No Such Thing As A Fish - 351: No Such Thing As Pop Charts for Bagpipers

Episode Date: December 11, 2020

Dan, Anna, James and Andy discuss remote Russians, minted Madagascans and a very brazen Dane. 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 Anna Tyshinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one and that is Andy. My fact is that one in three people in the UK has seen the Queen in real life. Wow.

That's insane. Feels high to me. There are about 70 million people in the UK. Shouldn't we start off with a survey of the people on this Zoom? Yes, 100%. And I've got some extra data to add actually. I know that Dan has for sure because Dan's actually properly met the Queen. I went to Buckingham Palace.

You slept with her, haven't you? It was Phillip. I slept with Phillip when she came in and served us tea in the morning. I'm sure you can be arrested for this kind of comment. Definitely. This is now the treason cast. OK, so Dan has to Buckingham Palace Garden Party, fine. Anna?

I don't think so. OK, data. We should ask the Queen. Have you seen her though, Anna? Like, have you with your eyes in public seen her? No, not in public. The only reason I hesitate is because I know my siblings have met her because my brother's called Charlie and I...

She meets all the Charlie's. It's a ceremony every year. Are they like swans? They're like the UK swans or all the Charlie's belong to the Queen? He got a golden ticket and some chocolate. They let him meet the Queen, didn't they? Yeah. I said that the wrong way round because my dad for his job

meant that my parents met her and my mum was holding my brother Charlie as a baby at the time and the Queen said to my mum, what's he called? And she said Charlie and the Queen said, oh, I've got a little Charlie as well. Wow, that's awesome. Which is weird because he would have been about 30 at that point.

OK, so it doesn't know. James? Well, I think I have seen her. I was very young when it happened. I think when I was 10 years old, she came to Bolton, right? OK. To celebrate Bolton's 150th birthday. And I think I stood on the street and saw her go past

and I looked on the Bolton Even News website to see what happened and they said that everyone from age 9 to 11 was given the morning off to go and see the Queen and I would have been 10, so that makes sense. But I asked my mum and she didn't remember it at all. And I'm like, yeah, but mum, I have kind of a memory and it's in the Bolton Even News that we were there. So, Charlie, it must have happened.

And she said, well, I had three young children and a full-time job, so how the hell am I supposed to remember stuff like that? But I think I might have done. Put you down as a half. Yeah. OK, I'm a yes. Oh, yeah, context.

Because she was visiting the university I was at and she walked past. But no face time with her, no personal contact. What? But I've also asked Ann Miller and Alex Bell, the other regulars, and they have both seen the Queen and was a child. And Alex was, I think, an ascot or something

and saw a yellow blur in the distance, which he claims was the Queen. Was she on a horse for yellow blur? Yeah, she came in third. She did really well. But that's, how many is that? That's one, two and a half with James. I think I'm a one, Andy.

I really do think, honestly, I think I've seen her. So that's five out of six. Am I one and a half because I've touched her? Am I in a different category? You're not allowed to, Dan. That's the main thing. What are you talking about? You're not allowed to touch the Queen.

Of course you are. No, you're not. Well, she touched me. She touched me. Oh, that's completely different. You're rather... But that's one of the main rules. There's no touching.

But there aren't really any rules, right? It's just kind of etiquette. In fact, on the Royal Family website, I think maybe they're trying to play it cool, but they strictly say there are no obligatory codes of behaviour at all when you meet the Queen. You can pull your trousers down if you like. You will be shocked.

Dan, you actually did pull your pants down, didn't you? And said, hey, I've got a little Charlie of my own. Oh, no. Oh, next week's episode coming to you live from the Tower of London. It is nerve-wracking, though, all the protocols. So I met her at Buckingham Palace. It was part of a party in celebration of her heading to Australia,

and I got sent an invitation, as supposedly a notable Australian, which is so bizarre. And you get with the invitation, you get this extraordinary list of protocol of how you approach the Queen if you meet her, what to say, how to use Mam the first time, and then Her Majesty the...

I've got the order wrong in that, but it's stuff like that. You've also got... Sorry, you've also got the pronunciation wrong according to the Royal Family official website. They're very strict. It's Mam. It's the only bit of protocol, they say, is a rule addressed as Mam as in Jam.

Well, she's from the Northeast, isn't she? So she always calls herself Mam. It's never Mum. It's always Mam. Yeah. But sorry, Dad, go on. No, just saying, with all that playing in your head, it's a very nerve-wracking experience to... You find it very hard to be present

in the moment when you're meeting the Queen and shaking her hand. Philip less so, because you're just waiting for him to say something a bit routine, which I was hoping for. He must have been in his element with all those Australians. Yeah, exactly. He just had to bite his tongue. He genuinely, when I shook hands with him,

he kind of lent in as if he was going to say something and just went, ah, not worth it. This little shake of his head just went, ah, I don't need this today. But he didn't say not worth it. His eyes said that. No, but you could tell with his look. His eyes said, well, because I got in a fight later on

with one of his sons, Prince Edward. I mean... Who came up. Who won? He did, because I was in his house. He kind of just sort of won it by default. He knows where the weapons are. He doesn't like QI, by the way.

So he kind of insulted all of us. Prince Edward? Yeah. He said, oh, is it that pompous show with the pompous Stephen Fry? He pretends to know all these facts. Well, at least he has seen it. Yeah. Yeah.

Christ, I think the Royal Family once talked about pomposity. That's true. Stephen Fry never insisted on a gold carriage. Not for the first three series, anyway. So, Dan, you're not the only eminent Australian to have met the Queen. I mean, it would be insane if you were,

because you've been to an entire party. But this sort of ties in with the touching thing and the etiquette about not touching the Queen unless you're shaking hands with her or whatever. But she visited Australia in 1992, which I guess was the time before Dan, your garden party with her. But the PM at the time, Paul Keating,

he put his arm around her, not in a kind of cinema yawn stretch way. But he sort of just put his hand on the small of her back and the British papers called him The Lizard of Oz as a result. Wow. Yeah. One newspaper wrote,

Mr Keating, in placing his hand in the centre of her back, was actually touching that little fastener, which is the miniature linchpin of all women's femininity. What? Is that a thing? It is. And how did they get hold of that secret? We were sworn to keep it under wraps.

But the Queen, actually, it's not a linchpin. It's one of those strings that you pull out. When you pull it out, she goes, how do you do? How do you do? How do you do? How do you do? I think it's implying that he was trying to unhook her bra.

Is it the minute... It says the minute little fastener, which is the miniature linchpin of all women's... Not lower back. Oh, no, it wasn't... Sorry, it was just a... Oh. How old was she?

Medium back. You don't... bras don't descend down your torso as the oppressors do. It's not like elderly women have got their bras around their waist. You know what? We're learning a lot here today, aren't we? Yeah. Real lesson for the lads.

But you shrink when you're older, so your back gets smaller, doesn't it? Just gets closer to... Your shoulders get closer to your bum, naturally. I guess. This thing about one-third of Britons having seen the Queen was part of a survey by Youguth, wasn't it? And so I looked at some of the other things in that survey. And so 22% of people have seen Prince Philip.

So that's one in five-ish. The next most commonly seen is Princess Anne on 17%. Only 1% have seen Meghan Markle. 1%. She was the least. But she's not been going for as long as she... No, that's true. She's a new character.

Prince Harry was the same. It's 3% of 65-year-olds and over have seen him, and only 5% of 18 to 24-year-olds. Yeah. And it's just because the Queen has been going for so long and has been doing so many visits all over the place. So for people over the age of 65, 49% have either seen or met her, which I just find insane. Well, it's true.

It's like when she came to Bolton, it was just to get her numbers up, really, because she got all the kids along the street. And she's like, oh, this is another 200,000 people that can access the list. Basically, she's playing a long Pokemon game with all of us. We are the Pokemon. It's Pokemon Commoner, isn't it? She's got a list of all the Coveners in the country, and she's just taking them all off. The list of people that she's met, I read that she has met over a quarter of all US presidents

ever. She's met something close to it. Yeah, she's met something close to 30% of all the presidents that America has ever had. That is insane. Yeah. Oh. Sorry.

That's breaking news for me. I was trying to find the most famous person the Queen hasn't met. And so I went onto Google and searched for who's the most famous person in the world, and then went down the list to see. Yeah. And Google has the Queen met this person. Well, I didn't have to go that far because as far as I can see, she hasn't met Justin Bieber.

And Google thinks that he's one of the most famous people in the world. They've never been seen in the same room at the same time. Well, you see Justin Bieber is another person whose shoulders are quite close to his bum, isn't he? Because he's a very small man because I was reading about people who have met Justin Bieber and Freddie Flintoff, the cricketer, who is an extremely tall guy, he went to meet him and got a meet and greet with his kids and his wife. And they went down the queue and they got to the front and the kids got to see Justin

Bieber. But the Justin Bieber staff wouldn't let Freddie Flintoff go anywhere near him. And they said he doesn't like big guys because if you have Freddie, who's like six, four, something like that, standing next to Justin Bieber, he's going to look like a little tiny bloke. Yeah. It's like why he only hangs out with Tom Cruise and people like that, Justin Bieber. Yeah, yeah.

Also, Justin Bieber is why he wears his trousers so low is because he's trying to make it look like a distance from his shoulders to his bum is greater than it actually is. That's it. There are only a few inches apart, actually. The Royal Family have banned commoners from wearing their official tartan. Oh, no. Can you believe this? Prince Albert designed the tartan for the family, for the firm in 1853.

And then several decades later in 1937, there was a tartan manufacturer who wrote to them saying, oh, this is a lovely tartan and we'd love to make it. And the keeper of the previous purse wrote back saying, absolutely not. You may not make this as exclusively for the royal use. Anyway, you would think that was in 1937. Things might have changed a bit since then. In 2016, the palace confirmed that this remains in place. There is one person in the world who is not a member of the Royal Family who is allowed

to wear the tartan. Can you guess who it is? Can we guess? It's guessable as well. It's definitely guessable. Nicholas Sturgeon. It's not Nicholas Sturgeon. Is it one of the crankies, if any of those are still alive?

It's Jimmy Cranky. No, it's not. Is it the person who tries on stuff for the Queen? Oh, yeah. Oh, no. Brilliant. Brilliant guess. Is it the winner of the caber toss in every year's Highland Games?

It's another lovely, lovely guess. That's a bit further away. That would be a great prize, wouldn't it? Is it someone Scottish? Does it have to be someone Scottish in this? It's someone who is almost certainly going to be Scottish due to their job. Oh, OK. It's someone who might be wearing tartan as a matter of course.

The person who paints the fourth rail bridge. Oh, no. It's not that. The backpiper on Princess Street who annoys everyone every morning during the festival. You were so... You know what? I think just to end this torch was competition. It's her alarm clock.

Her backpiping alarm clock man. Her backpiping alarm clock man as the official role is. Yes. Wow. I know. That's another incredibly long-lasting thing. There have only been 15 Royal Backpipers since 1843. And they have to play for her every weekday morning.

Not every morning of the week. She's not a masochist. To 15 minutes they play. And apparently she doesn't ever want to hear the same tune twice. So it's a nightmare. There was one called Gordon Webster who said he had to know about 700 or 800 different tunes. Yeah, but they must be running out by now. Like how long has she been Queen?

60 years. What is it? Something like that. And every morning, apart from the weekends, she's had a different tune. They must be getting down to the... Alright, I'm going to do the killers today. Has she had that one? Well, she's had Mr Brightside, but she hasn't.

That's a cool way to inform her of like the latest charts. Yeah. You just start playing the latest Ariana Grande. I don't know if she needs to be informed with the latest charts. Is that something that she demands? Definitely. Well, maybe, you know, when she meets Bieber one day, she can say, love yourself.

Can I do one more guessing game? Because Andy's one went so loud. Oh, yeah. According to Ben Shart, who I think we all kind of trust, writing in the spectator, a brilliant sort of collector of trivia, who do you think is the most seen human ever to have lived, as in the person that most people have seen in real life? Oh, wow.

OK. So someone who's done huge events and rallies and things like that. Is it Donald Trump? Nope. Is it a politician from a really popular country, like Xi Jinping? Oh, good call. Or Narendra Modi?

Oh, is it Dalai Lama? Ben Shart thinks none of those. Ben Shart thinks it is probably Mick Jagger. And that's because he's been going for so long, so long at playing in front of massive, massive audiences, non-stop and non-stop and non-stop and out of all the... Is he from the Rolling Stones? Yes.

Yes. Of all the Rolling Stones. He does most of it. Sorry. Wow. What a slam on the most seen man on earth. You don't deserve this fact. You don't deserve to be saying this fact.

Oh, my God. Hang on. Can we just do a little straw poll among us who's seen... We know James has it. Who knows who he is? I might have done for all I know. I don't think I have seen the Rolling Stones at any stage, any of them, I don't think.

I've seen Jagger. I've seen all of them because I went to a gig once. Me too. I've not. Dan, no. No. Surprising. No.

Very surprising. I'll drop the text. Jagger was on the horse behind the queen. Oh, that's such a good answer. What we're just talking of rock stars, I've been reading Elton John's autobiography called Me, which is unbelievably good, very scandalous. And he meets with the queen quite a few times in the book.

And he tells a story in it where he was at a party and he saw the queen approaching a man called Viscount Lindley. And she asked him to look at the queen. And she asked him to look on after his sister who'd been taken ill and retired to her room. So he said, go and look after her. And he kept just partying. And so once he was fobbing the queen off too many times,

she went up to them. And this is what Elton John saw. You know that thing of saying a single word and slapping a cheek of someone back and forth in between the words you see in movies? She says that the queen went up to Viscount Lindley and went, don't slap, argue with me. I am the queen.

And then he went off to look after the daughter. And then Elton says the queen then turned to Elton. She stared at him and gave a little wink and walked off. That's what he says. I mean, it might have happened. It's in the book. He's Elton John's a fantasist. I'm not sure he is.

I think he tells the story. I mean, can that have happened? No, because it's true. No, I do remember actually in Prince's biography, he says that he saw the queen slamming Prince Edward's head in the fridge door repeatedly. Because he said he didn't like QI. She said, you should watch QI.

It's very funny. OK, it is time for fact number two. And that is my fact. My fact this week is that in 1714, when a Dutch ship ran out of ammunition 14 hours into a battle, the captain sent a boat over to the enemy asking to borrow some gunpowder and cannonballs so they could continue the fight.

And did they give them the cannonballs? No. Can we borrow them as quite as like, we'll give them back. Give them back really fast. Yeah, no, I think it was seen as a sort of a bit of a cheeky surrender. Really? Because the captain's actually, I don't know if it was the humor of it, ended up having a drink and toasting each other,

sending some compliments very nicely for it, well done. And then off they went on their ways. So neither ship was sunk in the end and neither was captured. So quite a good ending. So yeah, so this is a story to do more with the captain, whose name was Peter Janssen Vessel, otherwise known as Tordenschild. And he was a Dano-Norwegian nobleman who was,

he's very famous in sort of the history now of Denmark. There's statues of him in Copenhagen, the most popular brand of matches, has his image on it. He's mentioned in the Royal National Anthem. He was sort of a big character at the time. But this was quite an infamous incident in what was known as the Great Northern War. He was captaining this Royal Danish-Norwegian Navy ship,

and he ran into what they thought was a British ship, but was actually Swedish. And it was a much bigger ship than what he had. He never should have engaged in a fight with it, in a battle with it. And so he was reprimanded when he got back for having done that, for risking everyone's life and the ship itself.

So he survived, but it kind of didn't work out for him for a while. Well, although he fought his case and won it in the end, didn't he? He was such a brazen man that it seemed like he just always got away with the stuff. He seemed to be always doing things like this. And yeah, like you say, he was reprimanded. He was court-martialed. And he managed to find an obscure piece of naval law,

which got him off. So he was court-martialed because he persisted much too long. But then he found a bit of law that said that you have to pursue any ship that's fleeing you. And got off scot-free and was immediately promoted. And he was constantly promoted in his life. But it was weird, this battle, because one of the reasons he was lucky, I guess, was because he was quite,

I guess he cheated. So he often went in disguise as another country. So in this battle, it would have looked to the outsider like it was a Dutch ship fighting a British ship. Because, like you said, he thought it was the British because the Swedes had sent a ship to Britain to have the Brits fit it out with, you know, some good gear. And the Brits were sending their ship back at the time.

So it looked like it was British because it was covered in British regalia. And then he himself had disguised his ship as a Dutch ship so that he could sneak up on the enemy without them realising that he was the enemy. So it looked like a Dutch ship and a British ship, but it was actually a Dano-Norwegian and a Swedish ship. That's correct. It's unbelievable that anyone got anything done in this time.

But what was the difference? Is it like the flag? I guess it's the flag that they're carrying, is it? I think it's mostly flags, yeah. It's not like anyone on board was like with a cup of tea and a bowl of hats and stuff and a monocle. Those Union Jack suits that... Head to toe.

He died aged about 30, didn't he? He was incredibly young when he died. And he died in a duel with a Swedish Count who was over a disagreement about cards. It feels like he could have... It feels like whatever war it was could have gone the other way. What did he say? It was Great Northern War. Great Northern War.

Well, it's like what Anna says, he was just incredibly brazen. And what happens is you get promoted to captain, then you get promoted to the next thing, then you get promoted to the next thing, but eventually your luck runs out and you get killed in a duel. But what Anna was like, he was in this duel with this proper... What was he, a captain or something like that? A Colonel.

And the Colonel was fully kitted out with proper war-like equipment, like proper swords and armour and stuff like that, whereas all he had was his ceremonial sword, which might as well have been made out of plastic and come from Fisher Price, because it didn't really work very well. And so as soon as he got in the duel, he had no chance. Oh, no.

His name was given to him quite... It was after even this incident where he asked to borrow some ammunition. In 1716, he was given it, and Tordin's shield translates as shield of thunder, like thundershield, such an awesome nickname to have. But yeah, it's interesting that that's what he's known as now, and it almost has been put as his unofficial, or rather look seemingly official surname, even though it's vessel.

Well, it was his official title, I think, when he was knighted. That's what they knighted him as. Tordin's shield of thunder, which would actually be a really useful shield if it was made of thunder. It doesn't work at all. But you'd only hear him coming like five seconds after he'd already attacked you. That's true. It's a good point. Hey, you know the brand of matches you mentioned at the start, Dan?

Yeah. That are named after him, and they were named after him in 1882 when they were founded, and it was because Sweden had a monopoly on matchmaking and match exports, and so the free catchphrase of these matches was you can use these to once again strike at the Swedish. The idea was to take down their monopoly. Wow.

Yeah, and they were bought by a Swedish company in 1972. So in your face, Tordin's shield. So Tordin's shield won this war in the end, or his side won it, and it kind of stopped the Swedes from being like an absolute massive country. So at that time, Sweden was huge. Like, they were in charge of most of, like, northern Europe. They even had a colony in North America at the time. They were kind of spreading out, and then it was kind of the Russians

and the Dano-Norwegians, and the British were on both sides at various times of this conflict, but it was basically the Russians who wanted to stop the Swedish from being massive, and then when the Swedish lost, that was kind of the rise of Russia and Peter the Great and stuff like that. But what I found really interesting is in this war, there was quite a lot. I think there are three or four examples of women who fought on the Swedish side who were dressed as men, and who no one realised until either they got caught

or, you know, after the war and stuff like that. There was one called Elizabeth Olstotter, who was actually executed afterwards on the charges of having dressed as a man and serving as a soldier. There was another one called Ulrika Stahlhammer, who was let off because she did such good work for the army, so they caught her and they arrested her and stuff, and she got married to a woman, but they arrested her and she got off.

But there was... Sorry, James, did she get married to a woman with the woman thinking she was a man? Well, it's controversial, Dan, you see, because they got caught and it went to, you know, it went to court and they said that the woman didn't know anything and she only found out later on, but we're not sure what happened there. But because this was happening, because it was really famous that it was happening, it was used as an excuse by homosexual soldiers in the Swedish army because, obviously, that was illegal in Sweden as well, especially in the army,

and whenever they got caught, they would say, well, we'd heard all these stories about these women pretending to be men, so we just assumed it was a woman, and apparently quite a lot of people got off because they used that excuse. That's quite... It's so slick. I just assumed that half the people on board this ship were very realistically women dressed as men. That's like... Is it Hannah Snell, who was the famous person around about the same time,

the famous British woman who was in the Navy, who was in the Royal Marines, I think, and she was shot in the groin at one point, which is really awkward if you're a woman pretending to be a man, so she had to extract the bullet and deal with the word completely herself to keep it secret. I was going to say that probably... Ow, my balls! My balls! I was going to say that would probably help with your secret, going, oh, lobbed right off!

I was looking into other sort of bizarre moments in naval wartime history, and just sticking with the Dutch for a second, the capture of the Dutch fleet at Den Helder, this was in 1795, and basically this was a battle between the Dutch and the French, and the Dutch were on a boat that was on a body of water that froze over while they were anchored, and so the French had the ability to not even need a boat or a ship to get to them. They went out on horseback with cavalry and they fought a ship on horseback. It was a battle between cannons and men on horses with swords,

and the French cavalry captured them. It's extraordinary, the imagery, I just want to see the paintings of that. So good. I want to surely just buy the cannons into the ice, create massive holes, and the horses are going to fall right through them. See, that's clever. They needed my kind of leadership, because I think they just surrendered straight away, didn't they? Yeah, they couldn't run away.

Iran owns a fake US aircraft carrier, which is exclusively for the purpose of them attacking it. But the great thing is, it's reusable. This year they had their third ever attack on it, where they symbolically sink it, basically, but unfortunately this year they tried it again and it sank by itself, and it's now created a shipping hazard blocking a really important naval port, so they can't get to it. How is it reusable if you sink it? Can you bring it back up again or not? Okay, so this is a really tricky thing. I think they didn't properly bomb it, as in when they do their displays, they might fly helicopters at it,

they might fire it at a bit, but they're quite careful to, I think, fire it above the waterline or whatever, so they don't properly sink it. And this year it clearly decided it had enough because it just sank, and they don't have salvage ships, so they now can't get it up either. Well, that sounds like good news, because it sounds like based on that, they probably won't be actually attacking the US anytime soon. What are you on about? They now know exactly how to sink quality ships.

All we have to do is try not to sink it. That's a good point. Do you know how you sink an ancient Greek trireme? What's a trireme? Is that a boat? With three sets of ours, is it? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, one of their boats. It sounds like the start of a joke, doesn't it?

How do you sink a trireme? They've all got holes that they row through, so do you just have to tilt it a bit so that the holes let the water enter? That's clever. That is clever. That's how you don't sink it. So they would ram each other, right?

They all had toughen prowls, and they would ram each other and try and sink each other that way, and the rams are often at the waterline, so if you hit them with the ram, that hole below the waterline, they're going to sink fast. So genuinely, if you were being attacked by another ship and you can't get out of the way in time, what they would do is everyone on board

would run to one side of the ship, which is about to be hit by the ram. The ship tilts over into the water. Then when the ram hits, it's hitting a much higher bit. Then when you tilt back, it's hit somewhere that's above the waterline. Exactly. Isn't that insane as a defence tactic

to run towards the massive battering ram that's about to hit your ship? That's amazing. But if you've half-tilted your ship one way, isn't the battering ram just being given an easier job to flip you over entirely? It's not aiming to flip you over. Yeah, yeah.

It's not like a spatula. You're not flipping a pancake. This isn't robot wars. Just me. By accident, not intention. Yeah, if Sir Killalot is approaching you with the battering ram, what are you... I don't think it would.

If you're coming at that angle, the physics of that wouldn't cause your boat to capsize. Largely speaking, boats are designed so that they don't flip over that easily. Yeah, that's true. Well, although... I mean, although some boats have flipped over, we all know that.

But famously, we were talking about the Swedish Empire and what powerhouse it was. And when it was this huge naval power in the 17th, early 18th centuries, they thought to celebrate this, they built the world's best warship. And this was 1628. It was called the Vassar.

It was 68 metres long. It was the most high-tech warship the world had ever known. It was painted in really stunning colours, scenes from the Swedish military victories of history all over it. And so thousands of people flocked to see it launch from harbour. And it set off. And 20 minutes later, it tipped over.

And sunk. And they just built it too top-heavy. And it keeled right over. Oh, my God. It's an amazing story. Is that the one they have in... In Stockholm? In Stockholm, yeah.

They just heard about that. They dredged it and they have built an entire museum around it. And you guys are not going to believe this. Can you see the mug I'm drinking from? It's got a ship on it. That ship is the Vassar. Look at the handle here.

It says Vassar. How weird. We don't see it, Andy. Did you go see it when we were there? It's where I bought this mug. You should have taken me. I didn't know about it. I was busy dancing with holograms of ABBA

at the ABBA Museum. I'd rather have been there. Some of us are doing long-range research for an episode of the podcast in two years' time. Nice try, mate. OK, it is time for fact number three and that is Anna. My fact this week is that vanilla farmers in Madagascar

stump their names on each individual pod on the vine. Wow. They dump it. That's incredible. It is, yeah. It's like when you're at school, you have to have your name sewn into all your clothes. It's the same kind of thing.

Except this is to stop gangs of robbers from stealing your vanilla. No, that's why I have my name stitched into my clothes. Of course. Stopped the gangs of robbers. You went to a pretty scary school, didn't you, Andy? They're really sweet, the little stumps as well. So this is because Madagascar is in the middle of a vanilla boom

or actually sort of coming out of a huge vanilla boom. So it produces 80% of the world's vanilla and prices just shot up a couple of years ago. And there are these vanilla gangs, these huge gangs and robbers at night who come when they strip your vines completely bare because it's going for so much money. And so now the farmers literally put

either their name or sometimes their serial number, a specific serial number on an individual pod. So if you see it on eBay later, you could be like, oh, that was stolen from my farm. One of the problems is that once your vanilla pod is ripe, you kind of need to leave it for quite a long time, don't you? You need to leave it for quite a few months to just get better and better and better.

And the longer you leave it, the better it is. But the thieves know this. So if they get there early, then they have something which is still good enough to sell but not quite as good enough that the farmer would like. It's a trade-off. Do you wait till the end so you get really high-quality product or do you take it early so the thieves don't get it?

Yeah. Actually, that makes more sense of something I found out because the government has now banned people, the farmers in Madagascar from picking vanilla too early because they have to be shrink-wrapped if they're picked early and that can make them moldy and it lowers the content of vanilla which is the main flavour chemical.

And in fact, you know how governments sometimes burn smuggled or illegal goods in public so they'll burn ivory, for example, to destroy the market? They recently burned half a ton of prematurely-picked vanilla pods in public to kind of make an example about this law. Do you think that would have smelled nice? I bet it would. Oh, what has smelled amazing?

Oh, yeah. Like an amazing scented candle, a giant scented candle. They ran a huge bath next to it. Relaxing music. It's amazing the prices have leapt up but weirdly, it doesn't seem to have leapt up specifically for the growers. There seems to be this middle group of people

who distribute it, who are known as vanilla-nares and they're the ones that are sort of really reaping the money and building up all these areas in Madagascar now from if you were living in a wooden, hutted house, they're now brick. Like, there's a big change going there as a result. Yeah, weirdly, the huge jump in prices doesn't seem to have made it back to the original producers.

Yeah. Very unusual situation in this world we live. Yeah, they're trying to write that wrong, aren't they? And actually, I read a very heartening article in, I think it was in the FT, which was saying that this is being clamped down on. And the reason it's being clamped down on is because buyers, as in us, are more discerning

than they used to be. So all the hipster, sort of, morally sound awareness of where your goods have come from means that there's a lot of pressure on big companies like Mars to actually make sure that you're not exploiting farms at the other end of the chain. And so what that means is the person who owns Mars goes to Madagascar, looks at farmers' situations

and tries to sort it out. And I think there's a project called Livelihoods Out There Now, which is making sure that the money's making it back to those original producers. But some people really did profit from growing them as well. There was a woman called Lydia Sower, who was interviewed in one article, who said that her husband was a fisherman a few years ago, and she wanted to plant vanilla.

And her husband said, no, absolutely not terrible idea. And she did it anyway. And it's now worth about... She's got a tiny little garden with a few vanilla pods in it. And it's worth about $8,000, which is massive, massive there. Although she was saying this very, very proudly to a woman called Victoria Mars, who was visiting and who does have an 8% stake in Mars,

which, as this person pointed out, it's annual sales are three times the size of Madagascar's GDP. But so, you know, it probably didn't... Her jaw didn't drop, but this sounds $8,000 in the same way that this woman was hoping. You know how there are vanilla nears, as you said, Dan? There are also... I don't think anyone's called this vanilla vigilantes.

It's the thing I'm trying to get. Because, as Anna was saying, it's so much theft. So a few years ago, 15% of all the vanilla on the planet was stolen, which is a hard... And some vanilla thieves would write ahead in advance. That's how brazen they got. They would write a note saying, we are coming tonight.

Prepare what we want. And that has actually led to quite a few deaths because when these people have been caught, there isn't enough sort of justice available on the ground. So there are vanilla vigilantes now who are catching and even killing the thieves. That is brazen. They sound like they've taken a few leaves

out of Peter Skeeldon's book. But can't you get round the poaching by just changing your name to the name that's on the pod? The guy in your article is called Leon. Couldn't I just arrive in town and change my name to Leon? Well, Anna also said, sometimes they put codes and barcodes on. You can't change your name to 731-964.

I bet there's a child of a celebrity who's called that right now. Yeah, Elon Musk is up to something. You don't know what yet. And so vanilla grown, like you say, 80% in Madagascar. But it's not originally from there, is it? It's originally from South America, or South and Central America,

and North America, because Mexico, which is neither in South America nor in Central America. It's in North America. It's from Mexico. It's vanilla's from Mexico. And it was invented by this woman called Princess Zanat, who probably didn't exist. But she was a princess from the Tottenaco people.

And she was goddess, kind of, as well as being a princess. And she was forbidden by her father from marrying a mortal. And she ran away to the forest with her lover, and they were captured and beheaded. And where their blood hit the ground, that's where the first vanilla pods grew. And that's where vanilla comes from. It was an arduous way to invent something, isn't it?

And then it got taken over to Madagascar, and more specifically Reunion, which is where they learned how to grow it. And it didn't work for ages, because the pollen is inaccessible. The flowers are insane. They're fertile for 12 hours after they bloom. So if you're a vanilla farmer, there's big pressure.

You can't just take the weekend off assuming that it'll be all right when you get back. The flowers bloom for one day, yes, for this 12 hours. And in Mexico, obviously, there are insects which have evolved to fertilize the flowers. There's only one species of bee. There's only one species of bee called a melipone, who can do it.

Although, actually, they've recently done a study, and they don't even think it's that. Really? They always thought it was this one melipone bee, and they now can't... I haven't actually got any evidence that this even pollinates it. Something's pollinating it. Something in Mexico.

That's all we have. So for years, they couldn't export it around the world because you don't have the bee or the hummingbird or whatever it is. So the method is hand fertilizing. You have to get in with a toothpick and rub the flowers, genitals together, and that's what fertilizes it,

and that's what makes it produce the vanilla pods. And if you miss your window with a flower, you lose the pods. You're sort of trying to make it have sex with itself, aren't you? Against its will. It's against its will. The reason they're so hard to pollinate is because they've got this lid between the male and the female parts of the plant, and the idea is that you don't really want to self- inseminate

because, I guess, over many, many generations, maybe that's bad for an organism. And so it's against the plant's will that you lift the lid very, very carefully and you dip into the anther, the female part, and you get the pollen out and you smear it all over the male part. This is definitely a side of the Me Too movement.

I don't think any of us expected it. So this was first discovered by an enslaved man in Reunion called Edmund Albius. And he basically had this guy who was his boss and he was telling him how they make watermelons but how they can't do it with vanilla pods. And so Edmund Albius decided, well, okay, you say you can't, but let's have a go.

And he started messing around with it, messing around with it, and he came up with this kind of technique where you use a little stick or a blade of grass and you flip up this little cap which Anna was talking about called the Rustelum and you flip it up and then with kind of a flip of the thumb, you move some of the male and female parts together and you smear them over each other

and that's how you pollinate them. And that technique is still used today in Reunion for sure. And I think actually in Madagascar, I think all over they use this exact same thing. And then he was given his freedom, but he really struggled afterwards and ended up dying in poverty, especially as there was a French guy

called Jean-Michel Claude Ricard who came over and said, oh, this was my idea. I came up with this. And he went back to Paris and he told everyone that he'd come up with this way of creating vanilla in Reunion and everyone sort of faded him for being amazing. But then the former owner of Edmund Albius came to Paris as well and said, mate,

that's just not what happened. Like it was this guy, Edmund Albius, who went round and teaching everyone else how to do it. And he's like a hero in Reunion and there's a statue of him quite near the airport and he's really famous. It's a good lie to make up. Yeah, but quite a Trumpian thing to do.

It is. Just sort of wander into a country where you're like, I did that, that was me. You know that thing which is like 4,000 miles away, which no one can prove who did it? That was me. Yeah, I think that. The longest cake ever made was vanilla flavoured.

What was it? It was baked this year in South India, in Kerala, state of Kerala, and it was 10 centimetres wide. But how long was it? 10 centimetres wide is really thin. That doesn't help you at all with knowing how long it is. It kind of feels like... But can you tell us the air full area of the cake?

At the height. 2.4 kilometres. Very strong offer. 20 kilometres. 20 kilometres. No, that's ridiculous. 200 yards long. And she said that it was in Kerala, not Kerala,

and down in Kerala. How long was it? Come on. These interminable guessing games are completely destroying the experience of our gods. It was six and a half kilometres, so James wins because he was close. It wasn't 20 kilometres.

Where did they fit that? Because outdoors, you'd imagine you'd run into a lot of obstacles. It's very rare you get a six and a half kilometre run. They did it in sections, and it goes up and down a lot. Slalom's a great deal. Hang on, so it's not one?

It's not one single cake that's 6,000 metres. You can't call that the longest cake. That's not the longest cake. The longest cake. The longest cake is every cake that's been made on bake-up in the last 10 years. They may not have to be collected. I'm so confused about what's happened here.

You can clearly see in the photos of the cake that there are sections which slot into place, but I think they're joined. They are all joined together. It's like a big cake snake. OK. It weighed 27,000 kilos, and as I say, it was vanilla favoured,

hence me mentioning it. So one of the best books about vanilla, I would say the best book, is called Travels in Search of the Vanilla Orchid by Tim. Sorry, James, are you claiming to have read all the books about vanilla? Because it sounds a bit like you are. And then you've ranked them all.

It's a small field. It's a very small field. And they're actually all, if you press them up against each other, they just make one long book. Tim Eckhart, who Andy and I at least know, he wrote the book about vanilla, and it is awesome.

There's lots of stuff about the history of vanilla in there. When it came to Europe, one of the reasons this guy was showing off about it is because it was an absolute amazing thing. So Louis the 15th would have soup made of vanilla. Francisco Hernandez, who was a physician to Philip II of Spain,

he said that vanilla could soothe the stomach, cure the bite of a venomous snake, reduce flatulence, and cause the urine to flow admirably. So if you've just, if you've got a bad stomach and you've just farted really loudly, attracting the attention of a snake,

which has then bitten you, and you need a piss. No, and your friend has been stung by a jellyfish, so you need to urinate on them. Just one vanilla part will do that. This one weird trick, yeah. Also, according to Bizarre Zimmerman, who's a German physician from the 18th century,

he says that vanilla cured no fewer than 342 impotent men. So they dragged vanilla and it made them able to have sex again. So if you were, if you'd farted really loudly because of your bad stomach and a snake came along, and a very beautiful person of the sex that you're attracted to has been stung by a jellyfish, after you've urinated on them, and they're so grateful you can then have sex with them.

I'm so impressed by the admirable flow of your urine, Timothy. This was a Bear Grylls episode, I'd love to. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that Russian football team, F.C. Sakhalin, are based in such a remote town that to get to their closest away game, they have to travel one-sixth of the circumference of the Earth.

It's incredible, isn't it? Oh, my days, like, this is incredible. So this is a team based in the town of Yuzhno Sakhalinsk, which is in a far, far, far east of Russia, and they're in the third division of Russian football, and the way the third division works in Russia is it's such a big country, they want all the teams to be kind of close together, because otherwise you have to spend so much money travelling.

So they put all the teams that are next to each other, playing each other, but unfortunately there's no one else around this town of Yuzhno Sakhalinsk, and so they've been put in with all the teams around the Black Sea and around Dagestan and stuff like that. And so when they play Krasnodar, which is one of the teams in their league, they have to, if they want to fly, it would be at least 16 hours, just over 16 hours to get to this game. You could drive, but it's a 132-hour drive,

and a total of 9781 kilometres, because you have to go a slightly weird way around. And I looked at it on Google Maps and it says, warning, this route includes a ferry, this route has tolls, this route has restricted usage or includes private roads, your destination is in a different time zone, so it's not an easy place to get to. So I'm suspecting stuff like this bit is guarded by a wizard.

At the time of writing, they haven't won any away games this season so far. They've won quite a few home games, but they've not won any away games. But they did have a few good seasons a while ago. They won the league a couple of times in the last few years, but they refused to get promoted, because if they get promoted, they're going to have to start playing lots of teams in different parts of Russia, and then they won't be able to do this thing, which they do, which is they go over and they play loads of games at once,

and then they come back, so they don't go every week, if you know what I mean. That is clever. Is the time difference between them and their nearest team is eight hours? It's so weird. Well, the thing is, it's not their nearest team. So if they played in the Japanese J-League, for instance, they're actually quite close to Hokkaido, so let's say all the planes stopped,

and they had to play either against someone like Krasnodar, or someone around there, or against Hokkaido, it would take them two days quicker to get to Hokkaido than it would take them to get to that part of Russia, and that's if they were to walk to Hokkaido and get a car to Russia. That's how much closer it is. They could walk to the ferry, get the ferry,

and walk to the football match two days quicker than driving all the way across Russia. And we could, if they were doing that distance, and we had to do the equivalent, drive to Moscow, back again to London, back to Moscow, back again to London, and probably one more route before they even got there. It's what a distance.

It's insane. They're closer to the Seattle football team in the American League than they are to their nearest Russian rivals. It's insane. So there's not a lot of sort of neighborly antagonism is what you're saying. It's not like Man United Man City,

where you shag the wife of someone who's now married the person across the street. Exactly. It's not like Liverpool Everton, where you literally cross one park to get to the other ground. It's like, yeah, it's incredible. It's more like there are fault lines left over from the Russo-Japanese War of 1905,

which is diplomatically tricky. Wasn't James, wasn't there a bizarre thing that happened with one of the British teams, or two British teams, that got to the final of some cup, and they had to, it was Arsenal and someone, right? They had to fly. I think it was Chelsea against someone.

Chelsea Spurs or Chelsea Arsenal or something. But yeah, then the final was in Baku, I think, in Azerbaijan, and they both had to go all the way over there for it. That was in the UEFA Cup, possibly. Yeah, wow. I didn't realise that this place is basically in the islands of Japan, isn't it?

I actually didn't realise that Russia claimed a portion of what I would have, if I'd looked at a blank map, assumed it was Japan. And I think, no, sorry, Putin, really hope you don't listen to this show. And I think isn't the south half of the island is Japanese, isn't it?

He turned off when we started making jokes about short people, I think. Oh yeah. Yeah, exactly, that's it. It's basically a part of, well, it's right on the border of Russia and Japan. Geologically, I guess it looks Japanese, but it's a very disputed territory,

and there are still some islands, the Kuril Islands, which are disputed, but this is Russian sort of, and is Russian administered, yeah. Yeah. I don't know why anyone plays football in Russia. It sounds like an enormous hassle for so many teams. It's just, it's too big.

Even if you're playing for Vladivostok, which at least is attached to it by land, it's still, I think, 10,000 kilometers east of St. Petersburg. Yeah. So a week's train journey. And I think there was quite a nice story in 2006 where three fans of Zenit St. Petersburg,

which is a football team there, they drove to Vladivostok because Peter was playing a away game there. So they drove the whole like week and a half there. Oh my goodness. Once they got there, their car broke down. But to reward their loyalty, their team gave them a new car.

Wow. Oh, that's cool. Nice. Of course, the reason that people play football in Russia is because the Soviets like to force people to play football back in the day. Okay, cool. Actually, it was quite thought of as a bourgeois sport

originally because it was brought over by the Scottish people in particular. And the first person who brought it over there was a guy called MacPherson, who was arrested after the revolution because they saw football as being a bourgeois European thing and they shouldn't be doing it in Russia. But the first ever football match in Russia was in 1893

and they squeezed it in between two tug-of-war competitions. So there was a big tug-of-war thing happening. And they were like, well, what should we do in the middle because we're just sorting out our rope or something. And they're like, oh, let's have a game of football. So funny. They cleared all the severed arms off the pitch

before they got the footballers on. Oh, dear. But yeah, handball, and it's just the ball rolling over someone's hand. And then the most famous team in Russia is Spartak, Moscow. And they came along. When the Soviets were controlling everything, they were the team of the people.

And there was a load of brothers called the Starristan brothers who started Spartak. And then very mysteriously, they got sent to the Gulag about three or four years later, because they started a, you know, people's football team. But they were so popular that when they got to Siberia, the guard in Siberia knew about them and so let them kind of practice their football.

And eventually Stalin's son Vasily was so into football that they brought Nikolai Starristan back from the Gulag so that he could live with Vasily Stalin and he would just live in his house because he was such a big fan of this footballer. That's so awkward. I know. Lionel Messi just moved in with you or something.

Even if you thought he was a great footballer, I still think that would be awkward around the dinner table. I think it would pass me the salt. I mean, does that have a head kick to you or something? Stalin was, just speaking of Stalin, was exiled to Siberia six times between 1900 and 1913 and escaped five times. Well, speaking of people who escape a lot

and the passing of someone quite famous, Diego Maradona, who passed away recently, very sadly, he used to, Diego used to play football at the request of Pablo Escobar while he was in prison. Just him and Pablo? Yeah, well, I'm sure there were teams that were put together, but he had, at this particular point, I think it was in 1991 Escobar was in quite a luxurious prison.

He kind of ran the prisons, didn't he, to begin with. And of course Escobar and Maradona had quite a lot in common. They had some shared hobbies, didn't they? They did. Did they? Maradona was once sent home from the World Cup for taking cocaine. I just cottoned on as you guys said it. You thought maybe he also collected dokozo or whatever it was

that Escobar had in his house. Shall we talk about Siberia for a while? Yeah, sure. So I was saying before about people being sent to Siberia in 1591. This is the earliest example of anyone being sent to Siberia and it's not anyone. This was a bell in Russia, which was found guilty of sedition and flogged and exiled to Siberia.

And that was because the bell had been wrung to celebrate the assassination of Dimitri, son of Ivan the Terrible. And so the son had died and the locals were happy about it. And so they rang a bell and then they put the bell in court and sent it off to Siberia. Was it because they couldn't identify any of the bell ringers? So was it a way of letting the bell ringers off the hook? Could have been that.

That is the epitome of a workman blaming their tools. It's not really the bell's fault, is it? It doesn't feel like it. It also feels like flogging a bell is going to cause it to ring again and then you'll have to flog a bell. This is never-ending cycle. Have you heard of Magadan, which is a very remote city, kind of two days north of the nearest train tracks and things like that?

Just a very, very remote city in Siberia. They have a mayoral position and they're having a nightmare filling out at the moment. There have been zero applications for the job of actual mayor of the city. And there are 92,000 people in Magadan. It's not a small place. And they've extended the deadline to mid-December. So depending on when this goes out, you might still be in time. What happened to the previous mayor?

If the seven last mayors all died in suspicious circumstances or something? A lot of people say that you kind of won't be able to change things properly and there's a fair bit of graft and corruption. And it's probably a pretty thankless job. But when the story broke for the first time, there have been no applications. The boss of a funeral firm from Tomsk, 4,000 miles away, said he would apply. And he said, of course, I don't know much about the city and it would be better if I had lived there a while, but I've never had the chance.

So he said he's going to apply. His main policy is to build a crematorium. Well, that sounds like he's just going to be greasing the palms of his crematorium friends, doesn't it? We've never actually talked about the amazing Lukov family. But if you're talking about the Siberian wilderness, they're kind of the epitome of it. So this is a family who basically fled the Bolsheviks in the 1920s, 1930s. Family of four, I think at the time, went into Siberia and just lived without ever seeing another human soul.

So until the 1980s. And it is insane. Their lifestyle, they didn't bring much stuff. So they had to, when their clothes started to fall apart, they had to grow hemp from seed in order to make new clothes out of that. They wrote by dipping sharp and birch sticks into honey supple juice and writing. But they raised this family and there's one surviving member, Agatya Lukov. And she is now in her 80s, but she lives completely by herself

in the middle of the tiger, middle of nowhere, 150 miles from the nearest town, a thousand meters high on this mountainside. And she wasn't discovered until the 80s when these geologists were flying over in a helicopter and saw their tiny little hut that they were living in. And they said they were kind of famous in Russia, weren't they, in the 80s for a while? When they were found in the 80s, they said to them, oh, you guys probably don't know that the Second World War has finished and they went, what's the Second World War?

Because they'd went before then, that was in the 30s, I think, or the 20s when they went, like, kind of sense. But yeah, when they were found, they were kind of taken around the country as almost like kind of a sideshow almost, I suppose, which is like, look at these amazing people that have been living in Siberia. And Agatya Lukov kind of was, they said in one article I read that she saw aeroplanes, horses, cars and money for the first time, but then basically said, I ain't having any of this shit.

I want to go back to where I live, because she says that whenever she leaves the town, she always gets really bad asthma or, you know, it's bad for her skin. She just doesn't like, she doesn't like the noise and all that kind of stuff. So she's just kind of happy where she is now. And every now and then they bring her like food, I think, like once a year, they bring her things and people, people knit them socks and stuff, don't they, and knit them things. Yeah.

Just earlier, when I said about the football team going back on the route, passing a wizard, I mean, this is, this is it. Yeah, almost. This is her. It was really sad, actually, when they were discovered, I think there are five of them. And then in the 80s, they all suddenly died and left her on her own. But the thing that most amazed the dad, he was told everything. They were told about the moon landings.

They were shown a television, which they became kind of addicted to and then thought it was the devil. So repented of it immediately. But they were told about the moon landings and refused to believe they happened, which is fair enough. The thing that most amazed the dad was cellophane. He saw this thing where she was like, it's like glass, but it crumples. They couldn't believe it.

Yeah. And they didn't, they didn't know what plastic bags were as well. I remember reading that was a new thing for them. I believe Mick Jagger was flown in to top his numbers up. And they were like, yeah, of course we know who this guy is. But then the big problem now is they do go in there every now and then and drop her some supplies and especially, like I said, people knit them socks and knit them clothes and stuff.

But of course, like with coronavirus, you just do not want to be going into an area with a very elderly lady who's not really had any human contacts for decades and decades and decades. And so that's a real issue with them at the moment. You know what they should do? They should set her up on a date with, do you remember that Brazilian guy, the man of the whole, the most isolated man in the world? They should get those two.

That would be a very charming rom-com. We are, we are on that copyright, Mr. Spielberg, just to say, because we mentioned it on here. So we'll take 10%. That's how that works. Just one last bit of data before we go. Okay. Yeah.

In the breaks between facts, I texted Anne and Alex to see if either of them had seen Mick Jagger live and said, no, I have not. Okay. So Mick said, no, I don't really know who he is. So James, if you want someone to talk to about this random guy. Me and Alex are like the man of the whole and the, you know, lady in Siberia. Yeah. Okay.

That's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shribeland, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James.

At James Harkin. And Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yeah. Well, you can go to our group account at no such thing or go to our website. No such thing as a fish.com. We got all of our previous episodes up there. We have links to bits of merchandise and we also have a few live shows coming up.

So do check in there occasionally to see where to get tickets from. Okay. That's it. We will be back again next week with another episode. We will see you then. Bye.