No Such Thing As A Fish - 353: No Such Thing As Hans Gruber's Silent Night

Episode Date: December 24, 2020

Dan, Anna, James and Andy discuss crap cracker jokes, Zen monk Grinches and the dangerous world of carol singing.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hey everyone, welcome to this week's episode of Fish, a very special episode. It is our 2020 Christmas Spectacular, recorded live at King's Place in London to an audience of zero. There was literally no one sitting in the room with us in this giant hall. There were of course people live streaming it, and a huge thank you to everyone who joined us on the night from whatever bit of the world you live in. It was a really fun night. We had a lot of fun with Christmas crackers and presents, and we did a Q&A at the end

of the show. In fact, if you want to watch the full extended version of the show that you're about to hear, you can go to qi.com slash fish and buy a ticket to the stream, and it's already happened, but you can watch the show, and that'll be up there until the end of the year. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this show, and we hope you have a merry Christmas. We know it's a tough one this year. We send you all our love, and we look forward to seeing you all in the new year. We'll be live and in person, but if not, well, we'll still be here every week on the

internet telling our favorite facts to each other and to you. Alright, dorks, we love you. Merry Christmas, and enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome to another episode, and no such thing as a fish, a weekly podcast coming to you live from King's Place in London. I'll edit the chairs in later. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinski, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin, and once

again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go, starting with fact number one. And that's my fact this week. My fact is that every year in the UK, a joke committee gets together to whittle down a short list of jokes that they think are unfunny enough to put in Christmas crackers. Amazing. Yeah, there's a company called Robin Reed, which was set up by a guy called Julian Reed,

and every year they get together a group of them, they sit in a room and they each read out jokes. And if it gets a laugh, Julian rejects it. He says, no, that's not going in. Oh, wow. And it's this big theory, which I think a lot of people know, which is that the idea of cracker jokes is that they're not meant to be funny. They're meant to be grown worthy because you don't want to isolate anyone at the dinner

table of wanting to tell a joke if they know that they might deliver it and it won't get a laugh. And also, if you're one of those kind of people who doesn't really understand jokes very well, you're not feeling bad because you're not laughing. Right. Everyone else is laughing. You're like, I don't understand. Yeah.

And I think Richard Wiseman theorized this, didn't he, who's like obviously a great psychologist who also talks about Christmas crackers. But the idea is that you are supposed to blame your tools. No one is a bad workman. You don't humiliate anyone around the dinner table that they can't deliver good jokes. So it's all the jokes fault. But it's quite nice. It's a scapegoat.

It's a scape joke. Okay. Who do you think laughs most at cracker jokes? Who laughs most? Well, which profession member laughs most at cracker jokes? Well, comedians don't laugh at any jokes. No. They just say, that was good.

Yeah. Yeah. Needs work. Needs work. Don't open with it. There was a survey. They found a thousand people from 10 professions, okay, to take part, so a hundred from each job, right?

Yeah. They got 10 kinds of job and their reactions were rated into a laugh, a smile, or nothing. Okay. And then they, Robin Reed, released the results of this study. So the profession that laughed most was funeral directors, then doctors, then accountants. The vickers were the least likely to laugh. I can't believe they got 100 vickers and 100 funeral directors and seriously got them to do this research.

That's a fun sitcom. Surely that science lab, they all get locks in 100 vickers, 100 funeral directors. Yeah. We get to pull these crackers, by the way. Yeah. Why not? We can read our shit. Well, I know why not because we're not allowed to touch each other or even get close to each

other. We can pull our own crackers. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I actually, let me pull it out now. I'm going to tell you something about that. All right.

It's going to be an awkward silence now. Oh, that lovely smell. So nice. It's good, isn't it? Really good smell. It's such a nice smell. Okay. I've got balloons here.

I've got, yeah. I've got a joke here. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. What did Adam say on the day before Christmas? I was born many, many thousands of years before Jesus, so this really doesn't have any application to me as a person.

Don't touch that fucking apple. He said happy Christmas Eve or a variation on that. A variation. You got it. It's Christmas Eve. Well done. I've got one. Who played Edward Scissorhands in the movie of the same name?

Was it Christian Bale, Edward Norton, Sean Penn or Johnny Depp? I don't get it. No. Is that one of those that you're not supposed to get? I think so. I think we all... No. We're given facts as well.

These are trivia questions. Oh, right. Okay. If we'd known about these crackers years ago, this is a goldmine of information. I've got one. I'm going to save that one for fact number four. Who got these crackers? Are you really?

I am. Okay. Why did the oyster leave the party early? Because he had a shucking bad time. That's really good, but no. Because he was being really shellfish and just got home. These are so much better than the slightly sexist one that I've got. Why did the oyster leave the party early?

Yes. Because he wanted to get a pearly night. Pearly? Pearly. Yeah, yeah. No, he pulled a muscle. He pulled a muscle. Oh, nice.

So you say sexy as opposed to sexy. It should have been sexy, shouldn't it? Yeah. I had the world record for pulling crackers on your own for a short amount of time earlier this year. Guinness world record. Guinness world record. As in the guy from Guinness was there and watched me do it and counted how many I pulled

and I beat the world record only for it to be beaten about three hours later by Alan Davis. No. Yeah. I did it in a QI rehearsal and I was pretending to be Alan for the show and they gave me two boxes of crackers and saw how many I could pull in a minute and I absolutely smashed it. And then because I did so many, they gave Alan an extra box and then he could beat my record.

Oh. That's sad. How many did you get? It was two full boxes, so it must have been 24. Did he manage to make a call back to HQ and say log harken down or did you just miss that altogether? I might have got really lucky that when they were printing the Guinness Book of Records 2020, it was just in that two hour slot.

I wonder why you kept changing the recording schedule, didn't you, to make sure? I've got another one. Which actress and her mother died within a day of each other in December 2016? This is genuinely in a cracker. It's Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds. Debbie Reynolds, that's right. To be honest, the funeral directors would have pissed themselves on that one. Christmas has come to a bang on time for them.

It's genuinely a Christmasy thing. What have you got? I've had Johnny Depp and I've had people dying within a day of each other. You just haven't got the joke out. It's a slightly different format and you can't tell the difference between a fact and a joke, which is what's been holding his back. Who played the role of Nelson Mandela in the 2009 film Invictus? What is this cracker?

This is bullshit. Jesus. I've got another joke from Christmas crackers. That is, what kind of medicine does Dracula take? Blood. And the answer is, and you'll get this in quite a lot of your crackers this year. A lot of people will get this in their crackers this year. The answer is con-medicine.

C-O-N medicine. It doesn't make any sense, right? So according to Matt Parker, who is our friend, who's a mathematician and all-round good guy, according to him, when computers write down the letters F-F-I, okay, the F-F-I kind of kind of squished together. So instead of putting them down as actual letters on their own, they have just an F-F-I character. So it's just one code that they put in just for the F-F-I.

Now, not all computers can read that and not all computers know that when they see that code, they're supposed to put F-F-I. So some of them just miss it out. And so it's supposed to be coffin medicine, but loads and loads of cracker companies have this particular computer system that misses out the F-F-I. And for years and years and years, you'll see it on the Internet every year. People see this and they're like, I don't get this joke.

Oh, what's it mean? What's it mean? That's so good. That's amazing. You know, you claimed you had alleged that yours was sexist, even though it wasn't, it was sexy. It wasn't really, yeah. I don't think it was sexy. Sorry, can I just say?

I think it was sexy. I was certainly aroused. Pull the muscle. Well, the person who runs the Tom Smith Cracker Company. So Tom Smith was allegedly the person who invented crackers 150 years ago. And his company became a company as today, which still sells a hell of a lot of crackers. Person who runs it said in 2005 that the only changes they've made

to any of the jokes since 1950 is going through every year to take out the offensive ones. So that's why they seem quite dated. Yeah. She said it's mainly things attacking the Scottish and women. Not attacking, sorry. Choshing in a potentially offensive way about Scottish people and women. And they go through, extract those. That means for years they were looking at the coffin Dracula joke going,

that's good. That's nice. Not offensive. Not offensive. We should give a shout out to Peter Kimpton, who literally wrote the book on crackers. He's written a book, a history of Christmas crackers. And I think he used to work for the Tom Smith Company as well.

Right. So he went, I think he went through the company archives because they used to have crackers for everything. It wasn't just for Christmas or rather, I think they released them at Christmas, but they were themed every year. So for example, in 1882, the crackers were featured around the battle of Tel El Kabir in the Anglo-Egyptian war. That was a theme.

Wow. 1904, you had Tom Smith's Rosso Japanese war crackers. I didn't know what was in them, but they had a lot of these very themed ones. So they had suffragette ones, had spinster ones specifically for spinsters, which included a wedding ring, some faded flowers and some makeup. Wow. Yeah. That's robbing it in.

What are you going to do with a wedding ring? You're right. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. It is robbing it then. Yeah. I even think if you're a spinster who finally gets lucky at Christmas, manages to almost seduce someone and then says,

well, I happen to have this wedding ring from a Christmas cracker. That might be what puts them right off. They also had one for the discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamun in 1928, or whatever that was. And in the same year, one that celebrated the Prince Edward's World Tour. And it was advertised with, you've met the Prince, now pull the cracker. That's so good. So this Tom Smith guy, it's a ledge that he invented it.

And he got the idea when he was in Paris and he had seen it was in baguette shots and baguette shots exclusively. They sold baguettes only. And it was little sweets wrapped up. Why were those being sold in baguette shops then? This is a tiny baguette you've got. This isn't going to feed the whole family. A terrible mix up.

Yeah. They were next to the baguettes. They weren't in the baguettes, but he saw that and he thought, that looks really interesting. Can I try and apply that back to my shop back in England? He did that. It was inspired by the baguette too. Because often you get the tug of war of the baguette.

Yeah. No, but he, there's a lot of mythology around it, right? Because we don't, we don't know what the true story is. And it sort of evolved over time. So the crackling bit was supposedly he was at his house asleep by the fire and a log cracked and he woke up and went, my goodness, fangs of expectation. And supposedly which is what they were called for ages.

I've tried to find that term, fangs of expectation. I can't find it before about 1960. Yes, that's what I mean. It seems like mythology, right? Because it just kind of appears. They were originally called fangs of expectation, but I don't think it's true. Because they were definitely called Cossack for a while, weren't they?

Which was apparently because the crack sounds like a Cossack's whip. And you do see that, but that's interesting. Yeah. Actually, the exact wording according to the myth of him waking up by the fire is he yelled, fangs of bonbons as soon as he woke up. That's it. And then he thought, wow, that would be great inside my weird baguette thing. And then that evolved into the cracker.

I'm banned from all the bakeries now though. So it was his mythology, wasn't it, Tom Smith? Yeah. And he said, I've invented the cracker. I'm genius. Here's how I did it. And he claimed to be the inventor. And I think he did invent them, didn't he?

He definitely did invent them. There was someone else around the time who was interviewed by Henry Mayhew, the journalist in 1850, just before Tom Smith came along. And he was called Gaudente Sparagna Pane, which I want him to invent of them because of that name. And so he was an Italian migrant and he came over and he said he invented them. And he actually, in the interview by Henry Mayhew, he gives him an Italian accent, which I won't.

But he said, yes. What, it writes down the Italian accent? Yeah. So it's D-E for the, it's dem for them. Right. It's pretty crude. He said, yes, I make detonating crackers and I'm the only man in England skillful enough to make them.

It lives in my breast alone, the full entire secret. And then he said what they're useful for. And he said, what happens is at parties, the pretty lady pool, a sudden bang, and the lady goes, ah! Wow. Amazing. Amazing that he kind of talking about the lady going ah and all that because both of his daughters were really prominent suffragettes.

What made them become prominent suffragettes? We may never know. They're dads. Spooking ladies. One of them was Maud Arncliffe Senate and she was once imprisoned in Holloway for breaking the windows of the offices of the Daily Mail because they hadn't reported a rally that had happened. But in fairness, the newspaper paid her fine in the end and she came out.

And she was part of a group called Women's Social and Political Union, but she left them in 1908. She resigned because she really, she thought that the people who were in charge really weren't doing the job properly. And then I found separately that in 1909, they made their first ever suffragette Christmas crackers. The year after she left. That must have been such a slam. Wow.

Oh, that is a real slam. Because she ran, she took over the company, Spiraniapania's company, and ran it. And I've got a suspicion, and I don't like to cast suspicions on a true feminist, but I think she might have just pretended to be a suffragette to sell crackers. Because she used to put adverts for the cracker company in all the suffragette newspapers. Oh, it's a good, I mean, it's a good idea because who goes, oh, when they see a cracker, women, where do you find lots of women, suffragette rallies? It's obvious, isn't it?

It's a marketing genius. God, imagine if you let off a cracker at a suffragette rally, the uproar and the riot that would have broken out. But actually, isn't that true about the bank that I read somewhere? In fact, it was on the Tom Smith website that they used to put them all together and pull them and make a massive bank to train soldiers what it would be like in war. I read that. Yeah, it's on their website.

I mean, that's amazing. The Second World War, it was a way of getting them used to the sound of gunfire. You can only imagine how unprepared you would be for D-Day. Calling around the beach is looking for your paper crown. Wait for the joke, wait for the joke. Who played? We've got to move on shortly. Oh, can I tell you about a giant cracker very quickly?

It's from, oh man, I think it's around the turn of the century, so around 1900. The Smith factory, they made an eight-foot cracker, which was to be pulled by a group of clowns led by the famous Harry Payne at the Drury Lane pantomime. It contained various things. So the sources all differ because it was meant to be reused every night. But it apparently contained a costume change for the whole cast inside the cracker. Several hundred smaller crackers which were then handed out to the children in the audience. And then other sources say there was just a person inside the cracker,

a sort of child who just burst out of the cracker and started doing something. Wow. That's very dangerous because you risk snapping the child right in half, presumably. But useful if you're a spinster because you have a child without having to get married. Spinsters in the audience, spinsters night at Drury Lane. I've actually just got, I've got one last thing before we move on, which is that the crackers that I was talking about, this joke committee was run by Julian Reed. So Julian Reed started this in 1975 when he was a young schoolboy.

He was obsessed over it. He got a £2.50 cracker kit and he made his own crackers and he started making them himself and he started selling them to local shops, built it up and built it up. And he's become this guy who 40 Christmases later is still making crackers for the country. Over 10 million go over. So I actually emailed him to say, can you give me any extra facts about crackers? Some of the stuff that I've already said about the committee and rejecting. But what he's also done is he has read out to me some of the jokes that made it through the committee this year

that will be appearing in this year's Christmas crackers. If you get a Robin Reed, you're going to hear about it. Wait a minute. So this goes out actually the day before Christmas. So spoiler alert. Yeah. Spoiler alert. Yeah.

Yeah. So yeah. Apologies. I really hope he reads out the con medicine one. I really hope because who plays Edward Scissorhounds. So we've become, we've become WhatsApp buddies and he's been sending me voice memos. So here, here are a few of the jokes that will be appearing in this year's crackers. This is Julian Reed, founder of Robin Reed Crackers.

Why did the doughnut seller retire? He was fed up with the whole business. What is the best thing about deadly snakes? They've got poisonality. What do you call a man with a seagull on his head? Cliff. Got it. That's from the voice of the jokes of crackers.

That's great. Amazing. Anyway, thank you to Julian for that. And we need to move on to our next fact. So it is time for fact number two, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that in the 1880s, to defend against attacks on nativity scenes, one priest issued knuckle dusters to his congregation. Wow.

Things got pretty heated round about this time. So this was, there were a lot of riots going on round about this time in the UK from anti-papers. So basically a lot of people felt like the Anglican church was creeping back towards Catholicism and the Pope and doing all sorts of things like putting decorations up and doing weird blessings and worshiping idols and all that fun frivolous stuff that the Protestant church didn't really like. And so when, for instance, people put up nativity scenes and did this big ceremony called the blessing of the crib, they were often vandalized and people used to get quite violent. And so there was a priest who issued knuckle dusters.

And you can actually see them, if you go to Clevedon court, which is in Somerset, I think, one of the knuckle dusters is on display that he issued to the people of this stately home to say, look, if they start trying to tear down your nativity, you have my blessing and God's blessing to crack him in the soul. Amazing. Yeah, I mean, he must have been able to source loads of knuckle dusters, which is quite impressive. You had a lot of knuckle dusters around in those days, they were a bit more common. Were they? They used to make them out of coins and used to make holes in coins and then put them together

and you'd be able to give someone a bunch of fives. Nice. And so do we know if they were used in a big battle? I don't know if it was a big battle. I found a few big battles. So one of the main offenders of people who wanted to stop all these processions and stuff was a guy called S.P. Andrew, who was in Manchester. And I was reading a story about him in the British newspaper archives and this was in the sun in Thursday,

the 5th of January, 1871. And apparently there was a procession going round and he tried to stop them from walking around with this cross and he just stopped them and stopped them and stopped them and eventually they went round. And then the next day they'd been trying to put decorations up and then he'd take the decorations down and then he'd put the decorations up again and then he'd take them down and they'd put them up again and he'd take them down. And eventually there was a massive brawl between all these kind of church people and they called the police and the police came, a whole load of police came, but they said that they had no authority inside the church. So all they could do was sit outside the church while everyone was having a massive scrap.

And eventually no one came out so they just left. But this guy did get arrested and find £5. Wow. Yeah, so Nativity Thefts, modern day Nativity Thefts and anyone trying to tamper with it is a big deal. In America it's got to the point where churches have been fitting baby Jesus with GPS tracking systems because people come in and they steal the baby Jesus and they wander off. And a lot of people, A, find it upset that baby Jesus is missing but B, some of them are really expensive. So there was one church which is in Florida which had a life-size ceramic Jesus

which was £1,350. Done. Sorry. That's right. Yeah, so it was very expensive and they wandered off with it, but it was a GPS tracking system which as soon as there's movement in Jesus, it sets off and it starts going and so you can silently follow without the people knowing that there's the GPS in there. And he was found face down on a carpet of a woman so they find her.

Sorry, repeat that sentence but better. Face down in the carpets of a woman. So he was found in a nearby house laying face down on a carpet, not dead. He was ceramic. It's just something about saying in the carpet of a woman which is absolutely foul. Too sexy for a cracker joke? I think it's been banned, yeah. You know Benedict Cumberbatch's first role was in a school Nativity Play, like a lot of people.

Yeah, apparently pushed Mary off stage because she was talking too long. What? Wow, he still does that. It's really awkward. The outtakes for Sherlock are insane. I'm the first Nativity Ever, I don't think we've mentioned, but it was made by a friend of the podcast in Francis of Assisi. Oh, he's going to guess who, yeah.

Oh, sorry. Friend of the podcast, who could it be? Oh, I want to know who you'd have guessed now. Everard Digby. Everard Digby. So sad. William Haslett, I would have gone for it. William Haslett.

Yeah. Julian Reed of Cracker fame. When people say, what's your ideal dinner party? I would always say, definitely William Haslett, Everard Digby and Julian of Cracker fame. Just to keep the conversation spicy. He can lob another one in any time. If anyone loves Julian Banzett. No, it was St. Francis, friend of the podcast.

And he set up the first nativity scene in a little Italian town in 1223. And he made this manger and he got a doll that he cradled as he gave mass. And apparently the doll, so this is what's meant to happen in nativity is the doll rose from its eternal sleep as dolls are usually in and cried real tears of joy, which obviously didn't happen. And then I mean, that sounds like Pinocchio. Dolls on in an eternal sleep. They're just not alive.

Well, don't ruin. I mean, there might be kids watching. It's not what you tell your buddy. Hope not. Wait. I think that's spoiling all of religion, which is that's a different kettle of fish. I think that's too big. All right.

The doll woke up. So imagine if you're a doll and you wake up and you're faced down in the woman's carpet. That would be surprising with that. I think this is probably quite dramatic for the doll as well. Swat team with a tracker making their way into the room. There he is. Secure the asset. And you got a Messiah complex.

Very weird. Sorry, Anna. You were saying I was saying Francis of Assisi. Yeah, look, I was I was mostly done, but it is the case. I think it's more true that apparently Francis himself was so moved by the mouse that he himself was giving that as he spoke the word Bethlehem during it, his voice sounded like the bleeding of a lamb, which I didn't know that was what happened when you're very moved by something.

Yeah. There you go. Very powerful. Weird thing to record. Weird, like weird detail to record about that. His diary. Did he say I was so good in the mass today that I sounded like a sheep? I don't know.

I think his mate wrote the diary. I do actually have a nativity sheep fact. Nativity sheep and dolls actually. So it really works as a story from 2018. The sourcing is impeccable Metro, but it is Amazon has pulled a sheep sex doll from its website after a mum accidentally bought it for her son's nativity play. It was so. Okay.

I don't really know much about sheep sex dolls, but I reckon you could get away with it. Can you? Well, I know it's a joke gag gift, right? It's it's it's cool. It was called a stag night bonkin sheep and it has a big how did she not realize when she was answering it? I think it was record. I think it was sort of those customers also bought things bought a Joseph outfit and it

was awesome. So anyway, she sent she sent her son to school with the doll blown up, but it had a really big hole at the back end and it was, you know, anyway, that I'm surprised the teachers knew what it was really, but they refused to use it. They sent the boy home and she the woman added has sent the boy kept the sheep just so that's harsh because they can't have said if this is a young it was a young boy. Yeah. Seven year old boy and you send them home because they've done something wrong.

You can't say the reason I'm sending you home is because this inflatable sheep is normally had sex with by people. Can you? What that kid doesn't know what's happening? No, I know. Well, the what she she added her son had become really attached to it and really liked it. She said she said no for heaven's sake. No.

She said he's probably in his room right now stuffing Lego in the hole. Wow. I'm so sorry. Wow. We do this stuff. It's low brown to high brown high brown to low brown here. Do you know who is very pro Christian Christmas? The Merry Christmas?

Christians. The Pope. Yeah. All correct. I should have I should have closed the field a bit there. Are you reading this from your cracker trivia? Someone you wouldn't expect Richard Dawkins. Okay.

Richard Dawkins very pro Christmas. We found this out in an article that he wrote was a letter actually in the new statesman that was published written as an open letter to David Cameron in which he wishes him Merry Christmas, adding that he would not accept substitutes to that no happy holidays, no nothing. He said all that happy holiday season stuff with holiday cards and holiday presents is a tiresome import from the United States where it has long been fostered more by rival religions than atheists as a cultural Anglican.

So he kind of puts himself as that. He says, I recoil from such secular carols as white Christmas Rudolph the red nose reindeer and the loathsome jingle bells, but I'm happy to sing real carols. And in the unlikely event that anyone wants me to read a lesson, I'll gladly oblige only from the King James version, of course. What was David Cameron like? Didn't even invite you, mate. Now he's not on anyone's dinner party list.

Dawkins or Cameron Dawkins. I'd be fun. Him and him and Julian. Dan, did you listen to the quote that you just read? He's pro classic. Oh, no, I'm, no, I'm modern. What am I talking about? Yeah, I love Rudolph.

Yeah. So, you know, people are always saying, are they that Christmas, you know, it's, it's not quite as religious as it should be. There's someone who said this festival teaches even the little children, artless and simple to be greedy. The tender minds of the young begin to be impressed with that which is commercial and sordid. And that was written by Cappadocian Bishop, Asterius of Amaseia in 400 AD.

Wow. Amazing. What was Saint Augustine as well? A bit later than that, but not much. He was saying that stop giving people gifts. You need to give people arms instead. You know, you need to give to charity. Stop giving gifts.

So that was right at the start because at the start they didn't really celebrate Christmas Christians because like in early Christianity, you wouldn't celebrate birthdays because it was kind of a pagan thing. And so to celebrate Jesus's birthday was just ridiculous. So it was quite late when they did it. And even then they were already saying this is too commercial. What? I mean, were there any shops?

But like what? I'm just trying to envisage 400 AD shops though, sort of what you would give someone. There wasn't wrapping paper. There will have been like baguette shops, wouldn't there? Yeah, of course. There have always been exclusive baguette shops. We've got to move on to our next fact, guys. Can I give you another just quick, just it's people who don't like Christmas.

This is about so you go does a lot of surveying of people and they ask all sorts of Christmasy questions. So there was a survey recently and they sort of matched people who don't like Christmas with all the other attributes that they know about all the people on their database. So people who don't like Christmas are more likely to say there's no point in getting married over half of marriages and in divorce anyway. They're more likely to say I think the Olympics is more financial trouble to a city than it's worth.

And they're also more likely to say I don't understand what many emojis mean. Did they only interview Richard Dawkins? Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is Andy. My fact is that when asked this year, 21% of people said they didn't want Christmas Carol singers visiting their home because of coronavirus. Another 55% said they didn't want Carol singers regardless of coronavirus. And maybe those 21% were slightly using the COVID as an excuse, but it seems that people just don't want Carol singers.

No, they hate them. I mean, I'd really like the sound of Carols. Would you guys say you didn't want? I would say I do want. Yeah. I would say that this year I haven't really opened my door to anyone other than the numbers and delivery. If he was singing at the same time, you wouldn't keep the door closed.

I've actually become quite good friends with that. I'm a simple delivery guy now. Another blow-up sheet, Mr. Harden. Yeah. Only 13% of people surveyed actively wanted Carolers and the math doesn't quite add up, but 11% were in the don't know camp. Bit indecisive. Wow.

There is a bit of a weird thing of if you're the only audience standing there at your front door. It is awkward. Oh, come on. You've done Edinburgh shows like that. We're literally doing a show with that one. What I wouldn't give for one audience member right now. There is a thing where people don't like them and there was kind of uproar in 2009.

There was this thing. It was in a place just opposite Preston where neighborhood watch distributed these cards. They put them through people's letterboxes and they gave them out in cafes and pubs and stuff. And there were cards you can put in your window saying Carol singers were not welcome at that house. I don't know if there was one person that stayed called Carol singer. It would feel awful.

She lives with Bill stickers, I believe. I actually was looking up Carol singers in the newspaper archive, British newspaper archive and the only one I could find was a Carol singer who was brutally murdered about 100 years ago, which really ruined my search terms. Well, to be fair, there were two separate editions. If you do search the newspaper archive for Carol singer shot, there were twice that that did happen in history, 30 years apart. One was in 1916 in Newcastle.

There was a guy called John Nixon who shot someone who was Carol singing outside his house. Apparently they were kind of friends and they might have been, I think he might have owned a pub or he'd owned somewhere near a pub and they'd been drinking earlier that day and then they decided to Carol sing and then he decided to shoot them. Wait, so were they singing together? No, they were singing at his property. Got it. And then another one in 1886, there was the rising sun in Clapham, it was a pub and again

the landlord shot someone because they were Carol singing. So it's a very dangerous, dangerous thing if you're in the turn of the 19th, 20th century. Wow. It's weird how the hatred goes back a long way. And so if you look them up, in 1906, the leading article across the papers, there was this big thing about whether Carol singing was a very annoying and they should be bound all together and there was a piece written like a leader piece in like the, I think the Bexhill on Sea newspaper or something saying, we love Carol singers, this is really unfair.

And it published, the letters are got in response and they were furious. So it got all these letters in response to it, publishing this thing saying, look Carol singers are harmless surely. One of them said, I don't think the writer kind of experienced firsthand the bands of Carol singers so called that visited this town the past few Christmases. And this is 1906 said most of us who have experienced it would be inclined to call it not Carol singing, but Carol howling or Carol murdering. Wow.

And that was only 20 years after there had been a Carol murder. So that's pretty insensitive. It really is. 1887 in the Essex Newsman, someone said the singer's antics were little better than Rowdy Burlesque, drunken or half drunken orgies. I mean, that sounds quite good. It's something to open your door to expecting silent singing while shepherds watch while you twirl.

So it seems to be a thing of Christmas music is another thing people really don't like when it's too early. So another survey, do you enjoy hearing Christmas music a month before Christmas? So November 25th. Are you up for it? 4% said yes, I'm up for it. The other 96% were not up for it. Or maybe they would don't know as I know, but 5% of people surveyed didn't want to hear

Christmas music until the 24th of December. What? 5% surveyed more than we're happy to hear it in the end of November. Right. Nothing until the day before. Do you remember when you guys were in Australia with me for the tour for fish and we went to my parents' house and it was I think May or something like that. The only thing my dad played was Christmas music.

Is that right? Do you not remember? I remember the day, but I don't remember the music. It was a lovely day. It was a lovely day and it was probably made better because of the Christmas carols, but for some reason the only playlist that was coming up. Do you know what? I remembered why they did that.

Well, I remembered why we were at your parents' house. It was my birthday and we went there. It was a special birthday treat to celebrate. So they must equate me with the Messiah, I suppose. The ceramic one? Be fair, you were faced down in the car quite early on in the day. They had a reputation of being raunchy though. They were banned by the church multiple times and medieval Christmases were generally really

raucous and it was the 12 days were basically all one big pagan drunken mess. And a lot of the carols like the Holly and the Ivy was actually a pagan fertility dance, they think, or related to it. So it would be accompanied by dance moves and I've read things that say maybe the Holly and the Ivy equate with male and female genitals. And if you read the lyrics with that in mind, things like the big thorn that's mentioned in about verse three do suddenly sound quite raunchy. I can imagine the congregation dancing in a bit of a Beyonce way that maybe a tenth

century priest might object to. I think that's why they do carols singing round to houses because it was banned from churches and they can kind of see if they're all doing sexy dances. There was a great one in Sri Lanka in 2016. The church accidentally printed the wrong lyrics for Hail Mary. They accidentally printed Tupac's version of Hail Mary and so they all had the lyrics. And it is one of those things where when you when you read the lyrics, I've got them here. There's a few bits where it like it says this blows like a 12 gauge shorty or shotty

rather. So again, but 12 days kind of immediately are thinking, OK, is this Christmasy? This sounds Christmasy. OK. Feel me. And God said he should send his one begotten son. I mean, he's. Yeah, feel me like you feel Jesus.

Yeah, exactly. Holy spirit in you. So I imagine they got in quite a few verses into this before realizing Tupac was behind the lyrics as opposed to. Yeah. So the song Silent Night, I'm sure you do, are written by two people. The lyrics written by a guy called Joseph Moore, who was a priest in Salzburg. And the music was written by an organist called Franz Gruber, who is from a village called

Andorff and became very popular, of course. They both died as people do. And in 1912. Spoiler alert. Too soon. I'm talking about it. It's that was just another one for the funeral directors. In 1912, the Austrian Taurus Office decided that they wanted a memorial for these two

writers. And there were loads of paintings of this guy called Gruber, but there were no paintings of Moore because he hated having his painting done. And so to get this, to get this sculpture, they dig up his grave and take out his skull so that they can make a sculpture of him. And the sculpture is still there. And they reinterred the skull in the chapel where the sculpture is. But that's going a long way, isn't it?

That's misinterpreting the word sculpture. That's insane. I know. Did they do a sculpture of them, the skull? Or did they put flesh over it? I think they must have got the skull and gone, well, he's got, you know, he's got big cheekbones. Imagine not liking having your portrait done in life. And then imagine if he could have known that after his death, people would dig up his body

to do the thing he didn't want done when he was alive. He probably would have acquiesced to one in his life. Simon, if he knew that was going to happen. Franz Gruber is such a good name because it's almost exactly the villain of Die Hard. I know. Honestly, because I've never seen Die Hard, but I do know about that. And when I saw this guy who was called Franz Gruber, I genuinely thought it was him. And I was like, this is the best fact I've ever heard.

Silent Night was written by Hans Gruber. Yeah. He wrote it at the Nakatomi Plaza building. The guy who wrote Silent Night apparently did it because the organ was broken and he needed an emergency to come up with the tune in time for Christmas. And I think he was near Salzburg. And so he was a vicar, wasn't he? Or a priest.

And he went to this church. He was working in this church. And the organ was quite, quite crap, didn't work. And so he was very good at the guitar. And so instead it was supposed to be accompanied by the guitar in its early days. And then it became more acapella. But it was so popular within 30 years. There was a version along the Labrador coast where it was translated into Inuktitut,

as in like the Inuit language in 30 years. Oh my God. And you know why they went to the organ? So they were playing it on the guitar, but the guitar was banned from churches. It wasn't seen as a church instrument. So you could only allow to play certain instruments in church. He wrote it on the guitar. They wouldn't let him play it, so he played it outside.

And then that's why he had to get the organist in. You know, there's... I didn't know that carols used to be for all occasions. Much like crackers, they were just themed differently. So there were Easter carols. There were New Year carols. Was the one for the Anglo-Egyptian War of 18, whatever it was? Okay, there wasn't, but there was a Battle of Agincourt carol.

No way. Yes, there was a carol that was written after the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. Oh, so not for it. No one was running out of the front with their guitar. No, sadly, I think they waited until the result was in before they commemorated it in song, because otherwise that's cocky. In the Second World War, carol singers kept going, but they were a bit restricted. And so to be safe during the blackout in Britain in World War II, in London specifically,

they weren't allowed to carry lanterns around with them when it kind of lights, so they couldn't actually read their hym sheets at all. And you couldn't see them, obviously, when you opened the door. And they also issued with a government warning that they mustn't warble like air raid sirens. That's a bad singing, if you can't tell the difference between a carol singer and an air raid siren. People flocking to the underground every time they're all there. No, no, no.

It's OK. Glam the door. I suppose that bit that goes, blah. That does sound a bit like it. Exactly. Yeah. That does sound like it, yeah. We've got to move on in the set, guys, for our final fact.

I'll tell you what. While I was searching for carol singer shot on the newspaper, I came across an article in The Sun from Thursday the 5th of January, 1871, and they had a Christmas cracker joke. Did you ever hear it? Yeah. Because we did that before. What ancient author is supposed to have written a treatise on plum pudding?

I think I've got it. Have you? Is it Suetonius? It's Suet Onius. Isn't that amazing? That is in The Sun in 1871. Wow. It's changed, hasn't it?

It's amazing. And just for anyone watching who doesn't get that, can we explain what that means? I don't think so. Suet is a type of pastry that's made out of animal innards. And Suetonius was an orator. Classical writer. Yeah. You're welcome.

Yeah. And in the same article, by the way, it said, the noticeable feature of Liverpool police sheets on Monday was the fact that only 66 persons had been booked for being drunk and disorderly. Good numbers. Small victories. Okay. Should we move on to our final fact?

Yes. All right. It is time for our final fact of the show. And that is James. Okay. My fact this week is that Jim Carrey's makeup for the Grinch was so onerous to apply, the studio brought in one of the CIA's experts enduring torture to help him get through it. So yeah, this is about Jim Carrey and the making of the Grinch.

And he had so much makeup on. He said it was like being buried alive. The main guy who was in charge of it was Ron Howard, the director. And he had a partner who was a producer called Brian Grazer. And Brian Grazer had a friend who was from the CIA. And he was specialized in kind of helping people get through torture. And he spent the weekend with Jim Carrey saying, this is the way that you have to sit through hours and hours and hours.

It was eight and a half hours that he had to sit there having this makeup on. That's a lot. He got taught how to do it. And Carrey said at first that he thought it was quite hilarious, but in the end, you know, it did the job and they made the film because he said that he wasn't going to do the film. You know, he said, this is too much. Yeah.

He said he had to sort of become a Zen master. He had to train himself to just be at peace. The guy, the CIA guy had to teach him a lot of things. One of the main things was distraction. He was saying, and there's a clip of Jim Carrey talking about this on the Graham Norton show where he really goes into it, where he says, you just have to punch yourself at times, just at random, just go, it hit yourself in the leg. Suddenly just get up to check something, do something very different.

He did a lot of smoking while he was doing it. This is not describing the Zen monk that I have in my mind. The stress of it with the smoking was just to get through the stress. But the problem was is that he was wearing this really thick Grinch suit, which was made of yak hair. And so he had to have a really long extended pipe. So he was sitting there sort of going. That's so Dr. Sussian, isn't it?

But then of course the movie did go on to win the Oscar for best makeup. So it was all worth it in the end. Is it? Will he have been happy about the best makeup Oscar? Because it feels like it's a bit of a slap in the face. Literally they're saying all the stuff around your body is getting an award and you are not. Yeah, but I'll be honest. I don't think that his performance in the Grinch probably was going to win best actor in the Oscars.

Yeah, I started watching it as research for this fact. And I can say that I've seen the first six minutes of the film. Would you describe the makeup as deserving of a best actor role? Makeup is incredible. Yeah, yeah, regardless of the movie. So the guy who did it is called Kazuhiro Tsuji. And he's an amazing sort of legend of the makeup world. And he said that Kerry was a bit of a nightmare to work with.

And that I mean, it sounds horrible being under all this makeup. It sounds really, really restrictive. But Kerry apparently sometimes said, you're painting me a different color to the color you painted me yesterday. And Tsuji obviously wanted to say, why would I do that? Why on this big budget Hollywood film would I paint you a different color? Imagine if you started watching it and you're just like, wait a minute. I just went from green to red. It used to be green.

Yeah. And Kerry kept saying, you've got to fix it. You've got to fix this. And he said in an interview, so I fixed it. I kept painting it the same color. You know, claimed it was different. It's different. Yeah.

Fittingly, actually, I think he only took that job in exchange for a green card. So if anyone knew about the color green, it was this guy. Brilliant. Brilliant. It's not quite that actually. No, no, no. That's absolutely true. It's not why he took the job.

He took the job because he was offered it and he thought this would be great. He was doing the job. But the stress that Jim Kerry put him under during this job was so intense that he had to quit. He actually had to get a bit of therapy because Jim Kerry was kicking his foot through. This is before he was then monk-like and had a CIA guy come in, I think. He really, the guy, this makeup artist says he was a real dick on the set. He was rude to everyone. He was, and Jim Kerry goes very method.

It's hard to know if he thought he was the Grinch and he was embodying that character. What an excuse. Come on. Well, there's a very famous documentary, which I'll mention in a second. Just to finish that, he basically sent this guy off the movie because he was so traumatized by Jim Kerry, how he spoke to him and everyone else. So he was off for a couple of weeks and Jim Kerry called him up himself and so did Ron Howard and said, please come back. I've worked on my temper.

I'm zen-like now. Please come back and do it. And he said, okay, I will. And his friends said to him, why don't you do it for more money? He said, I don't want to ask for more money. But then he went, okay, I'll tell you what though, I'll do it for a green card. And that's how you can work in America. Yes.

Yeah. Well, then I think they didn't even give him the green card until he got the BAFTA. It was a hard one thing. The BAFTA or the Oscar? No, it's BAFTA. Weirdly, but it was the BAFTA with it. But it was quite a big deal for once the BAFTA is in America then in that one year. So he got a BAFTA for the makeup and then they gave him a green card.

But that was a high bar to have to have to pass. Yeah, stressful. So the movie you're talking about where he goes method is called Jim and Andy, isn't it? The movie was Man on the Moon where he plays Andy Kaufman. But yeah, there was a documentary. They did a documentary where it's like that. But he got the job while he was working on Man on the Moon, didn't he? And Audrey Geisel, who was Dr. Seuss's wife, went to visit him while he was doing that

movie and tried to decide if he was going to get the job. Now he was doing this movie pretending to be Andy Kaufman and was so method that he wouldn't respond to Jim Carrey. He would only respond to Andy Kaufman and he would just pretend to be him completely. Basically for the whole making this movie, he was Andy Kaufman. And so when Audrey Geisel came to interview him and said, do you want to do the Grinch? The only way she could find out what he would be like was if Andy Kaufman did an impression of Jim Carrey who was doing an impression of being the Grinch.

Yes. Wow. Yeah. There's a dog in the Grinch. The Grinch has a dog. It looks pretty normal. Certainly in the first six minutes, there are some interactions between the Grinch and his dog.

And I found out later, the dog is voiced by a human. They didn't use the dog's box. That's disgusting, really. It's putting dogs out of business with humans. Yeah. It's a guy called Frank Welker. Oh, Frank Welker. Yeah.

Oh, okay. Does he do a lot of dogs? Frank Welker's probably got more Hollywood box office hits behind him than any actor alive. What? Huge claim. Huge. So this is the thing. He does have form in playing dogs because he also played Scooby-Doo.

Oh, there you go. Yeah. So maybe it's his thing. Go to Frank Welker's IMDB. He is the most successful actor on earth. I can't believe this because surely we would have heard of him more. No, because he does voices. It's like Andy Serkis before we found out his name and he was Gollum and King Kong.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is a bit like the original Grinch, right? Thel Ravenscroft was the voice of the Grinch and he was Tony the Tiger and lots of other people. People didn't know that because, sorry, he sung the Grinch's songs, but Boris Karloff was the Grinch's normal voice. So cool.

Which, well, that's what cool that he was. Frankenstein. Yeah. The mummy. It is very cool, but then he got all the credit. So it was reported as him being the Grinch, whereas actually the main song was sung by Tony the Tiger. And it was great.

Can I give you another joke from our crackers earlier on? Yeah, you were saving one. Yeah, it's this one. What is the name of the Grinch's dog? Is it A, Ben, B, Max, C, Sam, or D, Buddy? I actually, I literally watched the film and I have a note about the dog and Dan is the one who knows. I'm so upset.

What is it? I'm going for Max. Oh, I'll say. I mean, Dan knows the answer. I mean, go for something else if you want. I'll say Buddy. I'll spin it all. Put everything on Buddy.

It's Max. The Grinch wasn't green originally. He was black and white with pink eyes. I'm not sure if that's with pink eyes or with pink eye, the medical condition. I doubt it. That wasn't what it was about, certainly. No, certainly not. That was a theme.

Do you know what colour green he is? What shade of green? Is there a particular Grinch green that Dr. Seuss demanded? Kind of. It's ugly car. And that's not a specific green, obviously, but the director of that film, Chuck Jones, was really hard to use that colour green because he had this ugly car that he rented that was this horrible shade of green.

And he went, actually, that would look amazing on my Grinch. Wow. And he picked that exact colour and put it on the Grinch. So cool. Actually, speaking of Grinch-related cars, Audrey Geisel, who we're talking about, who sadly she died a couple of years ago, but at the age of 97, and she ran all of the Dr. Seuss estate for quite a long time, she had a Cadillac that she would drive around with with a number plate that read Grinch.

Wow. So cool. Is that Grinch poster's sort of reformation of character or pre is what I'd want to know? Oh, I think, no. I think deep down, the Grinch is a good guy who is misunderstood at the start, right? Because there were two kids, two little boys called Bob and David Grinch from New Jersey. They wrote a letter to Dr. Seuss saying everyone makes fun of them all the time because they're called the Grinch brothers.

And he wrote back to them saying, no, the Grinch is a hero, a changed man. Tell the other kids it's not where you start, it's where you end up. That's a hard message when your head is being flushed down the toilet to articulate. And I looked into some makeup, a little bit of movie makeup stuff. Oh, yeah. And so traumatizing makeup experiences in films. And I think the prize goes to the person who played the Tin Man in Wizard of Oz originally, who was Buddy Ebson.

So the Tin Man in Wizard of Oz was extremely intense. It was one of those, took five hours to put the makeup on every morning and then five hours to take it off again. And you don't know when they even got the acting in. And eventually he got really ill from all these aluminium powder fumes. He was ingesting and inhaling. And he woke up in the middle of the night screaming and he had violent cramping all over his body.

And he was rushed to hospital. He was in this oxygen tent for weeks. And the... Did they find he didn't have a heart? That is both about the Tin Man. The thing is, Andy, spoiler alert. He did have a heart all along. Did he?

I think. Wait, was that it? Oh, God, it's been a long time. The Tin Man. No, does he? I've done Tin. They don't tear out someone's heart, do they, in the film? It's been a while since I've seen it.

But I'd be really surprised if it ended with that. I think the lesson is he doesn't need a heart. I think, does he get like a medal of a heart? Or is that the courage for the lion? Thousands of people in the comments are screaming right now. Sorry. Thousands. Well, so he didn't need a heart, but he did need the use of his lungs,

which he didn't have for a while. And his skin turned blue. And the studio just wouldn't believe it. So the studio were like, no, this is rubbish. You're just malingering. Come back in. And they actually sent someone to the hospital, I think, or to his home when he was just sort of emerging from this coma

to say, you've got to come back and do the acting. And a nurse said, no, no, no. He really is in a bad way. And so they replaced him. And not only did they replace him with this guy, Jack Hailey, who played the Tin Man, but they never told Jack Hailey why the last person had resigned. That's incredible.

I've got a makeup fact about the Grinch. Oh, great. Mr. Grinch makeup, Kazuhiro Tsuji. So he's done a few things. Like he did Men in Black. You know when the guy is sort of a cockroach turned human and he's kind of twitchy under the skin. Terrifying.

He designed the silicon, the live twitching silicon. And it was, I think, silicon gel. So it's kind of implant gel on people's faces. So he did that. He did Benjamin Button. He's done all sorts of stuff. But he also, he came out of retirement to do Churchill. Because Gary Oldman was playing Churchill

a few years ago in a film called Darkest Hour. And so he did a wig for Gary Oldman, which has a very specific thing. Because Churchill was about mid-60s in the war, I think. And can you guess what he used for Churchill's very fine hair for that face of his life? Well, it wasn't his own pubes or anything, was it? Oh, come on.

It's all pubes. No, of course it wasn't his own pubes. Picture Churchill in your mind's eye. What is his hair like? Oh, my gosh. It's so much less good than that answer. But it was, it was baby's hair, right? To mimic elderly hair.

So he was asked about it. He said, baby's hair is the most expensive you can buy in the world, because it's very fine and very thin. And he was quoted, no one is killed. Alarming way to start talking about this. That just feels like he's protesting way too much. Way too much. No one is killed.

No one over the age of two is killed. A baby grows hair, and sometimes they decide to cut it. But it's so far, and it's for the hairline. It's for the hairline, because often your hair at your hairline is finer. But it was so fragile. He had to make a new wig every 10 days. How many children did he have to shave?

We've got to wrap up soon. Guys, we've actually gone way further than ever should have in a live stream. So more Christmas movie stuff really quickly. AIMDB top 100 Christmas movies by rating. It's a wonderful life. How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which I thought was going to be the one that we were talking about,

was actually the 1966 one that Anna was talking about. Charlie Brown's Christmas, and then Die Hard, which is the controversial one, right? Because some people think it's Christmas. Some people think it isn't. Yeah, but the villain did write Silent Night, so I think that's probably OK. Exactly.

That's why it is. Is that why? So I read an article, a scientific article, by Urs A. Deerker called Every Stainer Story, the Many Dirty Undershirts of John McClain in Die Hard. He says, this article explores that 34 undershirts, worn by Bruce Willis and his stuntmen in the 1988 action film Die Hard, OK, and they go through all of these things

and they tell you exactly what they mean and all that kind of stuff. So the Dirty Undershirt, according to Urs A. Deerker, is a symbol for injustice and class in other films, such as a streetcar named Desire and Rocky and Rambo. It's further tied to male sexuality and violence in films such as Bonnie and Clyde, Cruising and White House Down. And they said that all these different shirts,

they were all stained in a slightly different way so that you could know which ones were at all the different parts of the movie. So you had some that are really unstained and some that aren't. And they were all numbered on a rail and he would like, oh, I'm going to have number 12 today. All right. And all the stains were specific to things that had happened.

And according to the article, it was a planned design process in which no stain was accidental. That is really cool. And that wasn't written by a crazed journalist. That was written by someone that's like the... This is written by an academic, yeah. So, for instance, one of the shirts is in the Smithsonian now, so they kind of looked at 12.

He starts off with a nice, clean vest and by the end, he's absolutely mullet. And you'd never consider that. I assumed there was one shirt. How wrong was I? Really wrong. OK. That is it.

That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course's 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.qi.com. Yep. Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, nosuchthingasafish.com. We've got all of our previous episodes up there,

as well as a bunch of other stuff. We'll see you again next week. Goodbye.