No Such Thing As A Fish - 332: No Such Thing As An Innocent Apple

Episode Date: July 31, 2020

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss stickers, smartphones and a man who spent a lot of time cooped up. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi everyone, James here. Now before we start this week's show I just want to tell you one little thing about it and that is that it was actually recorded quite a long time ago, all the way back in February in fact and the reason I want to tell you that is because first of all it's obviously in the office and we're all still in our homes at the moment and also because there'll be a few things that we might say in there that might really perhaps give away that we didn't record it this week for instance. I do talk about Jasper Carrot for a while and that probably would have been a dated reference any time that we said it in the last five years but hey when you listen you'll get the idea so enjoy the show and just marvel about how

young we all sounded back in February. Okay, on with the podcast! 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 James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and Anna Chazinski 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, Anna. My fact this week is that in the 18th century women expressed their political beliefs by wearing decorative stickers on their faces. Wow, that's cool. What kind of stickers did they say like vote labor or? Yeah, screw you Boris, I just swirled all over their forehead. Very prescient

of them. Women have amazing foresight. And foreheads, they have a sticker on. No, this was so facial stickers were this huge fashion for about sort of 200 years and about the turn of the 18th century they suddenly became political and so there was one commentator for instance who said that he went to the opera and he saw two parties of very fine women as he said arranged in battle formation against each other and he said one group was wearing patches and stickers on the left side of their foreheads and the other on the right and became apparent they were wig supporters and Tory supporters and I looked into this and this was a thing. So it wasn't the stickers were just like little like beauty spots or something but it was where you wore them that was important,

is that it? Yes, that seems to be it, yes. So they started off as for decoration but it got to the extent that there were some marriage contracts where women would insist before they married their husband that regardless of the husband's political opinions the wife should be able to patch as she pleased. Wow. And it's so you would have one or two things but did it get to the point where people you know when you see full face tattoos? Did you ever see people just completely? You would see not completely the full face but you might see lots of these like fake beauty spots and you could supposedly identify prostitutes because their faces had so many of these patches on them. Was that a sign of being sexy though having lots of stickers?

Well having one sticker was supposed to be and the reason is supposedly Venus the goddess of beauty she had one mole on her face and it was by that one imperfection that you could see how beautiful the rest of her face was and the idea was that they were kind of copying that and by having like one little beauty spot it would show the paleness of your skin perhaps or you know show off the rest of your skin. So if you have lots and lots of stickers that means you're really really beautiful because you've got you need so many imperfections to disguise how fit you are. You wouldn't believe what I look like without these stickers on because I look really nice. It could have been that you're covering the symptoms of STDs.

It's a real gamble. So sorry I didn't think that we had glue sticker technology in the when is this 18th century. We had glue. Sure okay were they kind of fuzzy felt stickers that kind of thing? I actually don't think we had fuzzy felt. They would be made of various things so they could be made of silk or taffeta or leather sometimes and then they'd have mouth fur apparently. Mouth fur? On your tongue? No if I suddenly developed a lisp. It sounded like mouse from where I was sat but okay. Oh mouse fur okay I heard mouth as well. Okay right in and tell us what you heard. So and then they'd have on the back often a surface

that you could lick so women tended to take them out of their handbags and lick them to attach them to their face so you get very thin paper that does that. Well they had adhesive so they'd just stick it on with some glue. Yeah but sometimes the adhesive wasn't so great so there was an article in the spectator that spoke about a woman who had a beauty spot on her forehead but by the end of the evening it had gone to her chin. They got more and more elaborate as well didn't they? Is it caught on? So I think it started in France and the French called them mouche which is for flies because they look like little flies landing on your face but yeah they expanded to be weird shapes so by the end of the 18th century you'd have them cut into stars or sort of moons or crown

shapes or any shape you wanted really. You still get those don't you? On small children? Yeah and adults who like a bit of fun. Yeah why are you wearing that weird puppy dog on the middle of your forehead? I was so considering doing it this morning by bottled out of it again but yeah. No you do get them like little kind of I don't know stars and yeah. I've been very brave at the dentist today. Awesome. They don't stick those on your forehead though do they? No actually I've got I used to have one of those but it was a safety pin one so that's not for the forehead that's for the clothes. Safety pin really? Oh it was a badge I'm describing a badge. But what's interesting about that is I think you're only brave at the dentist once so you don't need it to be a badge

you only need it to be a sticker. Do you know what you're right I'm confusing it with my I've been to a party at Pizza Hut badge which is a badge because that's the thing that lasts a life if you go to a party at Pizza Hut in the early 90s. Yeah you want to show off about that don't you? That's why you wear badges. You don't want to be wearing a badge that says I've been brave at the dentist just to show off. You feel pretty silly at the military parade wouldn't you next to all the other medals? I got this one for bravery. I saw there's some drawings that people have done of some of the designs and there was a horse and carriage one and I think that's been questioned. That was satire was it? That was someone taking the piss out of power absurd they've gone. I thought that was

real too. Yeah I was really hoping that that would be because I just thought how interesting heads must have been back then. Just wait a minute if you're sitting on the tube and someone sat across from me with a horse and carriage drawn on their head and they had other cartoons you know I wouldn't need the paper. People still have tattoos these days so do you just when you're sat on the tube just read people's tattoos? I do but they give me a look that says I'm not friendly. Oh well this is the thing about other kinds of stickers is that they can be indicators of how friendly or not someone is so bumper stickers if people have bumper stickers on their car they tend to be more aggressive and territorial drivers. Study in 2008 by Colorado State University

and they surveyed people saying do you have bumper stickers on your car and do you drive like a bastard and basically people who said yes to one said yes to the other they said yeah I drive more territorially more aggressively I do not respond constructively on the road when people get in my way. And how often are these the baby on board stickers because I do think that's a well I read that article and actually it said that it doesn't matter what's on the sticker right so you might have a sticker that says everyone needs to be kind to each other and you're still going to drive like a maniac. Yeah so baby on board as well yeah more likely to be aggressive. Just one more thing on an alternative use for stickers for yourself for decoration is to

cover blemishes and so I think that's that's sort of where facial stickers might have come from originally but men wore them quite a lot to cover blemishes or to accentuate them and so so if men had been to war for instance it became quite common for them to come back and they'd put a scar sticker over their scar I think if a scar started to fade or something then you'd put a big black scar there and so there's for instance there's a bit in all's well that ends well which now makes sense if you know where Bertram comes back from war and it says he's got a patch of velvet on his face and it's unclear if there's a scar underneath and it was sort of a thing that people did if they hadn't really seen much military action and they were a

bit of a coward and they'd run away at the first sign anyway is that they'd suddenly put a big blemish on their face to imply that they'd been shot in the head. Wow that's amazing I've got a little scar on my face maybe I'll try and accentuate it. Have you? With some mouse fur. Why don't you do one of the sides I'm not sure which side. Oh yeah a little one. Somewhere you got shot in the Civil War isn't it? Obscene bumper stickers can sometimes be a matter for the law okay so there are all there are these lawsuits that happen in the USA over whether you're allowed a particular bumper sticker or not or whether it's basically creating a public disturbance just by having it on your car so in 2008 a guy went to the Georgia Supreme Court because he had a

shit happens bumper sticker okay and I he won and then more recently this bit is very rude by the way but the police in Florida arrested and charged a man who had a bumper sticker which said I eat ass and that was really big and it's right in the middle of his back windscreen as well so there's no way if you're driving along that you won't see it. And was he referring to donkey meat do we know? That wasn't his defence actually I mean it absolutely should have been but the police pulled him over and they said can you amend it so it wasn't offensive and he said well how do you suggest I do that and they said can you remove the second s from ass so it would be I eat as. But then the grammar police come in on the other side. Um guys who's the grandfather the god of stickers?

The god of stickers. The god of stickers. You all know this. Football albums. Panini. Oh no I was thinking of Mr Avery. Oh Avery yeah. Oh Avery. Stanton. Sorry sorry. Well because you never do any of the office admin Andy you are not familiar with Avery stickers but those of us who post letters every once in a while. This feels like more of a grudge it feels like this whole fact has been building up to a grudge. Um no so Stanton Avery mate was the inventor of the self-adhesive sticker as in you didn't need to lick it you didn't need to add glue to it and he still dominates the label market today so I was looking into him and he um so he built his first sticker machine I love this by marrying together a motor from a washing machine and a sewing machine sewing machine

so we smushed them together and generated a shed load of stickers his company was initially called cum clean products spelling cum k u m which I think is a good thing was changed. How did he make his glue? He was actually very cagey about the process but he was so pretty tired. He was super poor and so he really like dragged himself up from the bottom he lived in a rented chicken coop while he rented he couldn't even afford the deposit on a chicken coop. Did he pay the chickens every day? I don't know if the chickens own the coop I think they were also renting. Oh wow that was terrible flatmates. Do you want to eat an egg if your flatmate has just laid it before your horrified eyes? I refuse to eat food that's come out of any of my friends asses.

That's amazing. Yeah it's so cool. He could have written um I eat and then in brackets eggs that have come out of a chicken's clothes brackets ass. Another strong defense. So he tried a bunch of business. How did he get a washing machine in the chicken coop? So I think this was post chicken coop and he got it because he married a slightly wealthier lady who lent him a bit of money and he thought I need as a washing machine. He got back to your place I'll buy two chickens out tonight. So anyway. Do you invite them to the hendu? Okay it is time for fact number two and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the very first print run of the adventures of Huckleberry Finn had to be pulted after a bookstore owner

discovered someone had sneaked a drawing of a penis into one of the illustrations. The first suspect has to be the illustrator, is she? Yes we genuinely don't know. We don't know if it was the illustrator. We don't know if it was the photo engraver at the actual factory where they were printing the book. What we do know is when these books came out at the end of chapter 32 Huck Finn is meeting his aunt Sally and Uncle Silas and Uncle Silas has a big erect penis drawn in in the illustration itself and as a result 30,000 copies had to be pulted. And do they they definitely checked the plot and they don't it's not part of the storyline that references Uncle Silas's erect penis. Weirdly, weirdly I read the book and I can confirm there

isn't a bit where Uncle Silas has an erection and is showing it off to his family. That must have been very disappointing when you got to the end of that. It's the only reason I bought the book in the first place. So this is obviously it's a very important book in American literature. Ernest Hemingway said all modern American literature comes from one book and it's called Huckleberry Finn and the idea was it was the first book that used the vernacular of Americans. At that point Americans were really writing in the tone of British and European authors not using the day-to-day language and he kind of set the tone. Unfortunately, it's also a book that's laced with racism and that's caused

huge problems basically since publication. It's not a book that's sort of not been controversial throughout the years. The language used is difficult and racist and we should say that it's set Mark Twain wrote it in the 80s but it's set about 40 years earlier in the 1840s, isn't it? And the main plot of Huckleberry Finn for anyone who hasn't read it is basically it's about Huck Finn who is this kind of poor kid who held a seat 12 or 13 and he runs away along with a runaway slave who is called Jim and they run away together and they are good friends and Jim is a very sympathetic character but at the same time very problematically drawn. Not drawn with an erect penis like Uncle Silas we should say. People have objected to stuff other than that so it was extremely controversial

as soon as it was published largely because of the kind of crudeness of some of the language and that was written in this native dialect. It wasn't just like ordinary American dialect, it was proper Mississippi 1840s dialect and it was banned for bad grammar and employment of inelegant expressions. Things like in 1905 a Brooklyn library banned it because Huck not only itched but he scratched so apparently that's disgusting and he said sweat when he should have said perspiration. So Mark Twain had been kind of unhappy with the way that publishing had been going and he decided he didn't want to have normal publishers like before and get the money that way. He wanted to have a subscription service so he sent people door to door with like you know

the first chapter and said look there's this new book coming out how do you fancy buying it and then we'll send you all the chapters in future and he basically because he did this it meant he could have full control of it which meant he had full control of all of the illustrations and it meant that when the illustrator kept sending him stuff he was like don't like that, don't like that, don't like that, don't like that, do like that. Love that penis. So is that maybe why they pranked him? That's one theory that the illustrator hated him so much because he kept asking him to change things that he's like right fine. But they offered a massive reward to the press men working on the novel and a $500 reward which would have been a lot of money

today and no one fessed up so we still there's no culprit. And is the investigation still open? I think the reward is still available. He had a terrible relationship with his sort of typesetters and proofreaders and everyone like that didn't he which might be why they were so pissed off with him. He hated them and it does sound like they kept on trying to improve his punctuation and grammar which was deliberately vernacular and once upon getting a text back and seeing the corrections that had been made he wrote to a friend I've telegraphed orders to have the proofreader shot without giving him time to pray. So it was tense I think. If someone wrote that about hey I draw a penis on their picture. It wasn't the most successful book that he published with that

firm. So the first two books that that firm published were Huckleberry Finn and The Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, ex-president and it was pretty much the last thing Grant did was write this book and it was so successful that he gave Grant's widow the biggest ever royalty check in American publishing history. It was absolutely massive and it was thanks to that door-to-door technique that James mentioned because it was war veterans. So it was silver war veterans going door-to-door selling the book and that's a pretty strong sell you know. I might be wrong in saying this but from the story that I know about that it's that when Ulysses S. Grant died his wife was really struggling financially and was not given any help from anyone and Mark Twain published the

book and gave her that high amount of royalties before he knew it was going to be successful so that she had money to live off for the rest of her life. Apparently it's an extraordinary book that autobiography. Really? Yeah I've read so many things about it being the best book by anyone in government ever as a solid it's just incredible apparently. Surely not better than The Art of the Dale, surely? Surely not better than Jacob Reese Mogg's book about the Victorians. Can't be better than that can it? Now if we want to talk about offensive language and things. Mark Twain was wrote the first book on a typewriter in America. There's a bit of dispute over whether it was Tom Sawyer or another one of his books. It's usually credited as Tom Sawyer but he used

to love writing on a typewriter and no one really had it at the time so people used to write him letters and he would write letters back on his typewriter they would then write back to him asking about the typewriter and that got so annoying with so many people writing back to him asking him holy moly what is this this is incredible that he stopped writing letters using his typewriter. Really? She's got inundated yeah. I really love his correspondence because he didn't really much like getting them a lot of the time did he? I read one that he got in 1901 and the letter said dear Mr Mark Twain I am a little girl six years old I have read your stories ever since they first came out I have a cat named Kitty and a dog named Pop I like to guess puzzles did you write a story

for the herald competition I hope you will answer my letter yours truly Augusta Cortrecht to which he replied well no he didn't reply he just wrote a comment on it saying labor temp to the middle aged liar to pull an autograph. He invented one game for kids which I think sounds pretty cool so he he measured out a 817 foot path of his driveway and he marked every single foot and that was supposed to be a year and it was the year from 1066 when William the Conqueror arrived and the idea is you would walk along the path and at each point when there was a new king or queen in England or Britain then you would stake in the ground and you would be like oh this is Edward the first this is Henry the second blah blah blah and it was a way of having fun but also learning

your kings and queens because in those days education was very much rote learning like you just had to learn all these things and this was a fun way of doing it. Oh a very annoyingly slow way of getting to the front door after a long day in the office. But he turned it into a board game didn't he or he tried to it sounds really complicated I didn't fully understand it even after reading it. I thought it sounded quite it sounded a bit like battleship so basically it was another sort of history date memorization game and essentially you'd have a chart with a series of dates on it and each player would say a date so you say 1918 and then the other player has to say an event that happened on that date to say the end of the first world war. See I cleverly chose my

date in advance so I'd have something to say for it. I mean you also chose a date that was nearly ten years after Twain died when no one could possibly guess what was going to happen. But then a player puts a pin in that date if they get it right and if they don't get it right they don't get a pin and I guess when you covered up all your dates you've won. Sounds quite fun for a nerd. Okay it is time for fact number three and that is Andy. My fact is that before vaccination was invented the main method of inoculation against smallpox was to powder scabs and blow them up your nose. Lovely. Or to get someone else to blow them up your nose. That's hard to yeah it's very hard to blow up your own nose. And this was how inoculation worked for a long time it was done in China

thousand years ago. This was the method they knew about this. And it did work didn't it? It worked reasonably well so if you were healthy you would get some smallpox scabs and you would leave them for a little while because fresh scabs were likely to give you the infection properly so they would be dried aged smallpox scabs and they would be powdered up and then they would be blown up your nose with a special silver blowpipe for the procedure as well. The Chinese doctors had special blowpipes to do this and then apparently the right nostril was used for boys and the left for girls and you would maybe get some mild symptoms and some people did actually just then get full blown smallpox but most people then got it you know some mild symptoms and then were

resistant to any following exposure. There's a low percentage wasn't it? Yeah. So this was a really decent way of doing it before we had the method of vaccination. And we didn't know about this is that right? It took about 700 years to get over. And it works by the same method as vaccination right which is that it's an attenuated or weakened version of the disease in a scab. And your body then makes antibodies that can fight against that and then it can fight against the main thing is that right? Yeah. There was another version where you had some powdered scab as well or you had some pus from a smallpox pustule and you would make a little scratch on your skin and then you would just pour that pus or you know just rub that powdered scab into your skin and that worked too.

And that's called variolation because variola was the Latin for smallpox. In 2011 the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond had some things from its collection and one of them was a letter from the 1870s that had a smallpox scab in it. And the idea was that the person who wrote the letter in the 19th century was sending it to his father. It had been taken from the arm of a child and his father was going to make it into dust and inoculate people. But then it never got to the recipient and so they just found this letter and of course immediately the Census for Disease Control came in the hazmat suits and they said holy shit you don't need to be having this that the public can see this because smallpox has been eradicated basically hasn't it and

so yeah in the end there was some of the virus on this scab still but it wasn't deadly enough. I mean it must have attenuated pretty hard by that time. Yeah exactly. Over 100 when was it? It was from 1876 and they found it in 2011. Wow. That is really spooky finding it and not knowing what it is. You know you just think you found a little button or something. All right maybe it's like a little sticker to put on your face. But all these doctors had their own different methods of doing variolation and there were some celebrity doctors in Britain in the 17th, 18th century who worked this out. So have you heard of Johnny Notions? Sounds like he's got some weird ideas. Well he was a Scottish doctor and he had a really successful method for variolating because he

would collect the pus first of all and everyone had their own method of making it a bit less deadly basically. So he would dry it with peat smoke so he had a lovely sort of smoky flavour for the pus. Very nice. And then he would bury it in the ground between sheets of glass okay with some camphor. Then he would keep it there for seven or eight years. It's like he's making a whiskey isn't it? Yeah in genuine years and then he would insert it and he would then put a cabbage leaf on top as a plaster. And this was apparently a really good way of doing it and it just gave you the nice amount. I suppose it does take the edge off the urn pus doesn't it? Nice PT cabbagey flavour to it. Apparently you were more likely to get a job if you could be seen to have smallpox scars

because then the suggestion was oh great you can work with us you're not going to pass it on you've had it already. That was seen as a sort of ah great safe work mate. So two of the earliest people who worked with inoculation were Robert Koch in Germany and Louis Pasteur in France and they fell out with each other because um Pasteur once was doing a talk and he used the phrase requi allemande which means a collection of German writing but the translator translated it as augui allemande which means German arrogance and so Koch never forgave him for that because he thought that Pasteur was calling him arrogant. Although I think that before that they loathe each other if you read the dialogues that they had the letters they wrote each other it's just

basically spitting with rage you know uh Koch writing letters to Pasteur accusing him of stealing all of his ideas and vice versa saying you're a fraud you know really foul language because there was this huge fight basically when we suddenly discovered the power of the idea of vaccination between a few scientists wasn't there? So was that was after Jenner? Yes it was Jenner okay so Edward Jenner is the person who um kind of we give the we say created vaccinations today right he um got it from milkmates did he yeah because there were milkmates near him and he noticed that they got a thing called cowpox which is a disease that cows got and they would only get one single pustule on their hands which is where they've been touching the cows because of all the milking

and he theorized maybe this is a milder version of smallpox so then he did this amazing gamble Jenner he took some pus from a milkmaid and he injected it into a child yeah and six yeah not his child by the way although he did also do it with his own child actually later on so fair play um I think when he knew it worked and then he six weeks later he injected the child with full blown smallpox and he didn't know how it worked and um yeah and then but later in life they became friends so him and the child yeah James Phipps he was the son of Edward Jenner's gardener which if it hadn't worked would have made the gardening very very awkward I think for a long I think he would have ruined your rose bush after that he had smallpox when he was a child Jenner

and one of the reasons that he kind of went into getting rid of it later is because he had such a bad time of it he was varialated so they gave him some of the pus or some scabs or something but he was prepared for that by being starved purged and bled and locked in a stable with other infected boys with other infected boys yeah so they kind of varialated all these people gave them like very mild symptoms and then put them all in a stable wow meanwhile Stanton Avery's outside of the checking coop you don't know you're born mate okay it's time for our final fact of the show and that is James okay my fact this week is that you can tell if a movie character is a goodie or a baddie by the kind of phone they use that's that sucks now that I know that

and I'm watching movies I know sorry this is not just a spoiler of one movie this is a spoiler of all movies and so this came up in my rss feed and thanks to the blog Nitorama which I follow and it was an interview with Rian Johnson who's the director of the film Knives Out and he said that Apple have forbid filmmakers from letting villains use their iPhones on the screen and so if one of your characters is using an Apple product then they must be a good guy oh thank so you can't tell who's the good guy in the good the bad and the ugly for instance it's a wonderful life I'm not sure any of them had mobile phones in us they've been edited in it's yeah yeah but sometimes it's not clear who is a goodie

and who's a baddie if someone is if someone pushes one person in front of a train to say five people who will be allowed an iPhone at the situation you're absolutely right in any decent story everyone has a mixture of good and bad and everyone has one iPhone and one Android yeah that's a good point actually that saves it for me because the movie might have been sponsored by Samsung for example yeah yeah so that's good okay great I'll stop googling which phone sponsored all my movies but yeah and there was also an article in The Verge that says that Apple says that its products should only be used in the best light that reflects favorably on the Apple products and they don't they according to Apple they don't pay to have their phones in movies but what they

do do is give lots of free phones and MacBooks and stuff to the people who are making the movies in return for them being nice but you they wouldn't show someone looking up on the internet how to kill orphans on a MacBook on a MacBook you couldn't do that on a MacBook no yeah were to inject this person but this is a thing called product displacement which is the it's always kind of like product displacement product displacement is where you replace a real brand with a fictional one because the original brand are really annoyed about oh okay so there's a film called Flight which stars Denzel Washington as an alcoholic pilot who somehow he manages to pull off a crazy movie the plane's about to crash to you to you know it's all gone wrong on the plane

and he manages to fly it in upside down and then land it the right way up at the very last moment i'm going to say the first five minutes of that movie is one of the best things i've ever seen it's so tense it's so amazing okay and the rest is terrible right you didn't want to say it out loud but i've seen it too it's shit okay damn things the film is bad i'm gonna tell you all not to watch it especially now the ending's been spoiled anyway well the rest of the film is like other just a lengthy legal process about whether he was right to save the plane it's a legal drama imagine if you go to watch that film and you're five minutes late that would be the worst together oh my god they should make it into a short and release it

a short film yeah yeah anyway it's Robert Zemeckis who gave us back to the future he is an alcoholic pilot Denzel Washington the character sorry not Robert Zemeckis not Denzel Washington the character but he drinks Budweiser and a vodka that Budweiser own either while he's flying the plane or shortly before i mean you guys have seen the film so you'll know but Budweiser were furious about this and they said can you not show this drunk pilot singing a bud before he flies the plane and they refused they said there's nothing you can do but it's so um that happens sometimes movies do have to buckle to these bigger companies so Slumdog Millionaire when Danny Boyle made that he gave an interview where he talked about the fact that he had some criminal gangs drinking Coca-Cola at one point

um ice cold Coca-Cola and i don't know what to say are we sorry are you personally sponsored by Coca-Cola today wow was it was a refreshing ice cold Coca-Cola so yeah available in all shops but yeah they're drinking in that and Coca-Cola took a sort of stand against it and so they had to paint it out in the post-production of it yeah Slumdog Millionaire was the most bizarre film i hadn't realized this but obviously at the time it was so huge and it won the Oscar didn't it yeah and it was massive i hadn't realized it was made by the same company that makes who wants to be a millionaire so it was one huge piece of product place wow yeah isn't that Jasper Carrot who makes that yes it is i did sell yeah well he wrote Slumdog Millionaire it might be it's called

yes he's pretty hands off with it but yeah he's a direct beneficiary of both those things i think it's Celadon isn't it it's Celadon yeah it's well it's a company called Celadon of course it's like Celadon i just got it i don't think i don't think it's deliberately named to be like the Celadon it might be it's Jasper Carrot he does love his i think what's the metaphor behind that like don't look behind the Celadon it's actually Jasper Sarat any international listeners who wondering who Jasper Carrot is there's no time so Celadon made this who made who wants to be a millionaire and then they decided to make Slumdog to sort of advertise who wants to be a millionaire and the screenwriter for Slumdog Millionaire

was one of the co-creators of who wants to be a millionaire but the only thing that they stipulated was that at the end and this is a spoiler where he's being accused of cheating the hero is being accused of cheating the host of millionaire sort of tortures him backstage and at that point they said we can't have it look like the show is torturing this boy because that's going to make us look bad so it's just got to be the host so it's like Chris Tarrant's gone out on a limb but it wasn't Chris Tarrant in the film any international listeners who were clinging on after Jasper Carrot um so hang on wow torture equipment does the host of who wants to be a millionaire have

access to backstage like you couldn't do more than a quick chinese burn or a wedgie could you he's got that tension music yeah he's got a super long advert break without telling him i found out uh product just looking at product placement stuff i found out one of the first ever examples of product placement on a podcast okay so this was in 2005 there was a show called the dawn and drew show okay and it was the newspapers at the time had to explain what a podcast was which is so the report i read said a podcast is or this particular podcast is a program filled with strong language that is available only in a digital format and downloaded on ipods and other devices that play mp3 files okay so that's what a podcast is and this one was the dawn and true

show and it was sponsored it was product placement did by durax okay and durax um had inserted their product into the show because it was hosted by a husband and wife and the show featured the husband and the wife and their dog hercules tasting flavored condoms that was the first ever place the firm said they were delighted and they said this is quotes exactly how we want to position the branch were they condoms for dogs and humans alike no because you'd have to have a dog meat so anyway i'm just saying we've got further to sink before we you know your um this has not been a product placement but we're recording this podcast on mac computer and we're all good guys um now if you were to close that and don't close it because

we might lose the recording but you would see that the apple is upside down as you're looking at it so maybe if you half close it you see it's kind of upside down as you're looking now the reason that is is for product placement reasons so it was illegally blonde which is a properly great film she is using an apple mac but the apple is upside down to what we have it today because that's the way it used to be because it makes much more sense that if you have it closed and you're looking at it the apple is the right way up yeah um and that's how it used to be but then there was an employee called Joe Moreno who said to Steve Jobs look if we're going to put these in movies what we need is when it's open and you're looking at it the apple is the right way up yeah so they changed it

or if someone's just like watching you in a cafe of course you've got to put it the right way out for the people looking at it not the one who owns it already that's really interesting so basically the apple on your apple mac is not for you it's for everyone else yeah wow some advertisers um this is sort of the the next step they're doing for advertising and things so advertisers in soap operas are now selling billboards inside the fictional locations in the soap operas whoa yeah so coronation street is a fictional street but it's a fictional street with advertising billboards on it yeah and you know jewellery shops and other shops are buying up advertising space in fictional coronation street makes sense oh clever and there's a new thing also that other

advertisers are doing where you know you'll be able to digitally alter what viewers see on the screen when they're streaming so different people see different things is that what's happening so if you are watching uh let's say you drink whiskey and your tv knows that you drink whiskey there might be billboards for whiskey brands in the background whereas if you but what if you're a person who like secretly buys dog meat flavored condoms and you're watching coronation street with your parents that's such a good boy that's such a good boy the whole family looking at each other suspiciously it's like an agatha christie yeah exactly wow well they might do it based on the time of day even so if you're watching late at night there'll be adverts for as we all do what's

coronation street late at night absolutely have another late night set um yeah there'll be adverts for i guess late night stuff like swearing cocaine or if you're watching in the morning there'll just be adverts for cereal and orange juice well or whiskey just one ironic thing about this fact is that apples are a sign that someone's a villain what huh in films apparently people have spotted this if you're the baddie you're always eating an apple not always this isn't films yeah so mr bond the bad guys in doctor who do that don't they because an apple a day keeps the doctor away this is true please send in more if you've seen them but uh draco malfoy does it uh jeffrey rush in parts of the caribbean it's gonna crunch us down an apple call him

farrell when he's playing a vampire in something or other um and it's it's got a name it's the arrogant apple sometimes it's really just to show your dominance because it's kind of showing you're so aloof yeah yeah i can eat an apple as well as talking to you i don't give enough of a crap about what you're saying to stop eating my apple i wonder if there's like the history of the poisoned apple in fairy tales and things that's been theorized on the internet james you should check the internet out for more on that garden of eden again and apple was eaten there it's all on the forums sounds like we could think of everything on the internet anna so i'm not 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 have said over the course of this podcast we can be found on our twitter accounts i'm on at schreiberland james at james harkin andy at andrew hunter m edge zitsky you can email podcast at qi.com yep well you can go to our group account at no such thing or our website no such thing as a fish dot com why not check the internet out as well while you're there and uh we'll be back again next week with another episode we'll see you then goodbye anyway uh i was sponsored this week of the new durax range of pedigree charm stop the podcast