No Such Thing As A Fish - 364: No Such Thing As Kylie Minnow

Episode Date: March 11, 2021

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss hungry marines, thirsty police and sleepy snooker players. 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 a particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one and that is James. Okay my fact this week is that US Marines are considered to be so stupid that members of the other armed forces call them crayon eaters. This year a marine has invented an

actual edible crayon. Now does that prove the Marines are not stupid? I think so. Does it prove that they are and that they haven't understood the joke? This guy, he's invented something so that makes you smart doesn't it? Yeah. Does it draw? It actually draws like a crayon, it's not just an edible stick. It does draw.

He might have just taken a pepper army and shoved a nib in it. Does that count as a crayon a pepper army? I mean I suppose if you smeared it on the wall you could get some kind of drawing out of it. No, so this is a guy called Frank Manto and it was both him and his business partner who's called Cassandra Gordon and they decided in 2017 having heard of this thing about being called crayon eaters that they would decide to come up with an edible crayon and they've got these things called crayons ready to eat and they taste like delicious vanilla flavoured chocolate and anyone can eat them.

Don't give them to your pets because I think they have some chocolate in them and pets aren't allowed chocolate and actually this guy called Frank Manto he was using some crayons to colour in a project once when he was at high school and not when he was at high school he was kind of... I was going to say, I mean he's got a Marines reputation here. What happened was he put a crayon in his mouth like to kind of because he only had two hands and he needed to hold one so he put it in his mouth and that was when he realised wait a minute, are there any edible crayons actually and so then he got in touch with this lady

called Cassandra who's a pastry chef and she helped design this new product. I bet that when he put the crayon in his mouth immediately a Marines recruiting officer put Cassandra in the door and said, you're the kind of guy we need. So they're currently trying to crowdfund the crayons in order to go out these new edible crayons. If anyone wants to check it out it's crayonsreadytoeat.com and they're looking to get $75,000 at the moment they've got $5,750 as of recording but you can go to their shop and buy a t-shirt so that is available right now.

Is it an edible t-shirt? It is not an edible t-shirt. It would be a real shame if today, the day that we are doing a comic relief marathon asking people to donate money to the best causes in the world if actually all of their funds were redirected to fund this edible crayon and I just want to say if you have to choose one just think really carefully. Comic relief are trying to feed the world aren't they? How is it better to do that than to send a lot of edible crayons everywhere?

James, is it a pun on meals ready to eat because that's what they call their US military supplies isn't it? MREs that's the kind of the meal rations you get in the field. To be honest I didn't know about that but now you said it I mean it definitely is isn't it? It's even in the same packaging style Andy so it's like a round bag yeah it's got the font on it and it's the idea that they be given to children or to marines because obviously children tend to use crayons more but marines might need emergency supplies in the field.

They're not supposed to be emergency supplies I don't think. I don't think you replace them with the usual crayons that marines take in the field. It's very boring a lot of it is waiting around but they've got to have something to entertain them. It's a funny product like a... I like it. It's an annual face to the abusers right? To the insiders.

Yeah exactly and why do they call marines crayon eaters it's like this is quite a new thing. The interview with Frank Manto that I saw he said that when he was in the Marine Corps they never caught them crayon eaters that was until 2002 and they said they were known as jar heads, grunts, ground pounders, bullet sponges but they were never known as crayon eaters. I can only think looking at those dates that it's due to Ralph from The Simpsons who was a regular crayon eater and famously supposed to be a bit dumb that they must have taken

that it must be. You're so right. Yeah. There was a blog from another Marine about that nickname railing against it not because it's insulting but because it's just so shit and I couldn't tell if it was like the Lady Doth Protest too much but it started out him saying you know we always make fun of each other in the military so we call the air force the chair force very funny the coast guard are puddle pirates the list goes on apparently but he didn't he didn't but then he said the

crayon eaters is just super lame do you think that something as lame as crayon eater is going to offend a member of a tribe whose trainees are taught to yell kill during training? Yeah well he makes a point. Well he makes a point but I think like you say he makes it a bit too strongly doesn't he? Well the article is very very funny just a couple of extracts it's bullet point it's like point one first off it's just kind of weak maybe we're just too dumb to understand the insult here but quite frankly it sucks it's lame it's no better than a kindergarten

insult you might as well say you poop your pants at least there's some truth to that for the Marines. I mean it's really I mean that seems to be a self oh yeah doesn't it at least we shit ourselves. Should we be calling them pant poopers instead? You're right he's shot himself in the foot with that article it's just more ammunition he's shot himself in the pants. It doesn't seem like they had a tremendous reputation before if they were known as jarheads

grunts and bullets bungers it's not as though the fine nickname they had before has taken a battery. I reckon they probably like ground pounders because that implies running you know strong runners maybe. That's true. This bun just makes you sound pretty damn hardcore. Yeah yes that's true. I guess so or more like just people who are disposable in war that's what it sounds like

to me. Can and father. Yeah. Do you know if you have chewed off a bunch of crayon but you've you've left some over do you know what those are called those tiny little bits at the end that are sort of useless um no I don't know that they're called left allers and yeah left allers are very important because they can be collected and remoulded into new crayons and that's a project that a guy called Brian Ware was doing so for hospitals in the US he would collect all the endings

all those tiny little bits at the end and he has a new mould and he would pour it in he would melt it up and he would remould crayons and they go to hospitals for free so that's pretty good. God I mean I know hospital food is shit generally but that is a bit beyond the pale isn't it? That's their offering. What was the name of that um the little end bits done? Left allers. Left allers and that probably comes from the ola of crayola right?

That's right. So the name crayola right I think this is amazing the etymology of this word it's so ridiculous it was coined by Alice Binney who was the wife of Edwin Binney these two people kind of started the crayola company and she got the word from the French word cray meaning a stick of chalk and the English word oleaginous meaning oily so it means oily chalk but I just love that I mean oleaginous is such an unusual word to just think well I'm going to make a kid's play thing out of this word. It's a stupid name it's neither chalk nor oily and in fact the whole point of crayons

crayola crayons is that it was the first type of crayon to not use oil it used wax instead so it does seem bizarre to me to then give it the oil name it's not oleaginous well exactly but the Binney family in general they made obviously they made millions out of crayons and the really nice thing is what the money was spent on because in 1986 the San Diego Museum of Art got a world-class collection of art bequeathed to them and that was the result of the Binney family millions I think it was Edwin Binney the third who must have been I guess grandson of the original Edwin Binney he had bought this wonderful art collection so crayons paid for a world-class art collection which I think is a very nice made of crayons

so yeah it was only crayon art it was really I can't remember exactly what was in it but it was it was really good stuff although would you know we used to paint with proper crayons that's right yeah would you know 2012 up until 2012 the most expensive painting ever sold at auction was done by crayon rather pastels but you know the you know the same the same thing really I know there's an oil and wax slight difference to it but yeah and also reputationally if you say I've done a lovely pastel drawing then you must really know what you're doing if you say I've done a lovely crayon piece I think interesting though fruit pastels has begun as a painting tool that tasted like fruit oh god poor guy it's already been invented

we should tell him mate they've done it the fruit pastels the painting by the way was the Scream by Edvard Munch oh yeah he did one yeah because he did a bunch of versions of the Scream and one of them was on cardboard and it was done with these crayoni pastels and that sold for something like a hundred and nineteen million at the time it's now 23rd in the list of the most expensive pieces of art that have ever been sold with a da Vinci right at the top but yeah and also his name Edward Munch comes from the fact that he used to eat his drawing equipment as soon as he was done didn't he and Crayola Vigurd at PR I would say company when then latest new colour Blutiful came to be the company said it beat

four other finalists so the other finalists were Dreams Come Blue, Blue Moon Bliss, Reach for the Stars, Star Spangled Blue, they're the four that it beat and they said that the company chose Blutiful from over ninety thousand unique submissions someone read through ninety thousand names and then there were four hundred thousand votes to decide the winner. It's insane that you could have ninety thousand unique names when the public have no ability to think of anything new do they basically if they've got ninety thousand unique ones then think of all the people who said Bluey Blueface and add that to that number and you're in the millions.

So I think they can't they can't have meant unique names they must have meant unique submissions from people some people must have been coming up with the same ones. They must have been. There aren't ninety thousand sounds in the world but yeah there's not ninety thousand puns with the word blue and that's for sure. Even you couldn't generate. No but they probably just had people just sausage stick you know it's probably just random sausage random submissions ninety thousand is a lot of people.

That's really so many to be positive isn't it it'd be schools that they're all submitting around America but it's crazy I was looking through I read this amazing site that I want to give a shout out to which is Jenny's crayon collection site and a woman called Jenny has gone through and cataloged every single crayon that's ever been and ever been retired I read through all the all the colors obviously and they prioritized bizarre things so the initial ones are really obvious like red yellow blue brown but by the time you're in the thirty two crayon box you're getting timber wolf as a color in the forty eight box you've got macaroni and cheese as a color and yet maroon and navy blue you don't get them to the ninety

six box people in the navy must feel very bad about that but yeah those puddle pirates so but one other thing about that the color changes is the famous thing when they changed the flesh color so it used to be that Crayola had this color which was flesh which was very much the same color as a white person's skin but obviously that is you know extremely unwoken not the right thing to do and there was a woman called June Handler she was a scientist and she realized that when she was observing children they would often bully each other like the white kids would bully the non-white kids by saying you don't have any flesh because you don't have the same color skin as this crayon she wrote to Crayola and Crayola to their credit very very

quickly changed it changed the color to peach and now they have a colors of the world crayons where you can you know basically it's all the different skin type colors that you can get in one pack it's pretty good yeah good on you Crayola yeah oh good at PR I'm telling you did you read the list of internet crayons that Crayola released in the 1990s I mean it's just the same colors all over again but they were called things like web surfing blue circuit board green green dot com just another green online orange and my favorite floppy yellow oh really that used to be my nickname at school but I don't know why they call me that because I used to ship myself all the time okay it is time for fact number two and that is my fact my fact this week is

that the London Metropolitan Police used to have a van called teapot one exclusively to deliver cups of tea to officers stuck at the scene of a crime wow that's awesome yeah so this this sadly I believe that teapot one and its brother or sister teapot two are now decommissioned tragically they're no longer running and it's a shame because teapot one was this it looked kind of like a burger van that went around but it had also the sort of regalia of a classic police car and on the very front of it written in capitals was teapot one and it would be called for say example if police were called to an area where they thought maybe a protest was or if there was a big festival and they needed police on standby the whole time this was the catering truck that would come by

and top them up with tea there would be other things like coffees and sandwiches and so on but it was known as teapot one am i correct in thinking that behind teapot one you would also get the milk motorbike and that would bring the milk in the sidecar and you have the sugar scooter behind that didn't you yeah um yeah so it was basically the government privatized the catering of the met police after that and put it out to tender so this was the met police's own thing that they had but then the government said no we'll be able to make it more efficient if we put it out to other companies if you ever want an argument against privatization the end of teapot one is it well i read one vlog about it where they said let's be honest in the main the food was

shit but that's not the issue here um who else could give you a frozen pork pie a sandwich and apple and a cup of hot grey water at four o'clock in the morning and do it all with a smile so it's it's one of these things where everyone knew it was terrible but it was their thing and that's why they were excited about it yeah that's such a when teapot was written across the front of it down was it written backwards so that if you were in a car and it was going up with its sirens behind you you could see and the siren was the kettle just whistling i think from the photo that i've seen unless they've reversed the photo it looks like it was a normal reading for if you were standing in front of it so the correct way so before teapot one

existed officially on the front of a van it used to just be a call sign so police have all sorts of different call signs for if they need certain types of units to come in so if there's rioting going on and they have a van full of riot police that call sign might be gold or silver and they would know okay we need to send that van it's good that they're quite different isn't it you don't want to accidentally send the tea lady in especially james if you say right we need to kettle everybody so i actually spoke to a former police officer to ask you know do you know anything about where this came from and by an astonishing coincidence the person i spoke to is the person who may have generated the call sign teapot one oh yeah his name is his name is steven colgan

he's a buddy of ours he is a former qil he's been on the show before and he told me that at the time when the call sign came out he was an instructor at met telecom and wireless school and one day he created a temporary call sign teapot one for the catering van and it started getting used and started it got stuck and his colleagues started doing the same and then a second van came which was teapot two um he says it's quite possible that he wasn't the very first to use it but he can't find any instances before where anyone had done that and it was years after he left the police that it became the call sign so much that they eventually turned it into the van itself wicked i was on a reddit thread which asked a question that everyone's probably wondering which is is

it appropriate to offer police officers tea or coffee if they're outside or near property which so most answers were from american people saying this is the most british question i've ever heard being asked and not only are you offering the police tea but you're asking if that's polite to do it but the answer seems to be from various police officers who responded they love tea always right to offer please don't be offended if we turn it down sometimes we're busy even if we don't look busy but also there are some instances where it may be considered a bribe and so they are going to be obliged to turn it down i was told i was told when i worked in a hotel that when the police came for our regular fights and things that we had to call them for that we

weren't allowed to give them tea or biscuits or anything like that we were told we weren't allowed to because it was counted as a bribe and that was by the police but we still would ask them all the time because it's just polite isn't it was like a cup of tea but then probably about half of them would say no we're not allowed and then the other half would say oh yeah go on then and there was one time that i was working behind the bar and there was a massive fight like a really really massive fight going on and we called the police we kind of put all the shutters down and stuff and then eventually the police came i'll never forget it we gave him a cup of tea and he had like four massive guys who he was kind of corralling out of the building with a cup of tea on the saucer

with a biscuit on the saucer all the way through and he didn't spill a single drop it was one of the greatest things i've ever seen no that's amazing badass um i did spot uh that the st john ambulance twitter does say as of 28th of june 2020 that they have a vehicle called the teapot which seems to still be running and that is used to deliver refreshments to hospital staff and medics and volunteers so on um so it is possible that despite the police teapot one being down we still might have a teapot on the road um helping out hospital staff thank god as long as britain has a teapot vehicle on the road somewhere hey like tea is very important to our country and it's like what we were built on absolutely it's like the crows of uh tower of london if there's not a teapot

van on the streets of london england will fall in wartime especially we get very possessive about tea in the second world war i don't think we've mentioned that well first of all uh once the blitz came all british tea stock was moved out of london and it was dispersed through the country to 500 different locations whoa 500 that's you're really making sure they can't get all 500 um but also in 1942 britain bought up the world's entire supply of black tea this is how much we realized we needed it to get through the war it was all the tea on the european market and it was largely for the north africa desert campaigns because apparently all their water was transported in fuel containers so it tasted like oil so the only drink they would drink was tea

but yeah they bought up all the tea pretty much available that's so fun to you the suffragette movement tea was very important in that there was a suffragette called patricia hall who once said that the promise of a cup of tea was a great inducement to get women to come to meetings uh and also a lot of the tea rooms in london was where they would meet so um there was one in particular on oxford street called alan's tea rooms where a lot of the early suffragette plans got made uh and they this was run by a guy called alan liddle but alan liddle was actually a pseudonym for the person who actually run it who was called margarit liddle and her middle name was alan so she called it alan's tea rooms after her middle name because she was called margarit alan liddle

and i can't work out whether that alan as a middle name was fake completely or whether just by coincidence she had a male sounding middle name and she could use it for this tea shop but yeah that's hilarious was this sort of like how female authors in the 19th century had to have male pseudonyms was it like you weren't allowed to establish a tea room unless you were a male i think that's what i think it was like to stop people from worrying that this was a place where women were going to hang out um because like helen god and liddle was one of the people who went to um margarit's tea room and she was one of the very famous kind of suffragettes who wrote a book about i think about force feeding i think it was like the first account of women being

force fed in prisons and stuff so yeah but they went on to found um liddle didn't they yeah pretty good do you guys know uh who invented tea god what uh so close so close it was buddha uh yeah there's an indian legend that buddha went to china and when he was there he said right i'm gonna meditate for nine years now okay he thought he was in for a long meditation but he fell asleep and when he woke up from his nice sleep halfway through his nine years of meditating he was so annoyed at his own weakness that he cut off his own eyelids and he chucked them on the ground and where they fell a tree with eyelid shaped leaves sprang up in its place and that was the first ever tea tree oh wow never heard

that citation needed but still it's a nice story um teapots uh original teapots uh came from china where tea came from and they became popular in the Ming dynasty but apparently i read one source that said the chinese people would carry them around with them and just drink straight from the nozzle oh that does make well it would burn wouldn't it if it was too hot yeah i think that's the only thing that stops me from doing it is that i'm worried that i've been right your lips are gonna blister and was it known as the nozzle back in the day i'll be honest in ancient china i don't think they even called it a spout hubby they probably had their own word for it you're right i don't i don't think nozzle is a is a mandarin etymology um i read that on a lot of ships so

sort of military ships that the teapots you get there they are cube shaped are they and yeah they're rolling around and stuff exactly yeah the cube teapots so um it's it's yeah it's just a really cool teapot shape it's uh sorry cube shape it was invented by a guy called robert crawford johnson and uh it's still going like it's a big cube teapots limited is a big thing it's easy for storage as well because you can pack them up you know like those square watermelons that you get yeah but the nozzle's gonna get in the way but i do see that point but it's quite hard to make um square ceramics isn't it it's like because you have the the joints are really really difficult to make them watertight yeah interestingly it it does not have a nozzle does it not which is

interesting which is why you can pack it yeah does it have a handle um it does have a handle yeah because i was going to say it's like i'm a little cubic teapot shortest out i don't have an handle and i don't have a nozzle so it's just it sounds like they're boxes yeah it's a cardboard box and you write teapot on the side in crayon hanging on the ship give it to the marines they'll know what to do with it uh do you know that the oldest petrol station in america is shaped like a teapot no so i thought this is at least claimed to be the oldest petrol station in the country uh it's in zilla which is in washington state uh and it opened in around 1920s 2122 something like that and the reason it's shaped like a teapot is it's based on the teapot dome

scandal which was a bribery scandal during the presidency of warren harding there was an oil field that was known as the teapot dome oil field and someone had been paying to get their hands on this um oil field uh and the teapot dome oil field was named after a teapot shaped rock which was in the middle of the field and then that became the name of the scandal which became the name of the first petrol station amazing you wouldn't guess a teapot shaped petrol station was associated with mass government corruption so that was what it was nodding towards you think they probably sell tea yeah they probably built it thinking oh this will be one in the eye for the government won't it everyone will see this for hundreds of years and the first thing they'll think is

what an arsehole warren harding was but actually what everyone thinks is oh that looks like a teapot sorry do they call the nozzle the spout yeah i know a completely random thing about zilla uh just to chuck it this very small town which is that they've got a church there the church of god in zilla and they have a giant 10 foot tall t-rex out the front of it or they used to which is dubbed and known to the locals as god zilla oh no way yeah and so it's become an attraction you go and see god zilla at the church of the church of god and what kind of corruption was that uh metaphor for it was a lizard selling scandal in the presidency of taft quite confusing because god zilla am i right is not a is not a t-rex yep you're raising a very obvious point

okay obvious fine i'm saying i'm saying what i mean is everyone was thinking it um i speak for the people when i say i wonder what happened to the teesmaid does anyone else ever wonder that sorry you know the teesmaids that our parents reminisce about 2016 by the metropolitan police when they decided to outsource the that's that's the other i don't know what a teesmaid is so a teesmaid was what it's like a little thing that you have on the side of your bed that not only is an alarm clock but it also makes your cup of tea in the morning yeah it's a thing that makes your tea like they'll everyone sort of had them in the 50s 60s 70s um and the first ones were actually in 1891 the first one was made it was called the early risers friend and it was basically

an alarm clock but apparently in the description of the patent you replace the spring of the clock with cat gut and when the alarm vibrated the cat gut struck a match so it like pulled a match struck against the surface which lit some you know a bit of um a bit of wick oiled wick which boiled water and then the boiled water would tip itself into a cup of tea it sounds a little bit like i don't know if any of you guys haven't played mousetrap as a kid you know that thing that just never works yeah sounds like an okay go video it's like a heat robinson machine or uh you know whatever they're called we've all found a reference that fits us apart from Anna here so Anna said Anna had mousetrap mousetrap okay sorry yeah i don't recall hearing anything from you

Andy you've been particularly silent for references on this one oh dear i'd agree with the rest of us haven't you in this big old reference off um but anyway tees made about a quarter of households had them in the 70s and i've always wanted one and they were ruined according to various r-schools in the early 90s by norma major so norma major in an interview as in just say yeah yeah sorry yes just for international or um younger listeners norma major was john major prime minister john major's wife and she said in an interview that her tees made was the pride and joy of her bedroom and almost immediately sales of tees made plans i've got to say that's a bit of a slam on john major to say that your tees made is the pride and joy of your bedroom he was normally downstairs

enjoying a curry hey good luck getting that one international listener google it and then you'll you'll have a good old laugh it's very funny okay it is time for fact number three and that is andy my fact is that the ninth longest running british soap ever was designed exclusively to sell soap nice and you mean soap that when i first read this fact i genuinely forgot the other meaning of the word soap so i just thought you meant a bar of soap the ninth longest running bar of soap was designed to sell soap of course it bloody was great point very good point i do mean a soap opera yeah um so this is a spin-off because last week we were talking about laundry and afterwards i just i remembered that we'd spoken about dazz briefly in the recording and i started

reading about dazz and i found out that for 18 years from 2002 to 19 inclusive they had a soap opera which was in advert form which was about dazz and they got soap opera stars to be in the dazz adverts in similar roles to in the actual soaps they were in it's it's basically you know the marvel cinematic universe where everyone kind of meets all these characters from all over the place this is like that because they've got people from kori east enders brookside holly oaks they're all in the same world mingling and interacting with each other yeah it's very much the most ambitious crossover in uh television history isn't it it is it absolutely is um it's called cleaner close um does it count as a soap opera if it's actually an advert or not well what a great what a great

point james and what a time to raise it uh the wikipedia on it reports that episodes have a character who does not use dazz which causes them problems which are solved by a character who uses dazz so i mean i don't think anyone was waiting tuning in each week it wasn't like it ran for a thousand episodes or anything but you'd only get like a couple of episodes a year wouldn't you because they'd rerun the adverts and stuff exactly yeah but fortunately i don't think that is the dividing line between soap and non-soap and so i'm claiming that this is uh long-running soap and what do they do in the ad breaks with the dazz soap they have extremely sharp ad breaks in those um where they actually sell persil with another so it's like a little russian doll

so how come we've never seen this i've never seen this i know it quite well yeah definitely a lot of people who listen to this podcast will be very familiar with this advertising campaign or i can cleaner close more people will have known it than will have read anika renner um we're not going to spoil her either this week but um but it's really pleasing because this is back to the original days of soap operas which were sponsored by soap companies uh soap manufacturers the very first ever soap opera which started 1930 was sponsored by uh palm olive who who wanted ads for their super suds attached and the reasoning was these are for uh women working at home housewives and what are they like well they probably like

soap so let's try and sell them soap um while they listen and you know are at home do you know how palm olive got their name just as an aside no you can guess probably um all right was it founded by a woman called olive who had huge sweaty palms it always needed to wash them yeah it's a good guess i reckon the people at home might have worked it out already but um the two oils that it was made from with palm oil and olive oil oh yeah that makes more sense than the didn't the hand thing yeah that makes more sense i'd like to say no just different truer um but people hated soaps from the start right there was never a hating where soaps were considered a high culture thing um they were railed against from that nine early 1930s

they were 15 minutes long and most newspaper articles when they write about them say basically about four to five of those 15 minutes of these blimmin adverts all of which start with as you say andi ladies have you tried xyz and they were they were sometimes called washboard weepers that was an alternative name for soaps in the 40s um but i think really it was snobbishness wasn't it and also the fact that they were aimed towards women and often made by women so like one of the real first amazing uh writers for soap operas was someone called anna phillips and she was incredibly incredible writer she wrote two million words a year at her best and she was often suggesting new colors for the creola company wasn't she yes she invented things like cliffhanger ending

that was her idea but she was kind of the queen of soap operas in the early early days in the 30s yeah she had a show which was called painted dreams which was the very first one that she did so that started airing in 1930 and it was she was asked can you come up with a daily show that would show the sort of home life of people and as you say it was sort of treated like uh what is this lowbrow nonsense but actually for the time of 1930 the characters that she created were incredibly strong women on the show and there were virtually no regular male characters in it whatsoever so she really pushed forward this idea that women were more than what society was saying they were that they were much more they were clever they were more ambitious and so that was sort of like a

beautiful little secret movement uh to to push women's rights yeah but it must have made a difference because they were so popular straight away weren't they I think by like the started 1930 by 1940 92 percent of programs on the radio were soaps basically it was like 25 of the 30 top rated programs were soaps so maybe they are the cause of women's women's lip well they did have a lot to a lot to say for society because the person who came after Erna Phillips was Agnes Nixon so she was in the 50s and 60s she was like the successor of Erna Phillips and she not only wrote very strong characters but she also wrote about a lot of societal problems you know these days in your so proper she'll have lots of you know echoing the problems of society they'll

do that and she was really the first one who decided to do that and there was one time where one of her characters um had cervical cancer and they found it through a smear test and that really was the time that um the taboo over smear tests really kind of was obviously it's still there a little bit but it was like it was completely taboo before that and this really made a massive difference and loads more women got tested after that that was in 1962 wow didn't know they had smear tests back then yeah early days another thing that Erna Phillips innovated in the soap field was having an organ player um and most soaps then just had an organ player as part of the regular um employees whose job was just to give a diddler in between scenes did they do that

i don't know if they played that specific piece but they did you know there's tv shows in australia the soaps like home and away and neighbours are quite famous for giving us a lot of big stars that are now you know Kylie minnow and so on sort of all got you know cut their teeth on that show and i didn't really sorry kylie kylie is massive yeah she she's also her surname is vedogue what she's so big that most of us know what her surname is we're gonna say minnow like the fish small fish she's literally not a minnow she's she's a big fish she is quite petite though i have been saying minnow my whole life was she nicknamed okay been a good nickname for her at school because she was she's so petite for all i know she was minnow hasn't like that's

technically the correct way to pronounce it but that's not the way any one of the world has pronounced it off the level though you're right you're right now that he points it out i do know that every other person who's ever said the name to me in my entire life has said it with the GUE sort of really punctuated um mignot mignot listen whatever she's called um neighbours gave her to us um and well i've lost my place now so basically um kori coronation street the street is responsible for quite a lot of big actors as well that we now have so people who who sort of debuted on it include sir ben kingsley he was a coronation street actor yeah davie jones of the monkeys he he came out of coronation street he had

a little role in that and so did joanna lumley so you know yeah the soaps are responsible for some of our biggest highbrow actors as well kingsley and and lumley yeah davie jones he doesn't doesn't slot into that category does he not quite he's the wild card you can be promoted on soap operas so i really like this so there's a guy um there's an actor called bill tarny who is very famous in soap world he he played jack duckworth right and he started out he's kori isn't he yeah yeah um he started out as an extra and his his job was to play someone who was just out of shot um you occasionally would see playing an organ oh you'd see one of his arms briefly and occasionally in a shot but you would never see anything else of him that was well come on and then

he's true that was what he was initially cast as was just someone else to show the someone else if you have a really attractive arm or something he must have because when he was promoted he then spent 31 years as a full body actor uh as they're known in the biz and uh yeah that's a pleasing thing the pleasing career progression so he was he was supposed to be just out of shot so it was the idea that he's someone for the other actors who are in shot to sort of look at so it's realistic that i think in a in a crowd scene with a with a pub or whatever you don't you don't just have two people sitting there and you you have to imagine that there's everyone else in the pub you know you have maybe an establishing shot and then maybe you're next to someone at the pub so your arms up against

there so you occasionally see his arm but then he's in shot okay his his job was to be predominantly and almost always out of shot but then actually when he got the main role as um as jack duckworth whenever he walked into a room you would see his arm come in first here's jack duckworth yeah what he'll have to say what's that sexy move that i think people do it in like some musicals in chicago or something a woman in fishnet tights would project her leg in first and then her body would follow does he enter like that yeah that's exactly how he does it he's always wearing a very nice watch okay it's time for our final fact of the show that is ana my fact this week is that if you take an hour long nap after listening to this show you will remember five

times as many facts from it wow so do it cool so five times more than we said on the show or wear these extra facts coming down not everyone remembers every single fact as well you should know on this yes five times as many as if you don't take a nap yeah so this i really loved an app so i really enjoyed reading about this study and generally a lot of studies that have come out in the last couple of decades about how napping is great this one was from 2015 it was quite a small cohort but basically it gave participants uh 90 words to remember and then 120 word pairs so that's two random words paired together and so like milk taxi is the example they give in the study and sorry is that random milk taxi you could make a link there yeah well i mean there is of course

the milk taxi that follows the teapot what around in all subsequent studies are going to have to remove that word pair now we've ruined it for people because yeah they have to be so unrelated that you can't have a familiar connection which sort of allows you to cheat and remember it anyway they gave these 120 word pairs to people and then half the participants had to watch dvds and the other half uh took naps for it was an hour and a half in fact and the nappers afterwards were five times better remembering the word pairs than the ones who'd watched the dvd and in fact i find this astonishing the people who'd had the nap remembered exactly as much as they would have if they'd just been asked immediately afterwards so you know how you know you're

as soon as a couple of hours have passed then you forget the majority of stuff that you've immediately heard they remembered exactly the same amount as if they'd just been asked that's really i wonder if so um finella has a laptop that she was given by work and it was formatted by the people at her work and the password to log into the computer is cat bus 111 i can say that it's lockdown no one's taking her computer it's fine but the immediately both of us went cat bus what the hell is a cat bus who why would you ever use cat bus and both of us have never forgotten it like the the conversation and the pairing of it was just so bizarre that it's a connection that's stuck in also another thing that's interesting that is now everyone listening

to this will never forget it so when we are out of lockdown in the not too distant future we hope that everyone will be able to steal your wife's laptop and i'll change it after this episode i'll reset the password try bus cat everyone two two two my password is cool guy one two three because um you know no one's ever called me that two totally unassociated concepts that's what you need um i i quite like this study also because of the choice of dvds that the participants were given so like i said the um some got to go to sleep so much to watch these dvds and it was two dvds that lasted in total two hours one was called relaxing the most beautiful landscapes on earth and it was just what it sounds like and both had

only instrumental music and the other is called power catsie and it sounds like the maddest thing ever um so it's only instrumental and it's this weird experimental film made in the 80s about the conflict in third world countries between traditional ways of life and the new ways of life introduced with industrialization but all shown in very surrealist instrumental form oh my god and so i'm kind of amazed that they managed to stay awake through that two hours yeah so yeah i i wonder if the study is about how good it is to nap to remember things or whether watching weird dvds just really distract you it could be that couldn't it yeah if the dvd had been something else like stop all my mum will shoot or you know grown-ups two or something like that then stop all

my mum will shoot i think that's the second time you've ever referenced that extremely obscure it's like we finally found we finally found the only film james has actually seen i just watch it again and again and again and you guys know my memory for facts is extremely good so maybe if we'd given these guys stop all my mum will shoot to watch to be fair if you if that had been the first film you'd seen i could understand why you didn't watch any other film games a few years ago because there's no point you know why why why climb any other mountains when you started with everest yeah you know by the way i looked up whether there was a such thing as a milk taxi i don't know if any of the rest of you did and this is a new product well actually it was made in 2005

by a company called home and lau and they revolutionized bucket feeding for calves by the invention of the milk taxi and it's almost like a bucket that kind of drives around the farm and goes to the to the calves and gives them exactly the right amount of feed and exactly the right amount of milk that they need it's a bit like a tea's made but for cows wow is it like a robotic udder though because obviously they want an udder to suck a lad i don't i didn't quite i couldn't quite tell from the picture they look more like milk churns on on wheels but i couldn't quite tell but it is a thing so you know wow you could call it a tits made because it's flying around keeping your milk yeah god how bizarre speaking of weird portmanteau words that i already

regret saying um have you guys heard of the napotino i'm sure you have in the course of this research napotino i haven't actually i can guess what it is but also it sounds too much like the word nappy and would put me off it's a practice it's a habit it's a behavior it's where you drink a coffee and then you have a nap and you have to take a brief nap because then yeah you wake up supercharged just as you come out of the sleep the caffeine hits it takes about 20 minutes that's quite advanced i think because i'm a bit of a napper as well and i did read about the idea of having a coffee first and i tried it a few times but if you can't get straight to sleep then the caffeine hits you just as you think you're about to fall asleep and you just have a massive high

and you can't sleep anymore so i think you need to be tense yeah you need to be one of the nappers who can really kind of just go like a light immediately whereas i'm not really one of those it takes me a few minutes to get it i've always thought that my dad invented that because i know so i've read about that concept before but he always did it car journeys when we were kids you'd stop in a service station down a double espresso and then fall asleep when driving home back by the wheel yeah look your parked it's actually incredibly boring for four children in the back you're in a parked car for 15 minutes but it's just 15 solid minutes wake up and it's like you know okay wow new woman oh did it work it worked like a dream he claimed but i'm i'm with james

i don't think i could fall asleep like that on command and then it's just annoying i can't i could i think i could do that but i don't drink coffee so one way that i um one way that i nap quite probably once a week is this is a good way of getting to sleep is because i edit this podcast every week i have to then listen back to it to um kind of make sure that narratively it all makes sense from start to finish and i think a good way to do that is kind of lie down in bed while i'm listening to it and i usually get past about one fact and then i'm gone and then i have to go all the way back to the start and do it again but i think like nothing to podcast is a thing isn't it um and i read an article about this um this was a guy called craig richard um from

shenandoah university uh he wrote a book called brain tingles which is about ASMR stuff and he said that human voice podcasts are quite a good way of getting to sleep um as long as they contain a calm host voice um kindness which means basically you're not just having to go at people all the time uh and generally banal content that's the things that you need well at least we've got one out of three we're not kind and dan's always stressed but hey do you guys know uh where you are allowed to nap at the wheel um uh driverless car oh yeah no no you're definitely okay okay oh you're not okay um so some kind of wheel a ship a ships wheel ships wheel possibly i didn't actually look through all the possibilities the maybe at the roulette table oh yes very fresh

put it all on number 17 yeah wake up three hours later and it's landed on 17 200 times and you own all the money in the world bad gambling advice we know that thing is a fish is it a water wheel wake up got a loaf of bread made oh oh dan dan dan potter's wheel so you have hands there and then you just drop off but you've made a perfect vase a perfect cubicle teapot um no no okay please put us up by misery for god's sake no no anna there are more i'm trying i'm trying christ sake drive in five minutes um go on andy i i hadn't i didn't have anything i was just storming so james could think of another wheel i know i'm thinking of one the wheel of fortune the tv game show um well it's not that either it is at the in the cockpit as a pilot

at the wheel plane wheel at a plane come on i know are we supposed to guess that well you're at the wheel you're at the wheel like you said that you're at the wheel we've talked about this before pilots sleeping before and it's a problem they're definitely not allowed to do it aren't they well so that they're they're not really because there have been some horrible incidences like for example in 2008 both pilots fell asleep at the wheel and when they woke up they just completely gone past where they were meant to land in hawaii just like where are we way past where we're meant to be but some countries um like canada in australia allow for pilots to take naps in the cockpit so basically it's really strict rules

but what they call it is a controlled rest in position crip and the idea is that the pilot can sleep for no more than 40 minutes must wake up at least half an hour before the descent of landing and they have to sort of tell everyone like i'm gonna have a nap now and then then they can go down for a nap sitting in their position without worry that they might affect the controls as long as obviously they have a co-pilot next to them so yeah okay controlled rest in position that's a very good euphemism for saying having a little sis while you're at your seat it's clever yeah yeah um there is another place where you used to be able and able to have a nap and no one would mind or object and that was in the house of lords in the uk so there was a convention

until 2018 i believe in the house of lords that peers uh members of the house of lords are never they're not sleeping they are resting their eyes and they're closing their eyes and leaning back to really focus on the intellectual debate and the laws that they're debating um and then that was a lovely convention and then in 2018 they were told off for sleeping in the chamber it kind of burst and then in 2019 they all ripped their eyelids off didn't they did buddha never have eyelids for the rest of his life sorry i've been thinking about this ever since he said it they must have grown back hey did they grow back it's a really good point dan uh i don't think i don't think the myth says but it it should but buddha had all sorts of weird um physical

attributes that i think we've discussed before didn't he like some tentacles coming out of his earlobes or whatever i can't remember you'll have to refer back yeah exactly super long tongue if they would have grown back then that kind of defeats the gesture that he made if he's just got another pair of eyelids under there then i think that's a less impressive gesture to repent you falling asleep in your work he probably didn't know he did at the time though when you do it for the first time you can't be sure that's true i respect him for it the snooker player ronnie o sullivan he has been seen napping even during competitive matches yeah he does and he said his doctor advised him to do it but i really like this because obviously the nap in snooker is

the direction of the cloth isn't it yeah the bays so that's kind of pleasing a lot of the other players think that he is doing it to try and out psych them it's like because when you play snooker you're on the table or they're on the table and when they're playing you're just kind of sat in your chair and there's nothing you can do but if you're sat there pretending to fall asleep and put in a flannel of your face like he does sometimes then some people think that that's a bit bad form you know what i mean got it getting that point you can't it's the perfect chance it's fucking boring snooker and he knows it so might as well have a snooze 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 shribaland andy at andrew hunter m james at james harkin and anna you can email podcast at qi.com yep or you can go to our group account which is at no such thing or you can go to our website no such thing as a fish.com all of our previous episodes are up there also there is a chance that if you're listening to this on friday the 12th of march or saturday the 13th of march and the morning in the uk that we're actually live right now doing a marathon length version of our show in aid of comic relief go to comic relief's youtube page and you'll be able to find us there talking to an amazing sortment of comedians and actors

and writers and musicians they're all coming on 35 of them so tune into that we might be live right now if it's past that well you can watch it again on replay try and find that on our youtube page anyway we're going to be back again next week with another episode and we will see you then goodbye