No Such Thing As A Fish - 479: No Such Thing As Fake Coal

Episode Date: May 19, 2023

Dan, James, Andrew and Alex discuss Swiss subduing, supermarket wrong-doing, model choo-chooing and JR Ewing. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.  Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

Hey everybody, Dan and Andy here. Just wanted to let you know our special guest on this week's fish is none other than old friend of the podcast, your friend of mine, Alex Bell. That's right, Alex has returned. I mean he hasn't been on for ages but he has been there in the background the whole time. Anytime you hear a song or a noise. Shadowy the spider master. But now he's back, he's funnier than ever, we can't wait for you to hear it, he's brilliant, it's going to be great. So now I guess with no further ado let's get on with the only podcast any of us has ever made or will ever make. Right Dan? Ah, actually I've got a bit of news. What? Yeah I don't want this to be a shock but I've

actually launched a new podcast. Alright what's it called? It's called We Can Be Weirdos. Oh I see and I guess it's just about solid facts though right? It's about stuff with a strong evidential base. Well let's ignore that question quickly and focus on what the show is about. So it's a weekly show where I sit down with someone remarkable and I try and find out all the weird stuff that they believe in and all the weird stuff they do in their life. So it features everyone from British Museum curators like Irving Finkel who told me stuff about how he sits on buses and stares at the back of people's head trying to make them turn around. It's got a Betsy Cameron who used to be a part of the Children of God cult but who escaped and

wrote a fascinating memoir about it. There's Steve Feltham who is the Guinness World Record for the longest continuous search for the Loch Ness Monster. Dan Ackroyd is coming on. There's so many amazing guests and it's a weekly show where I ask them to tell me about every single weird belief that they have. That's right and guys we the rest of us know how hard Dan's been working on this. It sounds absolutely great. It's called We Can Be Weirdos. Give it a go wherever you get your podcast now and we should say it's all based on Dan's book The Theory of Everything Else which is out now in the UK in paperback and it's out in North America on the 27th of June Louis Theroux himself has called it totally compelling and utterly bizarre.

That's right so it would mean the world to me if you all fish listeners would subscribe to it, follow it, give it a listen and also pick up a copy in my book and okay okay okay back to the actual good podcast. Here we go. On with the show. On with the podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin and Alex Bell and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in a particular order here we go. Starting with fact number one and that is Alex. My fact this week is that when the founder of the budget

supermarket chain Aldi was kidnapped in the 1970s he successfully negotiated a discount off his own ransom. Brilliant. Did he claim that he was going off and that result he had a yellow sticker on him. Brilliant. That was such a good idea. So this guy is called Theo Albrecht. He founded Aldi with his brother Carl and they've got quite an interesting story in how they founded the supermarket but in the 1970s when he was one of the richest people in the world he was kidnapped at gunpoint by a convicted burglar called Paul Cron. Diamond Paul. And his crooked lawyer apparently who had gambling debts called Heinz Joachim Olinberg. Joachim Diamond Paul. Home alone wet bandits kind of duo and yeah they kidnapped him for 17 days

and held him in an office. What cupboard wasn't he? Yeah he was in a cupboard and apparently his but his appearance was so nondescript and he sort of wore quite kind of cheap suits because he was as money pinching as his discount supermarket reputation suggests. They had to ask him for ID to check they definitely kidnapped a billionaire. The thing was that he didn't do any interviews did hear anything like that right. He was really not very well known at the time. I read a US newspaper article from the week when he got kidnapped and they described him as West Germany's least known millionaire. Yeah so you know no one knew what he looked like he was just a name. So he was kept for 17 days he negotiates a cheaper ransom and they agreed to it a bishop comes and delivers it. The

Bishop of Essen which is the city that they were from. I guess it's where they lived at the time. But I didn't realize that was a bishop's responsibility to do. He mediated. Yeah I mean what a call to get as the bishop you must never get that. No but then he was didn't he isn't he the one who'd left the money. Yeah he did the handover. Yeah exactly yeah. But then and I think Albrecht stayed with him for 24 hours afterwards stayed with the bishop. Why? Because the police were kept out of it completely because the family didn't want the police involved because they thought he might be in danger and the kidnappers said they wanted a 24 hour period to get away and so they said okay well he'll stay with the bishop for 24 hours and then after that time we'll let

him go and he'll tell the police who he's seen and stuff. Okay so he gets out the bishop they get these 24 hours and they do they catch them as well. And they catch them yeah that's right. And they only get half the money back. And to the dying day of the two guys they never recovered the missing 3.5 million. And they died within a month of each other. How weird is that because they were about 20 years difference in age. That's so romantic. Six years I think. Within a six yeah. Oh yep one was 87 the other was 93. But no so after he gets let out Theo is goes even more recluse. He goes into total lockdown no photographs are going to be taken of him evermore. He is in every time he gets into a car it's an armored car a different route every single

day when he's going into his office. If he's staying somewhere he goes and he finds the exits immediately. So it's obviously a huge trauma this experience. But he also sorry I know one thing that will make you interested in him especially Dan yeah which is that Forbes described the brothers the Albrecht brothers Theo and Carl who co-founded Aldi described them as more elusive than the Yeti. I'm pretty sure like the Yeti doesn't have like a business trail like a paper trail. It's like he's not registered with company's house. Also that doesn't make me more interesting if he was a Yeti hunter that's interesting. Just saying the word Yeti in a sentence doesn't immediately leave me a higher threshold for interesting. I do okay okay. I think my favorite

bit of this whole story was that after the whole ordeal Albrecht went to court to try and claim the money that was paid as the ransom as a tax deductible business expense which is brilliant. I don't think he was successful but like that's so cool. I think you can still do that certainly in some places. If you have a good accountant because I think it's in America it's been done. In America for sure yeah famously Getty. I guess it is a business expense isn't it? If the person who is abducted is the CEO of the company then it's to do with the company. I think that's the argument. His brother Carl stumped up a lot of money for that as well the ransom. He was part of it. But yeah I love how much the Albrecht brothers were really sort of

stingy with their cash. They're brilliant. I think Theo was the one who they used to approve all the designs for all the shops and there was one where he was given the plans and he said the plans are fine but the paper you printed on is too thick. Printed on thinner cheaper paper. He used to famously use pencils right down to the end like when you see people with the pencil meets the rubber he would be using pencils like that and if he walked into the office of the Albrecht offices and he saw that the lights were on but he could see that you could see in a room without the lights he'd go around turning off all the lights. It's so scroogey isn't it? Yeah I did read one article that said he and his brother were the first people to ever turn off

the lights in the room because they were worried that they were wasting electricity. What a thing to invent. Yeah exactly he invented being a dad. The timing almost works. That's really funny. I think their story is very interesting because they founded it together didn't they? They founded Dali together. Yeah their mother ran a shop like I mean like so they took over the shop as part of their journey but she was the one who really started there. I think she does a little bit of credit. Yeah you're right that's a good point and then actually they were dragoonded to helping their mum because their father he'd been a coal miner and he got emphysema so he couldn't really work so they had to support the family but anyway they fell out over whether or not they should

sell cigarettes in their shops and I think Theo said we should and Karl said we shouldn't. And I think it was for shoplifting reasons. Yeah they didn't care about the health reasons. It was its dinginess as well. Despite their father having emphysema they were it was more about the deal. That's so interesting okay and then they had this thing the Aldi equator. Where they divided Germany top to bottom and north was Theo's territory. Not with any kind of wall we should say. So many people died crossing the Aldi equator. People were desperately trying to get to those. Because they did so this was in the this was 1961 and they had about 300 Aldi's all over the country and that's what got split up between them and if you look at the logos

they are different colors across the the Aldi equator and so they are definitely two different operations that are going on. Ironically if you were kidnapped in Germany you could use that to work out which half of the country you were in. Yes! What a brilliant idea. They're still different companies now aren't they? Aldi Nord and Aldi Sud. Yeah that's right. And I think which ones do we have? We have Aldi Nord. No we have Aldi Sud. And in America they have them both but one of them is called Trader Joe's. You have that's what Trader Joe's is. And Aldi itself is the name Aldi that we said it's it's a poor mancha of Albrecht Diskund. Discount. I was trying to remember what the German version was. His brother came up with that didn't they?

Yeah. Distingy cunt. The two businesses are called Discount and Dacron. There's like big billboards with them kind of over the border. I'm with Discount. I think they liked each other. They got on perfectly well. They just disagreed over this. I think Split was amicable. I've never read into Aldi before. I've been to Aldi many times. God damn it I love it so much. I don't want to treat this as an advert but what an operation. Well okay so for example they don't stock as many items as a regular supermarket will and they've never compromised on that. It's grown ever so slightly but an average supermarket might have something like 200,000 different items whereas they might have 2,000 items. It has grown since the

earlier days when it came to Britain. But one of the things was everyone who was working there was required to memorize the price of every single item in the shop so every 2,000 item which meant that there was a thing that's known as Aldi Panic which is when you get to the checkout the panic is I can't pack my bags as quickly as they're running the stuff through the till so you get a bit worried. That's really common now because they're so fast at scanning. Well here's the thing the reason they're so fast at scanning these days because this is another Aldi innovation is if you buy a product from any supermarket you got a barcode you get there the person's looking around for the barcode if you look on Aldi products that are specifically Aldi they print the barcode

all over it so no matter where you turn the product it scans exactly and it's right through. Yeah because they also opened I think in the 50s the first self-service grocery store in Germany but in those days self-service meant you go in and get stuff off the shelves and bring it to the checkout as opposed to giving your list to a clerk who were going to get it for you so that must have been a huge efficiency. Yeah and they brought in shopping trolleys and I think they were the first company to bring in the shopping trolleys where you had to put a coin in. That's what they say yeah. I read an article with the communications director Aldi and he said we're always amazed by the pay it forward spirit that happens in our parking lots and apparently

they reckon that in Germany at least people will pay for the next person's trolley and I just I've never seen that happen in my entire life in the UK. I go around checking to see if anyone's left a quid. I could lose an hour or two sometimes if it's very single you know. I literally only have one quid that I keep in my car for that thing as I don't really use cash these days. Yeah right do you keep it on a string? Because you're sounding a bit like Theodore Albrecht. They got big in Germany because they started looking at the models of what was happening in America with grocery stores and so there was a Memphis grocer that was called Pigley Wiggly. So it was Pigley Wiggly, Hogley Wogley and Handy Andy was the last one. These were all of the like the things

going on in America at the time and yeah so they became Pigley Wiggly was famously the first place that would let you take things off the shelves and put them in your trolley and then pay for them afterwards. Exactly. And I'm not sure if we said it here we might not have done but they basically people didn't want to do it because they felt like they were shoplifting. Well I feel like that with the new Amazon fresh stools where you walk in and you scan. Yeah but you go and wear a motorbike helmet don't you because you don't scan anything and you're shouting and all of the baseball bat. I actually was going to kidnap Jeff Bezos but he just walked into my house into my cupboard. Two weeks later they put loads of money in my account. So when you go to Audi

there's always and I didn't realize this was a big thing but in the middle of Audi there's always this weird aisle where it's just random stuff. The room of requirement is sort of like every time it's different. It's so bizarre. So the middle aisle and it's sort of famous amongst online people. There's Twitter accounts where what random thing have you found in the middle aisle. Yeah it's massive. Yeah so everything from motion activated toilet bowl night lights you know just randomly to traffic cones. It feels like it fell off the back of the lorry kind of vibe. Yeah but which definitely is not the case. No because I remember like you would always get like flyer through the post and it would tell you what was going to be in the middle aisle in the next

month or so. Oh really? And you would know that there was going to be a canoe there and you'd be like oh shit we got to get there on the second Tuesday. Well they have only have a certain amount and so if it was something really cool everyone in the town would want to get there as quickly as possible. And they never restock ever so it's just that it's like a one flash sale. It gets called the Isle of Shite. That's very good. One other thing on German kidnapping. Oh yeah. I think German. Do you know about the Pied Piper of Hamelin? Yes. Famously kidnapped all the children of Hamelin. I never thought of it that way. Ah. I thought he got rid of the rats. Other parents didn't pay him? Yeah so then he did the same thing. He played his pipe and led them. He basically

hypnotised children to come with him. So there's a question of like consent really. Yes it does sound like there isn't. There's no question. There was no consent. Like basically he took all the children out of the town because they didn't pay his bills. But he was fictional. Well there was an entry in Hamelin town records dating to 1384 that says that it is 100 years since our children left and that fits in with the date of when people said this happened which was in 1284 and it supposedly happened on the 26th of June the day of Saint John and Saint Paul and 130 children in Hamelin disappeared and that's what the story's based on. Was there a day of Saint George and Saint Ringo as well? But we now have theories as to what the Pied Piper was.

So we think that possibly the Pied Piper story is a fictional account of something that actually happened and the children did go missing and did get taken by someone. Can you guess what the actual job of the real life Pied Piper probably was? Ah okay. Is this guessable from Australia? School bus. That's really good. I mean the dates don't quite work for school buses 1284. I've got it. I've got it. It's called cart drivers. Swine herd. Dresses the children up as pigs. Really? Uh no that's not what the game is. How was he one of the wiggles then? Aldi trolley manager. Learned them in with free trolleys. Well according to most theories at the moment he could have been a recruitment consultant. Okay. Pied Piper. I followed them in the street.

I find it so beguiling. These children are now working like Deloitte. There was an economic depression around that time and a lot of the youth of various towns were taken out of German sort of villages and taken to the bigger areas of western Europe and they had locators or recruiters that would go around these towns and try and bring the youth out there to work in different places and so there's one possibility that the Pied Piper story is based on a recruitment consultant. Wow. They all got sort of free mugs. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hey everyone this week's episode of Fish is sponsored by Canva. That is right Canva is a design platform that makes it incredibly easy and pleasant and in fact

joyful to create gorgeous visual content. Yeah it's an amazing place isn't it because actually Andy I remember you've actually used Canva haven't you? I have. I'm really really bad at thinking of what might look nice and I went onto Canva. The templates are so easy. They're so simple to use. You can really bring things to life. There are lots of different kinds of templates that you can use and customize so you can make something that feels nice and personal. Genuinely did a bit of design and some friends said did you hire a professional designer? I'm not even joking that happened and I was able and I said no it's Canva. That's right it's Canva and exactly what Andy's talking about. You too can experience that beauty and you can do so many

other things on it as well. You can use it for business docs. You can help get your party invitations designed. There are templates for websites. You've got a mug that you want printed something cool on. Canva can do that for you. So head there and if you want to give it a go yourself and feel the joy that Andy felt when he was able to present whatever it was that he showed to his friends all you need to do is go to canva.me slash fish and you'll get a free 45 day extended trial. That's canvacanva.me slash fish for a free 45 day extended trial. Give it a go. Okay on with the show. Open the bookers. It is time for fact number two and that is Andy. My fact is that the world's largest collection of model trains doesn't fit on standard model train

tracks. I'm really pleased you added the word standard in there because it's a big discussion. Yeah we had a big email chat about this. No but I'm just going to say Alex has got in front of him actual like this is the weirdest bit of research. I'm not going to go into it. I'm going to say the basic fact and then we'll have the argument. By the way thank you to Neil Gibson who sent in this fact who didn't realize the chaos he was unleashing in our previously happy team. This is something that's from the National Rail Museum in York. They have a collection of 610 model railway vehicles all made by the same man who was called James Peel Richards 1902 to 99 and he was incredibly devoted to detail and accuracy and he thought he could get his models more accurate if he made them

to a 33 millimeter gauge so the gauge is the distance between the two train tracks and the normal gauge for model trains is 32 millimeters and they're not compatible with the vast majority of model railway lines and even the National Rail Museum don't have a layout where they can put these trains on a train track. Yeah I just think it's a very sweet fact I think. I don't want to make this fact even more contentious but I have a feeling it was 612 not 610. What did you guys read? Could you maybe forgive me? The idea is a lot of these model trains you take anything that's one foot long and you make it seven millimeters long and you do the same for everything else in all the trains right? Now if you do that then you get your gauge to be exactly 33 millimeters to a 0.01

of a millimeter so it's pretty much 33 millimeters but historically they've always had 32 millimeter gauges and so all the other trains that you would have are slightly not exact. So that's like the Hornby standard. The Hornby standard yeah. The track you'll find is that width. A lot of them is called the O gauge but basically he decided well I want mine to be exactly right so I'm going to get this one millimeter difference even though I won't be able to go on hardly any tracks I'm going to make it because I want it to be perfect. Yeah he's a hero. Did he make his own tracks? He must have right. I think as I went there and I had an amazing two days I stayed over night. Was there a sleeper train in the museum? Alex Kramick one finger into the sleeper train.

Because they have actual other stuff they don't just have model they have actual trains there and all sorts there. No it's an amazing and I remember seeing them they've got this a fantastic I think it's called an open archive where they've got all this stuff that they can't they really have room to sort of display in proper museum just like thrown on the shelves and sort of displays you can see it and I remember also seeing they've got scale models of Queen Victoria's royal train which is all sort of entirely plush inside with a with a velvet and upholstered toilet and things like that. In miniature? Yeah yeah this is all miniature when they were designing and building the train the actual full-on steam trains they used to make scale models of the steam trains that

are about I'd say like a foot wide and several feet long that were full-on working models to check that they worked and they were all kind of the right size so they have these really stonking great models of like working steam trains. They've also got you've mentioned it from the podcast there's a massive train set that was used to train the signal operators and so was his train set but the fun of the train set was like all about the signals and not the trains. So can I ask Alex did you see the entire collection of JP Richards's trains when you were there? I don't know because I there's loads on the wall I remember them they're all stacked up on the wall. You've seen them because they're all there but I don't know if I saw 610 but what's really interesting is that JP Richards

never saw the entire collection himself we think and that's because he always kept them in his home where most of them were in boxes so they were never all out at the same time and when he donated them to the museum he was really really sick it was just before he died he was too ill to travel so when it was on display he never got to see it so he actually never saw his entire collection on display. I'm really sad about that because what a hero what a great guy I love it. The collection is still growing but actually I should quickly say thank you to my friend Chris Valcoinen who is the associate archivist at the National Rail Museum who sent me loads of stuff for this absolutely brilliant but yeah the collection is still growing because a lot of his

wagons weren't quite finished when he got there so he left them to other people to finish them because he wanted the entirety of the train system of the London and Northwestern trains. Well that's what we all want to see. From between 1902 and 1944 so he wanted everything and they weren't all exactly done at that time so some people are still doing them now they're still kind of making them better and better. It is the most impressive thing when you see the detail that someone goes into to recreating an area because you make it's not these aren't things you buy from the shop you create the buildings and you create and this is like when you're making a whole landscape so the tracks the trees the buildings around it. I've only ever

played with two model train sets before oh yeah and they belonged to Eddie Izzard so this is not it's not what it sounds like so every time I go to Bexhill on sea which is my family goes there a lot I always take my boys to the Bexhill Museum and inside is Eddie Izzards childhood model train set that her father had built when Eddie's brother was born started building it then and then Eddie's mother got a bit ill and and eventually she passed away and part of the project of keeping themselves busy from the sort of you know the horrible depression of it all was to continue building this train set so you can go and press buttons and it sends two trains around and it's where Eddie's dad worked you can see the train

he used to get into London and it shows all the buildings around and they've commissioned all of Bexhill on sea as a train set as well Eddie's kind of put money into that and you press buttons and it goes around it snows and it's incredible did you guys read about um Simon George no very well I've done no Simon George is a model railway fan uh currently currently modeling and making huge sets so in 2021 he had just made a model railway which is really big was 61 meters and it was a model of a specific line from where he'd grown up in the 80s it was the Calder Valley lots of coal fired trains and it's one of Britain's biggest if not the biggest model train set really impressive spent eight years working on it um and he he

met someone he met uh his girlfriend while he was making it wow yeah this is the thing well okay fun so he was interviewed about it and he said when I first met her she didn't know I was building this and what had happened was it wasn't in his home this train that he was building he'd leased a mill because it had this enormous basement right so and he's okay she knew I leased a mill with a huge basement Simon said but I kind of led her to believe I was a wine merchant because that sounded cooler than building a model railway I'm just imagining the discussion that he had when he said now we've been getting on very well I think there could be something here I need to tell you that the basement in the mill I've not let you go in

it's not a wine collection what was she a thought yeah she turned up unannounced at his work one day she wanted to surprise him and she turned up to his wine merchant oh my god what did he do don't come in I'm wanking there's a body down here this is where I keep my family locked up come on he said she wondered where all the wine was but actually she really appreciated the detail and the artistic element very very cool um Herman Göring the the Nazi it's also who's who's Herman going not the Nazi I think is there any others out there um he was an enthusiastic no yeah Nazis love trains they love models obviously you know that famous big third Reich one but um no sorry again Alex you you spent two days sorry nothing to do with train room no no sorry

the that's a totally totally off topic but um did they have a big model the Hitler commissioned a huge model of watch the center of Berlin was going to look like and it's a really horrible scary model that still exists you can go see it okay right and it's really bizarre and interesting but like I think it's that whole element of control from afar like you know you're saying going did the train he had two train sets um just like Eddie is odd um one in the no just like sorry you've seen train wait you've seen said you've seen two train sets in your life played with it twice played with it too both of the eddies yeah right so okay so he had um Herman Göring had one train set in his attic and one in his basement oh yeah okay and um there are pictures of it and

they're really it's pretty extensive as if you lived he lives in a big old Nazi house and had a huge attic and a massive basement um and there's there's a rumor that you can sort of maybe see evidence for in the pictures that um there was there were wires that went over the one in the attic um that planes went across and you could drop little bombs out of the planes okay right which is wow good fun wow they originated in Germany didn't they model railways basically uh there was a company called Marklin and they've been making toys and stuff but they mostly made dolls houses the idea is you make a doll's house and you sell them the house and then they have to buy the dolls to go inside and they have to buy the cookers and they have to buy the chairs and they have to buy all the bits

and pieces and they wanted something that boys would like how are the dolls going to get to work and they just thought well by doing the railways then we can sell the railway tracks but then we can sell the stock and we can sell them little bushes that go i don't know i've never played there's another German connection which is maybe the earliest ever model train belonged to the poet Goethe did it clan yourself mate this is from 1829 it's six years before Germany had even a railway a steam railway of its own wow some English well-wishers gave him a tiny tiny model of Stevenson's rocket the earliest steam railway edge i think the earliest steam railway engine um and it came with a set of wagons and rails and Goethe put it on his desk i think he might have um

given it to his grandchildren at the time because he he was an old man by that point yeah cool wow do you want to hear an incredibly well so okay here's a fact about model railways i'm just gonna tell you what okay that's what we're all here for okay what a change of topic i know what's about to happen so you know how you use different things to represent so you might use a coffee stirrer as a piece of fencing yeah like big like things from our world oh okay yeah yeah yeah i see okay you could use a marble as a boulder for instance yeah you paint it or whatever yeah exactly okay so do you know what they use to make coal okay so it's got to be something that is looks like coal yeah but is much smaller yeah hmm but maybe it's not the same color but you could paint it black right

is it not just small bits of coal they use coal they hit it with a hammer and grind it up small what well it's definitely it's definitely a fact it's just by any chance the fact that you messaged us saying i just told my wife a fact and she said that's the dullest thing you ever said in your life that's the fact but she just said stop talking she took off her eye with this amazing andy great fact thank you yeah you know the really tragic thing well we last talked about model railways four years ago i looked through my notes for that show it was a nerd um so uh with the probably the most famous model railways in the world have to be

the ones that we see in thomas the tank engine uh thomas the tank engine that's i mean that's globally the biggest most famous and um just a just a cool connection so there is famously the fat controller who's now been renamed to topham hat uh he was he was sorry just so he was always cool yeah but they kind of phased out the fat controller he's in the cartoons he's back to the topham hat and um we know someone who was the real life's topham hat stop yeah what do you mean that's in the vice so no so they used to have offices for thomas the tank engine when children wrote in they had an official topham hat who would write letters back to the children and we know that person they've been on fish they've been on mitch is it craig glenday yes craig glenday

editor-in-chief for the Guinness world records wow okay that's bizarre yeah when i was tiny i wrote to topham hat and i got and i got a letter back did you it's just small coal you're a really annoying child okay it is time for fact number three and that is james okay my fact this week is that in 1760 a book was publicly burned in switzerland because it claimed that william tell did not exist set a game yeah because i sort of think he did i saw you're wrong well yeah well publicly burned me yeah because is it like the pied piper and he was just like a management consultant no he's less historical than the pied piper i would say um he was part of the

foundation myth of the country of switzerland basically yeah he's kind of robin hood s right yeah he is your spot on you know shot an apple off his son's head to that's the only thing i know it's the only thing like shot an apple off his son's head i don't i didn't know any of the context i just knew yeah i never questioned it it was quite contrived like for some reason he ended up in a situation where they were like shoot it or we'll kill you and your son and then he did it and then they were like well hang on a second why how come how come you've got two arrows then and he was like well if i accidentally killed my son i was gonna shoot you it's quite cool wasn't it because the reason this whole thing started was he was going through this town um which was called

alt dorf uh and he was there's a guy there who was a bailiff called gessler and gessler had had this thing where he put a hat on a pole and it was in the center of the town and if you walked past the pole and you had a hat on you had to sort of take your hat off and be like hello pole and so i think we should say the pole represented the immensely powerful hatsberg empire it's still weird it's still weird so he goes past doesn't take his hat off i guess gessler who's just happens to be monitoring every passing passing by sees that says hey take your hat off he says no and then that's where this thing happens where he says you need to now shoot your son or rather shoot the apple shoot the apple he says you got to put your son you got to put an apple on his head

and you got to shoot through it and if you get it then you guys can go free if you miss then i'm gonna kill you as well so it was a kind of big challenge perfectly fair challenge punishment that fits the crime it doesn't make any sense of course it makes sense for someone who's put a hat on a pole and made it to get to it could he choose the apple though could he choose a very large apple like a pink lady like the one i saw in me by any car dot com that time honestly i could have hit that how would you listen i know you stopped listening alex with james has an anecdote about this very very big apple he once saw it's actually it's really weird to get bored on a podcast that you're on they're not even listening to but if it had been that apple yeah you're right be easy

anyway look like dan said and alex said this is the story and then because he did the apple thing they said okay fine switzerland can exist and he became like the foundation myth of this country so everyone believed it and thought that he was a real character and then there was a historian called agideus chudi and he found out that actually the earliest writing of it was 250 years after the events and then they found the original oath of rootley which was for the foundation of switzerland for the early cantons all getting together and it named the three representatives and none of them was called tell none of them was called william tell and so and actually they got the date wrong as well in the original sort of the original story and so this guy called the halla wrote a book

called william tell a danish fable and everyone in switzerland thought this was outrageous that he could put this in writing and the book was publicly burned in altdorf square was was he a swiss author he was swiss yeah and i because i sort of vaguely thought of william tell as a bit robin herdish as in somebody might have existed but not really yeah i didn't really think oh that's see that doesn't seem like a very significant thing to me but i read a piece about it's from the atlantic but it's from 1890 and it's just this line to understand the commotion produced in switzerland by cops expose we must try to imagine what would be the result in the united states if george washington was suddenly declared to be a legendary character yeah it's a huge yeah a huge moment to find out it's a

bit of that and then what happened was everyone was like the halla what are you doing this ridiculous and so he said oh no no no this was a literary exercise i was just it was just a essay i was writing to see if i could it was like you know it's like coming up with two reasons whether we should leave the eu or not leave the eu and this was the one i decided to go with it wasn't supposed to be taken seriously the first like dude it's a social experiment like it sounds like he was petrified like it sounds it sounds like had he not renounced that it could have been like a salman rush tea kind of situation where he might have gone into a you know hiding in a cupboard kind they were absolutely furious but then obviously he'd open the floodgates and suddenly

all the skeptics came in like skeptics do and said well actually there was no organized uprising after all and there's no evidence that anyone called william tell had lived let alone shot and i pull off anyone's head and they concluded that he was probably a fictional character possibly based on the little bit of you know real-life stuff and then someone found this old story from the danish sagas which is basically the entire story and that was written you know hundreds and hundreds of years before william tell was supposed to have even existed and so it seems like they've taken an old story from the sagas and they've kind of appropriated it it was um it was a story of harold bluetooth yeah definitely the main sake of it danish

king of the 10th century yeah and it is like i looked at it and it's it's identical it is the same story yeah um there was a play schiller schiller's play yeah and then the play became an opera by rossini and it's just it's such an international thing so it's an opera about a swiss hero by an italian composer rossini based on a play by a german writer schiller which premiered in paris brilliant as in it's all of europe is involved in this uh and you know the but you know the famous william tell overture the um rossini didn't actually write that for the william tell opera get out he was like running out of time when he was writing the william tell opera that's not how it works when you're running out of time running music when it speeds up

no he he was running out of time to finish the entire opera and didn't have an overture ready so he went and borrowed a pre-existing uh piece from one of his uh earlier operas which was called elizabeth queen of england so that was written almost 15 years beforehand how interesting because everything i can think of about elizabeth the queen of england none of the events in her life fit in with that no it doesn't really work does it yeah like you can't imagine some walter rally laying down his cloak and her going the opera was only performed in full three times and then because it was five hours long five hours it was average time for an opera no really that's very long definitely more than a few hours is fine but five hours is pretty okay even three

years i've never been to one i was just always know that especially given that some of the music was so fast like you would have thought the music would be slower if he was going to write yeah there's a herman gearing link i can't believe there's another herman gearing the podcast uh the which herman gearing by the way the nazi one okay sorry good just got to clarify um the nazi regime made a movie of william tell okay and they treated the tell story as a kind of nazi myth because at that point what i think was before the war they claimed they were liberating ethnic germans living in other countries who'd been oppressed by those countries uh and herman gearing's mistress was cast in a leading role yeah okay right that was based on shillers play wasn't

it yeah uh but then hitler bandit later on uh because there was an assassination attempt on him by a guy called marise bavo who was known as the new william tell yeah and he thought well i better get rid of all other william tells he was swiss as well yeah that's good yeah um i've i've been in switzerland for swiss independence day on the first of august oh yeah which is when they had a lot of uh was sort of fireworks and stuff like that yeah it's relatively low key lots of chocolate probably cheese yeah lots of chocolate yeah yeah yeah where did where did you go like specifically uh a few different places oh they sound great did you go to burn i've been to burn i don't think i did get a burn i was very young i didn't know where they got rid of all the

books oh my god brilliant brilliant that was worth it in the burn there's a lots of like bears because bear a bear is the is the symbol of the city of burn uh and the appenzel canton flag so the the area of of switzerland called appenzel has a flag which is a bear with an erection crikey yeah um so if you look at it it's it's only a tiny little red triangle um if you can imagine a bear rampant yeah and then you've got a little red triangle where his penis would be and there was a a time when st gallen this was in 1579 um so the canton of st gallen had a printer and he did a calendar of all the swiss cantons and he did the appenzel canton flag but he didn't put the erection in the bear oh and this was it kicked off it really really kicked off they almost

went to war because they didn't have the penis on the bear uh and then wow it was only averted when the printer offered abject apologies and st gallen agreed to destroy every single copy of the calendar they could find wow lots of rounding things up and destroying them yeah it's a very spicy time no wonder switzerland is so determinedly neutral and calm today yeah through all of their stuff they say they're very for a very like organized country they've got a really chaotic origin story i think they've got it all out of their system they must have decided i think at a certain point no we can't stop rounding up and destroying um calendars and things like that stop the podcast stop the podcast hello everybody just to let you know we are sponsored this week

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promo code no fish and what you're going to get with that is three months free with a purchase of a three month subscription all right on with the show on the show okay it's time for our final fact of the show and that is my fact my fact this week is that to make sure that no one leaked the answer to who shot jr on the tv show dallas the production team had every main character film a scene of them shooting jr including jr it's amazing thing so this is we need to explain what dallas is exactly so dallas was a soap opera in america went on for a very long time uh in the 1980s it began and it was a show that kind of really transformed the idea of soap having um these dramatic plot twists and also cliff hangers and so on and it created the

greatest cliffhanger probably in tv history certainly american tv history isn't and it's about like uh it follows like the escapades of like a wealthy oil tycoons family yes it's a early cheesy succession really yeah it's about squillionaires and the main character is an anti-hero just like logan broy i do think that succession is a very original idea and they definitely didn't rip off dallas in any way whatsoever just as an ultimate opinion i'm not so sure i think uh so yeah it's at the end of this third series it's the finale and jr who is the character played by larry hagman is shot we don't know who's pulled the trigger and then there's a big break in the season and in that time america goes slightly ballistic we're trying to work out the

world almost yeah yeah yeah who shot jr was basically the big question that everyone there were t-shirts next to the i'm with this cunt uh who shot jr politicians were referencing it yeah everyone um and just a spoiler alert it was christin there we go what but the thing is they the shooting of jr this this huge event maybe the biggest event in fictional tv history yeah was not meant to be the end of the series they had already filmed an ending of the series yeah and they'd had a load of events they'd had a deathbed murder confession they'd had the sectioning they had all sorts of you know greatly written themselves into a corner kind of thing yeah and then they got told hey great news you got four more episodes and they had to write four more

episodes and and then there was there was a big head scratching thing in the writer's room and someone said why don't we just shoot the bastard because apparently a lot of the writers were comedians or funny people at least yeah and um this was i read this in an interview with lorraine desprez who was one of the main writers uh and yeah she said that these were really funny guys who were trying to come up with ideas and almost let's shoot jr was one person going wouldn't it be funny if we did that wouldn't it fuck things up if we did that and then they all went oh actually that would be good yeah well that's i mean um a lot of the writers of succession are very funny comic writers jessie armstrom lucy crebel rebel sorry so you know it's another link uh little link between

the two i'd say but you know i mean the world went crackers didn't it it is really if you were on a plane going from europe to america at the time if it was an air france plane they said that they would tell anyone over the intercom who'd shot jr it because if you couldn't watch the show yeah yeah they would someone would radio up from the ground say it was christin and then they were flying at 40 000 feet and it was christin who shot jr oh my god isn't that amazing but in that is a huge spoiler there's no way of avoiding a plane tanoi spoiler that's true although in those days you couldn't watch things on demand like you could have vhsed it or maybe so you actually kind of wanted to ask things for more actually even in 1980 i guess you would have had vhs but only just yeah

right so you know you had to watch it live yeah exactly watch it live you were not going to watch exactly you weren't going to know the turkish parliament suspended a session so that so that the legislators wouldn't would would be able to tune in and wouldn't miss it like really there was a really fantastic piece in texas monthly which if anyone's going to cover who shot yeah front page surely absolutely but no there is an amazing piece which is all about the madness that happened so uh they shot at a real ranch you know they shot some scenes at a real run yeah it was just shot in interior sets in in hollywood but um the son of the guy who lived at the ranch they shot at was it's called joe duncan and he says that they had people turning up to take chips of the fence

take pieces of rock you know they could have taken a chip of the fence and used it as a tiny fence that's like um relics that's mad he said listen to this quote he said i was once 20 feet away from a guy who jumped to the fence and went out into the pasture to pick up a piece of horse manure to take home as a souvenir and that was a time before ebay yeah as well the name was dad shriver i read an article from this was the day before they were about to show the who shot jr and this was in the minneapolis star and they asked some local celebs who they thought had shot jr and like the head of the coach of one of the local sports teams said i don't know who shot jr but there's a lot of agents of players who i'd like to shoot the police chief who's called antony buza he said

i'm happy to report that i've never seen a single minute of that goddamn program and they asked the mayor don frazier this is the mayor of minneapolis and he said i haven't the foggiest who shot him are you serious i've only seen one episode of that show and it was quite by accident wow sounds like a lifelong fan just happily they asked him like they asked someone and they got these answers and they felt well we'll look back as well print yeah the thing that i knew dad us for because i'd never really seen it yeah but i i know it as a famous like a famous example of retconning uh where you retroactively change what happened so um they wrote filmed and shot and broadcast an entire season in which a character bobby ewing died but this character was really popular and they decided

they wanted to bring him back so in order to do that they retconned it by at the beginning of the next series they they made the whole previous series of dream sequence which is hailed as one of the like the cheesiest most rubbish ways of like retconning um but one of the the weird continuity things was that um dalas had a spin-off show called not's landing that existed in the same universe okay but when they brought back bobby ewing and was like oh this character never died in not's landing they had referenced the fact that bobby had died so at that point it's like a universe splintering moment it's like spider-verse into the multiverse yeah but they were simultaneously taking into a like they were like keeping track of the different universes while simultaneously

wiping entire series off the face of the you would think it would be easier to say oh he didn't die he faked his own death or yes exactly as in unless they showed on camera the funeral the like open cast gear yeah i think it was like the main part of a lot of the story of that they literally were like forget that series happened it's weird yeah there was um there was a real life bobby ewing who lived in texas and who owned an oil and cattle company oh really yeah and so when this big sort of who shot jr thing was happening they really kind of cashed in and you could buy jr dolls jr cologne jr playing cards um and you could also buy fake certificates for ewing land oil and cattle company which was signed by bobby ewing the fake bobby ewing but then the real bobby ewing

who lived in texas sued them and said well you can't do this yeah like it makes it look like you're selling my company and i found out that it was settled in the end and the real bobby ewing wasn't allowed to sell any novelty items uh and it didn't say but i assume he got a massive you know payout he must have done right yeah that's amazing larry hagman yeah played jr so obviously there's a big break for the you know when they're not shooting yeah he hadn't signed his contract when they started shooting the next series and he held out for a long time and he because he knows he's a star now right yeah everyone's talking about him yeah he wanted a huge pay rise um he dispatched his agents to negotiate wearing white stetson hats with the uh the management of the

show and that was his kind of that was his look sorry yeah that was his thing yeah but they feel really stupid if i was his agent and i was told to do that well they were like you're overreaching with this negotiation and you want us to go and fancy dress it was worse when mr blobby asked for a pay rise when they were when they were trying to shoot the next series they had to start shooting but without jr being present and having signed off his contract you know without having signed his contract so what they started doing they they shot a couple of different versions one they just shot jr from behind he just shot someone with the same hair which they you know they could just like fill in later yeah and then they also shot scenes with a guy bandaged up like he did and

they said if we have to bring in another actor to play jr we can claim you had to have reconstructive surgery and i you know that's a guy's problem is jr was shot in the stomach there's no reason that's great hagman what an interesting kind of personality he was generally he used to do a thing for many many years um called silent sundays he just didn't talk on sundays so funny yeah he so what happened was is that religious religious no no it was part of he used to be on a different show called i dream a genie brilliant show and um during it he had vocal problems and so he went to a doctor and the doctor said why don't you try not talking for a few days and he thought not only did it work nicely but he really enjoyed the experience so every sunday he thought i'm just

going to do this and didn't speak for decades so good yeah yeah he claimed that for 25 years he never spoke on a sunday i think it's not hundred percent true i think he kind of cheated a fair amount but because sundays your birthday or yeah treadle some lego yeah sometimes he would go like four days in a row without talking wouldn't he and his family would hate him for it and really he kicked it because he uh he says that he started realizing he was missing a lot of opportunities because he says in la a lot of business is done on the weekends and so he said he couldn't call his agent he couldn't talk to them to say hey get on the case of doing this so it's incredibly good negotiating to stay silent he probably should have done all this business on a sunday just sit

there in silence while they just keep upping the offer until like the clock goes over to monday he's like yeah great so funny a nazi who's a fan of dallas great um rudolf has the nazi did we cover another person who there was another there was genuinely another rudolf has really or he was called rudolf has the avocado guy so unfortunately the guy behind the house avocado was called rudolf pass wow um this one was the nazi and presumably train enthysiast um was he still alive when he watched his band our prison he used to watch it in he's dallas and dynasty with his two favorite tv shows he did care did he they were all bad uh that is retcalling alex again 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 be found on our twitter accounts i am on at schreiberland andy at andrew hunter m james at james harkin and alex oh i've quit twitter are you on instagram uh no uh are you on anything are you'll be real no that's good that one i'm still on bebo is that real are you a master done no don't be disgusting that sounds horrible what is that mafia based porn site yeah or you can email us at podcast at qi.com or you can go to our website no such thing as a fish.com all of our previous episodes are up there do check them out uh we'll be back again next week with another episode we will see you then goodbye