No Such Thing As A Fish - 412: No Such Thing As A John Lennon Statue in Svalbard

Episode Date: February 4, 2022

Dan, James, Andrew, & special guest Deborah Frances-White discuss fake foxes, fake Drug habits, and fake Tina Turners. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. 

Hey everyone, welcome to this week's episode of Fish. Before we begin we just want to let you know that we have a very special guest on this week. So we were doing a live show in Brighton and Anna Tyshinski could not make it to the show unfortunately and so we had to find someone to fill those very big shoes and we did. In fact we went to the top, we brought in the big gun, Deborah Frances White of the Guilty Feminist. She is such a fun person, she's a really good pal of ours, we had so much fun on stage with her and you must check out if you haven't already the Guilty Feminist podcast. It's a really important, really great show, comedy show but always full of interesting and important issues and you can find all the information about it on GuiltyFeminist.com.

Deborah tours like we do all the time so do go check out her live show. In fact this one recorded in Brighton, she'll be back in Brighton on March the 5th. She's going to be playing at the Pavilion and it is going to be a show that is tied in with International Women's Day so 5th of March do get your tickets for that. It will be an awesome show, it always is with Deborah and we hope you enjoy her on this show. Okay, let's do it on with the pod. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Brighton. My name is Dan Shriver, I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin and special guest Deborah Francis White and once again we have gathered around the

microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go starting with fact number one and that is Deborah. So my fact is that actress Tallulah Bankhead had a parrot which she taught to say birds can't talk. She also taught her to say who'd want to talk to you. Nice. And who are you so sometimes someone will come in and say who are you and the person would answer and go birds can't talk which was a sort of gaslighting parrot really in a very real way. It was actually I think a minor bird which I'm assured is a sort of a parrot that might not be accurate but if it isn't email these guys. She had a lot of pets actually she had a lyam cup called Winston Churchill. She bought that when she was in Nevada and she

only went to Nevada so she could get a quick divorce and it used to take curtain calls with her on the stage. She had a dog called Hitchcock given to her by Hitchcock. All her life she had an incredible series of animals but she was one of the great eccentrics. She was completely amazing and she so she most famous as an actor but only really took off she was from America she was she came to the UK in 1923 and she spent eight years here doing plays and becoming a real complete sensation and there was a group of fans called the gallery girls who were a group of teenage cockney girls who would arrive and just wait in the gallery and whenever she came on stage they would just scream and cheer and it was incredibly annoying obviously for anyone else who actually

wanted to see the show and you know they would applaud for about as long as she was on stage herself as in that long again you know. They used to sing Tallulah hallelujah Tallulah hallelujah on and on and on and some of the other actors she'd vamp and some of the other actors that'd be like we're never gonna get out of here because she would let it go on but um but the gallery girls were working as you say working class women many lesbians and they knew that she was Tallulah was what she called ambicextrous and she famously said my father warned me about men and booze but never said a word about women and cocaine. She was also said to have slept with 70% of the aristocracy but her her I mean that was what she claimed. I love that idea like the battered old copy of

de Bret's like just crossing off the El of Westminster and in fact the Duchess of Kilmore. Like a Fogel sticker album or something yeah can't tell it's important. Fogel we've got to catch them all. Well she did catch quite a lot of things actually yeah um she did generally yeah. She was amazing. She was so famous in London when she lived there that according to Lord Beaverbrook there were only two people in the whole of the UK who could be identified by just the first name from an average costamunga and that was Tallulah and Steve. Steve? Steve. Everyone knows Steve. Let's try and guess it. 1920s Steve. I mean good luck because I can see the answer. Is this person still famous? Oh no. It was Steve Donahue the great English jockey.

Oh that's amazing. And she loved a bit of the races as well. Oh she did yes. You'd see her photograph with the Prince of Wales at the races and she was friends with the Arga Khan but she would often come to the door without any clothes on just with a strand of pearls around her neck. Even the stage door she'd come without any clothes on and she once said to an aristocrat at a stuffy party who was there with his wife who she had slept with many times. He looked away from her and she said what's the matter darling don't you recognize me with my clothes on. She was wonderful with those kind of quips and also the nudity thing like she used to do that not just in sort of her personal life but on sets of movies. She'd just get naked and start

cartwheeling everywhere. She loved a nude cartwheel. Pantsless cartwheels with her speciality. So you think it was a normal cartwheel and then she'd get to the top of the cartwheel and you'd know oh there's a very special cartwheel actually. So that might be the other thing. She might have her clothes on but she wouldn't have any underpants on and there was a thing with a movie she was on it was an Alfred Hitchcock movie where they did get complaints and they told Hitchcock we've got to sort this out and Hitchcock reportedly said back that he didn't know if it was a matter for wardrobe or hairdressing. She inspired amazing quits from everyone. That's the thing. Do you want to hear another Tallulah line? Yeah this is where she saw former lover of hers and she saw him for the first

time in years and she said to him I thought I told you to wait in the car. She also she used to say I hate to go to bed. I hate to get up and I hate to be alone. And so she employed in her later years middle aged and a bit later probably until she died young gay men she called Caddys to sit with her while she fell asleep. And I mean she was such a gay icon you can imagine because they were happy to do it but she paid them to sit with her and they would hold her hand but they did other things for her as well. They'd light her cigarettes draw her baths you know just generally make her life more convenient. She never liked being alone even if she was asleep so if she wasn't sleeping with anyone that night on the rare night she wasn't sleeping with anyone she would

hire a Caddy which I might do in my older years. Did they speak to her or was it just holding the hand? They were just there so she felt comfortable going to sleep she didn't like being alone and so yeah it's sweet but it has pathos. Absolutely yeah she was a she was a rather tragic figure her last ever words were bourbon codeine which told you about her life but in her book in her autobiography she denies being a cocaine addict and she absolutely was. Yeah in the book she says that what happened was and I agree that this is not true but this is what she says she said one time she got really really really drunk and she decided she was going to give up drink for a few days and she said okay well what I'm gonna do is if anyone says do you want to drink I'm gonna say

oh no thank you I don't drink have you got any cocaine right and that would get people to stop her getting drunk. The problem is that one day someone called her bluff according to her and that's why she had some cocaine and then the next day someone else did and the next day someone else did. Tower happens gang at the slippery slippery slope. Well she had the sick so it was alcohol it was cocaine it was sex a lot of sex and she had this moment where she had to go to hospitals to have an emergency hysterectomy brought on by gonorrhea I believe and so she got really ill she was rendered infertile she was in hospital her weight had gone down to 75 pounds and they were trying to say you know subtly that you got to change your life and the the thing that she

used to say to the doctors as they were sort of leaving the room as she would yell at them going don't think this has taught me a lesson she was just pure badass there's no other way of putting it yeah she's sort of force of nature energy levels one of her friends followed her around for a day with a stopwatch timing her speech and estimated that she spoke 70 000 words a day which is a lot that's a short novel. Well you just gave me a like lightweight. Yeah I could do that my lunch time. That's quite a weird thing to do with someone estimate the word count. I think there are a lot of sort of crazy people in the 20s just going around being fabulous around. She's like this is my caddy this is my word counter how many have you done so far was that like the original pedometer yeah

she had an amazing voice didn't she that's what she's quite famous for she had a very deep husky voice she said in the autobiography that her voice has been likened to the mating call of the caribou. Gosh I listened to her on desert island discs and that explains a lot actually. It explains why all the caribou run into you for real. What does if you heard her voice because I haven't actually heard her voice. You know like that. Well darling. See I'm tany it's like. Did she say words? Oh yeah I'll give you one of the things she actually said this is the thing she actually said she said I'll come and make love to you at five o'clock if I'm late start without me. She said that on desert island discs.

Roy probably did not know where to look. We're going to move on to our next fact. Okay it is time for fact number two and that is my fact my fact this week is that this year an invisible statue made of air went to auction with an estimate of five thousand pounds. The piece sold for thirteen thousand pounds and the winner went home with literally nothing. Well that's not quite true he had a certificate to prove he had nothing to go home with. It's amazing. It's incredible yeah so this is an artist called Salvatore Giral and he's done a couple of art pieces where it's invisible. This particular piece is has he has he really has he done has he done fuck all in fact. I have to say I buy into it. I'm probably in the minority but I do likely

I do that as some as soon as someone says let's imagine we're saying right now in front of us is a hovering yeti. We now all know that I've said there's a hovering invisible yeti there. It's there. Would anyone like to buy it? Okay that didn't go well. No so this was an art piece that was called I Am and that's the English translation. It's actually that's the short version the full title is I am thirteen thousand pounds richer thanks to you suckers. So the the instructions for if someone was buying this was that you need a room that is five foot long and five foot wide. Oh my god so you've got to buy all of the extras as well. You've got to buy a room to put it in. Lighting and environment are optional due to the

fact that it doesn't exist. Could you put it out doors or would the weather? Yeah you can put it out doors if you like. So we can get weather damaged. Is it fungible or non fungible? Um he does know what that means. Charles anybody does anybody. This is very very controversial though I should say because he is being sued by another artist who also created nothing. Oh interesting. I know this is a guy called Tom Miller who's a performance artist from Florida and he said that he was the first person to do an invisible sculpture. We might go on to the fact that many other people have done that as well but he says that he did it and what he did was he went into like a community area and he got a load of people to pretend they were moving blocks

like almost like building the pyramids or something so they just put some empty stuff here and then so it's like a performance of making an invisible sculpture and he's currently suing Salvatore. Yeah and he said he easily could have found out that I had done this previous to him. All he needed to do was google Tom Miller nothing and that would have and you're like I don't know why would you ever do that. Why would you ever do that but we should all if any of us has any artistic endeavor going forward should google Tom Miller and then whatever it is just to double check. Interesting case. Are you guys familiar with Tom Friedman as another artist he produced a piece of work which again it's like the idea of everyone buying into something and

sort of investing something with meaning I do think has a lot of merit actually so Tom Friedman came up with this work of art which is a sheet of paper and it's called A Thousand Hours of Staring and it's a sheet of paper that he spent a thousand hours staring at and then just displayed still empty still completely blank but it's called A Thousand Hours of Staring it took him five years just 1992 to seven. To be fair to be an expert at staring at a piece of paper you'd have to do ten thousand hours with you. That's true. That's an amateur. I'm paying for that. Was that Tom Friedman you said yeah that was Tom Friedman. So Tom Friedman did another one called Untitled A Curse which was again just an empty pedestal but he had employed a professional witch to put a curse on an invisible

sphere above it. Similarly on eBay you can buy things that are not really things there was a man who sold a ghost in a jar but he said I will not be responsible for the black spook that comes out if you take the lid off and the bidding went up to 55,000 dollars yeah but the final bidder didn't buy it didn't didn't pay just disappeared so I think the ghost was bidding against everyone else to stay in this man's house but there was also a haunted rubber duck sold on eBay a rubber duck that according to its owner had the power to possess children the seller said he would not be responsible for the duck after shipping he will not field questions or help to explain its unusual mystique

the duck sold after a week making him a profit of 107.50 so if you put just any old crab on eBay and say it's haunted people will bid for it. Everything you've said I will have bid on it and to remember we were in Newcastle a few weeks ago and we were chatting to the night porter after after hours we were having a few drinks and he said that the boxer Chris Eubank Jr had been there the day before and he was outside and taking selfies and doing signatures and stuff like that and some Jordy came up to him with a microwave and said will you sign my microwave please and he signed his microwave and then it's sold on eBay for £60,000 this video footage of it it's amazing have you heard of Mauricio Catalan

no I love we're on a roll with these great artists now so Mauricio Catalan this was an exhibition in fact that in 2012 the Haywood Gallery in London they they hosted an exhibition of drawings of art about invisibility so there was a there was a pedestal that Andy Warhol had stood on briefly to kind of create an anti-statute whatever Mauricio Catalan produced a work of art based on a claim that he had made that in his car he had been keeping an invisible work of art the car was then broken into and the artwork stolen the work of art that he claimed had existed was not the work of art that he submitted what he submitted was the police report by the police who had to take it seriously and investigate his claim that the invisible work of art had been

stolen wow and so you can see it in the museum this police report which he got a copy of and the police took that seriously I don't know how seriously I mean I guess the car had been broken into so that's that's breaking and entering if nothing else I don't know I don't know how long they looked for it yeah it must be nice to be a man because when women commit for report crimes we just don't get the same sort of response we're gonna move on very soon so let's get a few more couple of things in here I've got one about signing something yeah sure yeah okay um and making something unvaluable invaluable in 1922 all my facts are from the 20s just by the way I love I just love

and revel in the 20s it's where I belong um and I'm back in them oh I've just realized um um this is amazing what a moment I'm in the 20s um but Einstein was once at Tokyo's Imperial Hotel in 1922 and he didn't have any money to tip the bell boy so instead he wrote him two notes the first said a calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness and the second said where there's a will there's a way in 2017 guess what that first tip sold for so the physical handwriting yeah it was the note the calm and modest life one guess what it sold for a few grand I should think same by Einstein five

grand I'll say many I'll say 20 grand I'm gonna go a million 1.56 million yeah wow the second one got a mere quarter of a mil but it's because it was a bit of a cliche he wasn't really trying where there's a will there's a way come on Einstein you can do better than that there's a story I don't know if it's true but there's a story that Mozart if he was passing someone on the street and they asked for money and he didn't have any change on him that he would quickly grab a pen and a quill and would quickly write a quick little song and give it to them and say sell that and get to an ice cream bun it wasn't one of his famous ones was it it was um well I don't because I don't know if this is true but um yeah but he would just do

what he'd do a new one's bespoke for you yeah yeah he would just go ask you but I can give it to you it doesn't sound very good it doesn't matter if it's good or not it's Mozart it's yeah it's Mozart he could write yeah he could he could do a two-foot banquette impression but the point about about Mozart is that he was really really good no but he was he was like chump change this is this is yeah he's not gonna do it it's not gonna do a symphony if he's just trying to give someone you know for hours you know this is like when you go to when a famous person used to go to places where they would kind of think is it possible that when I give them the check with my signature on that they're gonna keep the check and not bank it because it's worth more to them and me not so

that would be the trigger I think it's supposed to be by Picasso who was in a restaurant and he hadn't he'd had his meal and they said can you uh instead of paying can you draw me a picture and he drew them a picture and then they said oh would you sign it mr Picasso and he said no I wanted to pay for the dinner not for the entire building what a dick move to say that so what you're saying is Mozart basically invented the cameo app yes to an extent so you'd say to your friend oh you know you love that Mozart don't you he just he just like me this he gives it to the guy yeah and then the guy just sells it saying I've got an original Mozart yeah he goes then to the institution of music and they take it and they go wow yeah okay classic armadillos let's get

but we um we do need to move on uh to our next fact so it is time for fact number three and that is James okay my fact this week is that the doomsday vault in Svalbard which keeps backups of more than a million of the world's seeds gets regular requests by men who wish to deposit their own seed there I saw this on a youtube clip by an account called Veritasium and they went to this doomsday vault in Svalbard where they keep all of these seeds and the idea is that every country can put seeds in there and if they have any problems if you know if there's disease that kind of kills off some plants then they can bring the seeds back out and they can regrow the plants and hopefully it will help the diversity of the earth now there is a lady who manages a vault called Benta Nevedal

and she like said lots of things that was happening there but one thing she said is they often get letters from men asking to deposit their semen and she says that they never answer those letters that's all I can really say about it is that they never answer them but on a fairly regular basis they get these requests wow okay well good to know why I didn't get a letter back it's like an extremely strange dick pic isn't it really just saying can I deliver my semen into your grain stores no it's one way of putting it it's pretty a comparatively direct way of putting it I mean I don't see that there's a more charming way to say it so this seed vault is very important for mankind we think the reason it's in Svalbard so Svalbard is an island group very very far north

it's owned by Norway we might get into the entire ownership later but kind of owned by Norway it's way above the Arctic Circle and the reason that they put it there is number one hardly any people there so that's good very little tectonic activities so it won't get hit by earthquakes or anything like that it's also really cold so it means that if the freezers kind of fail it still won't defrost because it's so cold there but most of all it's really really high up and if all of the polar ice caps completely melt it will still be above sea level so that's why they put it right here at the top of this mountain yeah right I actually know a man who was raised there really it's not there yeah in spitsbergen sorry I think it meant in the vault

no in spitsbergen cool which is the coldest place on earth and it's an it's an extraordinary place spitsbergen you have to have a gun when you leave the house because of bears but weirdly my the guy I know Sven he was raised you know you have to go out with a gun to shoot bears but when I was reading about it it said is although that is true it is also illegal to shoot a bear oh really nightmare a nightmare but it's the lowest power it's got the lowest crime rate in the whole world and anyone can live there you can you don't have to have a visa to go there but there's a reason why people don't go there it is all ice all snow in every single direction yeah and it is a very very tricky old place to live it is a mad sounding place the holest fell bad sounds completely

mad so what you just said about the crime there very low in crime if you commit a crime you can be sent home you can be sent away from the holest fell bad because they just don't have the facilities all the time to look after you yeah there are six police officers and there's one detention cell and in 2013 there was a crime wave where crime went up by 800% wow now that sounds bad but actually what it meant was the year before there was one barbroll and that year there were nine barbrolls right it's so weird like there's so many reasons that they send people one is you can't die there so you can you can technically die there but then you get sent away so burials don't and let that be a lesson to you they say waving you off you are allowed to die but you're not allowed

to be buried it's not illegal they won't yeah they won't jail you if you die there but they will send you away you can't be buried there because and for the reasons that James was saying about the fact that you know if all the ice melts and so on if that happens at any point with burials if the ice goes down let's say flues or whatever that might be still in the bacteria in the body that could spread and that that's very dangerous so they found some bodies that still had the Spanish flu in them so they buried them in 1990-1980 and something like that and it's in permafrost so it's really really cold and they dug them up and the bacterium was still alive in there oh no it's like nature's cryogenics really isn't it yeah yeah yeah yeah and you can't be but you can't be born

there either yeah so did you say your friend was born there well he was raised there okay his parents were in fact Austrian I'm telling too many details about him now but his parents are Austrian but I don't know if he was born there he's definitely not introduced the rule when when he was being born but basically they don't have any facilities to give birth so you if you're pregnant there you'll be sent to the mainland um a few weeks before your due date so that you can have the baby there and then bring it back although there aren't many I don't think there are many are there many children there they are because I know it's the most northerly kindergarten in the whole world so there are very small children there at least unless it's a very empty kindergarten

and they used to have one of the world's most northerly cats there until this year unfortunately the cat died um but the cat was uh brought to Svalbard though you're not allowed cats on Svalbard and the reason is that they have lots of birds there it's like the ecosystem is really really you know it's a real problem if cats come in and start killing things and so the only way it managed to get onto the islands was by pretending to be a fox and when I say pretending it was the owners that pretended it was a fox but yeah they had to dress up their cat as a fox to smuggle it in I'll be honest I think they just filled in the form as a fox but yeah I want to think they dressed it up as a fox

it's a much sweeter story honestly it's a really cute little ginger thing it looks fox-like I reckon and people would come from miles around to stroke it because it was the only cat in the whole of the country and unfortunately it died although there are rumors of a few other cats in the area so you never know most things that are open there are shops in schools and so on could you say of them that they are the most it's all the most it's all the northern ones they've got the northernmost airport they've got the northernmost fully serviced hotel um they've got the northernmost school hospital and they also have the world's two most northerly lennon statues so yeah John John or the other one the other one I'm so sorry then sorry the other one

Vladimir Iliac the other one yeah yeah but what I would like to see is no such thing as a fish donating a John Lennon statue to Spitzbergen great idea I think we will do but it'll be invisible you'll let me talk about the polar bears on Svalbard yeah sure so the polar bears are really interesting they found something quite recently about them in the last five or six years and that is they eat dolphins okay and not only do they eat dolphins dolphins are pretty big and the polar bear can't get through a whole one and so they freeze their leftovers and they come back to them later this is amazing there's a guy called John it looks like John arse but I think it's Ors it's double a rs John well let's call him John arse he found out he like was watching these

polar bears and he found that they were going getting these dolphins eating some of them and then digging a hole in the in the snow putting them in there covering it up and going away and then coming back and getting it later wow John arse also by the way gets emails every morning from several female polar bears what that's part of his job hot gets emails polar bears a new area well global warming I guess yeah so what happens is they put a load of trackers on the female polar bears in the area and every morning they are set so that they send him an email so he gets into work turns on his computer and he just gets a load of emails saying we're all obviously because you're the scientist you get to pick the subject line of the email he should absolutely

make the subject line whoa yeah yeah well that just sounded like Tallulah bank head to me oh darling imagine getting one though in the morning that just says subject line I'm behind you um we do need to move on to our final fact it is time for our final fact of the show and that is Andy my fact is that Tina Turner is currently suing a Tina Turner lookalike for looking too much like Tina Turner and there's an image on the screen here for those of you listening at home it's hard to tell the difference but on the left is the impersonator the tribute act she's called Dorothea Coco Fletcher she's to be fair she looks pretty pretty like Tina Turner and she's an incredibly good singer and she's been touring around Germany, Austria and Switzerland with a

Tina Turner show and Dorothea is 50 years younger than Tina Turner nonetheless Tina Turner's lawyers are maintaining that it's too hard to tell which of them is Tina Turner and which of them is not and that the average punter could be misled into booking tickets for Dorothea's show when they actually were hoping to see Tina Turner despite the fact Tina Turner hasn't gauged for years um this legislation has been going on and on and on and you know there it's been going on for about two years actually these various legal tussles between the two camps um and the lawyers for the show the Tina Turner tribute show say that only a chronically stupid person could mix up the two um I don't know I think they look kind of similar don't you think

I mean you know this is that is I'm not saying I'm not chronically stupid but it's a that photo is I think Tina Turner in her 80s or 90s phase so she would have been a bit closer in age to Dorothea now she is in her 80s now she's an octogenarian and I sort of love her Hootspur that she's like no some of I think that 30 year old it's me yeah it's me and I'm not having it yeah well she had it from the get-go there was a story and Tina Turner's not her real name Anna Bullock is her real name yeah Anna Mae Bullock and Tina Turner was a creation by Ike Turner who was her husband at the time abusive husband a very famous story of how she broke free of that and sort of rose above but he at the time came up with the name Tina Turner and he supposedly

trademarked the name because he thought if Tina ever leaves he can just swap in another singer oh interesting and use the name Tina Turner kind of like sugar babes exactly just continue the the ban but imagine doing that to your wife what a lovely fucking guy um that is a level of evil yeah it's beyond anything any normal human being could think up in my opinion I don't think he was a nice guy and I'm not sure if I'm alone in that but I I'm beginning to think he wasn't either um but she's got the trademark for Tina Turner now hasn't she I think in the divorce in the divorce basically she got nothing but she did get the name and that was literally the only thing she got but it did give her the freedom to be able to go on and

do that great things what right to feminism to go all I need is my fucking name and I'll do it all on my own and 40 years from now I'll be suing younger tributaries to oblivion but this happens a lot doesn't it the the acts suing tribute acts happens all the time it happens in so many cases one that I was reading about was a guy called Pete Rossi who someone said to him you seem very similar to meatloaf why don't you do an act Pete Rossi said yes so he started traveling around the UK as Pete loaf and you can't see that guy he's annoyingly spells it differently peat but he um he faced a million dollar lawsuit from meatloaf for doing it and he eventually met meatloaf and meatloaf kind of then went do you know what you can do it and so he's able to still travel around

doing it but yeah for a while interesting yeah because I guess sometimes it's just like the companies that are doing it right or the management that are doing it and then yes exactly yeah exactly Bon Jovi had a very similar thing with an all-female Bon Jovi tribute act where even in the writing it you kind of sound like Bon Jovi we're going we don't really want to do this but do you know what they were called I can't remember do you know I just know I just I love the names I love the names that the names are amazing because there's this wrong Jovi and then there's a there's a heavy metal ABBA tribute act called abattoir which I think is brilliant wow there's an there's an all-girl Led Zeppelin called Led Zeppelin I mean just there are so many good rolling clones I really

like Shirley Bassey's lookie like is called surely Bassey I like the oasis bands oasis isn't which is really nice and then they get a bit crap favorite crap one is the black Sabbath tribute act which is just called slack babith I really like that tribute acts is it elbow the band have got a tribute act called arse no oh that's fantastic yeah 1949 proctoring gamble launched a radio advertising campaign for a shampoo using a jingle and a character that they created called Tallulah the tube they were sued by Tallulah Bankhead oh my god yeah for uh closely being identified with her they were using her name to like if it was Steve the tube for instance she'd be exactly the same yeah and they settled outside a court one thing on the celebrity lookalikes yeah or people working

as lookalikes the thing is that you're really pegged to the person you were looking like for obviously and there's a risk that that person might have some reputational damage okay so there was a piece in piece of the Guardian by a great channel it's called Tom Lamont in 2016 it's about lookalikes where the celebrity is then as it were cancelled so a Tony Blair impersonator who started off in 1997 incredibly popular lost all his work and he used to work with he was called John Broly and um he would work with Shari Blair aka Caroline Bernstein they you know they went all over the place being Tony and Shari together opened a ride at Alton Towers together they lived the high life um and then when the Iraq war happened nothing career completely completely you know dead yeah

I mean they're the real victims of the Iraq war I'll say I'm not I'm not putting them high on that list I'm just saying yeah and anyway don't worry they got so sad for them they got lots of more work after 2007 when he came out of office um we're gonna have to wrap up soon guys um you don't want to end on that not on that you were talking about Shari Booth um one of her relations or ancestors the most famous one probably John Wilkes Booth oh yes yes so John Wilkes Booth who shot Lincoln in 1865 when that happened there was a man who looked almost exactly like John Wilkes Booth and he went around America and basically was almost lynched on three separate occasions within a week he kept going to a pub he would go into a pub he was called um he was

called Jacob Haas and he would just walk into a pub with his friends and everyone there would go that's the guy and they would just rile on him and they had to convince him that he wasn't John Wilkes Booth and then he would go to the next town the same would happen the next town the same would happen you'd get a label or something wouldn't you although it's suspicious actually wearing a big I am not John Wilkes Booth t-shirt more suspicious of anything a few final uh tribute names I found the most northerly um lookalike yeah Svalbard lookalike yeah there's a cab driver who looks like Rod Stewart in Svalbard no his name is Nils Engen and um he's 65 years old he said he's constantly being mistaken as the

singer like 500 people in Svalbard they must have been there must be wise to the thing now you know what you get in a cab in in a in a town made of ice in the dark and think oh Rod Stewart's not doing as well as he wants like I mean he gets paid a million a week just for Maggie May I just don't think he does it for the love Deborah he does it he loves driving cars apparently the tightest man in show business never buys around maybe people started tipping him all and they got out of the cab he could afford to um I don't know sorry I wasn't saying that taxi driver was tight I was saying Rod Stewart was tight I don't think we were sorry you're saying the taxi driver's the tightest man in show business he knows really tight that fucking norwegian cabbie

you know Brian Cox the actor he's in succession so Brian Cox the actor he joined equity uh when he was a young man and he found out there was another Brian Cox inequity nightmare he can't use your own name but he hadn't worked for ages this other Brian Cox good news so Brian Cox sent the other Brian Cox a begging letter saying you know dear Brian Cox I'm another actor with your name it seems like you haven't worked for a while I would be so grateful could you please let me play under my own name I'm also Brian Cox right sent this off okay didn't hear back until he got a letter soon after that it was from another Brian Cox and it said I I really want your name I'm another Brian Cox and it turns out Brian Cox had forgotten that he joined equity many years before

and written a letter to himself begging for his own name amazing okay we need to wrap up that is it that is all of our thanks thank you so much for last day 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 Shriverland Andy at Andrew Hunter M James at James Harkin and Deborah at Deborah FW and you can also go to our group account which is at no such thing or our website no such thing as a fish.com all of our previous episodes are up there Brighton that was awesome thank you so much for having us that was really wicked we'll be back again for another gig and listeners at home we'll be back again for another

show next week we'll see you then goodbye