No Such Thing As A Fish - 198: No Such Thing As Cleopatra Movie Trivia

Episode Date: January 6, 2018

Live from Up The Creek In Greenwich, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss the dead author under the bed, the first ever sports bra, and Poopy the Ambassador.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from up the creek in Greenwich, London. My name is Dan Shriver and I am sitting here with Anna Chazinski, Andrew Huntamari and James Harkin and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in a particular order here we go. Starting with you, Andy. My fact is that archaeologists have just dug up in the middle of the desert an enormous Sphinx statue. It is believed to be anywhere up to 95 years old. I think you're going to have to explain that to me. So there are now archaeologists looking at old film sets from the early days

of Hollywood and they're doing proper excavations on movie sets that were abandoned to the desert. This is a real thing. And there was a very famous film in the 20s called The Ten Commandments. It was this massive biblical epic and at the end of it they didn't take the sets down. There's a theory it would have been too expensive or... There's another theory that he didn't want anyone else to use the set because the director was Cecil B. DeMille and he was a bit of a megalomaniac, wasn't he? And he thought he didn't want anyone else to use this so I'm going to bury it in the middle of the desert and now he found it.

And there's this filmmaker who's been searching for it for years. He's called Peter Brosnan and there's now a film about the finding of the original film. Wow. It's called Cecil B. DeMille's Lost City or something very similar to that. And it was this enormous set. So it was 12 stories high, 800 feet wide. There were 21 sphinxes. The Pharaoh statues weighed four tons each and they built an extra sphinx so that actors playing slaves could drag it around. The effort they went through for this film was enormous. I read a thing that the idea that we have that slaves built the pyramids and so on is down largely to this movie because that's not the case. It wasn't. It was people working

but they just as a representation use slaves in the movie. That's where we get that common myth. They were kind of freelancers as far as I understand it. They were farmers outside the farming season, weren't they? Who did the pyramids? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. But this movie, when DeMille put it in the middle of the desert, he said if 1000 years from now archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands, I hope they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilization extended all the way to the Pacific coast of North America. So he actually saw the idea that people would

be digging this up in the future and might think that it was real. We've totally fucked up his plan. That's so sad. We knew as well that that's what he wanted. No, he didn't want that. That's what he said. He specifically didn't want it. I think he was saying that he was saying it with a bit of a wink, wasn't he? He was like, oh, I really hope they don't do that. Yeah, that's how I interpreted it. But I'm making that up. I actually thought that's what he had said. Some people who did do that is the website Nangag. Everyone knows the website Nangag? Yeah, we all know that. It sounds rude. I know people love, but it's not a rude site,

is it? It's just like memes and stuff like that. And what they did was they buried a huge pillar card with internet memes deliberately to fuck with the archaeologists of the future. So everyone had to vote for their favorite memes. And the ones that went in were such memes as Dick Butt, Doge, who you probably all know, shit just got real and hardest name in Africa. Don't know what that one was. But they buried this in there and they're hoping that in thousands of years people will see it and think that it was some kind of religion or something.

Right. Which I guess it is in a way, right? Yeah, yeah. Iron Age, Bronze Age, Bantor Age. I was reading in the movie Cleopatra itself because it was a huge, a huge operation to get this movie made. It was so ambitious. They made all these incredible sets. Were you talking about the Ten Commandments or Cleopatra? Sorry, sorry. It's the Ten Commandments we're meant to be talking about. I've researched

Cleopatra. Let's move on. Cleopatra, it was, they had a big set too. It was, you know, a very expensive film. Oh yeah. There's your segue. Yeah. Yeah, thanks guys. I'll just comment on what you guys have to say for the rest of the evening. Okay, sorry.

Has anyone got any Cleopatra material that we can help him out with? I do have a fact related to Cleopatra, which is, yeah, it's about the film The Ten Commandments. Okay, so it was basically, in 1922, Cecil B. DeMilt, he was already pretty famous, but he ran a competition for what his next film would be about. So everyone submitted subjects and the best subject won a thousand dollars and he would make the film. And it went to a man who was called FC Nelson. He was a lubricating oil manufacturer and he just wrote on a bit of paper, make the Ten Commandments. If only he'd written make Cleopatra.

But then beneath it, he had a little PS at the one on the page. He then wrote, you cannot break the Ten Commandments or they will break you. But he won, he won the competition. But it was, it was a bit disastrous, right? The Ten Commandments in a sense because Cecil B. DeMilt was so determined to get it working and it went so way over budget, he like didn't accept any profits from it. Like his producers called him and were like, come back now, give up. This is a complete disaster. And he refused to. And he did things like he refused to use painted backgrounds at all. So he refused to use like normal scenery. So that meant he just had to literally build everything. So I think there was like a wall that was miles

and miles long that he had built. It wasn't there. And then at the end, did he dynamite the whole thing? I'm just thinking if Donald Trump digs around and finds that wall. I don't think he did dynamite it. No, that's a rumor, but I don't think it's a rumor. Cecil DeMilt, sorry, just quickly. Great director. Do you guys have any stuff on Joseph Mankiewicz? Who, what did he do right then?

Sorry. I'm just quickly on Cecil DeMilt. So for the shooting of it, and this is just the incredible budgets of the day, he built a city which had 3500 actors, technicians and extras. They were divided into 14 units of men and seven of women in a 24 square mile city. And there were very strict rules about, you know, alcohol and gambling and stuff. He hired 225 Orthodox Jews to look like their ancestors, the Israelites. And apparently during the filming they kept missing their cues because they were so overwhelmed by the emotion of being in this thing. And then he wrote to everyone on set. He said, your skin will be cooked raw. You will miss

the comforts of home. You will be asked to endure perhaps the most unpleasant location in cinema history. I expect of you your supreme efforts. It was so tough to film. He was a gnarce, wasn't he? I like him. Do you? I do. This is someone who you could have, I think, and I'm not saying that you're a prima donna andy, but this, he had a chair boy who always walked three steps behind him carrying a chair.

He was never allowed to look his master in the eye. And whenever DeMilt stood still for more than a minute, the chair boy had to put the chair behind him and then bang the back of his knees so that he sat down on the chair, which was there. Whoa! Can you imagine having one of those? Yes, I can. And I'm frankly angry I had to sit down tonight. Was Cecil v. DeMiller puppet? Sounds like he was one of those collapsing puppets. He made loads of biblical films. He made another biblical epic called The King of Kings.

Oh, yeah. He was mostly known for slightly saucy movies. They always involved a naked woman in a bathtub at some point, and then he made the Ten Commandments, which was a big switcheroo. Cleopatra used to spend a lot of time in bathtubs, didn't she? James, I don't have anything on it. Actually, I got a different thing, which is just picking up on what James said earlier about him wanting to bury DeMill, wanting to bury the set so no one else would use it. There's a bit of logic behind that because people back in the day of early Hollywood

did used to do that. So there's a very famous version of Dracula that was made with Bella Lugosi. And the idea was you would pay for all these movies huge budgets for their sets to be made, but because of workers' unions and clocking off at the right time, it meant that you'd film in the day, and in the evening the set was just sitting there. So they thought, what if we filmed the foreign language version of the movie that we're now making in Spanish and Italian in the nighttime when they've abandoned the set? And that's what they did. And there's a very famous version of Dracula from 1931 where they made in the daytime the English version with Bella Lugosi, and in the evening time they made the Spanish version.

And the Spanish version, because they were able to sit at the end of the day of filming of the American one, they would watch the dailies, and so the rushes that they filmed that day, and they would go, oh, that angle's no use. Why don't we film from this direction? And so they would re-angle everything. They learned to make the movie by watching a different movie being made on the same set. Yeah, and as a result, it took something like seven weeks or something, sorry, a few months for them to make the American version, but the Spanish version just got done it really quickly, and they made it way before the Americans finished and released it before the Americans released it again. And so people saw the Spanish

version and the reviews were, well, if the American version is as good as this, and it's probably better, it's going to be an amazing movie, because it was awesome. But the problem was, it was shit, the American version. But one reason I think it would be shit is, doesn't Dracula die in the daytime? Yeah. Yes, you're right. Yeah. Yeah, well, the director was so bad he didn't even capture Dracula's death on camera. He failed to put the camera in the right position. So it's just Bella Lugosi going, off screen. You don't even see his death. I mean, presumably Bella Lugosi didn't actually die, so you can't just retake that and have them in front of the camera. I know, but they didn't. They just didn't. I guess

back then they were just like, oh, it's six o'clock, the Spanish are coming in. All right, let's, we got to go. Bella's done. But yeah, so they did used to double up on the sets. And so that version of Dracula is more famous for the Spanish version that was copying the American than the American version. Wow. So you can understand why he wanted to bury sets. There's probably a crew of Spaniards around the corner. He was only out there avoiding Thomas Edison, wasn't he? Who? Cecil B. DeMille. What? Yeah, that's why he was out west. That's why they went way out west is because there were loads of Edison thugs who would beat you up for using, was it film technology? That's basically why Hollywood is where it is today and why they

made all the movies out there because Edison was on the East Coast. And if they went to the other side of America, they couldn't get them with all the patents and all things like that. Yeah. And so Cecil B. DeMille owned 80 guns to protect himself. 80 guns and a wolf. Yeah, the wolf as well. I'm serious. I know it sounds like I just added that spur of the moment. Wow. The Blues Brothers, you know, when they filmed the Blues Brothers, again, when quite over budget, the most impressive set of thing they did was they dropped a car from a helicopter. I think there's a scene in it where they fly a helicopter like 1500 feet in the air, and then they drop a car down on Chicago. They got permission from the government, the state government, to do that. They dropped a

Pinto car down into like presumably an abandoned area of Chicago. Presumably. And the car, when it landed, it was 45 centimetres tall because of the, that was the extent of the force. Yeah. That's pretty cool. And they also had a cocaine budget. They always used to say that about the Blues Brothers, didn't they? That that film had its own cocaine budget. There's a film with Dennis Hopper, Easy Rider, it was called. And this is a book. Yeah, awesome film. But he was, he was part of the creative team. And he was doing drugs every single day. And he was doing all different kinds of drugs. And it got to the point where they were like, we just have to give up and accept that he's on ecstasy in the morning, cocaine in the afternoon, and heroin in the evening, whatever he was doing,

pot in the evening. It got to the point that when he got the scripts for the next day for the film, they wrote on it, the drug that he was on in the previous scene, so he could match the energy that he was bringing to it. So they're like, we're going to film the second half of the scene we did three days ago, and you were on cocaine then. So if you could do three lines before we start shooting, we'll get the same vibe as what you were. I'd love to see the movie where they mix them up. Yeah, it's true. We need to move on shortly to our second fact. You guys have anything before we go? Apocalypse Now. Yeah, sure. They're filming Apocalypse Now. One of the things that Francis Ford Acopola demanded was that, A, he was allowed to burn down a lot of jungle in Vietnam, and because

he was a big deal at that point, they allowed him to. So many acres of jungle were just burned down for it. But also he used real military helicopters. But apparently he used to get really annoyed on set because they kept on having to fly off to fight in actual wars. So he used to get really pissed off. Wow. Yeah. I got one last thing. It was a movie set problem. It's a movie back in the day called Cleopatra, where what happened was is that Cleopatra's entrance scene was a huge, you know, even listening, okay, it is time for fact number two. And that is me. It's my fact. Okay, my fact this week is that when British author William Haslett died, his landlady was so keen to re-let his room that she hid his body under the bed while she showed new tenants around.

This is extraordinary. What a viewing that must have been. Will he be here? So Haslett, he's not that famous now, is he? No, but if we made this show back in the 1800s, you guys would be like, Ah, Haslett was huge. He was a massive British author, not only an author, he was a literary critic, he was a painter, social commentator, philosopher. He was a big deal. He died in 1830. He was living in Soho. And in fact, there is a hotel now there, which is called the Haslett House, I believe, and that is the location where he died. And he's still there under that bed, isn't he? He's still there. But he was a big deal. And people used to go just to the Haslett Hotel just because that's where he lived. Seamus Heaney used to go there,

obsessed with him, and they would have meet-ups there just to be able to be in the sort of presence of the location of this great person who everyone seems to have forgotten, except it turns out you, Anna, just... I mean, he's a famous... People know what he has it is, but I did happen to take a book of his essays on my gap here, which I know is... I just told these guys backstage. One of those guys was going to mention it, so I'm going to get in there. Which drug would you take him when you read them? The essays themselves were my drug, James. What am I on? I'm on chapter three. I mean, they didn't come in chapters, but whatever.

But he was unappreciated by his death, wasn't he? Like, when he died, he died in poverty, it was on Frith Street, and he'd been basically dissed by all of the people he'd been mates with, so he was really good friends with Coleridge and Suddy and Wordsworth, but he kind of also hated everyone. Yeah, he kind of started it, didn't he? He did start it. So, they embodied these revolutionary ideals that he loved, and he thought that they didn't see them through properly. He thought they'd all sold out, so he kind of loved Coleridge, but he wrote all these essays saying, I hate that you haven't lived up to your potential. So, eventually, they just ruined his reputation, and he died in poverty. And it all started, actually, when he groped somebody. Did you read

this story? Yeah. Yeah, it was... Yeah, boo, exactly. Yeah. Well, well... Don't say it was a different time on it. It was a different time. They were staying in the Lake District, it was him and Coleridge and Wordsworth, all staying in the Lake District and writing together, and he went away, Hazlett went to the pub one night, and a woman was flirting with him and sort of teasing him, and he thought that she wanted to get off with him, so he sort of leaned in or something, or, you know, came onto her, and then she laughed at him and said, no, don't be such a, you know, cat. And so, he lifted up her petticoats and slapped her on the bottom. I'm with the lady on the second row here. Yeah. I'm not saying it's good behaviour, but he'd been embarrassed, and then

he got chased by this mob who wanted to duck him, which apparently is a common thing, they wanted to duck him in dirt and water. That's an awful correct thing, I think. I don't think so, but... But yeah, and he ran back to Coleridge and said, please hide me, and they smothered him away over the mountains. That's extreme. They saved him, but then they spread all these rumors that he was a horrible, lascivious, sleazy man. And then he had an affair with someone half his age. So it was his landlady's daughter, not the landlady, I believe, who later got vengeance by hiding him out of the bed. She was half his age, and he just fell completely in love with that. And then he wrote this whole book saying that he had fallen in love with her and declaring

it in public. And he sent his friend to test her by making advances and flirting with her and seeing how she reacted. And she flirted back with his friend, although she drew the line at any serious stuff. And then he asked his friend whether he could set Sarah, this girl, up as the friend's mistress, and he would pay for it. And the friend said, no, I would prefer a woman who can read and talk. The girl was in love with someone else. It was a complete disaster. Anyway, it was a great literary figure. Here's my favourite William Haslick complete disaster story. And that is his first lecture at the Russell Institution, where he turned up and they told him it had to be one hour long, but he prepared enough material for three hours. And so instead of editing it,

he just did the three hour talk in one hour. And just put his head down and just read it as quickly as he could. Wow. That's really funny, James, because it reminds me of another story about Haslick, which I've brought along and I'm so glad you mentioned it. I read actually relatedly something recently about Gordon Brown, which was this is in the week, I think, and it was a story that goes around Westminster, which is that he was asked to give a talk at sort of a pensions dinner quite early on in his MPdom, and it was about pensions. It was a talk about pensions to a bunch of pensioners and other people, and he was asked to speak for 45 minutes, so he got up and he gave, and he really works really hard, you know, he's never working hard on stuff,

so he thought really hard he'd deliver this 45 minute speech. And at the end, the person who was comparing the event came on and apologised for the fact that he'd gone on so long, and they'd actually asked him to do a four to five minutes speech. At what stage do you think I'm going to have to stop him here? Can it imagine on pensions? Haslick, in event, well, he coined a word that we all use today, gusto. Yeah? Yeah, it's got gusto, that's Haslick. It existed before, didn't it, but he sort of wrote an essay on it, sort of properly defining it. Yep. I thought he'd invented it, I must say. No, it did exist before, to mean like life and... He said it as something to do with arts, didn't he? Yes. He was the first person to use it to describe art. Yes. Oh, well, anyone can use

the word to mean a different thing to the thing we've all agreed it means. Well, he also, according to the OED, coined the words newsmongering, modernising, and acorning. Acorning apparently means collecting acorns, and he was the first person to use that. Unbelievable. What a great contribution to the English language, and people don't appreciate him. I can see why he took a massive brick of his essays on your gap year. Seeing your customs. Anything to declare? No. What's that in your back, madam? Book of essays and a bunch of acorns. Problem? Some stuff on dead bodies or estate agents. Dead bodies, please. Dead bodies. Dead bodies, and if we can, Cleopatra would be. So here's a thing about the dead. So a contemporary of Haslitz was Shelley, and there's an often repeated

story about Shelley's heart being plucked from the funeral pyre he was being burned on. So he drowned, and he was at sea for several days, dead and bobbing around, and then he was retrieved, and he was burned on the beach. There's now a theory that it wasn't his heart which refused to burn, because it's a very nice romantic image that his heart refused to burn. They now think it was his liver, which refused to burn, because it was just soaked in seawater for days and days, and it was the biggest organ, so it would have been less likely to burn. And it was taken out, and a friend of his took it, and then bequeathed it to another friend of his, who then gave it to Mary Shelley, who put it in a bag. It's re-gifting, isn't it, when you don't? But actually,

speaking of livers, and back on Haslitz, he didn't drink, but do you know why he didn't drink at the end of his life? No. Felt like you were going to guess then. Broke, he was broke. He was broke, but that's not why. So it's said that he died of tannic acid poisoning from excessive tea drinking, because he was obsessed with drinking tea, and he used to fill half a teapot with tea. That can't be possible, so they have too much tea. I don't think so. Half a Britain would be dead. He was obsessed with it, though. Apparently, he used to get up at one or two in the afternoon, never before that, and he would get up and pour himself a tea, half full of tea, like the tea leaves, and then half of water, and then he would sit there for four to five hours,

staring to the distance. 45 hours? That was beautiful, like the Hunter Vive. When we put this podcast out, that's going to come in stereo with people's ears. That's going to be the best hard-hitting punchline anyone's ever heard. Anyway, no, sorry, four to five hours, motionless, staring into the distance. So he loved tea, but he didn't drink, because the last time he drunk was when he went on a huge binge following the Battle of Waterloo, so he was a massive Napoleon fan, and he loved Napoleon, and he was devastated that Napoleon had been defeated. He thought he epitomised the great revolutionary cause, and so he went on this huge drinking binge, and he spent weeks and weeks wandering London

completely unwashed in a drunken haze, and after that, he thought alcohol wasn't for him. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that UNICEF has a nutrition ambassador called Poopy. So, this is just a thing, this is just true. She is called Jose Helihanta Ramahavi Lisoa, and she is a singer from Madagascar, and she goes by the stage name Poopy, and Lonely Planet has declared Poopy a national treasure, and she's been active in educating young mothers about breastfeeding their infants as a nutrition ambassador for UNICEF, and that's basically her entire English language Wikipedia that I've just read out, and there is nothing else on her,

on the internet really, there's an English anyway, but she joins other UNICEF ambassadors such as Katy Perry, Serena Williams, Liam Neeson, the Wiggles, Dustin the Turkey, and the Vanuatu Women's Beach Volleyball team. Oh, cool. God, that embassy must be a riot, mustn't it? And yeah, so she's just, she's a nutrition ambassador, and she's got a funny name. But we don't know why she's got, I mean it's her stage name, right? It's just her stage name, yeah, we don't know why she got that name. Okay. I imagine it must mean something different in Malagasy, I guess. Yeah, you would hope. I looked up a little bit on stage names. Okay. So, Stevie Wonder, he has a stage name. Really? Yes, because his real name,

what do you think his first name is? Stephen Wonder. Yeah, his first name is Steve Land. No, genuinely. That is a theme park I want to go to. Steve Land. No way. He was christened Steve Land. Yeah. What? S-T-E-V-L-A-N-D. Steve Land. Steve Land. Yeah. That's amazing. I know. Yeah, that's really cool. What's his surname? I didn't write it down. Okay. But was it Wonder? But it's not Wonder. No, it's not Wonder. Wonder Land. Wonder was because he was. No, he was a boy wonder, which is why he got the nickname Wonder. Oh, okay. Yeah. Michael Keaton, the actor. Yeah. His real name is Michael Douglas. What's Michael Douglas' real name? Um, Steve Land Wonder. I don't know Michael Douglas' real name.

Do you know what Wacken Phoenix's real name is? Or Bourne Bertain was? No. His surname is Bottom. That's right. Yeah. So does he Wacken Bottom? Wacken Bottom. Wacken Bottom. He's William Mandlet. It was a different time. But his brother was Riverbottom. So he was Riverbottom. He was Riverbottom. Yes. Yeah. He was. So he had a weird upbringing. They were members of the, was it the Children of God cult? The really famous cult. Yeah. Yeah. They were brought up in that. And then they escaped that and decided it wasn't a good idea. And the whole family decided to change their name to Phoenix, which does make sense. They were all called Mr and Mrs Bottom. And they went with Phoenix instead. Yeah. I found out today what Michael J Fox's middle name is.

Go on. Andrew. Yeah. With a silent J? Yeah. Yeah. Andrew. He basically, when he went to sign up for his, the actors, you have to officially register yourself as an actor in America. And there was already a Michael Andrew Fox. So he just had to pick J as a random initial. But that's what the J stands for. Andrew. It sort of stands for it. I found a list of the 150 worst rapper names in the world. Cool. Amazing. On the internet. So just a few of those. The teabag boys. Yak balls. These are all proper rappers, apparently. Cecil Otter. And bus driver. Really? That's so good. Actually, our musicians, do you, you guys know the band

In-X-S? Yeah. Yeah. So the bass guitarist for In-X-S is Gary Beers. And his middle name is Gary. But with a, with a different number of Rs. Get out of here. Gary. His name. Gary. Maybe that's exactly. No way. That's what it is. It used to be William. And he changed it to Gary. Gary Beers. He changed it. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Can't get enough Gary's. So yeah, the double Rs in the middle name. Wow. If you're interested. Joan Crawford, the actress. She was named by the public. No way. Joni McJoneface. Her original name was Lucille. This is a French surname. Le-S-U-R-S-L-E-S-U-E-U-R. But people thought, studio bosses thought, that sounds like Lucille the sewer. So they held a public competition

to change her name. And Joan Crawford was the entry which won. She didn't like it at first, but she had to be called that. Wow. It grew on her apparently. Okay. Yeah. So cool. It's not that cool a name really. Or is it like just the time that makes it feel like that? When was it? Because Joan Crawford doesn't feel like her. When was it? 20th century. Anyone? 47. What a specific answer. June 47th. Any advance on June 47? Do I have 48? June 47th was one of the names that were put up. I've got a thing on ambassadors. Okay. So the fact at the top, if you remember, UNICEF has a nutrition ambassador and that's called poopy. So a lot of celebrities get asked to be ambassadors and certain things. And very recently, Helen Mirren has been an ambassador for L'Oreal,

so she'll do panels and so on for their moisturiser. It's so annoying about the ambassador. It's the brand ambassador, that's why. It's not the same as UNICEF though, is it? Like you don't set up in a massive building in the Middle East and say, I am the L'Oreal ambassador. How can I? I wear the fuck of my Ferrero Rocher. Where is the L'Oreal embassy? You're right. Yeah. No, she's a L'Oreal ambassador. It's a real thing. Yeah, she's their brand ambassador and she's not a very good one because she did a talk, she did a panel talk in the south of France and they asked her about moisturiser and what it does and she said, probably fuck all.

That was her answer. No. I was looking at, because poopy, the ambassador is a nutritionist, right? Yeah. And it's from Madagascar. So I was looking at some Madagasi nutrition stuff and so there are some groups in Madagascar that will, circumcision is a thing in some tribes and some of them eat the foreskin. But also I was reading a... Oh, sorry. I got that three seconds after everyone else in the room. Is that weird though? I don't think that's weird. You don't think that's weird? In Madagascar, this is a thing. And there was a journalist who went to Madagascar and traveled around it a few years ago and it's specifically in certain regions. So it's in the Antamba Hoaca region and where they eat the foreskin and traditionally you get circumcised and then it's

given to the grandfather who then can either eat it or offer it to a very honoured guest. So it's journalist. Hula hoop. They've got a little bit soft in the bag but... Anyway, it's very awkward if you're a guest in specific Madagascar areas of Madagascar, then just look out for being offered foreskin and it is polite to accept it. Wow. There was another person who was interviewed from a different tribe who said we actually think that's weird. This is someone from the Sakalava tribe. This is a different anthropologist who went there and he said we think that's weird. It's only the guys in the mountains in the middle who do that. No, we put the foreskin into a firework and send it into the

sky. All right, should we move on to our final fact? Yes, please. Okay. It's time for our final fact of the show and that is Chazinsky. Yes, my fact this week is that the first ever sports bra was two jockstraps. Yeah, this is... I actually heard this on another podcast. I don't know if you're allowed to just like transmigrate facts from one but I heard it on 99% invisible which I assume a lot of you listen to and if you don't you should but this is... It was invented by someone called Lisa Lindahl in about 1970s, 1977 and she... It was when jogging became a really fashionable thing to do and specifically for women to do and there was an issue because sports bras didn't exist and there were various issues and she was in her sitting room one day and she was saying what are

we going to do about the fact that every time we go running there's all this rubbing and it hurts and it just doesn't work for us and then her husband started parading around their sitting room with his jockstrap on his chest saying you should try one of these guys they work really well and she actually thought yeah what a great plan and she got her friend to sew together two jockstraps which if... I had to remind myself what a jockstrap was but it's like tight wife runs for men who are playing sports right yeah yeah cool um and she said... We're a very sporty panel I must be saying We need to wrap up soon actually because we've got to hit the gym in a second

Hey don't laugh so hard in that case But so these ladies Lisa Lindahl and also Polly Smith who did her designing they get all the credit but surely the credit should go to her husband who was prancing around his front Good point James behind every great woman is a great... Because an unbelievably childish man dancing around his front room I didn't mean that by the way that was... They called it as a joke they called it the jock bra and then that got changed into the jock bra which got changed into the sports bra and who knows what that will become next

But you know someone else who was responsible for inventing it so what she did Lisa was she sewed these two or she got her assistant Polly to sew these two jockstraps together and she ran around with it and it worked but the person who helped with the sewing was someone called Hinda Schreiber yeah your surname so a distant relation of yours helped invent the sports bra Cool not that distant though because it's unbelievably recent right people are always surprised that the person who invented it's still alive and still doing interviews and stuff You're right it's so weird that it was literally 40 years ago She has a whole section on her website about I invented the sports bra

Well I would have thought that would be the main bit now Yeah no no she does loads of other stuff because she's not a you know one trick pony she now does loads of other stuff like well I didn't you know there's only so much reading time in the day and I didn't read the whole thing and she's an artist I think as well Does motivational speaking possible? I would think so yeah I heard that there was possibly a slightly earlier one called the free swing tennis bra Yes that was a rival and that was a couple of years earlier it was specifically for tennis and it was not so it wasn't really a sports bra that was it was just a bra and they were just

saying you can play sports in this if you want yeah okay this was a specific kind of holding you in kind of thing right held you in strap you down and also had thick straps because the rubbing but there were a few patents much earlier on this is the first commercial one but actually in 1909 a breast supporter was patented by someone called Madeleine Gabbo and that was actually the first thing that separated the breasts because breasts were thought of as one entity I remember researching this for qi once the bosom was what the word you would use to refer to your breast it's a singular and also a singular they were just one just one rectangular thing it was a rectangular yeah they were a different shape then

but that was that was popular until uh for very late the mono boob basically yeah there was no lift and separate that was just the shelf yeah the mono boob until the 20th century basically was the way to go and that's why the french phrase for a woman having a large bosom is il yamanda du balcon there is a crowd on the balcony is it still though I don't think it's very it's really french people in that's not in use now is it yeah no sorry I mean you should use it it's a it's a lovely metaphor yeah it applies also to a royal wedding for example yeah yeah there's there's a lot of amazing bras out there now like in japan they have a few which are sort of very technologically advanced um there's one called

the uplifting bra and the uplifting bra basically plays you sort of motivational conversation so it will monitor your heart rate and if it feels your heart rate going up it might sense that you're scared and your bra would be like you got this you don't need to you don't need to freak out you are gonna own this and it's just messages that come out from someone's t-shirt do they have this for pants as well I don't know just asking for a friend yeah just calm down you've got all the time in the world oh that's a shave there's another japanese bra that's also quite exciting which measures your heart rate but this

is the true love bra oh yeah and um this will only spring open if you are truly in love with the person who's trying to take it off and by truly in love they mean if your heart rate uh does the stuff that they've made sure the heart rate does so it goes on what if you're jogging well that does feel like one of the major flaws of this bra doesn't it loads of things make your heart rate or if you're like if you're on a roller coaster or if you're really anxious about the fact that your bra might i'm with you some kinks need ironing out but that is a thing it measures your heart rate it sends it to an iphone which analyzes your heart rate and tells if you're in love with someone based on how fast your heart's beating which is not a super foolproof method well and then springs open there's

another bra in japan which is in its translation called marriage hunt and the the bra comes down with a countdown clock on your bra which is set by the wearer of the bra so they go i want to be mean by count that i want to be married game show count no it's so you go i want to be married exactly a year from now i want to meet the right person i want to be married a year from now so you set on your bra the uh doesn't that look like you're wearing a bomb i know it's again like anna said about the previous one there's a few kinks to sort out if this woman doesn't get married in 20 minutes she's got to explode have you heard of uh mary felps jacob's yeah she is the person who supposedly invented well she patented an early version of it exactly in 1914 and there were versions

of it before then um but she uh she was a young woman she was quite a wealthy young woman she was going to a dance and she didn't want to wear a corset because it's very you know it's hard to move it's hard to dance um but she had the most incredible life so we featured her on the podcast a few weeks ago an audience member won a fact by saying that the woman who invented the bra had a whipet called clitoris and she did but she was the most incredible woman so she changed her name to caress crossby and she nearly named herself clitoris crossby but then she said no that's for the dog and then and she sold her patent for not very much money but then she moved to paris and became a publisher she and her husband harry had this incredible publishing life they published everyone

dh laurence and and charles bukowski and lewis carroll but they also had these raucous uh sex and drug fueled parties in an abandoned mill um which they owned and they had a uh they they bought their own tombstones and then they kept them on the roof of their block of flats and sunbathe naked on them they just had this incredible life sexy that's weird yeah um but the thing is about them she sold the patent like you say for not much money it was her husband's idea he got fed up with the whole thing and said oh you should just sell the patent and she did sell it she sold it for 1500 dollars and she did this in around 1915 1916 and then america joined the war in 1917 and corsets were banned because they had so much wire in them and suddenly bras became massive no well

but bras became really really really popular and so she missed out by only a couple of years on making billions from that wait and it's presumably why they needed why they needed the metal for the war effort yes yes i read that they got two battleships out of the steel they saved was enough to build two battleships oh wow the fact about rubber pants and the second of the first world war oh yeah people used to have a rubber diet and the rubber diet was not an actual food diet it was just to wear rubber knickers and rubber corsets which would rub against you and make you sweat and then you would lose weight oh yeah it didn't work and it just it flayed your flesh but that's like now people would put like um cling film around them wouldn't they yeah the cling film

diet we've all done it we've all yeah but don't i think boxers do that don't they they wrap themselves in cling film and then they exercise they lose more weight through water jockies too don't they yeah um yeah they you're right but they they didn't work and also it doesn't work because all you lose is water and then as soon as you drink some water it goes back into you so it's very short term um but then the first world war broke out and all the rubber was needed for the war yeah so bouncy bouncy what do you need rubber for in the water lots of stuff you know um wheels wheels i guess that's why they call it the bouncy war hey um just speaking of uh boxers and fighting there's been an innovation off the back of

someone watching um an MMA fight uh that sort of Conor McGregor style fighting uh that goes on um and someone lost a match after being kicked in the testicles and he thought ah i wonder why that jock strap didn't protect him more so he's invented now a bulletproof jock strap which is on the market it's called nut shells and and nut shells can withstand a bullet being fired at your groin um i mean who does those tests yeah i'm pretty sure that the inventor who's called rubber did do that um and um so the idea is it can be used for sports because if you're playing baseball and a fastball comes or a tennis serve comes or okay or someone's frying a bullet at you at a i mean an incredibly well-aimed bullet yes yeah but but i mean it's now it's

been picked up by the military on the size joke it's just a i need to be a pretty sharp shooter down to hit you why does the military need that technology it doesn't it has bulletproof technology it doesn't need a different kind of bulletproof your penis it's just the same kind of bulletproof you try surrounding the penis with 30 or 40 layers of toughened glass well it didn't um i think emelda marcos had a bulletproof bra didn't she did she think she yeah made out of kevlar right but yeah she did wow you know the the jock strap is as you mentioned it is from it's from jockey but it was invented for bicycle jockies so this is in the in the 1880s

i would have thought like american jocks like uh just a no the word jock comes from jock strap so it was invented for cyclists in boston in the 1880s because they were called jockies and they deliver stuff and they were cobbled streets and so it was quite painful to cycle over the cobbled streets and so the jock strap was invented for that and that's where the jock comes from it's a sporty thing now but at the start it was invented to stop your balls bumping over cobbles right wow um guys we need to wrap up very shortly okay um so the thing with bras is everyone thought they're invented about a hundred years ago but they found some really old ones from the middle ages and they were found in a castle in austria by a scientist or an archaeologist called

Beatrix nuts from the university of innsbruck and she's found out basically that what happened was the bra came first and then the course it took over and then the bra came back again which no one believed until 2012 when she found this wow and at the same time they found um what looks like a pair of panties is kind of like a gusset and just some kind of string going round but they turn out to be men's underwear because women didn't wear underwear at that time and according to Beatrix underpants were considered a symbol of male dominance and power oh really well because even when women started wearing underpants in victorian times they were crotchless and i read one historian said they were crotchless in order to distinguish them from men's underpants

there must be another way god that's amazing name labels name labels are the way yeah yeah or you know the men's ones are the ones which constantly matter things like you're doing fine really 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 tribeland um you can also follow my other account at cleopatra movie trivia um andy at andrew hunter m yep and james at james harkin and finally

chasinski you can email podcast at qi.com yep or you can go to our group account which is at no such thing you can go to our website no such thing as a fish.com where we have links to a tour that's coming up in 2018 uh thanks so much for listening to us guys thanks so much for being here tonight uh we'll see you again next week good bye