No Such Thing As A Fish - 241: No Such Thing As Tom Cruise In A Manger

Episode Date: November 1, 2018

Live from Nottingham, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss the Nativity with celebrities, giraffes with asthma, and chucking hospital patients into a bush.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from our Book of the Year 2018 tour in Nottingham! My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Czazinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go! Starting with you Anna Czazinski Yes, my fact this week is that old European malaria remedies included throwing the patient head first into a bush in the hope that he'd get out quickly enough to leave the fever behind Yeah, just got tangled up in there, can't get out and you scarpa! That was how you did it

and this was used all the way up until the 17th century basically until the 1600s no one knew how to cure malaria and so they just made up a lot of wacky wacky shit I wonder what they thought happened to the malaria in the bush, does it stay there like if you went through a walk through the bush Yeah, it is a bit like that so it's called passing through and it's kind of an old folklore thing they did it for lots of different diseases, sometimes it would be a hole in a tree or a hole in a stone or something like that and you would pass through the hole and the idea is you would leave the disease behind you and actually it happened in America they didn't, perhaps they didn't have trees or stones but they used to climb under the belly of a donkey

and the idea is you would leave your disease behind And is it that it gets so distracted by the inside of the tree or the belly of the donkey then it goes oh look and it loses sight of it I think so, I don't think they really knew what was going on Yeah, malaria is not like me, just distracted by any idiotic thing, what's wrong? But yeah, so of course as soon as the tree that has quinine in it was discovered suddenly everyone could be cured of malaria and that was in, well this is by Western Europeans it was discovered in the 17th century, so they went over to Peru

and they found the indigenous people were just using the bark from this tree called the conchona tree I think that's how you pronounce it, and that just cures it and so they started using it and then all their problems were over, no more running in and out bushes But yeah, it was a tough time up until then It was, because there's quite a few other things they tried as well as the bush thing, wasn't it? It wasn't just the bush thing, so eating an onion with the word armen on it With the word armen? Was this for malaria to get rid of it?

Yeah, that was to get rid of malaria, well it didn't work either But you can't, I mean very few onions have the word armen on them If you can find one of those I think you deserve to be cured Yeah, you were allowed to write it on yourself Oh fine Smearing cow manure on your body, drinking opium laced beer That was quite a good one actually There was a guy called Albertus Magnus, he was a Dominican scholar

and he said, allowing insects to devour 77 small cakes made from a dough prepared by mixing flour and the patient's urine Right, just on the beer one that you said No, no, no You kind of glossed over Allowing the flies to eat 77 small cakes Can't eat any insects Oh fine, okay

Do you have to open a tiny Gregg's for them which says we have urine cakes inside But I just say for the people at Gregg's, I'm sure you don't sell urine cakes They're never sponsoring us, James, we can say what we like Actually, Kate Guy was a guy called Albertus Magnus, wasn't it? This guy in the 13th century who came with loads of wacky cures and another one of his for malaria was that you could cut a chip off a block that a criminal had been executed on

and then rub it all over your body if you were suffering from it and that scared off the malaria because it reminded it of the penalty for being evil It reminded the evil malaria that maybe it'll be hanged one day if it doesn't go away That's where we get the phrase, a chip off the old block on which a criminal was executed Exactly Yes, I've got a real cure for malaria Viagra can fight malaria, did you know this? The malaria parasite gets into your body and it goes into red blood cells for a while

It spends a while in there in your bone marrow and the spleen strobe is to filter out old or dead or stiff red blood cells and so the malaria normally sneakily passes through However, and that means it spreads through the blood However, if a patient takes Viagra, the infected blood cells themselves stiffen up It only makes your blood cells go stiff We all know that about Viagra I knew that it made other things go stiff

I just didn't know that it made the actual blood cells in your body go stiff I think it's true, if you dilute Viagra and put it in a plant pot it makes the plant go stiff Get away I didn't know individual cells getting individual erections Exactly But it does, it will present the mosquitoes with a big target as well How come when you eat Viagra then it doesn't make your tongue stiff? In fairness, that's quite a good point

That's a great point How come basically anyone who's taken Viagra the whole body just isn't completely stiff? I don't know Walking in is a starfish I'm ready But starfish have got five limbs and you've only got, oh no, yeah Anyway Dr Butler, there was a famous doctor called Dr Butler

And his way of treating malaria was by dropping people through a trap door on London Bridge into the polluted river Thames There used to be a trap door in London Bridge I mean, I didn't think of that, but yeah, that is weird, isn't it? Wow So would you have to lure them onto the trap door? Would they know they're going to be dropped through the trap door? Or does he say, pay me the money and I'll show you where the cure is It's just over here

It's a really good question, I really don't know Because this guy wasn't great, he had a habit of treating epilepsy by firing a gun beside the victim's head He was the position to James the first, so he was like, you know, he's a real deal Well, no, he wasn't the real deal, but you know But you said that like James the first who famously lived for 700 years and like, how did he die? 26, malaria Hey, do you know the oldest example of malaria that we found in a human that we have now? No

It's Tutankhamun Is it? Yeah They've recently discovered a few years ago now that Tutankhamun actually had Types, not even one type, a few types of malaria inside him And that would have contributed to his immune system going down So they don't think it's what killed him, but they think it's what, you know, added to his problems of his feet being bad and whatever it was We don't actually know what killed him

I think he was possibly crushed by a hippo, but it's It's possible that the malaria, knock back the reflexes It's possible It's possible Everything's possible You know, maybe in the sarcophagus, he was very, very flat He also had syphilis, didn't he? He had everything Tutankhamun, he was the first try He had the first socks and sandals, I think, in the world

He just always on it In fact, malaria can cure syphilis, so maybe he had malaria to cure his syphilis That's possible So this is a genuine thing Yeah, someone won the Nobel Prize for this This was in 1917 that it was discovered, and it was an Austrian physician called Julius Wagner Jorreg And he realised that the fever that could be induced by malaria was hot enough to cure syphilis And so, yeah, he got the Nobel Prize, and that was used until 1940

If you had syphilis, then you would be infected deliberately with malaria And don't worry, we've got some gonorrhea for the malaria And then we've got some dengue fever for the gonorrhea It's like the old woman who swallowed a fly That was infected with malaria There's a town, a city, in fact, in Australia called Townsville And 7,000 families there have been nannying mosquitoes recently Within the last year or two

So they've all hosted a tub of mosquito eggs in their backyard And they've, you know, watered them and kept them nice and cool and moist and, you know, nurtured them Because those mosquitoes have all been infected with a bacteria Which means they're less able to transmit dengue and Zika viruses Are they the ones where you're going to try and get them to mate with the other mosquitoes? Exactly, yeah So they're breeding millions and millions And everyone in the town has agreed to it

They said, yeah, great, bring on the good mosquitoes That is good, yeah It's a rubbish pet, if you ask for a dog, you've got a thousand mosquitoes You're really pissed off And it's wrapped up under the tree in the shape of a dog But in fact, it's a thousand mosquitoes I mean, you're never going to wrap a dog, are you? So people are trying to find malaria vaccines still

And it seems to be a habit to infect yourself with malaria to work out what works But also in the past, people infected other people So, you know, we often talk about self-experimentation And it's kind of these heroes who poison themselves So they can work out how to cure themselves But there was a guy called Dr. Grassi in 1898 Who really wanted to work out Who really wanted to prove that malaria was caused by the anopheles mosquito

Which it is And no one would believe him And so he got a volunteer called Mr. Solar to be locked in a room In a tiny box for 11 days filled with malaria-infected mosquitoes Until he got malaria 11 days? Yeah, it took, yeah I mean, oh, wow

And the sad thing is, we know that he got malaria Because it was a successful experiment So this guy, Dr. Grassi, was thrilled He was like, now I've proven that the mosquito cures malaria And in his case notes, he writes The rest of the history of Mr. Solar's case has no interest for us But it is now certain that mosquitoes carry malaria So did not care

Wow I was looking into the idea of all these old suggestions for how you cure things So outside of malaria, there's everyone Every single disease seemed to have an eccentric thing assigned to it And one of my favorite ones is if you had swollen eyes The way that they suggested, Dr. suggested that you cure it Was that you tied a live crab to a necklace on your chest And you just let it live there

And nobody will notice your swollen eyes ever again You just tie it around your neck and you just have a live crab And that will cure it Cool I didn't know swollen eyes was really a thing Around the eyes, not swollen eyeballs It is thanks to the crab cure that was so successful That's why everyone's got normal eyes

We wiped it out, yeah Yeah I was just saying before about these mosquitoes in Townville They're going to send them out to have sex with other mosquitoes And I looked into how mosquitoes have sex And one interesting thing I found is It's the females that bite you And so what some male mosquitoes will do

Is they'll find a human And then just hang around the human Waiting for females to come So like the human is just like a singles bar or something That's so cool So you might just have a little mosquito flying around you And you're like, oh for God's sake And he's just waiting for a bit of lady mosquito

Wow It's quite risky then Landing on you though Going to that bar is a risky affair Because I didn't realise That's the dating scene Well you've got to put yourself out there And they do

But the reason they suck our blood is to feed their eggs So that's why it's only the females But they, as soon as they've sucked it They're so full they can't move anymore So every time a mosquito is sucking on your blood It's risking its own life Because if you spot it and spot it in time And that's why you often can

It can't really fly away It's got this giant sack of blood now inside it Wow It's actually really worse for them than it is for you We're going to have to move on in a second To our next fact Do you want to say something Andy or no? It's just a follow on fact from that really

But it's not relevant enough to end this To end this section No, no, no Bring it home man, bring it home Oh God It's not good, it's not good It's just that Mosquitoes are victims as much as we are

Because they're carrying the malaria parasite But there's a theory that Mosquitoes are actually made a bit crazy By having the parasite inside them And it makes them extra keen to suck blood So they would do it anyway But the parasite makes them basically like Vampire mosquitoes

And the other thing is they get sick Mosquitoes get sick so it's a bit harsh on them If they've got this malaria parasite they're sick And also we blame them for kind of spreading it But mosquitoes don't get on aeroplanes And fly around and stuff like that Mosquitoes stay near their little place where they live What happens is humans get bitten

Humans go somewhere else And they get bitten again and make a poor mosquito sick And then that mosquito gets loads of other people sick So it's the humans who are doing all the spreading around The poor mosquitoes are just flying around Getting sick and then get squashed Ahh The real enemy is man

Okay, it is time for fact number two And that is my fact My fact this week is that Instead of commissioning new waxworks for their exhibitions The Bible Walk Museum in Ohio Repurposes discarded waxworks from around the world instead As a result, Abel is played by Prince Charles King Solomon is played by John Travolta

And Jesus is played by Tom Cruise And I encourage you to go online and look at these photos Because Tom Cruise makes a good looking Jesus Is it baby Jesus? Like Nativity Scene in his manger And then you pull his little rug down And it's Tom Cruise's face peeping out Yeah, it's Tom Gunn, Tom Cruise with the Helmetard

Like a Mission Impossible, the way he always pulls off the rubber mask And it's Tom Cruise underneath You thought it was the baby Jesus Well, you were wrong Really good point Yeah, so this is a very almost famous in America Museum The Bible Walk Museum It was started by Pastor Richard Diamond in 1983

He was inspired after he visited another wax museum Not the greatest origin story Sort of expected almost And he wanted to do it and tell the story of the Bible But he realized how expensive it was to make new waxworks So he thought there's a lot that are closing down all the time There's a lot that are selling them off at auction Just by these

And they tend to be celebrities That's the thing, no one knows what Abel looked like He might have looked like Prince Charles, I don't know Yeah, that's true They gave Prince Charles, when you see that photo, a sort of pudding bowl haircut So they mess with the hair, they don't leave the head untouched They still dress them up And it looks really good

And Steve McQueen is there And George Harrison is there And Marlon Brando and Bert Lancaster and Clark Gable That's an unbelievably cool selection of people you just listed I'll leave you open with Prince Charles And you've got your Clark Gables and your Steve McQueens Are they all the wise men? No, they're all just random bit parts

They've got no starring roles Surely Jesus is a starring role at a biblically themed walkthrough waxwork museum There are also, there are quite a few Jesus's in there Because it's all of Jesus's life and stuff like that So at one stage Prince Philip is being resurrected Prince Philip? Yeah They've got the age of Jesus at resurrection wrong

Historically So do people not mind that? No, they actively love it And that's the problem that the Bible Walk Museum has Is that they don't like people liking that They think it takes away from the story of Jesus So if you call up, if anyone wants to visit them Don't call up and say, hey, can you give us the celebrity tour?

They will not let you into the museum They actively say, you're not coming now Really? I think so I'm pretty sure I read that But they don't encourage that at all And they want it, they do think it takes away I think they've got to make up their minds

Either be so stingy, you're going to repurpose tacky old waxworks for your museum Or four cowl and don't complain about, you know I'm thinking if you're going to do it, embrace it Like they did in fact, so Madame Two Swords did an activity thing in 2004 And they deliberately put loads of their Madame Two Swords icons in the nativity And so it had the three wise men Were Tony Blair, the Duke of Edinburgh Again, and George Bush

So these are all relevant people It was an ironic thing, I think Joseph and Mary were posh and becs But this was really unpopular I was going to say, did the Catholics and Christians not like that very much? They did not like it at all, no The Vatican spokesman in Britain said it was really disrespectful to Christianity And the exhibition actually closed before Christmas

Because someone got in, so Q'd got their ticket Then went straight up to Joseph and Mary and punched them in the face Wow Do you know, just speaking of Madame Two Swords Do you know what the waxwork Tom Daly, the diver Has that most other waxworks So anatomically what he has that most other waxworks don't have Well he's very strong, does he have a six pack?

I'm sure he does But some others do But so does Prince Philip, so that's not the... I'm just trying to not go for the obvious Yeah, does he have a lunch pack? No, no he doesn't Lunch box, I think is what it's called Are you sure?

You confused me, I thought you actually meant someone packed a lunch bag I don't think he does have a packed lunch No, it's feet He has feet Most waxworks just have the shoes And they have a very good sort of metal inside Almost like what you put a shoehorn into a shoe So yeah, Donald Trump's waxwork for example

Definitely no feet, it's just his shoes Most of them, I think, you can get by Just with head and hands So after they've finished with So for example what happened to David Cameron After he stopped being prime minister was Madame Two Swords waxwork was decapitated And had its hands chopped off

And they were kept in storage because the... Some applause I don't think we're in that divided a country yet So the thing is they never melt anyone down They never melt down a head or hands Because those are the most difficult fiddly And the most personal bits to do So it's kind of cheating, they're not making wax models

They're just making hands and a head There's an amazing book about Madame Two Swords Which is by Pamela Pilbeam And I read a bit of it In the 19th century Madame Two Swords had a live orchestra playing As you walked around And it was a really classy thing to do You could touch anyone you liked

Do you mean the models? Because it's going to put off the violinist, isn't it? Fondle the orchestra You're still allowed to touch them I think that's the whole point Are you? I think so I don't know, I haven't been for years When I used to go you weren't allowed to touch them

But I think more recently they've allowed you to Put your arms around them and take selfies and stuff I think we've mentioned before that they know That Brad Pitt is the most groped of the Waxworks at Madame Two Swords How do they know? They have someone watching No, the reason they know

Is because it's the one that they need to replace most often Because people keep touching it So it keeps the trousers Need replacing and stuff like that Oh well, well Like I say I haven't been for years Because I'm banned Tom Hardy for instance

Tom Hardy model at Two Swords Has a beating heart and a soft Warm torso What? So like if you weren't allowed to touch him There'd be no point having that, would there? Is it actually Tom Hardy? Because he is very still In a lot of his shows anyway, isn't he?

He's just had a lot of Viagra And it's stiffened him up Arnold Schwarzenegger actually did that Arnold Schwarzenegger, there was some Thing he was promoting and for a stunt He just stood in Madame Two Swords dressed up like the Terminator With the sort of metal showing through and injured And then he would move and freak people out

Some of the religious kind of Things that you can go and see The world's largest wooden construction So the largest wooden construction In the whole world is Noah's Ark Wow! And it's a Noah's Ark in America It's called the Ark Encounter And it fits over

16,000 people Simultaneously inside it But there only supposed to be two, I thought A lot of space They have a lot of space Well, actually there are a few more humans On Noah's Ark, wasn't there? Noah and his wife and there was his sons

So there was Shem Ham And the third one who has the more complicated name Wait, someone knows it Jedwood? That was two by two as well, Jedwood, wasn't it? I'm sorry, I heard Jedwood because apparently In the Dublin Wax Museum

And they're on a two-for-one deal Who was it again? JPEG So it was Shem, Ham and JPEG But the amazing thing is That this massive Noah's Ark Was made by a guy called Ken Ham

Wow! Which is the same name as someone on Noah's Ark He's quite famous in America as being Extremely pious Catholic A revolutionary kind of guy And Bill Nye, the science guy He went to see this Noah's Ark And he said on the third deck of the Ark

Every single science exhibit Is absolutely wrong Not just misleading But wrong So yeah, it's completely bad And Ken Ham, by the way, is trying to This year and last year trying to put the Jesus Back into Halloween

He's suggesting that people should go Reverse trick or treating Lots of goodies to bless your neighbours And what if they don't Want one? You have to do something nice To them? Well, good luck with that Mr Ham

Did you know that baby Jesus Theft has its own Wikipedia page? And there's so much on it? It's jam-packed to the rafters Yeah, so Jesus is always getting stolen At Christmas as it happens And then there's this list That's getting nicked from nativity scenes

Marilyn Manson once stole a whole bunch Of them, he admitted later He stole a whole bunch of Jesuses And actually, oddly, replaced them with hams So maybe that was a tribute To Ken I was thinking Marilyn Manson Did he not have a song called Personal Jesus?

Did he? Yeah, he did, didn't he? So he's just going, that's my personal Jesus That's my personal Jesus And actually, this is what you said earlier I went a quote from a historian Who He may have other strings to his bow Who's called Daniel Silliman

And Come on Genuinely, sorry Silliman What's your very serious paper about this time? Anyway, he said Baby Jesus Theft's literally Take the Christ out of Christmas Which I think is worth reflecting on

Okay, it is time for fact number three And that is James Okay, my fact this week is that A giraffe with breathing problems Can be treated by using a leaf blower Is it on suck or blow? I think it's on blow Oh, they're always on blow, aren't they?

Leaf blowers, generally, yeah Otherwise, they'd be leaf suckers My leaf blower sucks So Andy was the only person in the room Who found that funny Where were you all? So this is a 2007 paper

By Cetano et al And what the thing is And what did al contribute to proceedings? And what happened was They had to anesthetise a giraffe But as anesthetising it They had trouble breathing And they managed to fix it by

Getting a gas powered leaf blower And then attaching it to a few other parts And managed to artificially ventilate this giraffe By blowing into its mouth Through its trachea and into its lungs Wow And got all the leaves out of its insides Yeah, it won't come

It's like, is anyone else hungry? The thing I've always find weird about giraffes Is that I think we've done this on QI years ago Is that when they were first spotted By the Romans, they called them The camel leopard Someone saw a giraffe And thought, what's the striking thing about this?

Well, it looks like a cross between a camel and a leopard And in fact, he noted This animal is like a camel in all respects Except That its legs are not of the same length The skin is spotted like a leopard What about the neck? I wasn't looking up

You know, it was only until recently that we found out There was more than one giraffe You mean more than one species of giraffe Yeah Because actually, they were all stood in a line And you could only see the one right next to you No, yeah, I mean there was more than one species So

We thought up until now that it was just giraffe And there was subspecies within giraffe But now there's four Wow There's always been, but we've just suddenly been like There's three more So there's a thing about their nerves And it's a really annoying thing for them

It doesn't affect them too much But so most vertebrates We have these things called laryngeal nerves And they help to send signals to all the organs in your body And in all mammals, they branch off the Vagress nerve That's how it's pronounced That's good to know

Because we mentioned that in this next episode That's going on And you're not going to like how we say it So They branch off the Vagress nerve And then one of them loops under the aorta And then back to the, is it larynx?

So then it loops back to the larynx And it's a bit awkward, but it's only a few inches longer In almost all mammals Unfortunately in giraffes, they've got these really long necks So the nerve has to go on this massive Detour all the way down In humans, it's six inches long Or it should only be about six inches long for giraffes

But in giraffes, it's 15 feet long Because it has to go all the way down the neck And then back up And that's the nerve So does that mean if you slap a giraffe On the chest, then it won't feel it For ages? That is kind of true

So this is not the vagress nerve, but one of the other nerves So it takes a rat 4.5 milliseconds To respond to stimuli If you stand on a rat's foot, it would take that long But a giraffe, it takes them 100 milliseconds To sense and respond to something So if you stamp on a giraffe's foot It would take, I don't know, 25 times longer

Wow They'd be very dangerous drivers, wouldn't they? Yes Very slow reactions And also You'd have to hold them on top of your car I think the first giraffe that came over here Or the really famous giraffe that came to Britain

In 1827, I think it was Came, apparently, in a boat Where they had to have a hole drilled in the deck of the boat So that it could travel Wasn't that to France, wasn't it? There were three, and they were given by the Vice-Rover of Egypt, weren't they? And it was sort of like dealing cards

He gave three giraffes, one to Britain, one to France One to Austria And, bizarrely, they were transported From Egypt over to Western Europe On the backs of camels Yeah They were strapped to camels They were small when they started

They were young giraffes when it was started So for the first stage, they were put in a camel So how long was the trip, though? It was so long, it took two and a half years To get them from Sudan to No wonder, so they tricked the camel to begin with By going, this guy's tiny, he'll be fine One year in

This guy's, what the fuck is this? This guy's just like me, but with slightly longer legs It was amazing, though So the one that went to France Was called Zarafa And Zarafa had three nannies Who were all cows Yes

Because he needed six gallons of milk every day To keep growing So these cows all went along for the ride as well So wet nurse nannies, rather than It wasn't nannies who played with him With rattles and stuff, was it? They suckled the cow's teat They must have had a massive identity crisis

By the time they arrived How do you suckle at a cow's teat? Is it cow really, really high At stilts or something? The cow is on the back of a huge donkey Maybe they put a cow on stilts, I don't know It sounded like a lot of effort to go to But they suckled the cows

Yeah We thought until recently that giraffes were loners And now, apparently it turns out They can just see each other from further away And they, genuinely But they couldn't talk to each other From that distance, could they? They can communicate from a fair

I think from about 100 feet away Because they have infrasound and stuff today I think they can hum at volumes that we can't No, they've been here Yeah, we've been for centuries They've been trying to work out how they communicate through voice Because they don't really hear giraffes Communicating, so they think how's this done

And in zoos they did a study To see whether or not they could capture them Talking to each other And the conclusion is that they have found them Talking to each other at night And it is through, as you say, hums So they hear these hums and they're done in different patterns And so on, so they think they're talking to each other

There's a slight thought that it could Also be them snoring They're not sure Because it's curious that they do it only at night Maybe it's one of them snoring and the other one's saying Can you just turn over, please That's it Do you know the weirdest thing about giraffes

Of all quadrupeds They're the only known ones that can't Swim naturally So every single four-legged animal You've ever seen is a natural swimmer And so not like we are, we have to learn to swim If you drop a baby in the water it will sink Same with an ape, which actually they did

I think in the early 20th century They retrieved them but they dropped lots of monkeys into water Right Watched them for a while and they all flailed Right, quickly, then they got them out again Do any live by the ocean As in I'm just wondering if they live inland It's only lakes, they're probably tall enough

They've never had to learn to swim Because their necks are out Maybe, crossing a river, you can just walk across the river bed Can't you Well, you don't know until you try As in you don't know, a giraffe can't tell the depth of the river By just looking at it There'll come a point where you're walking into the river

You think this is fine, this is fine, this is not fine Yeah You're the exciting explorer And then the rest are going, all right, Mike didn't make it Let's find another way We're going to have to move on shortly Just quickly I found a fact about

Leaf blowers and animals So your fact was A giraffe with breathing problems can be treated Using a leaf blower I have to admit this is genuinely true Right until you said it tonight, I misread it I thought you said a giraffe with breathing problems Can be used as a leaf blower

Honestly, as you read it tonight They're the one giraffes That can't be used to blow leaves I thought that's what it was So I looked into other animals that can be used As a leaf blower I think we do need to interrogate for a second How you thought a giraffe was going to be used as a leaf blower

Was it like when you play wheelbarrow at school In races, you hold its legs and put its nose to the ground Yeah, I don't know, because the only I thought it was a bit of a cruel fact, to be honest I thought They must have this sort of push With a break in between, because it's like a wheeze And they probably lean over because it's hurting

So they're like, wow, this is really effective In zoos Let's walk the giraffe around with the breathing problems And let's clean this place up Anyway, so Elephants also use their trunks As a makeshift leaf blower As it were

Don't say also So elephants, they have this thing Where if they're in vicinity Of inaccessible food Because they're a bit too tight for them To get to the food What they do is they blow at the food If there's some sort of tree or wall, let's say

That's in the way And it bounces the food off it and back towards them And that's how they can get their food And this is something we've been observing about elephants For a very long time In fact, in The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin He writes about the leaf blowing Way ahead of his time, Charles Darwin

It's interesting because it's a bit like them Using tools, isn't it? Because they've basically solved a problem To be able to get food closer to them Which I think is really cool I was looking at a few other weird things that Vets had done And just this one thing I found which I really liked

It's not quite that but There was a spiny anteater called Matilda Who had inflamed skin, bold patches And bulging puffy eyes And it turned out that she was allergic to ants Wow She's an anteater allergic to ants Oh no

Wait, she had puffy eyes They should have just put a live crab Around her neck Problem solved They made a vaccine for her, that's it Okay Okay, time for our final fact of the show And that is Andy

My fact is that when 3,000 British teenagers Were surveyed in 2008 20% said that they thought Winston Churchill Was a fictional character They can all vote now, can't they? Yep So, and this is just Things that get thrown up by opinion polls

So the same poll found that 27% thought that Florence Nightingale Had never existed And 47% thought that Richard the Lionheart Was fictional, which I can kind of understand Because that sounds like a... Richard the Lionheart, yeah, sure But 47%

Thought that Eleanor Rigby was real So... There was a real one, must have been Yeah, I mean in a way she was because Paul McCartney did see the name Eleanor Rigby On a tombstone, he didn't know her Or her story, but there was one 47% of British teenagers in 2008

Knew that Beatles arcane anecdote It was a month later They did another survey And one in three primary school pupils The first man to walk on the moon Winston Churchill I think a lot of these things, it must be like They just give you a name of a person

They go real or not real and you just go I don't know, especially at primary school You don't care what you're crossing, you're just excited Someone's giving you a felt tip But so, just bringing up Moon, it's not as if they think He's fictional as in it's a conspiracy That he was invented as an idea

Because you know there was all that stuff And one of the beaches was said by someone else A voice actor, which is not true I don't think, but there was an idea that he had never It is true, there was It was a voice actor The famous recording that we have Or many of the famous recordings that we have

Winston Churchill, I think we're recorded after the war Churchill himself did a few in the studio But there are broadcasts which were done by a voice actor Okay, right He has been a fictional character in some respects I went onto Comic Vine Website and found that There's 164 comic books

With Winston Churchill as a character in them He's been in Star Trek, Comic Eagle Justice League, SuperBuy Captain America, Green Lantern And Santa Claus versus the Nazis Wow, they're the main ones He wasn't very good In studies, I mean I know it's a thing that's often said

About Churchill, but I do think it's quite reassuring When you realise how bad he was At school, so he failed basically everything That he didn't like except history in English He failed his entrance exam to university Twice, or to the Royal Military College Which I don't think was that hard to get into But he failed that twice

Wait, he failed everything except history in English Oh, he did it very badly in it Okay, but history in English was two best ones I think so, yeah And then later on he won the Nobel Prize for Literature And defeated Nazis History and English So what we're saying kids is specialise

Yeah If you know good of French Fuck it Is that what we're saying? How come we are that divided a country after all? You know in Roosevelt, FDR first met him He first met him in 1918 So that would have been just after he'd come out

From fighting the First World War And they were on a diplomatic mission And he met Churchill as a soldier And called him a stinker, hated him Okay, I'm really close in the Second World War But the only thing he said about Winston Churchill was What does stinker mean? Does it mean just a bad person?

Just means a stinker You're a stinker, like in a playground If you call someone a stinker Then... I know that only too well So Churchill first became famous In the Boer War As a reporter, didn't he?

Then as a correspondent, he got captured And he had to escape And then the Tales of His Escape became really, really famous But when he did escape They raised the alarm and they gave a description of him So they could find him And they said, escaped prisoner of war Winston Spencer Churchill

Englishman, 25 years old About 5'8'' tall Medium build Walks with a slight stoop Pale features, reddish brown hair Almost invisible, small moustache Speaks through his nose Cannot pronounce the letter S

And cannot speak one word of Dutch Oh, wow And that's your great Winston Churchill Almost invisible, small moustache Wait, you there, stop No, that's too visible A small moustache You're free to go

That was Hitler, wasn't it? Can I tell you just a really quick Churchill thing It's quite tangentially related But this was actually one of our researchers Sent me the book with us in the other day And it's that Winston Churchill had a son-in-law Duncan Sandis, who was a minister for a brief time

In the 60s And basically, Winston Churchill's son-in-law Was forced by Harold Macmillan's government To go to the doctor To have his penis compared to a penis In a salacious photo To prove that it wasn't the same penis And it's just such a good story

There was this huge ruckus in the early 60s Because someone was caught Having a blowjob given to them By a duchess And their head wasn't in the picture So you could only see the nether regions And it was going to be this huge scandal And everyone said it's this guy

It's the minister of defence, Duncan Sandis And so he eventually had to go He was made to go to Harley Street by the government With this photo in one hand And it's Willie in the other How did he ring the bell? LAUGHTER Anyway, they confirmed it wasn't the same penis

We should talk as well About surveys, because surveys They always bring up the weirdest Of revelations about What people think around the world I really like that there was A survey done about what we think Sci-fi things are real and not real

That we hear about For example, over a fifth of adults And this was in Birmingham Did this as a survey Over a fifth of adults incorrectly believe That lightsabers exist as a real thing Nearly a quarter 24% of people

Believe that humans can be teleported That's quite cool 40% believe that hoverboards exist I mean, it's a... I think they did invent a hoverboard I thought they invented the world's first hoverboard A couple of years ago They also had those really rubbish things

And they were called hoverboards Maybe I'm thinking of that They did invent one, I think it might have been a bit rubbish 11% of teenagers think that Fruit pastels count as one of your five a day Which colour? Any colour They're all fruit

They're all fruit and meat pastels, are they? LAUGHTER Although I've just had an amazing idea LAUGHTER Well, 11.5 tubes Of fruit pastels Would give you about as much vitamin C As a piece of fruit

So YouGov do, obviously, loads and loads Of loads of polls And they build up these huge crunching amounts Of data based on... They pick one thing that people divide into Like right-handed or left-handed And then they can find out massive amounts About the tendencies

So YouGov surveys have found That a quarter of lead voters Like their stakes well done More lead voters than Remain voters think that Doctor Who votes conservative Remain voters think He would probably vote green

She Oh! Thanks a bunch, James I've got up to Chris Ackleston LAUGHTER Well, get ready to be angry LAUGHTER This is... I found this amazing

There was a survey done last year That found 35% Of French people Cannot name the French Prime Minister What? Which, I mean, can you? No The French Prime Minister? The President is Macron Yes, indeed

Is that worth a half point? You don't get bonus points for naming Macron This is the worst pub quiz I've ever been to So who is it? It's a guy called Edouard Philippe I could have guessed that I would have said two random French names It got pretty close

There's no incredible more than a third I don't know who their own Prime Minister is Apparently on the survey a lot of people put Gerard Philippe, or I think it's an actor Or Louis Philippe Who's obviously an early French king But, yeah, they don't know their PM And I think probably Britain might be

In the same position at this stage This goes out next week There was a survey done in America About the cloud, or cloud computing Putting up in the clouds And 51% of the Americans that Answered to the survey said that They thought that if it was a stormy weather situation

Outside, that would affect them getting access To their cloud information That's fair enough There was a tech poll a few years ago Where 11% of people believe that HTML Was a sexually transmitted disease You know, that was So that was a

Survey, a study that was looking into How many people understood techie sounding words So as well as that How many people thought that JPEG was a character in the Bible So as well as HTML As sexually transmitted disease They found that 27% Of the people doing it thought

Gigabyte was an insect commonly found In South America 18% thought Blu-ray Was a marine animal And 23% thought MP3 Was a Star Wars robot To be fair, in five years time No one's gonna know what an MP3 is

And almost no one knows what a Blu-ray was So they were just ahead of their time Oh thanks, I just put all of Doctor Who on Blu-ray Alright guys, we need to wrap up Okay, that is it, that is all of our facts Thank you so much for listening If you'd like to get in contact with any of us About the things that we've said over the course of this podcast

We can be found on our Twitter accounts I'm on at Shriverland Andy, at Andrew Hunter M James, at James Harkin You can email podcast at qi.com Or you can go to our group account which is at no such thing Or you can go to our Facebook page, no such thing as a fish Or our website, no such thing as a fish.com

We got everything up there from upcoming tour dates To our book, a link to buy it To everything, it's got all the previous episodes And before we wrap up, we're going to very quickly Read out the winner of tonight's Prequel Book Wow So James, you've picked a winner

Yes, so this fact is from Becky Whose friend Chris Lemon Has a birthday today Happy birthday Happy birthday Chris, if you're here Thank you Well, Becky's fact is That in 1974

A research scientist, Doctor Sumerlin Announced that he had successfully Transplanted skin from a black mouse Onto a white mouse It was later discovered that he had actually Coloured the white mouse in with a black pen That's an amazing fact Okay guys, we're going to be outside

Signing these books if you want one Thank you so much for being here, we really appreciate it We'll be back again next week, goodbye Thank you