No Such Thing As A Fish - 262: No Such Thing As A Man In A Wine Bottle

Episode Date: March 29, 2019

Live from the Eventim Apollo in Hammersmith, Dan, James. Anna and Andy discuss time-travelling swordfish, the actor who reviewed his own plays, and Waddington's cattle semen trading board game.

Uh Hello and welcome to another episode of no such thing as a fish a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from the Hammersmith event of My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Chajinsky Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again We have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here We go starting with you James Okay, my fact this week is that in the 18th century London plays written by David Garrick and Starring David Garrick would often be shown in theaters owned by David Garrick

They would then be reviewed by David Garrick in Newspapers owned by David Garrick Amazing guy, wasn't he he was a man of many talents apparently according to the Yeah, I mean he ran the Drury Lane Theatre He was a great actor a lot of you will have heard of him He also had the st. James's Chronicle and the public Advertiser in the Chronicle it said mr. Garrick was most Extraordinarily accurate in every syllable which he uttered

And his spelling is really good He was a really exciting character for theatre. He was someone who brought in the old he championed Shakespeare But he also was looking at new technologies to make plays more interesting So for example when he played Hamlet, he designed a wig that when the ghost of his father walked in stood up on edge Yeah, he did change the way people acted weirdly so Before Garrick came along then for instance Spectators would be on the stage you guys would be up here with us like during the performance into mingling and he said Let's not do that

Definitely not do that He made actors he made actors come to rehearsals which really pissed them off He he abolished the practice of people audience members coming in at the interval for half price So people were coming in the middle of Hamlet and then spend the whole time going so who's that guy? Why is she so upset? But actually that was really really controversial wasn't it the war riots because of that Yeah, so when he decided against the half price thing he came on stage And all the people in the pit so it used to be that you have rich people in the top and you'd have really poor people in the pit

Or poorer people in the pit Let's hear it from the rich people up there They're all the same price So he came on stage and the people in the pit said that he had to stop this half price thing Yeah, I'll bring it back. I should say and he said he'd have to consult his business partner and he was booed off stage Was this business partner David Garrick And then the actors came on and then they were also booed off stage And then finally according to the article from the time that I read at eight o'clock the ladies were asked to leave so the house might be burnt

It's really the like the theater was a riser's place so the Garrett the sitting on the stage thing That was the result of a 15 year campaign It took 15 years to get people to stop sitting on the stage Um, and there was also Garrick the way he changed acting as well was very cool Because before Garrick and there was another guy called Macklin who was a huge rival of Garrick's But before that actors were basically stand with their feet at 10 and two shouting essentially shouting And Garrick was such a good actor because he paid attention to the other people he was on stage with rather than just waiting Um, but the reviews would say things like he even acts when he's not acting

This blew people's minds. What does that mean? Well, it means like he pretended to listen to the other people on stage He was playing a part he stayed in character rather than just going back to standing neutrally like a dummy waiting for his turn to shout Okay, right wandering off stage when it's not your line. You just go and get a coffee exactly Yeah, so I think did used to be very different of us as we said beforehand the Leading actor the greatest rival to Garrick was a guy called James Quinn who was known as the bellower and he was London's best actor because he had a very loud voice and Also, he was very good at gesticulating. So there were three hallmarks of great acting number one very loud voice number two

excessive gesticulating and number three incredibly long pauses so Actors at the time were schooled in three different types of Paul's you had moderate longer and grand He sounds like very much like Brian blessed doesn't he? But did he not was he not famous for killing people? I think he was in a lot of jewels Quinn. Yes, right? Yeah, I read that he he killed a fellow actor who mispronounced the word Kato as keto on stage What they know that's fair enough Dan you would not have lasted five minutes But that was like that did happen so you were you mentioned Andy Charles Maclin who was Garex rival I think and I'm Maclin once killed a fellow actor for borrowing his wig

That's harsh. Well, because he had that one that stood up and not many people. Yeah, that's true So we mentioned the riots briefly. Yes. I just had a one theatrical riot I wanted to share with you guys. So this was in Jury Lane It was after it was in 1755 and a Swiss ballet master had brought a festival to Jury Lane very exciting And the press were furious because he had brought Frenchmen and French women onto an English stage and they were livid So someone in a gallery cried out that the dancers were disguised French soldiers, which obviously they were not it was a ballet festival and One of the actors shouted back. I'm not French. I'm Swiss and one of the protesters then shouted back

Swiss what the devil do we know of Swiss? A Swiss is a foreigner and all foreigners are Frenchmen This went on for a few nights and then on the fifth night They just started the spectators to start of ripping up the benches and destroying the chandeliers and destroying the scenery on stage Constantly we're doing it. Yeah, I'm doing this as a part. I don't know how many theaters are still standing I think one of the most famous theater riots was in 1809 and that was the Covent Garden theater riots Basically the Covent Garden theater been burned down and they thought well use this as an excuse to rebuild it and put up prices And they also rebuilt it so that if you were in the upper tiers you could only see the legs of the people on stage And this really annoyed people and they properly rioted so they had this chart which was old prices old prices

The noise was so bad that soldiers were constantly having to be sent up To restore order the rioting lasted three months and the audiences did things like they would bring live pigs into the audience They were rattles they brought trumpets they were pigeons very often and released them into the auditorium and They wore these badges with OP standing for old price. It was quite nice bit of merch for the rioters In the same year as the Swiss riot Garrix theater posted an advert in the press to try and find out who it was that flung a hard piece of cheese of near half a Pound weight from one of the galleries last Tuesday night and greatly hurt a young lady in the pit Yeah, oh my god, was it spelt greatly like

Do you know that he um he went to when he was at school he was taught by Samuel Johnson Yeah, yeah, he was and this was in Litchfield and Samuel Johnson had to start a school Basically because he was not allowed to be a part of an already existing school And the reason that they said is it was feared that the way that he was able to distort his face all the time Would scare the children so they're like your face is too scary. You can't teach here So he set up yeah He set up his own school and there were only three pupils at it one of which was David Garrick and then after school They went to London together

That's the school shut down didn't it because it had three pupils. Yeah, then they went to London Yeah, can I just one more thing about a very exciting event in the 18th century theater world another big thing was 1749 at the Haymarket theater there were adverts all over London that the bottle conjurer was going to be performing and no one knew Who this was it's a mystery to this very day, but what was advertised was that various things it said that You could give him a walking cane on stage and he would tap it and play the sound of any instrument You liked with his tapping you could wear a mask and Even if you wore a mask you'd be able to tell you who you were and then the pièce de résistance was He'll have a common wine bottle on stage

He will go into it and sing in it and I said he would climb into the bottle climb into the wine bottle Yes, and sing in the wine bottle and during his stay in the bottle any person may handle it and I've seen some of your wine bottles and they are pretty big Why do they make the neck so tiny otherwise I'd go in myself But this huge audience turned up because they were like it was a quart So which I think it was about the bit bigger than a normal wine bottle a liter or whatever But a massive audience turned up including the King's son lots of nobility. It was obviously a ruse

He wasn't gonna climb inside a wine bottle And so people got really pissed off and so they went and he didn't turn up No one came on stage and the benches were torn out. This is the Haymarket theater big theater scenery totally destroyed Dabry was dragged out of the theater and all of the stuff inside the theater was set on fire and One newspaper explained this the next day the fact that the guy hadn't turned up and climbed inside a wine bottle explained it by saying he had given a private audience beforehand and Were upon receiving a demonstration of the trick the viewer as in that private audience had Corked up the bottle and whipped it in his pocket and made off

Of okay, it is time for fact number two and that is my fact my fact this week is that the main source for Sigmund Freud's work on paranoid schizophrenia was the memoirs of a man who made Unbelievable and ludicrous claims that man's name was Dan Shreber Daniel Paul Shreber was his name This is a guy who lived from 1842 to 1911 and he wrote a series what he wrote a memoir memoirs of my nervous illness and In it he was kind of trying to show what it was like from the inside of someone who was having all of these Thoughts and so on published the book and Freud picked it up and never met him

They lived at the same time but didn't want to meet him because he didn't want to be influenced by it He just used the book and that was the basis for a lot of his Freud's work Daniel Shreber's book is still in publication if you go into bookshops that memoir. It's how important it is So Shreber thought that there were little men living inside his feet They were taking out his genitals and then putting female genitals in so he could have God's child Yes, putting female genitals into his feet or into into the place where they normally are. Oh, yeah very hard to walk Yeah

He was mad wasn't he Freud Freud right once. Yeah, yeah, not this guy with the vagina in his foot. I think he was fine There were just so many things that are wrong about what he thought so he had a lifelong fear of trains Sigma Freud and that was based on a Experience he had in his early childhood which he explained in a letter 40 years after the event And he explained to one of his friends that when he was three years old he'd moved house his whole family had moved house not just him and They'd move gone by train and he explained that he'd seen his mother naked on the overnight train and

He thought you know from that experience He'd been permanently traumatized by the seeing his mother naked and obviously being sexually attracted to her So there is an idea that he had this theory of the edipus complex and now it's thought that maybe maybe he had one It's not true that everyone You know, he was almost not a psychiatrist He first started the first paper that he ever published was on the eels and it was his attempt to locate their testicles Mmm, that was what he was doing. He dissected 400 eels looking for their testicles Just was obsessed. He was like they got to be somewhere and

At what stage do you go? I've done 399. Yeah, I was a 400 400 Because he published the paper saying didn't find them This was one of the great mysteries of the age it genuinely was so what no one knew where eels bred and Male eels only have gonads when they need them basically. So Aristotle said that eels came from nothing. That was his great theory What a chance it sometimes said they came from the guts of wet soil, yes Yeah, and some people said they came out of thatch roofs. I mean no one knew so But the thing was Freud when he wrote this paper, he said well, they must have all been female

That's the only explanation I can think of rather than that he got it wrong And I read a great essay online which asked, you know, what this must have been very formative for Freud It said we know now that Freud views viewed most people's problems through a sexual lens But was that lens tinted by the set of testicles he couldn't find a lifetime ago Did his inability to locate the eels reproductive organs proved so prominent in his studies that he saw them everywhere He went in the manner that a rare car owner begins to see his car everywhere soon after driving it off the lot The weirdest simile ever He hated women though, didn't he maybe that's all about the eel testicles as well. It was the heinous sexist

So he said that women should be basically avoided because they were too susceptible to being seduced He advises friends against hanging out with them at all He said that they have an ineptitude for serious life tasks that they are in Unstable incapable of grasping their own unimportance and they're He said nature's inclined them to be vain and he said the only thing that women contributed to society Plating and weaving because women They did do a lot of weaving and plating and he attributed this to Obviously, they're desired to have a penis and so what he said was women are so upset about not having a penis that

Their plotting is expressing their desire to plant their pubic hair in order to conceal the fact that they have no Male genitals and conceal it. What's interesting is you say he didn't like women But it was a woman who actually helped him get to his biggest breakthrough in psychiatry When sitting with them and she was appropriately called Fanny Fanny Moser was her name. He was treating her and he used to do it through hypnosis, but he was a terrible hypnotist You're unstable. You're weak. You wish you had a penis So he used to do that you're getting sleepy thing and Fanny Moser said actually I don't think I am and he was like no You aren't you and I really don't think I am

So she just started talking and she was laying on the couch and kept talking and kept talking and he thought hang on a second This is amazing. I'm actually getting stuff here. That's real and raw and that was the game changer for him That's when in a way the talking cure was invented because a woman told him to shut the fuck up because she honestly because he Because Fanny basically he used to say his theories to her and at one point she just said honestly Please shut up because without your comments I can properly let my mind wander and work out what's going on and he was like, okay, cool I'll just step back. Yeah, well he saw sex everywhere

Didn't he he thought anything elongated such as sticks or tree trunks or umbrellas represented the penis He said that walking up and down steps symbolize the sexual act you guys in the circle Sounds like it What was his day-to-day like that he just saw penises everywhere? It must have been so distracting Do you guys know what the first Freudian slip was? So the first Freudian slip was a young man who said Exori are a ex nostris ossibus all tour when as you all know, he should have said Exori are a Allicuous nostris ex ossibus all tour. So I mean, it's obvious, isn't it?

So basically it was the suppression of the word aliquus meant that he must have had some association with that word So he did a word association and said, what does that make you think of and eventually got to a word which was Saint January us and Saint January us kept his blood in a file Which was supposed to have turned into liquid once a year and then was solid the rest of the time And then the man confessed that his girlfriend had missed her period And so Freud concluded that he had blocked out this word from ten minutes ago because he associated that with the fact that his

Girlfriend might be pregnant. Yeah You shouldn't give your blood in a file it makes the cardboard soggy Very good advice Have we talked about the cocaine? I don't think we have Huge fan of cocaine he experimented with it as a student believing it would alleviate his depression and anxiety and great news It did and he just started post it was this bizarre period where you were just posting cocaine around because it wasn't really illegal So he sent it to his fiancee to make us strong. He must have been plotting like mad He gave it to his great friend who was called fly shill because fly shill was addicted to morphine and he said

I know something it'll cure your morphine addiction Tri-cocaine fly shill then became completely addicted to cocaine and Freud said He claimed it had been a success, but it had not One of the things he justified it with when he was Recommending it to this guy whose life was ruined by Freud forcing cocaine on him Freud said the wonderful thing about cocaine the best thing about it is there is absolutely no craving for the further use of Cocaine after you first take it or even repeatedly

Your seat number has been taken down I Was looking into with Freud just off the back of David Garrick I thought what did he do you know as hobbies? Did he go to the theater for example and I could only find one example And it was to see a guy who we've mentioned very briefly on this podcast before called la petal main Oh, yeah, I mean the farther his act was to just fart on stage What's interesting is it wasn't that he was eating generating gas and farting He was sucking air up into his bum and farting it back out

So he discovered this when he was in the ocean and he was almost drowning He knows it's the ocean getting very slightly lower As he was drowning he went it went both in and up at the same time and he was like that's weird He came back to the surface He went to the beach and it all flooded out of his butt and he thought what's happening here So highlights of his act they involved the effects of cannon fire and thunderstorms from his bum He could play oh solomio Through a sort of rubber tube in his bum. I don't know that would you mind performing it?

We know it as just one carnetto Yeah, and that's who that's Sigmund Freud the only example I could find if I'm going to the theater was to see the farting man Yeah, good. Well, he was very into defecation He thought that was extremely important Freud was yeah, so was he going follow through? No, he was convinced that defecation obsession with defecation and obsession with money were related and He said that he was obsessed with money himself. He said money is like laughing gas to me he loved being rich and

He thought that being into excrement was something that transferred in later life into being into money And he said that like there's a constant Association with them in our minds and because it's the contrast he thought between the most precious thing which is money And the least precious thing which is shit and he also said it's because this it there's this perfect transition So when you're in your youth you're he thought erotically interested in defecation But not money and then as soon as that starts to recede you become erotically interested in money And so he thought they were intrinsically related pooing and money as we understand he was wrong about everything It is time for fact number three and that is

Chazinsky my fact this week is that swordfish can speed up and slow down time with their minds So this is this amazing thing that has been discovered about swordfish quite recently So if you say speed up and slow down time in the end time is about how you're perceiving stuff, right? So swordfish if hunting their time perception is about the same time as ours Which means that they basically are processing all the images that are coming into their eyes and their brain is processing That as fast as we do so they experience time in the same way as we do But if they're not hunting then time goes about five times more slowly for them It all slows down and they can do this deliberately

so what they do is they heat up their brains and their eyes and That just makes them be able to absorb more information And so the faster you can see light coming into your eyes and all these images then the slower time It's amazing and it means that they can hunt better, right? Yeah, exactly. So it's like Good a kind of an analogy is if you swat a fly or you try to swat a fly Then you're usually unsuccessful and that is because they are seeing way more frames per second than you are So you think you've got really close But to them they're like it's like so easy like to a fly if they watch a movie

It's just like a drawing and then a bit of a wait and then another drawing That's why we say time flies. No, it isn't. Yes, it is. I'm pretty sure it is So what happens because I've actually swatted flies. Do I have access to? You're not a you're not Neo in this No, it means that they just didn't see you coming But if they were to see you coming it would be like Neo, isn't it? It's like in the matrix You kind of see it slowing down and coming towards you really really slowly

Yeah, right and the weird thing is that they knew that swordfish did this thing where they heat up their eyes and their brains They found that out a few years ago, but they only just realized why and they did it By removing the retinas of freshly caught swordfish and they put them in a bath and they Connected them to some electrodes to measure their risk like the response of those retinas to lots of flashes of light And they changed the temperature of the bath that the retinas were in and when it was in a hotter bath Then their response to light was ten times faster So their response their ability to absorb lots of information and this is just a detached retina fully detached from the fish which has been eaten somewhere and

That retina responded ten times faster to the light that was being given to it than if they were in a bath that was much colder It is amazing. Yeah, do you know they don't stab their prey? I sort of vaguely assume that they would say they have like a really long Draw and I just assume that they would kebab as it were Yeah, I think the problem would be if you're a fish and you could kebab a fish Yes, you can't grab it with your hands Very true if you were feeding others if you went round as the kebab What a party that would be where the waiter had all the food balanced on his nose for you

Yeah, I'd go but the problem is they're solitary fish, so they can't do that They can't eat off each other's noses. Oh, well, they're quite solitary, but they do yeah They're very solitary, but what they do is did not know this so they they do this sailfish do this as well another fish with a very Very long upper draw they slowly put their bill into a school of sardines or other smaller fish and then yeah Yeah, yeah, they thrashed their head from side to side sorrow like sorrow and then they've they've they injure enough fish in that They can catch them they can then just eat them Amazing how they do that with the noses because they will slot their noses into a big school of fish that they've herded Into a big cluster and the fish don't notice so you can see the swordfish or the sailfish's nose

Sitting in amongst them just waiting with all the fish for me around they they sweat out of their noses But instead of sweating sweat they sweat lube Is there what's the what's the purpose of it? Well, it makes them really slippery and it means they can swim really really quickly There's no sexy evening where you go. Did you bring the swordfish? And in Sicily in the 18th century, it was believed that swordfish would dive out of the way if they heard anyone speaking Italian So all the local fishmen spoke Greek the whole time Wow Wow, but we think what that actually was it was basically an excuse for not catching them so You haven't caught any swordfish. Oh, it's because you know Leonardo's been speaking Italian. That's why we didn't catch them

We're gonna have to move on very shortly to our next fact just one last bodily control thing Yeah, so this is about heating yourself up. There are monks in Tibet who can decide how hot they are just through meditation I mean really? Yes, it's been tested and it's not like a huge difference. It's not as though. They'll be dangerous to touch But they can increase the temperature of their extremities just through meditation They train themselves a bit for years and they're quite good at it There is a report which says that if you put wet sheets on them, they could be dry within an hour But I think that is not true. I think that's an exaggeration Also, I think it's quite offensive to do that

Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show and that is Andy My fact is that in 1986 Waddington's invented a board game which was all about trading cattle semen This is a real game. It's called grade up to elite cow It sells itself as a game of skill and chance for dairy farmers And we have a copy here tonight That's good, it says from two to three thousand players This was by the British Friesian Cattle Society and it's basically marketing for cattle farmers It's like monopoly basically, but instead of property you collect semen

So there are various squares all the way around and there are risks and rewards. Here's one of the squares Accident to semen flask All your semen is lost unless an insurance policy is held return all your semen discs It's incredible. Is anyone ever played this? Lots of people if you go online. I started googling. It's so many people have played it. Yeah There's a there's a great website called boardgamegeek.com and they have a lot of reviews and the review. Oh nice Cool, but the reviews are I mean then they no one really loves the game, but they love the idea of it So one of the reviews was monopoly with cows and semen

No, the rules are quite complicated You start with little cows and you go around the board and that you know, there are there are various Seamen companies and there's one thing which is there's many pitfalls along the way as you're going around So you can pick up those market cards that you get sort of like monopoly Yeah, which will state stuff like this cow has persistent mastitis. Seller at the market price Thoroughly realistic game basically Well, yeah, I think so. I think that's very deceitful. You can't sell a cow at the market price I asked persistent mastitis and not to she didn't do this in Devon where we were last week

Takes out of town So is it is is to help? Help anything really But there are but there are lots of ball games where the point was to help so they used to have very moral purposes So the new game of human life was a 1790 classic and the aim of that was to be the first player to become an old man That's it. Surely whoever's oldest at the start has that You have to move through the seven periods of life and accumulate moral observations along the way Yeah, have you heard of Trump the game? No, yeah, that was quite a big one actually

It was launched in 1989 with a tagline. It's not whether you win or lose. It's whether you win The head of Parker Brothers said it can leave you exhausted and feeling like you don't want to play again Words later attributed to stormy Daniels Can I just you mentioned the game of life I think the early version and I used to play the game of life as a kid and it's amazing but it actually started in 1860 and at that time it was called the checkered game of life and it was made by this lithographer so like image printer an artist called Milton Bradley and He was very successful at the game of life

But the reason he had to make it is because he'd been very unsuccessful in another way So if you've ever played the game of life, the reason it exists is because Milton Bradley made lithographs of Abraham Lincoln and that was when he was a presidential nominee He wasn't very well known and he didn't have a beard. They were clean shaven Oh, what's it like a little girl who told him to get a beard or it was yeah So him and this little girl would have beef So he sold these lithographs really well and they were extremely popular and then Lincoln suddenly thought I'll grow my distinctive beard Everyone will associate with me forever more and the prince became totally worthless and this guy Milton Bradley

When completely bankrupt and then he created the game of life and he was a very moralistic guy So the game of life if you've ever played it has a spinning thing in the center rather than a dice And that is because dice were associated with gambling and he was very Christian and dice were evil So he had a spinning tea totem then It's not funny actually. It's evil That's what it has but it came it became super popular This is something I think we may have mentioned before so during the Second World War MI 9 which is like the cool version of MI 5 and 6

They smuggled escape kits to prisoners of you know allied prisoners of war who were being held in Germany They smuggled them escape kits inside Monopoly And the other thing I did they had they got in touch with another firm and they distributed snakes and ladders kits with genuine Escape equipment hidden inside the actual ladders. You could this go No, it wasn't an actual ladder If I were a prison guard and someone had a snakes and ladders kit delivered with an enormous spade Within the box. I would notice. Yeah, but they genuinely did it amazing. You know the game guess who you've played that Yeah, that that was invented by one of Anne Frank's schoolmates. Yeah

And it was two people who invented guess who they became a couple They actually knew each other at that time as well they used to walk to school together in the morning but didn't go to the same school and They ultimately invented not only guess who but over a hundred board games Many of which we know the names of or might have played for various different countries But they started their very first thing was inventing a thing for the board and dairy company So they started by working for yeah for cows as well But that couple they I think got separated at one point and they had to

Well, the guy had to find her and you know, he went to the police station They said does she have glasses and he said no and they said, well, is she wearing a hat never mind? God that was a long one The Soviet Union had amazing games. Oh, yeah, they were also very moralistic So there was the game tuberculosis a proletarian disease It was Look after your health the new hygiene game the abandoned where you had to round up homeless children and take them to an orphanage And my favorite healthy living where you had to become the healthiest worker possible

So basically it was the Soviet Union trying to inculcate its values into people So you would be penalized for consulting folk healers or drinking a beer at lunch or consorting with a strange woman Mm-hmm, we're gonna have to wrap up soon guys There's a Kickstarter which you can get involved in at the moment It's a board game and it's called Brexit the board game of second chances And third chances And they say we invite you to relive that historic referendum, but this time you're in control Unlike no one being in control

Honestly, if someone if the devil said to you I invite you to relive that historic referendum and this time you're in control You'd be like, oh cool. This is hell then They say this is the absolute must-have game to make all this political mayhem fun again I just got one last yeah, sure which is sometimes there are mistakes on board games and in 2017 the makers of the Anton deck Saturday night takeaway board game were forced to apologize after it was found to contain multiple errors One question claimed that the moon is two hundred and twenty-five miles from the earth Okay, that is it that is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening

If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast We can be found on our Twitter account. So I'm on at Shriverland Andy at Andrew Hunter M James James Huckin and Chazinsky. You can email podcast at qi.com Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much. I'm a Smith. Good night