No Such Thing As A Fish - 449: No Such Thing As the Blancmange Olympics

Episode Date: October 21, 2022

Dan, James, Anna, and Andrew discuss candy, desserts, popcorn and what's wrong with a Shirley Temple on ice. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at nosuchthingasafish.com/apple or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covert Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber, I'm sitting here with Anna Tyshinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin, and once again we have gathered round 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… Andy. My fact is that one traditional Irish recipe for Blemange involves moss. Here we go.

So, this is a cool fact about an old Irish pudding, and it's… That's what they say if you have to say it's cool. Yeah, you have to tell the listener. It's interesting, and it's cool. And it's actually from a Hakai magazine, which I know you read. That's Anna's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know, I'm on your turf already.

But basically, there is this pudding, and it's made from a thing called dried carrageen. Okay, now, it's called moss, it's called Irish moss, it's not actually moss, it's a kind of algae, and it's brown and crusty stuff when you take it out of the water, you dry out. Sounds delicious. And then you have to boil it in milk for 20 minutes. Okay. But the weird thing is, when you boil it in milk, it vomits out this huge…

It sounds absolutely delicious. You're all having your own cookery show. You're the next Nijella. It sort of vomits out this jelly stuff, and you add the sugar and vanilla to make it slightly sweet, and you whisk it all up, and then you let it chill a bit. I just love just going off the Nijella analogy, the way that you really, when you said vomiting up, you said it a few times, and you really stressed it, and then when you got to a nice bit of adding some vanilla and sugar, you're like, oh yeah, we'll just toss over that.

That's fine. And then you've got your moss blommage. And apparently, it's quite crap, isn't it? Well, what's bad about it? I just think it's extremely bland, but I think it's good if you add flavour to it. It doesn't really taste of any… Some people say it tastes of the sea. Yes.

But actually, I think it just tastes really bland, and they used to give it to sick people, didn't they? And in firm, you might get some of this pudding. Right. It's in a 19th century handbook of invalid cooking by Murray Boland, that's one of the early recipes. OK, right. And other recipes in that book, oatmeal mush.

Lovely. Delicious. Scraped beef. Scraped beef. Milk lemonade, which just sounds disgusting to me. Apart from it contains sherry, milk lemonade. OK. And restorative jelly, and the restorative part of that is it has port in it.

Oh, OK. Nice. Like alcogelly kind of thing. Hello, freshads, in this period, where these were the recipes that we were advertising. This algae, this seaweed, how do you pronounce it again, Andy? I said carrageen. Carrageen, yeah. This is one of those stealth things that's in our life in so many different ways that

we don't quite recognise. So if you look at the back of the ingredients list on many of the things in your house, you're going to find this as one of the elements. So it's in things like toothpaste, it's in shampoo and cosmetics. Firefighters use it to get a better foam when they're fighting fires. It's part of that. Yeah, it's used in that. It's used in personal lubricants.

Check your ingredients at home. But it's everywhere. Shoe polish everywhere. Laxatives. Laxatives, yeah. This helps those slide out. It seems to be a... It's good for helping things slide out.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But it's very controversial. Did you guys read about the rabid controversy surrounding carrageen? Ooh. Well... Is this athletes? Oh, it's not.

Maybe there are two. Oh, no, OK, OK. Oh, my God. OK, let's compare controversies. OK. This is just that it could be very bad for you and cause deadly diseases. It doesn't. But...

What? Yeah. A very much a one-dip roller coaster. This is a rumour that goes around in health circles about carrageenan, which is like the extract from the seaweed from carrageenan. Ultra-concentrated. Essence. Yeah.

Yes. And that is used, as we've said, in lots of thicknesses. It's also in ice cream, cottage cheese, soy milk, things like that. And there was a academic called Joanne Tabakman, who I think is still going campaigning against it, who said a few years ago that it caused all sorts of cancers, Parkinson's, heart disease, things like that. She was actually looking at a different thing. So it turned out someone looked into the study and she was looking at something that was

called like... Gamma radiation. Yeah. Yeah. A slightly different kind of seaweed. It's great. And if you go on any health website, it's like a void carrageen, it will give you cancer, it will give you heart attacks, it will give you...

Wow. So don't believe it. It's almost carcinogen, like the word is very similar, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe that's what she studied. She looked at carcinogens and said, well, these all cause cancer. Next to each other in the dictionary. Yeah.

It's... Its latter name is really fun. It's called Chondus Crispus. Ah. It's just a nice... Chondus Crispus. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd like to hear about the sport in controversy.

Oh, yeah. Have a guess of what it might be, because it's like a slippery thing, right? So maybe they attach it to toboggan when you do bobsled, and it makes you fly down the bobsled. That's correct. That's absolutely right. Yeah, there we go. No.

Here's another version. They put a load of it in the swimming pool, and it thickens up the water, and it means that you can just run across the water in a swimming race. That would help everyone, though. You have to put it in one lane. One lane, someone doing the 50 metres. Yeah, OK. Or you could do it in your opponent's lane, and so it slows them down.

I think you have to have a lot of caragine to turn water into a solid... Imagine the Olympic swimming pool. You've got one beautiful clear lane of water, and all the others are plamange, basically. So it's neither of those things. It's neither of those. No, the Australian cricket team have been using it for years to... Classic. It's bad that I believe that.

What it is... Actually, I don't think it's a control... I jumped the gun a bit. I think it's also been used by athletes and bodybuilders, although I'm not completely sure if what capacity... Maybe make them smoother. To make them look smoother. That might be it.

Yeah. I said I jumped the gun on it. But there is a thing. It's an aphrodisiac, which is good news, but for rats. It's a fancy rat. It's a fancy rat. Really. I mean, it really...

I think it's a fertility aid, actually. It ramps up your testicles, is the phrase I've written down. Ramps up your testicles? You don't want to put ramps up your testicles. That's going to be... Hard not to mention tiny little effusions now. Climbing up wheelchair-friendly testicles. Fun.

What does it do, sorry, to your testicles? It ramps them up. What does that mean? Like the outer coating, or like the inner... It gives the sperm a lot more motility. I think it makes the balls bigger, maybe, as well. The caragine is responsible for my fur lady. The musical.

Really? Well, we'll see. Wow. So it's used in medical circles. These are terrible headlines. These are like those websites. They're like, did you know that? And it's just not there.

The controversy of seaweed. Well, it's used medicinally, Irish masks. It's good for, like, your throat. It's supposed to be good for your throat. In fact, there's some evidence that it might stunt the replication of COVID, as well. Although that's not certain yet. But anyway, the person who introduced it into medical use was a guy called Mr. Todd Hunter. And Mr. Todd Hunter is more famous as a playwright.

Okay. And he did a play called The Land of Hearts Desire in Dublin. And it was so bad. So, so bad that everyone just booed him off. They kept booing him every time he put it on. They booed him off. They booed him off. It was taken off the rotor of the playhouse, and it was replaced by Arms of the Man,

which was the first success of George Bernard Shaw, who went on to write Pygmalion, which my fair lady was based on. Yes. I was going to guess that. Yeah. Yeah. That's flawless. Actually, I think that does check out.

That's great. I've got in my notes here. I don't know who wrote these. I don't know that Irish Moss saved America because there is, there was a lot of it grown in the USA. And there, in fact, there's a town in, it's near Boston. It's called Skituate. Skituated very near Boston.

Brilliant. Which is supposedly, it calls itself the most Irish town in the whole of the USA. About 50% of the population there are Irish. And from the 1840s onwards, it was a big site for Irish Moss farming, as in they farmed it. Yeah, you get it. It kind of comes onto the shore in North America and in Europe, doesn't it? Exactly.

Yeah, yeah. And he saw some in the water and he thought, wait, I know that. I recognize that from when I was in Ireland. And so he set up the industry, basically, this guy. He was called Daniel Ward. Anyway, so it became a big, big, big industry for this town. During the Second World War, suddenly there was a thing called Agar,

as in Agar jelly, you know? That was no longer available, because that was grown in the Far East. And you need Agar to grow bacteria and stuff? Well, it's a thickening agent. It's in all sorts of foods. And basically, it was no longer available, because it was largely grown in Japan and places like that, which were obviously no longer trading with the USA. Irish Moss Karagina, basically, rocketed in production.

In Canada, they made 261,000 pounds in 1941. The next year, they made over 2 million pounds of this stuff for use in foods. It was a huge deal. And why did it save America? Well... Otherwise, they would have starved to death. Well, they wouldn't have had pleasant sauces during the war, in fact, on morale. Is it called the Man in the High Castle, where they imagine that the Germans

had won the Second World War? Phil K. Do it, yeah. I think we should make a prequel of it, where we actually look at the reason they lost the war, and it was because of this lack of Agar. Probably. That's huge, yeah. That's right. So, are you buying that?

Nope. You know how we were saying that Karagina was in health food? Always husband. Many thousands of years have been around. And I came across an article in The New York Times in, I think it was like 1904 or something. And it was... I just found it really amusing how little the police obviously had to do at this time. So, it was a story about how a Romanian gypsy woman had been arrested in Jamaica

for charging over $7,000, which was a lot then, for basically Irish Moss. It's a lot now for Irish Moss. It is. Don't pay that for Irish Moss. But how much Irish Moss are we talking about? It was a very small tincture dropped in a glass of water in Seacrest. $7,000? Yeah, it's too much, isn't it?

Who's the buyer? Well, it was this lady who had a hunchback that she wanted cured, so she employed a healer, this woman who said she was Romanian. Anyway, the healer said she boiled some water, she covered it with cloth, and she said, look at that water, don't touch it, don't move, don't tell anyone for 24 hours what I've done, and then you'll be cured. The woman, idiot, ruined the cure by telling her mates, she was like, look, I've employed this doctor, but I'm a bit suspicious about the cure, because she just told me to not

touch this glass of water for 24 hours. 24 hours while she goes to the coast and gets the nearest ship with her new $7,000. Well, no, because she'd only charged like $100 at that point. So, the woman reported it to the police. Two detectives came to her house, hid behind the curtains, and the Romanian lady came back to say, you know, okay, that was the first step. The next step comes, and the detective saw her slip some Irish moss into the water and then say, okay, now I'm going to charge you $7,000, and then Ashley was going to hand

over the money in the details. The detectives jumped up behind the curtains. Do you get police doing that much these days? Sort of, we'll come into your house, hide behind your curtains. I think it's a disgrace. I think it's a disgrace. For my taxes, I want police when hiding behind my curtains every day of the week. Did she have an exact time she was coming back?

She was hiding behind the curtains. She said Wednesday, passing another cup of tea behind the curtains. I'm sure she had to knock so they could just hang out in the kitchen, I suppose. Like a surprise party. Everyone, everyone, quick, quick, quick. Also, it's an Amazon delivery. Did you guys hear about Mim Flynn? Mim Flynn.

The Irish mossing queen? No. She wasn't a beauty queen or anything. She was the queen of the Irish moss industry because she was a great mosser and she started at the age of nine. Is a mosser someone who eats it or who collects it? Harvested it.

I think she was in Skituate. Skituate. I think she said she was Irish. No, Irish moss. Oh, I see. She was the American Irish mossing. You're not paying attention. Remember his hilarious pun earlier?

I don't think so. Skituate is just outside Boston. I must not have been here at the time. I don't even hear. I don't think I was. Imagine if I had to out your original paper. Give us more about her. How's she doing?

I think she's passed away now. Skituate these days, it does have a mossing museum. Cool. There you go. Skituate has moved overseas. If you're in Skituate and you're wondering what to do. I've probably said Skituate wrong. That's why I didn't know.

Look on the map, don't ask a local. Get a pair of compasses. Put the middle point in Boston. The other arm to 30 miles. It'll be on that line. Which way? Well, it'll be coastal. I only know it's 30 miles outside Boston.

Just go 30 miles south of Boston along the coast. If it's not there, go 60 miles north. Just on Blemond. We should talk about the fact that it was only quite recently that it stopped containing meat. Yeah. Weird. Blemond has been around since

the earliest recipe may come from Baghdad in the 10th century, a long time. It was only in the 18th century that they thought let's stop putting chicken in this. It sounds so rough. They just used chicken in the same way they used seaweed as

to make it more gelatinous, to make it stringy. It had a pleasant stringiness, I think. Lovely. And you shredded and really pounded up the chicken. So it lost all of its flavour, I believe, and mixed it up with some almond milk and some sugar

and some rice. And yum, and they still eat it in Turkey. Almost the same thing, it seems like. What actually would the chicken in still? Yeah, it's called Tavuk Gogsu. It literally means, chicken breast. But you order it and what you get is

a blemange. You look at everything on the menu and you're like, I don't want that. Oh, chicken breast! That's safe. What a weird-ass chicken so they have it in Turkey. Have you guys heard of Bompas and Pa?

No. They're a jelly innovation firm and they basically do absolutely mad things with jelly all the time. They're constantly coming up with incredible innovations and weird flavours. Anyway, I just look through a list of all the things they've done over the years.

One year, for Valentine's Day, they created a jelly which was called Throbber. T-H-R-O-B-R. Sounds like a nap, doesn't it? It does sound like a nap. It's amazing what this jelly does. It locks onto your heart rate

and it pulses in time with your heart rate as you're eating it. I don't know. So if you get very excited as you're eating the jelly, the jelly itself will start reflecting that. It does feel like, because it's called Throbber, that perhaps if you got an erection,

the stiffer your erection, the stiffer the jelly would get. Make a steak knife for this one. OK, it is time for fact number two that is James. OK, my fact this week is that when communism fell in Czechoslovakia,

the US ambassador in the country was Shirley Temple. Really weird. I think this is amazing. Some people might know this already. I've spoken to one or two people who have, but to me, Shirley Temple is a child movie star who basically

retired when she was 10 years old. But actually, when she got a bit older, when she was 44, she became a diplomat and she did loads of stuff for the US. She was the first woman to serve as US ambassador to Ghana, but she was also the ambassador in Czechoslovakia in 1989

when the Velvet Revolution happened and the communist regime fell in what is now Czechia and Slovakia. It is amazing. Weirdly, she was sort of there towards the start as well, wasn't she? Maybe one of the things that helped her get that gig

was the fact that in the 60s she had been in Czechoslovakia and I think she was working for a multiple sclerosis foundation which is what she got her taste for international diplomacy and stuff. Her brother had MS and so she founded this organization.

She was doing some international work in Czechoslovakia and she happened to be there at the time that the Russians basically invaded to crush the uprising, to crush the Prague Spring. She remembers watching from her balcony as a woman got gunned down for her career in diplomacy.

The other thing was that she married her second husband in I think in her 30s and he was an aquaculture engineer and oceanographer so that also got her to go into the environmental side of diplomacy so that was part of it. She did have political ambitions

outside of being an ambassador. She was a Republican candidate. She wanted to run for the House of Representatives in 1967 and she lost out to a guy called congressman and she obviously had close relationships with leading Republicans at the time

because it was under Gerald Ford that she was the ambassador to Ghana. She was under Ronald Reagan when she did another of her posts and then the Czechoslovakia one was George H.W. Bush, Bush Sr. She must have been really good mates with them and you can see that

this child stock, because Shirley Temple really is even to my generation. I used to watch her movies in black and white when were you born? Danny, you're 100 years old. Right, okay. No, but no, like she's still a name that most of us know.

Largely it might be because of the drink, the non-alcoholic mocktail that you can get. But before this I thought Shirley Temple old child, sort of like curly hair child actor, like hugely famous child star and also non-alcoholic drink. I only thought Good Ship Lollipop which was that song that she sang.

But in a lot of her early films she preaches fiscal responsibility and the importance of a low-tax small state. So it's kind of unsurprising that her... She was an independent Republican candidate I think for the 1967 election

to be part of the US House of Representatives. What does that mean? I believe that it means she was Republican but she wasn't officially on the ticket, I think. I'm not sure about that. But she said during the election I think men are fine and here to stay it wouldn't hurt to have a woman's viewpoint

expressed in that delegation of 38 men. Too much too soon, Shirley. She started... So she's a child actor as we know in sort of like age six. She was already winning special Oscars that were being given to her. She was a big deal. I did not know this.

There's something quite seedy about her intro into the world of acting. Nothing against her. It's her parents who obviously signed her up. She was three at the time. And it was part of this thing called baby burlesques. It's incredibly weird. Did you watch it? Because I didn't.

I did not watch it. The bad news is we all had our laptops taken away. Is it online? I must be somewhere. I must be historical. Because it's quite obscure. It's like early 30s. I think it's hard. I couldn't find an online version. There's one film

which I reckon you can get on YouTube if you tried. Oh, it's on the dark web. Sorry, Dan. You should say what it was. It's described by The New York Times as a series of sexually suggestive one real shorts in which children played all the roles. What it was is basically

there were parodies of films for grown-ups. The grown-up stars were people like Marlena Dietrich and Mae West. They were very sexy women with very flirtatious dialogue. And these baby burlesques did

parody versions of these films where there are children playing the roles. Like Bugsy Malone, I guess, right? It's like a close version of it. Yeah, but not with saucy dialogue. It's so weird. In defense of the olden days. It was probably okay.

It was a comedy. So they'd wear sexy outfits on the top half. And then they'd have their nappies on on the bottom half. Like they're doing a Zoom meeting from home. I don't think it would get made today. And the stories that Shirley Temple would tell

about it later in her autobiography where she'd say that if they got in trouble the kids that were part of this production would be sent off to a sound booth where they'd have to sit on a block of ice. Apparently every night Shirley Temple's mother would curl her hair

into 56 perfect curls so she would have to sit there and do her hair every single night. And then she would be read a bedtime story was the next day's script that she had to learn. And so the mother would read the lines from the script and she'd have to parrot them back and she'd keep doing that until she fell asleep.

So Shirley Temple's mum, Gertrude, she does sound like a proper, classic, good old fashioned Hollywood insane pushy mum. She ensured that other child actors who might threaten her daughter's roles had their parts cut. Which parts?

Body parts. Fingers, yeah. She was very protective, very, very forceful in getting Shirley, you know, too fame. Also, one thing she stole from Shirley Temple herself was a year of her life. She knocked a year off Shirley Temple's age.

That's actually giving someone an extra year. Oh my god. She's the perfect mum. I mean if my mum could suddenly turn around and say that I'm 35, that'd be great. Well no, but she wouldn't be. She'd be telling you you're a year old. She was at her 12th birthday party

and her mum said, oh by the way, you're 13. Ah, well, but when she was nine, they said that she was eight. But that's why, so it's all part of the same story. Basically, when she was three or four, her mum thought, oh no, she's getting a bit too old for this whole baby game now.

Like she's about to be, no, I think she was about to turn five and a half or something. So her mum was like, right, we're going to make her four and a half again. And then Shirley, from the age of four and a half, thought that she was four and a half, five and a half, six and a half. And then it was when she was 12 that her mum went, actually, surprise. Right. Welcome to a teenagerhood.

It's just like turning the clock back in the autumn and turning it forward again in the spring. Yeah, exactly. So your mum could do this for you, James, but you'd be on borrowed time. I'm perhaps borrowing time. At this stage of my life, I'm up for borrowing any time I can borrow. And on the

ninth, on her eighth birthday, so she was actually nine, but she was, I thought she was eight. She got 135,000 gifts. That's amazing, isn't it? Really amazing. And it was sent to her by fans around the world, right? No, also from her mum.

She got a kangaroo from Australia. That's a burden. Is it? Well, you can keep other presents in the pouch. Good point. It's a suitcase. Her life just sounds insane. She was the biggest box office

star of the year in 1936, 37 and 38, which I think were the years where she was eight, nine and ten. She's the biggest child star that's ever been. There's been no contest ever since, really. Carly Culkin is the only other one I could think of. I think in terms of like the amount she earned at the time, the fact that she was the only

person anyone wanted in any films. Between the ages of three and ten, she was in 29 films. In 1935, her salary was $2,500 a week. This is when she was seven, six or seven? That was a lot of money in those days. It wasn't just like a third of a tincture of time.

God, her house was stuffed with Irish mustard. She was also responsible for quite a random bit of cultural input, possibly, and that is the novel The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. This is because

she had sort of a feud with Graham Greene at the age of sort of nine, eight or nine. I want to see, do you remember in the 90s or the early 2000s they used to have celebrity boxing and like Ricky Gervais fought with I don't know, some random person.

Did they? I don't remember that. Patrick Kilty or something like that. I just want to see Graham Greene in Shirley Temple. That is a pay-per-view I would pay for. I think I'd back Shirley. She was pretty tough under those ringlets. He was quite mean about her.

He wrote a review of her films saying, sort of suggesting that she was trained to deliberately be a bit cocketish, saying she symbolised dimpled depravity. She had a well-developed rump and suggesting that her films were targeting sleazy middle-aged men.

And it's unclear how humorous he was being. Having read it I don't think he was being that humorous. I think it was just a pretty nasty review. And then her mum and Fox decided to sue him for slander for suggesting that. And he, according to a friend

who wrote a biography of him years later, he realised that he was about to be sued and so he might go to prison. So he fled from England where he was to Mexico, which didn't have any extradition rules. And in Mexico, that was where he was inspired to write maybe his greatest magnum opus,

Para and the Glory, set in Mexico about oppression of Catholics. As an adult, she broke the ice. She sent him a copy. She's been sitting on all that time. She sent him a copy of her autobiography and she invited him to tea.

And then she put things on her part. Well, she was a diplomat, wasn't she? Well, she had got £3,500 from Graham Greene in the settlement. I wonder how much she saw of that though. I haven't got this written down, but I do in the course of reading remember that a lot of the money was taken by the parents

and wasn't seen by Shirley. I've got the figures. Right, she earned $3,200,000 in her acting career. Quite a lot of money at the time. By the time she was 22 years old, she earned $1,000 left. Was that because it was depleted by her parents?

It was her dad. Her dad was a banker and so he was in charge of all of her money. Obviously, her parents, they would be. But she never blamed him. She reckons that he got duped. He made a lot of bad investments because people could see he was making a lot of money

and he left school when he was in seventh grade. He wasn't the greatest banker of all time. I wonder if she was a banker? She was a monopoly banker. They should have looked underneath the bar. That's where the money would have been. She said that she didn't blame him one little bit and it was the people that counseled him

who were the bad guys. Just a nice link between her past and her future if you're placing yourself in 1940. It goes back to this fact, James's fact at the start of the show, when communism fell. She never liked references to her

history as a child star. Everyone was a child. There was only one who, as a very high-achieving diplomat and politician, gets labeled as a former child star. Not everyone. That level wasn't in movies. We don't know.

There might have been some obscure Czech films undiscovered with him spouting philosophy age nine. But she did give them a treat just once. So it was when communism did fall in Czechoslovakia, big day, very exciting. She called all of her senior staff together, shut the doors, very private room, and apparently looked them very sternly in the eye

and said, I'm only going to do this once. And then she started prancing around the room and singing on the good chip lot. That's amazing. That's awesome. I've just got one thing on child stars and how to become a child star. A bit late for us.

I've got a kid on the way, so I could actually get going on this. There's a company called Jam 2000, and they're the agency that basically, when you see a baby in the UK on TV and call the midwife, even the crown of Sherlock, if there's a baby in it,

it's a good chance that Jam 2000 gave them. So when the baby is born, a baby can get an acting license within a few hours of being born. In America, it takes about 15 days. You've got to be 15 days old to get a worker's permit. How do you need to audition? Like, when you're coming out of the birth canal,

you're like, Mary, come lie down. Exactly. I hear that often people complain, like, this baby's crying all the time. They say, well, you just happen to have been given a crying baby. Unfortunately, that's the case. But they do have specifications that they like.

So triplets or twins are particularly liked because twins most likely can be born three weeks early. Triplets, in some cases, seven weeks early, right? Is that good? I guess I'll be extra small because they can look newborn.

That's the other reason. So when they're looking for tiny babies, twins are fantastic. They're tiny, but you can do double time because you've got two babies to swap. They all look almost identical anyway. So you would think so, right? But sometimes it's to do with hair.

But yeah, so the youngest at this company said that they've ever handed over as a four-day-old baby in order to be used. Amazing. It's a great article. It just tells you about different types of babies for any Star Wars fans out there. In Star Wars Revenge of the Sith,

we get to see Luke and Leia, who are twins that are born. Wait, that's episode three. So you get to see them as babies, and that's where you learn that their brother and sister in the series. And the babies that were used for that were actually one,

which was a guy called Aidan Barton. He plays both Luke and Leia. Really? He's like Alec Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets. He's Eddie Murphy. What a reference to you to make James. From someone who hasn't seen any films made before about 1987, for you to make a Kind Hearts

and Coronets reference, what have you done with James? That's just somebody who does a lot of quizzes. Sorry, I've not seen Star Wars. What are you talking about? Also, can I... What you're going to say, and don't say it, because we're going to find out in the series that Luke and Leia are siblings.

If you start episode one like a psychopath... There we go. When are you going to find out? Come on, you've asked James the only person who doesn't know when to start watching Star Wars, and I think that's an unfair sample. It's the first episode. There's a second episode that you find out. They wouldn't have called the episode one, two, and three

if they didn't want you to watch them first, would they? No, no, no. Jabba the Hutt was actually played by a six-week-old baby. Very overhead. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that there used to be a cinema in Melbourne, Australia

that had a cloakroom to keep your babies in. What? So, this was called the Sun Theatre, and this was a place where, when you were arriving at the cinema, you would have a cloakroom, but rather than leaving your coat in there, you would push your baby in its pram into the cloakroom,

be given a ticket, and then go back to the show. Now, obviously, you don't want to completely abandon your baby, so while you're watching the movie, if your baby in the cloakroom kicks off and starts crying inconsolably, the ticket number that you hold will flash up on the screen of the movie

to let you know that you're desperately needed in the cloakroom so you can get out and look after your baby. It's very clever. Brilliant. Thank you. Would it flash up for all the other members of the audience? Is it going to replace the image that was on the screen, or is it a little thing in the corner that's subtle?

I think just a quick superimpose the number 29, whatever. Really? I think that would work. I think that would be all right. It would be mid-film. I don't know if it would be directly over the whole thing. It might be in the corner. I couldn't actually find that out. It must be corner. I'll be so annoyed because babies cry constantly, and if you've got 50 babies

at a big blockbuster film in the cloakroom, you're just going to be watching a series of numbers flashing up on the national lottery. Exactly. It's ingenious. It was a very clever idea. Why do we not have it today? Exactly. Probably because people don't think they should just leave their babies.

I don't think I'd leave my baby now that I say that out loud. Well, your baby is probably in the movie. That's right. We do have baby cinema now, which we take my son to go and see. I got to that. You really should take your child along. I know.

The first movie that we took, Fenella, my wife took, was the movie that was on the biopic of Churchill that came out about four years back. It looked like Churchill. Like, Wilf was really into it, because he was like, wow, it's me in a suit when I'm older. This is amazing.

So, there's the Sun Theatre. It opened up in Melbourne in 1938, and it was a single-screen theatre. It had 1,050 seats, and it was really massive. It was a big deal, and then over time, people stopped going as much, and they had to sell,

and new owners turned it into smaller screens. So, they stopped doing it. It was a shame. I can't find any other cinema that did this. No. There are people who've left their children in cloak rooms before. I won't go so far as to say,

this is a thing, because it's not. But in 1999, Tony Blair's chief of staff was a guy called Jonathan Powell. Oh, I remember Powell. Oh, those are the good old days, weren't they? Friend of Anna's. Anyway, he went to the Groucho Club and left his eight-week-old daughter

in a cloakroom attendant, and there was a brief comment about it, and then the family complained, saying the child has a right to a private life, and I think the newspaper said, well, don't leave the child in the cloakroom then. Anyway, but the Observer sent a reporter called Saskia Sessons,

who took a colleague of hers, a five-month-old baby, to various cloakrooms all over London. It's a great feature. So, Kings Cross left luggage office? Absolutely not. So, he had to cash him on a ledge. National Gallery were incredibly rude

to Saskia and her young friend. One of the cloakroom attendants said, out of the question, the second said, you need your head examined, and the third said, that's very, very irresponsible. Get on, yeah. Wait a minute, that was all in the same... She keeps saying, I want a second opinion.

I want a third opinion. But restaurants seemed to be much more willing of the Oxo Tower Brasserie, which is a restaurant in London, which is smaller, so, you know, you can go to the parent if there's an issue, whereas National Gallery feel like you could lose the parent right then.

One famous person left in the cloakroom is a character from Importance of Being Earnest, left in a handbag in the station. So, I thought I'd look into that play by Oscar Wilde. Yeah. So, Oscar Wilde famously... Can you tell I can't find

anything else about cloakrooms? So, he was famously brought up with charges of immorality, wasn't he, because he was homosexual, and in 1952 there was a movie, the first movie made of the Importance of Being Earnest, and it was directed by a guy called Anthony Asquith,

and Anthony Asquith was the son of Herbert Henry Asquith, who was Home Secretary, and he was the one who brought the charges of immorality against Oscar Wilde, which got him imprisoned in Reading Channel. That's interesting. Yeah, and so, he was the one who got him imprisoned,

and his son was the director of the movie. That's really cool. I found some famous people who worked in cloakrooms. Oh, yeah. Mark Ormond. From Soft Cell. Of Tainted Love fame. Can I just ask, is that the most famous

and you're going to less and less? I haven't heard of him, I'm going to scratch off the rest. Don't worry, I actually started with my weakest one. Where did he work in the cloakroom? Sorry, did you solve? Probably at the front bit, where you take those clothes. What happened there all? I didn't write it down, I'm sorry.

Silla Black, cloakroom attendant at the Cavern Club. Who else is on your list? Boy George. Boy George, yeah. At the Culture Club, wasn't it? Good. That's the band that Boy George was in.

Thank you. Boy George is a singer in the band. I don't want to ruin every joke by asking, so sometimes I'll just stay quiet. No, I'm just helping Anna understand who this is. He was interviewed about it later and he said, I was always riffling through pockets and handbags. Most people were too pissed to notice.

Oh, yeah. Any babies in the handbags? Riffling, hey? In my notes, I've got riffing, but that can't possibly be true. No, I just would always say rifling. That's better, then that is correct. Yep, sorry. On cloakrooms.

Oh, yeah. I read, so I think we've talked before about how popcorn wasn't really loud in cinemas until the third, and it was sort of post-depression, I think, when everyone was so depressed, they were like, let us have the popcorn. And also, yeah,

they thought people would tread it into the nice carpets. Well, before that, exactly. They thought people would tread it into the carpets. It was too noisy, and so you used to have to leave your popcorn in the cloakroom. Because people set up popcorn stands all outside cinemas, and they sell it to you leaving the cloakroom. That's amazing, just hand it in like a gun or something

and get it back afterwards. You take a gun to the cinema? No, sorry, I'm thinking of the thing in Old West. Every time someone looks at their phone in the middle of a movie. I mean... You got in a lot of trouble in your tour of some National Gallery Clubs, didn't you? Keep my AK-47.

Wasn't there a thing where you had to hand in your gun when you went to a Wild West bar? Towns, like most of the Wild West towns wouldn't allow guns inside, so they would have a way to sort of stop. I think that's what happened. Often you had them taken at the periphery of what we've talked about.

In fact, I think we said that in the OK Corral the problem was the reason it happened is because they hadn't put their guns in the cloakroom before they arrived. That's what I'm thinking of. Actually, speaking of weapons in cloakrooms tell me something famous about the Houses of Parliament.

Oh yeah, the swords in the cloakroom. You've got a place for your sword to go. There are hooks in the cloakroom so you can hang up your sword. Absolutely. If you go into the Houses of Parliament cloakrooms, all the coat hangers have a loop of pink ribbon around them and that is for holding your sword.

You're not allowed a sword in the chamber. I read a good expose of the fact that this there's no evidence this is true. Various reasons. In the massive fire in the 1830s when everything was destroyed

that was way after anyone would ever bring swords in and so it's weird that they would have the sword hooks. But even if they were swords the first mention that they were was 1928 and it was like an MP saying they've got ribbons there and that's from the olden days because of the sword thing. And actually all the mentions before that

say they were for a much more sensible item umbrellas. There you go. I've got a bit of Australian cinema news just while we were talking about Aussie cinemas. Australia's longest running pornographic cinema is finally going to shut down

and according to the article it's called the Crazy Horse Cinema and according to the article dozens of 90 year old pensioners are going to be absolutely distraught because it's their meeting place. There's a big group of... What? What did she say?

What's she doing? She's going to get a cold. He's not a real plumber. Sorry what? Yeah, this is you know this place has been open for many years and supposedly it's a really good meeting ground for a lot of these 90 year old pensioners

so they all meet up there at 10am. Very early to start. Very early. This comes from a quote from the lady. They come and they do their thing in the morning. Disgusting. They come and then they have the meeting. They come and do their thing in the morning

whatever that is they do and then they go and maybe do some shopping for the wife and maybe have some lunch like what they get is... It's male pensioners and they get a $10 pensioner all day ticket to the porno cinema. What? So sorry, when they're having this meeting

is it in the cinema? It's not really a meeting is it? It's sort of like a gathering. I even think as a teenager I would be able to get my buddy's worth from an all day ticket on that graphic cinema. For agriculture in Australia. That's so funny.

I've been going for 20 years so you know they were a fruity fresh 70 year olds at the time and then obviously these lads are going to be thrilled when they find out about the internet. So they're distraught at the moment and it's closing this year.

This is from this year, this article. Knock it down. It keeps them out for the full day judging by the sounds of these men. Is popcorn allowed? As a matter of the cup it's got bigger concerns. OK, it is time for our final fact of the show and that is

Anna. My fact this week is that the original vapes were pes dispensers. So you know for people in the UK who maybe don't, pes dispensers are like those sweet holders. They're a huge deal in America, right? They're kind of

tubes that hold sweets and they have a funny head on top. Yeah, so you've got a little funny head and you tip the head back and it's like an elevator system where the latest sweet that's sitting on top arrives at the top and you get to pull it out and it's a little rectangular sweetie.

Like a brick but much smaller. Exactly, like a tiny brick. Imagine if you were building a house but you have an elevator and every time you needed to put a brick on the brick had to come up in an elevator and then it would come out. This is a classically helpful.

No such thing as a fish explainer. The lucky thing is everyone knows what a pes dispensers is. That was like your time in ours. Are you going to try as well now? I think of them as kind of confectionary staplers because you have to load it in a cart and you like some staples.

That's actually the best simile that we've had so far. That was actually really good. Anyway, Pes Sweets were created in 1927 in Vienna and people smoked them. We'll load them into their cigarettes. No, but they were created by a guy called Edward Haas III

and he was an anti-smoking campaigner. I thought it was bad for your health. Well done, very forward thinking of him and he wanted to create a tablet that helped people to cut down on smoking or overeating and so they were these mint tablets and that was what they were explicitly for. Early advert said

no smoking, pezzing allowed. Like vaping. And then when the dispensers came about in the 50s, they are sort of the first ones were shaped really like cigarette lighters. They were for adults, marketed very much for adults. They used to send women

in sort of like quite cleavage heavy dresses around in vans. Low putts we call them. Cleavage heavy, not all right? Very cleavage heavy top tonight. Your saucy fashion show the descriptions are not good.

They said they do look a bit like lighters but according to Sean Peterson who is the historian at Pezz Candy Incorporated they were only designed that way to fit into pockets. It's just a coincidence that they look like lighters because lighters are also designed to go into pockets.

I did hear that Pezz Candy Incorporated does have an official historian. Sean Peterson. It's a very light historian gig as in it's a very small area of history. I reckon he does other stuff. You'd have to. I think usually the historians

in these kind of companies are actually someone who does another job but in their spare time they kind of... I'm sure you're right because otherwise you'd feel like a fool turning up at a historian's conference and like what are you studying? Oh the 19th century mostly, what about you? You sat next to Mary Beard on one side and Dan Snow

on the other side. But yeah it was until they came to America that they still, even when the dispensers were added this was a way to give up smoking and apparently it was only when they went to America in the 50s and tried to market them there and they were targeting adults, kids how to quit smoking.

America didn't have the same appetite to quit smoking. I think maybe there wasn't such a campaign back then as there was in Austria saying this is bad and so they thought let's start putting fun... turning them into fun kid shapes and marketing them to children. And changing the taste obviously of the thing from a sort of anti-smoking

nicotine... Peppermint. No, no, but as in they changed it to sweeties. But they were always mentee. Because that's where the name comes from comes from the German for peppermint. Weirdly one of the first flavours they had was chlorophyll.

Yeah. What? It's the green stuff you get in leaves. It's hard to know what it tastes like. Exactly. It tastes like grass, I reckon. I would imagine so too but it's such a weird flavour. Can we talk about Edward Haas the third? Haas.

It's a really interesting family because his father Edward Haas the second was a baked goods merchant so it's all baking powder and his father It's not actually a baked good, is it? It's a good for baking. What a good point, it's a baking goods.

Sorry, I stand corrected. But basically Edward the third seems to have invented the first ready-made cake mixture. It's a huge deal. So wait a minute, was this the one who did Paz? The one who did Paz the third. Edward the third is the guy who did Haas

in for the baking of health sponge cakes. Edward's grandfather Edward Haas the first. I've read one reference to this. I cannot find any more detail anywhere but there's a source online which claims that he died as a result of medical experiments he did on himself.

There's no further evidence that I found. So if you know please write in and enlighten us because it's not clear what he was doing to himself. They're in the baking industry, what could he have done? He was baking too much by carbonate soda to himself.

He wanted to know how hot to bake things so he tested the temperature himself. Sat in the oven. He cut a hole in his neck so he could dispense loads of bread when he took his head back. It's so unclear what he did. There's no further detail. The evolution of the

Paz dispenser itself is very exciting. Poor Haas the third didn't get to see the feet that were added to the bottom of a Paz dispenser to allow it to stand. That was a big innovation. It's the Paz we know and love.

That was 1987 I believe wasn't it? They had weird designs before. Before they added the feet, there was one in 1956. They invented a sort of space gun and also from what I've seen, regular looking guns. So the idea is that the gun would shoot out, it's like a pistol

would shoot out the Paz at the end into your mouth. It was hard to put the gun in your mouth. It doesn't seem like... The guy who set up the Paz dispenser as we know it, the guy who was in charge of the decision basically was a man called Curtis Alina

who was European. He was born in Prague in 1922. He was Jewish and that was not a good time to be born Jewish in Central Europe in Prague. His family were all sent to concentration camps. He was the only surviving member of his family

in Europe after the war. He went to the USA and he started working for Paz. But the US and the European Paz were kind of two different camps. They were quite remote from each other. They weren't really tied together and he had to persuade the Viennese

outfit. They wanted serious, sober, grown-up mints, you know, adult mints. That this dispenser thing was a good idea. But I just, I mention all this because there's a weird link to Sigmund Freud who was from Vienna. Okay. But the link is not

just that they're both in Vienna. Well, he lived across the street from Sigmund Freud when he was a boy, supposedly. There was this brilliant website I found which is called Freud's Butcher.com, which is about the history of Sigmund Freud by an author called Edie Jarlim. She's great. It's a blog about genealogy, psychology, and meat.

Okay. And there's a theory that she posits that Edward Haas III might have been considering Freud's theory of oral fixation when he came up with the idea of substituting peppermint sweets for cigarettes. Oh, I see.

Not that the Paz dispenser looks a bit like a penis. No, that's not. Although that's an excellent evolution of the theory, maybe he was only thinking about it subconsciously. I see. But wouldn't that be appropriate given that it's Freud? What a load of absolute balls.

Oh, he happened to live in opposite Freud. What weird convoluted thing can we attribute to that? Are you right? She says it's a huge stretch. She also says that. I disagree. So have you guys come across Steve Glue?

Oh, no. The Paz Outlaw. Self-styled. I genuinely got like a tingle of goosebumps when you both got excited by that. Well, Steve Glue. He is basically the king of collecting pezes. Right.

So he would go to Europe, and he would get all of these really, really rare pezes, sometimes digging through garbage to try and get ones which have been thrown out. And then he would take them back to America, and he would sell them to Paz enthusiasts. At the time, he was making $4.5 million.

He made that much in total selling pez candy dispensers that he'd taken from Eastern Europe and sold in America. And it seemed to be there was some kind of loophole in terms of importing them or... Well, he just sort of snuck through customs quite a lot with them.

Honestly, so this is where I first... Where was he hiding them? I think often they didn't check. It's just the right shape. That's why they're shaped like that. It wasn't one per trip. I don't think that would have been profitable.

Just a little Mickey Mouse head sticking out of his rectum. Help yourself to one more year down there. Yeah, this is how I came across this fact initially. I was reading a review of the Pez Outlaw, which is coming out this year, I think. Cool. And it's the film based on his adventures, and it sounds proper exciting stuff.

It was him and his son who's an equally avid collector, and he was real down and out, even making any money until he came across this big scam where he'd fly to Eastern Europe, go into factories, and basically bribe factory workers to give him a bunch of Pez he knew would be incredibly valuable.

But they drive around in this truck. Apparently, his son said he'd drive for 24 hours straight. He'd be so tired that he often crashed the truck, but just kept plugging away. And he had this amazing rival called Patek, who was another Pez

guy who also got first dibs in the factories and flogged Pez. And apparently, at one point, glue pursued Patek across Austria in a car chase. They drove on pavements. They were on the wrong side of the road.

They had to bribe police with Pez dispensers full of cash. They could only be tiny little son teams. They went with notes, apparently. I don't know how many notes you can fit in. But then, of course, Big Pez got involved, right?

And so this guy decided he sort of did a little bit of a deal with a guy in Hungary and said that this guy would make extras for him. And they would discontinued ones and swell sometimes. So they'd be really, really good, expensive, you know, rare Pezes. This guy in Hungary

would make them for him and he would buy loads of them and then take them back to America and sell them. But one day, he logged into the Pez website and he found a new section called Misfit Dispensers. And it was all the ones that he'd bought from this guy in Hungary. But Pez was selling them for like a dollar each.

And they basically just flooded the market with other ones. And he reckons that it left him $250,000 in debt. This one trick. And when he rang up this broker in Hungary and said, what's happened? Why are they doing this?

The broker said, the right hand knows what the left is doing. So basically it was all a scam. They just basically fitted him up. That's extraordinary. That's amazing. So the dispenser was made by someone called Oscar and his patent

actually said that it would be helpful for people who have only one hand. So it was a way of dispensing sweets from a box, but you only need one hand to do it. And that's what it says in the patent. It's useful for people with one hand. That's why it's so useful actually for the pensioners at Dan's Blue Movie Cinema

who want to have a hand free and it's a cinema snack. Blue Movie Cinema, because it is otherwise known. As it will be, because they're selling it, aren't they? They're selling it. I have loom my bid. Because in the patent it says it's important not only for persons who have only one hand, but also persons

who often have only one hand free. So he goes. His occupation causes their hands to become smeared with dirt. Well, this is all brilliant news, Dan. Get in touch with your trumps. Freud's penis dispensary one hand and your actual penis and the other.

Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James. At James Harkin. And Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep, where you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing or our website, no such thing as a fish.com. Check out all of our previous episodes up there. Make sure to check out Club Fish. We have exciting things hidden in a secret club like extra compilation episodes and drop us a line

where we go through the mailbag and share our favorite stories and facts that you've sent in. Otherwise, just come back here next week where we will be here waiting for you with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye. Music