No Such Thing As A Fish - 29: No Such Thing As Terrestrial Sweetcorn

Episode Date: October 3, 2014

Episode 29 - Dan (@schreiberland), James (@eggshaped), Anna (@nosuchthing), and Andy (@andrewhunterm) discuss alien chess, whirling chairs, criminal theme tunes and how to get drunk on a shark.

We run it on QI a few years ago, which was, there's no such thing as a fish. There's no such thing as a fish. No, seriously, it's in the Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life. It says it right there, first paragraph, no such thing as a fish. 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 Shriver. I'm sitting here with three of the regular elves. It is James Harkin, Anna Chasinski and Andy Murray. Once again, we've got our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and here they are in no particular order.

James, starting with you. What's your fact? Okay, my fact this week is that the head of the International Chess Federation believes that chess was brought to earth by aliens. And he should know. Yeah. What kind of evidence does he have for that? He has first hand evidence because he was abducted by aliens in 1997 and shown around the galaxy, and they told him the earth is set to collide with the planet Nibiru, killing us all

if mankind does not cleanse its aura by playing more chess. In an interview and time magazine, that was. But what's his name again? Mr. Ilyum Djinov. He's a politician as well. He's the head of the Kalmynchia province of Russia, and he has friends such as Chuck Norris, and he was friends with Salam Hussein. Was he friends with David Ike? Why do these political guys, all these sort of like eccentric characters always have an American action hero as a good mate? They all have, you know, Chuck Norris being his mate, or like Kim Jong

Un having Dennis Rodman. Yeah, I guess it's like a trophy friend. Trophy American mate for some kind of buddy movie that may erupt one day. Any biography movie done of a big political leader of our time is effectively going to come out like rush hour. Chuck Norris just quickly on him. I read this thing whereby he, despite being in violent movies, hates that his kids would have to watch violent movies, but they all want to watch his movies. So he does this thing where he edits out all the fight scenes from his movies and lets his kids watch that. And I cannot think of anything more painful

than watching a Chuck Norris movie without the fighting scenes. Yeah. Did they think that he's in a load of 26 minute long feature films? Just back to this guy, Mr. Ilium Janov, he said that aliens gave us chess, that's one thing, but he also said they gave us something else. Anyone know what it is? No. Is it a technology or an illness or a body part?

No, sweet corn. He says they gave us sweet corn, but he says it was a different civilization. They gave us sweet corn. Maybe the Aztecs or the Incans or something. And are they threatening the world with destruction unless we eat as much sweet corn as humanly possible? Do you know what? He's been more asked about the chess donation from space than he has the sweet corn. I can't find anything else.

You know what, guys? I was really hoping this was going to be about chess. Yes, I think so. Oh, let's go into chess. Can I tell you the fact about chess? Yes, please. In 1999, Gary Kasparov, obviously great chess champion, played the world at chess. He played 50,000 different people from more than 75 countries in one game. So they all submitted votes on what move they should take as a team. And whichever move received most votes was the move that the world made against Gary Kasparov.

After four months, the game ended at move 62, when 51% of the world's team voted to resign. Wow. 49% must have been livid. But they weren't even acting on that. So 50,000 people, but they weren't even on their own, even as 50,000. They had four chess experts guiding them, acting as world team coaches and suggesting moves and strategies. So even with expert help, 50,000 people cannot beat Gary Kasparov. Gary Kasparov, when he so famously, he obviously had the two matches against Deep Blue, the supercomputer, the latter of which was in nine. So he won the first one, which was a set of six

games. And then in 1997, he played another set of six games. And in the first game of the six, he won, but he basically had a mental breakdown after the finish, because the computer had done what he thought was a completely ingenious move that even he couldn't understand. So Gary Kasparov was winning, but the computer moved a rook in a really random position, and Gary Kasparov couldn't work out why that possibly would make any computing sense. So suddenly he went, oh my God, I can't work out the logic of what this computer is doing. It must be better than me. And that was the last game that he ever won against the computer, because he became so frightened that, oh, this has super human intelligence. And actually,

one of the computer engineers admitted to Nate Silver 15 years later that there was a bug in the computer, and it just resorted to randomly moving a piece totally at random. It would be better if someone had just moved the horse in the wrong way. Just knock the table over. Oh my God, you can move a horse three up and five across. I don't know, one tell me this. He thought it was a sign that there were humans intervening with the computer. Oh yeah, and he thought they were very... Just about your thing about Kasparov versus the world, Andy. I can go one better on that, which is the first ever world chess champion was called Wilhelm Steinitz. And he was a great player, and he beat everyone.

And then he started to slightly lose his marbles a little bit, and he challenged God to a match. And he would play God quite often. And he quite often beat God, and he got so much better than God that he would start giving God like a pawn extra to try and make it a bit more even. Wait, when you say he beat God, it was God playing, exactly. Well, I think he was like maybe slightly schizophrenic. So he was getting the moves himself and go, oh, God did that. Oh God, you idiot. And so he would be God. And very sadly, he ended up in a mental asylum and died penniless. But he was the first ever chess champion called Wilhelm Steinitz. There is a debate about whether chess makes you mad or not. There's a really good

Nabokov quote about the fact that everyone who plays chess must eventually go insane. But my favorite chess player is this guy called Nathan Sharansky, who is now an Israeli politician, I think, but he was a human rights campaigner in Soviet Russia. And he was a childhood chess prodigy. And he was put in a Siberian prison in 1977 for nine years. And he said chess kept him sane. So he was in this tiny, freezing cold cell, hardly given any food. It was completely dark. There was absolutely nothing in the cell, just stone. And he just played chess in his head against himself for nine years and said that that was the only way that he survived it. Wow. And that kept him sane. Wow. I think it's in Iran. They banned the, you know,

when you get the pawn to the end and you can turn it into a queen, I think they banned that move because it promoted Bigamy because then the king had two wives. Surely it would be promoting transvestism. Are you assuming that pawns are men? Yes, I am. Are they? I don't know. I'm comfortable with that. Queens used to only be able to move less like they could only move one space like in any direction. Yeah, they were rubbish. They were the worst. And then they could move like knights for a while for some reason, which is kind of bizarre because you would have thought knights could move like that because their horses. Queen could do it too. Sorry, just your logic is like, well, they're on horses, so that makes sense. Actually, it's never struck me that that doesn't

make sense. The horses can jump over. I think a horse can jump over. Yeah, they can jump, but there's no particular reason why a horse could, would move two forward and one to the side at the same time. Do you guys, when you play Monopoly, are you going, okay, I'm going to get the car because that moves faster than a hat. This is a bit too much logic on the battleship, blow up the iron. Yeah, you seem they brought out new pieces for the Monopoly board. Yeah, they brought in a cat last year, didn't they? Yeah, they've got rid of the iron or the old boot possibly and replaced it with a cat. Sorry, go on, Andy. Sorry, just on the Monopoly thing. The cat won a vote, a popular online vote, and it beat a robot, helicopter, diamond ring and a

guitar. And one of the guys from Hasbro said, I think there were a lot of cat lovers in the world that reached out. They're always bloody reaching out. Robot should have won. Robot should have won. King Canute, who we all know, turned back the waves. He once had a chess game with an Earl of his called Earl Ulf, and he did a move, I think it was a knight's move, but he realized it was a bad one, tried to take it back. Earl Ulf said, no, you can't do that. It turned into a massive argument. Canute tipped up the table, went off in a huff and then had Earl Ulf killed. Wow. Napoleon got really angry playing chess. Well, according to one account, Napoleon got really angry playing chess against the Mechanical Turk, didn't he? Yeah, we should explain who the Mechanical

Turk was. Yeah, so the Mechanical Turk was a fake chess machine that existed between 1770 and 1854, and it was theoretically, it was this robot that was dressed up like a Turk, and it managed to beat Napoleon, Franklin, Babbage, other famous people at chess, and it sort of toured the globe, and it was this Turkish man with a huge box on which he had a chessboard that he apparently played by some robotic power. So I don't know why no one ever said, hey, can this Turk play without the huge box? Because inside the huge box under the chessboard was obviously a guy who was controlling the chess pieces. Why does that box keep sneezing? Yeah. What? Maybe this is why the robot's not allowed on the Monopoly board. All games it's been banned from. Yeah, okay, Napoleon puts into

death. But yeah, at one point Napoleon, I think, wrapped a shawl around the Mechanical Turk's head so that he wouldn't be able to see the board, which obviously didn't make a blind bit of difference. There was another famous chess player who always had excuses, and he'd lost five games in a row, he was five nil down, and he said, oh, the first one I lost because I had toothache, and the second one I lost because I had a headache, and the third one I lost because I had rheumatism in my legs, and the fourth one I lost because I just wasn't feeling very well. And then they said, well, why did you lose the fifth one? And he said, what, am I expected to win every game? That's like when David Hay after his match where he lost, he's like, I twisted my ankle this morning

and that was his excuse. No, he broke a toe. He broke a toe. I broke my toe and that really affected how I punched with my arms. I just wish I'd learned. Oh, come on, that's all right. Yeah. What, your toe? Yeah, you can't move. It can be really painful. No, he was fine. Can I just say, if David Hay is listening, I believe you. Oh, me too, actually. Sorry, David. I don't, but I don't know who you are. I thought you were a chess player. Yeah. Come on, let's bring weedy chess player Hay over here. This is rash, guys. I'll break his other toe. Okay, time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week concerns the Greenland

shark, which is a shark I didn't know existed until a few days ago. And what I love about it is the Greenland shark is so slow that it basically needs all of his food to be asleep in order to eat it. Because otherwise if it can move, anything can out swim it because its fastest speed is one mile per hour. Why is it so slow? Because it's in cold water and so it needs to preserve all of its energy and so on. They can do a little burst of speed, can they, the sharks? They can, but when they say, when they, in everything I've read, I could be, if someone out there knows any different, because I'd love to know, apparently with the burst of speed, they can only get up to about 1.6 miles an hour. So that's their burst of speed.

That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah, it's not so much a burst, is it? They're amazing looking. They're 20 feet long as well. They're huge. Yeah, they're ginormous. So eat seals, the Greenland shark, and the problem with eating seals is that it's fine if they can manage to get the seal, but the seal can swim at two miles per hour. So it's always just in front of the shark who's given it its all. It's not always just in front. It's always increasing its distance by a mile every hour. So basically they have to wait to find a sleeping seal. And here's the thing, the seals, their main predator are the polar bears up on the ice, and they would rather be in the ocean and risk being asleep, because they can probably have a

good sleep, notice a shark on its way, and by the time it wakes up, it can still get away. Yeah, you could press snooze quite a few times before it gets you, couldn't you? Yeah. But they're extraordinary creatures just generally. Their skin is poisonous. I don't know if I've read about that within any other sharks. Not the rest of them too. They're flash as well. Yeah, yeah, so they're completely poisonous. We couldn't eat them. And do you know what it does to you if you eat it? Do you know the effects it has? What's the poison? So the poison is trimethylene oxide, and so if you eat the flesh of the shark, that has the

effect of extreme drunkenness. So if you manage to not eat too much, then you can just get really pissed. So it's like licking a toad, except if you don't like drugs and you like alcohol? Yeah, exactly. Wow, like a hallucinogenic toad. You can lick this shark. I think you'd have a nibble. You can cook it though. There are ways of preparing it properly, but it's a very disgusting way of cooking it. You have to bury the meat in the ground. It's one of these, is it?

Yeah, for six to 12 weeks, and then you expose it every so often, and you thaw it out, and then you freeze it again. Then you have to hang it up to dry for several months, and then you finally cut it into bite-sized cubes. Wow, I think in order to eat that, you'd have to be pretty drunk. And it says the end product, which is called hecarl, or hacarl, is a delicacy, which is the universal way of describing foods that are horrible, but rare. They can live. These sharks can live up to 200 years, they think. No, that can't be right.

Yeah, this is what they say. They know this because scientists have said that they can live up to roughly 200 years of age. They know this because they measure how much they grow per year, and they only grow about one, between half and one centimeter per year. And so they found them the size of great white sharks, and they made an assumption that that's how large they can get. It's really weird how little we know about this shark as well. They were only first photographed in 1995, and the first bit of actual footage of them is from 2003. So they're kind of this new species to us, really. It was actually thought that sharks in general died in the 20s, but then they did radioactive tests on them, because the radiation that went from the nuclear tests into the environment meant

that you can test how old things are, and they found that sharks now routinely live into the 70s, at least. Wow. Wow, okay. Yeah. That's such a strange thought, isn't it, an elderly shark? They have found inside the Greenland shark, haven't they? Some pretty impressive animals, given that they move so slowly. So they've found reindeer, and they found really fast-moving seals inside it. A lion, a cheetah, a polar bear, which is weird. They basically eat everything, because they don't have many options of living things to eat, because everything can swim away. They're genuinely scavengers. If they see something dead and it looks edible, they will eat it, because there are three options. It's either asleep, it's dead, or it's slam into my face.

Those are their three eating options that they have. I want to talk about some slow chases. Okay, yeah. I don't know when this was. A few years ago, there was a news report of a guy called Mr. Smith, who stole a JCB, and then he drove off at 10 to 15 miles an hour. The police were called. They started chasing him, but then realized that he was just going, and they couldn't stop him. So the policeman got out and chased him on foot. He said, I was able to keep pace at a fast jog, which is quite a good police chase. I was also reading about this really cool thing called the Marathon de Madoc, which is a French marathon. It's known as the world's longest marathon. It's a full 26 miles, and there are 23 wine stops on the way.

Is that where you just paused to complain? Sadly not. No, it's where you drink wine. They stops also offer specialties such as steak and ice cream when you get to stop. At 23 miles, there's an oyster stop, so you can have some oysters. According to the organizers, this marathon has the most medical support of any marathon in the world. Of course, yeah. And no one's ever finished it. Come for the steak. Stay for the heart attack. Are the slowest animals. The sloth is obviously a good guy and can only move three meters per minute, but I think that's fine because it can do so much other cool stuff. So it can spin its head 270 degrees, which I didn't know. Exorcist style. Quite impressive. Yeah,

James is trying it now. You've got about 40, I would say 40 degrees you've managed. No, you've got about 90. But I didn't know the sloths were so sudden through that algae grows on their coat and they use it as camouflage. Well, I think they're justifying that after the fact. No, this is camouflage. They eat it as well, don't they, the algae. There you go, this leads to a brilliant interesting thing about the sloths, which is the two-toed variety, I think they climb down from the tree to defecate and that uses up 8% of all their energy, which is a lot of energy just to go to the toilet. Terrifying that it would be 12 shits away from death. One uses 8% of your energy. Yeah, you will be counting in your head. That's four. That's

like you could see the energy bar at the top of Street Fighter. That's how you can break that down. You'd have to really conserve it, wouldn't you? Do they know that? I need it. I can hold it for another six hours. But it's been 11. Okay, time for fact number three, and that is you, Chazinsky. My fact is that in the 19th century, you could be committed to an asylum for novel reading. No. What's up? You're caught reading a novel. You're banged up. Was it specific novels? I didn't say, actually. It was just so this is, well, I found records from West Virginia Asylum from between 1864 and 1889 and Pennsylvania State Lunatic Hospital, just two sources that I found which give lists of reasons for admission. And one of them is novel reading. Other reasons for

admission into the West Virginia Asylum in that time period include kicked in the head by a horse, bad whiskey, and imaginary female trouble. I don't know what that is. Hysteria, I guess. But imaginary. No, there's a separate one. Hysteria is totally separate and menstrual trouble is separate. Could be an imaginary female trouble with the wife. It was only men. You're not married. Get to the asylum now. Actually, speaking of that, so in the other asylum, the Pennsylvania Asylum, novel reading was cited as a cause of lunacy in two patients. One man was admitted for mortified pride, but the most common cause of admission, say the most common illness or the most common reason for going mad, for which 226 patients were admitted in one year in

1866, was just trouble. Yeah, I got trouble. It's an incredible list. It includes things like the war is another reason for admission to an asylum. Yeah. Do you reckon that's PTSD? That would be shell shock. Yeah, shell shock. Two more of my favorites from that list. One of them is tobacco and masturbation. Are those paired together? Yes, they are. There's a separate one for masturbation and then tobacco and masturbation, I believe, is a different cause. There's masturbation and syphilis, suppressed masturbation, masturbation for 30 years, and my favorite, deranged masturbation. That's your favorite what? Hobby. This is like a list of our weekend. It's my to-do list. Masturbation also thought to be caused by novel reading

in the 19th century. Really? Yep. I was reading an extract from a book called Disease Insanity and Deformity written in 1860, and it said masturbation often caused by novel reading. And the way you can spot masturbation in somebody, so obviously it's a terrible sin. I know how to spot it. I don't need a guide. It's hard to identify. Give me a lineup. I'll spot the guy. It's number four. You can tell because he's got tobacco. How do you really spot it? You can spot it by sunken, ghastly eyes and clammy, greasy skin, irritability, eyes averted when they meet us, basically all the symptoms of being a teenager. Sorry, I have a good thing. This was in 1869 and it was an essay by the Reverend J.T. Crane

about novel reading, about why it's so bad for you. And there was loads of different reasons. Mostly it's about encouraging imagination and obviously that's not to be encouraged. But one of the things that says that a novel reader is merged in the hero of the story, handsome in person, brilliant in mind, endowed with every excellence and bearing a name of at least three syllables. So basically if you read novels, it makes you think you have a name of three syllables. He soon imagines he is desperately in love with some little damsel in the neighborhood. He begins to canvass her, she turns him down and eventually he commits suicide. And that's apparently if you read novels, that's what will happen to you. To every person who read a novel,

really? That's what they said. It is extraordinary, but we don't realise that the novel was a new form in the 18th and early 19th centuries. But it's extraordinary to think of a world in which novels were unknown. And then suddenly people were writing these books. And it was a lot of worried, of course, typical to the time about the effect on young women. It was all about women. How they would imagine themselves to be, as you say, James Heroines and things like that. That would lead them to abandon their studies, their wholesome pursuits. Actually, Jane Austen mounts a very lively defence of novel reading in North Anger Abbey. She says they contain everything that's excellent in mankind.

She did have a vested interest. She was a novel writer. Oh, you've blown the lid right on this one, Jane. Get it in private eye now. Not just women, because what about Goethe's Sorrows of Goethe? I like that it's Goethe's Sorrows of Goethe. I do like that. No, but that was the novel he wrote, wasn't it? The main character commits suicide. One of the characters was very distinctively dressed. I can't really remember. It was like he had yellow trousers or a red jacket or something. He commits suicide, and then everyone supposedly copied him. There was 2,000 suicides in Europe blamed on that novel. Wow. So they are dangerous. Stay away from the novels.

Okay, we've got to move on. Anyone got anything else? Just some really good stuff about how they dealt with the mentally ill in the 19th century. When you were put into your asylum for novel reading, some things that you could have done to you were freezing cold showers and shaved heads were often administered because it was thought that you could release the madness through your head. You'd have an application of blisters where your skin was burnt a lot, so you'd blister it up, so a blister would be prescribed. The funnest, I think, are whirling chairs. These were what they sound like, really, where you get sat in a chair tied to it, and it spins around and around and around,

and it's supposed to send your madness propelling from your body. There's a great account, for instance, in 1822. Did it work? Yeah, work like a charm, work like a dream. In all the accounts I've read, I've read tons. It's always no improvement, no improvement. They never caught on. If there was a transcript of just like the doctor's kitchen where they all met during the day, they would sound way more mad than anyone who was in that asylum. How's your day been? I put him on the whirling chair to, you know, propel his madness out of him. How'd it go? It didn't work. I don't know if we've got a faulty chair. I don't know what's going on. Just the conversations would have been insane in there. You did whirl him

fast enough. Okay, time for our final fact, and that is Andy. Hello. My fact is that the Japanese Yakuza crime syndicate has its own website, which has a theme tune designed to attract new members. Wait, so just very quickly, because I don't know much about them. This is like a real kind of menacing mafia-like group. Yeah. Except that there's a lot of acceptance of them in Japanese society, and it's not illegal to be a member, but it is illegal to do obviously a lot of the activities, which is extortion or rackets of one kind or another. So they have a very interesting racket, which is basically large-scale bribery, where they buy shares in a company enough to get them to a shareholders meeting where they can

speak in public, and then they just find dirt on the company's executives, get in touch with them, and say, if you don't pay us a significant whack of money, we will come to the shareholders meeting and read out all this terrible stuff about you. And so they do it. And the only effective method against them, apparently, is to have everyone's shareholder meetings on the same day, so that they can't be everywhere at once. So now 90% of companies on the Tokyo Stock Exchange have their annual shareholder meetings on the same day now. Yeah. But it's very weirdly half-accepted, and then they see themselves as not being criminals, they see themselves as having a proper code of honor and having, you know, they're like knights. And they sometimes do, I mean, whether it's a

cynical act or not, they, for instance, in 2011 were some of the first people to get to the tsunami, the tsunami-affected areas with aid, weren't they? And in 1995, the same thing in Kobe in when the earthquake hit, they think that if the Yakuza hadn't arrived in time with their aid, then there would have been much, much more damage done because other agencies couldn't get in fast enough. So they're controversial because they're not totally unpopular. They've got this thing. I read that they have a 12-page exam now for all of their members, just to make sure because they keep getting in trouble for kind of rookie errors in the way that laws are changing and so on. I think it's because they don't mind doing their big racketeering

and stuff, but they don't want to get in with a brawl or just like a really lame, like a parking fine or something like that. They're trying to stop them doing the small things. But that's what's really funny because in a normal exam, if you were doing that for normal people who just live quite a legal life, it would be stuff like not parking your car in a certain spot. The stuff that they have, the topics that they cover are dumping industrial waste and vehicle theft, which is normal. I love that dumping industrial waste. They also have a newsletter that they do. Do you want to? No, no, you go for it. So it goes only to the regular members. You have to be a proper full-time

member to get one of the newsletters, but that's 28,000 people and it's motivational articles from the management about the difficult times we're going through. Now it's going to pick up soon. Haikus, articles on fishing in treaties to perform good works. I think it's designed partly as a little propaganda thing because they know that people outside the Haikus are also going to read it and they're like, hey, these guys, they sound like pretty fun. We should go angling sometime with them. Did you go onto their website that you were talking about? Yeah, I did and it's very old school. You can translate it into English, can't you? And a lot of it is about anti-Marijuana, saying that marijuana shouldn't be allowed in the country and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, exactly. The banished drugs and purified the nation league is the front for it. Isn't there a branch of it that is quite anti-drug zone? It's called the Yamuchai something. Yamaguchi Gumi? Yeah, the Yamaguchi Gumi is genuinely quite anti-drugs or parts of it are very anti-drugs, aren't they? Yes, they are. So they're selective about the crimes they commit? They are, exactly. It's more a kind of power extortion, racketeering thing. I should say where I got this fact from. It's from this magazine called Delayed Gratification Quarterly, which is a very cool magazine because it's all news from three months ago, which has been filtered and written about really carefully. And there's this incredible photo feature,

which you should check out by a guy called Anton Custos, who was allowed into the syndicate for two years to photograph them. Their tattoos are extraordinary. They often don't get as say. Oh, we'll put these up on the side. Yeah. And if you Google Anton Custos, it's K-U-S-T-E-R-S, then you'll find his photos often. Right. This magazine just sounds like an excuse for a newspaper that was very slow getting to the press. It sounds like if Greenland Sharks made a newspaper. I did genuinely try and get hold of Delayed Gratification Quarterly on Monday last week, and they said, come back on Wednesday. Excellent. Hell's Angels, another, well, the U.S. Department of Justice considers them a crime

syndicate. And anyway, I was reading a news story on the other day where a German student mooned a group of Hell's Angels and hurled a puppy at them before escaping on a stolen bulldozer. So he ran outside, presumably, where every single one of their Harley-Davidson's was sitting, thought, I need an escape vehicle. Need to get away from these guys real quick. Bulldozer. He must have thought that the dog would distract them somehow. Well, it must have, because he was stopped by the police, not the Hell's Angels. Perhaps they thought they didn't really care that much, and they'd rather go on drinking. Did they have a theme tune as well? Oh, speaking of theme tunes, did you manage to find the

Yakuza theme tune? Yeah. So here it is. So the lyrics are, with nothing but my courage in this body, I'll trust myself to the life of a Yakuza and follow this path I've decided on. Wow. It's not as jingly as I was hoping it would be. I was hoping it was more like an advert trying to get you to a KFC or a McDonald's or something like that. Yeah, I'm not signing up after hearing that. You should be like, don't be a loser, join the Yakuza or something. James has been the whole bogus planning that. So speaking of theme tunes, did you guys know that Salmon Rushdie wrote a theme tune once? No. For a TV show we all know and love? Nope, he wrote a theme tune. It was titled

The Best Things Begin With B and it was for the Burnley Building Society. He wrote the lyrics to it. You can dream a little, you can dream a lot, but the best dreams of all are the ones you've got building in the Burnley. That is fantastic. And I can't find any evidence of it online. I reckon he goes through the internet every day and makes sure he deletes every reference to it. That's great though. I didn't even know Burnley had a building society. He didn't do his job. Apparently he was very bad in advertising. The one thing I know about Burnley is they drink more Benedictine than anywhere else in the world. Do they? Well, the best things in life do begin with B. Oh god, it's working. They drink it in Benion Hots, which is Benedictine in hot water and it's a

specific club especially in a certain area of Burnley and they all drink Benedictine. Really? And then invest their money very sensibly. Yes. That's what they're into. There was something else. Oh yeah, he worked, he came up with the slogan for fresh cream cakes, naughty but nice. Yes, he did. And he also invented the word irresistible bubble for Aero chocolate bars. Pretty cool. So that obviously prefigured a lot of his magical realism later on. Can I tell you something about theme tunes? Yes, please. Okay, I have a couple of things about theme tunes which I really like. So you know the theme tune to Desert Island Discs? Yes. Yeah, very nice. It was inspired by the view over Bognoregis.

Yeah, the composer wrote it looking across the lagoon towards Bogna. It's called the Blue Lagoon or something, isn't it? Yeah, it is Sleepy Lagoon. It kind of makes you want to go there. Good old Bognoregis. It gets really bad wrapped, doesn't it? It does. Yeah, it shouldn't, as you say. It's like water just a quick interjection. Waterloo Sunset was originally called Liverpool Sunset, wasn't it? Because it was about the beauty of the Sunset of Liverpool and then it was changed because I think the Kings felt that Waterloo might resonate with more people. Burnley Sunset would have been better, wouldn't it? Burnley Sunset, yeah. The best things in life begin with B.

Someone rushed he's working on his sequel now. A Burnley Building Society Sunset. Did you know that the Star Wars theme tune has lyrics? Well, no. Yeah. What are the lyrics? So, okay, basically there was a holiday special that was made that George Lucas has since said if he had enough time and a hammer he would go around smashing every pirated copy out there that still exists. And it was basically the story of Chewbacca going home for Chewbacca Wookie Day with his family. During it had all these very surreal moments and all the characters from Star Wars were in it, including Princess Leia, who then sings the Star Wars theme tune with lyrics. Yeah. And the lyrics are roughly,

we celebrate a day of peace, a day of harmony, a day of joy, we can all share together joy. Really boring lyrics, but it's a really nice, it's a really nice thing to know that lyrics are out there for that song. There was an, I don't know if it's right to call this a theme tune, but early American presidential candidates, they would have songs associated with them. Oh yeah. And they kind of are like theme tunes. So, John Quincy Adams was the president in 1828, and he was the incumbent and he was facing Andrew Jackson. So, John Quincy Adams, he didn't write it, but a song penned on his behalf was called Little No Yee Who's Coming, and it warns of fire and slavery and pestilence if John Quincy Adams loses the election.

Lyrics are fires are coming, swords are coming, pistols, guns and knives are coming, if John Quincy not be coming. That's quite good. And then he lost the election by a landslide. And did, was America overtaken for the next hundred years by fire and brimstone? It was not. You were just, you were talking about presidential theme tunes. I really like the fact that was it Bill Clinton's, one of the democratic conventions when Bill Clinton was incumbent, he, it was originally going to be the theme tune for the convention was going to be Mambo number five until some smart person pointed out that it contains the lyrics, a little bit of moniker in my life. So they changed that. I think Bill Clinton used to go up to ladies and go,

the best things in life begin with a B. That's very funny. Have we got any more on this? So there was a gang of counterfeiters that tried to con the Bank of England a few years ago out of 28 billion pounds. And they did that by claiming to have a collection of 1000 pound and 5000 pound banknotes. According to the news article, the audacious plot was foiled by the fact that the 1000 pound banknotes had not been legal tender for more than 60 years and the 500,000 pound version never existed. My Roman coin scam is going to go really bad. Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thank you so much, everyone, for listening. If you want to get in contact with any of us about the stuff we've been talking about, you can head to at QI

podcast on Twitter as a mainstop. But if you want to get to us individually, I can be gone on at Shriverland James, Techshapes, Andy at Andrew Hunter M and Anna. You can email me on podcast at qi.com. Why are you chuckling? I don't know. It always, when you say it, the fact that you're not on Twitter and then you say an email, it sounds as far away as like say facts. Telegram. Telegram. Okay, that's it. You can also head to our website. No such thing as a fish.com where we've got all the previous episodes of the series that we've made so far. It's about 27 episodes. Otherwise, we'll see you again next week for another episode and catch you then. Goodbye.