No Such Thing As A Fish - 584: No Such Thing As Drinking A Sock Full Of Custard

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

Dan, James, Anna and John Lloyd discuss postcards, Picasso, Foley and Fossey. 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 Get an exclusive 15% discount on Saily data plans! Use code [fish] at checkout. Download Saily app or go to https://saily.com/fish

Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of No Such Thing As A Fish. Andrew Hunter Murray is away on holiday looking for rare species of moss or perhaps covering his entire house in solar panels. I'm not sure what he's doing, but he's not here. And so in his place, we have the founder of QI, John Lloyd. Now, you'll all know John because he's been on this show many, many times, but if you're a new listener, then he is, he's like a master of British comedy over the last 40, 50 years.

He was instrumental in things like Not the Nine O'Clock News, Blackadder, QI of course, Spitting Image, if you were a fan of that back in the day, there's a really nice anecdote later on in this episode where he talks about that. Basically basically he's an all-around genius and I'm sure you'll enjoy his talents on this week's show I should quickly say because I know he would want me to that his son Harry who is a good friend of all of us he is in a band and they have a new single out the band is

called waiting for Smith so if you're interested in that then go to anywhere where you get your music or any bit of social media search for waiting for Smith and you will find all about that Anyway, without further ado, let us continue with another episode of no such thing as a fish with mr. John Lloyd I'm 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 James Harkin, Anna Tyshinsky and John Lloyd. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last

seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, that is Lloydy. So my fact is that Picasso inhaled his first cigar on the day he was born. Picasso was born at home on the 25th of October 1881. He had a very difficult birth and he was unusually small and undeveloped. The midwife wrote him off as stillborn. Oh no. Right. And literally parked him on a

side table while she looked after his mum. It was fortunate because Picasso's uncle, his father's brother, Salvador Ruiz Blasco, who was also a doctor, happened to be there and he was smoking a cigar, as you do in those days. And he strode over and puffed a great waft of smoke into Picasso's face and the baby went, aah! Oh really? In a horrible face and he lasered a huge yell and saved his life. Wow. Okay.

So he didn't enjoy his first smoke, like many of us it sounds like, he didn't embrace it first time round. Well he came round quickly because he was a lifelong smoker. In fact, he smoked until seven years before his death, age 91. But tellingly, he never inhaled. Oh, that's right. So there you are. Bill Clinton. Yeah, he died in 1973, which I worked out meant that he could,

in theory, have met Pharrell Williams, the pop star. Okay. And do you think they would have got along? Well, Pharrell was only three days old when Picasso died, and for all that time Pharrell was in Virginia and Picasso was in France, so at least one of them would have had to make quite a lengthy trip. Yes. Or a Zoom call. A Zoom call, yeah. What are you thinking we're missing out on by them not meeting? Why them two specifically? Well I just think Pharrell is a very very modern day name, right? And Picasso, for anyone who was born after he died, like myself, he feels like someone in the past.

Do you know what I mean? So I think it's quite surprising that those two could in theory have met. And of course Virginia, the home of tobacco, Virginia ready rubbed and so on, it would have gone on really well. Yes. Of course. He was baptized Pablo Diego Jose Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Crispiniano Maria de los Remedios de la Santísima Trinidad Ruy Picasso. Actually not. Because the priest made...

Well, you could have said that before I started. The priest made a spelling mistake. Oh, did he? He was supposed to be called Crispiniano, because St Crispin's Day, the 25th of October, was the day he was born. And the priest made a spelling mistake and called him Chipriano. Chipriano, which is a parameter of crisps. His first word, there's a legend behind that, that his mother says, which is that it was

pencil. So he seems like a child of destiny in a way. Yeah, Piz. I'm not allowed to do the accent on the show anymore, John. I just pronounced the English version. Is that slang for penis in Spanish as well? I think it might be. Is it? Well, pencil means little penis, doesn't it? Penicillus. Yeah. We'll never know what she was referring to

at the age of one and a half. They both could have been quite prescient, couldn't they? They were sort of his two leading tools, I would say, weren't they? We should say for anyone who's already switched off because we're talking about Picasso, his reputation has taken a bit of a dive hasn't it the last 10 years. I hadn't quite realised how much his mistresses were in basically all of his art. So it was sort of all about

his sex life and his shagging. And a lot of people do criticise the way that he exploited women and you know people say women were tools to be exploited for his art and he did once say every time I change wives I should burn the last one so that you know you can wipe the slate clean. The last wife or the last painting? The last wife. Oh okay. Yeah and he only actually married twice but I think he's referring to all his mistresses then. Two types of women he said, goddesses and doormats. Yeah. One of his early lovers Francois Chilot is part of one of my favorite facts, which is that she later married Jonah Sulk, who developed the polio jab.

Oh, that's a good fact. So she was basically Picasso's muse and then she married this guy who saved the world a little bit really, because so many people were dying of polio in those days. But people asked her later why she was attracted to such outstanding men and she replied, I think I am just as interesting as they. Lions mate with lions, they don't mate with mice. That's very good. I think wasn't she the only muse who left him? Yes, she was immune to his charms. She's such a, she's a nice person to read about after I suppose all these women who ended up according to some accounts destroyed. She just said he didn't know me very well at all. I'm very secretive. I smile politely but I don't agree and I didn't invest my narcissism

in being represented by him. I couldn't care less. And walked off. She wrote a book about him, a very famous book, Life with Picasso. I actually read it when I was like 15 years old sort of no library It's an amazing book and it basically caused a lot of problems when it came out because no one wanted to know this side About Picasso when it was released there were 40 intellectuals who signed a petition to have it banned and scrapped and pulped and intellectuals Yeah, they thought his reputation will yeah Including one of the major biographers who wrote numerous volumes on Picasso's life afterwards, saying that this should be in like a tabloid as opposed to a bookshop. Is that John Richardson?

Yeah, John Richardson. From 8 out of 10 cats that scammed him. Yeah, he was fuming. He was furious. But interestingly, she was asked about this in her 90s about this biography, and she said all these men who wrote that had never met me, didn't know what I was talking about, and she and John Richardson became really good friends despite him slagging it off. How interesting. Yeah and you will see her on Countdown, that's to Countdown. When Rachel Riley's off for maternity. Yeah, France Plus. Richardson argued that his art was almost parodying the machismo of Andalusian males

parodying the machismo of Andalusian males rather than him actually being like that, which I don't believe. It's a really interesting thing this I always believe that when you're at work if you're going to do it well you mustn't have an ego and I used to say for years and years you know Picasso famously didn't behave terribly well in all sorts of ways but I'm guessing that when he went in front of the easel that that all went away. And years later, I found this wonderful quote saying, when I enter my studio, I leave my personality outside the door as a Muslim leaves his slippers outside the mosque. He did spend a lot of time at the easel though, didn't he? Like, it's hard to find the exact

number of works that he did, but it was a lot. It's insane! 147,800, but that's not exact. That's according to, like, the official website. Yeah, they've done counting up and they, and we've lost a lot of it because in his early days he used to burn his bits of art to keep his fire going. Along with his wives. Yeah, I worked out that that's one work of art for every five hours, 25 minutes of his life. If he started as a baby and carried

on going until he met Pharrell that time. Which once you've had your first smoke, you might as well. Yeah. He also was responsible for a major art theft, which I hadn't realized because we'd mentioned before on the show that he was accused of stealing the Mona Lisa. He was interviewed by the police, right? Yes. He was, yes. Because of Polinaire, his friend shopped him to the police. Yes. And Picasso then went to court and denied he'd ever met him, even though he's one of his best friends. It's quite a low moment, isn't it? In their friendship, in their moral lives. That's probably the best indication of the power that Picasso had that he thought he

could Jedi his way through. The thing was when he described the person who actually stole it, the police did a sketch and the nose was on this side of his face and the eyes were on this side. But there's more to it, isn't there? Well, there is more to it, yes. So that was 1911, but actually in 1907 there were these two Iberian statues stolen from the Louvre. And I think there's just been a book written which puts all the pieces together, but Picasso had first spotted them in about 1904, fallen in love with them, told all his mates, loved these statues. They were put

in storage. Then they disappeared. Turned out they'd been stolen by this chap called Pierre Hay, and he was mates with Picasso and the dodgy Apollinaire. He was Apollinaire's secretary. He was Apollinaire's secretary, yes. But it turned basically Picasso's lover at the time, Fernande Olivier, said that he had lots of artworks around his house, and then he had these two statue heads under some clothes in his wardrobe. And she asked him about them once, and he said, oh, we shouldn't display them anywhere too prominent. And it turned out to be these two

stolen statues from the Louvre. And we assume that Pierre had given them to Picasso. Maybe Picasso would ask him to steal them. Some people say that Pierre couldn't have carried them both out under his coat, which is what he claimed. So maybe Picasso was there. It's a lot easier to steal stuff from the Louvre in those days, wasn't it? I was a piece of piss, yeah. Lousy security, didn't they? Yeah. I think there was a story that Pierrot once said to his girlfriend, I'm going to the Louvre today. Do you want me to pick anything up for you?

And then ironically, Picasso is the most stolen artist in history now. But I think it's largely because he made so much. Right. You can't help stealing one. You could have a sketch. Yeah. And the Folignor's secretary had something to do with it, I'm sure. Shifting his stuff back to... Yeah. So even when he was in his 70s and 80s, he was quite a womanizer Picasso. And whenever anyone came to his house who he fancied, he would make a little sculpture of a little man with an enormous phallus and then give it to them as like a love gift.

And- Did that work a high percentage of the time? It didn't work so often because he quite often did it in front of his wife. And anyone who'd be given this like phallic item was not allowed back in the house. Because his wife would just be like, well, you're obviously not coming back. Yeah, yeah.

And again, this is according to John Richardson. John Richardson. One ought to say, given all these sort of anecdotal things and the naughtiness, that he was an extraordinary painter. And those two statues you mentioned inspired him for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Yeah, which is a great painting. Which is described by John Golding, the art critic, as the greatest painting of the 20th century.

It was so influential. It's kind of cool for him to take, like, looking back at it now, if the ends justify the means, it's fine that he stole those things if they inspired those great works. Yeah, and no one gave us just about two random Iberian statues from 2000 years ago in storage. That reminds me not to have James as my lawyer ever tonight. We were gonna do a fact about them in the podcast the next week. He used to make some of his paints as well. There's a particular brown that he made which we only now know what the secret sauce was.

H2P? brown that he made, which we only now know what the secret source was. HP? No, not quite. It was his three-year-old daughter's poo. Oh, come on Dan, no. Poo-custle. Surely not. They've caught the article. Yeah.

He used to say that the best feces as well would be from a mother who the infant was being breastfed. Well I would say that, like, this is a three year old child, right? But definitely the poo of a much younger baby is a colour that you can't really see anywhere else in the world. Oh true, yes. I've never seen a felt tip the same colour as a nappy from a two month old. Well you've seen my tie though it's very similar. For listeners

John is wearing a tie which is like 50 shades of feces. Oh come on! But nice orangey baby feces. Yeah yeah yeah. The harmless kind. He also, I mean we're talking about his paintings but he predicted in his own lifetime that he would be more known for his poetry than his paintings. Picasso? Yeah, after his death. Did he? What did he do? He wrote over 300 poems and he also wrote two surrealist plays.

He can't really have believed. Because he was incredibly famous for his paintings throughout his life and no one was going, do you know Picasso? People should make more of your poems. Did he really think? Well, he probably thought they'll forget about it one day and my poems will live on after me. I think this is a common theme with artists though, you know, rock bands who always pick the wrong song is going to be successful and

hate the one that's famous. Yeah. Like John Richardson, it's always they're asking him in interviews about A. R. Tengkats does Countdown and they never ask him about his Picasso biographies to them. But like that Arthur Conan Doyle quote you must have touched before, that if in a hundred years I'm remembered just for Sherlock Holmes I would have considered my life a failure. Yeah, sorry mate. Embrace it. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast.

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And then you follow the instructions on the app to install the eSIM and basically Bob's your uncle. And you can get an exclusive 15% discount on your Sali eSIM data plan if you download the app and use the code fish at checkout. That's right. Do it now. Okay. On with the podcast. On with the show. Okay. It is time for fact number two, and that is James. Okay. My fact this week is that the national song of Saint Helena was written by a man who had never been there.

He based his lyrics on a postcard that he had seen. Incredible. Let's hear it. God save our great. That is the national anthem of St. Helena because it's a British territory. So did he base it on the stamp of the postcard? Here are another anthem called My St. Helena Island and is kind of the de facto anthem. It's not the official national anthem, but it's the one that all saints, as they're known

as in Saint Helena, would sing. And it was written by an American who is better known for his appearances on 8 Out of 10 Cat's Does Countdown called David Mitchell. Stunning. David Mitchell, he was nicknamed Old Saddlebags and he was a DJ on Ascension Island, which is, I was going to say nearby, it's not nearby, but it's the nearest place to St. Helena, because St. Helena is in the middle of the ocean. He became friends with some people from St. Helena and they suggested that he writes a

song for them. And he was a bit reluctant to do that because he's never been there but they sent him some postcards and he wrote this song and that's what happened, it goes My heart is drifting southwards to my home down in the sea to the Isle of St Helena where my loved ones wait for me We're having a lovely time, weather is changeable, food is awful, wish you were here Yeah, that's great

Genius It's really good. And he recorded them officially, the songs, and they made records of it. And he sent a bunch of records and pictures of himself to St. Helena as part of like, here's the merch that you can have. But he's not really known anywhere, even in his hometown in Memphis. But yeah, he's someone who's still around. I mean, it's not that long ago, right?

So I think he's dead. Do you? Oh, okay. The site, I saw. His family, he's, he's recently around. I mean, it's not that long ago, right? So I think he's dead. Do you? Oh, OK. The site I saw. I think his family, he's recently dead, I think. Right. But I might be wrong about that. But nobody's blown cigar smoke in his face yet,

so you can't tell. It's interesting in postcards, because both Matisse and Picasso used postcards to inspire some of their greatest work. Did they? So Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, for example, and Picasso used postcards to inspire some of their greatest work. Did you know? Les Demoiselles d'Avignon for example was based on a postcard that Picasso found. I did not know that. And did you know that it's not the only national anthem or national song, it's not strictly the national anthem that was written by

somebody who'd never been there. Did you know? Guinea Bissau on the west coast of Africa. The music was written by a Chinese guy called Xiao He, because the words were written by a separatist leader of the African party called Amukar Kabral, who was the leader of the African party for the independence of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde. And in 1963, he went on a delegation to China and they met this guy, And in 1963, he went on a delegation to China and they met this guy, Xiao He, and asked him to write the music. Really? Yeah. Literally last year in 2024, Xi Jinping held a welcome ceremony for the current president

of Guinea Bissau, who's a guy called Umaro Sissoko Mbalo, and they played the anthem. This is our well-beloved motherland. It feels like it's got an edge to it when you're being hosted by Xi Jinping as the president of tiny Guinea-Bissau and he's saying, here's your national anthem. We wrote it by the way. Don't forget it.

Well, if anyone doesn't know where St. Helena is, basically from Guinea-Bissau head west, and it's pretty much the first place you get to, it's like a tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic. It's so isolated when you look on a map. If you go on your Google Maps or whatever on your phone it is insanely isolated. We cannot find a way of getting there, you'll get a lot when you try direction. Exactly and there's like there's a lot of, I watched a few tourist videos for it where they said you can achieve all you need to see in a single day but why not

stay for three? It's just such a... Well, because that's when the next boat leaves. Yeah, possibly, right? Yeah. I should just say thanks to my sister-in-law's best friend who gave me a lot of information about St Helena, because she lives there. The national dish of St Helena is tomato paste sandwiches.

They're called Bread and Dance. And the idea is that if you're at a wedding, there'll be a big sort of table with a load of goodies on and everyone will dance around it and then you'll eat something from the table. And it's usually some bread and some tomato sauce. Yeah, pretty much. Because it's really hard to get a hold of fresh stuff there. Basically once a month you get a boat that comes in with fresh fruit and vegetables and everyone legs it to the shop. Six pack of Wotsits, which is £2 at Poundland in the UK is £4 on St Helena and a box of Cornflakes that's £2.85 in the UK is £7 in St Helena.

But there's not that much else to spend your money on. So you're not complaining. No, there's not a lot of going on. two very famous residents, as most people, if they think of St Helena, Napoleon being exiled there after Waterloo in 1815. And the other famous resident, you know who that is? No. Jonathan the Giant Tortoise. Oh, yeah. Who lives in the grounds of the governor's official residence, and he's 192.

Jonathan's still alive? Yeah. Still going. Pretty amazing. Yeah. It going, pretty amazing. Yeah. It was five when Queen Victoria was crowned. Probably he's died quite a few times and they've just replaced him with another Tartus. No, no.

Like SEO Trot. Yeah. He's not, he's terribly well, if I've got a quote about him. From him? Yeah, no, it's from his vet. Said, car bugger dude. It's from his vet.

Jonathan is now blind, but he still has a tremendous libido. Sorry, that's your Picasso notes. I kind of started off with the East India Company, who were doing lots of trade with the East and with Europe, and they needed somewhere to stop on the way because there's no Suez Canal in those days. So you go all the way around Africa and they would always call it St Helena on the way. And eventually they decided to put a colony down there. And the first laws included God was to be worshipped and served diligently and seaman were not allowed to stay on the island without permission. Oh really? If you were caught harbouring a

sailor you'd be fined £5. What's wrong with sailors? Should be inviting people I would have thought. Yeah I think they just didn't want anyone coming on the island who wasn't supposed to be there. Given it was only sailors who were going by. Yeah. Yeah who else are you going to get? Swimmers? Yeah. Do you know what the postcode is? Wasn't it Helena? No that's good. What? Well, it's STHL1ZZ, the point being it's a royal mail postcode.

And it had its own postcode, I think, but apparently people kept writing to St Helena and mail kept going to St Helens in Merseyside, which was just quite actually quite a long way to go from there. That's brilliant. Hard to know what to do with that mail when it drops through your doorstep. So they go from a Royal Mail postcode. Because that was the only way you could really get there for a very long time, which was the RMS St Helena.

And it was the Royal Mail ship that would bring all the post over. So you would sort of jump onto that in order to get over. And someone tried to post themselves out of St Helena actually, didn't they? Did they? Yes. So another thing that was used for by the Brits was in the Boer War, 1900 to 1902, they sent 6,000 Boer prisoners of war to this tiny place. God knows how they suddenly accommodated them.

And there was one prisoner of war called Andries Smorenberg who made this crate and he wrote on it, Cur curios only inside here. And then he climbed in and he got the crate put in a place where it was gonna be picked up by a passing mail ship, put a fake address on in London, filled it with like clothes and matches and water and bedded down for the 20 day journey. And sadly, even though,

there's also, even though he marks it with care and this side up, it was tossed around quite badly and he was very severely concussed. And then when they landed at Ascension Island, they got out sort of an unconscious damaged man and sent him straight back to St Helena. Oh, so he didn't die. Okay. He didn't die, no. They left him in someone's bin area for a few days. So St Helena and the RMS St Helena boat that you get there on, both of course named after

the actual St Helena, which I'm sure you knew, the mother of the Emperor Constantine and also a saint, famous for discovering parts of the True Cross, which she excavated from the Holy Land when she was visiting there. She excavated three crosses actually but she knew she'd got the real one when it created a miracle by curing a sick woman who touched it. But not only that, she also discovered the true nails that were holding the cross of Jesus onto the cross. The true hammer that was used to bang the nails in. No, that isn't mentioned in my research. But the nails were there and also uniquely the holy rope that Jesus was tied to the cross

with, which is unique. It's the only relic of the holy rope. How interesting, because I was taught at school that he was nailed and that the other thieves were tied on. Yeah. He wasn't tied. It could have been one of the thieves. I mean it's all made up isn't it?

We don't know where she was born, that's the thing. And there's an old British legend that she was a British princess, the daughter of old King Cole of Colchester. A very old soul fame. And Colchester has, on its coat of arms, it has the three nails that she discovered. Really? Yeah. Wow.

That's very cool. Well, this is interesting. So where do you think the second largest collection of St. Helinians? Saints. Saints is what they're called. The Saints are. Yeah. Well, I'm going to say St. Helens, I reckon, in Merseyside.

In Merseyside, In Merseyside. They got misdirected. It's not. It's Swindon. Is it? No. Swindelina, as it's known to the locals in Swindon. What does that make any sense?

Oh no. Like St Helena. Swindelina. Swindelina. There's about a fifth of what the current population in actual St Helena is in Swindon, so there's like 800 people there. What are they doing there? Well they were all given British nationalship in 2002 after the Falkland Wars and so if you want to go meet locals from St Helena go to Swindon. How cool!

Yeah. Didn't John Richardson move to Swindon? He did. He did move there because he worked out that it had the best transport links in the whole of the UK. Yeah, to get into London and to get to the gigs he needed to. That's right. God, he's more prolific than we've given him credit for, isn't he? Are we trying to get him on this show? What's going on here? OK, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that to go into the BBC's sound department in Maida Vale, you have to walk down a set of steps that are each one third concrete, one third carpet, and one third wood. This is amazing. I saw this fact, I should say, when I was just scrolling

through Facebook earlier this year, and Tony Way, who I'm friends with, he's a movie star. He's in The Edge of Tomorrow, the Tom Cruise movie. All right, clang. Yeah, he's also in a lot of British sitcoms, black books and I mean anything you can think of Afterlife with Ricky Gervais, he's part of it. He's a great actor. He was there and he took a photo of it and showed it and it's pretty amazing. So when I say that the staircase is a third of each. It's like you've got a runner down the middle but on the side it was different. That's a very good way of putting it. Yeah so this is where the BBC do their foley which is the sound effects, the extra noises that go into TV, radio and movies and they have a whole bottom floor

there which is pretty extraordinary when you get a walk through it. So I watched a video of Sean Keevney doing it, the radio. Another friend of yours, is he Dan? Actually is. Yeah, he actually is. So they have a kitchen that's set up and it's all miked up. And so you can make tea and you can slam cupboards and you can move bottles. So any time they need that, that's all done there. They have a room where it's just full of seaweed and sand and little mats that you can walk on that can create the sound of the ocean, done there. They have a room where it's just full of seaweed and sand and little mats that

you can walk on that can create the sound of the ocean, the forest with the magnetic tapes or compressed snow when you throw the mat on top of sand. Seaweed? Yeah. I mean, now that you say that. What noise is the seaweed making? Yeah. Is that the sound of seaweed?

That's a really good point. It must be artificial. It looked exactly like seaweed in the... Is it seaweed inside the water? No, no. This is just on the floor. That seaweed would just dry out in about... Well they've probably got a seaweed person who... The intern's job on your first day is to refresh the seaweed. It wouldn't have been seaweed. When I worked in radio when I started, we used to use quarter inch tape, recording tape, for lots of effects like walking through grass. You'd rustle that. Well that's what they had though, yeah. All this tape that was in piles. And I messaged Tony to say, is there anything else that you saw there? And he said there's also a Foley

coat. So it's made of different fabrics. It's a coat you put on, made of different fabrics with different kinds of zips and fastenings attached to replicate any kind of clothing sound that you want, but all in one coat, which is pretty amazing. That looks like it would be a really cool coat. No, Anna, how often have you been getting off a train and you're like, I need my ticket, and you've only got five pockets, but you've no idea which pocket it's in. And you're making a mad array of noises. HONK! Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz There's a very famous story about Mrs. Dale's diary, which was the sort of forerunner of the archers way back when. They were trying to get the sound of somebody opening a parcel. Mrs. Dale was delivered a parcel and they tried paper it and sound anything like it. Because famously in sound effects, often you think of a helicopter sounds like...

which we used to make using what's called a double ender, which is a wire with two brass plugs on the end. Right. It sounds like a helicopter because what a helicopter actually sounds like is not like what you think helicopters supposed to sound like. It's just very, very loud hum. It's a loud engine. You can't really hear what you're saying. So anyway, somebody undid their zip as an experiment and somebody said, what's that? That's an amazing sound. That's perfect parcel opening.

So in the script it comes Mrs Dale, oh hello there, ooh what have you got in there she said. Okay I'm seeing where the double ender name came from. I really hadn't quite realised that what being a foley artist entailed and I think I want it as a job. It's so cool if you're working in the films, basically they'll be sent the film and they'll come into a room and they've got all their props and often they've collected, I think all folio artists collect just like hundreds and hundreds of different props, bring them in, lay them all out and they've got a script which tells them

vaguely what sounds to make. But then they watch the film and live they try to imitate what the person's doing. So you see them sort of jerking around, clutching at something quickly, stomp, stomp, stomp. They have to grab a shoe, reach for a cloth. It's amazing, isn't it? It is amazing. And those items, like if it makes the perfect sound, you just want to keep it forever. And they get passed down from generation to generation. So I was reading an interview with someone called Alison D.ore and her former partner in Foley had retired and he gave her a copper towel bar with a koi fish on each end. And when you twisted it, it made a screech that sounded exactly like a startled cat. And he was like,

this is my pride and joy. I take it everywhere I go, but you can have it now I've retired. Wow. So good. The BBC, I wonder John, when you were saying that about the Foley sounds, was that live radio, the Foley was happening live along with it? I didn't do, I did very little actual live radio. No, you just, you just add the sound effects as you went along. So although you were recording live, of course, there was a famous, not famous to you, but to me, I used to do a radio show called The News Hudlines with Roy Hardy.

It was incredibly quick on the draw, a bit like a sort of Lee Mack of his day, very fast. And there was a sketch that involved a fridge. And in the script, the studio manager saw SFX door opens, and that's a standard BBC sound effect because the rattle of the door knob like that. And so it's, Rory said I'll just look in the fridge and there was a kind of he's oh a wooden fridge. It's a wonderful moment. It is amazing but it was really it was a very strong thing with the BBC for live radio, particularly comedy shows like The Goon Show. And there was a famous incident where in the script, Nettie Seagoon, who was played by Harry Seacombe,

was to be hit by a sock full of custard. And they tried all these different sounds. They couldn't get it. And Spike Milligan got so frustrated during rehearsal that he took his sock off. He grabbed an assistant, sent them to the BBC canteen to fill it up with custard, which they did, brought it back, walloped Harry Seacombe over the head with it.

And it still didn't get the sound that they need. But that story got out and the BBC got lots of complaints because this was in the last year of post-war rationing and they said you are wasting good custard. Do they not drink it afterwards out of the stock? Well, regardless of what they did. No, that is waste. Because they usually say on those programs, don't worry, the food was shared amongst the crew afterwards. Yeah.

Those bizarre sound effects. I remember I used to briefly produce a program called The Berkiss Wave, which was written by David Roemick and Andrew Marshall. And they used to take great pleasure in writing sound effects, impossible to do. And I remember one was SFX, Genghis Khan slices somebody's stomach off. Oh, wow. Which is quite a while that took to get right. What did you do? Well I went to the canteen, I got a fresh stomach. It is interesting, it's one of those unsung things in movies and television because without

those little sounds it doesn't have heft at all. When we did the first episode of Splitting Image, we decided not to have a laugh track because I don't know why. No time, I think. And it seemed completely boring because we used to make Splitting Image by recording the voice track first and then they puppeteers mimed to it. And of course they're made of rubber so when a puppet you know touched the desk and it was a pre-recorded thing nothing happened. So the two guys, two sound guys, absolute geniuses, stood up literally all night doing all the you know touching the table, banging each other's heads, you know

scratching their clothes and suddenly it comes alive. Well, no, it was an amazing thing because actually we owe the whole existence to those two guys. I was talking about this Foley artist called Alison D. Moore. I read an interview with her. It was really interesting. She said that there are more astronauts on earth than people working in Foley at the moment. What? I reckon that there's about 100 people doing Foley and there are more people who've been in space than that. She said that they can literally change the rating of a film by the sounds that they put in.

So, if there is, for instance, an oral sex scene, if they make it sound really filthy, then it can go up from a 15 to an 18. What's the, is it just like, like what? That's normal oral sex. That's how that sounds. I think that downgrades it to like a you, if you do that. It's important to say that the Foley is a specific thing, which is something that's made on the spot, isn't it? Not like a recording. Yeah.

That doesn't count as a Foley. So you get lots of sound effects artists. But I just wanted to give some people a hint of things, recordings that could be useful in other contexts. So for example, the roar of a leopard sounds like someone roughly sawing wood. Okay. Which is useful. Bill Bailey said, without the beat in the background, jazz basically sounds like an armadillo was let loose on the keyboard.

So if you wanted that sound... It's amazing though, because since BBC started recording their stuff and other massive production studios there's these huge foley archives that now exist and a lot of them have been made available to the public. So the BBC have over 33,000 of its sound effects that are just on a website you can download and use as part of whatever you want to use. It's open to the public. Hanna Barbera also is used a lot.

So Hanna Barbera that made the Flintstones and so on. Their sounds have been used in so many places you wouldn't expect. Multiple Mario Kart and Mario video games have the sounds that would have been used in the Flintstones that are sort of peppered all the way through. Really? Yeah. And they made those sounds by getting a pterodactyl to put their beak on a record player. On a record player.

Yeah. But it's yeah, it's pretty wild. And we missed, I think it was the first 10 years of any kind of recording with BBC Radio, until the arrival of a thing called the Blatner phone. It was only one machine that was recording all the radio output at the time that was coming from the BBC. And it wasn't a great recording necessarily, but the machine, the spools that would hold the tape were ginormous and the tape would be traveling at really high speeds, so it'd be traveling at five feet per second to record it which was really dangerous for anyone who had to monitor the tape because if it broke off it would be like shrapnel shooting out the tape and it was like a razor's edge you would be cut to pieces if it shot. Like a ninja. Yeah

yeah so it was incredibly dangerous. That's a great murder mystery that should be a Jonathan Creek episode. Yes that's true yeah and that would happen it would be more dangerous because eventually they got two of these machines the Bl Blatnophone, which meant that they could change tape on one while recording on the other. So that was a seriously dangerous thing. They used to have to wear heavy gloves and any time they were doing something that looked a bit delicate, they would run to the other side of the room in case it exploded on them. Hang on, presumably when you change the tape you stop the, you stop it. Yeah, yeah, but just, I mean, the thinking overheat, they had incidences basically where

it just got too much. It was the most dangerous job in the world working for the BBC in the 50s. It was. Out in the 70s. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hello everybody, this week we're sponsored by Squarespace. Yes that's right.

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That's right. So head there now. And I can't wait to hear all Swann updates. Okay, on with the podcast. On with the show. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show and that is Anna. My fact this week is that every year, tens of thousands of people attend Rwanda's annual gorilla baby naming ceremony. Isn't it sweet? It is good. It is sweet. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Nothing

dark to it. Which means to give a name in Nakinya Wanda, which is the language. And this is so cool. It's this whole full week of activities devoted to gorillas. And it's all about their conservation and their protection because it's a huge deal in Rwanda. And the highlight is this naming ceremony where they get, they've got a huge, really cool looking stage, which is a wicker sculpture of a gorilla or bamboo sculpture of a gorilla the size of a house. And then a celebrity and all researchers or who's the celebrity, lots of different celebrities. We'll get to the list. Probably some of your mates. John Richardson's gotta have a look at Namee a Gorilla.

John Keaveny goes there often, doesn't he? There are multiple characters who will come up on stage and then they'll name one of the new baby gorillas that's been born that year and a big picture comes up behind and they say, I name this gorilla and they give them sensible. They don't call them sort of Barry. Well, quite a lot of Arsenal footballers go there because Arsenal are sponsored by Rwanda. So they are, yes. The president's a big Arsenal fan. He is. Yeah. So in 2018, Alex Scott went in 2019, David Luiz went. In 2020, Hector Bellerin and Patrick Abameyang went. Abameyang named a 14 year old gorilla Legatego, meaning goal, and Bellerin chose Mugarriro, meaning defender.

So it's like appropriate stuff for them. So maybe next year they'll be runner up or smashed by Paris Saint-Germain. So do these poor gorillas have to wait sometimes nearly a year before they get a name? Yes I suppose they do, they probably have a holding name. They might have their own name in their own language and they might not care what we call them. I doubt it. They're on tentinets.

No they couldn't, I don't know about the grillers, but did you know that marmosets are the only non-human primate that call each other by name? Do they? Yeah, and they say, hello Barry. And they always Barry. Always Barry. It's got pointers really. Of course it may not be their name at all, it may be just their... It's just a burp. Idris Elba called, they get big names called one Narame meaning long life. David Attenborough is obviously named one. But yeah, it sounds really fun. And the idea is to protect gorillas. And the story of protecting gorillas in Rwanda is an amazing success story, isn't it? So they- Diane Fossey. Diane Fossey, yes, who I'm sure we'll talk about. It's estimated that one mountain gorilla

and it's mountain gorillas there, so there are four species and subspecies of gorilla, but one mountain gorilla can generate three million dollars during its lifetime from tourism and that all goes back into conservation, to protection, to the extent, and I found this really interesting, so there are, like I say, four species and subspecies of gorilla. There's West and Lowland, of which there are between 150 and 300,000. Remember that. There's Cross River Gorillas, of which there are about 300. Mountain Gorilla, I think there are about 800 to 1,000. And Growers Gorilla, 6,500. All are critically endangered endangered except one,

which is just endangered. Right. Now, have you memorized all the figures? Yeah, the Lowland Western Gorillas, you said. There you go, the Western Lowland, 150 to 300,000, surely they're just endangered. No, they're critically endangered and the Mountain Gorilla from Rwanda

is the only one that's only endangered, even though there are only 800, because their numbers are going up. Because they're going up. But I think that's how they do it, right? No, of course it's how they do it. That's what they're doing. But I think there's an extraordinary discrepancy between 300,000, 800, but only one is particularly endangered. And it's kind of surprising that they're going up, well, certainly over the last 30 years or so, because they had a big old war in Rwanda. Yeah. Yeah. And in actual facts, there were 16 gorillas killed during that civil war. But the population

still is a problem now. Gorillas or guerrillas? I should check that actually. That's not about any less. What do you call a gorilla with a machine gun? I don't know, Sean. But yeah, basically the gorillas moved up into the mountains away from all the humans and all their violence. And so that's why their numbers went way higher. And also none of the factions wanted the bad publicity of killing gorillas. Yeah. So yeah, they... Although, and that is amazing, but the mostly the reason, because it is such a success story,

is because Rwanda has run an extraordinary protection program since then, which basically means that they're... How have they stopped the poaching? Is there a sort of security force? There's just been an amazing investment in local communities. So a lot of the poachers, because people, I always think poachers get a bad rep, largely they're poaching for survival, right? These were people in a country that were so poor, people were struggling, and the poachers are now involved in conservation. So there are a lot of poachers who do various tourist things now, and it's just giving them real national pride in this thing, like this

big ceremony. Which means it literally doesn't happen. Yeah, because they worked out, as you say, one gorilla can bring three million in an entire lifetime. So it's more profitable now to be a tourist guide rather than to kill one and get a one-off payment. And so and so that I mean it has largely come down from the stuff I've read to Diane Fosse I mean, I know she's the ambassador name But she really kind of she moved there back in the 70s plopped herself on the side of the mountain When there was virtually no one doing that she she was given a name which was the woman who lives alone in the forest By all the locals big Big ceremony, was it?

Yeah. Yeah. Natalie Portman came along. I'm going to have to wait a year before they thought of it. But yeah, so Diane Fossey, the reason she went out there was this was off the back of a man called Louis Leakey, who we've mentioned before. One of my favorite people in the world of paleoanthropology. Had wild theories and also had a lot of discoveries about ancient versions of Homo sapien and so on.

A few episodes ago we had to fade you out when you started going into this kind of thing. Well he thinks that the reason that we became the dominant species of planet Earth is because we were too smelly to eat as we were in the wild. He's a brilliant guy. But he thought that the people who should go out and study apes should be a single woman with no scientific training. He's very much the Picasso of the paleoanthropology world in that he was a bit dubious with women. He had a lot of researchers around him who were, let's say, at his whim. He was a bit deviant, but he did amazing things. Did you say he was your favorite?

Do you know what? We can edit that. But he picked Diane Fossey. He thought she'd be perfect. And he said to her, the only thing that you need to have to go out there is no appendix. And so she took her appendix out to go. Someone else must have taken it out. Yeah. So a doctor took it out and then she got a letter six weeks later from him saying, by the way, that was joking about the whole appendix thing. No! Yeah. No.

Yeah, it was too late. She already did it by then. That's the problem with deadpan humour. If you don't put the emoji afterwards, people don't get it. She's quite controversial though, Diane Fosse, right? Absolutely. I read that once she captured, or her associates captured a poacher, stripped him of his clothes, laid him spread eagle on the ground and lashed his genitals with nettles. Yeah, that's all about it.

And she thought basically the way that you deal with poachers is not like Hannah says, improving society and giving them other ways of making money. You should just beat it out of them. Yeah. I mean that to be fair is kind of the twist in her story is that she arrived as a conservationist. She learned so much about gorillas, wrote that incredible book.

What was it called? Gorillas in the Mist is a movie based on her, right? Yeah, but that's off her book. So she wrote a book, which was a memoir of her time there. And then when poachers killed a gorilla that she'd really become close with, they lobbed the gorilla's head off.

That's... That's right. There was a turning point where she goes from conservationist really to poacher killer. And she was furious. And anyone who was in her way was part of the problem. So even the anti-poaching league, she thought, no, you're part of it as well. And to be fair, she had a horrific time in her early days there. She was kidnapped by rebels.

She was sexually assaulted. She had a lot of bad times there. ALICE Yeah, she was tough as nails, woman. I mean, bad child at tough times there. Extraordinary person. But then she did go a little bit... well, she just went hard line, didn't she, towards the end? And sort of beat up poachers, which is is quite hardcore and I actually had no idea that she was murdered, Tyanne Fossey, until we started this. It's just such a wild story. So Digit was decapitated by the poachers and his hands cut off to make ashtrays out of. And she was horribly murdered, she was found dead in her cabin and bizarrely blamed on a jealous fellow researcher in absentia who I don't think was ever really solved but I think we assume it was angry poachers. Yeah, we still don't know.

There's so many theories out there. And she's still there, though. She's buried in the gorilla cemetery. Next to Digit. She's buried next to Digit. Yeah. Gorillas, though. Amazing... amazing animals.

They get high by spinning in circles. That's a new discovery. Oh yeah. Yeah. And that was, like, I really love this bit of science. Basically, there was a viral clip that went around of a gorilla spinning around and they thought, oh, that looks fun. Let's see if anyone else does that. And then they did more research and found out that, yeah, they do do that.

If you will withhold drugs from the kids, they'll find a way, won't they? They make a, you know how we make a big deal about lions and tigers roaring? I think the gorilla roar is the most frightening. So they do that and then they make the belch sound, which is their other main kind of vocalization. And that's a little sort of like a little burp or a growl, which says, I'm here, don't worry, I'm your friend. And so if researchers are working with gorillas, then they learn to make that sound straight away to reassure them because you're in the jungle, you don't have that good visibility, so it's not as much about facial recognition. Although the other thing that researchers have to do is learn to memorize,

and this is something that I think was pioneered a little bit by Diane Fossey, but learn to memorize their nose prints so that after a few months you can spot one 50 yards away and immediately know. Well that makes sense. Barry! Yeah, that's great. Is it that obvious what the prints are or do you have to get really close? Because like fingerprints you need to put your fingers in ink right? It's definitely more obvious than that. It's like wrinkles on a

face, on quite a wrinkly face. Okay. I noticed you were looking at me when you said that. I was looking past you. Do you know that when you arrive into Rwanda, they go through, like any airport security, you know, there's certain countries you can't bring fruit in and so on. Do you know what you're not allowed to bring in to Rwanda? Drugs. Not drugs. Oh, you are allowed to bring drugs. No, it's just not the answer I'm looking for.

Okay. What's the answer you're looking for? Plastic bags. If you go to the official tourism website, that's on there saying you will be stopped and you can get in serious trouble if you're trying to smuggle plastic bags into the country. 12 months in prison for using plastic bags. Wow. Is it?

You're joking. 100%. The fine of up to $540. Now that law is really in place for large companies who are breaking the law. Like if you or I brought a plastic bag in, we probably wouldn't get 12 months in prison, but it is actually on the law books. That is the, that's the punishment. Yeah. I remember that happening. We all thought mad, imagine living without plastic bags. And now we all sort of do. We don't do we? That's a lie.

We just pay our IP and suck it up. I think even though we've had all this talk of gorillas, the favourite animal in Rwanda is the cow. They're obsessively into cows. It's great. And so there's lots of dances inspired by cows. So you've got the kind of Rwandan ballet, which is inspired by cows where women emulate cows movements. Maybe they're more graceful in Rwanda. Like what does a cow do? It just stands there for ages and occasionally eats a bit of grass. What I, gentle is what I read and I actually didn't watch it. So gentle movements. It's a bit of swaying sometimes. Swishing away a fly. It's the tail. The tail. It's all in the tail.

It's very unique. All Rwandan women have tails. Did I not mention that? Oh, is that right? Yeah. If you want to wish someone well, you say, may you have a cow or have thousands of cows. Same in America. Don't have a cow, man. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

It's like Helena, cowabunga, as the turtle says. Yeah. Okay. There's a lot of crossover. But they also love milk, and instead of going to a bar in Kigali, capital of Rwanda, you will go to a milk bar very often. And I think this is since the 90s when after the genocide there was massive urbanization and crops were decimated, a lot of cattle were were massacred and everything changed and a lot of people missed that agricultural connection and now they all go to milk bars and drink some milk. Are they alcoholic milks?

No. You can get that. They are not. Are they really? So they claim. It might be that they're all getting pissed, but they're all claiming they just like a hot or a cold milk. There's also a thing called the Goringa program, which is the idea that the government will

give every poor family a cow. And over the years, they've given over 400,000 cows to different families. And the idea is that you can use them in your to fertilize the land, you can help drink the milk. If you're not living in the city. I was thinking you're sitting there in your flat in the city, third floor with your cow in your lounge, I'm going, what the fuck are we gonna do with this? Oh man. Do you think the naming ceremony is based on the sort of human name, because there are lots of those

around the world, aren't there? Yeah, it is, it's big in Rwanda, giving the name, the name that you give someone determines their life. They are born, they have their first cigar, and then you have a big ceremony where you name them and all of the family members come along and some people suggest different names and then they decide which one they're gonna go with

and it's a big old party. And it's usually Idris Elba who it comes down to, the decision in the end, he's a very busy man, but. The ancient Romans had one called Deus illustricus, or purification day, that was what the naming day was called. According to Plutarch, until the baby had a name and the umbilical cord fell off, they were regarded as a plant rather than an animal. Really?

Yes. It was only when the umbilical cord fell off. I thought it was like a stalk. Yeah, I guess you're rooted to something. So this is a thing I didn't know. I knew that from somewhere that ancient Roman women had very small choice of names, but if you were called Claudius, for example, you had a daughter, she'd be called Claudia. You wouldn't have her own name. And if you had a second daughter, she would be called Claudia Minor and the first one would be called Claudia Major. If you had a third daughter, she would just be called Claudia Tertia, you know, Claudia the third

until... I think Julius Caesar had like four sisters all called Julia. Yes. Really? Yeah. Wow. In Hungary, there's a Hungarian naming day. Have you heard of this?

So the idea is that a name is associated with one day of the year and a lot of people will celebrate their name day rather than their actual birthday. Oh yeah, I think that happens in a few... I think we've discussed that quite recently, haven't we? Often the same day. Oh, right. It's all like Ghana, where they name kids after the day of the week. Yeah, right. So in Akan, for example, Kofi, as in Kofi Annan means born on Friday, and Kwasi, as

in Kwasi Kwatei means born on Sunday. Really? And Liz, as in Liz Truss means born yesterday. A bit of three-year year old satire there. Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. You can find us all on our various social media accounts.

I'm on Instagram at Tribaland. James. My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin. Jon, you're on Instagram. I'm Jon Lloyd QI. Nice. Anything you want to plug while we're here? Well I really want to say my son Harry, who you all know is an amazing band called Waiting for Smith and they've got a great new single coming out called I Got That Smiling For

You which I think is going to be his smash thing. Waiting for Smith on Instagram or all the other platforms. Nice. And if you want to get to us as a group, Anna? You can email podcast.qi.com or you can go to Instagram at No Such Thing As A Fish or tweet at No Such Thing. Yep, or you can go to our website, nosuchthingasafish.com.

You can find all of our previous episodes up there. There's links to some live shows that we're doing. There's bits of merch. There's the gateway to Club Fish, the membership club where we have bonus material popping up every fortnight. It's a really fun place. Check it out.

Otherwise just come back here next week because we will be back with another episode and we will see you then. Goodbye. ["Skyfall"] ["Skyfall"] ["Skyfall"] ["Skyfall"]

["Skyfall"] ["Skyfall"] ["Skyfall"] Can you do some foley? I'm just gonna walk over there. Yeah. ["Skyfall"] ["Skyfall"] ["Skyfall"] ["Skyfall"] That's offensive. He's not that heavy. Can you do some foley? I'm just going to walk over there. Yeah. That's offensive, he's not that heavy.

And I'm back. I just went to the I just went to the bookcase because staring me in the face is this book, The Annals of London. And it's by John Richardson wow. Oh my god. He's by another John Richardson. He is so good. What a coincidence.

This guy's amazing. He's a polymath. How does he get time to do the...