No Such Thing As A Fish - 464: No Such Thing As An Average Bucket

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss stone-throwing suffragettes, sizeable screens, simulated seasickness and scrotal scavengers. 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

Hi, everybody. Just before we start this week's show, we have an exciting announcement to make. And that is that the National Comedy Awards are coming up very soon, and the great mothership that is QI and the mother herself that is Sandy Toxvig. How creepy. I don't know how she'd feel about me calling her my mother, but that is Sandy Toxvig are both up for awards. That's absolutely right. QI is nominated for Best Comedy Panel Show, and Sandy, or Mummy as I call her, has been shortlisted for outstanding female comedy entertainment performance. We think that both are deserving winners,

so if you would like to go and vote for QI or for Sandy in those awards, go to qi.com slash vote. So easy to do and so important that you get your vote in and help us destroy all comedy competition, which as we all know is the point of comedy. Yes, exactly. Flatten all that comedy. And if you do want to remind yourself why they're the best, all of QI is now available on BBC iPlayer. Go and watch a few episodes and convince yourself that they both deserve to win. That's qi.com slash vote. Do it now. On with the show. On with the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you

from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Tyshinski and James Harkin. 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 Anna. My fact this week is that the first female composer to become a dame used to tie herself to trees to improve her posture. I have a question. Was her posture originally too bent so she stood next to a tall tree or was it originally too straight and she stood next to like a weeping willow or something to bend herself over? Tied herself to one of those really droopy branches. I believe it was to the trunk.

She didn't specify. I think she left it for us to assume. This was an amazing woman called Ethel Smyth. She was writing music and conducting and creating, you know, operas and all sorts of classical music at the turn of the 20th century. And there's a new book coming out which covers her life. It's going to be called Quartet. Sounds great coming out in spring by someone called Dr Leah Broad. And she read an account of an interviewer who went to meet Ethel Smyth at one point to interview her about her music making. And she found that she was tied to a tree and specifically to improve her posture as a conductor. Oh, come on. No, something went wrong. Some sort of weird sex game went wrong. The interviewer, what are you doing? Oh, that's for the old, the old conducting.

You're so right. Come on. She was actually one of a sex minks. So I reckon it was that. Yeah. Yeah. But you can't admit that to the interviewer first thing, can you? And then you have to just carry that on for the rest of your career. You just got to people are sort of recommending trees. You got a big pot plant with a thick trunk there in the orchestra pit tied to it. Which is what you should do. She's amazing. Yeah, she is incredible. So she was very successful in her time given how unlikely it was for a woman to be successful in composing writing music. What was her time specifically? She was born in 1858. She died in 1944. Yeah. And a lot of her most famous works will have been around the 1880s, 1890s and the early 1900s.

Yeah. And she was prolific. She wrote so much. She wrote six operas, which operas are a big feat. And plus loads of chamber music and orchestral and stuff. She played for Queen Victoria and for Edward VII. And she was so ambitious that we know that she kept a diary throughout her childhood. And she wrote in her diary, age eight, that she intended to be made a peer because of her musical prowess and lo and behold. She was. And she was. That's amazing. It's good to have something to aim for, isn't it? Yeah. Because actually, when she was a child, I read that she was quite good at sports. This was on the Surrey Government website. And it said, from the beginning, when she was a child, she won a bet for riding a pig. And to the end of her long life, she was a keen

sportswoman. Really? So yeah, that shows how keen you are at sports. She was. She definitely won lots of contests. And in lots of different sports, I think she was very vigorous. Picture like a good mistrunchable, maybe. So she did like mountaineering, tennis, hunting, cycling, golf, golf. Very keen on golf. James, she did do golf. I must admit, most of my facts are about Woking Golf Club. The thing is, the thing why James actually might theoretically have a point dragging us into the golfing world is that I was looking up her Dame Hood, which was 1923, the Honours List then. And she was convinced it was because she was a member of the Woking Golf Club. Oh, really? Okay. She had friends in high places, kissing some ass, where it

mattered. Well, it was owned by a guy called Lord Riddell, who was a bigwig, a bit senior lawyer in a newspaper proprietor and all that sort of stuff. And he was a member of the club, and so was she. And there was a big dispute about the changing rooms where the women members wanted to walk across a shortcut, a short route. What? I know. And it took them past the men's changing rooms to get to the women's rooms. Nightmare. And the men were very uncomfortable about this. The women walking past the changing rooms. I'm not sure if the men's changing rooms were just sheet glass in the windows or something like that. I don't think they would have seen anything. Also, it's not like a swimming pool. It's not like you have to take your kit off completely

to put your golf shoes on. What are they doing there? What do men do in changing rooms, it's way more suspicious for them to kick up this big fuss. You're right. James, you presumably spend a lot of time in those. You might have a shower. There we go. So basically, the men were uncomfortable about this situation with the women walking near their changing rooms, and they demanded that the women be banned from playing golf at weekends as a sort of proportional response. And Smythe actually told the ladies committee, look, let's give the men a slightly easier ride on this one. Maybe they're just incredibly modest, and they're worried about it. And the sort of militant women, almost all of them,

abandoned this shortcut route. So she basically sold out the sisterhood and gave the men at the golf club a slightly easier time. And she thinks that because Lord Riddell was maybe friends with the PM, he might have said, look, we should make this woman a day. Lord Riddell had a particularly tiny penis in here. So relieved. It's a particularly dangerous place to tie yourself to trees as well as golf course. Certainly if I'm playing golf, he'd do no one besides any trees near me. She I when I read her story, I've never heard of her before, but she just it's begging for a movie to be made about her life. She was a suffragette. She played a big role in composing songs for the suffragettes, but she also had rumors of affairs going on with people like Emily and

Pankhurst and everybody and Virginia Woolf. Although these are all kind of rumors. And I think Virginia Woolf was the one who started the Pankhurst rumor suggesting that they were lovers, but she spent time in jail for throwing stones. She was just she was a badass, basically. I think she was in love with both of those two people. I think she was a woman who fell in love quite a lot. You get the impression. And it was sometimes reciprocated and sometimes not. I mean, Virginia Woolf wrote when Ethel fell in love with her, she wrote in her diary, I think, an old woman has fallen in love with me. It's like being caught by a giant crab. Oh, it's not what you want, is it? It just comes like you sideways.

We should talk about the thing which landed her in prison. Yeah, because this is a brilliant incident. It was in 1912. And the really cool thing is you could hear her talking about it. There was a recording made before she died. But she was saying at 5 30 p.m. one evening in 1912, relays of women produced from their muffs and handbags, hammers and things like that and proceeded to methodically smash up windows in all the big London thoroughfares. And Mrs. Pankhurst was the one who kind of opened the bowling on that occasion. So she threw a stone at 10 Downing Street and then simultaneously all over London, suffragettes and suffragettes were throwing stones at various buildings. And she was one of them. So she went to the house of someone called

Lord Harcourt, who had annoyed her. And she got to the Target Square. There was a policeman standing around and she said, you know, whose house is that? And what about that one? And then she threw a stone through the window of Lord Harcourt. And he says, will you come quietly? And she said, yes. And then he arrested her and she went off to prison. That was it. That was the protest. That's cool. Virginia Woolf said that she was the first ever woman to write an opera. And she was wrong about that. Because the first woman to write an opera was someone called Francesca Caccini. And it was about 250 years before Ethel Smythe came along. And Caccini, she was amazing. She sang at the wedding of Henry the Fourth of France. And he was so impressed by her singing

that he asked her to stay in his court. And by the time of the 1620s or the top of her career, she was the highest paid musician in the court. Really? This woman. And her opera, which was the first written by a woman, this is called La Liberazione di Ruggiero. And it was so good that the King of Poland heard it. And he rushed all the way back to Poland and created his own opera house just so that he could get someone to play this opera in it. God, it was such a hassle before. Grammophones or CD plays, wasn't it? Spotify. Yeah, yeah. Had to build a bloody opera house. To be fair to Virginia Woolf, no internet for her.

No, she couldn't Google it, could she? We had to make a guess. Do you know we have mentioned Ethel Smythe on this podcast before? But without knowing it. So, do you remember listeners at home and you guys, you know the Bishop of Truro, Edward White Benson, who invented the carol concert, the Christmas carol concert. We talked about him because he had this amazing family. His wife was gay and kept a diary of her 39 lesbian lovers and had lots of affairs. And we mentioned that his wife was going out with this particular woman, who was then stolen by his daughter. And it was this raunchy love triangle where mother and daughter were fighting. And that was Ethel.

That's it. Yeah. It's obviously a different world now for composers, female composers. But a survey was done in 2020 to see on an average year how many orchestral concerts worldwide were playing music that was composed by women. So in percentage terms, what do you reckon it would be? Oh, they're still really low, I should think. Yeah, so they surveyed 15 orchestras worldwide who did more than 1,500 concerts and did 4,000 pieces. What it comes out is 8.2%. So only 142 of the pieces were composed by women, which is not much more than it was in her day, according to this stat from Don,

D-O-N-N-E, which is women. Don. You'll make Don down the pub. I've met him, yeah. I don't know if he's reliable. Don done my research for me this week. It's a women in music charity foundation and they did this as a big global survey to find out. There's that song about him, isn't there? The problem is, I suppose, is that orchestras tend to play classical music and it is all from the past and almost all past composers were men. So it's so hard to sort of create a female composer from the 1800s, but certainly there should be more contemporary ones, which still are. Just one more thing about Smythe. She wants kidnapped her own opera.

Oh, yes! Mid-show. This is so cool. It was in Leipzig in 1906. Her opera, The Wreckers, had its debut, which is about a load of people who wreck ships. She found out there had been edits made, which was absolutely furious. She found some cuts had been made to the third act and she walked into the orchestra pit. She took the parts off the musicians and she took the score with her and she went to Prague, where she thought she'd get a fairer hearing and get it played in full. A nuts move. For someone who's achieved what no one could have really dreamed a woman would achieve at that time, God, they're putting it on in Leipzig. It got a standing ovation, huge deal. She storms off in a strop with all the stuff they need to play it. I just find it so funny though

that how vulnerable are classical musicians that when the paper's taken away, well, that's it. We can't do anything. We can't remember the chords like any other song. It's not like, it's not a Westlife song. Operas are long, operas are long. Oh, if you're playing a violin, you can memorize, you can memorize a piece. Dude, no, they've just seen this piece. I think they're, you know. Bands play for three hours. It's the same chords, guys. It's the same instruments. Everyone, everyone, play an A. Now everyone, an E. There's no extra notes that classical people have that coldplay don't have.

And if you're a classical musician, if you're a classical bassoonist and you think that what you do is no more difficult than a rudimentary Coldplay song, please write to dan, podcast at qi.com. Yeah, yeah. We crave to hear from you. Let me hear. Okay. Let the bassoon meet the buffoon. Bruce Springsteen does five hour gigs. You're telling me you're better than him, bassoon boy? He's been playing the same tune for 150 years. He hasn't seen, I've got a three hour opera put in front of him two days ago. He's like, bloody hell, rehearse this. And then you're going to play it in two nights.

It's like a panic dream for any normal human being. Dan, he wouldn't have got it first time. A quick glance, nailed it. Got it. Tears up the paper. No, no, no, no. Forget that. How do you forget that? Da, da, da, da. Thank you. Good night. Good night, Vienna. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi, everybody. We just wanted to advertise ourselves. Yes, we're sponsored this week by no such thing as a fish. And specifically, we are sponsored by Club Fish. That is the special portal that I'm sure a lot of you know about, where we have all the real fun. It is a subscription arm of no such thing

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The mother glass itself, does it work as an enormous TV screen? I imagine it would do. Oh, cool. But it's so big that I don't think they've made the TV big enough. You wouldn't be able to get out the factory, would you? I should say where this comes from. This comes from a brilliant Atlantic piece about TV tech, and the main focus of it was actually that TVs are so cheap. TVs are way cheaper than they used to be. And there are various reasons for that. One is the LED panels, which are now the main ingredient TV, they're much cheaper. And another reason is the mother glass, because manufacturers

have way better these days at cutting screens out of the mother glass. So there's much less wastage. And so that's part of the reason why TVs are so much cheaper. So how do you make mother glass? We're talking about LCD screens, aren't we, which are basically what your TV screen property is today. And you've got your two thin sheets of glass sandwiched together. I think in between the two thin sheets of glass, there's like a liquid crystal thing, which acts as the conductor. And so you just have this huge sheet of that glass. And I think each sheet can be dozens of feet, the mother glass. And so you can cut, you know, 10, 15 TVs out of that. And how they make glass. Yeah, I don't know if they still do it this

way, but I think they do. It's basically float glass. So float glass was invented in the 50s in St. Helens near where I'm from. And the idea is it was really hard to make flat glass in those days. But what they've worked out is you could put a load of glass on a load of molten tin. So you melt a load of tin to a really high temperature. And then you put the glass on it. And it sits perfectly on top of it. Like if you pour oil on water, it would just be a small film of it. And then when the tin and the glass cools down, you can just sort of peel it off and it'll be a really flat piece of glass. And I think that's still how they make flat glass. So it certainly was 10 years ago. That's amazing. Researching this fact, I just came across so much new vocab.

It was great. It was like researching a foreign language. We don't watch much TV, do you Hannah? That's true. So there's a fab. Fabs are constantly referred to when you're talking about like high end technological production. And these are factories in China. It's short for fabrication plans. And no one ever explains what they are because they assume if you're reading these articles, you definitely know what a fab is. So all of these screens are made in fabs. Apparently you can spot an LCD screen making fab because they'll be very tall. They'll go out many, many stories and they will hoist the equipment up the outside. So they have big windows on the outside where they hoist the equipment up and then they just hoist it in to where they need it.

Cool. Everyone in there looks like they're in hazmat suits or Ebola fighters because they have to have what you call clean rooms because it's so fine. You know, you're working with like atomic level stuff. And when you're making these very specialized screens, you can't get a single speck of dust. So the rooms have to be what you call a class 10 clean room or even a class one clean room. And what that means is that you have to have fewer than one particle smaller than 0.3 microns in diameter per cubic meter of air. So for comparison, so that's class one. So who was that the best? That's the best. You were about to ask who cleans. You were like, how's the canal tube goes in and counts them? Yeah. Yeah, that's an eight.

Some, yeah, technician with a magnifying glass. So for comparison, the article I was reading, which I guess was written by someone in Harvard, so they compared it to Harvard Square, they said Harvard Square would in Boston would be class 8 million. Just in the air, not even on the ground. In the air, yeah, in the air, eight million particles per cubic meter. This has to have one. If there's more than one, you shut down the factory. That's awesome. My TV's got one of these. It's so annoying. What? Well, I think it's actually more of a dead pixel, but it's just this tiny spot and it's absolutely dead center. Everything I watch, whatever's in the middle has like a small fly on it.

Really? But you're always watching the darts, aren't you? Are you sure? Yeah, I gotta stop droid again when I watch it. That's so funny. You were saying that they need to be really thin and part of the reason for that is because to make your glass non-reflective, you need to put a kind of film on it. So if you just have normal glass, all the light's going to reflect off it, you're not going to be able to watch TV properly. And so they have something called non-reflective glass and that was invented by someone called Catherine Burr Blodgett. And what she did was she basically would build up these one molecule films of atoms and then she put another layer on and another layer on and another layer on. And so she could control exactly how thick it was going

to be. And she worked out the exact thickness that it would have to be to make this glass non-reflective. It's absolutely incredible. The first movie that used her invisible glass was Gone with the Wind and people said when they watched it how clear the cinematography was because the cameras had been using this amazing glass. When was this? This, well, Gone with the Wind was 39. Oh, so it was when it was released? Yeah, I didn't realize they could do that kind of thing. Well, exactly amazing, right? But it was also her glass or her non-reflective glass was used in World War II to make periscopes as well. Oh, cool. And I was looking into new TV innovations and just trying to see if there's a TV that I haven't seen because most of it is kind of just permutations at this point. It's just,

you know, like higher, higher, you know, Blu-ray, screen, you know, blah, blah, blah, kind of stuff. Why were you fired from Curry's then? You know, if you're a TV maker at the moment and Dad's just saying how pissy he is to make a new TV, I just add a permutation right into Dad's shrine. So check this out, Samsung, and this is clever, Samsung have released a vertical TV. They've turned a TV on its side. Yeah. Now, it's very clever because why do you think they've done this? Oh, because people film vertically on the phone. Exactly. So the new generation of kids that are sending their videos to the TV are not getting the proper view. Wait a minute. So if I buy that TV, great, my daughter will be able to watch her TikTok videos whenever she's old enough to.

And you'll have to watch this a promise. That was countdown sideways. No, so Samsung very cleverly have made it so that you can flip it back the right way around and you still have. I feel that's a gimmick. I'm going to say major, major advantage in innovation of TV. Okay, here's another one. In fact, this sort of links back to why TVs are cheap these days is the TVs that watch you. Not such a good show as the Sopranos. Poor things. No, no, no. Sopranos are bored out of their fucking mice. Trying to rub off a little spot on his TV. So this is a really interesting thing. TVs are smart. They're internet connected. All TVs sold these days pretty much are that. And one thing that

loads of TVs do, they collect your data and they will sell it to advertisers, right? And what that means is that TVs can be sold more cheaply because they know that for the next several years, they're going to be getting your data and that will be worth some money to them. So TVs are now being sold effectively for exactly what it costs to make them. And then they will sell your viewing data and they can make the money back on the long run. And sometimes the data will be sold to places like Netflix, even if you don't have a Netflix account, which I find so bizarre. And I think that might make sense. I wonder if that theoretically means that when you turn on Netflix for the first time,

if you do later get Netflix, they're like, ah, Mr Murray, we've been expecting you. But jokes on them because I always make sure to only watch stuff I hate on my smart TV. That's really interesting because I do the same on Amazon. I only buy things I hate just to get those things. I just screw with those algorithms. They don't know what data they're getting. It's not the truth. I read about a very old bit of TV technology that I just had never heard of before. And it seems an extraordinary thing. But have you guys heard of phone vision for TVs? No. Okay. So this was back in the 50s. And what it was is that this was pay for TV. This was like pay per view TV. So if a movie had been out in the cinema for two years,

they managed to get the rights to it and they would put on TV and it would be the first time anyone would be seeing it on TV in their house. So how do you do pay per view for TV back then when you don't have the kind of payment systems and stuff that we do now? Coin meter on the side of the TV. There was one that had a coin meter. But that's, this is more interesting in a weird kind of technological way. What they did was you would go to the channel and you would see the movie playing, but it would be completely blurry and all just didn't make, you know, the sound wasn't there and didn't make sense. So you could see like, oh my God, gone with the wind is on. I need to get to it. And what you did was you

then called up an operator and you told them that you would like to now watch this movie. It would cost a dollar and they would add that to your phone bill. And what they would then do is send a frequency through the phone that would somehow play with the TV and unblur it and give you all the sound. So it's your phone and TV working together to get a frequency, right? Yeah. I mean, it's mad and they did many tests on it and never, never kicked off obviously because various reasons like if you were quite stingy because this is definitely what I would do, especially if I was a teenager or something. Do you know if you could watch the whole thing, but like the blurry crap version that didn't really make sense? Like that would keep playing?

I think so. I would totally do that and just sort of try to work out. You know when you used to get like bootleg DVDs from foreign countries? Filmed in a cinema. Yeah. And you watch the bottom quarter of the screen and you'd only see half of their bodies. Yeah, exactly. I was reading about what claimed to be the first remote control, the lazy bones. And it was, it was a remote control and it was connected by a cable to the television. So it's, it's not completely remote. And the operation is mechanical. It's not electronic. So you know when you press it now it's a little infrared beam or whatever. These days that you should press the button it activated a motor that was used to physically turn the dial on the television. So good. It feels like this should be

a little hand like thing for the Adams family. On remote controls. Yeah. Is that what your family calls those? Yeah. Those items. Everyone else? What do you call it? Oh, I say the buttons. The buttons. They say channel changer. Channel changer. That's an unusual one. We used to call them the magic buttons. And there was a list online of someone did a survey of what people in the UK call them. And magic buttons wasn't in the top 100, I should say. But the number one was remote. Can you guess any of the others in the top five? We haven't said them yet. The doofa. Doofa number two. Yes. The word doofa originally meant half a cigarette in the 1920s. And it came from this will do for now. This will do for me. That's brilliant.

Nice. Okay. So that's remote doofa we got three to get. Was one the thing? Like that's not one that I saw. I'd say the thing. No. Zapper, clicker, flicker and flicker. Jobby? Jobby. Jobby, you've got something to say about Jobby. Someone's left a jobby on the other sofa. No, Anna. Put the jobby on the table where it belongs. You haven't seen much Billy Connolly, have you? Jobby, I believe, is only a euphemism for poo, to my knowledge. Okay. Come on, but you used the word jobby when you can't think of the right word for something. They're right. You're like, oh, pass that jobby over there. Your poor housemates come home with remote controls in the toilet again. That doesn't make any sense. Plunging away at it. They were leaving poos on

our tables. I never understood why. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that Queen Charlotte once got seasickness while visiting an art exhibition on land. Amazing. I can't believe we got a fact about sickness. Literally recovering from food poisoning. Yeah, I just feel like a terrible listener, just so you know. I got this fact from a brilliant book by a buddy of ours, Edward Brooke Hitching, and it's called The Madman's Gallery, which is an incredible book, by the way. I love his books, and this is a beautifully illustrated book all about the weirdest and most quirky and curious bits of art that have been made over the course of history all over the world. It's like he's curated

this really stunning book, and one of the chapters talks about this incredible thing that happened just five minutes walk from where we are, Leicester Square, down the road in 1790s, in 1794 particularly, when Queen Charlotte went to see what was a giant panoramic piece of art huge in a purpose built building so that you could go inside and be immersed by this extraordinary scene, and one that he did was a sea battle, and Queen Charlotte went to see it, and she was so immersed and felt so overcome by all the movement of the ships that she got seasick, and there's a few stories that said she vomited into her handkerchief, there's others that say she was very nauseous, but yeah. Which handkerchief? Was that a blower or a shower? It must have been

the blower. It was a vomit, it was a special handkerchief. Yeah, it's interesting. I think the main part of the story comes from the memoirs of the man who created this panorama, whose name was Barker, Robert Barker, and he wrote that Charlotte had told him that she had felt seasick at the time. There is a suggestion that he was quite a salesman, he used to make stuff up. Absolutely. So there's a chance it might not be true. Totally, there's a few accounts though of just like how people who went in. That's for sure it did happen, the people got seasick. Yeah, people got seasick, but also the thing was that the paintings themselves were, they were beautiful paintings, but they were sort of presented in this way that they kind of were a bit of an illusion,

that you got a bit confused that maybe something was going on and your eyes were playing tricks with you. So in the sea battle one, there was a capsized shipboat, and there were sailors that were struggling in the waves. And according to one story, there was a guy who was visiting, and he had his dog with him, a Newfoundland dog, and this dog saw the drowning man in the painting and leapt over to rescue the drowning man. That is one of the stories. Again, I think that was used in the advertising for the panorama. I think whether it happened or it might have happened, but yeah, they said this is so realistic that this happened. Yeah, exactly. Keep your dogs at home. Do not risk your dogs. That's so funny. I'm imagining like the end of the Truman show,

where the dog bites through the screen and he's suddenly on the on in the real world. It's not a spoiler. He's been trapped. It is. Yeah. If you haven't seen the end of the Truman show yet, James, it's almost as old as Anna Karenina. This building is so cool. And like Dan says, the building where he hosted lots of his panoramas, I went to it today. Before the church. Yeah, it's right next to the Prince Charles Cinema and the Leicester Square Theatre, you know, that street just off Leicester Square. And it's now a French Catholic Church. It's the church of Notre Dame de France. You're a French Catholic, aren't you? So you just have to be taking a map. That's how I got in. Yeah. And it's you go into the church and it's a completely

round church. And you think, oh, that's interesting. It's not a classic, your classic church cross shaped. And it's beautiful in there. And you can you can really I could still go in. That's really interesting. It's completely open every day of the week. He actually invented the word panorama. He said and he it is worth thinking about how amazing would have been to go into this place. It was two levels. And so I think he had two panoramas exhibiting in there at the same time. Yes, yeah. And it was kind of like when you go to a fairground, like one of the bit more crap rides where you just walk around it. But still, you look at the big painting on the ground floor. And then he went through a series of palette cleanser dark corridors and staircases,

so that you could raise that from your mind so that you can get up to the next for and enjoy that one. Even to get to the first one, you had to go through some weird dark corridors. And the way that it was lit was really impressive. Like it was lit from above using natural light, but it meant that it was really realistic. And so you would kind of go through all these dark corridors, dark corridors, and then you'd be hit by this incredible scene. But what that did mean was that at certain times of the year, it was better than others. So for instance, if the weather wasn't good, it wasn't that good to see. If it was foggy, you probably wouldn't go. If it was raining, you probably wouldn't go. In winter, you probably only go midday. The rest of the day,

it was not quite so good. And it was like a shilling to go, which is not that much, but to some London as it was. So if you're going to spend your money, you go on a really good day. But they kept putting them on. So he started in 1787, painting his first ever one, and it opened up in London in the 1780s or 90s. At the Leicester Square one, they had a new show every couple of years until 1861. So they had 126 different panoramas. It's a huge industry. And it meant you could travel the world from London. You could see all sorts of different cities and places and historical things. You could see battles and you could see revolutions. And it just sounds unbelievably good. And what's particularly beautiful about it is so you do have the ones

where it's all battle scenes. And the painters used to go and interview people of the area, and they would try and get the landscape. But for me, the most beautiful ones are there was a panorama of Edinburgh. And what it was is he stood up, I think, with his son on Colton Hill in Edinburgh. And so when you stand in the center of this panorama, what you're seeing is literally the view absolutely perfectly matched for what you would see if you were standing in his shoes when he was painting it. I just find that absolutely stunning as a concept. Yeah. I mean, that is the that is the premise of all paintings, really. You're seeing what the painter would see. Apart from abstract ones. Oh, God, I mean, yeah, but the sea battle ones that

we're showing, you know, that wasn't someone while everyone was falling out of their boats and everything was on fire. Sorry. Just hold it. Hold it for one minute. Stop. Yeah. Moving. The panoramas in general, they became huge. So Barker started this trend. He really quickly had imitators. He trademarked it, didn't he? Like that was he tried to make sure that that was his invention. But then it ran out about a decade. And so then it was a complete free for all the panoramas everywhere. There was one in 1831 in Paris, which was about the Battle of Navarino, the naval battle. And the producer, this is so cool, he was called Charles Longlois. And he replaced the normal viewing platform that everyone would stand on in the middle and look

around at the picture with the poop deck of a ship which had taken part in the Battle of Navarino. Nice. Ultra realistic. Lovely touch. He had a ventilation to give a sea breeze. And he did he did all of this clever stuff to make it feel incredibly accurate. Poop deck, of course, covered in channel changers, wasn't it? We covered very slightly ages ago about Banvard and that that brilliant book, Banvard's Folly, which we always get asked about from listeners. But what that was was those turnstile panoramas where it was basically a movie wrapped up and you would you would turn it and it would be a moving as if you were on a train and the view was passing you by the painting would pass you by and they would have sound and they

would have they would have smells kind of like what you're saying with the other immersive thing. And you would watch that like a movie, which is amazing. And Banvard had one which was the Mississippi Valley and it was it was a three mile canvas, three mile long canvas, he called it. It was actually half a mile. People probably looked into it. But all of this, which feels like it's such a shame that we don't have this anymore. These panoramic, you know, retundas. I think they'd be beautiful to go into. It was cinema that killed it when when cinema arrived. That just no one was interested anymore in seeing these things. I don't know they were still going at the turn of the 20th century. Yeah, they were still going and basically the 1900

grand exhibition, which I think was in Paris, was the last of the absolute apogee and the final grand hurrah of the panoramas. I was reading a really great book called Panorama and it said that between 1870 and 1900, 100 million people around the world went to see panoramas. Well, that 100 million tickets were sold. Maybe a lot of that was the same people. But a huge claim just on the kind of last hurrah of the panorama, the 1900 grand exhibition. So they got they got really, really fancy. Basically, they built and built and built and there were all these that were called Rama shows. So there was the Daya Rama, there was the Alparama, the Cosmarama, Europarama, Neorama, Futurama. Yeah, it's developed. In 1900, in the grand exhibition,

this sounds so good, the Mariorama. It's a me to find the princess. It was amazing. So 700 people got on the platform. Yeah. And then you would sail from Marseille to Yokohama. Okay, a huge long voyage. I don't know how it revolved or moved around you, but that's mostly sea, I would think. It's all sea. Oh, yeah, sorry, it's a complete sea voyage. But it was it was quite an easy thing to paint is what I'm saying. Whoa, you're saying in a bunch of season, easy thing to paint. Are you joining down? Please write it. And if you're an ocean painter, turn up, please get in touch. No, you're right. Sorry, there were big sites along the way of Naples

and the Suez Canal and Sri Lanka and things like that. And it sort of moved around you. And the this is so cool. The air was blown through a layer of kelp to make it seem like the sea breeze is blowing around you. Just on vomiting and art, sickness and art, do you guys know Millie Brown? Doesn't sound familiar. So she's friends with Lady Gaga. And so when she was 17 in the early 2000s, she was a young artist. She went on stage in Berlin doing some performance art. And she decided hadn't tried it before to try and vomit on to a canvas. And she lined up seven bottles of different colored milk died differently. And then the whole show is two hours of watching her throw it up. I could have done that yesterday.

But no one would have paid to watch you. And that's the artificial barriers of the art world, frankly. Right. Exactly. I often go to the to the tape mud and go, I could have done that. My five year old could have done that. I mean, literally could. Just go to Leicester Square on a Saturday night and get the free Millie Brown show. All sorts of colors. So what did she manage to do? Did she manage to do a nice picture of some flowers or or perhaps a portrait? It was a beautiful sort of impressionist is water lilies and more nice. Yeah, it was a vomiting mess, I suppose. But I'm sure it was very good. She said there was an old lady who was so moved that she left in tears.

Optical illusions. Sure. Just I was thinking things that look different or make you feel feel weird. So if if you're a footballer, yeah, and you score a goal, yeah, the next time you approach the goal, you perceive it as bigger than it is. And if you take a shot on goal and you miss the next time, you perceive it as smaller. Yeah, I watch a lot of basketball and you read about that a lot of players saying that when they get on a run of three pointers, the basket, the rim just feels like it's a bucket size like you just can't miss it just bucket sizes actually smaller than a basket mooring. Sorry. The average bucket. Yeah, no good point. Yeah, I think you're really knowledgeable about loads of stuff. I don't think you know the size

of the average bucket on earth. I'm watching like a metal bucket. I think she's right. I think I think a rim is right. No, I'm thinking of a paint bucket or a KFC bucket. Also definitely. That's small. That's small. What's a bigger bucket? What a nice bucket for the ice bucket challenge. Absolutely huge. Can be. Okay, tended to just be a big like plastic box full of water use. That's a laundry basket. You're thinking of a barrel. I think we're all making my case for me, which is that a bucket is not a size when you take your kids to the beach. Do you just take a giant? Make a sandcastle, bitch. I wrote one last thing is quite rude. It's quite recent as well. It's a news story. It's a guy who was he was an optical illusion show with his girlfriend

and there was one room in it where you could do an illusion which made things look bigger, right? Now he did what any funny young man would do. I've been in one of those rooms. I know the ones you mean. The person goes in one corner and then another person stands in the other corner and one of them looks like a giant and the other one looks tiny, right? And he obviously, obviously got his Norbelt and said, look, doesn't look how much bigger it is from here. And his girlfriend said, God, I can't take you anywhere. They were alone in the room. What he didn't realize was that the image was being projected onto a screen in another room next door, which was full of people. He was arrested for exposing himself. I mean, that kind of half fair enough. But on the other

hand, they should have told him that it was being definitely. You've got to be told if you think you're alone in a room, you can do any sort of thing. I know what he was completely mortified. He was so worried about it for two years. He has ended up being officially admonished. I think that actually women shouldn't be allowed to walk past that illusion on a Saturday anyway. I think Woking Golf Club should actually install one of those mirrors in the changing rooms. That's going to solve lots of issues. Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show. And that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that when hyenas hunt, they often go for low hanging fruit.

They especially like buffalo testicles. Doesn't that mean the buffalo is angry? And the buffalo is big? Sure. But hyenas are quick. Yeah, they are. Then they've got hot chopped teeth. So hyenas are famous for being scavengers, I think mostly. But if you look into it, they are all rounders really. They do scavenge sometimes, but they also hunt a lot. And they especially hunt when they don't have anything to scavenge. So there's been a thing recently in Kenya where there have been fewer lions around. And because there are fewer lions, there's fewer dead animals for the hyenas to go after. Because a hyena can't really chase a gazelle

because they're not fast enough. It's hard for them to catch big animals. They tend to go for things that are kind of easy for them to get. And according to this article I read, which was actually about the 2022 Kenyan election, weirdly enough, in this article. They said that there is a thing where they've been found to be grabbing the balls of buffaloes. Is it kind of on the go? Are they aiming to get the whole buffalo and they just settle for the balls? Or is it just... I believe they go for a quick testicle and then they get... The thing is their teeth are so sharp, they're so fast at eating as well. They can just absolutely decimate their prey really quickly. I imagine the buffaloes might not even notice to begin with.

Just to begin with, it's just so quick. It's just like your balls are gone and then it's like a few minutes later, like feels a bit looser, goosey down there. What's going on? Like that is just such a precision cut. I... No, no one? If you're a buffalo and you're all feeling sore. They're amazing though. So their teeth, properly, properly sharp. And this is the spotted hyena. So we've got four species of hyena that are alive today. We used to have a lot more. In the fossil record, there was something like 70 different species of hyena. They're even finding ones now that were sort of in the Arctic, you know, North Canada, where they didn't think they were before.

They found teeth extracts and so on. So we're finding more hyenas. Yeah. But their teeth are so strong, they can chew through the skulls of elephants. Like that's how... And they can digest things in ways that most other animals can't. So they can properly like, they can digest bone and... Yeah, they're the only things. It's extraordinary. It's the only mammals that can digest bone and one of the only mammals. And yeah, but they're bone crunching and that's really good because it sort of recycles stuff on the savannah and it like returns all those nutrients, all that good stuff in bone like phosphorus and calcium goes into the soil. And they have white poo.

So if you are looking around on the ground, you see some bright white poo likely to be a hyena around. Are they dangerous to humans? They can hurt you. You get your balls out. Sound like a buffalo. Not without my mirror. You're an amusing, optical illusion thing. I think that's really funny. I just want to say I find hyenas very gross. Personally, I know... Oh, yeah, but they're good letters. They're sort of pretty mean customers and they're, you know, I know they have lots of, you know, good things about... Oh, they're kind of God's creatures. They're all God's creatures, but they... I know they look weird and ugly. They're that weird sloping shape. They make a horrible laugh. They're in the Lion King, aren't they?

But they do make that horrible laugh. They're pretty... And do you think they're kind of laughing at you? No, they never do. Whenever I'm here, that's the annoying thing. Like, I'm banging out some great material for them. And Solosha, you took to the savannah. Have you ever gone to the zoo without the hyenas abyss of themselves until Andy passed and they go, I prefer these old stuff. Obviously, Andy's not alone and not liking hyenas. And we've talked before about the Lion King effect, not helping their reputation as well. I like them. I'm going to put it out there. I like them. All right, the kind of woke police comes along now.

Wait, I thought you were saying you like them too, Anna. Yeah, I'm not going to make a big deal of it. I'm not going to start an old campaign. That's what happens when you try... Try something nice, Dad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't win here. So the word mafisi means hyena in Swahili, but in Kenya, it's also an insult. Like, it's also slang. I think it means something like shahed or shipwrecks or something. It's so weird that the people who know most about hyenas would have a negative word, which also means hyena. Wow. They're clearly misinformed, aren't they? I hope you go over and do a re-education tour. There is something actually that they screw up for us. And that is

if you are a paleoanthropologist. And so maybe you don't like them from this perspective, because this is people who are looking for evidence of hunter-gatherer humans, ancient humans or proto-humans. And sometimes it's really hard to tell if humans have been somewhere or if hyenas have been somewhere, because they are the only two things that can break up bones. And so you'll find piles of animal bones have been shattered or mostly devoured. And humans had stone tools with which they could smash up bones. Hyenas obviously can just chew through them. And they actually, scientists did an experiment to see how we can tell the difference. And they fed some bones to hyenas and they gave some bones to humans with a hammer,

hammer stones, and told them to smash them up. And you can't really tell the difference. That's so interesting. There is one interesting thing that hyenas can tell your paleo guys and girls. And that is that there might have been neanderthals nearby, because hyenas were kept by neanderthals as pets. So in the same way that humans had dogs for various different things, you know, for, you know, partnership or hunting or whatever, then neanderthals had hyenas. And the thing is that hyena is a type of cat. But it really fills in the niche of a dog. You know, if you didn't know, you would think it was kind of a dog. And it could be that that's why they exist even, because they're basically the

neanderthal dog. And then the neanderthals died out, but then the hyenas are still here. And that's why they really miss their owners, which is why they're so sad. I bet they, I bet they ate their owners. That's why the neanderthals died out, actually, was because they had such incredibly unfriendly dogs. It's funny you say that there was a find, I think last year in a cave in Spain of neanderthal bones, and they think they were eaten by hyenas. No kidding. They're just animals that are just doing what they do, but they are they're unfriendly. They're not, they're not well-exposed to us. They're sort of, they sort of arrive unfriendly as well, don't they? So hyenas, it's a,

it's dominated by the females, their societies. And when the mother is pregnant in the later stages of pregnancy, there's a moment where sort of a lot of testosterone is released into the womb. And they basically just soak in it like a bath for the final stages of the pregnancy. And then when they come out, it's usually the female hyenas who really get more of this testosterone in them than the male hyena, the boy hyenas that are coming out. And so the females are like furious. Like they're in there. The testosterone is going crazy in them. Their teeth are ready. They get born with their eyes open and they're just ready to fight. And if the litter that the hyena has, if that's the correct term, is two girls, let's say,

then those two will immediately see some food and just try and kill each other to make sure that they're the one who gets the dinner. Whereas if a boy comes out with a girl, then there's no fighting because the boy's like, I'm not touching you. You're vicious. You're crazy. These are Lion King ones. The ones that were animated in the Lion King, they were based on some real hyenas. I mean, obviously they're based on hyenas, but in fact, we know specifically which hyenas they were based on. And these are the hyenas from Berkeley, California. It's a classic Hollywood. I was going to say, do you think they go back to their pack and they're sort of so, oh, well, I'm the famous hyena. But if they're already

living in Berkeley, then they're already completely out of themselves. They've all been in something. Yeah, they're on the bone smoothies. There was this research center in Berkeley, which had 30 hyenas living in it. And they were being studied by brilliant research scientists. And I read a great piece all about this research center. One of the keepers of the hyenas, who was interviewed in this article, she was called Mary Weldiller. I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right. I'm sure I'm not. But when the guy who's writing the piece goes and speaks to her, he notices that Mary had a very, really peculiar thumb. And you know why she had such a peculiar thumb? She part hyena, a very small part hyena. She trapped it in a dock. It's more

related to what I'm saying. She had a very peculiar looking thumb. Had it been eaten by a hyena? It was her big toe. And the reason was because her original thumb had been bitten off by a hyena. And so they had to replace it with her big toe. Well, I bet she aggravated that. I bet she gave it a thumbs down for something. We've said there are four, you said Dan, there are four species of hyena. And yeah, you say that they are more closely related to cats than to dogs. But they're actually just their own, they're not even their own species. They're their own family. They're so different to anything else. And each hyena species is in its own genus. I think the spotted hyenas get all the most press. And they are the ones who do the most hunting. So actually, they hunt most

of the food. They actually get more of their kills stolen by lions than the other way around. How do they? But my favorite hyenas are odd wolves, which get not that much press. And odd wolves are the fourth species, which only eat insects. And they're quite slow and quite crap at fighting. They only eat the testicles of ants. They have to get down really low. They're very good at limbo. God, I've heard of an odd wolf, but I did not know it was a kind of hyena. Now I didn't either. And now I've gone right off them. Well, bad news, Andy, because I know you don't want hyenas strolling the streets of Britain, but and they can't, according to the Dangerous Wild Animals

Act of 1976, you're not allowed to have a pet hyena, but you are allowed to have a pet odd wolf. Specifically in the lore, it says all hyenas are banned except for the odd wolf. No way, because they're safe. Well, because all they do is eat termites. Have you guys seen a photo of one? Do they look like a hyena? Are they sort of indistinguishable? Same height, same size? Yeah, I would say they look all four species look a bit different, but very similar to each other. But they have like really long tongues, like an odd bark. Basically, they're only way of defending themselves. One of the only ways is they secrete this substance from the anal glands, which is really disgusting. And actually,

we don't know, it could be defense or it could be to mark their territory or tell other hyenas where they are. And according to, there was a book on African mammals I was reading, which explained how they wipe their substances on the ground, and they straddle a grass stalk, and then they rapidly squat, I think, up and down on this grass stalk while inverting their anal pouch, and it wipes this smear. So you know, if they've been around, you can see a little smear of their presence. Do you know the hyena men in Nigeria? No. These are traditional storytellers, but the main trick seems to be, there are a few of them, their itinerant, they never stay in one place more than a couple of days. And the main thing is,

they have sort of pet hyenas. And their job, I think, is to sell kind of powders and potions that can, you know, cure you of things. And they have these pet hyenas. And what they do is they beat drums to attract crowds, and then the crowds come, and then they put their arms and their heads inside hyenas jaws. And so, look, I didn't bite my head off. And that's because I've used this powder. Why don't you buy some powder that won't bite your head off? What is the reason? They've just domesticated the hyenas? Yeah, or maybe sometimes they do bite their heads off, but you don't hear about those. Or it's an ard wolf. It's just dressed as a hyena, yeah. It just licks inside your ear while it's long time. Wow, that's great.

Hyenas go on a diet during Lent in Ethiopia, specifically. That's amazing. It's a Catholic country. It's very Christian. In Ethiopia, there's constant fasting in the Christian community. So I guess they're subscribing to that. Well, this was, again, a study done by a scientist called Gaidi Yerga and colleagues who analysed 553 hyena scats before, during and after the period of Lent in Ethiopia. And what they found is that basically, during Lent, the butchers aren't selling meat, because people aren't eating meat as much, right? So that's a problem. Hyenas don't have as much scavenging to do. So they hunt donkeys instead. All right, they don't say, oh, you know what, for well ends, I'm going to give up buffalo

testicles just for the 40 days. And then quite the reverse, it's really bad to be a donkey during Lent in Ethiopia, because the odds of you being eaten by a hyena rocket. And because they basically analysed all the hyena feces and they found that donkey hair proportion in the feces shoots up more than doubles during the Lenten period. That's a real stab in the face, isn't it? Because as the creature that brought the Virgin Mary into Bethlehem to give birth to Christ our savior and took Christ into on Palm Sunday, wasn't he? When he arrived on a donkey? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, and you're the one who's getting punished at Lent of all times. There's irony. There's irony. Yeah, no one of us are bloody gloomy all the time. That's what ER's thinking about.

I missed that bit of the hundred acre one that ER gets eaten by a hyena. 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've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shrybland, James, James Harkin, Andy, Andrew Hunter M and Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing or our website, no such thing as a fish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there. Do check it out. Also, check out Club Fish, the secret membership club, not so secret. You can just join it. Anyone can and you should. It's really fun. You get bonus

content. There's a really cool community hidden away in Discord where all the fans get together and chat about their favorite things. It's really, really fun. Have a look. But otherwise, just come back here next week. We'll be back with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye. Bye.