No Such Thing As A Fish - 244: No Such Thing As A Fishman

Episode Date: November 23, 2018

Dan, James, Anna, Andy and special guest Stephen Fry discuss frogs with regional accents, Canada's official tagline, and streaking in museums.

Hi guys, just before we start this show, we wanted to let you know we've got a really exciting guest on today. We were really looking forward to recording with this person. It's a new up-and-coming comic and creative talent called Stephen Fry. Yeah, I've not heard of him. Well, I think you will have in a couple of years. You know, he's new on the scene. Cool. Okay. Well, that's very exciting. And he has this new book out, which is called Heroes. It's a fantastic book. It's all about the Greek heroes. So Jason and Hercules slash Heracles and Pegasus, all these familiar characters, but written in the incredible comic wits and stylings of Stephen Fry. Really funny. It's fantastic for kids. And if you're an

adult who just wants to revisit these stories, I highly recommend it. There you go. That's Heroes by Stephen Fry. And then please do also buy Book of the Year by us. And we should just say this is a special extended version of the podcast because Stephen had so much to say and we wanted to hear it. We figured you guys would want to hear it. And so enjoy this episode of No Such Thing as a Fish Plus. Okay, on with the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Chazinski, Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkind, and a special guest and the man who gave us the

name, the QI elves, it's Stephen Fry. 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 you, Stephen. All right. Yes, I have a fact here. There was a make of toilet paper in Victorian England that was so posh, every sheet had a watermark to deter counterfeiters. And that if it was so posh, it wouldn't have been called toilet paper, it would have been called lavatory paper. If you remember, toilet is deeply non-you, as is the word posh. So in fact, it was probably the make of lavatory paper that was so classy, every sheet had a watermark. But anyway, that's the point. And what does that tell us about Victorians and their bathroom habits, I wonder,

their ablutionary customs? Well, this was one of the first toilet papers or lavatory papers, wasn't it? Yeah, what was used before that? We know all the stories of, you know, Swan's necks and Goose necks. Yeah. Corn cobs? I think we mentioned before. Yeah. I just wonder what, so for example, this is in the 19th century. So this was well after, for example, Jane Austen died. So what are the regency gentry or just the middle classes? I mean, I can't imagine Jane Austen using a corn cob is all I'm trying to say. Like a corn dolly. Lace, I know the French used lace, which is weird, because it's got holes in it, but apparently they did. You know that in many Middle Eastern customs, the hand was always used, and that's why you don't use the cac hand, literally the

shithand, if I may say so. Yeah, cac handed. And it's interesting, I don't know, many people have watched Peter Jackson's reconstruction of, you know, recolorization of some of that extraordinary Imperial War Museum, first World War footage, and they may remember seeing those men perched on a bar having a poo with their bottoms sort of hanging over. Yes. It's a reminded one, obviously, of the very everyday nature of war includes, naturally, the very everyday nature of emptying the bowels. And there, I think one of the comments was from a veteran speaking, that there was no paper. So our grandfathers and great-grandfathers who fought in that war and survived would have all had that same experience, and we don't talk about it.

Was the wiper's times, was that? That's a good point. Yeah, that wasn't signed for... It wasn't, no. It's just a classic Tommy mispronunciation of Ypres. Oh, it's not, did you think that? I thought you would read it and then wipe your butt with it. Well, that'd be a full amie, as they say, but a very happy one, yes. So there is a First World War toilet paper fact, which is that both sides printed toilet paper with propaganda on it. So the Germans issued sheets with a series of lying reports by our enemies, and British manufacturers did the same thing. I'll drop them on the other side. No, just for you to wipe your bottom with British propaganda. And I can offer a fact, because you know when we were young, and I don't suppose

cartoonists still do, but escaping prisoners always used to have suits with arrows on them, government property arrows. Well, when I was a young and unfortunate criminal convicted and inside a prison, the laboratory paper there was in those sort of boxes with their rather crispy leaves intertwined and interleaved, in fact. And they had those arrows on, as did the cigarette rolling papers that you've got from the shop. They all had those arrows, ancient prisons only, plus the arrows. Wouldn't that tempt you to take some... Oh, you left as a souvenir. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. To show you done your bird. Yeah. In America, they get like little tattoos, don't they, to show what they've done.

If you just have a piece of our old toilet paper, it's the same job, doesn't it? Well, have we mentioned that they used to... So before toilet paper was invented, they used to wipe their bums on the farmer's almanac, didn't they, in America, famously. And the Sears catalogue, and they both used to come with a hole in them so you could hang it up and then use it as loo rolls. Yeah, and I was actually listening to a podcast which was saying there are two reasons that suddenly loo roll was necessary and was taken on. One was that we invented plumbing, so suddenly you can't flush a corn on a cob down the loo. And the other was the Sears catalogue started coming laminated, started coming with glossy paper. Oh, right. It didn't work. It was absorbing,

but not absorbent. It's an important distinction. I find Waitrose food illustrated very uncomfortable every month. But this does bring us to a sensitive point about the wiping bottoms. Most people never talk how to wipe a bottom, I assume, unless there's some dim memory of a mother during potty training actually explaining it. But there was a new story just the other day about the fact that women are being told how to wipe their bottoms, and some people on social media were very angry at being told. But the answer is, and you know, this is all too distressing to hear. But that forwards to back is the correct female way. It's, as a woman, you just are told that you chant it practically. I think I'm right in saying guys, we don't do

that, do we? I go the other way. Exactly. You go back to, but yeah. But it's not, it doesn't matter for you, obviously. No, exactly. We don't have the other, the little. You'd have to really miss your target to get it up your way. Oh my God. It's important to be frank and open about these things. Absolutely. So it's a health issue for women, obviously, you know. I'm so glad you're here, Stephen. I'm sorry. Bring the levels up. Educate us on the inside. But it's interesting, we say bringing the levels up and everything, to an alien species looking at us, why, they would be very puzzled at the fact that we have these very normal and necessary actions that are part of every day, like eating and drinking and having a poo and a pee, and indeed making love in order to whatever

or coition or whatever one wants to call it, in order to propagate the species. And those are the very things that have the taboos. Whereas murder and cruelty, we can use those words we can say was in the Traffics Act, it was cruel. Oh God, it was murder. You think, well, how? Murder kills people. That's the thing we should have a taboo about. Whereas if you say it was shitting bad traffic, you could do swear. Hang on, hang on, which frame of reference is the dangerous one? Not the pooing. So I'm sure to the very useful Martian watching, that this should teach us something about how completely screwed up we are. It's so wrong to be obsessed. Well, I think, wasn't the people who invented Lou Roll on a roll for the first time,

in fact, invented it in 1890s and 1890, I think, and they didn't admit to it. And they did it under a shell company. They only admitted to it in 1902, because it was such a shameful thing to have invented. Oh, I met someone who worked for Dalton, the porcelain company in Staffordshire. And I asked the party and I said, oh, was it a picturing he did Staffordshire dogs or something, they go mantle pieces, you know, nice little sort of ornamental things. I said, what sort of things do you specialize in? He said rather coily, heavyware. I didn't quite know what heavyware was, and I sort of worked out what he meant was bathrooms and lavatories. It's heavyware. Nice. Being the proper porcelain. That's really okay. Just speaking of the late 1800s and which

way to wipe, I saw the patent for the first toilet roll. And it sort of answers the question of which way you meant to hang the roll. Does the paper come down underneath or does it go over? So which do you think it is? Well, I was thought forward so you can grab it and that's the way hotels do it because they do a little coy provocative peeked. Yes, unused. Yeah, that's correct. It's it's that way in the patent. Not a great question. But the thing about the little peek is supposed to be having worked in a hotel. It's so that the housekeepers can tell if the room has been serviced. So it's the last thing they do. And so if that's done, it means they know that it's fine. See, if I was a housekeeper, I'd just do that. Yeah. So if they got in and they

saw that there were sort of swan towel positioned little men, say, well, that could have just been the person staying here. Let me check the bathroom. So there was a sorry, no, I just thinking so. Yes, the first company to make Lural disclaim did or hid it. I wonder when it was first advertised then when it was first allowed into magazines and then into television. We're all familiar with Andrex and his puppy and everything. And I'm old enough to remember the hullabaloo when it was allowed to have female sanitary products as they call them advertised on TV. And everyone said that was the beginning of the end. That's disgusting. I don't want to see that. But presumably there may have been a similar moment when laboratory paper was first advertised. Well, but bizarrely,

you never you still never see loo paper or sanitary pads with the thing on them that they're supposed to clear up. I wonder if men think that we have blue periods. Because the only thing you see is a drop of blue water. That's only Picasso has a blue period. There is one that says for your bums, isn't there? There was one that has. But yes, I thought, I remember my friend, you and I, we wanted to do women in when we were heavy voiceover performers in the 80s and doing all kinds of adverts and things. We thought, why don't they do that? Be brilliant. Wipes your bottom beautifully. All you need, it just wipes your bottom. Brilliant. So this company is Scots who did this role and they couldn't advertise. I know that much at least. And they sold it under the counter in the

chemists. So you'd have to go in and they were just kind of they were even put it on the shelf. It's technically actually it should have been placed over the counter according to the patent. The outside loo would be a string with with newspaper in this. You say the holes in the CS cabinet. I found a man this is a two years ago. This is in 2016. It was a man who was fined in court after paying for a takeaway with a 10 pound note that he had printed onto some toilet paper. It's incredible. He used this computer and he just used a desktop computer and a normal printer and he just put the lee roll into the printer feet. His defense barrister said this is going to be the most expensive takeaway of Mr. Coburn's life. It's sad. Is the great achievement of Peter

Basil Jett and not Peter, but he's Joseph. I mean, don't I? Is the great achievement of Joseph Basil Jett to be undone by the arrival of moist laboratory paper because this seems to be now considered unflushable and yet everybody uses it. Do they? Lots of people use it. Yes. And there was a report just recently saying they did tests. There is no style of moist paper or wipe that is suitable for our sewers without creating blocks that cause millions. Fat birds. Everything has a cast a shadow in this world. There is no sort of things of free lunch. There was a free bottom wipe. It's got up somewhere, isn't it? It was the number one cause, I think, they found of those big fat birds that they were finding in the sewers. As in, if you took

percentages of what made it up, the wet wipes, which were largely, I think, more for babies than they are for adults, for cleaning nappies, that's what they found. And I read that we basically have KFC to blame for that. Colonel Sanders is the person who took the wet wipe and first introduced it into restaurants and that's spread around the world. Yeah, so before we were... Do you mean the moist lemon scented cleansing square? I think that's what you mean. Do you think another voice over is coming back to you? They do make sense, though. I mean, it is bizarre and I think people in other countries think we're bizarre that we use dry paper to get rid of that when it makes no sense not to apply water. I mean, we wash our hands if we think there might be one bacteria on it and

we cover our bottoms with food. Forward the bidet. Well, indeed, yeah. That's the answer, but not everyone has room for a bidet, but what they do have room for and these becoming more and more popular are little installations that are now quite cheap of a Japanese style. You know the kind of thing that you plumb it, you join into your plumbing, it's a seat and you have a remote control and you press buttons and it oscillates a jet up the jackseye and it has a female setting and a male setting and it can also offer a hot air to dry several madams back side and these are becoming more and more popular and considered very healthy and of course there is no, nothing goes into the sewer except once you've dropped in there. Great. So there is obviously it costs

energy because they're electric, but those are going to be more and more popular. It's so funny you're, just because your voice is so perfect for talking and selling things as you did that, I thought your voice would be fantastic for that with, with Sarah or Madame enjoy a jet of the jackseye. There's a great story about one of my heroes or one of my cinematic heroes as well, many people cinematic hero Billy Wilder, the great director, you know, some like it hot. Yeah, those Sunset Boulevard, whatever, many, many great films and I think he was in Paris with Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon and trying to keep control particularly of Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe and his wife Audrey whom I met, funnily enough, she told me this story

was true, had said to him, honey, I want you when you're in Paris to get a proper Parisian bidet because the, you know, the wall cuts have got one or whoever it was, some family that she sort of keeping up with the Jonesed with and she felt that they want and he said, sure, honey, I get you, I get you, no problem, no problem. Anyway, he was so busy, he was so busy in Paris that he just didn't get home, he didn't even have time to look at a plumbing supply shop and have a bidet shipped over from Paris to Beverly Hills and in the car, on the way to Wassey or whatever the airport was then in Paris, he suddenly remembered and he stopped off at a bureau de post to send a telegram to prepare for disappointments and honey, tried everywhere, no bidets in Paris,

suggest doing handstand in shower. I love bidet, which you might all know this, but is named after a small extinct donkey or horse. Did you know? Yeah, so bidet is French for this species of small horse and so small that the idea is with a bidet, you'd be straddling it like this little... Wait, is it a real animal? In Italian, the word for bidet translates as hygienic little horse. Same thing, yeah. But I didn't think it was based on an extinct real animal, which people rode to clean... No, no, no, no, no. No, no, like a burrito looks like a little donkey, but it doesn't mean people eat donkeys in the way

they eat burritos. God, time travel is when you go back, open the toilet and there's a corn of cob and there's a donkey. What am I meant to do here? This toilet paper that we were talking about, the main fact, it was shown at the 1878 Paris Exposition and it won the highest prize. So it was seen as such an innovation in anti-counterfeiting, in actual quality of lavatory, leurole. So the watermark was the maker of the... It wasn't that you could have it in your own family crest. It was the watermark of the manufacturer of the roll. That's Romo, exactly. That's who they were, right? That was the best they made, because they had amazing inventions in the Victorian era. I know, the travelator, I think, was there. Sometimes it's the simplest inventions that are

the best, though, isn't it? You're right. We do still all use leurole. There was a period when they called themselves medicated, which is, I suspect, not a legally enforceable, meaningful word, but Izale medicated, we had at my prep school, which was the hideously tissue we wanted, and Bronco, they claimed to be medicated. What they were medicated with, I don't know. The first packaged toilet paper was made by Gaietti, Joseph Gaietti, and he called it the therapeutic paper. Some of it named after Queen Victoria. What an honour. Victorian brands of toilet paper. I just found a list of a few and they included things like Bulldog and Samson and Virilla, which is great. But there were also others called Victoria and Queen and Gloria Victis.

Can I tell you about one, because this is a Victorian invention, and a Victorian invention that actually was made that I had never heard of before, but Bifocals for Horses. This was in the 1880s. 1887, someone went into a pharmacy and said, my horse has gone short-sighted. I'm a cab driver, and he's a glass... But the thing is, he likes to read the paper, so... Well, he kept walking into things. He's not getting as many tips as he used to. And it was actually tried out, and there are pictures of this horse. There are photographs of this horse wearing these Bifocals, which apparently it didn't like at first, but then

it refused to go without them. And it got taken up by handsome cab drivers, because what they actually did was make the road seem like it was rising up in the horse's face, and so they used to pick up their hooves much higher, and that looked, you know, that was quite posh. Smart, elegant, high-stepper. Exactly. So they started wearing them. So that actually happened. It actually happened. Bifocals, as we know, were invented by Benjamin Franklin, weren't they? But not equine ones. That's rather splendid. Another bit of a bizarre invention from the Victorian times. They used to, if you went to

a pub or any kind of restaurant, the opposite of today, smoking, the smell of smoke, was actively encouraged, and it made the place feel like somewhere you wanted to be, somewhere that was happening. So a lot of the problem was if a restaurant started its day, it was not full of smoke. So someone invented an automatic smoking machine. The machine would have lit cigarettes. So bellows. Exactly, and it would come out. And so the idea is that it would sort of cover the restaurant in this mist of smoke. And you go, oh, it's going to go, fantastic. What a happening restaurant. Wow. Do we know if that got made?

No, I mean, it got made, but I don't know if it was, I don't know if they made more than one. Oh, but they made a model of it. That is amazing. Yes, yeah. They used to have competitive smoking in pubs in the UK in the early 20th century. Did they? Yeah, and you would have a pipe and you'd have to keep it. Oh, yes, that went on way, way to my lifetime. Oh, really?

To keep it in America, they had it to, yeah. Everyone had an identical clay pipe. The whole point was it had to be sort of controlled. The clay pipe had an identical quantity of pipe tobacco, and it was their job to light it and keep it going for as long as possible, and staggering how long. You know, you or I would have just kind of, it would have gone out in seconds, but they could keep going for hours and hours, putting their fingers over the top of the bowl and just loading slowly. It's lost art. It is. I was the very last pipe smoker of the year ever.

Oh, wow. Yes, yes. It used to be a very popular thing every year. There's a big dinner at the Savoy Hotel, sponsored by Alfred Dunhill, who in those days were primarily tobacconists. Yeah. Our fashion house, of course, but their shop in German Street was filled with huge jars of tobacco, and they were called your sort. Snuff and tobacco were called a sort. So you'd hear someone come in and they'd go, hello, your grace is here, sorry, come in. Have you got any of my sort in at the moment?

Yes, okay. And their sort would be a mixture of Cavendish and these strange names that these particular types of tobacco had. And anyway, it was actually QI. It was the very first QI. I agreed to do an interview for The Independent, I think it was, to publicize QI as a new program. And I went to the Groucho Club, and at the time I had decided to try and cut down cigarette smoking, but I always carried a pipe with me. I always loved smoking pipe. The first pipe of the day I really enjoyed. So I had a pipe and I really felt like smoking and those days you could smoke anywhere. And so I lit the pipe and the photographer was taking pictures on me and it was

on the front of The Independent that next day or whatever the following week. And immediately I got a letter from the pipe smokers. So it's how desperate they were. Finally. Because the old days they had Harold Wilson and Eric Morkham and all these kind of people. It could be the pipe smokers of the year, but it was running thin on the ground, Russ Abbott. And finally, and I said, well, I don't really regularly smoke. And they made me a special pipe, which I still have, which is in the shape of a BBC microphone. You can disassemble like the man with the golden gun and these various apparatus and turn into a pipe. And yeah, it was really, really fun. Are you technically the reigning? I am. Yeah, I think they gave a very special lifetime pipe award

to the comedy writer, Lawrence Marks, who was also on the board of the Pipe Smoking Association. And obviously, we all deprecate smoking now and I don't smoke anymore and haven't for 12 years, I think it is. But I sometimes think, you know, when I had a bit of a cancer scare the earlier this year, I kind of think, well, if I got my death sentence, I would probably just order a pipe online and a great, you know, big, great vat of tobacco and just carry on again. But I probably wouldn't actually, it would probably taste horrible in my mouth, but it is. It's a memory of that. But I'm old enough to remember smoking cinemas, smoking the tubes, smoking buses, smoking absolutely everywhere, even in church. You know, the grand families had

their box pews with brass aftertrays so they could have a cigar while listening to the sermon. But it was short. It was really, I mean, apart from pipes, you know, we think of water rally, it was really Oscar Wilde's generation that made cigarettes popular and they were considered very decadent and extraordinary. And that was in the 1890s, but by 15 years later, virtually 20 years later, it was in the middle of the First World War, everyone did it. I mean, it was just everybody. But we've only had about a century of it, basically. Yeah, but now, of course, it looks weird. You see people doing it in, you know, like, again, that Peter Jackson thing, you just saw all those Thomas smoking a well.

I love those things which it's like throughout all of history, no one smoked. And then for 100 years, everyone started and then for the rest of time, no one will smoke again. Even though to us, it's a normal thing. It's completely unusual in the history of... There's that amazing moment as well that America experienced and it's covered in a Adam Curtis documentary, Power of Nightmares, I think the documentary is called. And the idea was that they realized in America that it was only men smoking and they needed women to smoke as well. Oh, this is Freud's Berlin Law. Yes, it is. Yeah. And the idea was that they empowered the women of America to start smoking

saying that they were something like sticks of freedom. Oh, liberty, liberty, torches. The famous photograph of them, he paid for them to walk down Fifth Avenue with cigarettes. Yes. It's a very famous picture. I think, yes, it's the same member of the Freud family who invented Bacon and Exopers, that's right. Yes, right. He was the father of the advertising. The father of healthy consumption. Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that in 1972, a Canadian DJ held a contest to choose a Canadian national simile like as American as Apple Pie. The winning entry was as Canadian as possible under the circumstances.

So they don't know what similes are for a star. Yeah, this was a DJ called Peter Zarski. And he was a great Canadian broadcaster and he hosted shows for decades and lots of aspects of Canadian life he analyzed and examined. And he hosted this competition and a 17 year old student came up with that slogan as Canadian as possible. And weirdly, Zarski, he, just speaking about smoking, he once wrote an essay called How to Quit Smoking in 50 Years or Less. Brilliant. I like that. Yeah, humorists and Canada, lots of those, Stephen Lee Cook, obviously famous writers writing humorists, but all those comedians like Dan Aykroyd and Brin Moranis and all that, there's so many of them.

Yeah, they have an unfair reputation, don't they, for being dull, given that they, which I'm not saying I believe, but it is a reputation they have. I think nice, but a bit dull. I remember when I first went to Toronto, years and years and years ago, and I called up my friend and colleague, we were working together all the time then, Hugh Laurie, and he had never been at that point too. And he asked what it was like. I said, I think probably, I can best describe how Toronto is by saying that I asked at the front desk what attractions they were to see. And they said, well, there's the Bali Footwear Museum down the street. And we laughed at that. And then two days later, I said, I can give you a clearer idea of Toronto now. I had nothing better to do than go to the

Bali Footwear Museum. But in fairness to Toronto, it has improved enormously in that regard. The foot museum or the whole city. It won the World Series twice in a row, the Blue Jays, and it became a, you know, and now it's, yeah, it's a pretty, I just spent three months in Niagara on the lake, which is beautiful. Oh, wow. Just on the, right on the American border. Oh, really? And that was, that was stunning. It's, and they are very aware of how the world looks at them. And they know that they're a bit over polite and a bit over, you know. And do you find, they are actually factually like that, aren't they? I mean, there was a study done looking at people's Twitter feeds, and it was only comparing American and Canadian Twitter feeds,

but the preponderance of words on American Twitter feeds were negative things. So like, hate and dam and bored and annoying. And then on Canadian feeds, they're all just saying words like favorite and gorgeous. Who even says gorgeous anymore? Great. Amazing. In Ontario, they have the Apology Act that came in in 2009. And that's because people apologize all the time. And their law now is that an apology is not allowed to be considered an admission of guilt. Because what would happen is you'd have a little car crash or something. Sorry, sorry, sorry. And they go, well, he said sorry. That's an admission of liability. And because it is, it is just a natural instinct. That's so good. Just on the boredom thing, there is a town in Canada called

Okatoks. Has anyone been? No. Well, they had a slogan, a tourist slogan. And it was, there are a number of things to do in Okatoks. Very nice. And that number is zero. My friend, John Sessions, did his postgraduate, his doctorate at a university in Canada. And he waxes very, very miracle on his contempt for some of the more dull sides of it. Back then in the 80s, I guess, or the 80s, 70s, even in his case. And I happened to be in Oxford at the Oxford, I was filming there, and there's the Oxford University Press Shop on the high or the broader. And I was ordering the new Oxford English Dictionary, the second edition of that whole thing. And it was, there was a special price for, for, for an early buyer of it. And it wasn't in the shop. It was in the

depository in Northampton, and they would send it to any address. And, and it was, I don't know, £1,200 or something. It's a huge number of volumes of this massive dictionary. And I was terribly pleased with it. And then I was looking around, and I saw one of those Oxford books of, you know, you have Oxford books of the quotations and so on. This was the Oxford Book of Canadian Political Anecdotes. And I thought, I must have, Mr John Sessions, it would drive you insane. What? How could you fill a book with Canadian Political Anecdotes? Anyway, I thought it was very amusing, so I took it up to the front of the desk. And then, who should come into the shop? Jeremy Paxman. He'd been across the road at all souls, having a lunch, because he was doing a

book on the British establishment. So we what-hoed and said hello, and I sort of vaguely knew him, and he, I said, look at this book I've got here. So it's the Oxford Book of Canadian Political Anecdotes, and he said, and then the assistant behind the desk said that'll be twelve hundred and seventeen. And Jeremy Paxman could only see that book. And I said, oh yes, very rare book. I mean, Canadian Political Anecdotes. Jeremy, come on. And he was going, are you mad? And the assistant, bless him, he joined in and said, oh yes, yes, very, very rare book. So I signed it, and Paxman went off pulling at his hair, doing all those Paxman-y what sort of expressions. And then it wasn't until two years later, I was filming again in Oxford, and I'd been asked to do this spectator diary,

you know. And so I told that story in the spectator diary, and about two days later, I got this furious letter from Jeremy Paxman, I have been dining out on how mad you are. No, I discover. There's something else Canadians are very well known for, is saying A. How are you all right? It's nice weather today, A, but not in that accent, in a Canadian accent. The Canadian alphabet A, A, B, A. Exactly. So the University of British Columbia has an official A lab, which is, it's their syntax of speech lab, it's where you go if you want to study the linguistics of that kind of thing, and it's called the A lab. Very good. Yes, and I think it's first, it goes back a long time, it goes back to before Canada was a country at all, so 1773,

it appeared in an Irish play, and you know, Irish people went to Canada, and then it appeared in a book in the 1830s that was completely littered with it. But yeah, it's weird. Do we know why they might do that? So I think there's been a suggestion that there is a small bit of England where there's a similar inflection, and I can't remember where it is actually, but people took it from there. Because the accent is not dissimilar as it creeps over the border into Wisconsin, and North Dakota, if you think of that movie Fargo, and the wonderful Francis McDormand performance, they've got to question your police work there, A kind of, it's got that similar kind of slight, and there, the reason is supposedly the Scandinavian input into Wisconsin, and that

part there, they're all called Sorensen, in fact with the Bill Macy character was called Gunderson, I think, wasn't he? They've all got names like that. The other thing is just the size of the place. I mean, Canada has been fast. They think America's big, but Canada fans out into a greater width and up into the Arctic Circle. There's a great story, sort of like a gap year, where a woman writes to her sister, who's Canadian, and says, my son, your nephew's got his gap year, and he'd be landing in Newfoundland. I wonder if you could pick him up, and her sister lived in British Columbia. So she sent her reply back saying, why don't you, you're nearer. We are nearer here in Britain to that coast than to Lumberjack. So good. I was reading about Lumberjacks,

classic Canadian. I love that a female Lumberjack is a Lumberjill. I think that's a lovely term. But I've discovered there's a thing, the clothing, I was reading about their clothing, and there have been Lumberjack trousers invented, which I've never seen before. And the idea is that they are chainsaw proof. You can't chainsaw through them, and there are videos, yeah, on YouTube of Lumberjacks showing you, and they all start the video by going, do not do this at home, do not do this at home, do not do this at home, do not do this at home. And they rev it up, and the chainsaw gets going, and they just slam it down onto their trousers, and the fabric, it's eight layers of a plastic that are, there's a whole science video you

can watch about the beauty of the science of how it works, and you can watch it immediately get chewed up in the trousers, and store the chainsaw immediately. It's extraordinary and scary. Let's be the first person to try that. And yet it can fell a tree. Yes, exactly. Yeah, imagine if you were going out and you're also Lumberjack wife and put out your other pair of trousers that morning, just off to do my filming, honey. Oh, great, have fun. So I was looking up other slogans in Canada and place named slogans. So Ottawa launched a new slogan in 2001, and the slogan was technically beautiful. So despite what you're looking at.

What they were trying to say is that it's technologically advanced, it's great. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, they responded saying the response to the slogan might be described as technically mixed. I do have to share with you just on the basis of that sort of interrupt, but this thing of getting yourself a phrase, a logo, you know, a strap line, what do you want to call it as a country, a city, a state. When I was touring across all the American states for a BBC documentary a few years ago, you noticed every time we crossed a state line that they would say welcome to Mississippi, and it would have its official name, you know, the Magnolia State, and there'd be some

phrase like come play or something like that, you know. And the one that I really wanted to congratulate was Kentucky. Now Kentucky is probably known for two things, the bluegrass state is its official name, but they wanted a kind of one that expressed what it was to be a Kentucky. And you think of two things, you think of the Kentucky Derby, and you think of bourbon. They came up with a two-word phrase that incorporated both that, both those two things, and it's beautiful. Horse throat, because you'll have a horse throat if you drink bourbon, and they have lots of horse nose. It's unbridled spirit, isn't that great? Whoever thought of that deserves a case of makers mark. Yours would have been runner-up,

I'd have been better than horse throat. But good, you've got the idea. They're weirdly interstate identity, aren't they though, and state slogans, and it really took off in the 20s and 30s, I think, and they've all got state symbols. And in fact, I've put down here Mexico, but I think I meant to write New Mexico, because Mexico is not a state of America. New Mexico is the only US state that has, and it's legally enshrined, an official state question. And the state question is red or green. And do you know why? Is it a game show or something? No, it's because chili is very important in their cuisine, and apparently you're asking a

restaurant red or green, and that's what you go for. So they've got a state question. That's good. We could have tomato sauce or brown sauce as the British one. Yeah, as Danny Baker does on his show every week, and I embarrassed myself by saying, I'm afraid I've never had brown sauce, and I wasn't making a point. I didn't, it's going to disapprove of brown sauce. Many of my very closest friends and my admirers regularly buy it. I just had never tried it at that point. Have you since tried it? You can see when I say, I've never watched Strictly Come Done, so it's just one of those things I've never got round to, and I have a very strong feeling I never will.

It does upset some people, because they're very excited. Did they bring you brown sauce? I have since tasted it, and it's perfectly nice. It's slightly vinegary from what it tastes, but it makes me cough a bit when you first breathe in, you know? I think it's because that's two quintessentially British things, Stephen Fry and brown sauce. It feels like they should be together, doesn't it? Well, you see, whenever there's a binary question, like, you know, tomato ketchup or brown sauce, I will immediately assume there isn't, I'll say, mustard. Really annoying people. Some more Canadian things, perhaps. It's very cold in Canada, famous.

Well cold. The coldest they've ever had is minus 62.8 degrees, and that was in a place called Snag in Yukon. And the residents would walk around like zombies, because if they walked too fast, they would get out of breath. And something to do with the way that the air went meant that you could hear things from a massive distance. So it's very, very dry air and very, very dense at one point. So like as in underwater channels? Yeah, absolutely. And it meant that you could hear people talking from five kilometres away. You could overhear their conversations. Oh no, there are lots of fallings out, neighbours bitching about people in the next town.

You're walking so slowly that you can't get to them to say, hey. I have not put on winter weight, thanks very much. I did a film in Winnipeg once, and then that gets to minus 40, which is very, very cold. I told my father that, and my brother, who was there, said, is that, Senator Greydorff or Farronite, my father, who's a physicist, brilliant, he came back straight away. So it doesn't make any difference. My brother was very cross about this. I mean, it doesn't make any difference. It doesn't make any difference. He said, but that's ridiculous,

of course it makes a difference. And my father just happened to know, and he was not giving it away, that minus 40 is exactly the same. Yeah. Senator Greydorff, that's Farronite. It's the one point where they're identical. So it's when it's minus 40, it doesn't make any difference. Which you're using Celsius or Farronite. I hope he never revealed the reason. No, he was the kind of person who, if you've got cold in the kitchen, would open the fridge, you know, like a true physicist. Oh, really? To warm the room up. Yes.

Those of us who are superstitious about these things, we go, well, surely he's going to make the room colder. You go, don't you know anything about thermodynamics? You can only make it warmer. I was wondering about national stereotypes and, like, across the world, and how old they are. And partly because I'm reading Martin Chasawit at the moment, which has amazing descriptions of Americans in it. And it's just so interesting that his descriptions are hilarious,

and exactly what you describe. Very satirical. They're so satirical. So it's brilliant. So one of my favorite scenes is where Martin has just gone to America a spoiler, and he's hanging out with Americans for the first time, and he's astonished at how much they eat and how fast they eat. And I just loved his quote that said, the poultry, there was a turkey at the top,

a pair of ducks at the bottom and two fowls in the middle, disappeared as rapidly as if every bird had had the use of its wings and had flown in desperation down a human throat. He was sadly disappointed in America, though, Dickens, wasn't he, in as much as... There's that wonderful bit in Chasawit. Do you remember? Have you come up to it yet? The Watertoast Society. Yes.

Which is really... Just at that point. The Watertoast Society is an American Fenian society, a home rule for Ireland society. And Chasawit has invited them, as someone who apparently believes in home rule for the Irish and all the Americans, say how cruel the lion of Albion, with its paws and its claws tearing at the throat of the free Irish

and the Watertoast Society exists to spread the gospel of freedom for all people. And Chasawit got up and said, yes, and I know you must all feel the same about your slaves and your Indians. And there was a terrible silence. Yes. And they burned the Watertoast Meeting Hall down to the ground and the society's never heard of again. Oh, wow.

And as Dickens, really having a go at the fact that Americans were all very good at saying how, look at you and Ireland, but the torque was back on them. Yeah, the hypocrisy of it is amazing. Didn't he, as well, just speaking of, in the first fact about anti-counterfeit measures of the watermark, wasn't a large part of his life dominated by stopping the copying of his books and the reselling.

And that took a huge part of his, and a large part of his hatred for America, again, because that's where it was. And he tried to get twain and all sorts to... Even his very first book, when he was a young man who had never been heard of and he was just doing the text to a famous illustrator, and he did the text of the proceedings at the Pickwick Club, and slowly it just took off and everyone said,

who is this? Right or the right? Yes, the drawings are very nice, but the writing, before it had even finished its Cyrilized form, there were the Pinklewick papers, the Piggy-Weak Chronicles. There were so many of these pirate versions floating around, and Dickens was always furious at that. Yes, yeah. I love the idea of sort of back alley editions of Dickens.

You think you're buying some uncut Pickwick? Yeah. You get at home and open the papers, and it turns out you've got some Pinklewick. If you read the diaries of the James family, for example, Henry James and his brother William, the famous unicycologist, and all the New England literary families, they would gather together on a Sunday,

and the previous Saturday, one of them would have gone down to the docks to get the latest Dickens, and they would arrive in bundles, and they would be cut open, and you would, you know, race home with it, bring as many people around from, you know, who were of a similar literary bent,

or were excited, and read the next chapter. And it was like the most exciting thing, and Henry James talks about remembering this as a boy sitting under the table, and in particular, the one that we now most laugh at, or is probably least regarded as a great Dickens novel, is the old curiosity shop, and partly because of Oscar Wilde's famous comment,

is that you have to have a heart of stone to read of the death of Little Nell without laughing. But there was so excited about Little Nell that there was a riot at the docks in Boston. Everyone shouting, is Nell dead? Is Nell dead? And it was like, you know, later on, there was the JR in Dallas, and there have been such things,

and I guess people want to know what the finale of this Game of Thrones episode is, but really nothing touched that. Thank you. How ordinary effect. And am I right in saying, they, people on the ship, actually announced it. In other words, even the point of taking it home and reading, someone says... Total spoiler.

Yes, ultimate spoiler. Yeah, Little Nell died, yeah. Bill Hayden is the mole. Carla defect. Horrible experience for our listeners there. Don't broadcast this. Don't broadcast this. We need to get a new captain of this ship.

This guy is a really, everything. There's a narrator in the murder of Roger Ackroyd, who does the murder. Oh, God. Policeman in her corporeos Christmas. Stephen, somebody unwinded. OK, it is time for fact number three, and that is Chasinski.

Yes, my fact this week is that the scholar who first discovered that the Noah's Ark story predates the Bible got so excited by it that he stripped off his clothes and ran naked around the British Museum. And this was just how thrilling it was. This was in 1853, and this amazing discovery was made, which was basically the palaces of this great Assyrian king

and the Library of Nineveh, and this person found them, and then this scholar called George Smith, back in the British Museum, who was a very devout Christian, translated this tablet and realized this is the Noah's story, and freaked out, and apparently took some clothes off and ran around the Museum. But it was fair enough because it was a big deal. Yeah, the excitement was so great for him.

That was his only way of expressing. He wasn't a nudist, basically. It was just, it was too much in the moment. I'm certain he was completely stark as he may have been in. I think you took off some clothes, some sources say, you know, maybe you kept as willy in. I tell you what though, they get excited about things in very odd ways at the British Museum.

I have a friend who James and I know, and I think Stephen, you might have met him. He's called Irving Finkel. Oh, yeah, the great, yeah, the great witch, the cuneiform. Cuneiform, yeah. And I was behind the scenes with him at the Museum, and he showed me a sort of a cast of the tablet, the cuneiform Noah's Ark tablet that he used to study

because he actually studied it further, decoded certain aspects of it that had not been seen before, which was the actual measurements from Noah's Ark, and they recreated it, which is amazing. But while we were sitting there in the very beginning of our meeting, he suddenly got an email and jumped up from his seat, and he went, quick, run, and we ran through the corridor.

I was chasing him. Were you naked at the time? No, we were every all bits of clothing. You could make a magnificent bearded individual by the way. Yes, yes. So it looks wonderful. But so he sort of ran down the corridor, and then he cut into the kitchen, and we stopped.

What happened? And he said, there's just been an announcement, there's orange juice in the fridge for any member of staff. And he said, you've got to be quick. Everyone gets to it before I do. And we quickly had two cups and went back into his room. So... That is classic academic everyone.

I first went to Cambridge to do an interview at Cambridge. I saw these two old dons in black gowns, and I thought I'd follow them, and I'll hear them talking about Aristotle, or something really, really intellectual. And one of them was saying, no, no, it comes in a small packet about the size of a single-play record, a 45 RPM record,

and it's full of comminuted little pieces that come to life when you pour boiling water in them. And I assure you, it's singularly toothsy. A chicken noodle. The company is called Nor with a K, a silent K. And that's what they were talking about, and they were thinking, wow, that's not what I expected. But it was very pleasing.

But so this academic, what was his... Do you know his name? George Smith. George Smith. And was it the... Cognitive dissonance isn't quite the word. Was it the shock that the Bible story might not be true, or that it is true, but not as the Bible tells it? It's confusing because he was pleased,

whereas I would have thought, yes, how shocking, but I think it was almost like, good, this is verifying that the Bible was the truth, perhaps. He was obsessed with these tablets. Or eight truths. Yes. Because, of course, the Greeks also, around the same time, they had a flood myth, Deucalian and Pyram.

Yes. And the same thing, they had a wooden chest, it's called in the way it's translated, but it might as well be called an ark, because an ark is a chest, as much as it is anything else. The Ark of the Covenant is a chest, after all. It's a strange word. And so the Deucalian and Pyram, Pyram was the daughter of Pandora,

the first woman. So it's a very early thing that mankind displeased the gods, and they sent the flood. And Deucalian and Pyram survived, because they were warned about it. And then when they landed, it wasn't on, well, we think now, Mount Ararat, the supposedly the ark landed. So many people believed Noah's Ark was on Mount Ararat.

But it landed somewhere, and they were told by Athena, I think it was, they were told to throw the bones of their mother over their shoulders. And they didn't know what that meant, and they were very confused. And they said, well, the bones of her mother, it's the stones of Mother Earth. So they threw stones, and whenever a pyra threw a stone

over her shoulder, a woman sprang up out of the ground, and wherever. Deucalian, a man sprang up out. So it's one of those autochthonic stories. But you don't want to take that literally, accidentally. It's a similar thing of punishment. And the Philemon and Baucus story is also another flood. And so they exist, at least two versions in Greek myth,

many other Mediterranean mythists, Sumerian, Akkadian. Babylonian, I think. I mean, I think these guys stole a lot from the Babylonians, in fact, the Assyrians, so they probably got it. But yeah, they all have been passed down from one another. Is it like that 5000 BC, was it, when there was all those civilizations, the Mayans, and all these cities suddenly were evacuated,

these great, there seems to have been a plague that was common across early civilizations. How amazing is that? It's passed down. Yes, and of course, yeah. But this myth is particularly bizarre. So this is how the Assyrian myth had it in the library at Nineveh when they found it.

And I didn't realize this is in the epic of Gilgamesh, so the very famous discovery, the most famous discovery that was made there. And the belief, the story as it was told, was that there was this huge flood, and before the flood, then God had delivered all his messages to people via these fish, these weird fish creatures.

So they were right near the Persian Gulf, and the idea was these huge fish creatures used to come out on the Persian Gulf in a day, and they'd go and they'd tell the Assyrians what to do. They'd be like, don't drink that, be nice to your mum, et cetera. And then this huge flood came, and it basically poisoned the fish creatures, so they never came back.

And after the flood, there was lots of disease, because floods will cause disease, and it was thought that was part of the God's punishment. And from that moment onward, the God stopped visiting them with these fish creatures. And so, yeah, that was the thing, and that was why you had to have human scholars who were the ones who then received messages

from the gods via strange cryptic ways. And in the Hebrew myth as well, it's the same thing as God provides a rainbow at the end as a covenant that he will not interfere again. So it also marks the slight withdrawal of God from the people of Israel, his chosen people, at that moment that he's slightly more distant apart from a few prophets.

It's like a show creator handing over, you know, a slight tea Davis to Stephen Moffat in the Doctor Who series. So is the vibe not, all right, fine, if that's how you want to do it, I'll leave you to it. Is it a bitter kind of God saying, fine, whatever, get on with it then. There's still some things that are punished, and in the same way that the real punishment

is a transgression of Xenia in Greek mythology, which is the guest friendship and the honor you do as a host to a stranger who comes to your door. And that's really what the story of Philemon of Baucus is about, and that's why they're visited with a flood because everyone in the village turns away Zeus and Hermes who appear as travelers, except this old couple who welcome them. And that actually is closer to the story of Lot and his wife

in the city of the plain, Sodom and Gomorrah. If you remember, and angels come, you're looking puzzled as if you haven't read the Bible name yet. Front to back, many times. But that front to back is the way to do it, isn't it? You certainly have heard of Sodom and Gomorrah, what happens is angels come, they hear about what wicked city the cities of the plain are, they're at the bottom of the Dead Sea.

There's still sea signs when you travel down the road to Jordan saying Sodom that way, very pleasing. But anyway, yeah, the angels arrived and were treated very, very rudely and even more rudely by one particular citizen of Sodom who wanted to know the angel. And that is where the phrase to know them in the biblical sense comes from. In other words, he tried to seduce this angel.

And Sodomy, Sodomite and the whole idea that Sodom was this place because that one reference in the Bible of someone who wanted to know the angel. And they punished the city with fire. And except for the holy couple, just like Deaconian and Bikers who were, I mean, Phil and Evelyn, Bikers who were Lot and his wife. And they were allowed to, but they mustn't look back. And it was exactly the same in the Greek myth.

There's no news stories. They're all boys digging for each other. Well, Steve, you said that they have the rainbow at the end of Noah's... Yes, he sends that as a covenant, doesn't he? Yeah, he then, according to Genesis, he began to be a husbandman and planted a vineyard. Noah's vineyard, yes, famously the first wine. He then drank the wine and was drunken.

And he was uncovered within his tent. So he basically, once he finished, he got drunk and got naked. That's what you do. Well, we see, finally, a story in the Bible to which everyone... They've done a Noah. You know the fish creature that you're talking about? So I'm going off memory here, but depictions I've seen of it is, it's a sort of reverse mermaid.

It's a fish head with legs. Oh, yes, yes. It was a partial human-based thing. And it's used as those ancient alien kind of things that that was a higher knowledge that was coming to educate and create these amazing civilizations at the time. Yeah, no one keen on that line of chat? Great, all right, let's...

No such thing as a fish man. It's interesting, though, because, of course, all the evangelists who became part of the temperance movement at the end of the 19th century believed everything in the Bible, but they had to rule out wine. And wine is unquestionably approved of throughout the Bible. Not only is Noah the first example of it, but Christ's first miracle is turning water into wine

at the wedding in Canaan. So it is clear. And indeed, obviously, the last supper and everything that becomes it. It's quite difficult to believe in all the Bible, but decide that alcohol is terrible because it clearly vindicated. Well, there's some translations where they changed it to grape juice. Oh, problem. Yeah, yeah.

Yes, it happens by chance. I don't know what kind of bore you'd have to be to make the Bible less sexy. Very well. Oh, having to talk to these people. This guy, George Smith, who decided for the Cuneiform. So he's an amazing guy because he left education at the age of 14. He became an engraver of banknotes at the Bank of England.

So as a result, he had an incredible eye. He could detect incredible details in banknotes that he was engraving that other people couldn't spot. So and also he was obsessed with these Cuneiform tablets. So he firstly, you know, he delivered this lecture saying the Noah's Ark story is a Hebrew adaptation of a much older story, which created huge controversy because it was quite soon after on the origin of species. It was another way of, it was another.

Geology was also doing its damnedest to undermine. Yeah. What, yes, was it Ruskin called those damned hammers? Yeah. Chipping away at every truth that was understood. So he was kind of a controversial figure. But then the amazing thing was in this tablet that he had translated of the Noah's Ark story, there was a section that was missing.

There were about 17 lines that were missing from the tablet just ended there. And the Daily Telegraph offered a thousand guineas to whoever found this missing 11 lines of Cuneiform tablet, obviously with him in mind, because he was the expert. He knew all about it. And he went there. He went to what is now Mosul, which is where the library. And it was where the the library had been of King Sennacherib.

Is that it? Was it? It was Ashurbanipa. Sorry, Ashurbanipa, where the library of King Ashurbanipa had been. And he got to the site of the library. It was a huge site. It was about three miles across the whole city. And so it was like looking for a, you know, really was needle in haystack stuff.

He looked and he went to the pit of the old libraries, the likeliest place he'd found it. And he found that had been used as a quarry and it was a complete mess of rubble, you know, different different fragments from all over all different centuries. But he started looking and the amazing thing was he found it. He found a tiny. Only he could have found it. Yeah, exactly. He found the 17 lines which completed the Noah's Ark story and he brought it back.

They see a naked man running back out of the quarry. Wow, fabulous. Imagine that feeling. And also that's kind of a nice mirroring of actually what happened in terms of collecting the information for the library at the time. So in the Assyrian culture, so this is like 3000 years ago and Ashurbanipal wanted to collect all human knowledge ever at that point. And he'd collect all these tablets and went and got scholars to write them.

And if there was something missing, he'd say, oh, there's this story that I've heard about and I don't have it. He'd put a call out to everyone in his kingdom saying, everyone go hunting. So all the Assyrians knew what he was looking for and there'd be a reward and they just go scouting out for it and bring it. And it's one of the biggest kind of kingdoms that had ever existed, right? It was all of North Africa, all of Middle East, all the way across. Yeah, it was huge.

And Sennacherib was after him or before him? Before him was his father, I think. He was destroyed because there was that famous Byron Perm, isn't there? The destruction of Sennacherib. The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold. These girls were shining in scarlet and gold. Oh, really? How was he, what, he was killed?

That was called the destruction of Sennacherib, I think. Oh, really? Someone listening will know. On the Assyrians named after Noah's grandson. Isn't Assyrian, Ashur, one of the tribes, isn't it? Yeah, Ashur. And that's where Assyria or Assyrian comes from. So there's staring us right in the face.

Well, Semite is from Shem, of course. Semite, so. And as in Hamshem and if you're anti-Semitic, technically it means you don't like Arabs as much as anything because they are before the split between Abraham and Ishmael. Who were the patriarchs of the two different peoples? There was Abraham and Ishmael. Ishmael went out and founded the Arab people, as it were.

And Abraham was the patriarch of the Jewish people. So you're even more prejudiced than you actually thought. They also had, with the Keneiform tablet, something interesting. They were used constantly so they wouldn't fire them and make them a solid because they wanted to reuse them. So once a tablet had been read, they could remould it and make it better. But what that meant was if they were ever attacked the Assyrians and, let's say, their places were burnt down,

by burning down their libraries, they were actually preserving their information because the clay would be fired up. Baked, yes. So they would bake the information into... That's the whole reason. The whole library in Innova, the reason it survives, is because of that it's such a funny irony

and it's such a good thing because the Assyrians were eventually taken down by the Babylonians and the, I think it's, they're like from the Iranian area, currently Iranian, the Needs. And the Babylonians, yes. Meeds, yeah. Meeds and Persians were the two groups that made up the Camorra and Iran, as in Dorothy Parker's famous remark.

One man's mead is another man's Persian. Oh, well, maybe she'd argue with, I think it... I can't remember who was saying this, but the Meads weren't particularly cultured. So the Babylonians would have taken these tablets and preserved them and gone, oh, my God, this is learning. But the Meads just went, sod it, let's burn the whole thing down. And then, ironically, they managed by doing that

to completely preserve them forever. So in your face, Meads. Very good. And they're so revealing, aren't they, about what it is to be human? Because like almost all ancient forms of writing, 95% of it is taxation and accounting and storage of grain. But then you get this fabulous bit,

the bit that Irving Finkel is so excited by, the children's, the crudence of the exercise book, where you have the little clay tablets that he has in the British Museum, which you can go and see, which are children writing insults about their teachers. So great. That is their practicing.

I mean, it's just delicious. Yeah. Real insight. There is one story, which I haven't found, I've found it in one source only, and it's, so I think it's not true, but it's of a clay bottle, and there was an apprentice at the British Museum

who would not rest until he had deciphered this inscription on the bottle. And it turned out to read, please replace stopper in bottle. 90% sure it's a joke. That's like that wooden post that had Toti Emel Esto written on it. Two, three, four letter words. Toti Emel E-M-U-L-S-T-O.

And they looked at it and said, sort of looks Latin. No, simul. So why emel? But s-to is not quite right. Late Latin, maybe pig Latin, might have s-to. Toti, all something. And someone pointed out and said,

no, let's tie mules too. OK, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that the rarest frog in England has a distinctive Norfolk accent. Very pleasant now. I've heard of birds having local accents with frogs. Well, actually, there's a...

I'm sure you can tell us about the Californian Western literal frog. Oh, the one which you hear in Hollywood. Yeah, the only frog that actually goes ribbit. Ribbit, yes. Because it was used by sound recordists to do backgrounds for the jungle and everything, wasn't it? Is that right?

I think I saw that on QI. I think it was on QI. That's my memory. So this is the Northern Pool Frog. It was extinct in England, in Norfolk, and they found out, doing 10 years of research, that they had this distinctive call, which is common to the Norfolk area.

It's a unique accent, and that and some genetics made them realise that it was endemic to Norfolk, which meant that they could bring it back, and they've just recently put it back into some pools in Norfolk. Wonderful in the broads or the fens, presumably. Yeah, in the broads, yeah. Very satisfying.

And does it bear any resemblance to the Cuban Norfolk accent? It's just a slightly deeper ribbit, I guess. All right. One single comment about it being fond of its sister than most frogs, and I will be very cross indeed. So humans can tell if frogs are excited or not. This is a really interesting thing. So humans can tell, basically,

if almost all vertebrates, really, are excited or not. So this was an experiment done by scientists. They played recordings of aroused and nonaroused frogs, and aroused just means not sexually. It's stimulated in some way. Nervous. Angry nervous. Exactly, yeah.

And this was people who spoke different languages as well. So it was, I think, some English, and some Mandarin, and some of the third language. And 90% of them could tell which the aroused ones were. And the reason that we think this is is because we think there are universal vocal elements. So when we're excited or as we speak higher and faster, and frogs do the same thing.

So we think there are vocal signals that are the same, even in different taxa. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah. But frogs are a sort of index species for all kinds of the health of wetlands and everything. Yeah.

And there are tens of thousands of... And there's a runny... Whatever it is, a runny form virus at the moment that's threatening for us everywhere. Yeah, absolutely. Herobicide, yeah. Yeah, they're all dying out. Like everything is.

And also, we're running out of ponds. Yeah. In the UK. Let alone, yeah, natural wetlands, the good old suburban ones, you mean? Yeah, there are half as many ponds in the UK than there were 50 years ago. Really?

Norfolk has lost 8,000 ponds since the 1950s. Oh, have you known my parents have a pond in Norfolk? Excellent. Does it have frogs? It does have frogs, and they're frog spawn, and it's always rather amazing, and they try and protect the frog spawn from the various predators that like to eat it.

But if you combine two ponds into one larger pond, you have technically destroyed a pond. So, is it possible there are... It's made of lake. Just one massive lake. I know it seems unlikely, yeah. I don't think that's what's happened. I don't think Norfolk is now one huge lake

and no other ponds. Exactly. When I was a boy, you were definitely... I mean, they're sort of virtually... I don't know my brother, but I've had nothing better to do. We'd go and hunt for sticklebacks and mutes and all those sort of creatures. Well, every village would have a pond,

and most farms would have a pond because it's where you would get your water from, and that's where they don't live in. Yeah, like a titty-titty bang-bang one, you know, the one that Trudy Scrumptious gets stuck in in her car, that sort of one, you know, with ducks and... Was it in Norfolk where there's that myth about a lake where the reflection of the moon is in it,

and the myth was that they used to tell visitors to the area that they'd been trying to catch that big white thing in the middle of the lake for years, and they should have a go, because they just couldn't get it, and it was the trick they played. I think it's in Wiltshire. In Wiltshire.

I thought it was in... Potato potato. I thought it was in Somerset. Oh, I'm sure it's in Somerset. One of those ones in whichever county you happen to be talking about. Don't confuse Norfolk with the language with Norfolk, which is N-O-R-F-U-K, which is a language spoken on Norfolk Island.

Oh, it goes. Oh, just off Australia. In the Pacific, yeah. Yeah. And it's a blend of 18th-century English and Tahitian. Is it? Right, isn't it? Yeah.

Don't confuse it. Do you think people are showing off? Going, hey, you got a lightbulb? That's the wrong accent for it. On the bold city. Do you know where you can find a Norfolk accent? Not in Norfolk is in parts of New England, because so when the Pilgrim Fathers went over

and say that a lot of them are from East Anglia, a lot from Norfolk, and there are certain quirks of the accent in New England accent that are only seen in Norfolk, so I think. And a few phrases. One of them was good on you, apparently. Good on you, yeah. Good on you.

Another one was how much did you give for it, as opposed to how much did you pay for it, which apparently is a quintessentially Norfolk thing. And the do you, the, I don't know whether that sort of progressive present is really peculiar, when the do you not as a question, but as an invitation or even a command, do you sit down?

Meaning sit down. Yeah, that's weird. Do you come in? Do you come in? Oh, you must be cold, do you come in? That just means come in. Yeah. All there's do meaning if,

which is a very strange Norfolk thing, say you want to come in, do you get cold? Really? The do means if you don't. Oh, my goodness. Says you really are. Oh, wow, blessed. Oh, wow, blessed.

Yeah, my sister's nanny was from Norfolk, and she eyes today in Rachel, or no, not really, she was a, but you know, sort of teaser and things like that. And she said, you stop having do, I'll tell your father. Do, I'll tell your father. Oh, really? Yeah, it's very, very extraordinary.

I read a really funny blog on the British Library website. So the British Library have done this amazing thing, which is they want to preserve dialects before they all disappear. So they've got loads of volunteers over the last few years to go and record things that they say in their own local dialect. And they've kept these recordings

so you can go online. It's brilliant. Go to it. It's called the Evolving English Word Bank. But it's really great. The only problem with it is the kind of people who are going around the British Library and volunteering stuff are,

you can tell when you listen to the recordings, they're not the kind of people who are using the street slang of the modern day. So you have a listen to one. It's so good. It's this obviously really learned, sounding nerdy old man that says, I've got two examples of words I'd like preserved

that are used by pupils at a school in Oxford where I'm from. The first word is bear, spelled B-A-R-E, which now means a lot. And the second word is jokes, that is jokes, which is now used as a word meaning fun. And then he gave an example. He said, so a pupil in school recently wrote,

I am a seed. He was learning about germination. I am a seed. And when it's winter, I don't sprout because there's bear, snow on the ground. But if I wait until it's warm, everything will be jokes. And it's just if that's what's preserved

as how people are using bear and jokes in the future. There is an amazing book, which this is more just for people listening right now, Susie Dent. She wrote a fantastic book recently, which was she went to every sort of, she went to hang out with builders and people who work in transport.

And the current slang being used by all of them, she documented down in this book. So it's sort of fresh slang, preserving a time. It's a really beautiful book. Oh, good for her. Very important, I love books on thieves, Kant and those sort of slangs of the 17th century and onwards.

And I want to just memorialize the great Dennis Norden, because you reminded me of a story he told. You remember the great comic writer and who died in his late nineties just recently. He told me this family story. When he was at school, he had a very good English teacher, a very advanced for his day.

I mean, this is way back in the 20s and 30s, or 20s, I guess. And he said, right, we're going to do words that reinforce meaning class. And then we're going to reinforce what's happening. You know, London, it's a pretty poor ordinary school in the east end where Dennis grew up. And he said, I'll illustrate this

by telling the story of these two road builders, Navies, you know, and one of them sees a poster on the wall and it says, one man, one vote. He goes, what's that about? And he says, what, it means one man, one vote, doesn't it? He said, what? I don't get it. One man, one vote.

And how does that? I don't get it. I mean, you've got one man, you've got one vote. No, I, no, I still don't get it. One fucking man, one fucking vote. Oh! I have a good way to seem cool in front of your pupils telling that story.

Yeah. As soon as you drop a swear word as a teacher, you've got their respect. Yeah. Yeah. Well done. Because every generation thinks they've invented it. Yes.

That's the extraordinary thing. You know, the idea that one's grandfather was saying, the F word all the time in the trenches. Yeah. Which I remember being so shocked by when I read all, goodbye to all that, you know, the Robert Graves. And he thought he'd heard all the swearing he could ever hear at school, you know,

in the showers, as it were, after the rugby game. And he said, the first moment he was, you know, training with other cadets and listening to NCOs and sergeants and all that, he'd just never imagined people would swear that much. Grownups. And, and of course, that's, you don't see that. Yeah.

Sanitized version, just as you don't see them wiping their bottoms away, shouldn't you? We've got better things to do, obviously. But it is important to remember, because certainly some of my generation thinks the First World War as one's grandfather's generation. Obviously, most people listening are far too young to, to that, they'll be your great-grandfathers,

possibly even great-great-grandfathers. But I knew people. I had been at my school, there were, there were people who fought in the First World War. And to my eternal shame, I remember this man, Mr. Sordan, who, who shook his hands all the time and slightly gaped with his mouth, and he was the brother of the headmaster's wife.

And he was, we teased him mercilessly. And then one day, one of the masters said, you do know he won a military cross in the First World War. He was one of the bravest men he will ever meet. And he was destroyed by watching a whole trench of his friends blown up in front of his eyes. And I just remember thinking, oh, dear. What?

There was mocking him and doing his early imitating. Trembling hands. And so I was like, you think of them as a very extraordinary generation, but you don't think of them as just like us. It's so important we do think that. They did swear, they did live colorful lives, as Peter Jackson says, literally colorful in any sense.

Yeah, that was brilliant, wasn't it? Peter Jackson thing, if anyone didn't see it. It's amazing when you see war suddenly with a blue sky. Yes, yes. So counter-intuitive, you thought it's going to be mucky and dark, but yeah, they fought on sunny days. Yeah. We should wrap up shortly.

We can. We can do one last thing. Go on, Andy. Yeah, I've got a frog. It's a cool frog, and I didn't want to not mention the frog. Have you heard of the northern spring peeper? Nope. Okay, so it's very cool.

It lives in ponds, and the temperature frequently drops below freezing, problem. But the frog hibernates, and it has evolved away to stay alive while it has frozen. What? The temperature inside it, if it gets to minus two or three Celsius, the frog can survive because the water inside it is super cooled.

So it's still liquid. If it gets any colder than that, it's still not a problem. The water under the frog's skin freezes, and its stomach becomes a solid ball of ice. So about half the water inside the frog freezes. It can survive for a week like this. And it's because, so normally the problem is, you get ice crystals inside your cells,

and the cells rupture, and you die. That's what happens. Yes, yes. As soon as the ice crystals start to form inside the frog, the frog's liver goes into an emergency rapid response action. It produces a load of glucose, and it spreads it. Yeah, it spreads it throughout the body,

and it prevents the crystals forming in the cells. But the glucose levels in its core organs shoot up 50 times as much. Wow. As soon as the first ice crystal forms, the frog's liver goes, ah, with freezing. React. I wonder if you get an alcoholic frog who's

got liver damage, whether it's less good incipient diabetes as well. Wow. Well, I'll, I'll, I mean, I've got a story to tell about a frog, and if you'll cut this, because it's really not very of a sound. But it's, there's a librarian who's busy, and she, hen comes in, into the library, and goes,

and the librarian thinks, okay, and grabs a book, and gives it to her. And the hen goes off, and then the hen comes back really quite, you know, a few hours later, and goes, bop, bop, bop, and gives her three books, and two under one wing, and one under the other, and off goes the hen, and then the hen comes back, and goes, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop.

And it dumps the three books that had been given, and so she gives it another six books, and it's lunchtime, and the librarian thinks, I've got to see this extraordinary literary hen, and follows it down the street, down little alleyways, and then up, up into a door, and the door's left open, and so the librarian watches the hen, with these books tucked under its wing,

going all the way up to the top of the stairs, and into a room, and the door's closed, but the librarian kneels down, and looks through the keyhole, and there, on the bed, is a frog, with a little spotty bandage around its forehead, and a thermometer in its mouth, and the hen takes the thermometer out, and reads it, and then hands the book to the frog, and the frog says,

read it, if you don't know one, read it, just read it. Oh, that's a fantastic fact to end on. Okay, that's it, that is all of our facts, thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we'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. Stephen. At Stephen Cry. I might get some followers off this. I'm hoping. And Chasinski.

You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep, where you can go to our group account, at no such thing, or go to our website, no such thing as a fish.com, where we have all of our previous episodes. You should also go to bookshops and to Amazon, and wherever you can get books to get Stephen's new book, which is Heroes.

That's the story of the Greek myth. It's an amazing book, and yeah, definitely get it for everyone for this Christmas. Thank you, Dan. Yeah, that's all right, okay, that's it. We'll be back again next week. We'll see you then. Goodbye.

Bye.