No Such Thing As A Fish - 533: No Such Thing As The Farto Phone

Episode Date: May 30, 2024

James, Anna, Andy and a silent puppet of Dan Schreiber discuss Key West, D-Day, tomahawks and trouser handles. 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

the number of the dates. There's still quite a lot of tickets available though so do go to no such things are fish dot com forward slash live to see what tickets are available now. But the main reason that I've come here today is to speak directly to the people of Sydney, Australia. You, of all the people around the world, have really pulled out all the stops and helped us to sell out the Sydney Opera House in just a couple of days. Absolute insanity it has to be said, but to thank you for doing that we're going to put on an extra show in Sydney. Now the details of that will first be told to Club Fish members at the beginning of your next bit of bonus content which is due to come out on the 11th of June. You people will have a pre-sale and then if there are any tickets left they will go on

sale on the 14th of June and we'll give details at the top of that Friday show. So that's the big news we're really looking forward to this tour it's going to be absolutely amazing if you haven't got tickets yet then do not dilly dally because they are going the show. It's absolutely amazing. If you haven't got tickets yet, then do not dilly dally because they are going super, super fast. And like I said, you can get those at no six things.

Fish dot com forward slash alive. One more thing to say, and that is that there is a bit of an odd thing about this week's show. That is that one member of the team was unable to make it to the office on time. Despite leaving home on time, they never made it. I will leave it up to you to guess who that's going to be. But what it means is that this was a three person show. Obviously we very much missed the person in question,

but hopefully you will enjoy the show nonetheless. Anyway, no more to say apart from, as we always do, every week on with the podcast! Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing As A Fish coming to you from the QI offices in Hoben. My name is Anna Tuschinsky and I'm joined here today by James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and a superior replacement to Dan Schreiber in the form of, if you're seeing the video clip of this, a puppet of Dan Schreiber who will say much less and I think that'll be appreciated. I'm afraid Dan is stuck on a train somewhere in the East

of England. Hashtag broken Britain. Let's go. Nice to hear broken Britain making a comeback. No one said that. Is that quite dated? Too busy living it, you know. No, Dan, this is the first ever, I think, three person podcast we've ever done. Yeah. If you prefer the format,, you know. No, Dan, this is the first ever, I think, three person podcast we've ever done. Yeah. If you prefer the format, let us know. Yeah. I think this could be it. We might crack it. I just want to say, Dan, if you're listening, which I know you will be, I really missed

you. James was the first one to suggest, he said, let's cut the sound bag loose. He kept saying over and over again. He said that before your train was even bag loose. He kept saying, kept saying over and over again. He said that before your train was even delayed actually. We had a whole train going. How do we ditch that? It was actually me that stopped the train and put five people on the track and then one person on another track. You put one leaf on the line. So we'll be there for a couple of days. Anyway, we're going to kick off with fact number one.

And because I'm hosting, I've made that my fact. My fact this week is that as part of the preparations for D-Day, one scientist persuaded another to inhale oxygen until she vomited. They got married shortly afterwards. Sort of a weird rom-com in a fact. Is it a meet-cute? Maybe they already knew each other. I don't know what meet-cute is. God guys that's in a rom-com, the moment where the couple they bump into each other, she drops all her stuff, he

helps her pick them up. She vomits. They're under the ocean maybe? They're in a hyperbaric chamber? They're simulating me under the ocean certainly. Okay well it's the original meet-cute. This is from this amazing book that I need to cite. It's written by someone called Rachel Lance, who is actually a blast injury specialist and a researcher into bodies surviving the extremes of being underwater. But she's written this book called Chamber Divers and she's uncovered this story, which is that the D-Day landings hadn't happened yet, this is Second World War, but there had been a disastrous Canadian beach landing in the Second World War on the beaches of France and it'd been disastrous because they had based it on a bunch of old photos they had, like old holiday photos from the 1920s. You're joking, and they're like, where's the ferris wheel?

Exactly, where's all the zombie? So you've got to make landfall by the donkeys, right? And it turned out the donkeys and the ferris wheel and all that have been replaced by German guns. Oh, that's bad luck. Which is such bad luck. And it was awful and a huge number of casualties. Was it that the sand had moved or the tides had moved the sand or that they couldn't land in the same way because of the ocean conditions? I think it was that they couldn't tell what the terrain was like based on the pictures. So they thought it was going to be nice and sandy. It was very rocky. It was very hazardous. Couldn't land properly. Really bad.

And so it became apparent that in order to do a successful beach landing to invade the Germans, the Allies would have to know more about the coastline, which would mean divers getting right up to the beach, spending a long time underwater, going deep down, getting up to the beach, then popping up at night and actually figuring out exactly what was on the beach. And to do that, we needed to know how to dive, which we didn't really in the 40s. You know what I was reading yesterday, I was reading a book about the history of barbed wire. And this is really off topic. There was a thing in it how during the war they used to put barbed wire under the sea. So as in when people would come and land you would jump off the boat and start running up but your oh my would get tangled because there's barbed wire under the sea.

It's not better. That's mean. It was a time of meanies. 39 to 45. That's extraordinary. I was a time of meanings. 39 to 45. It was, wasn't it? That's extraordinary. I did not know that. But that would be useful for your divers as well because they would notice it, I guess. They'd see it exactly with the goggles on because they wear goggles, don't they?

Anyway, this is a long-winded way of getting to the point that there were these two researchers, JBS Haldane and Helen Spurway. They work for UCL and they shot themselves repeatedly in these hyperbaric chambers, chambers that could be filled up with oxygen and simulate underwater pressures. They did this over and over again to find out the effects on the human body, so that the D-Day landings could happen. And Helen Spurway is in there, and she's the one who's inhaling pure oxygen, because it's the other body deals with oxygen at high pressures because it can be very dangerous. And JBS Haldane is sitting next to her taking notes in this hypervaric chamber and she managed

to last for 33 minutes on pure oxygen before she tore the breathing tube out of her mouth, vomited repeatedly, hallucinated and said, I'm done, thanks. Well, she might've said, I'm done, thanks. Because I read about what happens to you in those situations. And yeah, your voice goes really high like you're on helium. I didn't know that. They should do that at kids birthday party, shouldn't they? Well, it's kind of... It's kind of...

Exactly. Well, there's a lot of vomiting at kids birthday parties. It does sound kind of fun apart from people can't whistle when there's so much oxygen either. Oh no. So you know it's... Well I wouldn't like that because I'm a whistler. Are you?

Yeah. I get told off for whistling from my wife's family who think it's bad luck in the house. Well you're whistling out of the window passing women aren't you? And you've got your hard hat on. They're right. It really affected Haldane didn't it? And you've got your hard hat on. They're right. It really affected Haldane, didn't it? So I read that in the course of this research, he got a bubble at the base of his spine,

which stayed there for the rest of his life. And it made it incredibly painful for him to sit down anywhere. No. Yeah. It was extremely dangerous. He was an incredible guy. JBS Haldane. He was, yeah.

John Burdon Sanderson Haldane. He was amazing. I was just sayingerson Haldane. He was amazing. I was just saying before we started recording this, you sometimes you meet someone researching this podcast and you think I just want to spend weeks with you. I just want to do like a month long special of the show about this guy. And if you spend weeks with him he'd make you do so much mad stuff that you wouldn't have the guts for I'm afraid. No, okay fair enough.

But he was constantly experimenting on himself and his dad was also a really famous scientist who experimented on him and He did all of this science despite not having a science degree even he studied maths and then classics I'm sorry to say but if you do that, you're gonna end up with a bubble on your back We've been so professional so no, you're right. You're right You're right, but he was like he was a geneticist by training and yet throughout his life He was constantly doing crazy experiments. Which were really useful as well. You know, he really did find out a lot about how the body responds to these pressures and different gases. I think he did a lot of research into nitrogen

as well. If we get overexposed to nitrogen, he went down. I think when he was when he was about 13, he was first experimented on undersea by his father. This is a lifelong thing for Haldane. He and his father, who was called also John Haldane. John Scott Haldane. John Scott Haldane, sorry. Yeah, yeah. They went up to the west coast of Scotland on HMS Spanker, which was a Navy ship. Oh, yeah. Do you have a cap?

A hat? I do. I have a naval cap with the band HMS Spanker, which was an old prop from QI. And I wear that standing at my window. And I also have had complaints. And his father was trying to work out the speed divers should rise at to stop getting the bends, the decompression sickness.

And they didn't know what caused that. And he found out basically. Haldane senior put his volunteers, including his 13 year old son, Jack, in a badly fitting diving suit, got them to repeatedly go down into the sea and then come back up at different speeds. He did work out eventually how to come back up. But Jack Jr. became incredibly

cold and frightened. He was 13 years old and his dad just apparently dosed him with lots of whiskey and then put him to bed. And that was parenting in the audience. And now we look back and think, what a legend. Because actually it was him and Naomi, his sister, and she was a sort of equally amazing character. So she was four years younger than JBS Haldane and their dad experimented on both of them constantly. Apparently Naomi's job as a child from literally the age of three was to monitor test subjects through an observation window in these gas chambers that he'd set up.

Make sure your brother's not dead. It was literally that if they fell unconscious, she had to drag them out and resuscitate them. Honestly, I'm starting to warm a little less to this guy. I'm just imagining what a genius he would have been in adult life, Haldane, had he not had his brain squashed by gases every weekend. Maybe it was that's the equivalent of the bonk on the head though. Maybe that was what sparked the genius. Yeah, maybe maybe we should all be doing it.

Yeah. He spent his whole life being gassed. I've just realized he was gassed in the First World War as well. His entire life. Yeah, yeah. So he was in the Black Watch and the Black Watch are very famous Scotch regiment, you know, they're like legends of the British Army. They all wore a black watch, didn't they? That's right, Cassiopeia. And that's why they never started their attacks on time, because they'd all drifted a little bit. One, two, three, beep! Let's go! The Germans just opened the machine gun fire as soon as I hear this huge beep.

And so his job was trench mortar officer, so he had to lead groups to throw bombs by hand into enemy trenches I mean, it's quite fierce and hard and horrible work He loved it and he was gassed which sparked an interest in mustard gas and experimenting on that But while he was at the front, I love this He was writing back and forth with namee his sister about mouse genetics and he later he boasted He was the only officer to complete a scientific paper from a forward position of the black watch. No way. That's amazing.

It is amazing. But he must have been like, the gas comes towards him. He must be like getting a Madeleine moment of his childhood, mustn't he? He's like, oh, this reminds me of old dad. He's taking off his mask, getting his notepad out. Can we talk about Helen Spurway? Yeah, she was awesome. She was the other one in the diving experiments.

She was the one who vomited. Yes, and who he did marry. As they did mention after vomiting all over him, they did get married afterwards. She reminds me a bit of Erica McAllister because she, her most of her research was on drosophilia, fruit flies. So she was a world expert on fruit flies basically. And then she later wrote a paper about pathogenesis in guppies in the fish. So that means that a female guppy can give birth without having sex. Virgin birth. Virgin birth. But she also

said that possibly it could happen in humans because of her work in guppies. She was like, well, there's no reason if it happens in guppies, it can't happen in puppies and then in humans. Guppies, puppies, humans. She was extremely hardcore as well, wasn't she? As you'd have to be. They sort of found each other soulmates in each other and she was quite a strange character. So there's a Time magazine report of an incident that happened to her in 1956, which you have to bear in mind it is 1956. It began, Britain's blonde biologist, Helen Spurway Haldane, wife of brilliant biologist JBS Haldane. The blonde and the brilliant.

Emerged from a London pub after downing three and a half pints of bitter and encountered a bobby stamped on his police dog's tail and clouted the cop. So she was clearly a bit feisty. Maybe she was just experimenting what would happen if a dog got its tail stumped on. Maybe she was. Well, the answer it turns out is you end up in prison for two months. Two months. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. But she was offered to pay a fine and she said, no, not up for it. And she was about to go to India and she said, I'll fit in much better with some of the other people

who've gone to India if I've done a prison spell. Basically, that's why they left Britain. So Haldane was at Cambridge and she got arrested for drunken disorderly. And he said, well, let's just go to India then. Really? Yeah, but whenever anyone asked him why, he said, oh, the said, Oh, I am the

Suez crisis. I think the government has handled that so badly that I want to leave the UK and I want to go to India. But it's actually because his wife was a piss head. Because I read that I read a few reasons that he gave. One was that he was broke as well. Like after the war, his lab had no money and he was broke and those pipes are bitter. Don't go cheap. And he'd be given a really good job offer from the Indian Statistical Institute. But also he then claimed, this is a bit more in the Suez line of things, that he just didn't want to wear socks anymore. He said 60 years in socks is enough.

So I'm moving to India. Yeah, okay. Well you don't have to wear socks. Well also one thing he really liked, apart from the nice job offer and you know the cultural that he liked the socialism there, because they had a lot of socialism in India at the time. And he was a former communist. He spent years and years in the communist party and slightly embarrassed himself a bit

over Lysenko, who was the dodgy Soviet pseudo scientist who claimed he was going to revolutionize crops. Well, yeah, that's the thing like Lysenko. He was the one who said Darwin's theories are not completely correct Yeah, obviously for Haldane. This is a big problem because he was such a geneticist and he was so that's weird Like for him like to be a world expert on genetics for a while He was kind of saying well, you know, there might be something in it and he slightly compromised his scientific principles Naomi was also a socialist. Mmm. Was she okay and committed socialist

But anyway, she also proofread Lord of the Rings in her spare time. Get out. She actually in fact wrote over 90 novels. She was incredibly good. You're going to say over 90% of it. The great Dungeon Valley women. Yeah. She proofread it. Could she not have got him to kind of pare it down a little bit? It was actually 19 books long before she edited it. No, if she wrote 90 books, she's not a master of concision. No. Haldane's first's first wife Charlotte Franken was a daughter of an alien. Oh yeah. Go on. Dan? No response from Dan there? No, he's just sat there. He's stunned, you've stolen his only fact. Her father was Jewish and the son of a German and during the First World War there was a thing called the Alien Restrictions Act. If you personally wasn't a British

citizen then they would you would have less rights than anyone else in the country. So he decided to leave and left Sharla on her own. But she became a reporter for the Daily Express apparently because and this is going to the dictionary of National Biography because her father this is according to the dictionary of national biography, because her father had taught her to drink like a man. So that helps her to become a reporter for the Express. I believe it. Yeah, yeah.

Pretty much the only qualification you needed. But she was actually married when she met Haldane and she got divorced and the divorce quoted Haldane as a person in the divorce. And he basically got fired from Cambridge because of that. As in he was quoted as a person she'd been shagging, monkeying about with. Exactly. Cambridge was very uptight back in the days, wasn't it?

He was brought up in front of the sex viri. The what? The sex viri. Viri? Viri. V-I-R-I. What are they? Well, sex.

Six men. Six men. Yeah. So they were the moral guardians of the University of Cambridge, which if you'd done anything wrong, you would be brought up in front of them and they say, you're going to lose your position in the universe. Wow. Sex Viri. Sex Viri. That must have led to some confusion. People turning up for a good time. Seeing the plaque on the door. Well, Haldane, he contested the charge, he won. He started calling the sex very the sex weary. A bit of a joke. And they basically lost all of their authority and wow, and they weren't there anymore. Not thanks solely to that.

Nobody was really part of it. Well, the pun, the whole was part of it. Yeah. Of course, if you are speaking classical Latin, the way it's traditionally spoken, it's pronounced sex weary anyway, isn't it? Oh, maybe it's even better joke. Even better back in those days. That's great. Latin. Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is Andy.

My fact is that the Swiss have a special kind of wrestling trouser named the Schwingerhosen with a special belt for your opponent to hang on to. Why does your opponent want to hang on to your trousers? Well, the Schwingerhosen are these heavy trunks that you wear in the Alps when you're wrestling with your fellow farmers and loggers and herdsmen and all of that. It's quite a blokey sport traditionally. There are some, it's been making strides. There are some lady swingers now, but it was a lad's occupation. And basically you put your right hand on your opponent's belt, your left hand on their right leg, you brace, I'm sure, your left hand on their right leg, you brace, I'm sure, and then you tussle. And you're trying to make your opponent vulnerable to the Schwunger,

the Schwunger, which are the holds. There are dozens of holds. The average Schwinger masters several Schwunger, three or four, but they'll know loads, but like you have your three or four signature moves. It's kind of like Street Fighter, the arcade game. And once you enact a Schwunger, your opponent might go for a Gegenschwunger, which is a counter hold. And you get points for the holds that you make. I think you just get points for throwing your opponent or moving them. I think it's just throwing them on the floor. I think it's the aim. And it does, if you watch videos, it's very crotch heavy a lot of the time. Because if you imagine you've grabbed someone's belt loops from behind and you sort of a lot of the time just shoving them towards you, aren't they? As they're doing the same. So you sort of

crotch on crotch quite a lot of the time and then eventually one of you flips the other onto the ground and you've won the bout. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. And the competitions are often known as swing fests. Yeah. But don't get them mistaken with the South London Swing Fest, which is a celebration of swing music. The Sussex Swing Fest, which is a golf competition. Or Swing Fest, a swing-only festival from East Yorkshire. Is that swinging, swinging? That's right. So don't get mixed up with any of those if you want to go for your homoerotic Swiss wrestling competition.

Yeah, leather trousers would be useful. I think they'd probably be useful for a few of those. For all of those, really. Absolutely. It should be one of those flow charts in a magazine. Which swing fest are you? Oh yeah. Do you have leather trousers?

That doesn't help us. Yeah. And I read a great article in the German language press about Paul Eggiman, who's a master saddler and he makes the wrestling trousers. And he's one of, I think, a handful of people who now truly knows the art of how to make a schwingerhosen. And did you read it in German? No, I clicked the button that said, I toggled from German to English. I always do that as well, for languages that I can speak.

Even for English, you toggle. More More English please. More Englishy. And there's a quite a nice thing at the end where it's a sort of respectful thing at the end. The winner ends the match by brushing the sawdust off the loser's back. Oh yeah. Really? What do you think that used to be? That you brushed off his back? Just going to get a tissue. Come on. It's huge though, isn't it? I think it's one of the most well attended sports in

Switzerland, if not the most. About 300,000 people attend the finals, which happen every year to crown the king of the swingers. The jungle VIP. There was a magazine called Schwinger Zeitung magazine, which the first edition was in 1907. And in that edition, they talk about bets being placed in taverns on swinging. But it's also, it's amazing.

There's a big article about how terrible cycling is. It's so weird. 1907. Really? Yeah, I guess that's when it was taking off, you know, so that will be a... And people were quite anti, they were anti-women cycling especially. Why were they? Why do they think it was bad? Well, because it was an imported sport and compared to shrinking, which obviously all normal, upstanding Swiss people love to do. Cycling involves wretched hunchback figures on

their velocipedes. You can't commute to work by swinging, can you? Swing your way to work. If you and another swinger grab each other and then throw yourselves off the mountain, you can get down to your office in a kind of wheel formation. So you are the bike, basically. Yeah. It's one of the three Swiss national sports, or often cited as one of the three really traditional Swiss national sports. And the other two be... Can we guess? Swiss national sports.

I doubt it, but give it a go. Skiing. I'd say no from me. Cow riding. You've got to put a bell around the neck of the biggest bull in the valley. Do you know what? That's not a terrible guess.

I like it. Blowing that massive horn. That big alpine horn thing. Oh yeah, the alpine horn. Oh, yodeling. I don't think that's a sport. Are you calling that a sport? No, I'm going to tell you.

Eating Toblerone. Yes. You'll kick yourselves. Making knives. Anonymized bank accounts. Protecting the Pope. Yes. I'm going to tell you if that's all right.

So Dan, what was that you said, Dan? Stein's tossing and Hornuusen. Yeah, you're absolutely right, Dan. Did I not say Hornuusen? Did you say Hornuusen? Well, I said Horn. It has nothing to do with horns. It's like a giant. I've watched a bit of it.

It's really fun. It's like fly swatting, but on a giant scale. And it's a bit like golf. Someone swings this whip at the horn-oose, which is a hornet. Oh, I've seen it. It's like a golf club, but it's like got a whip on the end. Exactly. Yeah, I've seen that. It's like if you're a golf club, if you had a trick golf club that was flexible and you hit it.

So what am I hitting it at? You're hitting it at this massive field in front of you or slope and up the slope are the opponents and they're all holding these huge flapping bats that look like giant fly swats and their job is to swat your ball out of the air and you've got to see. Sounds incredibly difficult. Wait, so I'm whipping my ball into the air and they're trying to swat my ball out. So imagine I hit a golf ball to you, you're 200 yards away, and you've got a tennis racket, and you're trying to hit the golf ball before it lands. But with additional difficulties.

And you're trying to get it what, past me? Or? You're trying to get it to hit the ground before someone swats it. Right, okay, okay. It's such a pretty basic concept. It's the kind of game you come up with as a seven year old with your sibling and they've stuck with it and it's huge. And in fact, Rudolph minger, who I'm sure you guys know, was a 1950s Swiss politician. No, please. Just a

name. It's not funny. It's not a funny name. It's just a name. He said it was the ultimate mark of patriotism alongside wrestling and yodeling. Oh, can I tell you a thing or two about funny name. It's just a name. He said it was the ultimate mark of patriotism alongside wrestling and yodeling. Oh, can I tell you a thing or two about leather trousers? Sure. Did we talk ever about the ale Connor? Oh, I don't think so. So basically this was this idea that in the old days, the way you tested beer was that

you go to a pub, you'd pour the beer onto a wooden bench and then you sit down and you'd see if you stuck to it. Right. And this is a myth. It's a complete myth from 1911. Yeah. It's from this book ins, ales and drinking customs of old England. So it already sounds like copper bottom nonsense. The idea was that like, um, a publican might put extra sugar in or something like that and it would make it sticky. And yeah. If you, so you would, so you'd come in wearing your leather trousers, you'd sit, you'd get some beer, pour it on your bench, sit down, and then you'd sit there for half an hour and try and stand up.

And if you stuck to it, it had too much sugar in and it was impure. If the bench came up with your ass, as you stood up, then that's treacle. And they would walk out with the bench stuck on their ass and they'd take your plaque to show you were licensed with them as they went. And it's how who we were ale Connors, but they tasted there are no contemporary sources all the time saying they sat in a pint. Because if it's got sugar in it, you would be able to taste it wouldn't you?

Yeah. That's the test. Dave, why are you pouring it on there? No, no, this is how I do it. But no, it just tastes really sweet. It tastes like honey. No, no, I'm going to sit on it for half an hour. Is this my tea or yours? I don't know, has it got sugar in it? Sit on it and see. You've never had that exchange, have you? No. And if the nail was strong enough, it could make something stick to a table, like

it's sticky. That's brilliant. That's a real exploding of a very niche QI myth which is something we specialize in. Absolutely. I tried to find something interesting out about Theresa May's leather trousers. Oh yeah. Which for international listeners who don't keep a hawkeye on British news, Theresa May, former Prime Minister, wore some leather trousers famously in a photo shoot at 2016 and got in huge trouble for it. That's probably why she had to leave because it was revealed that they'd cost £995 and also they just noticeably leathered trousers. And that was worth a lot more before Brexit as well.

And did you find anything? It was very hard. They're designed, all I found out was that she really didn't want to wear them. And it was the director of communications, Fiona Hill, who you may well remember, who insisted that Amanda Wakely, the designer, send a van full of clothes to Downing street and sort of squeaked her into these leather trousers. I'm imagining like that scene in Ross from Friends when he has to sort of put a flower down his legs. And yes, her other director of cons, Katy Perry said

she didn't even like the bloody trousers. They were the wrong kind of brown, if you know what I mean, which I don't know. But it was, it was quite mad because Cameron did habitually wear and other male leaders do habitually wear things that cost 3500. So when everyone was demanding that you declare it, have you declared this on your register of interest? I imagine Rishi Sunak's wife runs cost more than that. Yeah, are they leather? Let's put in a freedom of information request and find out. He's at the press conference, he's answered all the big questions. No such thing as a fish. That would be amazing if he could get into those junkets. How do you get into those junkets?

The Lederhausen has been banned from time to time in Germany. The church banned it during the 19th century revival of Lederhausen. What? And in 1913 the Munich archbishop declared Laederhosen immoral. And they've got a Laederhosen scene in Peru as well. There's this tiny bit of Peru, this village called Pozuzu between the Andes and the Amazon and it was set up by Austrian and German immigrants led by a priest called Joseph Egg. Oh yeah. Hang on you had another egg earlier. Yeah you did. Did I? Yeah an egg name in your German article that you'd earlier. Yeah, you did. Did I? Yeah, an egg name in your German article that you got Google to translate. Oh yeah, Paul Eggieman, the master saddler. I am the Eggieman. Yeah, and anyway, so every year they have Pozzuso Fest. So these

Germans went over to South America, did they? Yes. Right, okay. As we said in the previous episode, when? 100 years before the unpleasantness. Although King Edward VIII wore lederhosen on his honeymoon with Wallis Simpson, where he went to met Hitler. On their honeymoon, they went off and had a meeting with Hitler. It's very romantic, isn't it? It's every girl's dream. Foe of the podcast. They went to the Eagles Nest, which is that, you know, it's called Berchtesgaden, it's sort of Hitler's very high mountain alpine retreat. It does sound like a bit of a glamping situation. Maybe she thought when he said we're going to the Eagles Nest, I I found it on Airbnb, which she didn't quite realise. Arian B&B. OK, it's time for fact number three and that is James.

OK, my fact this week is that in 1963, a fire at the Curry building was put out by a man called Bum Farto. It was also started by him though. He was just setting fire to his Fartos. And no, this is a fact about Key West in Florida. City? Yeah, it's a city. Yeah, it's the Sonoma City in mainland America. I'm pretty sure.

I think so, yeah. Is it still mainland? I know, because it's right at the tip of the Florida Keys. It is. You know what? The Keys, you can drive there. So it's kind of mainland. But the truth is there's lots of bridges because the Keys are so close together. So they've been bridged all the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've never been there. It sounds like an amazing bit of the world. It's great. It's really good. It's extraordinary. Let's talk about it in a bit because it's good.

So Bonfato. Bonfato was a major figure in 1960s Key West because he was a fire chief. Okay. And he was a friend, I believe, of Julio de Pou, who was one of the main surgeons in the town, but I thought his name was marginally funnier. So we would talk about him. But he was really good. And the reason I came across him actually is because there is a musical that's been written about him called Bon Farto the musical, and it was written by Pamela Stevenson, who is Billy Connolly's wife and a writer.

She's a shrink and a comedian. And she runs a long route from sort of Rodgers and Hammerstein, hasn't it? We've gone far too the musical. We really run out of all the evidence. We've done Hamilton and lots of other key figures in American history. So he was the fire chief. He wore red suits, drove around in a lime green Ford Galaxy, which had a Yoruba shrine on its hood. Yoruba as in the Nigerian religion.

Religion, yes. He was a practitioner, wasn't he? Of the Yoruba religion. He called himself El Hefe. Or El Jeff, if you want to give it this Anglicised pronunciation, which is more funny. The chief. The chief, yes. I think it this Anglicised pronunciation, which is more funny. The Chief. The Chief, yes. I think he painted that on his car, didn't he? Yeah, he had a license plate that said L. Jeff. He eventually got done for selling drugs out of the fire department.

That is tragic. Can I just ask about the Curry Factory fire? Do we know anything else about that? Yeah, I can tell you that it was owned by Mr. Curry. Um, whose name have I written it down? So he didn't make Curry or did he have to be called Mr. Curry? But it was a Curry factory as well. No, no, no, it wasn't a factory. It was Curry building. And he was Mr. Curry and he was the first millionaire in Florida and he was a wrecker. So big thing in Key West back in the day is you would have people sort of sat on big towers and whenever a ship went past, if it wrecked, they would go,

wrecker high, wrecker high, and all the men would run out and try and get at the wreck. And then it was just like finders keepers. It was just finders keepers. And then they would have a big auction in Key West every month where they would sell everything that they got from the wrecks. It's very bad behavior, wrecking. It's bad behavior where you put the light up and you lure a ship onto the rocks. I think actually most of that is relatively mythical.

That's rare, isn't it? And I think that's really, really different. That's like the difference between murdering someone and pickpocketing a dead body. And I think one is much worse than the other. Anna is really clear about the difference between those things. No, you're right. Wrecking is sort of different.

I think that's all. The myths about that are in Cornwall, aren't they? Yeah, but no, the myths are the same in Key West, actually. Basically, in fact, if you read about wrecking in Cornwall and wrecking in Key West, it's all the same stories. It's the same myths. It's the same, you know. Because it must be quite hard to mimic a lighthouse accurately if you don't have a lighthouse.

I think so. I've got a pretty good Halloween costume actually. Just going around flashing people. As a former subscriber to Lamp Magazine, I can assure you that I've done my reading on this. Anyway, can we say why Fatto was called Fatto? Because he was called Bum. Yeah, Fatto was his actual name. Fatah was his name and his first name, his birth name was Joseph Fatah and his parents probably thought, well, you know, it's an unfortunate surname, but at least it can't get any worse.

And then he loved fire from a young age and he was always hanging around the fire station and he was known as the little bum, the American version meaning tramp, you know, or one friend reported that he was always bumming things, which again shows the difference between American and British English where he... Oh, I don't know. You would say, can I bum a cigarette? And he disappeared, didn't he? In the end he vanished and he was never found.

He's somewhere with Lord Lucan and Elvis. And Shergar. And Shergar at the party of the century. Because he was flogging drugs. Yes. And he got caught because he tried to sell it to an undercover police officer. And then they arrested him. And then he was out on bail.

And they thought that probably he would go out to prison for a long, long, long, long time or perhaps he would dob in the people who gave him the gear in the first place. Because he had connections with Cuba. So then he disappeared. Maybe he drove off and started a new life. Maybe the people who didn't want him to dob them in might have dobed him off. And there was a lot of stuff like that going on.

I mean, it was a very shady, gang-heavy world. And in fact, the person who dobbed him in, who basically told this undercover agent to go and set him up, was a guy called Titus Rudolph Walters. And he convinced the undercover agent who was a guy called Larry Dollar, who I quite like. Larry Dollar. Everyone in the story has a great name. Titus Walters is a good name. It's really good. But Titus, before the deal even happened, where Faso was set up by Larry Dollar, Titus, who'd dobed him in, was brutally murdered. And I ended up reading this description of

his murder and it was extraordinary. He was like the Rasputin of his time. He was murdered by other gang people who shot him in the head multiple times. He just wouldn't die. He was like crawling out of the bathroom. Eventually they had to inject him with heroin and drain cleaner to kill him off. Lorcs, were you just reading it to make sure that somebody had been through his pockets? Yeah, but a few good things that Afato did when he was Fire Chief. He installed a system which turned all the traffic lights near the fire station on green with a push of a button. That's fantastic.

No, that sounds incredibly dangerous. Wait, all of them? All the ones that he needed to go to to get to the main road. That's brilliant. There's only like one main road in Key West. That's really clever. That's a really good idea. Yeah, well, he did it.

I bet he used it a bit nefariously sometimes. He's late for a date. Do modern fire engines have that capacity? I don't think so. I don't know, he just turned the sirens on and go through red lights, didn't they? Yeah, I think you're right. As far as I've seen. But he also had a hotline to his home phone that required no dialing.

So if he was at home and there was a fire, someone could just press one button like the bat phone, the phato phone. The phato phone is a completely different prank toy. Instead of a spotlight into the sky, it's just they play the noise of a huge guff over Key West. He hears it. He stops flogging cocaine to a student. I must go. He runs into a phone box and he pulls on the father costume. I think I do know what he would be 104 years old now and part of me does hope maybe he's still out there somewhere.

Oh, me too. Right? Yeah. Yeah. There's a way to this show. There's a weird coincidence about him or just like a weird collision of histories where his parents owned a restaurant in Key West, which is called Victoria, and they sold it to a guy called Joe Russell, who was mates with Ernest Hemingway, who'd recently come

from Cuba. So Ernest Hemingway has come from Cuba. He visits this restaurant that's just been sold by Bumfato's family. And he says, you know what, you should call this place Sloppy Joe's, because that's the name of a place that I used to go to Havana. And that is now incredibly iconic. I've been there. And have you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been to sloppy Joe's. Yeah, well, there you go. That was named suggested by Ernest. And it's this iconic bar. And in fact, once it changed lodgings, because the rents were massively increased and so it moved

across the road, but the barn never closed when it moved. The people just picked up their drinks as they moved venue and went across the road. That's very good. It's brilliant. That's commitment to your customers. That's fantastic. A few other good things that Fatto did. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Just quickly say. So he ordered the replacement of all foam mattresses in the jails because if there was a fire, he knew they would release cyanide. So they were really dangerous. So he got rid of all the foam mattresses in the jails because if there was a fire he knew they would release cyanide so they were really dangerous so he got rid of all the foam mattresses and obviously the irony of that is the likelihood was that he would have ended up on one of these mattresses you know when he got arrested. See if it had been Haldane, Haldane would have delighted in setting fire to one of the mattresses while he lay on it. Delicious cyanide. And the other thing was that he was like the unofficial welcome for Cuban exiles. So a lot of people were leaving Cuba at the time because Castro had just come in, right?

So he would provide food and accommodation just for the first couple of days when you arrived in Key West and then maybe even sort you out with a job and stuff like that. That's interesting. Yeah. It's very close. In fact, I think is it closer to Cuba than it is to Miami? It's close. It's a hop, skip and a jump. Harder to drive, I could say that much. You need a sort of subterranean Haldane designed car, yeah.

The road down that you drove along, James, it used to be a train. Yeah, you can see it actually. I think there are still some bits of railway. I think so. It was called Flagler's Folly because It was Henry Flagler who was a millionaire and he had this vision of a railway all the way down to Key West, all the way through the Florida Keys, all the bridges that you drive over now. And it was his life's work. It took $50 million of his money. It nearly killed him. He finally saw it open the year before he died. And he

was in fact, he was tragically, he had gone blind by then. He was in his eighties by the time it opened and you know, he, he couldn't see his life's achievement, but he could hear as he arrived on the train in Key West, the children of Key West cheering as, as he stepped off the train and he was weeping and emotion at this amazing achievement. Did you know the, um, I learned something about Miami, which I didn't know, which was very interesting in the course of this. So the only reason he could bring the railroad down to Florida Keys all the way down was because it had extended down to Miami. But there was a woman called Julia Tuttle, who lived on what became Miami in the 1890s. And she really wanted to improve

her business standing. So she owned a few hundred acres of land. She wanted the railroad to come down there because obviously that's very useful commercially. So she owned a few hundred acres of land. She wanted the railroad to come down there because obviously that's very useful commercially. And she wrote to him saying, bring your railway down here, bring it down here. And he said, no, can't be bothered. That's way too far. She invented Disneyland.

Well, damn, she's not quite that cool, but she did, the story goes, sent him during the great frost of 1894, some flowering orange blossom from South in Miami saying, look, our fields are so fertile, even though it's so cold, that it's a great place to set up shop. And he eventually was persuaded

to build the railway down there. And therefore Miami is the only city of any note in America founded by a woman. So she's the founder of Miami. I did not know that. No, but she didn't make Disneyland. So what's the point. I read this website, I got to say it was it was fun facts about Key West. Look, just judge for yourselves. At one point about 10% of Key West population was chickens. Okay, okay. All right. Well, all right. Here's another

one. I want to know what population they're counting. Are they counting the insects? Because when they're saying 10% of his population, you've got a good point. They're covering all animals. You can't just include humans and chickens. The bacteriophages. What about them? Okay. All right. I've got two more fun facts from the same website for you. Key West was a major hub for salt production in the 1800s. Okay. That is fun. Oh, because it's near the sea? Yeah, I guess. I'm feeling the fun draining away a bit. All right, here's the nail in the coffin. Key West is home to the largest historical district of wooden structures on the US Department

of the Interior's National Register of Historic Places. Wow. Dan, wake up! The sad thing is, I know how excited you are about that fact, Andy. Oh yeah, I mean, that's mega. Well, a lot of the wooden structures would have been lookouts for wreckers as well. I think there are some that are still there, although they might be reproductions, but they're just like, if you can imagine like a 30 foot building, but it's just like slats

of wood, almost like in the shape of a lighthouse. I'm thinking of an umpire's chair. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like a bigger version of that. Like that, but with a big sort of flat top which you can stand on. That's cool. Although they do have one of those in low sugarloaf key, which is one of the Florida keys, which isn't one of those. It is a similar looking structure, but it used to be filled with ground up female bat genitals. Um, this firstly, grim. I'm sorry, just want to say that. Firstly, grim. Secondly, is it to lure in male bats? Is it a bat trap? Oh my God, you've got it. Andy's got it. And why do you want a bat trap?

You've got too many bats. No, no, you want more bats. You're a bat farmer. No, there's a mosquito problem. There was a mosquito problem in the 1920s. So a chap called Richard Clyde Percy read a book about how to get bats to kill mosquitoes wrote to the guy who wrote the book said, how do I do this? And he said build a tower, fill it with ground up female bat genitals. What can you just put female bats in the tower with that? You got to have the ground up maybe it's easier to source ground up genitals. That's so weird.

I guess without being ground up the female bats can maybe fly away. Whereas in this way when they're ground their gen to source ground up genitals. That's so weird. I guess without being ground up, the female bats can maybe fly away. Whereas in this way, when they're ground up, their genitals are ground up. I presume you've killed the whole bat and you've had to take and you've had to, but why not just grind up the whole, is it to lure male bats? Yes, and the male bats come and they eat all the mosquitoes.

So it's only the male bats that eat the mosquitoes. No, I think just that's the only way you can lure bats. Yeah, the males are probably more likely to be like, well, I can smell female genitals. They might be not attached to a bat anymore or ground up, but beggars can't be choosers. Give it a go. Okay, it's time for our final fact and that is dance facts. Should we get him to send it as a voicemail? And I'll play it in.

That's a good idea. That's a great idea, let's do that now. My fact this week is that for over two decades, the actors Grace Kelly and Alec Guinness secretly hid a tomahawk in each other's hotel rooms around the world. Oh! Well, great fact, Dan. I've got loads of questions about it.

Yeah, tell us more. Who's Grace Kelly? Actually, I didn't look into Dan's fact and sorry to peel back the curtain for a second. He's still not here live in the room. So I'm not sure exactly what happened with this story. No, I'm not either. Did you, Andy? Yes, thankfully I did. Oh, that's good. Because I went and read Alec Guinness' memoir.

And so it's a story he told. Basically, he was making this film called The Swan and Grace Kelly was in it too. And if you don't know who Alec Guinness and Grace Kelly are, they're two of the greats. That's all we need to say. The greatest actors ever, brilliant. And Alec Guinness, he got given this tomahawk

by some native Americans who were also involved in the filming. And it was massive. It was a kind of, it wasn't a prop, it was a proper thing. And it was really heavy and he didn't want to take it at the end of the job. So he asked Hotel Porter, as he was leaving, you know, going off to the next job, whatever, to slip it into Grace Kelly's bed as a kind of joke. You know, it's a sort of silly thing, because she would have known it was his,

because she'd seen him go. And then a few years after that, he came home from a performance in London. He was doing a lot of theatre at the time and he found it in his bed and she had found a way somehow to smuggle it into his bed. I don't know if she ever told her end of the story. He waits a few more years and then he finds out that she's doing a project in the USA with someone who he doesn't know actually. And he gets in contact via a third party of the, I think the poet she was doing this work

with, she was doing this work with, she was traveling with this poet and he gets in contact via a third party. So her companion can honestly say, no, I've never met or spoken to Alec Guinness. So he really goes to a length and then he gets it back into her bed that way. But wait a minute. Like that does seem a bit pointless because is she going around her whole life just checking that everyone doesn't know Alec Guinness? She only hangs around with people who don't know Alec Guinness. After she's found it in her bed, she comes downstairs the next morning and says to the

poet, you don't know Alec Guinness at all, do you? And he can honestly say, no, I've never met Alec Guinness. But he did. It was. And then eventually he goes to Hollywood in 1979 to receive an Oscar. And what does he find in his bed? Grace Kelly. No, he finds the tomahawk in his bed. And yeah, so that was a long running good Hollywood prank. And then one of them murdered the other with the tomahawk. That's right. Grace Kelly died tragically. I think she did die because I didn't read the whole story, but I like skimmed it. She did die. And she died without ever being acknowledged. So I think that's this really weird thing that's left hanging. Her and Alec Guinness

never discussed that. No, they never mentioned it to each other. She died in a car crash, didn't she? Yeah, I think in the early 80s. She was still very young. She was in her 50s at the time. But she died a princess. She did. In many ways, we all die princesses. Oh, is that right? In many ways, we all die a pauper because you can't take it with you. That's a really good point. Well Well she died an incredibly wealthy princess. So yeah she was the princess of Monaco. Yeah some listeners will remember maybe. She, some, few listeners, she married Prince Rainier of Monaco.

Rainier than here. It's actually a lot drier I would suspect. Yeah yeah not as rainy. It's actually a lot drier, I would suspect. In Monaco, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Not as rainy. And she was 26, which means that her Hollywood career, the grand total of five years maximum, I believe.

Yeah, she was in 11 movies, I think. Because he forced her to stop, basically. Yeah, although I think she was up for it, wasn't she? She was keen to retire. In fact, do you know why, one of the explanations she gave for why she left? Suez, the Suez crisis. She didn't like wearing socks. Yeah, I've been wearing socks 26 years.

That's long enough. She said when I first came to Hollywood five years ago, my makeup call was at 8am. I'll be god damned if I'm going to stay in the business where I have to get up earlier and earlier and it takes longer and longer to get me in front of the camera. I think saying as she gets older and older, she's going to have to come in earlier and earlier to get the makeup. That's very funny. I see to get the makeup. I thought you'd empathize James with that a bit. Well, because I'm allergic to makeup pretty much.

And you know, you like you used to like a lion. Because you have to get in at 6am every day for extensive hair and makeup. I thought you were talking about yesterday we did some filming and I was wearing makeup and just came out in. No. Yeah, if you see the film, we sound cheerful but James is streaming from his eyes. yesterday we did some filming and I was wearing makeup and just came out in no, sobbing. Yeah. If you see the film, we sound cheerful, but James is streaming from his eyes. That's working with you. And I blame it on the makeup. Yeah. No, I think he did forces for retire because

he also banned any showing of her movies in Monaco. Well, I heard that. But I also heard that she was in the middle of a big contract with MGM. You know, you sign up to do seven films and all that. And I think the deal part of the deal was that she would be freed from the contract, she didn't have to make any more movies, but the wedding was filmed and broadcast to 30 million people and it was in cinemas. Yeah, 30 million people, like half the population of the UK that is at that time. There were nearly 2000 journalists at the wedding. Yeah, but not many like kings or queens of Europe were there, because they all kind of

disagreed with it because it was a royal marrying a plebeian So yeah, a lot of the royals got invited but none of them went. Wow, that's interesting Yeah, because it wasn't very much an arranged marriage It seems like as and it was I believe it was suggested to iranian that he find a hollywood star to marry because they wanted To increase tourism since the war people have stopped going. That's right. And the person who suggested it, did you see that? Aristotle Onassis. Oh yes, the ship guy. Greek shipping magnate, again, crazy name, crazy guy, later husband of Jackie Kennedy.

Jackie Kennedy, yes. I believe his yacht had a, had barstools made out of whale's foreskids. That's correct. Oh, so it didn't have taste, all right. There were female whales were flocking to the show. Grace Kelly's story is very interesting because it's kind of a riches to riches story. Like she grew up really wealthy. Her father was a brick magnate called Jack Kelly. He was amazing actually. He was an Olympic gold medalist and her mother was a competitive swimmer, Grace Kelly's mom. So very athletic.

Be honest, the entire family were stunningly good looking. You know, it's not surprising that she became a Hollywood star. He was a rower, wasn't he? That's why you guys meddle in. And she said once someone asked her, Grace Kelly, would you write an autobiography? And she said, No, but I would like to write a biography of my father. And in 1920, he wanted to be in the Henley Regatta which is a big posh rowing competition in the UK but he was banned because in those days anyone who is a mechanic artisan or labourer or works in any menial activity was not allowed to take part in the Henley Regatta. Was that a sort of class barrier?

Yes it was but it well it was. But it, well, it was. Sounds like it was, as opposed to like, you don't want them to take the time off their job. Well, if someone's plumbing doesn't get fixed. According to them, it was because they wanted it to be amateur. And if you had a job as a bricklayer, then you were technically a professional. It's unfair. It's actually cheating to have big muscles from your work. Only softies who've been spent their whole lives punting so far reading a little bit of Tennyson. Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, so obviously it was class-based but he was very annoyed about it but in the same year there was an Olympics and

he won his Olympic rowing medal and apparently he mailed his cap to King George V with a note saying greetings from a bricklayer. Oh, nice. Slam. If that got to George V and if George V with a note saying greetings from a brick layer. Oh, slam. If that got to George V and if George V had any idea what, who's a random American brick dude? And then in 2003, the Princess Grace Kelly Challenge Cup was launched by the Royal Regatta, which was in memory of Grace Kelly, but also in memory of John Kelly, who they'd snubbed all those years earlier. Wow. I read he was nicknamed the most perfectly formed American male, which is quite an accolade to have.

Sexy. Yeah. That is, that's impressive, you know. It's because he's quite a high bar, it's not like the most well-formed man in ****. It's interesting, isn't it? Becoming a princess is such an odd thing. Like what have you done? Oh I've won an Oscar. Oh well I've secured the Grimaldi succession. Yeah. Actually because the current Monaco prince is her son Albert. Yeah and the reason they were so desperate to find her as you sort of allude to is that if he didn't have a son I think the Monarchy would have not existed.

They needed a child. They needed a son. So they had to take fertility tests. She had to be properly tested to check that she could have a children. She also had to have a virginity test, but it wasn't taken very seriously. It wasn't a grace Kelly. Grace Kelly did. And she, she would absolutely have flunked that because she'd had a love life before, you know, she had lots of boyfriends and things like that. Was it like a written test? Like a driving theory test? Was it like that?

Have you ever shagged anyone? Yeah, I think it was a formality rather than a originally observed thing. But I mean, still weird, you know. Gosh. Alec Guinness. No one ever gave him a virginity test as far as I can tell. Alec Guinness? Yeah.

No, as far as I know. He was called Alec Stephen until he was 14. I see. And then someone just said, oh, you're not called Alec Stephen, you're called Alec Guinness. Ah. What was his middle name from, I think his mom.

His mother married David Daniel Stephen. Oh, okay. So he was given his stepfather's name in day-to-day life. But on the birth certificate, he was actually Alan Guinness. But it was only when he was 14 that his mum just said to him, oh, by the way, that's not your name. The thing that everyone's been calling you for the last 14 years. That's not your name.

You know, this beer that everyone likes. Is that instead? We spoke earlier about how Andy, we were wondering whether you would be friends with Haldane. Oh, yeah, you know, whether you might be a bit much for you. I had sort of all the experiments and all the time. Yeah, I would probably would not see him a lot socially. Well, Alec Guinness, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, was a stickler for punctuality and for good service in restaurants of which he was a connoisseur.

He hated change, which in his opinion was almost always for the worse. And he hated any assaults on the English language, particularly those said on the BBC. Why, why are you assuming anything about how we would have clearly been the best of friends? I mean, we wouldn't have spoken much, but we would have approved of each other. Yeah, yeah. A silent nod in the street. It is weird, isn't it, that the thing he hated most of all is the thing that now he's best remembered for. Like most widely, you know, you can talk about The Bridge on the River

Kwai or you can talk about kind hearts and coronets, but he's best remembered for Star Wars, which he thought was basically a film for children and which made him rich, quite rich, you know, he got 2% of the profits. It must have been very rich, I imagine. It's a bit mealy-mouthed, isn't it? He would always say how bad the dialogue was and he was getting millions and millions from it. He claims he was taxed very heavily on those proceeds so really once all that was over he got tuppencehapenny you know. But he was embarrassed. Harrison Ford kept calling him mother superior on the set and he felt very old and out of touch.

It was the thing that everyone really knew him for. And people started to treat him as a kind of agony aunt for it, because Obi-Wan Kenobi is a kind of wise being. I've only seen styles once. I think he's like a wise man, right? I reckon he must be. He wears a cloak, doesn't he? Yeah, he's wise. There's no one who wears a cloak who isn't wise. There you go. Please write in with your examples of people who aren't. But yeah, people used to write to him and say, please, can you give me advice on this? He said an example of a request I would

typically get, he said this interview is, you know, a married couple wrote to me once saying we're having problems in our relationship. Can you come and live with us and sort them out for us? Please. Oh my God, that's a proposition though, isn't it? Yeah, that's a bit of a, uh, got a Schwingr vibes, hasn't it? The thing is, if you've played Hamlet, Shylock, Macbeth, and then you've played Obi-Wan, you must feel a bit like you've slummed it, because he was one of the great classical stage actors of the 20th century.

He took it really, really, really seriously. He did. His art. There's many people saying, not as good a stage actor as the true great. A level below the Olivier's and the Gielgud's, according to some. Oh, wow.

This is great, this is the slam. Sick burn. Even he said, I'm really only suited to smaller parts. feel-good according to some. Oh wow. This is great. This is the slam. Sick burn. Even he said I'm really only suited to smaller parts. It was very modest, wasn't he? I did find a bad review of his stuff. It mentions, foe of the podcast, Adolf Hitler, where a film he was in called Hitler the Last Ten Days from 1973.

And the telegraph said, in Hitler the last ten days, Guinness, having discovered through his usual assiduous research that Hitler was a boring man, unfortunately succeeded brilliantly in bringing this interpretation to the screen. I'm going to ask you a quick quiz question, quite a nice quiz question maybe, but Anna Guinness played Lawrence of Arabia in what did he play Lawrence of Arabia? Oh, was it in Lawrence of Arabia? It wasn't, James. God, you've made a fool of yourself. Have I?

He played King Faisal in Lawrence of Arabia. But bizarrely, two years before the film Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence of Arabia. It's a version I accidentally watched. I can see why there's shocked audiences in 1960 actually. There's your episode title. It's so nice, isn't it? I can't call it, I think it's Lawrence of Arabia. It just falls right into your lap, you know?

BBC sounds would have pit-a-pits. Okay, before he starred in Lawrence of Arabia, two years earlier, he played Lawrence of Arabia in a play called Ross. So he played him and then they were casting for Lawrence of Arabia and they were said, do you want to be in Lawrence of Arabia? Yeah. Wow. What a strange name for a movie about Lawrence of Arabia. Yes. And then after that guy from French, he put flour on his legs.

Okay, that is it. That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to get in touch with any of us on the show today, Andy, you can be found on? On Twitter at Andrew Hunter M. James? My Twitter is at James Harkin. You can find down on a stranded train somewhere, or you can get in touch with all of us by emailing podcast.qi.com or tweeting at No Such Thing, or going to Instagram, No Such Thing as a Fish, or you can go to nosuchthingasafish.com

to find all our previous episodes or links to our tour of the world. And if you don't wanna do any of that, you can just come back again next week where you'll find us here. As always, we'll see you then. Goodbye.