No Such Thing As A Fish - 334: No Such Thing As A Babysitter's Trade Union

Episode Date: August 14, 2020

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss swimming, wrestling, necking, and a very unfortunate giraffe. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Tijinski and Andrew Hunter Murray and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite 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 1948 a drive-thru fly-thru cinema opened in New Jersey where you could watch movies from the seat of your car or the seat of your small aircraft.

That's great. Okay, so a couple of things to say before we get into this. Number one is that most of the following material you're about to hear from me comes from an amazing book called The History of Driving Theatres by Kerry Seagrave and secondly, this fact would have made a lot more sense if it had been in its original setting which was in a drive-in show that we were supposed to do this week. Yes, yeah, this episode was meant to be in one very disclosed location and unfortunately got cancelled.

Sorry about that, everyone. Yeah, much apologies. Not our fault. Not our fault, but you're going to get the facts anyway. I think we can pretend, guys, we can pretend, we can just all pretend we're in a car. The people at home won't know. Andy, we weren't supposed to be in a car when we were doing the show, it was the audience that were in a car, we were supposed to be on the stage.

I was going to bring my car to the stage and then sit in there. So this fly-through, did you have planes and cars next to each other? The planes were behind the cars. That makes sense because if the planes were in front of the cars then it's a raw deal if you're sitting in your car, isn't it? Just looking at the arse of a plane. If it's a 747 or something like that, you don't want to climb in front of you. But this was organised by a guy called Edward Brown Jr. who was a former Navy pilot and

his drive-in had capacity for 500 cars and then 25 aeroplanes on the last couple of rows. And what would happen is you would fly into a nearby airfield and then you would taxi into the, not get a taxi, you would drive the plane on its wheels into the last row of the theatre and then afterwards a jeep would tow you back to the airfield and you'd be able to fly off again. And the charge for the aeroplanes was 25 cents. Wow.

Extraordinary. Yeah. I guess this was a bit more in the time when your average Joe sometimes had a plane. People sort of did a bit more in the 40s, didn't they? They did like a small piece together aeroplanes. I think it was much, much more common. People used to have hobbyists who would do sort of trick flights in and out of sheds and stuff.

Yeah. But still very weird. Although I read that it sort of caught on, so it must have had a few people going because a few more popped up in the subsequent years, right, in like Alabama and Texas. That's right. Yeah. Some of them opened by the same guy. So I don't know if that's a huge mark of success.

You don't open up a second drive-through fly-through unless your first one was successful. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But he really, it was quite exciting what he did because he bought this land and he turned the whole, so he set up the airport, he set up the drive-through. He bulldozed everything in the way using a World War I tank. And it also had a sort of gulf range next to it and an amusement park and playground. There was a great article by someone called Mary Morley Cohen on this.

And I'm just going to list the extra things that one particular drive-in had, OK? It had a playground, pony rides, a dance floor, shuffleboard and horseshoe pitching tournaments, cartoon carnivals, midnight spook shows, baby parades and beautiful child contests, daredevil car rides, circus acts, high-tower dives, anniversary and birthday celebrations, fireworks, a picnic and play area, potato sack races and television. What? That's just extra TV in case you were bored of the film, I guess. That's amazing.

There was one in Memphis where you could get your laundry done when you went to the drive-in. So you'd turn up with your laundry, hand it in and then they'd clean it for you and as you left, you'd pick it up. That's so good. It's almost like the films just weren't the main attraction. And I think someone did an experiment because they thought, actually, are people even coming to see the films? And so they didn't advertise what film was showing and the same number of people showed

up and then they started interviewing people as they were driving in and said, what film are you coming for? And most people didn't know what film they were going to see. They're just kind of coming because it's a thing to do. But I think the laundry thing was particularly interesting because that was about how one of the appeals of the drive-ins was that it appealed to a much broader audience. And so, for instance, one of the people they advertised to was mothers, housewives, because you could bring your kids.

So the idea was you didn't have to find a babysitter to leave them at home, brought your kids along. They also specifically advertised to disabled people because you can stay in your car. You don't have to get up and like maneuver into a seat. And they advertised specifically to obese people at the start, didn't they? I think one of the very first adverts from the guy who invented the drive-in was a picture of an overweight lady trying to squeeze into a cinema seat. And then it said something like, Kate doesn't have any problem at the drive-in.

So she was called Kate Smith, the lady who was in that image. And she was a really famous singer. And she was like the South America's version of Dame Vera Linda. So she was really big during the war, and she sang a load of amazing songs, and everyone got really patriotic about her. And she was also, she sang for the Philadelphia Flyers. So before the game, before every game, she would sing God Bless America. And whenever she sang, they almost always won.

They had a record of 100 wins and 29 losses and five ties whenever she sang. And normally it was more like 50-50. So all the other teams really hated her because she was just this amazingly good mascot for that team. But yeah, she was super famous Kate Smith. God, I feel terrible. I've described her as just an overweight lady trying to squeeze into a cinema seat. And she's basically the laughing charm of the whole United States.

I'm so sorry. But so that was the reason, wasn't it, for the whole invention of the drive-in. It was 1933, a guy called Richard Hollingshead was living in New Jersey, and his mother found cinema seats uncomfortable. And he wanted to fix that. So he thought, if she could watch it from the comfort of her car, this would be a much better system. So he rigged up a sort of system for her to test it out on.

And it's so clever, the sort of innovation that he did in the early days of, once he had the idea that this could be commercial, the thought of, OK, how do I deal with it if it's raining, for example? So he would have his water hose and sprinkler systems going off in the background while he tested different ways. He thought if cars were going to be parked behind each other, how could they see each other? So he tested out these sort of ramp systems whereby he could levitate, not levitate.

Oh, no, no, no. He couldn't levitate. That would be an amazing innovation, wouldn't it? When guardian love you so much. That's the helicopter drive-in you're thinking of, Dan. Just on bringing your kids, this is a really clever thing and how it was advertised. Lots of cinemas put the playground for the children, because the children might not want to sit and watch the film.

They put the playground under the screen. So as you were watching the film as a parent, you could just check in and see your kids directly beneath the cinema screen. That's so good. Although, actually, not everyone was happy about this idea that you could bring your kids because in 1947, there was a picket outside one of the drive-ins by a load of baby-sitters who said, down with drive-ins, more work for baby-sitters and while you drive in movie theatres, baby-sitters staff.

And so they were outside saying, down with drive-ins, because they were losing money. That's amazing. It feels like they've kind of won now. It feels like baby-sitters have remained culturally necessary in a way that drive-ins kind of haven't. That's true. Yeah. Have you ever heard of another baby-sitter revolt?

I can't complain. Is that unique? They're not very heavily unionized, the baby-sitter. I think if I was a baby-sitter, I would be really angry with recipe box services because when I was a baby-sitter, what you'd get is free reign of whatever was in the fridge. But with those recipe boxes, you only get exactly what you have to cook, so there's never any spare food. So it means baby-sitters are starving in that case.

All right, James. As an outfit that does some of the advertised Hello Fresh, I don't know if we need to be putting baby-sitters off it, driving a wedge between them. Well, these baby-sitters, anyway, in near Seattle, they picked it for a while, but then they were bought off with a free movie and a hot dog. Wow. So cheeky. I think that's what they were going for.

It could be. I don't think driving movies have ever been popular enough that they've been putting baby-sitters out of business en masse. I think they just wanted a free film. We know what the first movie was to play in a drive-in, which is quite cool. So this was in 1933. It's a movie called Wives Beware. And it is the story of a man who tires of married life, and he feigns memory loss so

that he can then pursue other women. That's the whole plot. So when his wife's like, hey, you slept with that lady, he goes, did I? That's weird. And that was the movie. And the reason they had that movie, and this became the thing for drive-throughs, was this was a movie that played in cinemas for one week, and then it went off cinemas and drive-through specifically were playing films that were not in competition with the cinema.

It was the movies that were no longer on screen there. And actually the popularity of it started dwindling to more B movies and then erotic movies. But I think one of the reasons was, as well though, Dan, is that there was quite a union between all of the different movie-making studios. And then America smashed it and whenever it was, the 40s or 50s or something like that. But before then, basically, if you weren't in on it, you couldn't get the best movies. And so all of the theatres really wanted to stop the drive-ins from getting the best movies

because they thought that everyone would go to the drive-ins instead of going to the theatres, I think. Yeah. I think they were more forced into the position, weren't they? Because no one would actually sell them the popular release. Like Hannah says, no one really cared what was on, right? No. They just went there to snog.

They just went there to snog. So like, there was a real big problem. It wasn't just the baby sisters who didn't like the drive-ins. It was also the puritanical people because they were worried about neckers. So when their first one opened in Camden, this first one, Hollingshead's one that we were talking about, a writer noted, perhaps it will occur readily enough to the reader what fun young America could have in a coop under the added stimulation of a sophisticated romance.

So that was the first one that came, and they were already saying that people might be snogging in the cars. They were very paranoid, weren't they? They were quite paranoid, but I mean, it did happen. Oh yeah. A lot of snogging went on. Yeah. One of the owners said, the only thing that can slow us down is an ugly rumour going

around that the drive-in are perfect for neckers. They did have people go around checking, didn't they? Checking for necking. They had necker checkers. Yeah. So a lot of them employed policemen or just members of staff who had to go around and look in people's windows, because they got this reputation as being passion pits. And the reputation was from people called blue noses, which I'd never heard before,

but is a term for a sort of prudish church types in America. And various drive-ins would have rules about what was allowed, so one owner of a drive-in specified. If a man puts his arm around a woman, that's okay, but if she puts her arm back around him and then they go into a clinch, that's out. Okay. And then they're removed from the premises. So that's where the line is.

There was an actual law against it in 1972 in New Jersey, which would find the operator $100 if any cars remained on the premises one hour after the end of the show. And they said that the reason was because they didn't want any carbon monoxide deaths, but actually it was just to stop the neckers. Oh. Stop the neckers. If you can't get your necking done within an hour, then, you know. I genuinely didn't know what the word necking meant, so I Googled it and apparently it's

a short, plain concave section between the capital and the shaft of a classical Doric or Tuscan column, but just in case people were hearing. You probably need a third person to be in the car with you to not be caught out for necking, right? Because it's hard to see what's going on around you when you're kissing. And general kissing sort of etiquette means you have to have your eyes closed. So if you had your eyes open while kissing, A, you risk being a weirdo, but you are safer, I guess.

If the other person has their eyes open as well, then they're a weirdo, so you can usually get away with it because they have their eyes closed. You're right. One person has to have their eyes open at all times looking for blue noses, and the other person gets on with removing their neckers. You need both with eyes open because all you're getting is you're getting that window only of your position. You can have a mini periscope installed in the car, and then you can just see all the

way around you at all times. Oh, that's cool. In which case, you only need one eye open. I don't want to be a female in the car with you, Andy, when you say periscope up. The second ever drive-in was built by a man called Wilson Shankwaila, who was from Pennsylvania, and they tried to stop it by taxing him. They wanted to give him a massive amusement tax, and he tried to avoid it by advertising it as free movies, parking 50 cents.

It was like he advertised it as just a parking lot that just happens to have free movies happening. That's what it happened. Shankwaila is another activity that was banned. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the Beatles once rejected a £50 million reunion gig because the Warm-Up Act was going to be a man wrestling a great white shark. This is according to Ringo Starr, who revealed this in an interview recently in the lead-up

to his 80th birthday, and he was talking about how back in 1975 they were approached by an incredible character called Bill Sargent, who wanted to reunite them. He had £50 million, which is roughly £200 million in today's money. The idea was for them to do this gig, and according to the Beatles, the pitch was that it was going to be a Warm-Up Act of a man underwater fighting a shark. I think Ringo's muddled this story a bit. I don't think that great white shark was going to be the Warm-Up Act, however, Bill Sargent was going to do this.

He'd put the great white shark on last, there's no way the Beatles can follow a man fighting a shark. It's going to be such a letdown for the audience, even the Beatles reuniting. You've got to mud with a shark, and then some people saying, I am a walrus? Come on. Octopus' Garden, now desperately trying to think of, they would have needed a yellow submarine in order to get to the stage. I can play this all night.

OK, we can wait, I'll leave for another one. I'm not sure he had $50 million, because he was like the father of pay-per-view, wasn't he? His idea was that he would put it on, and then people would pay to watch it, and then the Beatles would get the money from that. Oh. I think so. I see.

But he said, there was an interview with him in 1976, and he said, I definitely asked them to do this, and as far as I know, they're considering it, but he said that the problem was that Paul McCartney was about to start a U.S. tour, a 20-day U.S. tour that was going to be huge for McCartney, and that it was because he didn't want to bring the Beatles back together quite yet that it didn't happen. That was quite a sergeant. James, I don't know if we read the same thing about Bill Sgt. I was reading People magazine from 1976.

Same article. Nice. I reckon for probably about 15 years, no one else has read that article, and then four people read it this week. The People at People magazine are going to be so excited by the sun boost. Yeah. In the office, there was a ping noise that went off four times. But it was so funny because it reported that this guy, Bill Sgt., had made and lost a million

dollars seven times over, and he'd also had two heart attacks. Then it said, as of now, the Beatles seem more likely to provide Sgt. with coronary number three than fortune number eight. Yeah. Actually, the guy who fought the Great Work Shark, I think, might have caused another coronary because that was also supposed to happen as a pay-per-view thing, and they even made the posters and everything. But Bill Sgt. had a heart attack before they could do it, so they couldn't have lost that.

I actually found the press release that they issued to companies around the world about this big fight, and it's remarkable reading. It's about six pages long. It's written in such great, so in the most unusual, deaf-defying event ever to come to the screen, Bill Sgt. has announced that he will bring a life fight to the death between a single man and a giant live man-eating shark to theater, arena, and Coliseum screens by satellite closed-circuit television, and it was a guy called Wally Gibbons, who was a shark expert, and he was going to be given a spear, and that is how he was going to fight

the shark. The sharks, three of them, were going to be brought five weeks early to Samoa, where the fight was going to occur, so they could acclimatize to the water, and in the 48 hours leading up to the fight, they were going to be starved. So Wally was going to have to fight a starving shark, and he said a lot about, in this press release, about what he thought his odds were of surviving. He thought if he could shoot the shark with the speargun first time and get him, that was going to bring the odds up, but he needed to shoot it about five times to kill him.

But what about the two other sharks? They were backup sharks. They're holding the towel and the bucket in the toilet. Can I ask you, Addy, if you're in the water, what are you keeping in the bucket? I don't know. I don't think it would have defied death. I think it would have really embraced death. I have a suspicion that old Wally, the absolute Wally, would have died within maybe five seconds.

Ah. Because I don't think... What do you think? Yeah, I think so, because... I don't know. I think that... He tried this a few times, because there was someone called Geoffrey Mann, who wrote a book later in life about Bill Sargent trying to get him to fight a shark in Samoa as well,

which you've got to assume is the same kind of setup. And apparently that was cancelled, according to this guy, cancelled last minute by Jack Cousteau, who... Ah. I don't know what he was doing being involved in the event, but a famed oceanographer Jack Cousteau cancelled this shark fight, but he was going to have a knife, which I think is going to be quite similar to a spear. And in the end, I was looking at how you'd kill a shark if you faced it, and stabbing

it is the worst possible thing you can do, according to a guy called Ray Johnson. It's not the worst thing. The worst thing is to climb into its mouth. Yeah. He actually does say, when he's giving advice, he says, go for the face and gills, because they're quite sensitive, so, you know, like punching them in the face. But do try to keep your hands out of its mouth, that's always the best thing. But Wally Gibbons was an interesting guy, wasn't he?

Yeah. There was a 1952 contest between fisherman and spearmen, which were people who caught fish with spears, and he caught more fish than all the 37 fishermen who were in that competition on his own. Wow. He was amazing. And during, just after World War II, he swam around the Solomon Islands, picking up, like, unexploded shells, and then taking them away so that they wouldn't affect people in the

future. Isn't that amazing, like? That's really cool. Yeah. There's a biography in this press release where they say that he has killed more sharks in man-to-fish underwater combat than any other man in Australia, and possibly in the world. I mean, so yeah, I find it unlikely that anyone from anywhere else in Australia will have

killed any sharks in man-to-fish fights. And it's Stenstein, probably not. Yeah. He was known as a man-fish. That's what they called him. Merman. We've got a name for a man-fish. It's a merman.

Yeah. Merman's also had the best collection of seashells in the whole of Australia. He had the world's rarest shell. He owned it, the Gloria Maris, which is also known as the Glory of the Seacone. And that shell used to be so rare that there was once a collector who bought one in an auction only to immediately destroy it so that he had the only one, because he found this other one that was... What?

He didn't want two in the world to exist, so he bought one in the auction when it came up and he destroyed it, so he had the only one. That's pretty sick. Supposedly. That was in 1792. But then there was only a few of them in the world. Wally Gibbons had one of them. And when proper scuba diving got invented, they found...

Oh, yeah, they're just down there. They were just a bit lower than we could normally go. So people, you can collect them quite easily now and you can buy them for not too much. I think that would be a disappointing if the shark fight couldn't go ahead, but he said but don't worry, Wally Gibbons will be showing you his seashell collection. Because I was thinking, Anna said that he would die after five minutes. If you're the Beatles and you're thinking, OK, we're going on in an hour after the fight and then after five minutes, they're like, well, sorry, the guy just got eaten, so you're

going to have to go on early. I'd be pretty pissed off. Also, there's a bit of a weird vibe in the audience right now. They probably had a backup, warmer backed, which was a therapist to come out on stage and have a real deal with the massacre they'd just seen. Just can I say one weird interesting thing about Bill Sargent, the guy who Dan mentioned at the start, who was organizing the shark fights. So he was an inventor.

He invented tons of stuff. He had, I think, over 400 patents, so gadget patents. And one thing that I think he invented is something that we think of as new, which is televised theatre. So, you know, now you can go and see the National Theatre Live at your local cinema or you could before the theatre stopped happening. And he invented the precursor to this called electronovision in the 1960s. And so basically it involved him going in and videotaping plays and then broadcasting

them in cinemas. And he made loads of money out of it. And the first one he did was a take of Richard Burton in Hamlet in 1964. And he filmed three separate productions that edited them together to get the best best of highlights, showed in 1000 cinemas and made him millions of dollars. Amazing. Bill Sargent's first job was a radio repairman, which he had at the age of six. Wow.

He started work at the age of six. In fairness, it was in the family workshop, which was attached to his family home. Unfortunately, a year later, he burned them both down by accident. And then later on, when he got a load of money for his movies, he set up an electronics laboratory in Missouri. But then he burned that down as well. So you kind of had a habit of burning down electronic shops. I that time when he burned down the second one, James, apparently it was

because he put down just not really thinking. He put down a welding torch in the wrong place. He put it onto a drum of paint thinner or thinner. So kind of the winch is obviously highly flammable. According, I guess to him, because I don't think there were many other people around, he was blown 170 feet into the air. What? No.

170 feet. That's impossible. Someone's flying over to the drive-in theater going, what the fuck was that? 170 feet. Yep, that's what he says. Well, I love him. Love this man so much. So this thing of a man fighting a shark was basically an insane, weird, warm-up act.

And so I looked into a few other weird acts, like kind of vaudeville acts from, you know, the last century or two. So have you heard of Hadji Ali, who was also known as the Egyptian enigma? Oh, he was amazing. OK, so he was a vaudeville performer. His act was to swallow kerosene, then he would swallow some water, OK? Then he would regurgitate the kerosene and set it on fire, as he did so. But then he would regurgitate the water to put out the fire that he had lit from the kerosene.

I think he was also known as the human volcano or something like that. And then there's just one line about him saying he would also regurgitate live goldfish and nuts. The nuts was actually more impressive than it sounds, wasn't it, with Hadji Ali? Because he, one of his tricks was being able to regurgitate stuff in the order specified by the audience. So he'd swallow a bunch of objects and then be like, all right, bring up the goldfish now, OK, bring up your braces.

And so he'd swallow, for instance, 50 hazelnuts and one almond. And he'd start regurgitating them one by one. And when an audience member said, bring up the almond now, mate, he'd call the almond up. No. It's amazing. Apparently. Oh, my God. I genuinely think if you gave me a bowl of nuts and said, which one of those is an almond, I would struggle.

Maybe that's what he was relying on. He just told the audience it was an almond. I can say one more Borderville thing related to animals. And this was an amazing act, which is a group of women called the Barrison Sisters. And it seems like their entire act was to do a little bit of a sexy dance that gets more and more sexy. And all the way through, they would ask the audience, would you like to see my pussy?

And then when eventually the audience said, yes, they would lift their skirts and they would all have a cat in the knickers. And this was absolutely massive. This they were they were huge. They were so famous, these people. They played Berlin for eight months with this act. They played. But is it like the mousetrap, James?

Are they like, please don't tell anyone the spoiler when you leave? It must be, right? It must be that. They must have been exactly like that. And there was a French nobleman who committed suicide because he loved one of them so much. And they were so shocking that after the eight months in Berlin, they were banned from ever re-entering Germany.

I love the fact that they waited eight months to ban them. OK, now that everyone in Germany has had a chance to see you, now you're banned because now that's not appropriate. The censors went countless times, thousands of times. Yeah, we're just we're just trying to assess whether or not it really is offensive enough to ban. Just like a few more months of seeing them, to be sure. Were the cats alive?

Yeah, they were alive. They were in like a little pouch over their crutches. So the cats had to sit there in between their legs for the full act. They must have been sedated. I don't know whether they regurgitated them somehow or what, but they were definitely there. And there was an article about them and one guy in New York said, it was the most audacious piece of deviltry and abandonment

I ever saw offered to a New York public. Wow. I really thought you were going to say that he committed suicide because he was so disappointed when they lifted up their skirts at the end and he didn't see that for change. Oh, it's only a cat. It's all been for nothing. OK, it's time for fact number three. And that is Anna.

My fact this week is that in 1919, it was ruled that women would be allowed to swim competitively without wearing stockings on the one condition that they quickly put on a robe as soon as they got out of the water. And this was specifically in America. And I think these are nylon stockings because there won't have been any nylon in 1919, would they? So what were they? Was it like wool or what? I think they were wool.

I think quite a lot of people had to wear that. It's not going to be that's not going to be conducive to a quick swim. Is it? It's like carrying a sheep while you're swimming. That's yeah, it's like that. Did you guys all do that swimming survival test when you were younger? We had to wear pyjamas in the water. It's like every time a woman swam in the water, it was like having to do that survival test in every Olympics.

They had to pick up a brick from the bottom of the pool. So this was in America and it was the Amateur Athletics Union, which had only recently allowed women to take part in competitive swimming events anyway, but it was very controversial what women would wear in the water and they essentially had to be covered from neck to toe fully. And this irritated the women because they realised that this would put them at a massive disadvantage in the Olympics, for instance, when they were competing against other countries like Australia,

who were a bit looser with their regulations and they would be weighed down by their massive cotton waterlogs, head to toe outfits while the Aussies were smashing them. So there was sort of a campaign. There's this amazing woman called Charlotte Epstein, who was a court stenographer, actually, and she'd formed the Women's Swimming Association in 1917 and she campaigned to have the stocking requirement removed.

And eventually she did this stunt where she invited some of the best women in the country, female swimmers in the country, to come to a beach in California and strip down to ordinary swimsuits without stockings. And they were all arrested and she invited the tabloids to see them all be arrested. And this kind of created this atmosphere of how ridiculous is this? Women are just being arrested for wearing some in costumes. Come on, come on, guys.

Sort your shit out. And so they relaxed the rules. But you did have to very quickly put on a robe as soon as you emerged. Yeah, the rules were pretty strict, weren't they? Back in the day, like in 1921, in New York, everyone had to wear a two piece swimming suit, everyone. And there was a specific law that made it illegal for any bold men to stare at women.

Yeah, I saw that. What does that mean? I think that was one person on the beach, like the person who was monitoring that beach, who thought that bold men were sort of equated with perverts and he said, I'm going to stop bold men from staring at women. It's so strange. Maybe there was a specific bold man that they were worried about, like, Stary Steve and they sort of said, well, we can't say Stary Steve

is found from the beach, but we will say this. Yeah, well, weren't weren't hats very popular back then? So maybe bold means a hatless, because maybe they were taking their hat down to hide a protrusion below. Is that how, you know, how they always say in the olden days, whenever you met a lady, you had to lift your hat. It wasn't to hide your protrusion down there. The taller the hat, the bigger the brag.

You remember Mr. Darcy always had a very tall top hat. And yeah, but that's how you catch them is that you just say, can you show me your hands, please? And if the hat stays where it is on their lap, then you know that there's a protrusion situation. In the Olympics, the first time that women swam in the Olympics, I think, was in 1912. And the British team had to wear a bra and knickers while they swam,

as well as their swimsuit. And that's because they had this amazingly awesome silk swimsuit that would help them to swim really fast. But it was completely see-through when it got wet. And so, I mean, it was amazing. It was so thin that the silk that you could take the whole thing and pass it through a wedding ring. That's how thin the material was, but it did have that one problem

that it was see-through. So you had to wear underwear as well. And did you, was it a Superman situation where it's on top of the outfit? I've seen the pictures and they were on the inside, but definitely they should have gone the outside, shouldn't they? Yeah. I find it really bizarre that women weren't encouraged to swim until about the 19th century.

So this only really became a situation then or late on then, because before that, you just, if you were a woman, you just didn't swim. I thought there's very little evidence of women swimming before the 17th century. There is some. Yeah, I found the description of a standard ladies' bathing costume in 1687 by someone called Celia Feins, who said it was made of fine yellow canvas,

which made it that when you went in the water, it filled up with water. So no one could see the shape of your body. I'm clever. Like a Mr. Blobby costume. A Mr. Blobby. Because you can never tell how sexy the person playing Mr. Blobby is, can you? They don't need to be sexy on the inside if they're wearing a Mr. Blobby costume.

I'm theirs. And in the 18th century in the UK, they made laws. Every town could make its own laws about what you would wear when you were swimming. So in the city of Bath, they made it illegal for men to swim without a waistcoat. No. Yep. Is that with...

Would men have to have the sort of the top as well, or is this bare chest with a waistcoat on? I think the waistcoat just referred to anything that would cover your chest, really. It wasn't like a proper top hat and tails kind of thing. Yeah. Did you guys come across Donald Clark in your research? Yeah. He was an early...

He was very much fighting the tide of history. He was an opponent to mixed swimming. He was a counsellor in Tonbridge. And he said that by making girls look like wet Scotch terriers, mixed bathing stops more marriages than any other cause and much unrest in the country due to the barbarous licence in women's dress. So he was basically saying, women look like such men as when they've been in the water

that no one will want to marry them. And he was then... So this is in a sort of furious letter to the papers or something. He was then given a job by the Daily Mail to go around beaches looking for outrageous things to be angry about. Some things haven't changed. That's amazing. Wow.

That's so good. Because I think the Daily Mail does employ a lot of people like that still today, doesn't it? Literally just find something to get angry about. We need to fill our pages. Anything. Yeah. I was reading about a swimming hero called Gertrude Eddell. So she was the first woman to swim the English Channel in 1925.

And she was trained by this guy called Jabez Wolff, who was a bizarre character himself. I don't know why she chose him to train her because he'd tried and failed us from the Channel 22 times previously. And despite it, apparently he employed a bagpiper for encouragement, and that didn't help. It was so nice. But anyway, she tried and...

If the bagpipers are behind you, then that will encourage you to swim forwards as fast as you possibly can. You're trying to get as far away from Scotland as you can, but then... Yeah. So her first attempt, he, Jabez, her trainer pulled her out of the water halfway through, saying that it looked like she was drowning. And she said she wasn't drowning at all.

She'd just been having a rest face down in the water. Eventually she did it. She was the sixth person ever to swim the Channel. And she was the fastest ever of men and women. She did it in 14 and a half hours. So she beat the previous person by two hours. Did front crawl all the way. And the first thing, she did it from France to England.

And the first person to meet her on the beach in Kent when she arrived was an immigration officer who demanded to see her passport. Amazing. He was actually working for the Daily Mail, wasn't he, at the time? Do you know what she was fed on the way? I find this so weird... No. ...when she got fed chicken legs.

I think... If they touched you in the water, then that sort of... You're out because you've been supported by a human. But her support boat was apparently full of chicken legs, which, OK, throws someone a chicken leg in the water, oranges and chicken soup to sustain her as she went. And I have no idea how she was fed the soup. Right. What must happen, right, is...

I don't want to take anything away from her swim, but they give her a straw to suck the soup. And actually, she's biting onto the straw while it's attached to the boat and she's used it to pull her along. She's water skiing there basically. Basically doing that. This is a great and niche conspiracy theory that needs to see more. One person who tried to swim the channel before Gertrude

was an Australian called Annette Kellerman, who was probably the most famous swimmer in the world. She was the first woman to publicly wear a one-piece swimming costume. She was arrested on the beach. She was one of these people who was arrested for public indecency, for wearing, like, a two-sexier swimming costume. But it wasn't really very effective and she ended up releasing her own line of bathing costumes

and became massively rich because people wanted to look like her because she was so famous. She was paid by the Melbourne exhibition hall to swim in an aquarium. So people would come and watch her swim. It was like you were saying about the boarder earlier, Pundi. It was like you would just go to watch her swim. She was like a swimming costume hero, wasn't she? She was the person who brought us the swimming costume, Annette Kellerman.

We've been pitching about the Daily Mail, so for some balance, here's some perspective on the Daily Mirror. She came between Australia and America. She came to the UK to do some swimming. And she broke a record for swimming from Dover to Margate. And she caused this huge stir and it was all great. And the Daily Mirror paid her to swim along that coast every single day for two months.

And they said to her, she was like, every day for two months? Oh, God. I mean, that sounds like hell. And they said it's a huge thing for women. It's going to go down as a great, successful, women-kind. And what they actually meant was there's a lady from Australia in a swimsuit, which we've never seen before here. And they obviously invited lots of crowds every day to come and watch her in her swimsuit

and made loads of money selling their papers. And it was sort of the first page three type of things with these pictures of Annette Kellerman and people like her in swimsuits. I've read about her show. She was called The Diving Venus. And the show ran on Broadway for four years. And then she went to Hollywood

and she starred in a film called Daughter of the Gods. She did loads of films, but this was in 1916. And the film used 20,000 extras. It cost a million dollars to make, which was pretty unusual at the time. And there were scenes of her swimming nude in it, I think from quite a distance, but this led to the formal banning of,

as they were called, nude scenes in films. And so, yeah, it's thanks to her. Yeah, she did all her own stunts in that movie, including a 20-meter dive into the ocean with her hands and feet tied together and also being thrown into a pool with six crocodiles. Wow. It sounds like if promoter Bill Sargent

had known that he really would have made a lot of money out of that woman. When she was on Broadway making all her money, she made $1,250 a week on Broadway. And when she was doing it, there was a Harvard professor who said she was a perfect woman after comparing her measurements to the Venus de Milo. Now, the Venus de Milo doesn't have any arms.

No. LAUGHTER Useful in swimming, particularly. OK, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy. My fact is that the film of Dr. Doolittle was delayed for days after the giraffe being used accidentally stepped on its own penis.

So... How long is a giraffe's penis? Is it, like, a fifth leg? Well, is it that before or after you've trodden on it? That's the question. They have really long legs. I just can't work out the mechanics of this, Andy, at all. Well, they're like folding deck chairs.

It's very easy to get something caught in a folding deck chair, and I think that's the same principle. You need to stop going on those nudist holidays, Andy. I can't take any more of those injuries. I'll tell you that much. So, to be completely clear, this is the 1967 Dr. Doolittle with Rex Harrison, not the 2021 with Robert Downey Jr., where pretty much all the animals are CGI,

and nobody stepped on anybody's penises. And this comes from a great book called Scenes from a Revolution, The Birth of the New Hollywood, which is kind of an in-depth look at five films in particular. It's by Mark Harris, and one of those films is Dr. Doolittle, and there was a guy working on it called Herbert Ross, who was the choreographer, and he wrote to a colleague saying,

we're postponed for three days, the giraffe stepped on his cock. And so... It stepped on his cock, though. Are we misreading that? Yeah. Stepped on Rex Harrison's. Yeah, so that's that. It was pretty chaotic, wasn't it?

That's amazing. Apparently, it was revealed after it was one giraffe died, and I don't think we know how, still, but one of the people who worked on it said one giraffe died. But, I mean, the general management of animals sounds like hell. It had lots of different filming locations, so it was partly filmed in LA and then in the Caribbean and in the UK,

and because of quarantine laws, they had to hire separate sets of identical animals for each place to play the same characters. And then also, the animals grow so fast that they had to keep finding replacements, like doppelgangers. So, I think there was a pig called Gub-Gub in the film, which had 40 different piglets at various times. Yeah. I mean, it does seem questionable, doesn't it?

A lot of the sort of stuff they did to the animals, there was a squirrel that they had to sedate during a scene that they needed him for by the sedation method they used was a fountain pen where they dripped a gin through it to just get it drunk. But it ended up losing consciousness, because it was so drunk that they couldn't properly get the scene done. That doesn't seem very ethical in terms of...

I think that's absolutely fine. Elizabeth Taylor used to request that kind of thing before she'd go over it on the camera. There's a great story where, in one scene that Rex Harrison was doing, he kept... This is the story that he kept stopping the scene, and the director's going, what are you doing? And he goes, will you keep calling cut? He's going, I'm not calling cut, you're definitely calling cut.

And they worked out that it was the parrot that was in the scene that's going to mimic the word cut. No way. Yeah. And Rex was getting confused. So they built a set for the house of Dr. Doolittle. Whose whole stake is that he can talk to the animals, so he lives with a lot of animals. But the whole house, the set had to be built on a slant,

because obviously the animals are pooing everywhere and peeing everywhere. So they had lots of people in the crew just standing around with brooms waiting for when that happened. All the furniture had to be either plastic or painted so that it could be hosed down at the end of each day, filming in this set house. They had to have double the sets, because frequently animals would just kick a hole in the walls

or the furniture. The trainers got hepatitis from being bitten. I read one amazing sentence in the link you sent, Andy, which is, unfathomably, the ducks in the pond appear to forget how to swim and started to sink, which you know you're having a bad time. You'd think you'd be able to rely on the ducks to be able to swim. It was so funny.

But apparently what had happened was it was the wrong time of year, so they'd lost all their waterproof sheen on their feathers. And at that time of year, ducks don't normally swim or something, and so they all just started sinking. Yeah, I found that amazing. I didn't know that. I didn't know that ever happened. Has anyone seen the movie?

Years ago as a kid, yeah. Really? Was that any good? Yeah, I mean, as a kid, it was one of those Sunday afternoon movies, and I do remember loving it, but I've read a lot of things that suggest I'm completely wrong about that. It has a very low rating.

It got the best-pitched Oscar nomination, but it's the lowest-rated scorer in Rotten Tomatoes ever to get a nomination. Ooh, what's it rocking on? Rotten. 32%. Rex Harrison, who was the star of it, was so horrible to everyone that he was nicknamed Tyrannosaurus Rex,

which is very clever when you think because it's a film about animals that are talking. Yes. He had a good reputation for behaving like that quite frequently, didn't he, Rex Harrison? And he was grumpy bastard, or a character, depending on which way you want to frame it. But I should say,

so I'm a huge My Fair Lady fan, and a big Rex Harrison fan in that, and there's a guy called Will Harrison, who's his grandson, who listens to the podcast. So we have inside Rex Harrison info, apparently, if you look at the film poster of Cleopatra, it was supposed to just have Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor on it, as Anthony and Cleopatra.

But Rex was like, I'm the big star here, guys. What the hell are you doing? Get me on the poster. And so you see, just behind them, Julius Caesar, Rex Harrison, staring really creepily down at this loving couple. And he was always doing stuff like that. There's one particularly famous anecdote, which is that he'd performed in the theater,

and there was an autograph hunter waiting outside. She had her book ready for him to sign. He came out, she asked for the autograph, and he said, sod off. And what she did was, she rolled up the program, she wanted him to sign, and she hit him with it. And the co-star of the play, Stanley Holloway, later said that it was a rare but welcome case

of the fan hitting the shit. That's how they viewed him. You know, Christopher Plummer, the actor? Yes, his sound of music and stuff, I guess. He was paid $300,000 not to be in Dr. Do little. Really? Which is such an epic fail by the accountants, I think. So basically, Harrison temporarily quit the project.

He decided he wasn't completely up for it. And then so they said, well, who do we get? We need some Hollywood giant. So they got Christopher Plummer, signed him up for $300,000, and then Harrison said, oh, fine, I will do the film then. So Plummer never filmed a scene, never said a line of the dialogue,

but still got paid his full fee for it. It's the dream job. It's the dream job. It was originally written by a woman called Helen Winston, and they rewrote it. They just completely rewrote the thing. Apart from, they used loads of her stuff, but then didn't tell her she was gonna use it.

And so she sued them, and she got 3.2 million pounds out of them for that. Whoa! And it lost 9 million in the box office. So like a third of that was just due to stealing this woman's work. So actually, the two people in it who had their work stolen from them, Christopher Plummer,

and this lady, sounds like they were the real winners here. So Dr. Dolittle is incredibly loosely based on the series of stories written by Hugh Lofting in the 1920s and during the First World War. And they bear no resemblance. I don't think the plots, but any resemblance to the stories he originally wrote,

but they are about a doctor who talks to animals. And it's quite a sweet story. So I hadn't realised he wrote them while he was fighting in the trenches in World War I, and he was writing letters back to his children. And he understandably thought, I'm not sure I want to tell the kids about my trenches-based experience.

And so instead he wrote these brilliant stories about a guy who talks to animals. He was a real crusader for animal rights in lots of ways. And he once beat up three men, including one who had a knife, because they were trying to tame some wild horses. And they were, I think, not being especially pleasant to the horses.

So, yeah. Yeah. He was very strong on sympathising with animals. He was shocked by how horses were treated. They did have a very bad time in the First World War. Yeah, it was the way that he saw horses being treated. And they needed to be looked after by vets. But he was like, well, they can't really tell us

what's wrong with them because they're horses. And that was kind of what gave him the idea of writing Dr. Dolittle. But we should say that if you have read Dr. Dolittle in the last 20 or 30 years, you're probably reading a massively sanitised version of it, because it is, the original is extremely racist. So, in 1968, there was a librarian called Isabel Sewell,

who wrote an essay about a few different books, but specifically about Dr. Dolittle, who described Hugh Lofting as a white racist and chauvinist guilty of almost every prejudice known to modern white Western man. And that was in the 60s, so... Yeah, exactly. And so, basically, from then on,

he just got pretty much cancelled and really all his books went out-print for quite a long time until they got rewritten with a lot of the racist bits taken out. Yeah, with no resemblance to the originals, basically. But on the other hand, loved horses. Yeah, I mean, anti-war and pro-animal, for sure. Yeah, yeah. So, I've been looking a bit into talking to animals

and people are doing serious work on this right now, and it's really cool. So, there is a new device which is trying to train basically lassie technology. So, the idea is that dogs will have a vest, and if the person needs help, they can pull a tab to communicate a message, OK? Right. So, it might be...

Someone's fallen down a well, but that's probably not going to be it, because it's only one message on the tab that they can pull. Right. So, for example, lots of children with autism find it very helpful and calming to have a dog, and if they are panicking or upset, it might be possible to train the dog to pull the tab on its little vest,

because it can spot the size that its owner is upset. And then, that will read out the dog saying, could you please pet me now? And then, therefore, the child will pet the dog and will calm down, and that will help. So, they're trying to see if they can train dogs to have several different messages, whereas they could say, so either could you pet me now,

or someone's fallen down a well, or whatever it might be. It's just those two they've coded in at the moment, isn't it? Wait, so, the dog senses that the child is anxious, and so then pulls the tab that says, can you pet me? So, the child signals they're anxious without realising it, and then the dog does something to make the child calm down. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Well, you might be anxious, because the dog's just told you

that someone's fallen down a well. I really wish I hadn't mentioned this well thing. Complete red herring. Do you know that... I was going to do this as a fact in a future week, but do you know that the traditional way of preparing melon in France was to put it down a well for four hours? Melon. A melon, yeah.

Because before... What, and it came up perfectly sliced, in short? Who lived down that well? A small child who fell there many years ago. No, basically, you wanted your melon to be nice and cold, right? And they had no refrigeration, but they did have a well, which was cold at the bottom, so they used to traditionally, in France, they would put their melon in the well a few hours before,

and then bring it up, and it's nice and cold. So the dog would, in this case, have a third tab, which says, your melon is ready, sir. LAUGHTER That was in an article written by B Wilson that I read the other day, which is pretty amazing. Oh, cool. Artificial intelligence might help us to talk to animals or to understand what they're thinking.

There is a scientist called Dr. Christa MacLennan, who is working on a way of using AI to tell you what sheep are thinking. And apparently, it's really hard for farmers to tell what a sheep is thinking just by looking at its face, because they don't have much expression on their faces. You often see farmers kneeling down, just staring deep into a sheep's eyes, don't you, going, why can't I tell? I mean, I believe this.

So I was reading this article about this AI algorithm that tells you whether a sheep's happy or not happy, and there's part of it on NBC. They had a quiz where they would show you pictures of sheep, and you had to guess whether they were happy or sad. And I only got one out of four, and that was a lucky guess, because I just had three sad sheep in a row, and I thought the fourth one must be a sheep.

That's games for a show. I did that same quiz. I'm very proud to say I got three. Wow. So I'm a sheep whisperer, basically. LAUGHTER I didn't... It's quite specific, isn't it, though? It is tricky. So the signs of pain or emotional suffering in a sheep are narrow eyes, tight cheeks. Hold on. I don't know if I really want to do the test.

Yeah. OK. Don't tell us your facts. Anna, tell you the symptoms before you do the test, is what the test is based on. That's the thing. They say if it has a nostril shape like a V rather than a U, then it's either happy or sad, even though it told me that I couldn't do it. Although, I think handy, because there were only four,

and it was a 50-50 choice each time, then one out of four and three out of four is within the standard deviation of what you would expect. OK. All I'm hearing is that I won! LAUGHTER I'm going to be the sheep farmer. LAUGHTER Yeah.

OK, 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 Shriverland, Andy... At Andrew Hunter M. James.

At James Harkin. And Anna. You can email our podcast at qi.com. Yep. Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing. Or there's our website, no such thing as a fish.com. We've got all of our previous episodes up there, as well as links to bits of merchandise.

That's it, guys. Thanks again for listening to us during these crazy times. We hope you are well and safe, and we will be back again with another episode next week. We'll see you then. Goodbye.