No Such Thing As A Fish - 402: No Such Thing As A Pig Playing Fortnite

Episode Date: December 3, 2021

Live from Barnstaple, Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss smells in Southampton, screens in the sea, and some spectacularly suspicious sawing. 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 this week coming to you live from Barstapa! My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Toshinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin, and once again we have gathered around 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. OK, my fact this week is that when the bird poo import industry first reached the UK, the smell was so bad in Southampton that the entire urban population fled to the hills.

Was it in one go? You know when you watch movies like Deep Impact or Armageddon where you just see people flocking away from cities, was there a traffic? I just got one guy with a cold gun in the other direction, go what the fuck are they doing? So this is Guano, so in the olden days you would get this bird poo, and it would get brought into the country and they would use it as fertilizer, and there is an English historian called Frederick Pike who wrote the modern history of Peru, so he was writing about the Peruvian Guano industry, and he said that the stench was so miserable that the entire population of Southampton left the town.

It might be true, it might not be true, this is what the historian says so it's quite a good source. It certainly feels like it's an exaggeration though, doesn't it? It does. I'd eat all of my clothes right now if every human in Southampton evacuated and went up a hill, surely we'd know about that. It's true, but have you ever been to Southampton? I have, and I don't know what you're saying about it, but I'm going to say I don't agree.

No, I don't agree with myself. Can I just say I'd eat all of my clothes right now, it's an incredible escalation of I'd eat my hat. What I did find was in Massachusetts there is a place called Woods Hole, and there was a company called the Pacific Guano Company, and I've seen some very good evidence that whenever the weather changed, the wind changed in a certain direction, the entire town would have to be evacuated from the smell, so it is very smelly bird poo when you have it on such big amounts.

The reason it's so smelly is that it's not just any bird poo, isn't it? It's bird poo of specific birds that have been eating specific fish, and the reason that Guano was this incredible wonder substance in the 19th century is that it has lots of what is it, nitrogen and phosphate and potassium, all of the chemicals that just act as rocket fuel for plants, and so it suddenly acts as this incredible fertilizer, but the reason it smells so bad is it's so full of this very, very oily fish. So there's the fish Guano, which is very important, but bat Guano as well is very important, but what are the bats eating?

They're not eating fish, right? They're all eating sex bats. Okay, and it produces the same, because those are the most important. Seabirds and bats. Wait, I didn't know bats would use this fertilizer. It can be. I think mostly they would use it to make gunpowder and stuff, I think, but the fish one, when they first found these islands off the coast of Peru, which had all this tons and tons

of bird shit on, that kind of changed the world a little bit, because it was the first mass produced fertilizer that wasn't coming, let's say, out of humans. Yeah. Well, they had islands just off Peru, where the Guano had built up for all those years, that they were like 200 feet deep. Yeah, I've been there actually. Have you? I've been to those Guano islands, yeah.

I tricked my wife into going there, because there was an excursion to swim with sea lions, and I noticed it was on the Guano islands, and I was like, oh, you've always wanted to swim with sea lions, haven't you? And she hadn't. Have I? But we went down there, and I kept asking the guy who was in charge about the Guano, and I'm like, oh, you know, is there still guards here and stuff like that, and he didn't know anything about it?

Really? He only knew about sea lions. I think you weren't cheated there. I think that's fair. I think one of the reasons as well, that it was so useful, and I think this might be why back Guano was the other famous one, I suppose, is that it's all together. So the reason you can use back Guano for, let's say, gunpowder, and this is that seabirds all flock to one spot, and then they shit everywhere, bats are obviously all in one

cave, they shit everywhere. If it was pigeon guano, that would be hell, right, because you'd have to crawl around the streets of London scraping up individual pigeon poo after pigeon poo. You wouldn't get anywhere. And also those islands, it hardly ever rains, so it's always quite overcast, but it doesn't really rain very often, and so it never gets washed away, it just kind of layers and layers and layers. It was, Matt.

So there was a newspaper advert I read from the 1840s, and it just read, Guano, Guano, Guano, and then in caps lock, Guano. It was so impressive, and it was this kind of wonder substance, so there was a story that the San Francisco Journal printed in 1857, and it was about a shipment of Guano making its way across the Atlantic, and the ship's hatches were left open by mistake and the Guano got wet, and the account is that the timbers of the ship started growing and sprouting in all directions. The rudder of the ship grew into a huge, great oak, they had to start pruning the ship every

couple of days, and apples were growing on the pump handle. Worst of all, the ship's cockroaches, all the cockroaches on board, had got into the Guano, and they got so big and powerful that they were able to pull up the anchor of the ship. Whoa! I mean, that's not true. It's such a... Well, it's printed in the San Francisco Journal.

Why did they print it as a fable? It was a humorous myth related to how potent Guano was, you know, Guano is so strong if you chuck a cockroach at it, it grows to the size of a person, and then you'll go away going, wow, do you know what the senator just told me? Yeah, I really would. I mean, it is super impressive stuff, isn't it? And people really valued it massively back in the day. So in 1850, President Fillmore, it was part of his union address that he was promising

fairer prices for Guano, and that was like a big deal. We don't appreciate it now as much because it's a bit harder to get it because all the islands where the seabirds were pooing on, they've kind of been depleted. And also, we don't need it. That's the main reason, really, that it doesn't exist anymore, is that we managed to invent fertilizer around about the turn of the 20th century, and so suddenly it wasn't necessary anymore. And so it was the 19th century when this massive rush happened, right?

But that was when Britain and the new migrant Americans discovered it, but it had been used for many centuries before that in South America. So in the 17th century, in fact, when Europeans first got to America, they said that the Peruvians used it so much that it looked like they had loads of snow-capped mountains in the regions because they had just had huge mountains of Guano that they had stocked up. That's a very disappointing ski trip, isn't it? But yeah, the Incas were very into it, and the Incas had a cool communist kind of a system with Guano, where every town, every Inca town, was assigned its own Guano island, and then

every household in the town was assigned its own bit of Guano, or bit of share of that island, and that was how much you had, and it was according to how much you needed. And that meant no one could get a big monopoly, no one could come in and raid at all, and it was all working very well. All right, Jeremy Corbyn has checked in to the podcast. But lots of Britain was built on Guano, effectively, or built on the money from Guano. So there was a Guano millionaire, maybe the first Guano millionaire called William Gibbs, and he was the subject of a musical song which ran William Gibbs made his dibs selling the

turds of foreign birds, and there's a local link with him, which is that there's a church in Exeter called St. Michael and all angels church, and that has this big memorial to William Gibbs, because he was such a big noise and funded so many churches and chapels with the mining. Keeble College, Oxford, was that their chapel was, you know, it's a huge thing, it was completely funded by bird poo, basically. Funny that more of them don't use this in their PR, isn't it? Built on bird ships.

Yeah, yeah. Well, the conditions in which it was mined were not great either, and there were lots of kind of indentured labor, you know, workers were shipped over from China, and it's pretty horrible stuff to work among, because if you don't have a really, really good mask, you'll be inhaling kind of dust from it. Oh, it's covered with it, yeah. They don't really bother with masks as well, do they? No, they don't.

Yes, there were no masks. Coolest thing that I think Guano has given us is that there's an island called Nauru, which made so much money from Guano, from the selling of it, and so on, and they decided to invest a lot of that money in a musical called Leonardo, A Portrait of Love, the story of Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo da Vinci, and Mona Lisa, and how they had a relationship. I mean, it was completely factually inaccurate, and it was pretty much a flop. I think it had like one or two shows that went well in Oxford. I also bring it back.

Yeah. What the musical? Yeah. Not Guano. I can live without Guano. What about the Guano Islands near Peru? In 1865, when it was the real height of it, Spain decided they would send a scientific mission to South America to kind of look at this.

It didn't belong to them, okay, but they just wanted to see what was going on. So they sent a scientific mission of about a dozen warships, and basically then they forced a situation where some of their soldiers were attacked, and there was a full all-out war for bird shit. Wow. Basically, Chile got involved, Bolivia got involved, the whole of South America against Spain, they all blockaded the Spanish, and eventually the Spanish disappeared with the tails between their legs, but really that was the start of quite a lot of battles over

these bird shit islands. Wow. What must the birds have thought? So weird. One year to go back to this deserted island, you've always shat on to find warring nations desperately holding their hands up to your arseholes going, Oh my God, Adam. Just a morsel.

Oh my God. For wildering. It was in the US Civil War as well. Guano featured in the American Civil War. It didn't change the outcome, but the Confederacy had been blockaded, and so they had to mine bat Guano to make their gunpowder. So they went to the Batcave in order to try and... Cool.

Yeah. That's Robin's job, isn't it? When he's... On the weekdays, he's just scraping Batman's poo off the walls. Oh my God, that's how Bruce Wayne became a multi-millionaire. We never really understand it. And Commissioner Gordon's going, one more morsel, Batman. It is time for fact number two, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that scientists have made a TV for fish, but if humans want to watch it, they have to wear sunscreen. Bizarre. Is that because it's placed on the beach and... Yeah, good point. Yeah, just hovering above the sea. No, this is a scientist at the University of Queensland, and they wanted to know about the visual capabilities of fish.

They started with clownfish, often very good for experimenting on, and they were looking at what they can see in the UV spectrum. So fish can see in the UV spectrum where we can't. And so they developed a screen display that just includes the violet and the ultraviolet spectrum, and they had the fish kind of peck at targets. So they have targets in certain UV wavelengths on it, and they'd reward fish if they pecked at certain ones to see if they could see and distinguish between the different UV wavelengths. And they could.

But the thing is, of course, is giving off lots of UV radiation, and what do we know about that? It's bad for us. So you've got to wear a fact of 50 and sunglasses. Oh, wow. I think it's very good programs. No, if it's just like UV light, and you just peck it on it all the time. Yeah, yeah.

But yeah, they can all see, in fact, loads of animals can see things that we can't. I really like the idea that they're all seeing completely different stuff. Like a rainbow. Never thought about it. That's not just red to violet, right? That goes to infrared in one direction. So if you can see an infrared spectrum, then you'd be able to see all the colors that we can't.

And then the other side, like if you're a bird looking at a rainbow, so all birds can see UV, you'll see loads more colors, I guess, beyond violet. Wow. Do they see, do they, do we know if they see rainbows? Yeah, I see them. They must do, right? But their eyes are on different sides of their head, often, if they're prey animals. If you're looking at a rainbow and you close one of your eyes, does it disappear?

I've never tried. I'm not going to follow this line of inquiry any further. You put me off it. Fish aren't the only animals that TV is being created for. There is, well, there's Dog TV, which is a channel. OK. It's actually TV shows made for dogs. And I spend a lot of time on their website today.

And what do they watch? It's a it's a range of shows to inform, educate and entertain. It's very wreathy. I would be like EastEnders, but all the characters are dogs. Do they watch animal based TV? Or Great British Bake Off, but all the contestants are dogs. Yeah. I get where you're going with it, Jones.

It could be like the football match, but all the footballers are dogs. I think I think it's not exactly that. It could be Crofts, but all the contestants are humans. It's I think sometimes there's a squirrel on the screen, but that kind of thing. But it's mostly it's to sort of it's to entertain your dog when you're not around. But the FAQ section of the website is unbelievable, because it costs about the same as Netflix, but it's just for your dog. So one of the questions the FAQ is called Petflex.

Brilliant. It should be. It's called Dog TV. I think probably due to a legal issue with Netflix. But one of the FAQs is it seems like my dog is not watching this and I've paid for it. And the answer is, well, you have to understand dogs don't watch TV the same way that humans do. It won't happen. Dogs, you know, some of them like the visuals. Some just lie there and feel calmed by the relaxing music.

Either of those methods is great. And when you're there with the dog, he will always be more interested in you than the TV screen. So that's basically right. You're never going to see your dog relax to this channel. If you're in the room, it can only relax when you're away. One really interesting thing about dogs with TV is that until probably, I'm going to say about 10 years ago, they would not have enjoyed watching

normal TV, any kind of TV. And that's because the number of frames per second and the speed in which they see those frames, it would kind of look like a slideshow to them. You know what I mean? I mean, we did a slideshow in our first half today, and I think everyone enjoyed it. So you don't necessarily not enjoy something because it's a slideshow. Yeah, but they wouldn't get all of the nuances that we would get from watching Breaking Bad, for instance. Sure.

But like they need about 70 images per second in order to look as if it's a continuous movement. And these days, your TV does have that. But until around 10, 20 years ago, it didn't look like that. So recently, they've been looking at this box in the middle of the house that kind of just flashes these pictures. And then suddenly it was like a proper TV channel. Wow. And you remember the day?

Don't you wear all dogs changed overnight? They all seem so much happier. But it also means that they wouldn't want to go to the cinema because all cinemas have still got the same old framerate because people prefer it. OK, that's interesting. They do. I think they should make this dog TV for humans. It shows dog surfing. It is. You're right.

It is pretty much all dogs because they've done experiments and it turns out all dogs want to watch self-involved as they are is other dogs. Sounds like Baywatch, but all the characters are dogs. That's what it is. I'd watch a show of dog surfing for 10 minutes, I reckon. Yeah, yeah. I think that's a good point. I got over the craziest thing about the TV show Skippy today. Oh, it's just this we're talking about animals on TV.

It's it's quite disgusting. So I'm very sorry if I'm going to ruin any skippy lovers here. But Skippy on screen always used to have the ability to open up doors and stuff like that. So this is like a kangaroo, right? Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. Oh, my God. Yeah, what am I doing? I'm talking about a show that hasn't been on TV for 50 years. Let's move on to our next. No, no, no, no.

That was just for the young skippy. No, it's a good point. Like, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. It's like glassy, but he's a kangaroo. But he's kangaroo. Yeah. Yeah. And he was, what's that? Skippy? Yeah. Kind of thing. And so Skippy would be on screen as the kangaroo. But he was a really grumpy kangaroo and he would never properly enjoy it. And so when he had to do things like open the door, he couldn't really do that.

So what they did was they had kangaroo hands that were from, I think, a dead kangaroo with sticks on them. Oh, my God. And so when you see Skippy opening doors, they would lead in with the stick. And just have a kangaroo's back in. Oh, my God. That is I don't know why I told you guys. I sort of thought you were going to say he opened it with his pouch or something cute like blue blue tit birds. They get TV as well in one experiment that they did.

And they worked out that blue tits make better dinner choices at a buffet after watching TV footage of other birds making bad decisions. What are you talking about? What is a bad dinner decision for a blue tit? A bad dinner decision might be something that is dead, that has just a foul taste to it that you might not have eaten as a blue tit. But if presented to you in a package, you might go for it. And so they would see these blue tits eating this food and then going

and spitting it out. And then later, when they then presented them with that food and other options, in most cases, they would avoid the one that they saw on TV. That's amazing. That's a bad reaction. Yeah. So TV can teach. It's very rithian. Very clever. And pigs can play video games. Can they? Yeah.

Properly now. They used to play them but like with touch screen. Well, they used to play Pong and now they're playing Fortnite. Is what you're playing. Yeah, I think it is actually still Pong, but they're using a joystick. This is leaks and bounds for Pig World. This is this year. Scientists have put pigs in front of a video game

and they've given them a joystick to operate with their snout, which is harder than with a hand. And they realize that they connect what they're doing on the joystick to what's happening on the screen and then they connect what's happening on the screen to rewards that they get. And so, you know, they can chase the right thing and catch it knowing that they'll get a reward just using this joystick thing. That's clever. Very cool.

I think the thing with pigs is like they're quite intelligent and you need to give them stuff to play with, don't you? I think even by law, you need to give them stuff to play with. So it doesn't have to be a PS5. It can just be a ball. But UV UV light, this fact is about these these fish that can see UV light. There was a thing. So there's a there's a condition where some people can see ultraviolet light,

which is very strange. It's a condition called Afakia and it's where you don't have a lens in your eye. So the lens has been removed for whatever reason that is. And it means that you can sometimes see ultraviolet light. But this actually there's a rumor and it's not completely confirmed that this was used in the Second World War, which is bizarre. It's that military intelligence recruited people who had this condition Afakia to watch the coastline for German U-boats

signalling to spies on the shore with UV lamps. Now, I don't think it's true, but I love the idea of it. But I don't know. Here's a true thing. You can buy ultraviolet trousers. These are really cool. I want to get these. So ultraviolet will glow in a black light, right? So if you go to a club and you have a gin and tonic, it'll be slow slightly because it's under the UV light. OK.

These trousers will look like normal trousers when you're walking down the street. No one will notice. And as soon as you walk into a club, party in your pants. They're glowing in all sorts of different colors. Wow. That's amazing. I hope you don't say that sentence when you walk into a club. Party in my pants. We're going to have to move on, guys, for our next fact.

Can I just one piece of technology created for animals that I liked is chickens. We also like to look out for. Well, some farmers like to look out for their chickens welfare. And chickens apparently like physical contact with their farmers when they know them, so they'll hold them and they'll stroke them. When you've got lots, then you can't do that every single day. And so they've developed a chicken jacket and chickens wear it and it allows humans to give the chicken a virtual hug,

even though they're not present. So a farmer will stroke a chicken model in a sitting room and then the chickens wearing the jacket will feel the farmer stroking him. And can you do it for a thousand chickens at the same time? I believe so. They all wear the jacket. They all go, ah. I guess that would work, right? Yeah, as we then they look at each other and they're like,

what, he's doing it to you as well? So that is incredible. We do need to move on to our next fact. It is time for fact number three. And that is my fact. My fact this week is just like how we have ice cream truck music in the UK. In Taiwan, they have garbage truck music. How cool is that?

So this I mean, this was a genius. Are they different? They must be different tunes. It's still green sleeves. That's the amazing thing. No, but it's it's it's Beethoven. It's Fuellis, which I think is. Is that that one?

Game of Thrones, isn't it? No, it's OK. After three, one, two, three. That one, yeah, thank you. Yeah, so this was this was a genius concept from Taiwan. Taiwan was an incredibly garbage ridden place. It was just steaming with it. It was called Garbage Island.

Everyone knew it was that and they needed to do something. And they worked out that in and this was in 1997. They started a thing called a trash off the ground movement. And basically like an ice cream truck coming out and everyone running out to get an ice cream, kids running out. In Taiwan, they abandoned the idea of you stocking up your garbage and then putting it out on one single day. These trucks would go around four or five times a night

and they would have their song playing and you would run outside and you would throw your garbage directly into the truck. And it became a social event. Most people who've reported about it said, this is the time that I got to properly meet my neighbors as we were out there excitedly holding our trash can bags and checking them in. And and as a result, the the the pollution problem in Taiwan

has gone extraordinarily down. I mean, it's a model for how countries really should be operating for recycling and garbage. Oh, I'd love to see them attempt that in Britain or America. No one would do it. They'd be right immediately. There's no way I would do it. Another bottle of wine, another bottle of wine, another bottle of wine.

You've got to adapt your laws to the people in your country. It does seem to work extremely well there. Yeah, you said it was 1980. Ninety ninety ninety seven before that, even in 1987, there was a group of ten Taiwanese women and they started something called the Homemakers United Foundation. And they were kind of the first group of people who really wanted to make a difference in Taiwan.

And they were responsible for the yellow trash trucks, which kind of started going around Taiwan around that time. Yeah. And now if you go to a tube station or something or a metro station in Taiwan, you'll see these old ladies just kind of picking up trash and putting in the bin. It's really cool. Let's hope they never get ice cream trucks, otherwise they'll realize what fun it's really like.

But they do crazy things as well, like there's public shaming. So if someone hasn't done it, probably or tries to cheat the system, they they film them, the CCTV footage, and that gets circulated in their area, but they blur their faces because of. But everyone will know. Exactly. So I know that shirt. That's damn sure. Yeah, exactly. That's yeah.

Well, because they have quite convoluted recycling policies, don't they? Which again, they demand obedience. So the recycling truck, I think, follows basically behind the garbage truck and you're obviously incentivized, I think, like we often are here to recycle rather than throw rubbish away. So it costs less, you know, it's free for the bin bags and stuff like that. But there are 13 different types of recycling bin and you have to sort your recyclables into all those 13 different types.

And if you fail to sort them, you get you find two hundred dollars. I can only think of red wine, white wine and rose. You're champagne. Oh, yeah. But they sing a different song. They have a song called Any Empty Wine Bottles for Sale blasting out from them, which sounds fun. And there's an incredibly sad song from a film called Puppa. Can you hear me sing?

But I recommend looking it up. It's quite nice. But for release was apparently chosen because the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, his daughter at the time, was playing constantly on her piano. So he just picked it. You'd think you'd think he would want to break from the song if his daughter was learning it on the piano. Yeah, maybe she was so bad. It was like, this is what it's supposed to sound like.

Yeah, even the bin truck can play this better than you. But you know, it happens so much, this music around town. And it actually pisses off a lot of people as well. Like they because there's now an app that you can get where you can see where the trucks are going to be. And so some people try to work out where they can move, where it happens less, because between six and eight p.m. Sometimes four or five times you've got Beethoven just playing in the streets.

And you're like, oh, my God, it's just so annoying. And there was this one guy who wrote a blog who said he was out in the countryside and suddenly he's hearing the song play and he's like, oh, my God, I can't get away from this song. And then he realized there were no trucks there. And he thought, what is going on? And he investigated it and it turned out that the local birds started mimicking. No, yeah.

And so people started throwing garbage at them. So he went out to investigate and he's got this whole blog where he's trying to prove that there's a species of bird out there that is currently mimicking Beethoven. Imagine when Beethoven wrote that song. Could he ever have thought that it would translate then into a garbage truck song that then got picked up by a species of bird that would just fly around? No, I think you'd have to explain a lot of concepts.

Just on bins, the dumpster was invented by a man called Dempster. And he named it after himself. But he got it wrong? No, he just named it slightly differently. But he was an incredible guy. He was called George Dempster. He was the mayor of a place in the USA called Knoxville. And he was, you know, an interesting man.

He used to work on the Panama Canal when he was a young man. And later in life, he created the Dempster dumpster. And it was the first ever waste container that could be emptied onto a truck. So this was a huge leap forward in taking rubbish away. Yeah, he was a cool guy. And dump obviously meant still to dump something, didn't it? So that it was a fun pun for him. He didn't change it for no reason.

He didn't invent the word dump. No, no, no. But he did. He did create the dumpster. I read about this guy, Dempster. And he was the mayor of Knoxville. And he got into a feud with the editor of the Knoxville Journal. The editor of the journal criticised him. And then Dempster decided that he would get the town police to follow the editor around towing his car at every opportunity.

And then in retaliation, the guy from the newspaper cropped him out of every single newspaper picture. That's absolutely amazing. And then Dempster organised a police raid that caught the journalist with a large supply of illegal whiskey. Wow. Isn't that amazing? This feels like abuse of power in a lot of ways. By both of them.

But then the Knoxville News last year claimed 2020 as its own for Knoxville. And they said that 2020 was a complete dumpster fire. So since we invented the dumpster, we know on this year. Wow, Doug, you can have it, guys. Do you guys know what the French for bin is? French for bin. Is it Poobel or something? Poobel. Do you know why it's called Poobel? Because it's got poo in it? No, I can't believe it.

No, not that. It's named after someone called Mr. Poobel. No. So many bins are just named after people who invented the bins. Yeah. It's weird how many people want to put their name to it. You just thought of all the things you want your name stamped on. I actually don't know if it was him who did the dubbing on this occasion because he was the police chief of Paris, Eugène, René, Poobel. And he ordered that everyone had to have a rubbish receptacle outside their doors in the 1880s and they got called Poobels.

And that's where the French for bin comes from. Wow, that's so cool. Yeah, cool. Yeah. Just on words then, Susie Dent wrote this amazing book where she showed the slang language that exists within every different culture. So, you know, butchers will have slang terms that they use that they'll understand police officers and garbage bin workers also have that same thing. They have words that they know. So I was reading about in America, Coney Island Whitefish in New York.

What would that be? Do you think Coney Island Whitefish? OK. So Coney Island, there was a big sort of fun fair there. So lots of like you won't get it from that really. It's used condoms is what they would call the Coney Island Whitefish. Disco Rice. OK, so Disco is a fun place as well. People were really cool trousers with his parties in your pants. Disco Rice. Maggots. Oh, that's fantastic. What a great hit. Dancing Rice. Yeah, I'll buy that.

If you got airmail, if you were, if you were, I mean, this one's quite literal. Someone throws rubbish at your head from New York. They would throw it from the windows into the garbage truck in the open toss and so on. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah. Great. I love that. I love those kind of slang cultures. You know, we have a rubbish bin called Dame Foodie Dench. A food bin in this country in Bracknell Forest Council. Called it. It's like officially called it.

Yeah, a rubbish truck, sorry, I should say. So and but not only this, this is in Berkshire and there are a bunch of trucks, the fleet of trucks they have. They're called Truck Norris, Binderella. And then for some reason, just Hank Marvin, so I spent a long time looking at it and thinking, am I missing something? What is that? Because like that's slang for being starving.

So maybe because it eats the garbage. Oh, that's good. That's a good, that's a very compelling theory. All right, I'll accept that. But Dame Foodie Dench received a video message from Dame Judy Dench, thanking it for the honour. She said she'd never been called Foodie Dench before, but it's sort of like you're not being called Foodie Dench now.

You've missed the point. But she'd never been called Foodie Dench before and she was very proud of the accolade. I've got some from Thurrock Council. They got their school children to name their lorries. One of them is named after a cult movie from the 80s, I think, 70s or 80s. OK, give us a bit more clue. With Brian Blessed in it.

Oh, Trash Gordon. Trash Gordon. Very good, very good. One of them is named after a footballer who became a movie star. Eric. Eric Trashner. No, no, no, what about the guy he was in? Like Lockstock? Oh, Vinnie, Vinnie. Vinnie Jones. Vinnie Jones, you've got it. One of them is named after a male pop star,

probably the biggest pop star of the last 10 years. Dustin Bieber. Correct. Really? Oh, that's amazing. Oh, that's good. Probably on House of Games. Very good. It is time for a final fact, and that is Andy. My fact is that in 1956, the BBC broadcast a magic show which involved a woman being sawn in half.

Unfortunately, the show ran out of time and it ended before she was put back together. And the BBC was then inundated with complaints from people who thought they had just witnessed a murder. What a way to commit a murder. It was a year. Exactly. On prime time television. This was so weird. It was on panorama,

which feels like it must have been a very different show back in the day. This was a magician called P.C. Sorsa, who was an Indian magician, is born in Bengal. And he was over. It was one of his first big international gigs. So he sought his assistant in half. She was called Dipty Day. But the show was running really short of time,

and it was all live, so they just ran out of time. And he was sort of standing over her, saying, oh, dear, what's going on here? And then the show was just completely out of time. So Richard Dimbleby, who was hosting, stepped forward and said, well, that's all we've got time for, so now it's time for the news.

The phone lines went crazy at the BBC. The BBC set up a special phone operator to divert calls to with just this poor operator having to say, no, she is fine. No, she is fine. But of course, the theory is that P.C. Sorsa knew exactly what he was doing, and he would never have mistimed his tricks so badly. Yeah. And it was a publicity thing for him. But what's amazing is, so 1956, right?

So all the newspapers the next day were, you know, girl cut in half shock. It was all it was all probably, you know, it was a confusion whether or not this happened. He was doing a run at the Duke of York Theatre. And as a result of this stunt, he sold it out completely as if people just needed the answer. Like, was she going to be there? It was definitely a publicity.

Yeah, like the like you say, the newspapers, if you look at the British newspaper archives, you can see it's like woman cut in half and whatever. But if you go to the stage newspaper, which was the newspaper for magicians, their headline was Sorsa is publicity magician. And it was all about how he was a publicist and how he'd done this before. Yeah, it was great.

That wasn't he? Yeah, for motion. Even from the start of his career, where he started out in Bengal, he called himself the world's greatest magician immediately before even really starting his career and shortened it, bizarrely, to TW's GM, the world's greatest magician, which feels like really complicated with non acronym. Well, it's weird to do an acronym where there had to be an apostrophe S in it and he did call himself that.

He was on TW's GM. Of course, he then came over to Europe and everyone's like, well, you're not the greatest magician. But his idea was, well, India is the home of magic and I'm the best magician in India. So therefore it's fine that I call myself the world's greatest magician. But basically all the other magicians really didn't like him very much. And they started like writing pieces and newspapers about how bad he was.

And there was one where they called him a Pakistani illusionist. This was a time when India and Pakistan have been at quite a lot of war in the previous few years, and he felt like everyone was against him. Someone who didn't like him was Schreiber, Helmut Schreiber. I don't know if he's a relation, but Uncle Helmut. He was Hitler's favourite magician, wasn't he? He certainly was. He was the one who, I think, turned people on to this magician piece,

a piece he saw, because people didn't like him. But then Hitler's favourite magician came along in 1955. It feels a bit like to be trading all the Hitler's favourite magician label there at that point. I think maybe he was trying to abandon the label at that point, but at least things stick, don't they? So, yeah, people knew he was Hitler's favourite magician. Most mostly taught in Argentina, didn't he, at that stage?

It's very successful. He was very good at making former senior Nazis disappear. He performed in front of Hitler. He once conjured 150 Reichsmarks into Hitler's jacket. He made Eva Bronze diamonds, studied platinum, watched disappear and then come back. But he was, after the war, he was a first German entertainer to get permission to perform abroad.

And they said, well, you were part of the Nazi party, weren't you? And he was like, no, I don't know what you're talking about. And some people said he was the Houdini of coming to terms with the past. Yeah, right. And there were rumours that he'd taken a lot of the kind of Nazi gold. And so when he died, his widow kind of went back, sort of, desperately trying to find where all the money was. And all she found was seven keys to seven different safes,

but didn't find the safes. Oh, right. Oh, she found the keys. Yeah. How did she know they were safe? So they have little labels on them saying safe number one. But to be fair, I'd have just bought seven keys for a laugh and labelled them message safe full of gold. Number one, I'm going to do that. I'm going to do that.

What is the Houdini of coming to terms with the past? I'm sorry, I'm really struggling. Is it someone who managed to escape from the past? Exactly. So he kind of he was part of the Nazi regime, but he managed to convince people that he wasn't. So he escaped from his dark past. Go on in. Look at the CV of mine. I'm going to make it completely disappear like that.

Sort of works. Do you know that Jonathan Creek was based on a real person? Alan Davis. No, no. No, Jonathan Creek was played by a real person, Alan Davis. You're absolutely right. Oh, that's how TV works. I'm afraid so. You should get on this TV for dogs thing. You love it.

No, he was a magician called Ali Bongo. And that was who? Yeah, he's famous. He is famous. Yeah. David Rennick, the writer of Jonathan Creek, said he was based on Ali Bongo. This guy, P.C., what was he called? Sosa. Sosa. One thing about him is that he had a rival called Gojia Pasha,

who was another Indian magician. They were real proper rivals, and there was a lot of argument that maybe Sosa had stolen some of his tricks. And there was another magician called K.Lal, and he told an author, Lee Seigel, when he was writing about magicians, that Sosa once bribed a member of his crew 10,000 rupees to sabotage a sawing in lady in half magic trick. That's a risky one to sabotage, isn't it?

I would just sabotage the rabbit in the hat. And yeah, basically what he did is he bribed this guy a load of money to make this trick fail. And at the last minute, this guy, Pasha, realized what had happened. And so he ran over and he put his finger in a little hole in the trick and managed to stop the blade from sort of going towards her. Wait, did he lose the finger? He didn't, but he was badly wounded.

He was like, it was cut to the bone, they said. Oh, my word. So that's one of the reasons why people didn't like him so much. Yeah, I mean, that's quite a good reason, isn't it? Wow. David Copperfield saw it himself in half once. Yeah, I think that's really impressive. Yeah, did he put himself back together? Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

How do you do that, though? He was, I think it's I think it's quite a famous one. He's tied to a table, isn't it? And it's just like Goldfinger, where there's something, you know, there's a saw coming down towards him and and he doesn't get away in time. And that's the you think you're watching a trick where he is going to show you and escape, but you don't. And he gets sawed in half.

And I think the is it very bloody? No, it's not at all. And I think the but it's a version of the sawing someone in half trick where it's meant to look like it's a mistake. So so David Copperfield, as it's happening, the box is up. And this huge, as Andy says, this incredible drill, which I believe was owned by Orson Wells, who was trying to get into magic. So it was he bought Orson Wells's.

What? Yes. Citizen Kane's Orson Wells. He bought this big thing of the estate or maybe even personally from him. So it comes down and as it's coming down, the the box that he's in flips open so you can see him laying there and it goes through him. And that's meant to be the big it's meant to be the sawing trick that goes wrong. I just remembered, actually, on QI in series H, we chopped Daniel Radcliffe's head off. Do you remember? Yeah. Yeah.

And I had to do that in the rehearsal. Had to pretend to be Daniel Radcliffe having his head chopped off. And there was a massive argument afterwards about whether we would show afterwards that he was fine or whether we would just say, Oh, sorry, guys, we're going to have to stop the trick. We should have said, oh, we've run out of time on the show. That was a publicity. Yeah. David Copperfield.

There's a story I read about him, which was he was walking after a show with a couple of his assistants from the show, and they all got mugged in the street. And the mugger went, give me all the stuff that you have, you know, give me your wallet. Give me. And so I know. Yeah. So the so the two assistants took out their wallets and their their airplane tickets and their passports and gave it. David Copperfield, who also had his phone, his wallet and his airplane tickets on him, went into his pockets

and then did a trick where it looked like he had nothing. So he was like, oh, I don't have anything on me. And the guy was like, OK, that's fine. And went away. He risked this guy's worth over eight hundred million dollars. It would be worse if he pulled out a load of flags and then a lot of packages and stuff, maybe a few dubs. That would have been so good.

You've got to use it. I'm sorry, if you've been training to do you've been training for that moment your whole life. If you don't then whip out the tricks, then when are you going to do it? I'll like carry a saw on you and chop the guy's head. Like do something. I've actually been a savior like what happened to me in Nuremberg that time when we were on tour. I don't know if I've said it.

So we were on tour and I was I was dressed in like a yellow and black suit. And Andy said that I look like a magician, which in fairness, I did look a bit like a magician. So we decided to put some magic tricks on. And I had this kind of cane that's just appeared from nowhere. And I had like the kind of the handkerchiefs that would come out. Anyway, we finished the last tour of the gig and then I had to go to Nuremberg to see my in-laws the next day.

And I didn't have I couldn't put stuff in the hold. So it was all hand luggage. And so I had all of my tricks with me in my bag. And this like cane that appeared from nowhere just looked like a bomb, basically. And so we went through the airport and they were like, what's this? So what's this? These German guys. And I'm like, oh, it's magic, it's magic, it's magic.

And they went, what? I said, it's magic, magic. I said, let me show you, let me show you. And so then I did a load of magic tricks in front of them in security. And they were like, OK, OK. And I was just about to go and they went, no, no, stop, stop, stop, stop. I'm like, oh, shit, what, what, what? They said, do it again. And they got all of the other security guys in the whole of Nuremberg

a part and they made me do a magic tricks in front of them all. That's really funny. Can I just one place to be questioned, Nuremberg, isn't it? Just while we're on tour stories on our previous tour, we had a guy who was our road manager called Daniel and he lives in Wales and just on on mugging. He was walking home one night in Wales and he was going under a bridge at a guy walked up behind him and tried to mug him.

So he went, oh, and Daniel turned around and Daniel's a really big guy. And he's he's from America and he's quite an intimidating character if you didn't see the front of him. So he turns around and this guy is holding a knife at him. But he looks at Daniel and sees the size of him and the look of him and goes, want to buy a knife? And Daniel went, yeah, it looks good. And he bought it off him for 20 quid.

Wow. And he has that knife. It brought it on all of our tours. It's what he uses to cut things to put things like this up really funny. 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 of this podcast, we can all be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Shriverland, Andy at Andrew Hunter and James at James Harkin and Anna. You can email our podcast at qi.com. Yeah, where 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 dot com. All of our previous episodes are up there as well as links to our ongoing tour. Nerd immunity. We're doing all of the UK. Check out if we're coming to a city near you.

But just very quickly, Bonstable, thank you so much for having us here. It's been so much fun and we will be back. We'll see you again, everyone at home. We're going to be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.