No Such Thing As A Fish - 197: No Such Thing As Eurovision For Christmas Trees

Episode Date: December 22, 2017

A special Christmas episode with Dan, James, Anna and Andy, live from Up The Creek in Greenwich

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week I'm coming to you from Up the Creek in Greenwich London! My name is Dan Schreiber and I am sitting here with Anna Chazinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered around the microphones for this time with our four favourite Christmas facts Christmas special and in no particular order here we go starting with my fact my fact this week is that as well as getting a visit from Santa Claus at Christmas Icelanders also get a visit from the spoon liquor, the door sniffer and the sausage swiper yeah so these they do have Santa there but they also have and this is what Wikipedia says they're called

your lads they're like lads lads lads lads lads yeah lads lads lads also sausage swiper lads lads lads lads lads lads I think the reason Wikipedia calls them that is because that's what they are called yeah right oh okay okay cool yeah I mean I know you've fallen for fake Wikipedia facts a lot in the past but this is real I just thought that was cool casual lingo I was like yeah I'm cool with you wiki so yeah they're called the your lads and there's there's 13 of them in total spoon liquor is one he licks bowls no he licks spoons

but there is a bowl liquor there is actually a bowl liquor yeah I misread my note there and then covered it up like it was a joke there's the sausage swiper who licks spoons and then there so does the sausage swiper he swipes sausages does he yeah so he hides in the rafters of your house and while you go and you know check for your spoons so someone's look the spoons he quickly he quickly head into the kitchen he lowers himself I think Tom Cruise style from Mission Impossible gets your sausages and then gets pulled back up to the to the roof and then you come back in and go ah the spoons now the sausages what's going on

yeah we've had three what are the other ten like there's a guy who he harasses sheep they all have very like expressive names don't they yeah his one's not so sheep coat Claude is his name yeah there's meat hook they were all thieves basically aren't they just in Iceland you just have to accept that like people will come and steal all your stuff there's pot scraper there's door the doorway sniffer is not someone who likes doorways it's just someone who's smelling beyond the doorway to try and steal your food later

but there used to be way more of them so they used to be more than 80 your lads which is a lot to descend upon you and there are ones that were you know kiboshed about mid-century were Falda Fakir which is skirt sweeper he got the shop and literally Pungo which is small testicles what did he do he just went around flattering people those are bigger than mine I've got small ones so it's yeah

so do they do these guys bring you anything do they just take things away they take things well they used to take things away and back in the day in 1746 the stories became so scary that they actually banned them from telling them to children because they brought them into such a sort of Stephen King-esque territory of fear that they said this is too much it was the Danish wasn't it who did that and not only that they banned using any stories to scare children and it was because of these guys it wasn't only because of them so have you heard of Iceland's famous Christmas child eating cat

who prowls around the country eating children on Christmas day and the terrible thing is so you know if you're naughty or nice you'll get presents or you get a lump of coal the child has no control over whether it's eaten or not the only thing that controls whether the child is eaten or not is whether the child got any new clothes for Christmas from its parents and if your parents didn't give you some socks you're gonna be eaten there is a slight thing with that with if you've done all of your chores by Christmas day then they're supposed to give you some clothes but they could not

it just I'm saying it really that would be a pretty harsh bit of parenting it's insult to injury isn't it A you're not getting a new t-shirt and B you're about to be eaten by a giant cat it was a big cat though wasn't it it was like the size of a house and it belonged to a troll right so it was like Katie Hopkins this is all still I say

satire we don't do that James come on we welcome all people in our podcast we honestly do not she is not invited to anything that I'd like to publicly state Katie Hopkins fuck you was that satire? no it's not satire my satirical show is not going down well

hey Trump fuck you hey Farage fuck you catch you next week on Saturdays today what were we talking about Iceland? yeah so these these yule lads their mother is called Grula she's been married three times but she killed all of her husbands because they bored her and my wife is in the audience and I just like to say that's not the right way to behave

and she is the mother of the yule lads? no she's just my wife and she she is half ogre half troll and I am referring here to Grula and their cat is Christmas cat the family cat is Christmas cat and the cat brings the yule lads sometimes grabbed her children and brought them back to be turned into stew

but this is all just to deter children from misbehaving it's not anything worse than what we do which is Santa won't bring you presents if you're bad should we talk about Father Christmas? yeah sure because you know he is leaking his bones Father Christmas has bones so this is Saint Nicholas and he has some relics

and it's kind of debatable which relics are his but it's generally accepted that he has some in Italy it's a clear liquid that is called sort of manna by the priest who guard the tomb and it can sell for a good amount oh come on it's surprising wow but I think it's because he's in this place called Bari in Italy which is a harbour town so it's below sea level in fact

so the harbour water tends to seep into where he's entombed and then every year they have this festival where he will come oh a holy fish has come in this room yeah exactly it's like the great story of Jesus he makes fish out of Santa there is a place where I think it's South America yeah it's parts of Latin America

baby the bot, hang on the models of baby Jesus are dressed up like Father Christmas really? yeah there's this weird synergy between Jesus and Father Christmas really? yeah I can't find it in my notes either I am panicking like crazy oh yeah yeah yeah

I've seen the words magic helicopter yeah well no so basically you get presents from the baby Jesus you don't get them from Father Christmas so that's why they've kind of dressed up the two traditions together but people ask children how exactly does that work how are you getting presents from this baby he has a magic helicopter

or B that he owns all the toy shops he's just a massive toy magnate and he can afford to give them to children do you know how the reason he exists though is because it's too difficult for Jesus on his own to deliver all those presents so um what?

so Nicholas was like a common thing everyone knew about so Nicholas until about the 1500s and then the Reformation came in and Protestantism came in and they said Jesus is the only thing and then it was established that there should be a festival where Jesus brings everyone presents on Christmas Day on the day of his birth

and then it was established that a tiny newborn baby can't handle all these presents and all this present giving and so Father Christmas initially was the sidekick to Jesus this was like post Reformation was the first time he became his co-deliverer of gifts because it was like well he's a tiny baby he can't actually carry all these presents

so um so Nicholas joined him what? but a tiny baby could fit down a chimney much more easily than a massive man so that was why Father Christmas brought Jesus it was a symbiotic relationship but so are there actual historical stories of the two of them like Batman Robin style just travelling

I refer you to the word historical in that sense alright should we move on to our second fact? sure it's time for our second fact of the show and that is Anna yep my fact this week is that an ancient Greek form of contraception was a suppository made of frankincense, myrrh

and blister beetles this is a thing and blister beetles by the way if you don't know what they are they're beetles that cause blisters um no they're so blister beetles are these things that secrete something called cantheridin which I probably mispronounced but it's this poison and the reason they secrete it is because

they give it to their the male gives it to the female during mating as a gift as like a mating gift but during sex which is a bit weird and then it's to cover her eggs with it and that stops predators from getting hold of it but it's actually very poisonous so a tenth of a milligram can blister your skin really badly

but this was a very common medicine so it was used as a contraception you shove it up the bum and you don't get pregnant this is what traditionally happens when you shove it up the bum that blister beetle stuff is called Spanish fly I think and it was an aphrodisiac as well and I think I've written down Casanova and Marquis de Sade I can't remember which one it was

but he used it as an aphrodisiac Marquis de Sade and that's what he got since prison sorry if you're using the blister beetles I'm going off memory but I think that's right and the idea was it would make you itchy and you would put it down there and itch yourself and that would turn you on

nice just a bit of history and a good tip for the room but frankincense and mech and let's talk about those frankincense a bit of a panacea people thought it kind of cured loads of different things

in Oman it still is a little bit it's been variously used as a stomach soother a cough remover, a blood thinner cold medicine, wound cleaner and fly repellent and it was really really popular in Oman it was basically made them one of the most kind of rich

countries in the world but not anymore because the Roman Catholic church buys cheap stuff from Somalia these days what is frankincense? it's incense with the word frank at the front is that really what it is? and frank kind of means honest or whatever it just means really good

really good incense don't listen I swear to god that's true, that is true was the incense bit true? the frank bit as well? Andy? Dan, the reason I asked was because I had dramatically under researched on this fact

but it is and the word frank to mean really good and honest came from franks meaning french people as well from the roman times in roman times it was so important frankincense that Augustus Caesar sent 10,000 troops to invade

the area where frankincense came from because he thought it was so important it's so weird it was so important frankincense and so it was medicinally thought to be so important and it was an incense and it's from tree sap basically isn't it which is like myrrh

they're both basically from tree sap and they're turned into incense but between 1000 BC and 400 AD frankincense was the most lucrative trade in the world it was the most valuable thing in the world to be traded for like 1500 years, it's amazing

and in Oman it's still a really big deal to the extent that they have I think roundabouts in Oman are quite famous so they're quite well decorated with giant versions of stuff and in quite a lot of roundabouts in Oman then they have giant frankincense dispensers like properly huge

the size of a building of frankincense dispenser in the centre of a roundabout I did a little bit on gift giving because these blister beetles they give a present to their mates during sex and so I looked up and also called frankincense and mer would gifts given to the baby Jesus

there are so many links to the things like that but so you've heard of these spiders that give gifts to the females they're called paretrichalea ornata and they give silk wrapped parcels full of prey and it's really interesting because 70% of them

give rubbish gifts which are worthless, they're leftovers it's like basically giving someone an empty... selection box selection box exactly like just the bounty bar left in exactly like that but basically the male spiders

they can't help themselves from eating most of the present before they give it to the female better just wrap this nice oh god it's so but the spiders it's really sensible for the spiders to give a rubbish present to the female because the females don't judge on what's inside the parcel

by the time they open the package they've already pressed the button to go ahead or not go ahead with the mating and what they judge on is how the male looks, his physical condition so the main thing is good body condition so the males who ate their gift were cleverer because it's better to turn up looking

well fed and in good shape but with nothing in the box than it is to turn up with an actual meal in the box but you look hungry and you do know that's not going to fly in your own life I think the main thing, darling, is that I look good I

I read something really interesting today have you guys heard the Jesus as an alien theory? No Jesus no no hang in there this one's really interesting so the idea is that a lot of people think that Jesus

is an alien and so because they describe in the bible that the star they say low the star which they saw in the east went before them till it came and stood over where the young child was and everyone's like how can a star move like that

that's insane, maybe it wasn't a star maybe it was a UFO now, UFO comes guiding these three wise men three kings from very separate places who all of a sudden are hanging out how's that happen, were they like a king conference like how one was from Persia

one was from India, they were all over the shop and suddenly there weren't three of them in the bible and I'm telling a story here then you go okay the immaculate conception how did she have the child inside of her well that's very consistent my friends

with an abduction where they bring you up and they place something inside you not my theory of presenting the first are you saying the Virgin Mary was anally probed and that's the one time where the bum contraception would not work Andy because look what she had a Jesus

I cannot believe you've done this to our show what do you mean can I tell you something about Jesus can I ask you something about Jesus where was he born Bethlehem incorrect

not Bethlehem, he was born in Bethlehem so it's a different Bethlehem there's a Bethlehem in Israel where everyone goes and they're like this is the birthplace of Jesus Israel has two Bethlehems and it turns out that the one

that is much closer to Nazareth where Jesus was born is a totally different Bethlehem and archaeologists now are saying that actually we've got the wrong one so the place that everyone goes to celebrate the birth of Jesus is completely wrong they should be going to area 51

you know I'm trying to raise the turn so do you know what the names of the three UIs men were yes Balthazar Melchior and according to a survey by the British Christmas tree growers association your sourcing is getting worse

there is only one place in the world or at least in the UK where there are people with those surnames that all live in that place and it is it's Bedfordshire apparently there are people with that names and they decided

because presumably it was the slow season for Christmas tree growing that they'd look at all the different Christmasy names and see where people are there is only one Mr Scrooge in the whole world and he lives in Canada there are 16 people in England called Grinch

the surname Grinch and there's only one person in the whole UK called Mr Barbles so all right let's move on to our next fact it is time for fact number three and that is Andy my fact is that Oregon

has 12 times as many Christmas trees as humans yeah so this is just a fact about how many Christmas trees there are you've heard the fact it's about it could be about how few humans there are in Oregon that's true but it's not it's got a reasonably healthy human population

and just a shit load of Christmas trees but the amazing thing is how it harvests them so it harvests them you may have seen this by helicopter to where the van is is that a magic helicopter flown by Jesus

it's not a magic helicopter they get lifted up in massive bundles and it's incredible to watch in action because they're doing a constant zigzag between where the Christmas trees are in bundles and where they need to be loaded and it takes about 26 seconds to fly a few hundred yards from one to the other

and then they zip back and one of the pilot trainers the helicopter pilot trainers said it's similar to sprinting down a field putting someone on your back, piggyback and then dropping them off then running back across the field which is such an unhelpful energy

but in America there's a massive shortage right now of trees and this is because of the recession when the recession happened a long time ago that it takes to grow a Christmas tree so just under 10 years so now we've got a massive shortage

because people's businesses went to pot and they went into other industries so actually in Oregon which is one of the main Christmas tree industries pot growing, marijuana growing is a big industry as well and so a lot of Christmas tree farmers have gone on to marijuana instead so you can't get a Christmas tree

you can get some wheat but does that mean like in what 15 years time everyone will have pot plants yeah really? I guess so giant pot plants that they hang baubles and tinsel off and put an angel on top of but there is a shortage

it's a problem not a huge problem do you know Britain has a Eurovision for Christmas trees I don't know it's from the British Christmas tree growers association they have an annual Christmas tree

grower of the year competition and they all compete on various metrics of you know height and other so when you say Eurovision sorry is it all of Europe? it's not all of Europe it's all the

British Christmas tree growers the only thing that even makes it slightly like Eurovision is we all ring up to see who wins it's something zero in prime time it's hosted by Graham Norton that's right yeah it's got an undercurrent of cold war rivalries

that determines the winner every year is it that they get to vote on each other's trees? what happens to the best tree? it's not interesting no it gets to go outside Downing Street

does it really? do you know what happens to the runner up? it gets probably a pub no the runner up gets to go inside Downing Street that was amazing that's the better prize you don't get seen by the public

but you get to hear all the juicy juicy gossip that's true so you can buy half Christmas trees have you seen these? they're pretty cool they're plastic ones but they're basically half a Christmas tree and you lean it up against your wall

that is so clever isn't that clever? I mean it's awful but it is awfully clever they put them up because if you live in a small flat let's say in London for instance you don't have that much space and you can have it just half of the wall

that's great and you can also have Argos cells upside down Christmas trees so the pointy bitters at the bottom and the fat bitters at the top and that's if you don't have much floor space that was very cool and that used to happen in the 19th century

people hung it upside down from the rafters really? because there was not much floor space same reason but actually the Christmas tree industry in the 2000s was one of these plastic trees in 2004 the national Christmas tree association of America

launched a free online video game called attack of the mutant artificial Christmas tree and in it you would throw snowballs at artificial trees that were blamed for sucking the spirit out of Christmas whereas actually artificial trees have been around

for almost as long as Christmas trees have been around in popular terms so feather trees were a thing from the late 19th century feather trees? yeah so the first artificial Christmas trees were made of goose feather and they used to backcomb it

so it looked like a tree and then they would paint it and that was an artificial tree because they were really worried about deforestation in the 19th century which I think is quite interesting and it's still an argument about what's best for the environment like an artificial one or a real one I read one report and a few of them

have kind of vary but one of them says it's better to use real ones but not if you're going to use your artificial tree for 20 years or more 20 years? basically 20 years worth of real trees is what one plastic one is worth but I throw away my plastic one every year

do you know how the Christmas tree was made popular worldwide? like Martin Luther or something I'm thinking about like commercially popular was made popular by Queen Victoria which so it was in 1846 when Victoria and Albert had a Christmas tree

because in Germany Christmas trees were where they celebrate Christmas and Albert came over and he brought that over with him and then this image of their Christmas tree was published in like London Illustrated Magazine or something and then it really caught on because they had this decorated tree

and so everyone got this decorated tree but then it caught on in America a couple of years later because it was in something called Goody's Lady Book and it was totally innocent by the way but what they did was

they took this picture and they popularized it in America but they thought that Victoria's tiara and Albert's moustache were too British so they removed them and this was like the early days of Photoshop and that's how the Christmas tree got popular in America was a moustache-less Albert

can I give you a story from the New York Herald in the early 20th century about a cursed Christmas tree someone's allergic to cursed Christmas trees over there chopping the butt of a Christmas tree in prospect this afternoon William Smith, a farmhand

nearly cut off his great toe angered he threw an axe and it broke a window and struck a child in the face inflicting a severe cut can I just say you're all laughing at a child it's a long time ago it was a different time

trimming the tree later Mrs. William Scoville fell and broke an ankle indignant over the chain of events Howard Scoville, son of the woman insisted on doing the rest of the work himself and while testing the candles set the tree afire

and nearly burned down the farmhouse believing the tree bewitched the father, Ambrose Scoville threw it into the hogpen where it fell on and killed a chicken I find it amazing that people didn't die constantly from Christmas tree accidents

because before electricity became a thing they were all lit by candlelight and that was 50, 60 years of just being candles strapped to a tree and they were decorated with snow made out of cotton you could get in the 50s it was called flocking wasn't it

you could get an attachment for your vacuum cleaner which was like a gun to fire artificial snow from your hoover all over the tree at the candles way I know isn't it good

and you know like you're saying the Christmas tree with Albert and Victoria suddenly took off that was the same for electric Christmas lights that we all have now around our tree that was invented by a guy called Edward Hibbert Johnson who was the right hand man to Thomas Edison people were putting candles on their tree

they kept burning down and he thought we should try and make this a thing and it just caught on in the next few years in America just so quickly because it was just such a beautiful thing and he died of an electric shock no way it says citation needed on Wikipedia next to that

but but it sounds plausible doesn't it should we move on to the final fact to the show it is time for our final fact of the show and that is James Harkin ok my fact this week who brought the phrase Merry Christmas

to English was also the first Englishman to use the word Prosecco was it in the same guard Merry Christmas I have invented Prosecco so he didn't invent it

it was invented by some Italian people but he was in Italy at the time he was a traveller called Fiennes Morrison and he wrote all about Italy and lots of different countries actually he was travelling around the time it was in the 16th century late 16th century and it was kind of dangerous

to travel around the world really but especially in Europe there was a time of kind of bad religious strife and he would always whenever anyone mentioned religion to him especially around Easter he would immediately move to another city to avoid inquiries when he was in Spain

he pretended to be Czech when he was in France he pretended to be Polish when he was in Netherlands he pretended to be German when he was in Italy he pretended to be Dutch except when he was in Rome and he pretended to be French and he travelled without any funds he didn't have any official protection

and so whenever there was any problems he adopted a deferential posture and avoided eye contact that's great that's a good way of travelling though isn't it sounds like me on a night out I've read something about Fiennes Morrison this is from the Wikipedia entry on him

I'm quoting exactly here his biographer Charles Hughes says he had a sane charity for all men except Turks and Irish priests which is another way of saying that he was prejudiced against Turks and Irish priests yeah he was he was a man of his time

but also no one had seen Prosecco before and this was it was a drink that even Pliny drank and it was also known as Pukinum and then he said it was called Pukinum now called Prosecco much celebrated by Pliny and when we say celebrated by Pliny

we mean sparkling wine presumably I had no idea that sparkling wine went that far back yeah because with wine its default position is often sparkling we get the stuff which they've taken the bubbles out why?

why do these people treat us like children? who doesn't want all wine to be sparkling wine? children love busy stuff why are they treating us like grown-ups? but Prosecco Christmas drink at the moment the UK consumed 77 million litres of Prosecco last year

and I worked out that's in the region of the amount of rain that falls on Wembley Stadium in a year also my favourite thing about Brexit and it's a long list thank god I've got a favourable audience ok so no but is that champagne

can be sold by the pint again? so there's always been this weird dichotomy which is that wine can only be sold in metric and beer can only be sold in imperial but Paul Roger always used to sell champagne by the pint

it was a bottle that was the size of a pint rather than a pint glass and Churchill loved Paul Roger that was served in pints he said it was perfect for lunch and actually he actually had Paul Roger the champagne manufacturers deliver him

a pint of champagne at 11am every morning because he was so such a fan of it and now Paul Roger have explicitly said maybe one of the advantages of leaving the EU is that we'll be able to sell champagne by the pint again and they're already preparing to sell champagne by the pint

so if you want to be optimistic about the future this is it is that one of the battle buses we didn't see for you? did you know one of the first battles of the First World War was called the Champagne Offensive so it was when the German armies

were moving west through the Champagne region and lots of people at the time fled underground but basically they learned their lesson in the Champagne region because when the German army arrived again in 1940 there were false walls built in the wine cellars

to conceal the really good stuff and supposedly some houses like Bollinger mislabeled their really good bottles poison they did it it was a real front of the Second World War that we haven't acknowledged so far

I think there's a book called Wine and War which has first hand accounts of winemakers in France who fought the Nazis by withholding their best wine and they're so proud of it so it's so sweet so it's in the Champagne region

and there's one winemaker who bragged about the fact that he watered down his champagne before giving it to the Nazis and or he would bottle his worst wines this is in the Champagne region he would bottle his worst wines and say this is the special cuvet for the Wehrmacht

and there was one guy who said that we got orders from the Nazis to deliver them lots of wine and they made the foolish mistake of not saying which vintage wine they would prefer and so we sent them a thousand bottles of our 1939

which was absolute rubbish and that absolutely taught them I have a fact about wishing people a merry Christmas so this was an experiment that happened in 1974 sociological two sociologists called Philip Kunz and Michael Wolcott they posted nearly 600 Christmas cards

to people they didn't know they got the addresses out of the phone book and they sent some high status cards which were very lavish and fancy and some were low status which were just plain white cards with merry Christmas written in a red sharpie on the front and they were either signed from

Doctor or Mrs Philip Kunz or from Philip and Joyce Kunz and they included a return address saying where you can send them back to so they were definitely for people they hadn't met and over 20% of people sent a signed card back with varying degrees of detail

some said merry Christmas some sent pictures of their families to people they had never met some sent letters of several pages saying what had been going on with them for the last few years I know a couple of people wrote back

and directly asked how do I know you which is incredibly ballsy to me I wouldn't have the courage to do that when was that? 74 you can't imagine what would happen today do you think?

if you got a random Christmas card would you respond to it? well a few liars but most people say my parents keep getting a card but they arrive clockwork every year and the family has grown

it's added several members in this time and they never include the return address and they keep saying we'd love to see you in their new year please, please can it touch the winter look that they are so Wendy, John if you're listening we need to wrap up guys anything before we do?

some stuff on wine or in 2015 Scotland made its first home grown wine and it was described as undrinkable by experts the guy who produced it said it has potential it doesn't smell fresh

but I enjoyed it in a bizarre masochistic way okay that is 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've said over the course of this podcast we can be found on our Twitter accounts I'm on at Shriverland

Andy at Andrew Hunter M James at James Harkin you can email podcast at qi.com or you can go to our group account which is at no such thing or you can go to our website

nosuchthingasafish.com it's got all of our previous episodes one away at the end of this show but so what we're going to do tonight is take one away thank you so much for being here guys that was really fun, we'll see you again, goodbye!