No Such Thing As A Fish - 406: No Such Thing As Batman And Thrush

Episode Date: December 24, 2021

Live from Birmingham it's the Fish Christmas Special! Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss Christmas birds and Christmas paintings, and wish you a Randy Christmas.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. 

Pfft. Pfft. Pfft. Gido de offu no mo makasu busu. Gido de offu no mo makasu busu. Gido de offu no mo makasu busu. Gido de offu no mo makasu busu. Gido de offu no mo makasu busu. Gido de offu no mo makasu busu. Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such There Is A Fish,

a weekly podcast! This week, Coming to You Live from Birmingham! My name is Dennis Shriver, I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin, and once again, we have gathered round the microphones this time for our Christmas special! Yeah! And once again, we have gathered round with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go, starting with fact number one, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that the song, when the red, red robin goes bop, bop, bop in the lung, is actually about a thrush. But thrush didn't rhyme with bubbing? It could be rushing along, couldn't he? It could be rushing along. It is an American song, the red, red robin goes bop, bop, bop in the lung, I don't know if you guys know it, when the red, red robin goes bop, bop, bop in the lung, it was written about the American robin, whose Latin name is Turdus migratorius,

and as every childish person knows, the Latin word turdus means thrush, and it's called a robin, that bird, because when the early migrants got to America, it has a red breast, and it reminded them of the European robin. Right. And so, a lot of American songs like rockin' robin, for instance, is the same, all these songs are actually about thrushes. So technically, it should also be Batman and Thrush. Well, that's another story of Batman's medical problems.

That is actually true, because Robin was, in some versions of the early Batman and Robin comics, he is named Robin because he was born on the first day of spring, and the American Robin is associated with spring, so these songs, the red, red robin, these are springtime songs, they're not Christmas songs. Wow. It's better looking than our thrush, isn't it?

I mean, the red breast does make a big difference. Yeah, it's a nice bird, nice looking bird. It looks like, you know, if you think about your classic European robin, it's quite fat and round, and it's got a red breast. The American one is a bit more proud looking, it's a bit bigger, it's got a slightly longer neck, but it still has the red colouring. Yeah.

And it's the most abundant bird in North America, apparently. Is it? Yeah, it's all over the bloody place. Well, they're not shyer than our robins. The robin that we know is the European robin, but in Britain, it's way more cocky and confident than all over the rest of Europe. Really?

Yeah. And this is just because we actually like robins so much. So in Europe, it's much more common to hunt robins or has been historically, and they're not kind of treasured as much as this kind of Christmas symbol. So they're way shyer. And similarly in America, these guys, they hide in the woods,

whereas our robins, you know, they chase you around the garden when you're digging out worms. Yeah, of course, yeah. Well, yes, but it's because, basically, they think you're a pig. So... What? What?

I've never said all that nice stuff about robins. Well, it's not reciprocated. Robins basically evolved to follow wild boar around forests because they truffle up food, don't they? They dig for their food and they will overturn a lot of earth and they'll reveal lots of earthworms.

So, you know, it thinks you're a pig and a boar. Yeah. I've got to say, they've never offended. Is it really bad at telling the difference between species, though? I'm exaggerating a little for comic effects. I don't know about its eyesight. It has got good eyesight, hasn't it? Or sort of something special about its eyes that it can navigate?

Magna Titan, perhaps, I reckon. Yeah. I think that's probably the American ones because they migrate quite a lot, although the American ones do. You almost never see them here, but did you read about the... I think one of the last times that American robin

was seen in the UK was in 2004 and it was one of these. It was blown over the Atlantic so it got lost on a migration. That's a hell of a path, isn't it, to go to the Atlantic? It was a gusty day. And it...

So it turned up in Grimsby and there was huge excitement. Oh, God, I mean, your face is bad enough, isn't it? Can I put it over? You end up in Grimsby. That's a bad hangover. What did I do last night? I also got very excited and all communicated with each other

to say, come on, come on, see this American robin. It's so rare to see them here. And they all arrived just in time to see it get eaten by a sparrow hawk. Oh! Oh, cool thing. I didn't know it was called turd migratus. Turdus, yeah.

Not turd migratus. Turdus migratus. Turd still works nicely. It's a very, very lazy Harry Potter spell, basically. If you're a bit constipated, is that what you do? Oh, if you hear that in the stall, yeah, next to you. Turdus migratus!

Yeah. I thought exbellianus would have been the better one. OK, so on the word turdus, the word sturdy, that supposedly comes from the Latin for thrush. That's supposed to come from turdus as well. And the idea was, if a thrush would eat lots of berries,

it might get drunk. And it would kind of sway around and sway around. And so turdy meant swaying. And then sturdy came from non-drunk thrushes, yeah. That's according to the Oxford English Dictionary, who I must say I don't believe. But there is a French saying, which is as drunk as a thrush,

which gives a little bit of credence to it. They are the most prone to get drunk on fermented berries, I think, aren't they, the American rubies? Rubies? That's what I called them, we're close. And it happens, so it tends to happen in spring, but it can actually happen in autumn,

so basically it'll happen when the berries have frozen, and so when frost hits them, then they'll start converting their starch to sugars, then I think when they thaw, then that starts fermenting, and then they get eaten, and then they do funny things, like crash into each other or fall off branches. In Minnesota in October,

a couple of years ago, there was an early frost that caused a big outbreak of this, and the police were called so many times, that they actually had to report, like put in a report out saying, there's no need to report drunk robins to the police, they will sober up within a short period of time and get on with their lives.

I read a really lovely story, in India there was a species, a type of robin, that had made its way into the electrical box of a very tiny town, so there's about 150 people that live in this town, and this box would be turned on every night at 6pm by one guy,

and so he noticed that a robin, this species of robin had laid eggs and was using this electrical circuit board as its nest, so he wrote on a WhatsApp group to all of the people in the village, saying, is it cool if we don't turn on the street lights at night time until they've hatched and the birds have flown away,

and the whole village all agreed, for over 35 days, they had no lights at night just to make sure that these little birds were born properly, and then they flew away, and then he started turning them on again. That is a nice story. Did they have lots of traffic incidents?

There was, yeah, non-key fatalities. Robins live really short lives most of the time, so they live for about 13 months, a very, very high mortality rate in their first year, but if they're through that, they stand a very good chance of surviving for a lot longer. So the oldest ever robin known was recorded as being,

it was ringed, you know, with a ring around its foot or whatever, it was 19 years and four months. Oh, my God! Imagine if there were people just walking around who were a thousand years old and they'd just got lucky. Oh, my God! That's what it's like for robins. When he said ringed, I thought he meant we cut it in half

every year and count the rings. It was amazingly hardy, yeah. This fact is about the fact that a robin is actually a thrush and a misnamed bird and it's a Christmas bird that we're talking about and so I started looking into other Christmas birds and it turns out a lot of them are misnamed as well, so one of the great songs that we have

on the first day of Christmas, my true, we have a bunch of birds in that song, don't we? Yeah. So, okay, turtle doves. Turtle doves are given another thing. So we think that they're called turtle doves because they make a tur tur sound. So that's the turtle.

So as the article points out, and this is according to a biologist called Pamela Ramison, no relation to turtles. So they're just... What? This is your facts? The doves are not related to turtles? Turtle doves, zero relation to turtles.

And myth busted. Myth busted. French hens, there's three French hens in it. Oh, my God. They're probably from France, but they're not actually a species called French hen. That doesn't exist. Myth busted.

Second one down. Calling birds. That sounds interesting. It doesn't exist. We don't have calling birds. What they're probably talking about is for collie birds. And we just misunderstood that. We've called them calling birds.

Andy? Myth busted. A collie bird is like a black bird, right? Yeah. An old word for black. Exactly. Is that right? Yeah, yeah.

Partridge and a pear tree. They're ground birds. They're never seen in trees. That is good, actually. You say the best of last. Myth busted. You do see the odd part of a tree, to be fair. They don't nest in trees.

Are they drunk? Only when they're pissed. They're like the opposite of all other birds. They fall up trees when they're drunk. The song When the Red Red Rubbing Goes Bob Bob Bobbing Along. Really quickly on that. It was written in 1926, or 1925, by 1926. It was a hit for whispering Jack Smith, Cliff Edwards,

Paul Whiteman, the Ipanama Troubadours, and Al Jolson. In the same year, it was a hit for all those people. Wow. And it's not like one of those, you know, when you get a rap song and you've got 20 different rappers on it, they all did their own version of it. That's amazing. What was the first one called?

It was Whispering Jack Smith. That sounds terrifying. When the Red Red Rubbing Goes Bob Bobbing Along. It was most famous by Bodhulstar, William Roth. She's the most famous one who sang it. And she sang it when she was really young, when she was about 14 or 15. And then she became not famous anymore.

And then later on, she went on This Is Your Life. And she kind of was really honest about her alcoholism. And she got more than 40,000 letters when she went on This Is Your Life. She wrote not a biography. And then it got turned into a movie starring Susan Hayward. And that was nominated for an Academy Award. Because her life was so amazing. And then when she kind of went on This Is Your Life,

she became famous again. And she had a huge sort of revival. She went on Broadway and did her own song. And the highlight of her act was singing when the Red Red Rubbing Came Bob Bobbing Along. But she sang it in the style of the person who played her in the movie doing an impression of her. Jesus.

That's not amazing. You probably know the song most where you go to Charlton Athletic every now and then, and that's what they sing. Is that what they're trying to sing? Jesus Christ. Really, are they doing it in the style of this woman? Do they get in the style of her?

And Doug is doing it in the style of some other bird? Wow. Did you guys read that there's a type of thrush that gets its prey to come to the top of the surface by farting on the ground? What, and it leers worms towards it? It just gets down and it just starts farting. What do the worms think of this thing?

I think you know that thing where it feels like it's rain and it's coming up and they hear vibrations and they come up? It turns out, anyway, it's not true. Don't come to the others. Myth busted. Thank you, Andy. It is time for fact number two,

and that is Andy. My fact is that nobody knows where Caravaggio's most Christmassy painting is, but the main theory is that it was eaten by pigs in the 1970s. This is a painting. So Caravaggio's extremely famous 16th century artist, 16th early 17th, and he painted a painting

called The Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence, and it was stolen. It was in a church in Palermo in Italy, and it had been there for nearly 400 years. It was incredibly well established there. And in 1969, it was nicked by persons unknown. It's worth, obviously, millions and millions. There are not that many Caravaggio's,

and no one knows where it is to this day. It was cut from its frame. And there are rumors about where it is. So some people say it's in Switzerland. Some people say there's no way it ever left Italy. There was no international gossip about where it might have ended up. But one mafia informer claimed that it had been damaged in an earthquake

and then just left it alone for a bit and then gnawed on by rats and pigs until it was completely worthless, and then they burned it. Wow. Weird. We don't know, but yeah. It seems very odd, this habit,

that all these mafia members, it's the Cosa Nostra, isn't it? Members have, of admitting to stealing the painting and then telling the story of the painting, and you never know if they're telling the truth. And I think, so these are like pentitos who go to the police and say, oh, I've been in the mafia,

and I'm really sorry about it, and I'll tell you where this nativity painting is. And I think the latest person is Guy Tano Grado who said he helped to steal the painting and then it somehow got into the hands of a mafia boss who took it to a Swiss art dealer. And I just like the scene, the dealer wept when he saw it

because it's such a beautiful, unbelievable painting. It's a caravaggio. So the dealer burst into tears, sobbed, and then immediately said, we need to cut this into pieces so we can sell them discreetly. Otherwise, people will know what it is. Right.

So what do you do? Do you buy all the pieces and put them together like a jigsaw? Yeah, it's not like that. I don't realise how fucking dangerous pigs are. Top tip, don't die next to a pig. It will eat you. Yeah, but watch your dad,

it doesn't really matter. I know, but like, if you were even in the process of dying and you happen to fall next to a pig, you're a goner. Yep, that's it. And the Robin will watch from the side and laugh. Well, to him, it's like a pig's eating a pig.

It's like cannibalism. Cannibalism, it will look like. Excuse me, last few years, just the headlines. 2020, missing Polish farmer eaten by his own pigs, officials say. 2019, woman eaten by a pig after she collapses while feeding. Basically, if you fall near a pig

and you're asleep, it will eat you. And it's quite famous, I think. Is it a cannibal book? Yeah, you've got to watch Cannibal. It's great. Most things in that scene. We're getting eaten by pigs. It's a documentary about how it's very easy

to get eaten by pigs if you're not careful. It's funny because pigs do have a reputation for being very intelligent and quite friendly. They do, don't they? Like, babe. Yeah, like, babe. Have you got much? Babe's strength?

Yeah. Babe's strength, but babe eats the farmer. Yeah. Is that what Dope Pig? Do you guys know Pig Casso? No. Just speaking of art and pigs, he's the first non-human to hold his own exhibition.

Art exhibition. Really? Yeah. But, in 2016... I mean, when we say hold his own art exhibition, did he book the venue? Yes. Did he do the catering?

God, I don't have the catering, actually. He did all the admin. He finds it difficult to hold the phone, but he's overcoming it. No, he was born in 2016. He was one of these people who was rescued and taken to a sanctuary that was set up by this woman called Joanne Lesson in South Africa.

And she said the reason that he became a famous painter, as he is now, is that she put him in a pen with loads and loads of stuff, and he ate or destroyed everything in the stool, except the paintbrushes, and so she deduced from that that he must love art. He's since become a painter. He designed Swatch's 2019 Swatch Design,

which is called Flying Pig, and it's lots of purple and pink. Was it not... Did they not find, like, a work of art, and then maybe the shoes of an artist that he just eats and the rest of the artist? It could be that. Does he draw with a pig pen?

Don't do that. It's Christmas. It's Christmas. I'm sorry, I've ruined Christmas. Shall we talk about Caravaggio? I think we better. Caravaggio. He was a bit of a badden, wasn't he?

He was a bit of a badden. In 1604, the year, variously, he was arrested for assaulting a waiter who had served him with a plate of artichokes dressed in butter rather than oil for throwing stones in the street next to a perfume maker and some prostitutes and for telling a policeman

who was attempting to release him quietly, even though he was carrying a sod, which he wasn't supposed to, you can stick it up your arse. Right. You've given a very one-sided story there. I'm quite a fan of Caravaggio, and the artichoke story, for example,

was sort of justifiable. It was a test. So it was... He ordered eight artichokes for lunch, and he ordered four to be fried in oil and four to be fried in butter. The artichokes arrived, and then he asked the waiter,

well, which of the four fried in oil, and the waiter couldn't tell. And then he picked up his sod, he had attacked the waiter, and then got a plate and smashed him in the face with it. There's no excuse for bad service, James. The customer's always right.

Speaking of bad service, he killed a man after a game of tennis, didn't he? Greatly. Yeah, that's one of the most famous things about him. So he had to leave Rome when he killed his opponent in a game of tennis. Now, we think possibly it wasn't because of the tennis

that he did this murder, and we think possibly he might not have been deliberately trying to kill the man. He might have only been trying to cut off his testicles. Right. My client was merely trying to cut off this man's testicles with his sword. Balls, please.

Very strong. Wow. Yeah, it's very unclear, because they were having an argument about a woman who was maybe one of Caravaggio's models, but was also a prostitute, but was also working for the opponent. This man, Tomassini, was it?

Yeah, so Tomassini was the pimp of this woman. Yes. But also, when you're an artist, it was illegal for someone to sit for you, especially naked, unless they were a prostitute, unless you were paying them. Oh.

And so, basically, most of the artists around that time were employing prostitutes to, or sex workers, I should say, to sit for them. And so, there was obviously something happening here. We weren't quite sure. The woman was called Faleed Melendroni, and there's not much else about her.

She was once called a scandalous courtesan by the vicariat of Rome, no less, for refusing the sacrament. And later that year, she was arrested for possessing a weapon, so she was a bit of a badden as well. If that's the most scandalous thing you're doing as a prostitute,

refusing the sacrament, then I think you've got to up your game. He was a very, very naughty boy, Caravaggio. No, he was. No, we shouldn't be glamorising it, because he was a ron. He was a rogue.

There was a film. There's a film made about his life in 1986, in which he's... Sean Bean is one of Sean Bean's very earliest films. He plays the guy Caravaggio had a deal with, Ranuccio Tomassoni. And that is also notable, because it's the first time that Sean Bean died on screen.

Oh, no way! Yes! Really? Sean Bean has had a lot of screen deaths, if you don't know. Sean Bean has been impaled on an anchor. He's been stabbed. He's fallen off an antenna.

He's been buried alive and then died. He's been hanged. He's been shot through the neck with a grappling hook, and then hanged. He's been torn into quarters by horses, decapitated and shot 10 times. Well, he's hard. He's a hard man.

He's a hard man from all those things. He's still swinging. But he's not the actor who's died most in films. This is diversion now, but... Uh-huh. Danny, is it Trejo? Um, Machete. Machete, yeah.

He's died 65 times in different films. Has he? Yeah. He has been killed by topless prostitutes in two separate films. Wow. That's typecasting starting to... It's a baleful influence, I'm afraid.

You know, he invented really incredible lighting for paintings, and two people have been massively influenced by... David Hockney talks about it, saying he basically invented Hollywood lighting. It was just... It was in one direction, and he believes that he used... It was in one direction?

Yeah. He was multi-talented. He was... Yeah. He was a very influential character. Supposedly, he would use mirrors to sort of bend light towards, and Martin Scorsese, when he would see his paintings,

was a lot of Scorsese's movies, he says, were influenced by the lighting that he saw in Caravaggio's paintings, and is convinced that if he was in modern times, he would have been one of our great directors, purely for that, purely for his understanding of light and composure. Yeah.

But it was particularly dark. I've always thought they're too dark. It always looks like it's not very well lit in galleries, I think. I agree. It's basically because it's all kind of black, except one shaft of light. Yeah, it's like Blade Runner.

Yeah. But he did get in trouble once with his landlord. In fact, he was evicted because he cut... He was renting a room, and he cut a hole in the ceiling to get that single shaft of light. Cool. And a lot of landlords hate that.

Was it in the ceiling, so rain could get in? In the roof. Yes, yeah, yeah. I suppose that's going to ruin the painting, isn't it? Well, also, he was in a ground floor flat, so he had to do every single thing. Can we move on to the next fact? Yes, please.

Okay, it is time for fact number three. And that is my fact. My fact this week is that Merry Christmas Park in Miami isn't named after the holiday, but after a girl named Merry, who was the daughter of the city's former mayor, Randy Christmas. I love that song.

Count yourself a rusty little Christmas. We will cure Randy Christmas. So Randy Christmas was the mayor of Miami from 1955 to 1957, and he had a little daughter who he named Merry, spelled M-E-R-R-I-E, and Merry, unfortunately, was quite sick when she was born.

She was born with only one kidney, which she was basically correctly diagnosed with when she was about three years old, and they thought that she wasn't going to make it, unfortunately. And one of the things that Miami wanted to do to sort of talk about, you know, what an amazing and brave girl she was going through,

what she was going through, is to name this park after her. So it's a very tiny little park, and she was just, she was an amazing person. She continued, she had 12 operations. They thought she was only going to live for a few months, but she had survived 12 more years. She used to go to the park once a year.

She loved visiting it. She would sometimes go to it during Christmas as well to visit Merry Christmas Park, her park, she used to say. She sadly passed away, but she did get to experience this park for a long time. And how many disappointed people would show up at the park every day throughout December, going, where the hell is Santa Claus?

Why is there a 12-year-old girl here instead? It's good to look at the story that way as well. She's letting a lot of people down. Is this your fault, you little dick? What is this? Get out your wheelchair and look me in the eye. Come on, Anna. So the Christmas family,

they said it took them three children for them to get up the nerve to call one of them Merry. Oh, really? Although Merry Christmas did have her sister called Holly, who actually is still around. She was posted on the internet in June this year, so she's definitely still alive. Some of the other children in the school

would tease Merry Christmas and call her Happy New Year. But when she died, she did die very young, but she was so popular that they had to put on buses to get people to the funeral. It was an absolutely massive funeral. Oh, wow. And Randy Christmas's mother was called Leonora Pauline Pope Christmas.

Her surname was Pope, so Pope married Christmas and had Randy. There's a lot of names there. Seems like it's kind of degrading the family names there, doesn't it? Yeah, and thank God it wasn't double-barred because he could have been Randy Pope Christmas as the mayor of Miami. Gosh.

There was a competition to find the most Christmassy name in the UK in 2017, and it was held by the British Christmas Tree Growers Association. And there were various great entries. The eventual winner was a woman called Donna Rudolph, which is good because that's two of the reindeer, which is very impressive. But other winners included people like Val Spruce, Holly Berry,

which I think is really good, Chris Tingley. But this is the thing. The prize was a Christmas tree, right? A real Christmas tree, not an artificial one. And in her winning speech, Donna Rudolph said she was really happy to win because she'd never had in her whole life a real Christmas tree,

and she would be having a real one from now on. This is, let's not forget, promoted by the British Christmas Tree Growers Association, who I think may have fed her some copy in what she was going to say. And the whole thing was to promote real trees. But I looked into this a bit further, guys. Donna Rudolph lived in Whizbeach, right?

Which was fewer than 10 miles from the place which actually had the farm where she collected her Christmas tree from. What, wait a minute, how old was she? I think in her 30s? It was going to be 30 years ago, they decided this scab that they were going to name her a weird Christmas name.

I'm not suggesting her parents named her to get her a free tree in 30 years. I'm saying the Christmas tree growers may have picked her because they wanted someone to turn up in person and collect their tree from the farm. It's not the biggest thing ever. It's not the biggest thing to bust ever. It's not Dan Brown, is it?

I'm just saying, I think Chris Tingley might have been a bit wrong. He varies really good, isn't he? That's great. Anyway, so that's my niche and illegally quite actionable. That's your panorama documentary style expose, eh? I looked the other way. I looked at people who were called Randy

because I thought, that's a fun first name if you pair it up with a surname. So Wikipedia has just a really big list of different people called Randy. So there's a Randy Baker, there's a Randy Farmer, there's a Randy Gardner, there's Randy Love,

there's Randy Rogers, Randy Messenger, which sounds like someone who'd slip into your DMs. I like that one. And in my favourite one of all, Randy Murray. Oh! Do you know anything about Randy Murray? He's a Canadian guitarist.

He's amazing. He used to be in a band with a guy called Ronald McDonald. No. That's as far as I got into his, yeah. Let's get him on, adequate replacement, do we think? We don't even have to tweet one letter on the posters. Yeah. There was a guy called Alistair Christmas

who was born on Christmas Day, which is very exciting. He was interviewed by the Daily Mirror and he said that on at least one occasion in his life someone had refused to hand over a parcel that was for him because they just couldn't possibly believe that his name was Alistair Christmas. Which I have to say is quite,

not especially unbelievable, but he said, of his name, when people find out he's called Alistair Christmas, they will just see you and look at you as if you were magic. You can see it in their eyes. To them, it is like they have just met Santa. Can I say?

The delivery guy, right? He turns up with a parcel for Mr. A. Christmas. Yeah. And then the guy comes out and says, I'm Mr. A. Christmas, and he says, I don't believe you. What was he expecting the person to say? Who's this box for, then?

Exactly. His surname is Christmas. Quite common in Essex and Sussex. And the theory is that it was probably, you know, people got their surnames in the olden days. It was probably someone who was born on Christmas Day. That's what we think.

However, there is a guy called Henry Christmas who is a retired engineer who has spent decades delving into the history of the name. And he said in 2005 that the Christmas Day-Christmas connection is too easy. I'd rather think that he's spent decades

doing it and realised that it's actually the obvious thing that everyone thinks. Yeah. He's got to justify a lifetime wasted. Yeah. Sorry, Henry. Do you guys know about Merry Christmas Claus and Santa Claus, the Nebraska couple?

No. These are two people who legally changed their names in 2017. They're so sweet. So they won't give their real names to journalists who interviewed them. Merry Christmas Claus, the husband is Santa Claus. And they go and they dress up. They wear their dress reds at Christmas,

which is the term for the Santa outfit. And for the rest of the year, Santa's a taxi driver. And yeah, they just decided they loved being in the mall so much, having kids swarming around and sitting on their laps and everything, that they've changed their names. And it's so sweet.

They met in December 2009 and she, Merry Christmas Claus, said she knew he was the one when he asked to make me dinner. There aren't many men willing to cook a woman dinner. I knew I'd found a keeper. Which just imply a low bar.

But she then says, but the bar gets even lower. She said, what I love about Santa, my husband, is that he's so great that the kid friendly jokes at Christmas. So that's kind of, can someone explain this to me? She says, when the kids ask for iPods,

he says, why an iPod? I'd rather have a three-pod. There's three P's in a pod, but there's only one I in an iPod. The parents roar with laughter over that. LAUGHTER Does that make sense? I think, what does that mean?

Kind of. Look, I made a pig-ped joke earlier. I'm not going to slag off this guy. He's doing his best. He's doing his best. Wow, we're ignoring one very famous, Christmas, fictional Christmas. Christmas Jones Bond character?

Yes. Oh, here's that. Pierce Brosnan flake, wasn't it? That was one of the Pierce Brosnan ones. It was Denise Richards, who was a nuclear physicist character. And it's basically a load of really cheap tacky gags.

James Bond says, I thought Christmas only came once a year. It's aged poorly, and it was quite recent. LAUGHTER Just off the back of this, I thought I'd try and find the worst role Denise Richards has ever had to play,

and I think I found it. Her first starring role was in a film called Tammy and the T-Rex, which is a comedy about a girl whose boyfriend, his brain, is put into a T-Rex, right? Yeah, I know. What do you mean it's put into a T-Rex?

His consciousness goes into the T-Rex. What T-Rex? There is a T-Rex in the film. I'm getting to that. I think clearly. So this is the thing. I was reading about this film on IMDB. I cannot believe it.

Basically, listen to this. The writer slash director, Stuart Raffle, has said in an interview, the idea for the film only happened because they had access to a full-size T-Rex animatronic. Someone phoned him up and said, hey, we have this T-Rex for a month. What shall we do? Shall we make a film?

They said, I'll start writing immediately. I'm going to say this to this thing for a month. He was constantly writing scenes and then saying to his colleagues and the cast and crew, do you have any better ideas for the next scene? All locations were within 25 minutes of his house.

It's incredible. That's amazing. It's such a good film. Wow, yeah. Dan will be watching that when he gets home tonight. That's also so sad about this. Anyway, tangent over. Hey, listen, I need to move us on to our final fact of the show. And that is Anna.

My fact this week is that the edible advent calendar came before the printed picture advent calendar. This is this is this is my interpretation of what the first advent calendar was which was Gerhard Lang who was the first person to print and sell

advent calendars. He did it in 1908 and he got his inspiration from his mum who when he was young she had like a little kind of cardboard box thing to which she fixed a baked meringue pastry for each day of advent

and she allowed him to eat one per day. Oh, it's so charming. Yeah, in fact, it was a something called a Webley which I think is a specific German dish. It's a sweet like meringue which has a figure of eight shape and yeah, he was inspired by that and he's the father

of the advent calendar. And then his later advent calendars were called Munich calendars, weren't they? And then something in the 30s happened and he just wasn't very popular anymore outside of Germany. Yeah. It's really tragic. Carmel was rationed in the 30s and they shut his company down

the German government in the 30s the Nazi government, sorry sort of, you know, concealing that but they the Nazis made their own advent calendars as well. Yeah. There was one company wasn't there that they accepted that they could make them and they were they accepted company and basically

yeah, if you got an advent calendar in Nazi Germany it was just Nazi symbolism. Yeah, it was another swastika basically, right? No, no, no, there were tanks. There were there was Wotan who was a Nordic god that didn't mention Jesus at all and there was advice on how to

keep your children entertained over Christmas swastika biscuits for the SS put a swastika at the top of the tree. Yeah, they were actually looking at it now. There are a lot of swastika because they kind of I think the Nazis tried to do away with other kept Christmas but they made it like a celebration of Naziism

because obviously Jesus was Jewish and that didn't fit in with their ideas. Yeah, but they had a full they couldn't be able to come up with their own pictures or stories. So they printed in 1943 a full calendar full colour calendar where I think

each I think this is around Christmas and each image was like a Christmassy type image but with a different story attached so there was Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus in a manger with I think the three kings going up to them and it had text underneath explaining that's just a story about a woodcutter, a soldier and a king who get

lost in the woods and encounter a woman with a baby Come on guys, be a bit imaginative. And so before this guy was it called Gerhadlang that we think there were some kind of advent calendars but they weren't mass produced, they weren't a proper thing, they were just a thing that people did

in villages and towns and stuff, right? So in the 19th century before that in the early 19th century you would have a load of chalk marks on the road and every day you would rub one off Don't be disgusting Timmy, what are we doing over there? Sorry, okay, never mind

Too crude, too crude There was another one, there's a there's a book by Alice Avedek called Rowland und Elisabeth which came out in 1851 and in that they say that every evening a new picture is added to the wallpaper, this is before Christmas

and the children know then when all 24 pictures are hanging on the wallpaper then Christmas is here So that was a thing in this book from 1850s and quite like Alice Avedek she basically was a deaconess and she started this group of women

who would organise all the charity and stuff in the area she was really awesome and she had a motto which was every person, whether man or woman, should learn as much and for as long as he or she can one can never learn too much I think it's our kind of thing

Yeah, definitely, what's her name again? She's called Alice Avedek I don't know if it's because we're doing a Christmas flow but every time you say that in my head I'm going Alice Avedek which is the Spanish Christmas Alice Avedek

Oh, okay It just scans in my head every time It's really stratospheric in the last few years I think there have been extreme novelty ones so this year you can get a Sriracha Avedek calendar

which is marketed as the 12 days of Sriracha But then surely everything is just the same flavour of Sriracha every time though James, I'm here to tell you you're wrong wrong wrong because it has 12 200 millilitre bottles of Sriracha

which apparently you're getting through one of these things a day yellow chilli, green chilli, wasabi blackout, super hot extra garlic, smoky, black pepper tikka and yuzu Srirachas are available and if you drink one of those every day you will die

This one is a counteract the product placement we're doing there Are you hoping that you might get some free Sriracha I actually don't really, don't especially like Sriracha, I don't know why I brought it up Well I was going to tell you about the 2017 Porsche Avedek calendar that cost

one million dollars each There was only one allowed on each continent on Earth but it was 1.75 meters in height, it was made from aluminium it contained a a gold watch designed by Porsche

it supposedly contained a kitchen but it's definitely not big enough so maybe a voucher for a kitchen I'm not really sure it had a voucher possibly as well for a yacht in there also some sunglasses made from gold

and some cuff links Hang on, who are you handing this yacht voucher to I love the idea of just like being at Tesco Do you have any vouchers to redeem against your transaction today Yes, I've got this for one yacht please So funny

Can you get all that stuff What did you say? It was 1.75 meters At least two of the seven things you named were vouchers and one was a wristwatch Where's the size coming in here The sunglasses the cuff links

Was there a Porsche? Did you get a Porsche? It didn't seem that way from what I saw That's a bit fucking disappointing You're getting a fucking yacht You paid a million pounds for this and you're not getting the feet that it's named after How much yachts cost a lot more

than a million pounds? When do you use a yacht? You use cars every day Are you a yacht? You can't drive your kid to school in a yacht It depends where you live If you live on an archipelago you absolutely can drive your kid to school in a yacht

I've been to some floating islands where people live and the school is a floating island and they use a yacht I must admit They use more of a wicker boat Well imagine how impressive a yacht would look next to that Anyway If a Porsche wants to send me one of those

then I will accept it It's estimated that there are twice as many advent calendars for pets than there are with pictures of Jesus on them God, who read? Well this is an estimate that has been made by a man who is the founder of one of Britain's explicitly Christian

advent calendars He reckons there are 400,000 Jesus ones sold each year and over a million advent calendars I did read a story about a lady who bought her daughter a Garfield advent calendar and 11 days in after she was complaining every day that the chocolate tastes a bit funky

I realized that it was an advent calendar for her cat After 11 days her child was like and she even looked at it I think and was like, oh it's green it must be mint flavored Okay, 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 be found on our Twitter accounts I'm on at Shribeland Andy You can email podcast at qi.com Or you can reach us on our group account

which is at no such thing Or you can find us on the website nosuchthingasafish.com All of our previous episodes are there so do check them out Also, in January, we are going to be doing the final leg of our nerd immunity tour Do come and see us live

It's going to be awesome shows There's eight more of them to go, so do come along And before we wrap up tonight just to let you know here, Birmingham it's quite a sad night for us because the effectively fifth fish member of our tour is leaving us

This is his final show tonight This is Ash Gardner in the background of no such thing as a fish He is the singer and writer of our theme tune which is called Wasps When you hear that, go check it out on Spotify There's a full album by MPRES

and that's where we got our theme tune from When we started as a podcast he was the person who gave us the gear in order to record it and taught us how to press play and how to do it all Genuinely, we used his stuff When we first decided to do a live show he was the guy who came and mic'd up the whole room

and worked out how we could do it so that could get out there He's fed us facts the whole way through He's been on every single tour with us He's been the person that's basically been our emotional crutch for the tour Always making us happy, just such an awesome guy This is his last night

So we're going to close the show tonight by having him come on stage and singing the theme tune for you as we end the night We're going to miss him so much He's really just beating hard of our tour without him But fuck him, he's moving to Australia

so tough luck Anyway, that is it That is all of our facts We'll be back again next week We'll see you, thank you so much Bernie and that was awesome We'll catch you again soon Good night

Ash Garner, get the music up Let's go Let's give it up Crank it Oh, we're going back to the chorus Let's not escape They'll move from heart to heart Leaving nothing alive

So it's time to get together Sure what we can do You hold on to me And I'll hold on to you So it's time to get together Sure what we can do You hold on to me And I'll hold on to you

Thank you guys Take care, see you next time