. Okay starting with fact number one this week and

that is Cariad Lloyd. My fact is that Unity Mittford was the only person to be BFFs with Churchill and Hitler. She was best friends forever just for any 80s kids in the room. Yeah she was definitely best buddies, bezies with Hitler, she was very bezies with Hitler but she was also very old family friends with Churchill and at some point just before war broke out so she was living in Germany basically completely in Hitler's inner circle, she was completely there and she's to write to her friend Winston and beg him very regularly to make peace with Hitler because she really believed in both countries. Now Cariad, yes she was a massive fascist so obviously not like saying I love her but she did really believe that England and Germany could work together and become this

incredible superpower and she always said if they go to war I'll kill myself, I'll kill because these are my two greatest arts in my country and spoiler alert the moment war broke out she went into a park and she shot herself in the head but spoiler spoiler alert it didn't work she survived with the bullet in her head. Wow but then she did also die due to an infection but much later much much later so Hitler her BFF when she did shoot herself in the head Hitler felt so bad of it was his fault hashtag you caused the war. He arranged for a train to take her to Switzerland and then her mother and I think it was Debo the young sister came and got her but he he you know wars breaking out everyone's leaving countries Hitler made sure that she got out of Germany and he knew she was

going back to Britain and he funded her healthcare and stuff and it's very easy to accidentally read the story and go oh that's quite nice. I know yes I know again Cariad he was a massive fascist but I think he was quite big into it. He was one of the worst I would say. You know there's a theory about Hitler funding all this so yes the theory is that her sister Deborah and her mother took her home after she tried to kill herself she then recuperated at a little nursing home in a village called Wiggington in Oxfordshire the home was a maternity home this and there is a story this is rubbish there is a story from the woman who ran the home that she may have had a baby and the baby had a tiny mustache and was a massive fascist yeah and so the journalist who read about this she

asked the woman who she thought the father might be and and she said well my mother always said it was Hitler's although there is no record of this happening so it's probable there is not a secret Hitler love child but they definitely copped off didn't they? No also that's a good yeah there's a lot of like it was very suspicious in the inner circle all the Germans hated her they were like there's this British woman who Hitler literally she would like advise him and wind him up on stuff and she was extremely jealous of Eva Braun as well and Eva Braun was very jealous of her right? Yeah so Unity definitely was in love with him but what I've read seems to be like that nothing happened basically he was kind of using her because she was extremely useful and the

other weird thing about Unity is her middle name was Valkyrie Unity Valkyrie Mitford and she was born in the town of Swastika so weird and so it said that he was very um superstitious and it was said when he found this stuff out about her and she was a six foot blonde blue eyed woman that he kind of felt like she was very lucky but apparently they like nothing ever he apparently there was no way they ever slept together but she definitely would have and she used to kind of hang out with other fascists. Did she sleep with Churchill? No but her sister Decker was married to Esmond who the big rumor is that he was Churchill's secret son and it was all sort of hidden that he was actually a nephew but yeah I thought Churchill was quite happily married though not like that

massive fascist Hitler. So this town of Swastika is in Ontario yes and they wanted to change the name during the war to Winston because of obvious reasons and they even did it I think or at least they got pretty close but then everyone who was living there said no and so they took down all the new signs and they said no we were called Swastika before Hitler came along yeah we came up with the idea first why should we change our names and they were named after the the symbol which was a good luck symbol in is it Hindi or Hinduism yeah Hinduism so that's you know they were there beforehand. It doesn't down have a fact about that guy I think possibly also in Canada who was called Adolf Hitler and it was asked if you're going to change your name and he said

I'm not going to let one guy ruin the name and he didn't change his name yeah anyway they were an amazing family yeah there literally isn't one of them that wasn't somehow involved in something. So Unity was well they were all bizarre but she was bizarre so she said that her and her sister grew up her to be a fascist her sister one of her sisters had to be a communist yes and she said that they used to scratch she would scratch a Swastika and her sister would scratch a hammer and sickle into the window of the bedroom that they shared together and the scratchers were still there and so they really pursued their dreams there was an article in The Guardian about how they're kind of inspiring in a twisted way because she was like I'm in love with Hitler I'm going to go

track him down and she did and she went to Germany and she sat in a cafe that he frequented she sat there every day yeah she sat there every single day until eventually he was like who's that six foot blonde woman that keeps staring at me and that's how she got to know him and apparently she told she wrote to Decker and said this is my plan like any good obsessed teenager this time I'm going to get him and her and so her and Decker Jessica Mitford shared a room and they had a chalk line down the middle of the room and at one end was a bust of Lenin and the other end was a picture of Hitler wow but they were obviously still sisters and loved each other very much and then completely opposite but obviously growing up in exactly the

same household. Do you think maybe like sometimes brothers and sisters go against their brothers and sisters right yeah well they sort of if you read any of the Mitford stuff there's an amazing biography by Mary S Lovell which is the the best Mitford S one tree which says that they all of them had these incredibly obsessive personalities and filled them with so either fascism or communism or Pam who was obsessed with farming. Pam is the one that everyone forgets but she introduced a new breed of chicken into this country yeah so and Pam apparently was quite a wit and like Evelyn Moore was in love with her I think but the only people who heard her jokes were the chickens yeah exactly sad with a six. So there was yeah and there's a brother who died in the war and then

you have Nancy who was a very famous writer Diana who obviously also being of a fascist they do not they don't do well on fascists. Diana was the mistress of Oswald Mosley head of the British. She was the wife the wife, eventual wife of Oswald Mosley. Well I was just referring to the courting phase. She was the one who famously said Hitler had beautiful blue eyes. Oh yeah Did she tell Stephen Fry this? Well Stephen actually mentioned that on QI. He says Stephen Fry says that she said to him of course you never met Hitler did you? Yeah she was an incredible woman Diana and she was said to be like the most beautiful woman of her age like men were literally falling over and then she married a Guinness and had an affair not a pint of Guinness

and then had an affair with Oswald Mosley and then ended up marrying him and then went to prison and she was the only during the war they were interred and she and another woman were allowed their husbands in Holloway prison so she was in Holloway women's prison and then Oswald was allowed to join her because Churchill said that was okay because he was mates with the family Nancy Metford was famous for doing the upper class and lower class writing since you and non you was a famous essay she wrote yeah about the correct ways. What things show you off as being posh or not posh right? Yes. Have you got a test for us? I couldn't do one. How do you pronounce the word which refers to a large cat with a main lion? Lion? No not posh not posh. Oh no

lion? Oh you're pretty posh. I'm putting it on I'm putting it on. It rhymes with barn apparently lawn yeah. How do you pronounce the game which I like to play where I hit little balls around with a stick in a field. Uh golf. Goof. Goof. Goof. Goof. No. Oh yeah goof. Who's that goof? Like Darren Goof. Going to a gamer goof. Oh wow. There was a study recently that found the queen has become less posh over the course of her reign as in if you listen to her vowels from 1953. She's still quite posh. She's still quite posh though. If you listen to the old recordings it's almost like it sounds almost alien. But that's her accent is less posh. She still lives in a massive country. She hasn't kept it real recently yeah. But she talks quite street I think is what

we're saying. She lives in a palace but she talks pretty street. She says BFF. Yeah. Wasn't the non-new you thing part of it was about that thing where people who want to be posh put on posh words so things like serviette instead of napkin. So it wasn't about telling the posh from the working class. It was about telling the posh from the kind of middle class who wanted to be. The really posh don't say the posh word. They just call it a napkin. Yeah. Whereas the social climate says the serviette. Exactly. What have you called a mouth face wiper. You're just a plain old widow. Nancy was very like a Serbic and witty about so she was sort of taking the piss out of people. There was a lot of piss taken involved wasn't there. Yeah. Apparently a gentleman when he's drunk

may become amorous or maudlin or vomit in public but he would never become truckulent. That's how you know Andy's so common. Regularly truckulent. Fighty-fighty. Okay it's time for fact number two and that is Anna. My fact this week is that in the 1920s doctors prescribed intentionally terrifying flights and airplanes to cure deafness. Why did they think that that would what was their reason? Well I would think maybe because it makes your ears pop. Yeah but like. Is it that? It was not that no it was the shock factor. So it actually it actually started with someone who couldn't speak. It was an army serviceman who I think lost the ability to speak during the first world war and this is in 1921 this doctor called

Charles McInerney said it was a psychological problem and that the solution would be going into a plane and being treated to a series of loop the loops and nose dives and spins and things that made him think he was going to die and lo and behold he was he took this prescription he did it he stepped off the plane and he said I don't know if I can speak anymore and it turned out he could because he said that and then it started being touted as a cure for everything including deafness so deaf flights were a thing that was quite commonly prescribed and Charles Lindbergh very famous obviously aviator on his business card he had deaf flights as one of the things that he offered to take deaf people up and the idea was that people might have suffered from these

things for psychological reasons you were saying yeah shell-shocky kind of thing yeah so were they take yeah was it only if you develop deafness or was it more like oh I've been deaf since birth there were some people who were deaf since birth so for example in 1930 there was a boxer called Fred Mahon his nickname was dummy which is a cruel nickname because he'd been deaf since the age of eight months so he took a flight in 1930 I was designed to cure his hearing it was designed to cure his hearing with a parachute jump that he was going to take out of the plane okay in front of a crowd of thousands the parachute failed to open oh my god and he died where's the happy ending Andy yeah probably in the next fact I'm afraid sometimes people did die the idea also was that

it had to be a surprise so the patients were told that where are we going don't worry just put on this rucksack they were told they were just going in a flight because it was the altitude that cured the deafness right and then they'd go up in the flight and then it would be a horrible shock when you suddenly started nose diving towards the ground or spinning around in circles because obviously if you knew it was going to happen then the cure wasn't going to be as effective have you heard about this flight that happened in um well when did it happen in 1969 with Alan Funt have you heard this before I don't think I've ever heard the word Alan Funt before I think I remember he was the host of a prank show in America there was like absolutely massive kind of like candid

camera sort of you've been you know early you've been framed it was called candid camera I feel like a funt what a funt Alan Funt hosted candid camera which is like the original you've been framed and he was hugely hugey famous as much as I would say Jeremy Beal was in his day and he was on a flight with his family and they had a camera crew because they were going to film like this new prank show and it got taken hostage so the plane a guy stands up and it was at the time apparently there was loads of this happening and they were just constantly in 1969 being taken to Cuba it was like quite fashionable so everyone starts panicking then some of the passengers see Alan Funt and go oh it's a prank and it wasn't a prank so Alan Funt standing up he's like it's not a prank which

obviously is what Alan Funt would do if it was a prank so the whole plane starts laughing and relaxing because they think it's a prank and I think they even got flown to Cuba and they were on the ground for like five hours with everyone really relaxed thinking in a minute yeah it seems that the whole plane thinking in a minute the camera's gonna come out we're all gonna laugh and they were winding him up the whole time and he was with his wife and child and the the daughter that has recounted it and said like they just thought they just he was getting more and more frustrated and upset because no one would believe it. What's the hijacker? No Alan Funt! Eventually Funt hijacked the plane and he started taking me to anywhere apart from Cuba. It did happen a lot I remember

Andy had a fact where there was a guy who said take me to Cuba but the flight was already going to Cuba. Oh yeah oh my god that's a that's a book of prerogative failures classic that one yeah um Charles Lindbergh yeah one of his other specialties listed on his business card which is an amazing business card by the way including death flights one of the other things he offered was plane change in midair yeah what this was a trick in early aerial circuses where you would just climb out of the plane you were in or flying and climb into another plane next to you that's would you do that if you're traveling and you'd do it for an exchange or is it a trick it's a trick right I was gonna say it wasn't what changing your flight was in the older days

if anyone from Ryanair is listening they will be considering that he was a real uh daredevil in some way so Lindbergh he did um New York to Paris in 1924 I did not know this thing about it he uh had to get rid of all non-essential equipment make the plane as light as possible so he took out all non-essential equipment and then he put a big fuel tank on the front of the plane so he could get that have as much fuel as he needed unfortunately that meant he could not see out in front of him I'm not even kidding to see out of the plane in front of him he had a few options he installed a periscope in the cockpit oh my god he also sometimes just had to open the right hand door to peek out the front oh my god his final option was just to turn the plane sideways

for a bit that's how I drive it does work it does um but yeah um aerial acrobatics was super popular in the 1920s it was this very specific phase because a lot of people learned to fly in the first world war and then they realized they could make a living out of it and barnstorming it was called and it became this very popular thing and I can't tell if it was uh I think the etymology of it is vaguely unclear it's either because people would often do these amazing aerial acrobatics in like fields and people would stand by a barn and watch but also quite a common trick they'd do is to fly through a barn so they'd open the doors of a barn and then you had to fly your plane through the barn and come out at the other end it's that way the trope of bursting into a

barn and then you burst out the other end and all the chickens are you know flapping around you know it happens in every show Seinfeld runs into a barn but is that obviously where the word barnstorm it was a real barnstormer I think it is yeah I've seen videos of them going flying through and I'm sure that must be where it comes from yeah it must be yeah they I think they played some stunt games of tennis on planes no oh my god on the wings from one wing to another there are a few photos of people doing oh it's wing walking you know normally you're you're just sort of discreetly strapped to the

plane you're not standing completely free because obviously you'd immediately fall off did that mean you had to hit the ball ahead of where the person was at the time how does physics work aren't they I think the person who really suffers is the ball boy there's a guy called Ormer Locklear who was a 20s stunt pilot he I think was the first person to fly from one plane to another in midair possibly sorry fly from one plane to another sorry sorry climb he launched a smaller plane out of the window of a jumbo jet that's incredible so Ormer Locklear was a stunt pilot in the 20s and in a film in a film called The Great Air Robbery his one stunt he did he climbed down from a plane to a speeding car fought the baddie for a bit

kicked the baddie out of the car then he grabbed the plane's undercarriage and climbed back into it as the car overturned and crashed you should never climb back into someone's undercarriage very rude um do you know another old cure for deafness around about this time in the 1920s and before was to make your own artificial eardrum or have an artificial eardrum inserted but um you could order them I was going to say online and they sent you um things that were ever made of elts claw or pigs bladder or fishbone or something called gold beater's skin which I didn't know about but your dad probably would Andy because it's in used in the gold leaf making process and apparently it's animal intestine but anyway you put this on a little stick and

you put it in your ear and it apparently replaced your eardrum it didn't work but it was invented in 1853 or pioneered by a doctor called Joseph Toinby who is Polly Toinby's great grandfather is that right isn't that weird that's good I read the other day and I haven't looked into this I just saw the headline that your eardrum moves um the same way as your eyes move so when your eyes kind of move to the left or right your eardrum slightly move around like cats is you know when they like cats are obviously just doing it themselves our eardrums are obviously doing it yeah oh my god I can kind of feel it if you move around I think that might be your ear bones moving in your jaw oh yeah yeah it might be all right the other thing with um you know like well I can feel it too

yes might be your ear bones you have ear bones too and it's not just Anna who has ear bones no I'm just moving my eyes there's something moving in there if I think that's your jaw I think that's your jaw moving which is connecting to your ear bones but why would my jaw move when I'm just moving my eyes because you're moving the muscles around your eyes to look that way Carrie I'm not really into logical fact-based explanations here so this is kind of a psychological affliction that they thought could be cured by flying and there was another fashion for curing psychological afflictions in about the 1920s and this was pioneered by this doctor called Henry Cotten and I'd never heard of this but he thought that all madness or depression or anxiety was caused by

physical stuff and could all be cured by surgery and so he used to just pull more and more body parts out of people until they were cured so he'd start with the teeth so you'd go in and you'd pull out all of your teeth if you're mad and then if you still he'd go for another body part he'd keep on going so then I think he invented it he was like this is fun it was a lot like operation he'd go tonsils next and then adenoids and then he'd remove your colon if you still weren't cured I feel like you need your colon don't you? What about the appendix? No he did acknowledge that once my stomach's gone yes my anxiety is going to go because I'm trying to deal with not having a stomach so I'm probably just going to be really upset probably not well platypuses don't have

stomachs don't they? No they used to be very anxious no they don't and they used to this happened to my granny they used to pull out all your teeth as prevention for tooth decay so when you were like 18 or 21 and this was offered to her she was extremely poor working class AD and so they said well to save you some money and worrying about your teeth just take them all out lose them out did you go for it? Yes she had to hold every single tooth removed at 21 my granny was offered it didn't didn't take her off any offer. This guy did pull out his own children's and wife's teeth as soon as he had children and a wife but that was he had children and a wife or at what point in the ceremony or the reception did he do it? The christening there's one in there now kiss the

bride well just one thing before I do that you may now plier the bride's mouth open okay it's time for fact number three and that is James Huckett okay my fact this week is that there is a patch of snow in Scotland that fell 11 years ago and has just melted this week that is amazing it's sad it's very sad I thought it was amazing then when I looked into it I realized it was sad super sad at first I was like wow oh sad yeah so there are these people who kind of always looking for the last bit of snow that's on the Scottish mountains and most years it's still there when it starts snowing again so it's always going to be there and actually it always melts from the top so the bit at the bottom will have been there for the whole time but this week and I'm going on

a bit of a limb because as we're doing this podcast I think there might still be a tiny bit there but it's like a bit the size of a rucksack or something there's hardly anything and it looks like it's on its last legs probably we're recording this on September 29th and I think by the 30th or by the start of October it will definitely be gone god but you're in trouble if there's an unexpected blizzard in Scotland over the next week yeah exactly yeah hasn't it only disappeared six times in the last 300 years or something like that so yeah I read it as in the last 300 years there have only been six times when there's been no snow on the ground in Britain god yeah you know like every time you listen to the news at moment you feel like it's end of days and then you read a

story like that where you go and the snow has also gone and you think oh god but it's got a name yeah and there's a few of them I think the one that I'm talking about is called the Sphinx yeah and it's because there's a rock above it that looks a bit like the Sphinx oh I didn't know that was the reason yeah and would they like it I think it was I thought it was like the patch of snow asked you a riddle when you get there and if you answer wrong it folds you into its cold heart I don't know that's how it keeps going it keeps on absorbing but he's one more virgin to come and ask you the question Andy whenever hey so these people are very interesting guys there's no patch hunters yes and so this we only know about this because of this guy Ian

Cameron yeah and he's like one of the main guys and he often goes and tries to find these patches and then we'll take photos of them and then eventually pretty much if Ian Cameron says they're not there anymore they're probably not there anymore and he's got a Facebook group which you can go on and you know every few days he posts and he's like oh there's still a little bit left here but probably not tomorrow but and all of the data he gathers is really useful for climate scientists because he's got a record stretching back years and years now which is very useful in terms of the temperature on the ground and this is what they think it's climate change is that what he is quite circumspect about it he says look I'm just going to leave it to the scientists to

decide this kind of stuff I wish more people would take that I suppose it seems pretty likely that it's climate change right well you know what I like Ian I'm going to leave it to the scientists but yeah clearly it's um but he told the news statesman when they uh they spoke to him he said it might sound weird to say but it's like seeing an elderly relative or an old friend you're slightly disappointed if it's not in as good a condition and you're really disappointed if you turn up and it's not there he is all about the snow isn't he yeah I think he just he only cares about these snow patches and he says he I'm sure he cares about other things his tall wife covering herself in snow look at me look at me his children wearing snow hats eating snow desperately putting

carrots out in front of their noses daddy are we snow now no you're hot you're hot and you're nothing to me it's it's I'm sorry it's not like that being Ian's child I would like to counter it so the sg reported he's an enthusiast but he is not mad so tell that to his poor melting wife I think Ian Cameron is a bit of a hero because you know he's like looking at this kind of thing and not no one else is but actually it's like you say really good data and no he sounds amazing it's amazing and obviously he needs recording people do seem to be taking notice there's a whole there's a whole wikipedia article called snow patches in Scotland um which I suspect maybe Ian Cameron wrote this there are things like it's so weird it does seem to be a big thing based on

this so it describes a relatively little known snow patch which was Scotland's largest at the time of writing it said this patch does not appear in the known literature on the subject so it may be very under-recorded only the hips does know about that one it's a really obscure you probably haven't heard of it do you want some good news do you want to know about the world's tallest snow woman of course guys I feel like this is camera so her name is Olympia and she is 30 feet shorter than the Statue of Liberty uh yeah her arms consist of 27 foot tall evergreens and uh she has 16 skis for eyelashes and 2 000 feet of rope hair like she's amazing five red auto tires for lips which were painted by the Mahusuk kids association so basically the whole town got together and made

this this from the photo this absolute travesty of a snow person I don't know what the carrot is made of because presumably that's the size of a bus or something the carrot nose is made of muslin chicken wire and wood rain by the ms ad number 44 elementary school children uh yeah it's better than me if that magically came to life and approached me one night I would run for the hills and why is that might why would that happen well like in that like in the snowman you know the Christmas I would not go walking in the air with that I would sit indoors with a hair dryer on full blast if it came near me I mean it's not 100 clear just looking at this from a bit of a distance that she is a woman they've given it eyelashes in the classic cartoon version of gender I think

I think a snow vagina would be a bit much you don't see many snow penises on the old snowman do you do you do is it hanging down in walking in the air I didn't notice you see a lot of snow penises say um have you guys heard about the oldest ever ice is it in Antarctica yes it is and it was discovered this year it dates back guys 2.7 million years yeah is that the one that putin drank I sincerely hope not do you not remember that he did that they drilled down to some really old ice and then melted it and putin drank it well just dropped it in a whiskey or something he's gonna live forever and no he wasn't he wasn't down at the bottom of the hole eating the ice when they drove down to him um yeah no so as a climate scientist keep on

drilling down because the snow that falls and then compacts in Antarctica obviously uh not obviously but it has tiny bubbles of air which tell you a huge amount about the climate two million years ago and you can find out how much carbon dioxide there was and what that means for the temperature of the earth which is going to be very useful for us over the next century but this this year in April there was a freezer in Canada where they had ice cores that dated back thousands and thousands of years yeah your way ahead of me carry out no there was a freezer malfunction no and they melted guys I've had that with ice cream and it's really disappointing it is so disappointed well imagine if there was 22,000 years of history in your ice cream

if it's a queen of blacks chocolate I'd be as upset as I would be and the director of the Canadian ice core archives a guy called Martin Sharp and he said this is a bad day for Martin Sharp he said I've had better days so you're not far off but by a massive stroke of luck which sounds crazy but there was a massive stroke of like 90% of it was saved solely because uh camera crew had been filming a documentary about this ice core archive and they had said can we move most of it into this other freezer which has better lighting no so thank god most of it was saved that's amazing is it like ice cream where if it freezes it's not quite as good I think that's right yeah and then you still eat it but you think oh I should have eaten this earlier yeah

it's hard to shove the little bubbles of ancient carbon dioxide back in at the riot height I love them though because they're like time capsules but from literally millions of years ago I kind of find the fact that these bubbles are 2.7 million years old more exciting than the ice because it's like a little world even though it doesn't have the cool stuff like the blue peter badge or whatever inside it it's still like a little time capsule apparently you're not supposed to make snowmen in Antarctica really it's a boo according to the telegraph they're so uptight apparently the rules are designed to prevent the Antarctic's animals from being disturbed right yeah that's fair enough animals penguins I don't know they might be like what the is that you know hey that's my snow

imagine I came into your house and rolled up all your cushions and made a giant cushion man and you woke up yeah it does sound like I'd wake up because it sounds like that happened in a dream I think the other day the penguins is they're like just mind no business and suddenly someone's taking all their like house and Antarctica had no land animals permanent land animals apart from that tiny fly it's got penguins I think it's does never yeah but they they live in the sea the only I think we did the song QI the only permanent land animal is a mid is a mid with no wings hey and what the midge doesn't have feelings yeah it's even worse for the midge because if it could be quite a small snowman but to them it's going to look like that one from Maine yeah the princess

okay I now understand and the other point because what about like the the Antarctic bases they've built and all the science stations like no one's like hey we're disturbing them are they no the penguins are fine with that that must look like the death start of the midges okay it's time for a final fact that is my fact this week my fact is that the first person ever to use the word sponge cake was Jane Austen oh good old Jane good old Jane now we mentioned this because Cariad you are in an improvised comedy group called ostentatious which is about Jane Austen yeah I am a hm great she's in that with me uh Jamal Pergo yeah Joseph Pergo is in that Rachel Parris he's a great comic isn't he Jamal Pergo he's amazing yeah he does very well

Andy is also in that group with me I am I'm in Austin yes and you guys have got some big shows coming up we have we're going to the west end uh for three dates the Piccadilly theatre we're going to temper fifth january 23rd and special valentine's day february 13th go the day before that's what all the fashionable couples are doing and then on february the 14th you can do something actually fun yeah exactly at the Piccadilly theatre at 7 30 yeah ostentatious are playing their biggest dates yet and we've both seen it and it's amazing it's fantastic yeah so sponge cake so we know our Jane Austen right Andy we know our Jane Austen but she coined the word sponge cake she's got a few citations in the oxford english dictionary and this is so it doesn't mean that

she invented the sponge cake she's the first person just to write it down the world they called it something else before her did they call it cake sponge yeah it's so the first record of the word comes from her writings I'm not even convinced it's a word well is it two words or is it one word I thought she wrote it down hyphenated she wrote it down hyphenated in a letter to her sister she said you know how interesting the purchase of a sponge cake is to me and I think it was a famous Jane Austen sense of humor coming in there so it's interesting the first mention of a sponge cake is it being given a sick burn in the letter which is a shame because sponge cake is a great thing but do you know other words that she either coined or first usage the first evidence of it comes from

her I went through the OED and found all gone as many as I could read the whole thing well I've only started at the beginning can't do it hard back no um antebilias they're all kind of very ostiny words the ones like there's coddle cousinly she she invented coddle she didn't invent them I suppose but she's the first example we have okay don't you have a isn't this like you coddle an egg yeah yeah so maybe it's coddle in just that specific term as in to molly coddle yeah yeah uh irrepressible obtrusiveness titopy what's titopy titopy it's the study of tits it's titography i'm sorry i'm sorry it's not sorry photographing oh i'm getting confused uh titopy i think it means like a tit up

oh yes yes and i suppose a tit up is a mistake or something no Darcy's always tit hopping isn't he that bull went really tit hopping that's how lizzie fell and gad as in to gad about you're kidding the verbal use of gad yeah that's better than sponge cake to be honest yes it is about they're quite niche words yeah that's what i think it's not like shakespeare who just invented the and and all the main words before that we just literally let it gap um i've got some mind blowing news on that ana oh yeah so checks was always is always said that checks were invented 1700 words right and i'm always saying it and so the words include bump hurry road i mean it's it's nonsense so the reason that he gets all these citations is because the first um team of people

compiling the oxford english dictionary knew his works intimately because they were all lexicographers so when they were thinking oh well where's the word critical you know they say oh there is a critical in whatever play it was and then now that we've got better technology we're going back and we're finding way earlier ones so we thought that the word puke was a shakespearean coinage turns out it dates back to 1465 it's almost two centuries before shakespeare wrote it i bet you also was saying the word road come on can't retail it wasn't gone on a road yeah because it would be weird if shakespears plays were just full of words that no one had heard of the audience the audience would be although i can imagine the reviews you know you know people say now i find shakespear hard to

understand perhaps it was happening in the 16th century people like i don't know it's on about can't really follow it did you see the amazing website right like austin dot com no it's a written so it tells you you can type in a word it will tell you how many times she used it or is she ever so she only used the word swoon four times wow which for people who watch ostentatious will know we use that word quite a lot she's word curtsy six times she never used the word marvel so words it she had invented superheroes no no she was mainly using the word dc she did um there were things that i think that she may have invented like so the phrase tom dick or harry i think comes from her and you can imagine her thinking that up from her own head right

or dog tired comes from jane austin again like that's the kind of thing maybe she had made up good writing yeah if i've told you once i've told you a hundred times no she came up with that yeah that was from her that is a biggie that's probably her i'd say that's her lasting achievement but you're only saying that because you've been told that a lot of times i think it's about puke yeah um jane austin wrote not very well according to some according to this professor this is really interesting i'm bristling i'm going to a lot of people as well let's go a lot of men throughout the years have written harsh reviews of her well virginia wolf didn't like her much oh no that is well virginia wolf was a man it's extremely interesting you raised virginia wolf so this

is a study done by his professor called catherine southerland um and basically what she's saying is jane austin didn't write like we think she wrote that was the work of an editor so i agree with cariad and andy that like her novels are perfection in terms of like the construction of the sentences and the english language but what this academic says is that that was all the editor and if you look at her works her first drafts of works she writes totally differently they're just they're just the doorbings of prey on on the back of a mirror she posed to her big nice man came in the room yeah and he was like so nice well she was more experimental so it actually sounds like she was more interesting and she said that she wrote a bit more like virginia wolf so

for instance when she had exchanges between characters like speech exchanges she wouldn't separate out one speaker from another so it would all be like blurred in a more stream of consciousness the kind of way which is yeah keeping the idea of speech which is so good at that speech is so good yeah well the editor was one who had to separate it out and um she couldn't spell so she um didn't didn't know which went first of i and e she didn't know punctuation but also loads of people didn't spell yeah the rules hadn't been set you and on you had not been set yeah yes the rules hadn't been set i think maybe she was a little bit worse than other writers at the time and also she didn't separate things into paragraphs very well so to be fair

she was a woman in the like 19th century or the one before that she hadn't had a lot of education i'm not saying she didn't do very well we're really bristling aren't we could it be that she didn't try and write sponge cake she just misspelled like sponge carcass what book is that in james you know how interesting the purchase of a sponge cock is to me that is a way more interesting letter to be fair to be fair um virginia wolf said that um one of the reasons that she was so popular is there are 25 elderly gentlemen living in the neighborhood of london who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts wow that's a lovely sentence equally brilliant writer didn't you i know it's so sad they're both so fantastic and yet

didn't like each other well also didn't have many opinions on it well there will come in the years after my death a woman who is crap and i will call her virginia wolf but spell wolf wrong but didn't charlotte bronte hate her as well there's a quote yeah i'm sure there's a quote from bronte that said i read probably like i read that and i recognized no love that i've ever known i can imagine the bronte is not getting along yeah but it's all howling on a more somewhere very different vibe wasn't it but when the brontes came out they were really popular and jane austin went out a favor for a long time completely out of favor and actually it's i think it's partly only due to cinema that she's back in so silent movies very bad improvised comedy oh yeah we have

affected her sales quite heavily silent movies i think would have been terrible for austin because it's words because it's all conversation i think the first adaptation was 1940 of bright and fresh yes the amazing film black and white film starring uh laurence Olivier yes as lizzie bennett uh most versatile um yeah there's been some amazing spinoffs i don't know anyone looked into this like i mean obviously the austin industry uh myself and andy are employed by is huge and there's lots of fan fiction and lots of people writing other books so i just looked up like top the top 20 of other books there's just like definitely not mr darcy prom and prejudice kernel brandon's diary pride and prejudice and zombies mr darcy takes a wife

pride and prejudice continues they read like titles from our show like they're incredible amounts i read that a lot of people do um this fan fiction because there's not enough sex in the actual yes a lot of it is sexy darcy's passions pride and prejudice we told through his eyes by regina jeffers um i think is a little bit more sexy than her stuff because she doesn't really go into it it has to be said darcy and elizabeth nights and days at pemberley these are all available to buy guys more nights and days i reckon hot nights at pemberley mr darcy's undoing a pride and prejudice variation do you know her sexiest line maybe um or the line that most overtly refers to sex no it's pretty with sponge cocks i would like to see

sponge cock square pants the kids tv show oh my god um this is just a real classic jane also line it's um in mansfield park fanny price the main character fanny because it's fanny price is the rude name it's fanny it's fanny um no it's a reference to her getting pregnant and the sentence is just about it's one of the last sentences it's about how fanny price and her husband come into some money just after they had been married long enough to begin to want an increase of income that's not the rudest line in mansfield park it is an overt reference to sex though well would you like an overt reference to something else you know i would it's in mansfield park as well and there's a character called mary crawford who's a bad bad girl and um she's talking about the

admiralty and she says she used to know a load of admirals and she says of rears and vices i saw enough of rears and vices which are both kinds of admiral but they're also both references to something else i don't get it so vices as in woodwork yes okay rears in the back of the room yes yeah no and that's an incredibly filthy line that is quite raunchy i don't know that people are the academic community is divided over whether it refers to sodomy or spanking but it's it's one of the two she's trying to hint that mary crawford is a very saucy not not nice lady and that our main character is in trouble so that's what she's doing a good character study she could have said that she's known a lot of seabed and with her bad spelling she could have

made that quite obvious um you can play a jane austin role-playing game now which i really want to play so you don't want to fork out for ostentatious you could no there's this online role-playing game and it sounds really fun um and i think i saw that the video game yeah you get to pick a character and then you um have all these interactions so it's a guardian journalist went and played it and started out by making this character who lost her handkerchief and then found it and then went for a walk and bumped into a gentleman um although the the writer did say that while she was going on this virtual walk she saw a bunch of sheep stacked on top of each other so some of the algorithms in the game need some ironing out she said every austin novel there's a discrete sheep

stack uh my my lord will it be this sheep are stacked so fine today about ten years ago um an austin buff and an author sent off some of her manuscripts to various british publishers seeing if you could get them published and he made very slight changes to the title and the characters and um the pseudonym he used was alison lady as in a lady which is austin's pseudonym it wasn't the world's greatest pseudonym is it but you know um he's the guy who runs the jane austin festival in bath oh well you know who were they all rejected the manuscripts um and only one of them spotted the fact that it was almost identical to austin's work he got one letter back from penguin he just sent them pride and prejudice and they wrote back saying thank you for your

recent letter and chapters from your book first impressions it seems like a really original and interesting read i'm gonna say i really do like penguin though don't you i'll show you an excellent publisher oh gosh and thank god they haven't spotted that our book is just a complete rebel of bleak hands okay that's it that's all of our facts thank you very much indeed for listening we will be back again next week with another podcast uh but until then you can check us out on twitter we are at no such thing and we all have individual twitter accounts i'm on at andrew hunter m james at james harkin cariad at lady cariad and anna you can email podcast at qi.com yeah and if you want to come and see us on tour we've just announced a whole

new bunch of tour dates we're going all over the uk and you can see that at qi.com slash fish events you can also see our book we're publishing a book which is coming out very soon you can get that by going to qi.com slash fish or google the book of the year which is what it's called and if you want to see cariad and me in ostentatious you can go to the atg website or you can go to ostentatiousimpro.com forward slash shows and that has all the booking links for all our london shows and our uk tour as well lovely okay we'll see you next week thank you very much for listening goodbye