No Such Thing As A Fish - 200: No Such Thing As A Jigsaw For The Queen

Episode Date: January 19, 2018

Live from Birmingham, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss the squatting Queen impersonator, misplace nuclear launch codes, and the statue in Belgium commemorating Peter the Great's sick.

Hi guys, just before we start this show, I want to celebrate the fact that this is our 200th episode of No Such Things as a Fish. Thanks for that, Dan. A little woohoo. Yep, found the second one. And the way I've celebrated our 200th episode is by making a mistake. Yep, last week's episode, there was an incorrect fact in it. So we recorded the show live in Leicester and my fact was about how the Walker's Crisp Factory can't tell the difference between golf balls and crisps. And after we recorded this show, someone came up to me, he was called Greg Hilliard, and he actually works in the Walker's Crisp Factory, and he informed me that fact was out of date because they've now created a machine that can distinguish between the two. It's in

the last couple of years, so walkers can now tell the difference between golf balls and crisps. Happy birthday, No Such Things as a Fish. Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Things as a Fish, a weekly podcast. Okay, guys, I'm trying to do the intro here. A weekly podcast coming to you from Burma! 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 with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with my fact this week, my fact this week is that in Brussels, there is a commemorative statue to

where Peter the Great once vomited. Anyone else want to vomit at this stage? Is it in the shape of vomit or what? What do you mean? Oh, the statue, no, it's of Peter the Great. Yeah, yeah, but what it was is he was over in Brussels, and he was out just having a big day, and he had a bit too much of a big day, and they pulled over to where this sort of little fountainy bit is, and he vomited, and it was established that that's what he did historically. And then years later, as in 1856, there was a prince who donated a statue to say we need to commemorate this, so it said it had this little plaque on it which says, as he sat on the edge of this fountain, he ennobled its waters with the wine of his libations. Did I say any of the words right in that?

It's close enough. I think his. Peter the Great was obviously, in one sense, this very grand, historical figure, like probably the most influential Tsar Russia ever had, you know, like early 18th century influence everything that came after him, but also he was an absolute lad, so he founded a drinking society called, it was originally called the Jolly Company, and then it was called the All Joking, All Drunken Cynod of Fools and Gestures, and it had a few rules, so there were rules like you were never allowed to go to bed sober, you always had to empty your cup when instructed to, and they just did mad stuff all the time, just constantly fooling around, so I think there was something where his favourite jester

got married, he had this jester, and he decided he was Tsar by this time, so he could do whatever he wanted, so he decided to make this wedding like a massive royal deal, and he gave his jester his Tsar's carriage, and then him and his drinking society wore boots made of straw, and they wore gloves made of mice, so they shoved their hands into mice, and they wore... Sorry, do you mean like finger puppets? No, it must be mouse skin right, they weren't putting the hand up of mouse's... Oh yeah, okay. Well I don't know because they wore squirrels, tails and cat's paws just hanging off their clothes for fun, and then they made the married couple enter Moscow on the back of a camel, and then they just spent three days getting

absolutely smashed, and as one biographer put it, the joke may have been carried too far because the groom died during the celebrations. May, may have been carried too far, that's a historian's way of looking at it, isn't it? He was a terrifying man, so he was six foot seven, he had a standing desk, that's not terrifying, but the standing desk he had, the writing surface was five foot six inches off the floor, he was huge, yeah, and also the other thing about it, he was obsessed with dwarfs, so when he was a baby, this is before he was... To him everyone would have been a dwarf, but he had a retinue of dwarfs acting as his servants and playmates, and he had a mini carriage and he would ride in it, drawn by four dwarf ponies with four dwarfs riding their own horses at the

side, and even in later life he became obsessed with dwarfs in pies, he loved a dwarf jumping out of a pie at a banquet, really, he was obsessed with it. Often naked, naked dwarfs jumping out of pies, he was really into, yeah, so Simon C. Back Montefiore wrote a really good biography, and he basically said all of the parties they had had naked girls jumping out of pies, dwarves being tossed, dwarves dressed as old men, old men dressed as dwarves, all of them naked, except for the bishop who would be carrying dildos on a cushion. But that's the thing about it, is this thing that he did, this club, it was called a synod, wasn't it, and so it was basically to take the piss out of the church, and that's why he did the whole time, so instead of holy water they would scatter

vodka. And if you were ever caught being sober you'd get excommunicated from his club, but the worst thing was, if you got excommunicated you were barred from all the pubs in the whole of Russia. Wow, way, way. Imagine the horror Anna, listening at home you want to be able to imagine the horror on Anna's face right now. He did another thing where, so he did a number of trips to Europe, he was famous for these massive trips, and one time he came back and he was so impressed by the clean shavenness of the Europeans that he imposed a beard tax into Russia, but the way he did it was, he came back and they threw a massive reception for him, and he was giving a sort of arousing speech, and everyone said it was elation, everyone was so excited, and then it turned to

horror when he suddenly said, I don't want beards anymore, and he pulls out a massive razor, and he starts shaving the faces of people who were attending, what they thought was just a pleasant talk of a homecoming hero, and they all left without their face hair. But he did, he did the tax to start off with, and then when people started paying the tax he would just went, oh, I'm just gonna ban them then. So he just didn't want beards at all, because he saw that as an example of the old Russia, and he was a great moderniser of Russia, so he had a law that everyone had to dress as either a Hungarian, a Frenchman, or a German. That was because he knew a very funny joke about a Hungarian, a Frenchman. But with the beard tax, the thing was, with the tax they gave you these

coins, and I didn't realise these coins are still in existence, this is from the 1700s, and you can see them, there's pictures online where it's like a sort of a goatee, and a little, what's that bit called? A soul patch. Soul patch kind of thing, but like Satan would have, you know, the more pointy one. A goatee. Oh yeah, a goatee, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that would be on the coin, and you would carry your coin around with you, so if you were seen in the streets with a beard, they'd go, where's your coin, and you'd look around for the coin, and if you didn't have your coin, they'd shave your face on the spot. He took Russia back 5,000 years, as well as being a massive moderniser. What do you mean? He left Russia in the year 7206, and he got back, and he said, I don't want this anymore, because

Russia used to begin at 5,508 BC, and he left Russia for the west, and he found, oh, it's 1700 here, well I prefer this, and so he came back and said, right, it's 1700, forget the 7,200 nonsense, changing it. Beardstone exists in the future. That's so cool, so he just altered time, and he trained as a shipbuilder, so when he was touring Europe, he personally went to a shipyard and just worked there in Amsterdam for months, and he cooked his own meals, and he lit his own fires, and he ignored anybody who called him your Majesty. He answered only to carpenter Peter, who is very eccentric, but an incredibly practical man in loads of ways. He also really liked cutting something else off people, so you would be actually thankful if he

cut your beard off, because he loved cutting people's heads off himself, so usually as a world leader at the time, people would be headed, but you'd get your executioner to do it, but he really liked to be there in the thick of it, and so he did lots of executions himself, and he was really fascinated by anatomy, again, because I think he liked Europeans, and they were maybe a head in biology. If he comes at you with a razor, at what stage do you know he's going to go for the beard and not cut your head? Oh yeah. That's got to be absolutely terrifying. He comes out with a great big axe. No, this is just my beard axe, don't worry. He actually had a mistress called Mary Hamilton, and then she ended up being beheaded as lots of mistresses did, and when she was beheaded,

he was there, and as soon as she was beheaded, he lifted up her head in front of the crowns who were all watching, and he gave them all a medical lesson on anatomy, so he turned her neck side out and was like, this is the trachea, this is her carotid artery, and then he gave her a big snog, and then he dropped the head and walked away. He gave her a snog? Yeah, yeah, he gave her a big kiss on the lips. So this fact was sent to me by a listener of our podcast called Carrie, and I loved it because there are amazing statues all over the world that represent very odd things. I found one which I find, I've been trying to track down whether the truth of this, which is George Washington in Trafalgar Square, very close to where we work in Covent Garden, literally a walking

distance, there's a statue of George Washington there outside the National Portrait Gallery, and it was donated by the Americans. However, there was a sentence that George Washington said just before he died, which is he said, I would never will stand on British soil again. And as a result, it is said, and this is what tour guides tell everyone, that as they were putting down the statue of George Washington, they imported American soil, and sitting underneath it is American soil, so he still is not standing. But what's under the American soil? It's more British soil. How far down does this go, basically? On vomiting, and on American presidents, actually, Ulysses S. Grant was president,

and also he was prominent in the Civil War, in the American Civil War before that, and so he was kind of a war hero, but at the same time he was an alcoholic, so he used to swig whiskey wherever he went, apparently, and at one point in battle, he vomited into his horse's mane, and just went on with it. What about George W. Bush? Was it George W. Bush? No, it's George H. W. Bush, wasn't it, who vomited on the lap of Japan's prime minister in 1992, and as a result, the Japanese coined a phrase, bushu suru, meaning embarrassing public vomiting, or literally, to do a bush. Because that is frowned on, isn't it, in Japan? Yeah, actually, everywhere. What? Oh, I've got so many apologetic texts to say.

Do you know, he was so good-natured about that moment, though, so he kind of collapsed at this dinner, he'd been feeling bad anyway, I think, because he just played a tennis match against the Japanese emperor, and he'd lost, so he was feeling really unwell after that, and he collapsed onto the floor, vomited, passed out, and as soon as he woke up with the Japanese prime minister there, above him, saying, you okay, he said, why don't you just roll me under the table and I'll sleep it off while you finish dinner? Really? Which is quite cool, yeah. One thing about Peter the Great is, at his parties, he would train bears to serve alcohol, and they would growl and harass at those who said no.

So I thought I'd look at some other awesome parties, and I really like the engagement party of the newspaper magnet, Gordon Bennett. He turned up at his own engagement party so drunk that he immediately urinated into the living room fireplace in full view of his hosts, and it's in the Guinness Book of Records as the greatest engagement faux pas, and it's supposed to be where we get the phrase, Gordon Bennett! Are you kidding me? Something bad, yeah, supposed to be. Wait, Guinness still accepting any advance on urinating into the fireplace? Sure.

Okay, go for it. I think we could smash that. During the gin craze, there was quite a few good parties, so this was in the 18th century, and a lot of people were drinking gin, especially in London. There was an author called Henry McKenzie who was at a drinking party, and he didn't want to drink anymore, so he fell to the floor to disguise himself as a drunken body, and then soon after he felt a small hand around his neck, and he was like, what's going on? And he confronted the boy who was doing it, and apparently the boy said it was his job to loosen the neckties of the guests to prevent them from choking on

their own vomit. Wow. If you have to hire someone to do that. Yeah, I had at my stag do party. Oh, are we really? Yeah, just before I did my speech, my brother made me drink what in Australia is called a shoey, and they do it on the Formula One. You fill a shoe full of beer, and you have to drink the whole shoe of beer. So I did that right after I decided I'd say a quick thank you to everyone that came, and I did that, passed out, woke up in the morning and thought, I did a pretty good speech last night, and my brother said I recorded it. I thought it was like about two minutes,

45 minutes. 45 minutes speech. Whose shoe did you have to drink? My brother's. It was disgusting. Because he's a clown, isn't he? That was the problem. Let's move on to our second fact of the show. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that only one study has ever found that men are better than women at recognizing faces. It was a study looking at the recognition of the transformers. And I know that's bad, obviously, but internally I am thinking, yeah, I'm pretty good at recognizing

transformers. And they're robots in disguise, so that's even better, right? So this is obviously like an on average thing, so you couldn't say, for instance, that Anna would be worse at recognizing transformers than Dan, just on average women are worse than men. Although you know that I asked you earlier what transformers were, so... And that was having just read the Wikipedia page on transformers, wasn't it? I still didn't understand it. Conforming to stereotype. And you couldn't say, for instance, that Andy would be worse than Anna at recognizing Barbie faces, which is the other part of this study. And so they took Barbie faces, and they took transformer faces, and they found that the women were better at recognizing Barbie,

and the men were better at recognizing transformers. And what they think is this is a study about looking whether experience is important when it comes to recognizing faces. So they found these things where they thought women would have more experience in looking at Barbies, and men would have more experience in looking at transformers, and they found that maybe experience has something to do with it. But actually, overall, women are a lot, lot better than men at looking at faces. Yeah, because I think I read a study, and this is off memory, so very risky right now, about that also women, because of the genetic material instinct, then you kind of have to be primed to recognize people more often, and you have to take an interest in more people so you can form a bond

with them, and as soon as you form an emotional bond with people, then you're more likely to recognize them next time you see them. Yeah, it could be that, it could be that. But it's probably the Barbie thing. So you have these things called face patches in your brain, and they're these little bits, they're about the size of a blueberry, and they are specifically for recognizing faces, so they don't respond if you get shown another body part, but they do respond if you get shown a face, and they are so predictable, these face patches, that scientists tried it out with monkeys, monkeys also have face patches, and they would measure the electrical activity of the face cells, and then they could recreate the face that the monkey had seen accurately. You know what? Yes,

from the activity in the brain cells. Wow, that is magic. But monkeys don't, aren't very good at recognizing faces, I don't think are they? I think great apes are, but monkeys are quite bad. They are good though, at recognizing bottoms. Oh yeah. Monkeys recognize, chimpanzees especially, recognize each other by their bottoms, the way that we recognize each other by the face. Well, not exactly the same way. Well, the same way but upside down. Yeah, yeah. Does that mean they back into every social engagement? They go, ask first. Well then they can't, because one of them has to be faced first in order to see the ass. Oh yeah. It's unbelievably embarrassing when one comes in asked first and another one comes in asked first. Imagine that in an engagement.

Yeah. But they tested this, they tested it by showing them, they showed humans faces and then faces upside down. And it's much, humans are much slower to recognize faces when they're turned upside down. They then showed the chimpanzees asses, chimpanzees asses, and then asses upside down. And the slow down was the same, whereas humans did not slow down when they were shown a normal bottom and then an upside down bottom, which they also did for this experiment. But could the humans recognize the bottoms? No, they also could not recognize upside down bottoms. Okay, I got it. Yeah. I just thought maybe I'd have a quick game of transformer or Barbie. Oh, okay. Great. We can't do the images because this is a podcast. Yeah. But what I can do is give

you some names of either these are people from transformers, not people, transformers. They're either transformers from transformers. They're people to me, James. Or toys from the Barbie universe. Okay. Okay. So, dude, a Ken, a friend of Ken. Yeah, it must be a Barbie thing. Transformer. It is everyone. Barbie, they knew it. Yeah, it's a friend of Jazzy. What? Slag. Is that a Barbie doll? I think it is a transformer. I think it's an incredibly ill-conceived Barbie. It's a triceratops dino bot. Oh, wow. Should have got that. MC Hammer. Barbie. Yeah, he's got it. Yeah. He's got it because they do celebrity Barbies.

There's an Angela Merkel as well. Yeah. Yeah, I tried to get one and they'd said it was for sale, but then it turned out it was they brought it just to an EU conference. Barbie created an Angela Merkel Barbie and so it's not for sale for general public. It should be. It is if you pay £50 billion. Yes. Yeah. One more, Alan. Transformer. Transformer. Who's the transformer? Who's for Barbie? Who doesn't give a shit? Okay, it's time for fact number three then. Well, the answer is you were right not to give a shit because it's both. It's a high-speed train and someone who's married to Barbie's friend, Midge. I beg your pardon. I said Midge. Oh, Midge. Cool. I mean, if her friend was called Midge, that would have been one of my boys.

So you may well have heard of these guys called super recognizers. Oh, yeah. So they're police officers and they're incredibly good at recognizing criminals faces based on really blurry CCTV. So in the Metropolitan Police, they identify a quarter of all the criminals, despite the fact that out of 32,000 Metropolitan Police officers, there are only six super recognizers and they get a quarter. And they're so good that one officer was interviewed for the Guardian and he said, I was coming back from court and I saw someone who was wanted for seven offenses because they just spot, they remember the faces of people who are wanted and they just see them and they go, that guy. I saw someone who was wanted for seven offenses. Once I had to stop the car three times,

I would take one person in and then on the way to the station, I saw someone else who was wanted. So I picked them up and then as we were driving, I saw someone else. No. Yeah, they're just constantly seeing crooks. Wow. Do you know who was very bad at recognizing people was back to American president Ronald Reagan. So he had to speak at a graduation ceremony in 1964 and he was giving, you know, the graduation certificate to students and a boy came up on stage and he shook the boy's hand, gave him a certificate and said, my name is Ronald. What's yours? And the boy said, I'm Michael. I'm your son. It was his adoptive son. They adopted him when he was a baby. He was 19 by that point. I mean, for an actor who has to recognize people, you would think that would be a flaw,

not being able to recognize other humans. Yeah, that's true. Actors need to recognize people. I mean, it helps if you're facing the right way. You only have to recognize the camera then, no? I guess so. I just because I can't recognize people. So I'm just a bit worried I can't be an actor. James has genuine face blindness. He doesn't remember faces. Kind of. I have no imagination. Oh, James. I thought those poems you showed me were wonderful. And that whole Barbie transformer game was top. I can't imagine people's faces. I can't imagine what my wife looks like, for instance. So he's not proper face blindness. It's aphantasia. It's cold. But it means that I can't really recognize people

very well. Aphantasia? Yeah. What a whimsical name for presumably a bad condition. It's not that bad. It's not embarrassing. Who ever the fuck you are. I'm your wife. Just one quick thing about face recognition. This year, there was a festival in Wales that used facial recognition technology to recognize evil elvises. They were trying to scan for people who were wanted, same as the police do, when they were on their way into the world's largest Elvis festival in Bridgend in September. 35,000 people were going in. Most of them dressed as Elvis and offered to scan their faces all. And what they were looking for. Bad guys.

There's a thing as well in Barcelona. They've tested out this new thing at comedy clubs, whereby they've put on the back of seats little cameras that stares directly into the face of the person sitting watching the comedy show. And it's there to monitor laughter patterns. So every time you laugh, it clicks and says you've laughed once. So if people at the end of the show go up and say, I found that very disappointing, I would like a refund, they can go, well, actually, you've laughed 67 times this evening and you can't have your money back. There's one. Yeah. Two. But everyone's fake laughs at a comedy show. Don't think for a minute we genuinely think you're laughing. Everyone puts on a fake laugh. You could be laughing at how shit it is. Yeah, yeah.

No, it's a test. It's to see how it would work because what they do is they then they drop the price altogether of the ticket. And so they clock up everyone's free gig, you go to it, they clock up the laughter amount. And then at the end of the gig, they say you've laughed and there's a cap on how much laughter there is. Because then everyone's just going to go, I'm just going to enjoy this, but I'm not going to laugh so I get it for free. But they are awful. Yeah. Mouth closed, look straight ahead, think of death, think of old people, just think of sadness. Some people don't laugh even when they're finding things really funny. You keep telling yourself that after your Edinburgh show, I'd refer to the audiences

at my solo show and a wonderful time on the feedback forms. Just explained a lot of them were remembering something sad. Can I quickly tell you my favorite headline that I've read recently? This is about recognizing stuff. The headline is that babies can see things that adults can't, but are unable to tell them. They'll look at a picture and they'll notice differences that we won't have spotted, or maybe they haven't told us, we don't know. That's what they think. So how do we know they can see the differences? I don't know. I didn't read the article, I just read the headline. That's going to go on your headstone, Dan.

Shall we move on to our next fact? Yeah, let's move on. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that there is a woman whose job for the last 30 years has been squatting above the Queen's throne so the TV cameras can get their angle right. The Queen doesn't squat above the throne, does she? No, exactly, certainly not. There's a woman who's called Ella Slack, and she's in her early 70s. She is the official stand-in for the Queen, at all events, where there are going to be TV cameras, because she's pretty much exactly the same size as the Queen, and she doesn't look like the Queen at all, but she does it, and she's done it 50 times for different state occasions. But why the squatting thing, that's what I want to know.

Well, she said she was interviewed about her life not quite being the Queen, by quite a long way not being the Queen, but she's not even in the line of succession, James. And that's what makes you famous these days, not being the Queen. But what she said about the ceremony... How long have you not been the Queen? She said about the ceremonies, I've never been allowed to sit on the throne in the House of Lords for the state opening of Parliament. Oh, I see. She said, I have to lurk above it. Yeah, but she says it's a very strict rule, and she does say, if I'm in a carriage or a car, I will wave. Which is very sweet. She was employed over 30 years ago when it was realised that the Queen

had a son in her eyes at some event, or the Queen might have the son in her eyes when she was standing on a podium, and so this woman was sent to check that the son wouldn't be in her eyes. And now she checks for that, so whenever the Queen has to stand up on a sunny day, she goes and checks first that the son won't be in her eyes. She checks that she'll be visible over podiums in case you've made a podium too high. In case Peter the Great's desk is brought up. Wow. Yeah, and she has her own Queen costume, which she's put together from charity shops, so her Queen handbag cost one quid. Yeah, and she got fake diamonds from Woolworths for the millennium. I just love it, I just think it's really nice. Sorry, she's not paid, she refuses to accept

any money for the work she does, and she's been doing it for 30 years. I think she's one of the great unsung heroes of this country. It's weird that she doesn't accept any payment, and she pays for her travel and everything. I mean, I agree, she's a hero in a very small way. Yeah. Speaking of clothing, there is someone else who sort of does a stand-in job for the Queen as well, and that is it's someone specifically whose job is to break in the shoes of the Queen that are as of yet unworn, so that's what they do. The people who provide all the clothing for her, her fashion people, the Queen's fashion people, they buy new shoes, and obviously when you're wearing new shoes they're very painful, and so someone is hired to just walk around in the new pair of shoes before

she has a go at them. That's cool. So they must have the same size feet as the Queen, right? Yes, it would be very funny if they did not. I'm just thinking that the audition for that job or the job interview would be just like Cinderella or something, when they have a load of people sat there, they just need the right size feet, because there's no other skill there, is there? No, and it's probably a quick audition process. Are you size eight? No? Okay, thank you. Size eight is not massive, by the way. It's massive if you're five foot two. Do you know, so I was looking at sort of the reason this lady, Ella Slack, she called, the reason she does this, it's like to prepare for ceremonial events, and the royal family,

they have to rehearse all the royal ceremonies quite a lot, and in fact the Queen herself spent weeks rehearsing for her coronation in 1953, so she was really nervous about it, and she used to play recordings of her father's coronation over and over again. Her father was George, you know, who had a stutter, and so it was quite difficult for him. She used to play recordings of his coronation, and she paraded up and down what was called the white drawing room, because that had the same dimensions as the theatre in the Abbey where she was going to be coronated, and she timed herself doing it to make sure she was going to walk the right, you know, distance at the right pace, and she got all her ladies in waiting to walk alongside her, and she used to wear her bedsheets

as a robe, as her queenly robes, which is so cool. That is really cool. Do you know in 2012 there was a queen shortage in the UK? Sorry? There was a queen shortage. It was due to all the jubilee stuff, and they needed queen lookalikes, and basically there's about, I don't know, there's about a couple of dozen people who can do queen lookalikes, and they needed them all the time, and they said the main lookalike company, Susan Scott Lookalike, said we could have done with double or triple the amount of queens. That is amazing. Imagine when the button was pressed, dispatch the queens. Oh come on, what do you do? What do you do? What do you do? What a room. Do you think they've ever all been in the same place at the same time?

I don't know, but I did read an interview with a Kate Middleton lookalike, and she says that one of the queens, or one of the queen lookalikes, is like her honorary granny, and the reason is because they all hang out together, all these lookalikes. Of course she do, you wouldn't, because you're all working in the same role, you're kind of job. The queen lookalikes and the Kate Middleton lookalikes will hang out with them. Yeah, and the Pippa Middleton lookalikes, the Harry Potter lookalikes, the David Beckham lookalikes, they all hang out together. Why is Harry Potter at that party? That's breaking a wall of some sort. Because then that's the only time they can truly be themselves, because outside those circles, everyone's always

saying, oh, you look just like Camilla Parker-Balls. Well, to the Harry Potter lookalike. Have you ever thought about changing your lookalike mate? You don't look like Harry Potter. Just on that subject, they do often, if they're a couple who are celebrity couples in real life, they will fall in love with each other and get married. I think there's examples of like a Katie Price and a Peter Andre lookalike, when that was massive, falling in love, because they did so many events together. When that was massive. Did you not buy a whole new world album? So on body doubles, General Montgomery in the Second World War, Monty, had an impersonator who for spying purposes, pretended to be him, and would go to different

places so that German spies would think, oh, Monty's over here. Actually, Monty wasn't over here. Monty was over there, defeating the Germans. So the only problem was that the lookalike had had a finger shot off in the First World War. So you needed to count the fingers on the fake Monty. Really? He had a prosthetic finger mate. He wore gloves or a prosthetic finger or something. And the only thing was, there was another body double who was called Keith Deemer-Banwell, who looked exactly like Montgomery. So he was used as a lookalike. The only problem was, he was substantially taller than Monty, so he was never allowed on any account to get out of his car. Was that Tex Banwell or was that, or Clifton James, I think? Clifton James was the first

one with no finger. Clifton James, yeah. It was called Operation Copperhead. And basically, it was when, you know, we were planning, the British were planning attacks on the Germans, and it was dispatched people who looked like him to all parts of the world to make sure. But he was drunk as well, so he was an absolute liability, I think. So funny, the idea of dispatching these fake Monty's everywhere. Well, we've had intelligence that he's an Antarctica. Should we strengthen defenses in Antarctica? Did you guys read about the Mexican politician who was actually looking for body doubles, or he was looking for body doubles? This is a guy called Renato Tronco Gomez, and this was in 2015. He's a politician in the Mexican parliament,

and he put out a call for body doubles because he wants to maintain his popularity, and he's like, I'm so popular that I need to be in multiple places at once. What an ego on the man. He said, and he said, I'm not that fussy. If you're short, then you can wear platform shoes. If you're chubby, you can lose weight. If you're thin, you can gain weight. It's fine. If you're tall, I'll cut your feet off. He said they're banned from smoking and drinking, because he doesn't smoke and drink, and it has to be realistic. Although at any public events, he stipulated that they would have to say, I'm the double, by the way. You're not quite getting the real guy. You're getting a look alike. And he said, most importantly, they will not be able

to live in my home, sleep with my wife, or go to Congress. So no shagging as part of the job, but yeah. Was any second most important on his list, though, wasn't it? In order of importance, between going to Congress and living in my house. Yeah. I can imagine his wife going, wait a minute, you've got no feet. Hey, I read a thing, guys, which is that so on the subject of body doubles, a lot of in movies is obviously stunt doubles and body doubles for the biggest actors in the world. They all have them. And I started looking into stunt doubles, generally, for this topic tonight, and found this thing where there's a lot of anger amongst the Hollywood community of stunt of stunt doubles, because there's no Oscar for stunt doubling or body

doubling. And that is such a huge part of the movies. What you see in there is making people believe that you've been blown out of a window or that you jumped. They have it for special effects. They have a special event, but they think they should have an Oscar for it. And I found that there's actually a big petition that's been going on. And as far as I could see, as of last year, they stopped pushing it to the public because they didn't get the hundred thousand votes that they needed. So it's on a site where they've managed to get 87,393 supporters, and they've not quite hit the 100,000 that they need. So I'm going to read out the website for this here. It's called thepetitionsite.com. You've got to look for stand up for stunts. And I reckon if

enough people who are listening to this podcast can just go to that site very quickly and just give them a petition support, we could get to 100,000. And maybe next year or the year after, stunt people can get an Oscar at the main award. How cool would that be? But they could up sail through the ceiling and pick up their award. They're so close. And the last update was a year ago, so they've given up. And that's so sad because they're incredible. I would love to see the stunt Oscars. Everyone's constantly blowing shit up, smashing through the glass. That would be incredible. You'd be, as a member of the audience, you'd be constantly looking for the emergency exit before someone said, no, no, no, it's fine,

it's part of it. But they're more omnipresent than you think, aren't they? So you know that bit in Notting Hill where Julie Roberts talks about people having butt doubles? I always thought that was a bit that had been scripted in and wasn't true, but they all have body doubles. And in fact, really trashy piece of celebrity information. But in Pretty Woman, Julie Roberts had a body double for that as she was called Shelly Michelle. And actually in the really iconic poster of Pretty Woman where, you know, she's kind of leaning against something and she's got something over her shoulder. She's wearing some short leather skirt or something. The whole, the only bit of her that's Julie Roberts is the head. The rest of that is a body. So it's just so weird. Someone

else's body. But there are, there are a lot of monkeys looking at that picture going, that's not Julie Roberts' house. Guys, we need to move on to our final fact. James, you got something before we do? So I was looking at Queen's jobs because this is a person who's employed to do something for the Queen. The Queen has a keeper of the Queen's stamps. Because the Queen doesn't like stamp collecting, but she has a shitload of stamps. And so she employs someone to be her official stamp collector. You're kidding. I am not kidding. And does she go and say, how's my stamp collection doing? I guess so. Why doesn't she like, does she not like the licking the back of her own head? If you collect stamps, you don't lick them. What? That's surely one of the perks of stamp collecting.

It's fun. You just go and get your stamps out and go, oh, just lick that one again. I wouldn't lick the fronts of the stamps. That is deranged. No one's forcing her to collect stamps. She has a collection that's already there, so she needs someone to look after it. But this guy does go and get extra stamps for her collection. Yeah. So he is basically doing a hobby for her. Yeah. It's like having an official jigsaw maker. Yes. Oh, but she does collect jigsaws. No, wait, the fact is she doesn't collect jigsaws. Sorry. Hang on. It's better than it sounds. She doesn't collect jigsaws. She does jigsaws. She loves them. But to save buying loads of jigsaws, she gets them out of a jigsaw library.

You can rent jigsaws? Yeah. It's just a library. It's a free library for jigsaws. It's sorry. Is she low on cash, Don? She is thrifty. Well, I think they should put our taxes up. If the queen can't afford jigsaws, I'm not paying enough tax. Hey, listen, let's move on to our final fact of the show, and that is Chazinsky. My fact is that US president Jimmy Carter once sent the nuclear launch codes to his dry cleaner. And not on purpose. I read this article in Timeline, which is one of my favorite websites, Timeline.com, and it's about the fact that there's been an open secret in Washington

since Jimmy Carter was president that he lost the nuclear biscuit, as it's known, which is the little credit card with the codes on it, because he sent a suit to the dry cleaners, and it was in the pocket because the president has to have it on him at all times. And it's just... It is amazing. Did it come back sort of slightly blurry, and he was like, oh, is that a six or a five? I'll wing it. I'll wing it. But isn't it true that basically all the presidents lose the codes all the time? They're very scattered with it.

We can only hope that they lose the codes all the time, frankly, at the moment. One of the problems that they do have from George W. Bush onwards is that the person carrying the football has to be by the president at all times, but the president often forgets that. So the president will finish what they're doing, hop in a car and drive off, and then suddenly guy with the nuclear code is going, shit, what do I do? And they have to chase after the president and try and get back to him in case he's needed. I would constantly hide as president. You actually would, wouldn't you?

Yeah. You'd be deliberately all the time trying to sneak up. Yeah, because they have to go even in the same lift as the president. I don't... What happens when the president's asleep, though? They sleep in the same bed as them, do they? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you found a fact for our book, which is about the fact that if Trump goes to... Yes.

Yeah. If he goes to New York, the nuclear button has its own multimillion-dollar flat in New York, which he didn't... The flat didn't get used for the first eight months of the presidency because he didn't go to New York, but they've hired a luxury apartment just for the button to sit in. But I like the fact that it's for the button, and it's also for the people who guard the button, so it's for his staff. But I like the idea that it is mainly for the button, so the button's in the double bed, and the staff are just standing to attention around the bed. Are you comfortable, sir?

As you say, Clinton lost it. Yeah, Clinton lost it. He kept it rubber-banded for his credit cards in a trouser pocket. Imagine that! That makes sense. It doesn't make sense. It's a very crazy thing to do. What if you accidentally put in your nuclear button card into the machine at the till? Imagine if you...

I don't think that's how it sets off, sir. This is why they say contactless is a very dangerous technology. And they only found out, didn't they, when I think Clinton's aide said, look, could you give me the biscuit back because we need to give you an updated version? This came out in an autobiography he wrote a short while ago. I think there's someone called Patterson. And so his aide said, give me the biscuit back because we need to swap it. And Clinton said, yeah, yeah, sure. I think he's upstairs.

I just left it upstairs. I'll go and get it. And he scurried around for a bit. And then eventually he admitted that he hadn't seen it for months and he had no idea where he put it. Oh, my God. But he must have known he hadn't seen it for months. Oh, he would have been panicking. And he must have been absolutely shitting.

So there was a lot of worry that a president with this kind of power could launch based on, let's say, even in our current climate, you know, you get too angry one day, the president might suddenly go... Even in the current climate, that might happen. In the current blissfully calm environment, we're all living at the moment, yeah. But he might suddenly, you know, it's quite an easy process to do. And back in the day, there was a Harvard professor who thought about this and thought, actually, we need to make it a bit harder.

We need to make it a big decision for the president to do. So this is what he suggested. He said, my suggestion was quite simple. Put the code that you needed to launch the nuclear warheads in a little capsule. Implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer would carry with him a big butcher's knife as he accompanied the president. If the president ever wanted to fire the nuclear weapons, the only way he would do so would be with his own hands to kill the person

and then to break it out of them in order to do it. And that wasn't a popular suggestion. In fact, I don't think they even went for it. With Peter the Great, who would have absolutely loved to do that. It's in here somewhere. Although, interestingly, this is the carotid. I think that's a very impractical suggestion. It's a guy, Roger Fisher.

He was a Harvard professor. He published in the Bulletin of Atomic Science. It was a real thing, and it was very talked about. Imagine, though, the president constantly being accompanied by his man with a knife. This absolutely terrified-looking man with a knife. How? Well, just to finish that off, because I found that as well, they suggested it to the Pentagon, didn't they?

And the Pentagon said, my God, that's terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the president's judgment. He might never push the button. Really? Wow. Wow. So like you said, there are two things, isn't there? There's this card, which is the biscuit,

and then there's the briefcase, which is the football. The briefcase is manufactured by a company called Zero Halliburton. Okay, and Zero Halliburton, they were a Utah firm, and they do this, and the other thing is, they do aluminium briefcases for Hollywood. So they've made briefcases for 24, West Wing, Independence Day, and Santa with Muscles. That's the main ones. Santa with Muscles is the 79th worst-rated film in the whole of IMDB.

Wow. No way. In the whole thing. In the whole thing. There must be billions in there. Yeah. But sorry, they make... So they make this, they make, well, they're not fake,

because they need to use them in the movies, but they're these really awesome kind of aluminium briefcases, because the guy who invented it realised that briefcases are not so good, and aluminium ones will be better. And they're good for carrying nuclear codes. The nuclear codes that they have, by the way, are pretty weird, so that is basically two lists, and they're pictorial,

and their one list is places to bomb, and the other one is how to bomb them. So you basically go down, you go, I'll go for this one, Pyongyang, and this one, a big fuck-off bomb. Wow. I mean, the one thing keeping the world safe was the idea that Trump would have to read more than six words. A military aide to Bill Clinton said it was like a Denny's breakfast menu.

He said, you pick one out of column A and two out of column B. But it's... That's bad. I wonder how seriously this... Because it obviously scares you to hear that this thing exists, generally, I think. But I don't know how seriously they took it. So the fact is about Jimmy Carter having sent it accidentally

the codes to the dry cleaners. When Jimmy Carter first got the nuclear football, it was given to him by the LBJ Presidential Administration. And when it was brought to him, the guy looked inside the briefcase when he first opened it in the companionship of... In the companionship of when he was with Jimmy Carter. And inside it, when they opened it,

they found that the previous administration was having a bit of a joke because they left inside it an empty beer can and a condom, not for humans, for horses. And that was inside the most deadly bag that a president could have next to them. And he didn't tell Jimmy Carter he closed and he went, yep, it's all good. And Jimmy Carter never found out about that.

What? Yeah. Sorry, horses have condoms. I didn't know that either. No. That, for me, is the headline from that story. Yeah. How long did they put them on?

Yeah, I've not even thought about it. Nobody knows. On the US nukes, so there is a secretive US agency and their job is to transport all the nuclear material around America because obviously you've got loads of missile silos, you've got loads of nuclear sites, and very few people know about this, but they're called the Office of Secure Transportation

and their vehicles sound absolutely insane. So the defences, obviously they've got convoys they go with, but the defences include shock-delivering systems, which basically means if you touch it, it electrocutes you. They've got axles which explode, so you can't drive them away even if you do manage to take over it. And they also have thick walls which ooze immobilising foam. Wow.

So if you are wrong and you touch the lorry, it just oozes out at you and then catches you like you're on flypaper. God, but it's so weird because foam isn't that immobilising. I've been in bars. Can you think of how difficult it is to get out of the bath? Yeah. They have special stuff, don't they? I think it's special.

Special foam. Special foam. It's immobilising foam. Got it. Not palm olive. We're going to have to wrap up in a sec. Anything before we do, guys? I can tell you that we've been talking about American nuclear bombs.

Yeah, we have nuclear bombs as well in the UK. And it is technically legal for Prince Charles to set off a nuclear bomb. No. That's true. It's true ring. It's because he is the Duke of Cornwall. And if you're Duke of Cornwall, there's a few laws you technically don't have to follow.

And one of them is the Nuclear Explosions Act. Another one is the Data Protection Act. And another one is the Wildlife and Countryside Act. So it means as well as being able to set off nuclear bombs, he can share your email address with third parties. And technically, he's allowed to shoot a great crested newt with a machine gun. That's amazing. 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 have 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. And Czazinski. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep. Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing. Or you can go to our website, no such thing as a fish.com, where we have all of our previous episodes. Also got a link to our book,

which we're about to give a copy away to one member of the audience here in Birmingham. We asked you to send in your facts before the show started. And here we go. This is the fact, Andy. What is it? I've got it. I'm just taking the phone off airplane mode.

Unbelievable. Okay. So this fact was sent in by a man called Stephen Connebere. And his fact is that the game Cludo was invented by a Pratt from Birmingham. Sorry, that's a Pratt from Birmingham. Anthony Pratt from Birmingham specifically. And it was called Murder at Tudor Close.

Wow. Cool. Okay. Well, if you're here, come and come and grab a book from us at the end. Guys, as I said at the beginning, we're going to be in the back. We've got books.

If you want to get one, we'll be there signing them. There's hopefully, I don't know how much time we have, but we'll try and bang through as many of you as possible. And then we'll study on them. I mean, in the current climate, Dan. Bad choice of words. But Birmingham, this has been awesome. And by the way, just before we wrap up,

because again, we're doing these bigger venues, we thought we'd end on something special. We have here tonight, as I said, the singer and songwriter, Emperor Yes, Ash Gardner is here. And we're going to go out by playing our theme tune live for you guys tonight. As we go. Yeah.

So please welcome to the stage. Ladies and gentlemen, it is Ash Gardner. Here he is, everybody. And thank you so much, Birmingham. That was awesome. Thank you. We're off so long that we're waiting. This time, there's another stage.

Tell me, come on, come on. Leave me down in the light. And we're not playing together, show what we can do. You know what's being done. And I will marry you. And that will sign it. Never show me a tune. You will love me.

I will love you. Thank you, Ali. Thank you.