No Such Thing As A Fish - 608: No Such Thing As A Chocolate Sausage

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

Live from the Cheltenham Literature Festival, Rachel Parris joins Dan, James and Andy to discuss baboons, breakouts, Beethoven, and bottom stainers. 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

Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, live from the Cheltenham Literature Festival with a very special guest. It was our good friend, Rachel Paris. Yes, Rachel's been on the pot a few times before, and she was at Cheltenham, partly because she has a brilliant new book out. It is a Pride and Prejudice sequel of sorts. It's all about Charlotte Lucas, who you might remember marries Mr Collins, big mistake. And Rachel's book is called Introducing Mrs Collins, and it's all about what happens next.

And it reintroduces basically the whole cast of Pride and Prej, but with a focus on Charlotte, Lucas, it's a really great book. I've just finished reading it. So much fun. It's got a lot of really funny lines in it, and it's exciting, too. Any fans of Austin or Pride and Prej, I think, will really like it. And I hope you really like this episode of Noses Singers of Fish as well. But if you would like a longer episode, this one has been really beautifully honed down by your your lovely editor, James Harkin.

But if you would like the full, almost an edited version, that is possible by joining Clubfish. Yes, Clubfish is our members' club. It contains all kinds of stuff. It contains longer episodes. It contains ad-free episodes. It contains bonus material of all varieties. If you want to find out any more,

just go to our Patreon. Which is patreon.com slash no such thing as a fish. It's so much fun stuff there. Check it out now. Yeah, it's really good. If you can join it, really helps us to make the podcast, which is what we intend to do for the rest of our lives. But one important thing to say is that this podcast that you're listening to right now on the main feed

is always going to be free. The other stuff is just for bonus. It's just for extra. It's just if you really want more. Anyway, sit back relax and listen to this episode of No Such Things of Fish with Rachel Paris. On with the show. On with the podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast, this week coming to you live from the Cheltenham Literature Festival. My name is Dan Shriver. I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Rachel Paris, and once again we have gathered around the microphones. our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Rachel.

Ooh, right. My fact is, in 1764, the Earl of Sandwich read a long, erotic poem out in the House of Lords as revenge for a fellow MP setting a baboon on him. That is an amazing fact. There's a lot of different components to that, Lots to process.

Lots to process. Is it the Earl of Sandwich who invented the sandwich? Is it the same guy? I don't know. He's the fourth Earl of Sandwich, John Montague. Is it the right one? It was. I read into it.

So we name the sandwich after him, but it feels like we should name all this other stuff after him, really, doesn't it? It's more notable. I think if an erotic poem was called a sandwich, it wouldn't be as sexy. Do you think so? I just think the word sandwich is inherently cotidienne, you know? I just think it's... No, I disagree.

Yeah. Sounds like a three-neutral. person activity, doesn't it? It'd get you fired off the Strictly tour. Let's just say that. John Wilkes, who was an MP and went on to be famous for so much more important things

than baboon prankery. And Thomas Potter wrote an essay on woman, which was a parody of Alexander Pope's essay on man. And basically, they were all members of a thing called the Hellfire Club, of which there were lots of different iterations. And the Hellfire Clubs were

like very irreverent they like were blasphemous that was their whole thing blasphemy and and and pranks and one of the pranks that john wilkes did was he he got a baboon it was other accounts say it was a mandrill look don't sue me um and like dressed it up and painted it up to look like the devil and released it at one of the meetings of the hellfire club right and it basically came for the earl of sandwich and the ear of sandwich kind of had a moment and i mean you would be scared if a baboon came at you. How dangerous is a baboon? Are you joking?

The thing is that he wasn't massively worried about it being a baboon. He genuinely thought it was the devil. Yeah. And obviously, with his name sandwich, meaning something so sexy, he obviously thought that the devil had come for him. And he said, when the baboon came right to his face, he said, I know, I'm just,

I'm not as bad as sinner as all the other people here. Oh, really? Yeah, he dug his friends in it and said, look, he's much worse than me. Go and get him, devil. But it was a baboon. so it didn't have the capacity to... Or a mandrill.

Or a mandrel. But Dan, just say, baboons can do a lot of damage. I wasn't questioning it. I was sort of, it was a rhetorical question. It's like, obviously, if you let a baboon loose in my house, I'm not going to just say, all right, kids, have fun. It's like, how come no one got savaged, is my question.

I don't know what happened apart from the... Yes, him saying, I am but half a sinner and saying everyone else here is more, is worse than that. But essentially, after that, In the 1760s, John Wilkes and the Earl of Sandwich, who had been great friends, then had fallen out after this event. And so to get him back, John Wilkes and Potter had written this, yeah, this erotic, sort of erotic satirical poem.

And Samuage, the Earl of Samuich, tried to dobb him in, basically, in the House of Lords, and he read it out in full, accusing him of seditious libel, and it worked. And it's really rude as well. Has it has F-bombs in it, which. which you wouldn't think for the 1700s, but it does. And what's weird is the subject of this piece was a courtesan in London called Fanny Murray. Any relation?

Yes. So Granny Fanny Murray, right? The subject... Granny Fanny, as we call it, yes. She's the subject of this piece. It's lucky. that she rhymed so well that she's in this poem, isn't it? But the Earl of Sandwich, who was reading it out,

actually had had an affair with Fanny Murray. So it was really odd because he was sort of reading about this woman who he secretively had had an affair with. Wow. Yeah. Rich seems. It's one of the dirty phrases that was in the poem, actually. Well, when the Earl was reading it out,

there was one lord who shouted for him to stop in the chamber of the House of Lord. So this is appalling, this is outrageous. The other Lord were all shouting, Go on, go on. They wanted to hear a bit more of it. Wilkes fled to France, I believe. But it also, this incident collapsed Sandwich's reputation too. He had a really bad reputation for a long time after this.

He's an amazingly interesting guy. I don't know if you guys researched Sandwich himself. He was First Lord of the Admiralty on three separate occasions. And his main job was improving the Navy. But the main means he had to do that was to show interesting models of ships to the king to try and interest him to... Really? Yeah, so he just had to take him, like, he had to commission models of ships.

That feels like a job you were made for, Andy. I would absolutely love to do that. Your Majesty, I have some new Hornby stuff, if we'd like to talk about the railways. He had to commission a model of the historic dockyards. They weren't historic at the time. They were just called the dockyards. But, yeah, he was a fascinating guy. He was once described, The Earl of Sandwich,

is looking like he was walking down both sides of the street at once. What does that mean? What does it? What a slam? Yeah, I mean, for the seven. In 1900s, it's stunning. Does it mean he was corpulent? I just think it meant he walked funny.

Oh. He was a bit, or he was indecisive? I can't pass it. Because I think he was. And actually Sandwich and Wilkes, if you look at those two as a pair, they really liked insulting each other. And they did it in Parliament quite a lot. So there's a really famous time when that happened, which was when Sandwich said to Wilkes,

I don't know whether you'll die upon the gallows or by the pox. and Wilk said, that depends, my lord, whether I embrace your principals or your mistresses. Boom! So that's like a famous one. Very good. It's an absolute zinger. The others, you are a fat, greasy, unprincipled villain.

Not quite as much of as Zika. It's not, but it's... But Wilkes, one of the slurs they used to throw at him was they used to say he was the ugliest man in England. And he kind of, eight-mile M&M style leaned into that, And quite, he owned it. He used to say, yeah, but after half an hour with my face, that goes away and the charm comes through. And he also used to say that if there was a rival who was a good-looking man and they were both going for the same girl,

if he was given a month-long advantage, he could win her over if the other guy was then introduced. But he needed a month. I read that he was advised never to risk showing his face to a pregnant woman. Wow. Wow. Interesting. Because she'd get pregnant twice, baby. I want to tell you more about the Hellfire Club, of which there were several iterations,

and I think it's a cool name. So different clubs were like, we're the Hellfire Club as well. But the OG Hellfire Club was founded in 1718 by the Duke of Wharton, and then it was sort of carried on by Sir Francis Dashwood in the 1730s, which is when the baboon incident and all of this. was happening. It wasn't really called the Hellfire Club at that point until later it was known as the Order of the Friars of St Francis of Wickham, which I think sounds quite... That is a rebrand and a half. Yeah, isn't it? I think it's quite Monty Python to call it that.

So they called it Francis after Francis Dashwood and they met in High Wickham in these sort of man-made caves, which is where what I will keep referring to as the baboon incident happened. But it was very irreverent. They would like come to meetings dressed as members of the Bible for a laugh. They like lewd ceremonies. They had orgies. They got to mischiefs general. I like that the original Wharton Hellfire Club was not a gentleman's club. It accepted men and women equally. Okay. Quite progressive. And its motto was, do what thou wilt. Oh. Lovely. I like that. I like that. Yeah. Well, I think Granny Fanny used to go there as well, dressed, dressed as a nun,

because they used to get women to dress up as nuns. I mean, she, again, like, what a spectacular figure. She was so famous in her day. She was written about by Casanova. She was part of the Hellfly Club. She was read out as part of a poem in Parliament. Well, a bit like Emma, who's Mrs. Hamilton's mistress? Hamilton. She had a similar reputation, right? Yeah, exactly. She was part of the famous Harris's list, the sort of yellow pages of women of the night that was compiled in Covent Garden. Why are they yellow? Carry on. So this was a book that you could literally buy and it would tell you the address in the name of the women who were living in central London, who were sex workers, and they would all have a check for venereal disease

ahead of being able to be put into the book, and they had to pay for their listing. It's almost like the Edinburgh Fringe Guide. Like you get a little blurb, you pay your money to get that in there. No photos at the time, but yeah. And just on Wilkes, who was the other character you mentioned about Sandwich. So Wilkes became, you said that he went to France, he had to flee. to France. Well, the reason was he had a paper, like

a journal called the North Britain and in issue number 45, he argued that they should change Parliament and change the way that democracy worked. And everyone agreed, apart from the people in charge. And it became this massive thing. The number

45 became absolutely massive. If you said 45, it meant that you were a dissident and you were against the government and they tried to stop people from saying it. People would write 45 on the wall. They would meet in groups of 45 and eat 45 dishes. When Wilkes was arrested, he was then released, and the club drank 45 drinks to him

between 7.45pm and 12.45 a.m. Wow. Yeah. That's amazing. One extra tiny little nugget about John Wilkes is that there's a few pubs in London that carry his name. There's one called the Three Johns, of which he is one of the three. There's a statue you can see of him. But also, he was the middle name of a presidential assassin. John Wilkes Booth.

The Wilkes was a tribute to, and many sources actually say that he's a distant relative. Because I know Sheree Booth, Tony Blair's wife, is a distant relative of the John Wilkes Booth family as well. He supported the rebels in the American War of Independence. That's right, yeah. Who did? Wilkes. Wilks. So maybe that's a factor.

I have a link to this. Guess what? The Boston Tea Party. which, you know, in many ways kicked off the American Revolution, contained sandwiches because the Earl of Sandwich was present. What? How good is that? The Earl of Sandwich. What do you mean? It wasn't an actual tea party. No, well, he was not an actual sandwich.

He must have thought such an idiot when he's walking around with his... I brought... I got one of the M&S platters. I hope you don't mind. Some are veggie, some are not. Got shit loads of Battenberg here. Eminest platters. You're playing to the Cheltenham crowd, aren't you? Can I get it? Yeah, yeah. So, no, this is an audience fact. He got emailed in by Jessica Ringgeisen,

so thank you so much, Jessica. The Earl of Sandwich, when he was First Lord of the Emeraldty, was in Boston when the Tea Party broke out. I just think that's lovely. He watched it from a window overlooking the wharf. How lovely. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Can I just say two tiny things. Because what led me to talk about that erotic poem was I was looking at the rise of Romantacy. And the Victorians were absolutely obsessed with flagellation. and I just wanted to tell you quickly that Algern and Swinburne wrote a 94-stands a poem in the Victorian area called Reginald's Flogging

and also that John Camden Hotton wrote a comic operator called Lady Bumtickler's Revels. Ooh! And we don't mean the chocolate snack, the delicious chocolate snack, do we? Who knows? Stop the podcast! Stop! the podcast.

Hi everybody. Just wanted to let you know this week's episode of fish is sponsored by Babel. Babel, our favorite language learning people. Did you know, Andy, that studies show

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on with the podcast. On with the show. We do need to move on to our next fact, so let's do it. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is, the Japan's greatest ever prison escape artist escaped four times twice by using his own miso soup. What?

So this is the story of Yoshi Shira Tori. Oh, that's nice. He was a prisoner, and there was a prison in Japan which has made itself a museum. Well, it was closed down as a prison, and then it became a museum. It didn't just, like, vote among the inmates. You're doing 20 to 25, but we could just be curators, couldn't we?

It's a nicer life. So he was a Japanese man, born in 1907, As a young man, he got into trouble. He fell in with a gang, and during a robbery of a shop, one of the gang stabbed a shopkeeper, who very sadly died. Shiro always maintained he'd never actually committed that murder. It was just part of the gang, but he was jailed. And yet, he launched this incredible career escaping from four different prisons,

progressively harder prisons as well. It's really interesting, but what's miso soup got to do with it? Well, I'm glad you asked me, James. So he escaped the first couple of... of times just through slightly different methods. I mean, they were both very impressive as well. And we should say the details of this, they're a little bit hazy. He has definitely become a folk hero in Japan.

There's a statue of him in the prison that he was kept in. But prison number three, they thought, right, you've escaped from two hard prisons. This is a nightmare. And he was put in special extra heavy handcuffs that were impossible to get out of. And every day, he would drip a little bit of his miso soup onto the cuffs. And slowly it would erode the handcuffs over time. And eventually, after a couple of years of doing this, he managed to, okay, it's a bit gross. He dislocated his own shoulder, but that was necessary so he could get out of the incredibly

narrow slot that the soup was delivered through. What? I know. Wow. As I say, folk heroes, some of the details are hazy. And he was gone. And then, so they thought, right, this is a nightmare. We're going to put you in a cell where there is one window, which is the size of your head.

Try getting out of that. Because previously he'd done a lot of great work getting through windows. Make it smaller than his head. That's a good point. Well, he thought, I'm going to reverse you, Percy, this. He went upside down, and he had a miso soup bowl, and he used that to dig his way out of the prison. And eventually he was given a shorter sentence.

The thing I like about the digging is that, so Shawshank Redemption style, you've got to get rid of all of the rubble. And apparently, to this day, they have no idea where he put any of it. ate it. Did he... Oh, well, there we go. Just a guess.

Good guess. Good guess. I don't think it's the right guess. No, but it's a good one. It still happens. Like, incredible daring escapes from jails still happen. There was one that happened in France, near Leon, very recently, where one prisoner left,

and then they discovered that actually two had left, and it's because a second prisoner had snuck himself into the laundry bag that the guy was carrying over his shoulder. No. That's so basic. Yeah, just walked out with him, this guy, just in this hessian kind of laundry bag hanging over his shoulder. I think it was as simple as that. I've got this slippery guy.

Choi Gapbach, who had practiced yoga of 23 years. He was arrested on suspicion of robbery. This was, relatively recent times, was put in a detention cell. Stayed there for five days, and he applied skin ointment. I don't know where he got skin ointment from. Must have been very low security prison slash spa.

He put it on the upper part of his body and slipped out by squeezing through a tiny food slot, like you describe. The entire escape took 34 seconds, apparently. Wow. The space, in case you're wondering, he was 5'4 foot 4, the space was just under 6 inches tall

and 18 inches wide. See, what kind of food are they delivering that requires such a tall... Maybe like a wedding cake? I know, as it what? Panatoni? We will not collapse their soufflis for them. They have to get a whole one.

No, sir, why don't you put the sausage inside? I looked into other corrosive soups. Oh, terrific. So apparently, I couldn't, I don't have the scientific know-how to have understood all the articles I read, but there seems to be an understanding that canned chicken noodle soup is corrosive to metals. Even though it's in a metal.

Yeah, because it starts to corrode the metal that it is inside, and therefore it can, after some years, be quite bad for you. Oh, interesting. But I wonder if he'd used chicken noodle soup, it might have worked as well. Well, there is a prisoner who was called Juan Lopez, who, and I don't think this is true, because the story is that he escaped a Mexican prison using his own salsa. Again, to corrode the bars of his cell. And actually, Mythbusters, the TV show, experimented with this,

and they found that only if you could consistently add electricity, if you could use electrolysis, you could corrode the bars using the salsa. but he probably didn't have access to that on the inside. Right. So that seems to not be true, I think. Wow. Okay, here's a quiz for you. Stephen J. Russell, American con artist, sent to prison.

He escaped using a green felt tip. What did he do? He coloured his food and said, this is so badly off that I'm going to need to pass it back through the food slot. And they disguised himself as a sausage. Yes. Did he use the filter pen to make some part of his body look really ill? Oh, that's good.

Yes, yeah. That's good, but not quite right. Not quite right. He had a white jumpsuit, and he coloured it in green and disguised himself as a doctor and walked out. No. Wow. How much ink was in that pen?

I get like two minutes out of a highlighter. That's pretty impressive. Check this guy out. This is a phenomenal one. There was a prison in America, which was known be escape-proof. At 21st of July, 1971, a guy called Warren George Briggs escapes from it. And four other people help him to get out. The bullets are fired at them, and he manages to escape. He eventually turns himself in, and he says the only reason that he escaped it is because

he wanted to get some press, some PR, for the fact that while inside jail, he had invented and developed a water desalting process that would enable mankind to purify seawater at a reasonable price. And he was like, no one's listening to me, so I'm going to escape this inescapable jail, and all the headlines are going to say, man escapes, but invents water source. And did it work? Did his thing work? There's been

no further story about Warren, George Briggs. Superb. One of the sort of archetypes, one of the places that is most famous for escapes is Kolditz, the German, the castle

during the Second World War, which was where lots of people were put and was supposedly escape-proof, and it's where lots of people who had escaped, other places were sent, officers and things. Like, all these prisons, like, stop calling them escape-proof. Yeah, that's true. You can't escape.

It's like calling boats unsinkable. Like, really, you're tempting face. You're so right. And Colnitz was a terrible place to try and keep prisoners because it had 700 rooms. It was this huge, like, it was really quite hard to defend, I would say. And it had to have its own escape committee because so many of the men in there were plotting their own escapes.

And they had to basically say, you can't escape on Tuesday. Terry's escape. on Tuesday. You can go Thursday 915 to 9.30. But don't go over 9.30 because Barry's getting out. And it just some officers, this is really interesting. See if you can work out

why. Pretended to escape. They only pretended to escape colders. To see what would happen, what the punishment would be if they got caught? Not quite. Nice guess. So they pretended as in they hid in the jail so then they thought he's escaped

and then they stopped looking for him within the jail and then he could get a highlighter and draw all over... You're close. They escaped and they hid within the jail. Yeah. Within Colvitz. Rachel, do you want to have a guess?

No. All right. So their reasoning was they were escape and then hide. More TV quizzes should just have that as an answer. Basically, they escaped and then they hid so that when a different officer actually did escape, the hiders would pretend to be the actual escape so that they could be.

delay their discovery. So no one was looking for the guy who had actually escaped because they thought he was still there. Right. Okay. It feels like still only one person's escaped. Well, look, we won the war in the end. That's the main thing. Can I tell you what toilets are used for in American prisons? Apart from the obvious. Is it going to be a contraband thing? It's not. So this is quite a few different facilities in America, especially Union County Jail in New Jersey, which is where I read about it. And some prisoners are flirting with each other

using their toilets. Okay. And what they do is they take all of the water out and they say, this one's not for normal use. And then it's attached to all of the pipes, and so you can yell into it. And then people in another cell can hear what you're saying.

Romeo! Romeo! And apparently you have like one cell where everyone knows that's the place people go for their flirt, Like if there's that, let's say that the men's wing is on one part, and the women's wing is somewhere else, but they're attached. So all the men were, one man would go in here, one woman would go in there,

and they had like a special knock, so you know that it's your particular girlfriend or boyfriend. Oh, wow. And yeah, this is a thing that's happening in America right now. And it's not just they have phone sex through the toilets. Sorry, James, how do you do phone sex through a toilet? Do you know all the stuff that I said a minute ago about how they're using it like a phone.

Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I thought you were then introducing a phone as like an extra thing. Got it. Is that what you think phone sexes? You actually introduce the phone somewhere. Actually, prison phones do have to be introduced

to get them onto the premises, so that's... I've worked down on this. Like, you mean just spoken sex. Yeah. Well, shouted, shouted into... Shouted sex. No, no, I do, Rachel, drink sex with my wife go, honey, have you seen the new iPhone?

It's got this new feature. Okay, so they talk, yeah. Talk sex. They talk sexy words with each other. And they also carry out religious conversions. They pass news. You don't want a mistake at the phone exchange when that's happening to hear.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that one of Britain's greatest living playwrights, Tom Stoppard, wrote the final draft of the movie Beethoven. There you go. So, yeah, this is Tom Snopad, a great playwright, and he does a lot of work on the side for movies, it turns out, which I didn't know. He is polished scripts for 102 Dalmatians,

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. And one very exciting thing that I found about when looking through the adventuary of his papers in America is that I don't know if he wrote the final script, but he definitely did some work on Stop All My Mom Will Shoot. No. end of the podcast. Our white whale of a film.

Absolutely, yeah. But he basically says that he finds the work frustrating, burdensome, and time wasting. But at the end of the day, you have to wear money somehow. And, you know, these, when you're doing it for a very big movie, so he worked on Indiana Jones, for instance, he earns an awful lot of money for it, so much that you can't really turn it down.

Yeah, and it's not even just polishing scripts. Like, for example, he was in the shower one day, and his phone was ringing, and he jumped out, and it was Stephen Spielberg, and Spielberg was like, I'm filming Schindler's list right now, and this scene doesn't work, what would you do in this situation, and he would go, you know, so he's like standing naked in his shower room, solving problems while they're on set, and that was part of the gig as well, that they would just go to him as a brain. Is he the only person to have worked on both Schindler's list and Stop All My Mom will shoot?

It can't be a long list. That's not going to be a huge list, no. should say, so Beethoven is a classic of the 90s, I'm sure some of you've seen it, the dog is a real comic character full of Pratt falls, making life health for the dad of the family.

What would you call that, St. Bernard dog? Yeah, he's a St. Bernard dog, and he's always like, if he runs, he ruins the whole house. The dog that was used was a descendant of Buster Keaton's own dog. So Busted Keaton had a dog and his wife, Eleanor, started breeding

them, and these St. Bernard dogs, then became the stars and stunt doubles of Baithoven the movie. Baithoven won Best Picture, of course. What? At the American Humane Society Awards for Outstanding Words which raised public awareness of animal issues. Other winners include Babe, Black Beauty, Free Willy and Chicken Run. Do you know what? Those are all good films.

They are. In 2011, this best picture to raise awareness of animal issues was won by How to Train Your Dragon. A thin year, a thin year. And 2012, it was won by Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Oh, which I think is a documentary about the Earl of Sandwich, isn't it? But actually, Beethoven's second. So there have been five, actually there have been, I think, eight Beethoven movies. But there's Beethoven, Beethoven's second, Beethoven's third, Beethoven's fourth,

Beethoven's fifth. Okay. And you kind of got the feeling that they had to do that to get the Beethoven's fifth job. That's why they did all those. But Beethoven's 2nd was nominated for an Academy Award. In the category. Best dog. No, it was Best song, best original song.

Or a Dolly Patton song that's in that. Wow, that's very exciting. Back to Tom Stobbard for a second. He wrote a play which is called The Real Thing. And in 2014, there was a revival of The Real Thing, put on stage, which he was part of. and Ewan McGregor was the lead role in it. And during an interview, someone said,

wow, what's it like working with Ewan McGregor again? And he said, I haven't ever worked with Ewan McGregor before? And he said, no, you have. You did a rewrite of Star Wars Episode 3, Revenge of the Sith. And you would have written some Jedi dialogue for Ewan McGregor. I did look up some of the lines from that film to see if any of them have the stop-ard magic. What about the droid attack on the Wookiees?

feels like him I have seen a security hologram of him killing younglings clearly Stoppard What Stoppardian is in the OED But I've never read any Tom Stoppard So what is his genre It's kind of witty

I'm don't yeah They're brilliantly sort of funny and clever And for a long time people accused him Of being as it were the tin man of British theatre Because he was writing plays That were intellectually stimulating But didn't kind of captivate the emotions I've been in the same room

as him once, and it was so exciting. It was the day my first ever book had come out, and my publisher took me to dinner after the launch party, and it was so exciting. Tom Stopper was at a nearby table hanging out with other famous people, and I thought, this is my life from now on. I haven't seen him since. I just haven't seen him since. Did you read out those lines from Revenge of the Save to him? His head snap round, his eyes light up, yeah? No, no, no, no. The practice of someone taking a pass at a film script is quite common in Hollywood, isn't it? And I know there have been lots of comedy films in Hollywood

where they've actually been offered up to like every British comedian I know has taken a crack at a few modern film scripts. Really? I've done, I've had a cracker. Oh, yeah. Which ones? I'll tell you afterwards. Oh, come on.

I don't think I got any lines in. But I know there was like, there was one that was made Beethoven 7th. Recently, there was a Christmas film that I know. at least 10 comedians who had a crack at it. Really? So just adding extra lines to it? Yeah, yeah. Submitting them and they see if they

like them or not. Yeah, yeah. But I wanted to tell you about one, not related to Stop Art, that is close to my heart, because my book is all about Charlotte Lucas from Pride and Prejudice. And Emma Thompson famously wrote the amazing screenplay of Sense and Sensibility. But she took a pass at the 2005 Pride and Prejudice. And the line that became a meme that Charlotte Lucas says, she says, I'm 27 years old. I've no money and no prospects. I'm already a burden to my parents

and I'm frightened. And Emma Thompson wrote those lines. Joe Wright, the director said, he went to Emma Thompson and said, can you help? She said, get a notebook out. Write this down. And she just improvised those lines. Wow. Wow. And yet that apparently among Gen Z and millennials has become a massive meme for like very hard relate. I'm 27 years old. I've no money and no prospects. I'm already a burden to my parents and I'm frightened. That's so good. Can I tell you one of the greatest script doctors of all time?

Yeah? Because lots of people, Carrie Fisher was a great, she worked on loads. Roald Dahl did a little bit on You Only Live Twice, which I find interesting. El Ron Hubbard of the Church of Scientology, founder of. Oh, that one.

Thanks for clarifying. So there's this really bad, had film called Battlefield Earth. Yes. Oh, yeah, I've heard that. John Travolta. Now, Hubbard had written a book called Battlefield Earth, and it's about aliens.

It's a saga of the year 3,000. It's 1,000 pages long. It's lightweight for real SF fans. But he really wanted it to be a movie. Travolta loved it. Was a Scientologist. Now, Travolta really wanted to make it, and a writer called J.D. Shapiro

got attached to the project. And he wrote a script, and he got a load of script notes, and he said these come right from the top, i.e., they come from El Ron Hubbard. The interesting thing about it is, Hubbard had died about 10 years before. So he's, as far as I can tell, the only posthumous script doctor that I've found.

Do you know the script-doctoring work of M. Knight-Shammelan? So he wrote The Sixth Sense, that incredible movie, and then that kind of plot twist, became kind of his signature move, right? So, Signs was another movie of his. The Village. Exactly. But he was also trying to make it as a writer

and so had to do a lot of different projects at the same time while he was doing the Sixth Sense. So in the same year, he then had a movie come out in December, his follow-up movie with his name on the credits. And that movie was Stuart Little. Can you believe that?

About the cartoon mouse? Well, it's not a cartoon, well, I guess it's a normal movie with an animated mouse. is the other lead character. And all the humans are dead at the end. Sorry? And all the humans were dead all that time. Yeah, it was through.

Well, he also, he did the script doctoring for She's All That. Do you remember Rachel Lee Cook? She's an incredibly hideous woman because she wears glasses. But if you spend half an hour with her, that wears off. Oh, yeah, yeah. And the charm begins to come through. But classic, classic M Night Shyamalan plot twist. she takes the glasses off

and suddenly she's really beautiful and... Have you ever tried that done? You need to wear a red dress as well. Yeah, yeah. I think, do we have to move on? We do have to move on, yeah. Just going back to Tom Stappard, very briefly.

He became massive when he wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, right? It's basically two characters from Hamlet and it's their story. And I didn't know this. It premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1966 but it was absolutely massive there and then he went to London and it was absolutely massive there

and then it went to New York and at the New York Premier a journalist asked him what is it about and he said it's about to make me a lot of money and he was a journalist at the Bristol Evening Post when it debuted that's how he'd be making his living

and again this is an example of his amazing lines an editor tried to catch him out his news editor tried to catch him out because he said he was interested in current affairs and the editor said, all right, well, who's the current home secretary? And Stoppard said, I said I was interested in politics, not obsessed by them. It's very good at night. This episode of No Such Thing as a Fish is brought to you by Airbnb.

Cool. That's seen anything good on TV recently, Andy? Oh, I watch Only Connect. Do you? Do you do well in it? I do. Do you and your wife compete? against each other. We're a team, James.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. You also have a third person who comes and sits in your house on the sofa and does the game with you, don't you? I mean, that's a separate matter. But James, oddly, you and I have been away together for I think about a week at a time when we were on the show years ago. Oh, we did, yeah.

Only connect. We went to Cardiff. And while we were there, we could have put our house on Airbnb. I know. It would have been a smart thing to do. It would have given us a little extra money to spend on encyclopedias and quizzing practice books in Cardiff. I always thought it would be too difficult for me to do, but then of course our mutual close personal friend, Dan Schreiber managed to do it. Exactly. If he can do it, anyone can. I mean, that really is true. And if you live in a home, then you already have an Airbnb. Why not

put it on Airbnb? Your home might be worth more than you think. And you can find out how much by going to Airbnb.com.com.com.org. Forward slash host. Brilliant. What's the Welsh for on with the show? I have absolutely no idea. only got to the semis. On with the podcast. On with the show. Let's move on to our final fact. Okay, it is time for our final fact,

and that is my fact. My fact this week is, old jobs in the UK that you used to be able to do included buttwoman, baller, boner, and bottom stainer. Now, this is from the back end of a bow. that is called Craftland by James Fox, who was actually here at the festival earlier today doing a talk.

He did a 12 p.m. today. He's released this book where he's looking into craft jobs that are either endangered in the modern world or people that are just carrying on with it and that we might not know about. But it includes an index of all of these jobs that he says are on the brink of extinction or endangered. I think in the case of the ones I just read,

they must be basically extinct. Can you tell us what they do? like what is a, what's a boner? A boner. Okay, so a boner used to be someone who would be the insurter of whale bones into a corset. So when you were building a corset, yeah, that used to be used to help give it its...

And buttwoman? That sounds like it's the female version of butt man. Yeah, well, it's the seller of flatfish on a key side. Yeah. Butt woman, okay. What's a baller? The baller is someone who would check,

let's say if you were working in textiles, you would check the balls of wool in advance of spinning, so you would go around and go, yep, nice ball. Dan, as you're explaining that, you're doing like really egregious hand gestures that don't match up with what your words are saying. It's just for the room, you know? For all of us, yeah.

And could you give us some gestures for bottom stainer? Bottom stator. That would be putting stain on a bottom of a boot or a shoe. I also had bump, so this isn't to do with craft exactly, but Bummery. Oh, what's Bummerie? I think Bummerie. So with a double E at the end,

which I just think sounds delightful. Described in 1875 as great burly fellows with bluff faces, deep chests, and still deeper voices with a smack of the watermen about them, and a faculty for mental arithmetic, which is perfectly surprising. Those are the words of James Greenwood. It was a middleman on a fish market.

Usually, I think the term was attached to Billingsgate, Fish Market, particularly. So it was like a commerce, but it's like a retail position, basically, but in fish specifically. But they obviously had this reputation for being big, burly bluff man. Yeah, nice. Very cool. I mean, it's such an interesting world, the world of Craftland. This book, by the way, I just would give a shout out to Francesca at the Margate Bookshop,

who told me about this amazing bookshop, if you're ever in that bit of the country. She showed it to me, and basically it covers 280 crafts that are still practice in Britain, but what was noticed by James Fox is that half of them or more are in danger. So we're sort of losing, we're getting down to the final person who is able to do certain things. And there's an example that he gives of one person who is able to tune English church bells. He's called Giddhar Vad Hooker, and while he's doing it, he writes little things on each bell, almost like little motos on it to sort of give it something extra. Yeah, so like he'll write om, for example, on one of the bells.

Dong? And he should write tong. Ding? I've run out. Bong and Bing. Oh, for God, idiot. Yeah, yeah, go on. There's a list, isn't there, of heritage crafts that are endangered.

There's a list of ones that have gone completely now. And there's a list of ones that are endangered, which means there's only one or maybe two people in the country who do it. So in the UK, there are only one or two people who make arrows, bells, musical bows, clogs, fans, gloves, pianos, ballet shoes, saws, scissors, clay pipes, glass eyes, watches, and horse whips. So if we get cut off from the rest of the world, which of those can we not do without? Scissors.

Scissors. It's going to be tough. Ballet shoes, probably fine. Yeah, horsewhips. We'll improvise. But scissors are fiddly. Glass eyes? Well, you do want to, you don't know when you need one. Well, it's scary, scary stuff. I went today to see a guy called Andy Peters, who is. the only person in the UK who makes the wooden figureheads for boats.

Oh. Which feels like something we could probably do without. No, we can't. Did you strong disagree? Did you tell that to him, to his case? I said, well, my thought was like people were doing this in the olden days, right? And it takes him like five months

to make one of these things. How do you make money like that? Because it's not like everyone needs one. Pirates will pay a fortune. June. An arm and a leg. Thank you. I haven't seen the new aircraft carriers

that we've got. Have they got some of Andy Peters's work up front? No, they haven't, but he does, he makes them for yachts, like super yachts sometimes. I have genuinely seen some of his work within the last fortnight.

Really? On your super yacht. I don't want super yachts to have them. Fair enough. This is a better one. You know Cutty Sark? In Greenwich. Cutty Sark in Greenwich has a figure head.

at the front, and I'm sure it's an Andy Peters thing. I think I read a thing about... Yeah, it is. He did the... Basically, there was a restoration that was done, and then they found some old pictures and realized that what they'd restored looked nothing like what it originally looked like, so they asked him to make a new one.

That's so cool. And they have a massive collection of ships' figureheads around the prow of the Cuttysau. It's an awesome display. Actually, now there are definitely more figureheads in museums than there are on ships. Right. I think that's sad. But it's interesting becoming the last person

who makes something. So James Fox was talking about a watchmaker who only produces five watches a year but he does them entirely on his own and the difference is is watchmakers generally don't make an entire watch on their own. Usually, if you were making a really well-crafted one would involve probably 20 different people

doing different bits, it's different disciplines coming together. He trained himself as a kid to make watches entirely on his own. He was obsessed with this guy who was a master watchmaker and he brought him his first watch after a year and showed it to him and he said, rubbish, after spending a whole year on it. So he went away for five years and made another watch, brought it back, and he went, yes, you are a watchmaker.

So he now makes five a year, and each one sell for roughly 300,000 pounds per watch. Does he write tick or tock on them as he finishes? Because he should. So the Heritage Crafts website is really interesting, well worth a look, because it's got this huge list. I've just joined, you can join and kind of sign up to support some of the crafts. It's very cool.

So extinct ones are things like mouth. blown sheet glass making which survived until 1992 which I'm quite surprised by to be honest but there is one of the very oldest, in fact, sorry, the oldest thing anyone's done professionally is still going strong

because they list heritage crafts some of which is currently viable. Flint napping. Oh yeah I met a Flint napper like two weeks ago. Did you? Yeah. I wish I hadn't said it because there's no anecdote that goes with it but... It's good. Yeah. What is it? What's flint napping? It's like you get

piece of stone and you hit it with a harder piece of stone and you get tiny bits of flint and you can use them for cutting things and for shaving. You can either do it to sort of repair a wall which a flint wall or you can in the old times people would be making arrowheads or sharp instruments or tools

like that and this I find this absolutely unbelievable. There are still a few people doing it these days to make replicas of prehistoric objects and maybe 10 more doing it to shape flint for masonry so it is currently viable although small but it is 3.3 million years as old as a trade.

Wow. It is more than 10 times as old as our species. Wow. It's 11 times as old as homo sapiens as a thing. Is it still the same family running it? It's the same family. Closed shop, mate. Closed shop. They won't let you in.

I just find that bizarre. Like the older shaped flint tools would date back that far. Yeah, that's very cool. Well, interestingly, one of the old jobs that used to be able to be was a caveman. That's not a craft. No, it was because you were responsible for the removal of clinkers and ashes

from the cave or a tunnel beneath a furnace. You were called a caveman as a result. Here's another thing, two things that have a different meaning today. A mugger, do you know what a mugger was? It was a job that you could... Mug maker? Yeah. For the first hundred years of that word,

the word mugger meant someone who sold mugs. Was there an amusing crossover period where someone said, I'm a mugger? I'm sorry, I've got plenty of mugs at home. Thank you. No, no, no, you misunderstand. Give me your mugs. Yeah, and a badger. Badger? Badger.

Badger was someone who... It was a bit like Rachel's fish person. It was someone who got some food from one place and then took it to someone to sell it from another place. But they often got in trouble because they would hoard food, hoard grain and hoard bread. Oh. I read also about badges, which was like...

It was young boys who played, like, a bugle or trumpet or something, and that call was used to, like, call men to war. Badges? Wow. Sources needed for this. But Badgees was definitely, yeah, Badgeys was, like, sort of slang term, for that job. Nice. There was also a bodger, as well as a badger.

Right. That's just, I'm serious. Really? Yeah, Bodger would have made chair legs. That's very funny. But badly. But badly. Do any of us have a craft?

I can't think of... How dare you? What do you mean you... This is our craft. stagecraft. Yeah, but a real one. You know, like a proper one. Yeah.

No, I don't have a craft. No, you make, like, chocolate sausages or something. You've got, like, a weird... What? That's what he calls it when he's come back for the bathroom. I've made a chocolate sausage. I don't want to talk about my time in the American prison system.

All right, Dan. God, this guy's flirting. It's really weird. Dan is referring to a private incident where I made a tasty... What was it? Like, what's it called? That sausage? that you, you know, it's, what is it called a chocolate salami? Has anyone ever made a chocolate salami?

That sounds even worse. It's a delicious pudding, but it's also an amusing trick. Because, you know, you bring out, oh, it's pudding time, everyone. You bring out what looks like a salami. It's covered in icing sugar. You put netting around it. You put string around it, yeah. I put string around it like a proper salami.

Surprise, it's a turd. Well, okay, Dan. Well, you're off the pudding list for life now. that is it unfortunately that is all of our facts thank you so much for listening if you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast we can all be found online i'm on at schreiberland on instagram my instagram is known such thing as james harkin andy and rachel s v paris yeah and just a reminder is everyone listening.

Rachel's book is out now introducing Mrs. Collins. It is, give a quick blurb on it, Rach. It follows Charlotte Lucas from Pride and Prejudice after she marries Mr. Collins and all that happens in the next few years. Super cool. Very exciting. And yeah, if you want to get in contact with us as a group, podcast at QI.com, send us an email

and we'll put it onto our very exciting secret show called Jewel, drop us a line, which is part of our clubfish world, which is our secret members club. It's kind of like the Hellfire Club. but with less orgies. For just $3.99 a month, we will release a baboon into your home.

Yeah, or hey, just come back again next week because we'll be back with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye! Thank you.