No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Cardigan For Ginger Rogers

Episode Date: August 21, 2020

Dan, James, Andy and Sandi Toksvig discuss Bargain Hoovers, Hidden Rivers and Ginger Rogers Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi, everyone. Before we begin this week's episode of Fish, we just want to let you know that we have a very special guest on today. It is the mighty host of QI herself, Sandy Toxfig. Finally, to have the supreme boss come and fight us with facts was a wonderful honor. Also, just to mention that this week, by coincidence, genuine coincidence, Sandy's book between the stops is coming out in paperback. It's a memoir that collects all stories via very interesting route, specifically a bus route of the number 12 bus. where she travels around London, jumps off at the stops and explores her childhood and memories from her life. I've read it. It is absolutely brilliant. It is packed with facts. Every single paragraph just has something that blows your mind. I highly recommend reading it. It's fantastic. And we hope you enjoy the show as well. So let's do it. On with the show. Hello and welcome to another working from home episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four, disclose locations in the UK. My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter-Murray,

and special guest, it's Sandy Toxvig. And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Sandy. So my fact is that Sloan Square

Underground Station in London has a river running through it. Well, actually, does just run through it. It runs over the trains. Yeah. Wow. And I think this is a marvelous thing that you can actually go under a river, but be on a train in that

way. I love that. It's astonishing. I've been to Sloan Square Station a lot. I've never noticed that. I've looked up photos and I now understand what this giant metallic pipe that sort of sits above the trackers. I mean, that's the exciting thing about London, is that really nobody has a full map

of it. That's the extraordinary thing. We don't really have a full map of where everything goes, where all the pipes are, were all deserted tunnels and so on. And that in Sloan Square is the Westbourne River. It used to be called the Serpentine River. And they had to divert it when they built the underground. And they diverted it into a massive pipe.

And it crosses between the platforms just above where the carriages travel. And you can actually see it. But it's not the only one. There are just loads and loads and loads of rivers that stop or used to course. When I worked at the Palace Theatre years and years ago, which is in the west end of London, if you go right down into the sub-sub-sub-basement of the theatre, you can open a large metal hatch and you can see the Fleet River still.

Cool. Oh my God, I've seen that. I've been there. It was our mutual friend Chris Buddle, wasn't it? Ah, there you go, yeah, yeah, Chris Butler, yes. He used to be the chief electrician there. Oh, I can go on this tour. Am I the only person in this podcast recording who hasn't seen the Fleet River through a hatch?

I'm afraid so. Yeah, oh, great, okay. Probably the only person listening to this podcast who hasn't seen that actually. Quite embarrassing. Yeah, that's a very small club that you belong to. Chris says, please stop contacting him, Andy. He just doesn't like you, okay?

So I love that. I love that about London. I love that you can find the extraordinary bits of history. Do you guys know the Thomas A Beckett pub on the old Kent Road? Do you know it? Yeah. So it used to be, I think it's closed down there, but it used to be a spot called St. Thomas A Watering.

and it was a place where horses used to go and drink. It was the last stop out of London. It was also the sort of first into the capital. And now there's a closed pub and I think an ex-white goods store, which is what we all need. But where the litter blows and the traffic steams past, that's where Chaucer's Pilgrims set off for Canterbury. It's the very spot where Henry V returned from Agincourt.

It's the very spot where Charles II processed with 20,000 people on his way and to reclaim the throne in 1660. And it's a really important place. But the stream that used to run there, the river Neckinger, there's no sign of it now, I think, whatsoever. But it was a really important place for horses coming in. And the water was the thing that drew them there. So I love all those.

If you look for those old rivers, then you'll find that tremendous history. Yeah. I really didn't know about these rivers, as in I'd heard that, there was the one in Sloan Square and so on. But I didn't appreciate how much they were the fabric of London in the old days and the 1700s and before.

And it's extraordinary because all the names of the tube stations are a reflection of the rivers and their name. So Bayes Water and Knights Bridge, where there was a bridge for Knights and so on. And it would be insane to bring someone from Old London to New London and show that we've turned it into sort of metal rivers now, like the robotic future. Yeah, especially Knightsbridge, which was also the Westbourne River,

so the same one that goes through Sloan Square, the Knights Bridge was the bridge over that river. And it was where all the highwaymen would get you. So if you were leaving London to the north-west, you would have to go over this bridge and we would always get captured by highwaymen. And obviously now Knightsbridge is, well, obviously no highwayman there now. Still, I think, some highwaymen in Knightsbridge

and some of those shops, if I'm honestly. Prize of a handbag. Apparently, you can swim in the Westbourne River even these days a little bit of it. So not very much because, obviously, it's in a tube, and you can't go into the tube, the red-hot on that, but it empties out into the Thames proper at Chelsea Embankment. And if you go there at low tide, the opening is visible,

where the pipe comes out, basically. And apparently you can get 20 metres in there, and then there's a hatch. So you could theoretically, it's probably more paddling than swimming. Yeah, and probably more dying of botulism than swimming. But it is extraordinary when you think about all the stuff that's going on underground that we don't know about. I'm reading a book at the moment called The Mole People, and it's about the number of people who live underground in New York City.

Oh, wow. And they estimate there's about 2,000 people who live full-time in the old tunnels that are now abandoned. Do they not worry, isn't there supposed to be like an urban myth that there are crocodiles in the sewers in New York or something? Alligators. Alligators. Alligators, yes. when I was a child, if you came up from Florida, there would be people at the side of the road

selling baby alligators. It was perfectly allowable. And children used to pester and say, please, can I have a baby alligator? And you would drive all the way to New York with this baby alligator, and then the baby alligator would have a very annoying thing and grow into a bigger alligator.

And people were said to flush them down the toilet. Yeah, to this day, I still check the toilet to make sure that an alligator is it. Isn't going to appear. There was a trend for micro pigs, wasn't there? Wasn't there? I think this might be an urban myth too, that people bought micro pigs lots in the early 2000s,

and it sounds like they were just buying pigs. Just small pigs? Yeah, piglets are obviously tiny pigs. There's like a really old Russian joke where a guy walks into a pub with a massive bear and says, where's that bastard that sold me a guinea pig? That is Russians. But about the pigs, Andy,

the idea of the being alligators in New York, there was also an urban myth that there were wild hogs living in the sewers of London. And there was a group of people called Toshas who went through the sewers collecting like people's refuse, but they'd be able to find little bits and pieces and trinkets and make a load of money. And they believed that there was a race of wild hogs that was down there that might get them. So Toshing was a full-time career for some people, particularly in the East End. And the best thing that you could do is have some kind of accommodation

where you had a manhole cover in your garden. I mean, I say garden, it'd be more like a, you know, sort of a yard. And any Tosha who had their own manhole cover was simply able to go, it was a very easy commute to go down into the sewers where they would find, I don't know, coins and things that the rich had dropped down open grates. And it was a living, yeah, the Toshas were famous. But they also kind of helped keep the sewage system. moving. You know, we now have these fat mountains and stuff down in the sewage systems,

but the toshers were busy making sure that areas were cleared because they wanted to get through the sewer system and see if anything of value had fallen down to the sewage system. And I think they had a special bucket that they would keep the things they found in, and that was called a toch pot. Very nice. Yeah. If it's not true, I think we should spread the word that it is. I believe the etymology of toss pot is to toss back a drink.

Like if you had a drink, you would toss it back, and it was a word for people who drank a lot, I think, that's right. Oh, nice, okay. No, but Andy's is way better. I think you're right, yeah. Another river that goes into the Thames, which you can't see anymore, is the Ephra, which is in South London,

and it kind of bends around Stockwell and Oval, and the reason that the oval cricket ground is oval in shape is because it had to go where the river wasn't, basically. So the river went, and landed around it, and so they put the cricket ground there, which was oval shaped. And then all the other cricket grounds in the world were oval because of the oval in South London. And that's why that all cricket grounds of that shape is because of this particular river in London. I love that to just think, well, we've found a shape, let's stick with it.

Let's just, that square cricket ground thing, not working for us. We'll just stick with that. I love that. While I was looking into this, I found a couple of things about the London Underground, just actual, you know, general facts about it. And I really wanted to mention this one. I read about a train driver, a tube driver called Red Pepper. I don't know if you guys have heard of Red Pepper,

R-E-D-Peper. So he was a London Underground driver, and his thing was any time when a train was in the middle in between two stations and had to stop because they had to regulate the services, he would often, when they were sitting there, would turn the lights off inside the carriages of all the trains and go, this is your driver speaking, or is it?

And he was a real prankster, and he used to love doing all these silly voices. Anyway, one day he pulls into the station and someone comes and knocks on the, I believe this is the story, knocks on the window, and hands him a card and says, I'm a voiceover exec, please get in contact. So he gets in contact, Red Pepper writes to him. Red Pepper goes on to be a voiceover man who does the, in a world voice

have trailers in Hollywood yes a London Underground driver driver did the inner world voice for Independence Day for Space Jam for Armageddon for the Blair Witch project for Mr. Bean's holiday

his career kind of went a bit lower in the late 2000s in fact the last thing I could find on IMDB where he did a Hollywood movie or a movie was so he did the Blair Witch Project in 1999 but then in 2010 he did the Blair Bitch Project,

which was a very much a B movie, yeah, misogynistic, starring Linda Blair of The Exorcist, the girl in The Exorcist. What a wormhole, Dan. I was reading about one more train driver who was Hannah Dads. Do you know about her, Sandy? I bet you do.

No. Well, she was the first woman to become a tube driver. Because what happened was, when the war happened, when both wars happened, they needed to bring new people into the underground to do all the jobs. And loads of women started doing those jobs. And in fact, when made a veil opened, it was staffed completely by women. But there was one job that they basically didn't let women do all the way until the late 70s.

And that was a tube driver for some reason. Which is weird, because it's not like you can get lost. Men are always so unwilling to ask for directions on that way. All right. for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that in 1992, Hoover ran a promotion, which was so successful that the firm collapsed and had to be sold off. What the heck happened?

So they thought, this is the European arm of Hoover we're talking about, and in 1992, they thought of this brilliant promotion, and it was this, if you spent 100 quid on any Hoover product, you would get two free return flights to somewhere in Europe. And that was very exciting. And they had worked out the maths of it. They thought people will spend enough money on extra products. And, you know, there were hoops to jump through and things like guests. It sold a lot of Hovers.

Brilliant. And then, so that kind of gone all right. And then Hoover got a bit confident. And they said, we're going to expand this deal and say, if you spend 100 quid on any Hoover product, you will get two return flights to America. And they were advised by risk management people not to do this. And they said, no, it's fine. People will spend so much on Hoover products

that it will completely offset the cost. Unfortunately, they weren't reckoning on the British people who flocked to Hoover Jobs, bought the absolute cheapest thing they could, which is about 120 quid, and then sent off for £600 worth of free flights. And it was such a disaster. 500,000 people applied for the promotion.

Oh my goodness. I know, and they weren't making much profit even on the cheap vacuum cleaners that they were selling at the time. They made about 30 quid profit on the vacuum cleaner, and then they had to spend £600 on plane tickets. Amazing. I read that people were buying a vacuum cleaner,

and they're just leaving it in the shop. And they didn't need a vacuum cleaner. And Hoover started panicking, obviously, when they saw the numbers coming in. So they started, you know, being really finicky about the fine print. It was a really complicated procedure you had to go through to get to return flights. But they started saying people hadn't filled in the forms,

or they would offer you the flights and you could accept them or say, oh, I can't do that. So they started offering people flights from airports which were hundreds of miles from where they lived. Or they would send out request forms on Christmas Eve in the hope that the post would be closed and people would miss the deadline to return them because it was Christmas.

They tried everything. Yeah, it's an astonishing. But the first promotion that they did were there was the tickets to Europe, the complications of trying to actually be someone who actually receives it is extraordinary. They would send you a registration form. You had 14 days to fill it out, send it back.

Then they sent you another form, which had three different destination airports and combinations and dates that you had to fill out and send back. Then that came back. If they rejected it and you had to pick three more. They made it as hard as possible, but it worked out for them the first time. The problem with the second time is

they didn't send anyone to America. They should have at least sent, you know, some in order to make it look like it was a genuine thing. they just knocked it out so heavily that no one ended up going as far as I could see. Andy, you looked like people did. I don't think that's right. I think about 220,000 people got their flights.

That might be both promotions. Yeah, it was absolutely huge. I know one person who, in fact, we all know one person who got one of the flights, and that's Stephen K. Amos, the comedian. Oh, really? Yeah, and he says that it kind of started his career. When he was 19 years old, he got these tickets.

He went to New York, and he met a promoter called Delphine Manfield. who said, hey, you're a really funny guy, you should become a comedian, and she set him up in a show in London when he got back, and he said that was his big break. So what happened to them, Andy? They obviously went bankrupt. Well, there was another problem. So the company spent £50 million on airline tickets in the end.

And the other problem was that so many people had bought hoovers that everyone now had a hoover, and people started selling them off cheaply in secondhand, which meant that no one was going into shops and buying new hoovers, because they were on every street corner as far as I could tell. The observer said, if left uncontrolled, Britain could soon be knee-deep in Hoover Turbomaster uprights. And just I'll tell you what, I'll tell you the final thing that happened, but the just one previous thing is that there was a kidnapping, or it's kind of slight kidnapping over this, which was that there was a Hoover customer who bought a washing machine. That was his way of getting the free tickets.

And a repairman from the firm came around to fix it, some little problem with it. and the guy said, yeah, I'm going to be getting these flights. And the Hoover repairman called him an idiot for thinking he would get these flights. And this customer, it was called David Dixon, he saw Red, and he blocked in the Hoover Guy's repair van, and he held it hostage in his front drive for 13 days. He was a national hero. Oh, the temptation.

I know. I know. I found one other promotion, which was by Tesco in 1997, and I'm pretty sure this is niche enough that it'll be news to all of you. This was a deal where if you bought three pounds of bananas, you would get 25 points on your Tesco Club card, all right? And that was worth £1.25. That's how I started my comedy career, Andy. I bought all those bananas and left them on the street,

so people slipped on them and videoed them. You're still living off the you've been framed income, aren't you? 250 pounds of time. No, so you'd get these things. You'd get £1.25 on your card if you bought these bananas. and the bananas, three pounds at the time, only cost one pound 17. And a heroic shopper, he's probably still out there somewhere, he's called Phil Colcott. He said, I did a mental calculation and it seems like you couldn't lose.

Basically, they were paying shoppers eight pence to take away three pounds of bananas. So he spent 367 pounds on 942 pounds of bananas and took them away in his car, had to make a few trips. He ended up with about 3,000 bananas. and he just started giving them away. He got the local nickname Banana Man because he was just constantly giving out bananas. He ended up making £25 and 12 pence in profit, thanks to the scheme. The thing is, can you be asked?

That's the thing. Can you be bothered to go and do that is the real question. That's amazing. Phil, if you're out there, write in. We want to know, we want to hear from you. Yeah, we need to track these people down. One or two things on Hoover's? Yeah, sure.

Yeah, sure. Okay, so this is, I think, of no interest to anyone but me, but I want to say it anyway, which is that. The lead singer of ACDC, this is a guy called Brian Johnson. His final job, before getting the gig, as the lead singer of ACDC, the biggest, you know, heavy metal band in the world, was a Hoover advert, was singing the jingle on a Hoover advert. Really?

Yeah. I don't think you're alone in finding that interesting. I love that. Oh. I love that very much. In fact, he got the job because the previous singer, Bon Scott had died, and he was auditioning, but he made the band wait. They were waiting in London for him to get to his callback,

and he insisted on going off to record a Hoover jingle first. And then the very next thing he recorded after that was Back in Black, which was the second biggest album of all time. Wow. I know. But on the way up, everybody's got to make a living. You know what I'm saying. But that's more extraordinary that I thought he had, you know, done the gig,

and that was on TV, and then he went to this audition. He actually said to ACDC the most rock and roll band at that time, sorry guys, I've got to do a corporate gig before auditioning for the band? I think they were down in London saying, can you come by? And he said, yeah, I'll come by in a bit,

but I have this thing I've got to do first. Yeah. We've all done adverts where you think, I'm ashamed that that happened. Years ago, I did an advert in Ireland for cottage cheese, which involved me being inside a giant pot of cottage cheese. Wow.

Yeah, so I'm just saying, I've never seen it. but it's out there somewhere. Wow. I mean, if anyone can find that video and send it to us, I would be very grateful. That's so funny. I want to hear more, Sunday.

You were in the pot. Was there actual cottage cheese in the pot? And also, it was just before that people could do green screen and all these kind of clear technical tricks. Oh, no, they didn't actually. They actually made this enormous pot. And I think they chose me

because it seemed, you know, like they didn't have to make such a big pot with me. thing. And they were wonderful. It's just the most glorious people to work with. And I finished, we've worked all day. I was eating cottage cheese all day. And then I went back to the hotel early because I needed to get a flight first thing. And at about six o'clock in the morning, I got a call from the director. So if I just wanted to wish a good flight, I said, oh, thank you very much. I said, it's very sweet to you to get up for this time to wish me a good place. Ah, sure or no, we're all just going home now. So they'd not partying around, around the. the cottage cheese for the entire knife. Sorry, Sandy, can I just check what the conceit was of the advert? Was it that this pot you were in was normal size? Was there going to be a massive knife sort of diving in to the pot?

I never saw it, darling. I feel really bad. I never saw it. I've done a few adverts in my time. I did that and I did an advert for a tora beef suet once, which I played a small girl. You had to get into a giant pudding for that? Me and a Melders Staunton made school girls wanting to eat. Wow. Beef suet. That's so funny. Again, didn't get shown, I don't think.

Some more Hoover stuff, anyone? Sure. So the first upright Hoover or vacuum cleaner. You say we call it Hoover in the UK, right? But I think it's mostly because of this promotion, isn't it? Because so many people own them because of this massive promotion, they were completely ubiquitous. And so that became the name for any vacuum cleaner. Right.

But the first one was invented by James Murray Spangler in 1908, and he had terrible asthma, and he decided that the reason that it was is because it was the carpet sweeping that he was doing, so he came up with a basic suction system. And to start off with, he could only make two machines a week to sell because he was doing all the designing. His son was assembling them all,

and his daughter was assembling the dustbags. And so it was like literally a cottage industry where that was all they could do to a week, and it was only when they sold it, I think, to his brother-in-law, the company, that they managed to put some money behind it and make loads of them. But yeah.

And he was an inventor throughout his whole life, and this came very late in his career. I think he'd just hit his 60s when he invented this Hoover. But after he sold it to the Hoover family, William Hoover, he worked as a superintendent for the company, so he stayed on working for them. And then finally, he decided he was going to go

on his first ever holiday. because he never had a holiday before, and he was going to go to Florida, and sadly he passed away the night before going on his first ever holiday. Dan. Oh. I know. The tragic thing was, thanks to inventing the Hoover,

he was actually given two free flights. Yes, which is a very good thing. I've always wanted to be an inventor. I just think it's a nice thing to say. Actually, this is what I want you do for a living. I'm an inventor. My great grandfather was an inventor. His name was Field Trickett,

and he worked with Sahara Maxim. I'm embarrassed to say. Wow. Oh, wow. Inventing the machine gun. But he was also, which links us back to an earlier conversation, he was the person who put electric light into the West End, and he put the lighting into the Palace Theatre where the River Fleet runs below,

and where I once worked in the Electrics Department. Wow. Hang on, you worked in the lighting. Was that nepotism? Did you get that gig? Because of my great one of fun. I don't know how I got the gig. I was too small to operate any of the lights.

I had to, the chief electrician, Chris Bottle, had to make a special box for me to stand on order to do it. Well, also, you probably had cottage cheese still all over your hands. I know, darling. It was a disaster on the decks. Chris Buddle's a guy, Andy, that we know. Really nice guy. Yes, you've named him before.

Yep, thank you. Hi again, Chris, if you're listening, please right back. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that after he retired from dancing in his late 70s, Fred Astaire became a lot. a skateboarder. Just a classic...

Just wonderful. Career shift, isn't it? So when you say became a skateboarder? Yeah. He didn't, he didn't, you know, become a pro-scapeboarder. You know, it's very hard to skateboard. But this is, you know, one of the most elegant dancers

that we've ever committed to film. An extraordinary human whose whole career was defined by his career largely with Ginger Rogers on screen. And when he hit his late 70s, he realized that the grace of his dancing wasn't going to keep up. So he thought, better leave it on top.

He could still act, so he thought, I'll continue on with that. But he retired from dancing, and then he was hanging out with his grandkids when they introduced him to the skateboard. And this is someone who danced on screen on roller skates. You know, it's someone who was an innovator of dance, and he saw this as another place to innovate dancing. So he, in his late 70s, was reportedly doing handstands on his skateboard as he was going across his tennis court.

These are the reports. And he was just very good with it. He was very obsessed with it. If he went on a talk show, like the Merv Griffin Show, he would talk about how incredible the skateboard was and his fascination that if he had discovered it years before, how he definitely would have brought that into the films that he was doing. But then unfortunately, one day, he fell over

and he ruined his wrist in the process and had to be in a cast for weeks on end. And that was the sort of end of his skateboarding career. But, you know, he was made a member of the National Skateboard Society of America. He featured in skateboard magazines. He pushed it as a sport. I think that counts as a skateboarder. Dan, I read that that he was given lifetime membership of the National Skateboard Society.

But I can't find what the National Skateboard Society is. There seems to be nothing online or anything like that. I looked for it as well. I couldn't find anything. So I found an old article in the British newspaper archives, and it was from actually the Irish Independent. And it was an interview with Averastair. who was Fred's daughter.

And she said that after he broke his wrist, he got a plaque from the Skateboarding Association, which definitely does exist, for highlighting how dangerous the sport can be without proper protection. So I wonder if that story's been slightly kind of bolderized. Yeah. Also, he got an award for being crap.

That's not even a good award. I tell you, it's a very odd kind of six degrees of separation, but I know his daughter of her. Really? Ireland, I'll ask her. Oh, great. I was hoping you'd have a Fred Astaire connection somewhere. I was banking, I was crossing my fingers.

I thought she must do. Yeah. I'm so glad. No, she's absolutely lovely. Cool. Yeah, she's a smashing person. I've had dinner with her many times, so I will, I'll see how I can ask her. Oh, okay.

But I mean, he was clearly, he was clearly somebody who was full of pep, as it were, because when he was 81, he married a woman jockey called Robin Smith, and she was 45 years younger than him. I mean, he, you know, and she's the one who looks pleased. You know what I mean? She's looking very in the photo. So he clearly didn't lack vim and vigor, shall we call it. Yeah.

We should put together a list of questions for you to ask his daughter, because I've got so many things. So one thing that I wanted to know about was that he was in an episode of Battlestar Galactica. Was he? Playing what? An alien. No, he was an alien.

No, he was an alien. He was an alien that looked like a man, as in, you know, he was a human-shaped alien. Isn't everyone in Battlestar Electrical an alien? Well, I've only seen the new series, not the original, but I just find that insane. Have you watched it, then? Have you watched the episode?

I tried to find it, no, I didn't find it in time. There are some clips on YouTube, and you know how you said he didn't dance anymore? Well, he is dancing in this episode of Battlestar Galactica, but he's just kind of swaying and moving his hands a little bit, so it's not tap dancing. No, but you're right. He came out of retirement from the dancing retirement in order to do one final dance to disco as an alien on Battlestar Galactica. Wow.

Yeah, and I really want to see it. I'm glad it's online. And again, it was because his grandchildren loved the show, right? And I think there was an interview afterwards, and he said it was the favorite thing that he did in his whole career, but only for the reason that it was something that his grandchildren really loved and were really proud of him. I did bake-off for the same reason my kids like. For me, the most interesting thing is the success of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers films is extraordinary. So top hat and follow the fleet and the gay divorcee and shall we dance and so on. And I discovered why they all seem so successful in such a, they're so beautifully shaped. It's because the director Mark Sandrich, he did what he called minitage for each film.

So he had this elaborate colour-coded chart and he detailed minute by minute everything that was going to happen in the first. So there would be a blue section for music. There'd be a green section for singing, a red section for dancing, and a yellow section of novelty and speaking and so on. And he made all the films look roughly the same. So you would have that much singing in that point in the film. You'd have that much dancing at that point in the film. And actually, if you look at the color-coded charts,

you can see them. There's a book called The Fred Sera and Ginger Rogers book, and they reproduce a panel from one of his color-coded charts. You can see that he used, it's almost Mozart-like in its mathematical calculation about, what makes the perfect song and dance musical because he'd worked it out. So like the phrase to make a song and dance out of something, really, it should be, we've done this then, and then we did this.

But you wouldn't expect it to be so prescriptive in a way. When you're writing your plays or books or whatever, Sandy, would you do similar kind of things to that? Would you try and have a... Yeah, so I'm sitting in my office at the moment. I'm writing an opera with my sister, my sister and I write. musicals and stuff together. And we have different coloured post-it notes depending on whether it's a particular kind of song

or whether it's a light moment or a big moment in a night. And always our great moment which we got to yesterday is that we now know what the opening number is and we know what the closing number is. So we know how we begin and we know how we end. And all we've got to do now is filling the bit of the level of time. And that's all there is. I'm sure Verdi had exactly the same technique.

Post-it notes all over his office. So one thing I did read is that, when Astaire and Rogers were making these films, they had to be adjusted in part because the films were almost too good. So every routine they did, dancing, was followed by applause. Live cinema audiences would applaud for a little while

after the dance ended. So the producers had to follow in the movie. They had to put in some applause after the end of the dance, or some laughter or some thing, just to let the atmosphere in the cinema calm down. You get those brilliant scenes

with Edward Everett Horton doing gurning, you know, just basically doing a lot of silly funny faces. And that's really a sort of cover to make sure that the audience

has come back to the story. Not that the story was ever so complicated. It was difficult to follow. Yeah. Ginger Rogers, speaking, Sandy, of your great-great-grandfather

who was an inventor. Ginger Rogers' great-great-grandfather discovered something as well. He was the person who discovered quinning for malaria. Really? Wow. He's called John S. Sappington, and he developed a sort of precursor to hydroxychloroquine, which is something we've been hearing a lot about from the president of the United States of America. Yeah, apparently it cheers stupidity. Well, it hasn't yet.

Ginger Rogers, I mean, genius. And as she said herself, you know, I did all the same dancers as Fred, but I did it backwards and in high heels. And there is something in that. It was tougher for her, I think, than it was for him. It's a wonderful early film called Stage Door with her in it, and Lucille Ball and Catherine Hepburn. Have you guys seen it? No. It's a whole black and white movie.

With all of these incredible, it's a set in a boarding house of lots of young enjeunus who want to get into show business, but it is actually lots of women who became incredibly famous. And the thing about Ginger Rogers, but from being brilliant dancer, is you can see what a phenomenal amount of comedy timing she had. she just was a comedic genius. I found out her first famous catchphrase, which I'd never heard before.

So the first movie she was in was called Young Man of Manhattan, and she said the line in it, there's a line where she says, cigarette me, big boy, and this became a popular catchphrase across America. Sugarette me, big boy. We should all take that on, then. I almost feel like taking up smoking.

I've never taken up smoking in my whole life. But just the chance to say, cigarette me big bye. I don't think vape me big boy has quite the same effect. Is it true that he didn't really want to pair up with Ginger Rogers at the start because he'd had a duet with his sister? Yeah, his sister was his partner for many, many years in the years when he did live performances. His original name, I think, is Osterlitz, not Astaire at all.

is Freddrich Ostellitz. But I think his sister married money and decided to give up show business. And dear God, that's such a good idea. I mean, I think anybody... I thought my wife did have money, which is why I was on my way out. But what was she called Adele, I think, Adel Astaire.

Yeah, right. One of the... Not charges, I mean, he was obviously pretty much the greatest dancer ever to live, but he was accused of being quite sexless or that the dancers were not censored. in the way that maybe in his later career when he was dancing with Sid Cherokee.

They were a bit sexier, actually, but when he was younger, they weren't. And that might be partly because he spent pretty much his entire early career dancing with his sister. Yeah, and that would have been a bad look, darling. Yeah. And she was the one who was going to be successful.

This is a really fascinating thing. But one of the first dances they did was when he was about five years old when they were dancing together as a pair, and they did a bride and groom dance on top of a wedding cake in the first half. Wow. Yeah, it sounds amazing.

And in the second half, you played a lobster. Wow. Yeah. Was that a Bordable thing, Andy, I think. Yeah, I think it was, yeah. I think it was called juvenile artists presenting an electric musical toe-dancing novelty. It's not that's not exactly catchy, is it?

I don't often get professional jealousy, but I totally want to play a lobster. I think in this weather, we're all playing lobsters, and we live? Dying it. his first wife sounds pretty pretty intimidating actually so before he married the jockey

he was he married quite young and he and his first wife were together until 1954 she died of of cancer unfortunately they've been married 21 years and he absolutely adored her yeah he was inconsolable and then didn't marry for years and years and years afterwards it was a proper love match

but she was very concerned about his leading ladies I believe and she would turn up at the side of the set and knit to make sure that there was no inappropriateness going on. Wow. Wow. I know. The amazing thing is that Fredster and Gidroyd, they made ten films together. They

kissed once on screen and even that kiss had to be... It's behind the door, I think, that kiss. Oh, was it? Yeah, so I think it's not even you don't even really see anything. Because the thing I heard, well, maybe there's one behind a door and one on screen, I'm not sure, but

the one that was on screen was extended in slow-mo to make it seem longer than it actually had been. So it was a pretty brief pack. And they did have one scene in bed, but for that they used a dummy instead of a real woman, instead of Ginger Rogers. I like the idea of the wife knitting, like the women at the guillotine. I was just going to say the same thing.

It's like the intimidating knitters of history. There is something quite intimidating about someone just sat there knitting, isn't there? Yeah. And if Ginger Roger comes on with a low-cut dress, she goes, I've knitted you a cardigan, darling. Yes. Here's a little Belero for you. I was reading about some other dancers, actually.

Oh, yeah. National Tap Dancing Day is May the 25th. And who hasn't celebrated that? Well, it was designated that date because it was the birthday of Bill Robinson. And Bill Robinson is a very famous... Is that Bill Bojangles? Bojangles, exactly, yeah. Oh, wow.

He was the highest paid black American entertainer in America during the first half of the 20th century. One year he did 400 charity events in a single year. This guy was absolutely amazing. And whenever he did a show, he needed to get publicity for it. There was no TV in those days. How do you get publicity? He would run backwards and have races running backwards

against local athletes. Because apparently he held the world record for running backwards, which was 100 yards in 13.5 seconds. Wow. That's pretty good. I'm wondering who holds it now. We should surely meet this person. We need to find that out.

I think there would be. I think it is a Guinness World Record thing. But that's, I mean, 13.5 seconds for 100 yards is certainly faster than I've ever run that distance forwards in my entire life. Even when I was a young man, I couldn't do that. I haven't covered it that fast in a car. There was another dancer who the name caught my eye, which was Anne Miller, obviously, our colleague, Anne Miller.

And she was incredible. She could dance 500 taps in a minute when she was tap dancing. That's what she claimed, and no one doubted her. Five hundred taps in a minute. And she was... Stunning. Yeah. Oh, so you know about her, Sandy?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm a big musical theatre buff. But what I like about Anne Miller is when she was very young, she suffered from rickets, and she had to have her legs strengthened as a child. And that seems to have been what made her a brilliant dancer as she got older. And there's a lot of other people like that. Like, there's a soccer player called Gorincha, a Brazilian,

who had rickets as a child and then strengthened his legs, and it made him a great player. And last week we talked about Annette Kellerman. Do you remember the swimmer? Yes, an Australian swimmer. Yeah, exactly. And she was exactly the same. She had this problem as a child, very weak legs,

but they really strengthened them. And it made her a brilliant swimmer when she got older. She got into trouble, didn't she, for wearing a one-piece swimsuit? Exactly, yeah. Very naughty. But Anne Miller as well, she was quite tall, and she once danced with Fred Astaire,

and she had to wear ballet slippers so that she wasn't taller than him. Mm. Should have danced with me. It would have been all right. I have a link fact, which is that Fred Astaire, 10 years after his death, appeared in an advert for a vacuum cleaner.

No. That's very good. Dancing with the vacuum cleaner? Yes, because, as you'll know, there's a bit where he's dancing with a mop in one of his films. Yeah, and I think they CGIed it. I think it would have been the 90s. they CGI'd it, so he was dancing with a vacuum cleaner instead.

And his widow, his second wife, Robin, the jockey, she said it was artistically suitable to use the vacuum cleaners as props. But his daughter, Ava, was so angry about him being used in an ad without his permission, obviously, because he was dead. She returned her Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner to the firm. Well, that's told them. Yeah. I'm not surprised, I mean, I am surprised that it happened at all.

I'm not surprised his daughter was angry because one of the things he left very strict instructions about was that he was never to be portrayed after his death. He didn't want his life story done. He didn't want anybody to do his autobiography on film, as it were, or portray him in any way. So I suspect she wouldn't have been thrilled with that because actually it's a great story, him coming up hooffing through vaudeville

and working with his sister and coming to Hollywood and making it and so on and working with Ginger Rogers. It seems like a natural biopic, but apparently he left incredibly strict instructions saying that the estate would never give permission. But he didn't mention vacuum cleaner. Never mentioned the bloody Hoover. Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that the Icelandic word for museum is the same as the word for a flock of sheep. I love this fact. Yes, me too. I think it's so Icelandic. It's got two of the most Icelandic things, which is sheep and museums, because they have so... many museums in Iceland. They have about 300, which is one for every 1,000 people, just about,

which is proportionally 25 times more common in Iceland than they are in Britain. So this is from a book by someone called A. Kendra Green, which is called the Museum of Wales You Will Never See, and it's all about these museums in Iceland. And the word is saffin. I'm sure I'm pronouncing that wrong. It's S-A-F-N. And that comes from Saffna, which is an old Norse word, meaning to collect or assemble. So it was a collection of things, became a museum, and also a collection of sheep,

like a flock of sheep, became that word as well. And there's a similar word in English, which comes from the same route from thousands and thousands of years ago, and that is the root Sam, which is where we get the word same or similar. And the Russian tojia samoa,

which means the same. It's like all these words all come from the same original route from thousands of thousands of years. What did you say? S-A-F-N, did you say? S-A-F-N. in Icelandic. Yeah, so S-A-V-N in Danish-Salm means to save, means to, you know, save things together.

Exactly. And then this word also, Sama became Hamer in Greek, in ancient Greek, and that's where we get words like homeopathy, homosexual, meaning the same. You know, things, a homeopathy, it's word the same thing, yours, the same thing. But it's the same with the actual word, isn't it? Because it's a homograph, it's a, it's a, you know, it's the similar. spelt the same, but it means two completely different ways. So really interesting stuff about etymology of words, which is what I love, but really I just want to talk about the amazing museums in Iceland because I've just been there. You've just been there, yeah. This is the what I did on my holidays section of the podcast. I'm looking forward to the course.

Listen to everything James says now to be tax deductible in the course of this chap. So, James, which museums did you see? Well, I mean, everyone's going to expect me to say the penis museum in Reykivak, which of course I did go to. Yay! I mean, it's brilliant. It really is a good museum. There's so many interesting things there. And it was started by this guy who acquired his first penis in 1970.

Well, a second penis, but it's... I was going to go for number two there. He acquired it. He must have been so thrilled for the day he acquired his first penis. I should start. museum. It's like a clip-on thing. Yeah, it's like Mr. Potato Head.

You never know. The curator, speaking of clip-ons, the curator does have a bow-tie made from a sperm whale's penis, which he wears for the Christmas party every year, which is on display. But he acquired his first or second penis in 1974 when he got a bull's pizzle,

which was being used by a local teacher as a blackboard pointer. And then that was handed to him and he later on, a few years later, thought, you know what, I could turn this into a collection. Is that not a kind of child abuse to point things out with a penis? I mean, depends what lesson it is, I guess. I guess that's true. Yeah. But, so, James, I read that people started giving him more as a kind of joke. Once he had the Bulls one, sort of, you know, if someone's into something, you always give them a tourist bit of that. And then he, he got sort of

almost every mammal in Iceland and he thought, actually, this is a proper collection now. Yeah, a bit like collecting, like, football. ball cards or, you know, football stickers. He wanted to get them all. Oh, Pokemon. He wanted to collect all of them. So it was like, okay, well, we know all of these animals in Iceland. I need one penis from every male animal. It's like the Noah of Iceland. That's a weird calling from God.

Two of every animal. Yeah. Actually, just one of every animal. Actually, just the penis of every animal. And they have the penises of the 2008 Icelandic. National Handball Team, which are not the actual ones, but they're not the actual ones, they're silver replicas. They're silver cast.

They're silver cast because they won silver medal in that game. Oh. God, what a really... He must have been hugely relieved if they didn't take gold because the cost would have been extortent. Never mind that. What about the molten metal on you? Wow. It's like gold finger, isn't it,

where they cover that lady in gold all the way through. Yeah. They probably threw the match, go, we can't win gold. Have I remembered incorrectly, guys, but in parts of the Arctic, when people made wooden huts, they sometimes used to make windows out of stretched foreskins. Is that right? Yeah. I think you are right, yes.

I think you're right, yeah. But straight, not, I think there were warres. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, obviously it's going to be a walrus foreskin if you're going to make a window. Sorry, the windows are so tiny. They've been those mullioned sort of diamond-shaped windows you get in old houses. It really worries me that that's in my head. You guys are too young to remember play school

where they used to look through a different window every day. Oh, God. Let's look through the walrus four-school window. The other things he has in his museum are penises from various animals in full-schooling. folklore. So they have an elf penis, a troll penis, and the testicles of a corpse-eating ghoul cat. And again, what it is, it's like locals just give him these things and say, I'm pretty sure this is the testicles of a ghost-eating ghoul cat. Yeah, and then they get home and sob with laughter. Did he not go, sorry, the testicle museum's down the road we only use her penises?

Actually, the testicle museum down is on either side of the penis museum. Well, we do have a a vagina museum, don't we, in London? Yes. In London, the vagina museum, which was started by someone we all know, someone the elves know anyway, Florence, who worked with us for a little while. But yeah, I think they're closed at the moment

due to COVID, but they're still doing events online, so it's worth searching Twitter for vagina museum and following those guys, for sure. Worrying about what the opening hours are for the vagina. Not something. that had occurred to me until this moment.

I've always thought they'll open if you're that keen, you know what I mean? You have to buy them a drink first. Obviously. Did you swim in the Blue Lagoon? Yeah, we went to the Blue Lagoon. It was great. What's that? It's a hot water kind of spa area.

Because obviously, Iceland, the land of ice and fire, they have a lot of geeseers and hot water and stuff like that. So, yeah, it was really good. It's amazing. It has a sort of sulfur coating on the bottom of the pool, which is white. And people cover themselves all over. But I've been there when it's deep snow and you have to run through the snow to get into the Blue Lagoon. But then there's all this steam and you're covering yourself in this kind of white.

It's supposed to be incredibly good for you. But it's a very surreal experience to be in a swimsuit in the freezing cold. Yeah, I had a couple of facial. of the local mud and stuff. And I'm quite surprised you guys haven't noticed how young my skin looks. It's just the quality of the Zoom, James. I hardly recognise you.

I'm honest with you. But those geysers, what it means is that, for example, the whole town of Reckubik, nobody pays for central heating, even though you are talking about one of the coldest countries in the world because there's enough natural heat underground, which they have, you know, transferred.

into domestic heating. So you can have it as hot as you like. Interesting. It's freezing cold outside, which is absolutely fantastic. And there are restaurants where they cook, they have deep pits outside the restaurant, and the pits, they put the pots down into the steaming heat down into the ground and cook it and then bring it back up again.

So they're even using it for cooking. So cool. That's wonderful. It's a fantastic country. I really need to go. I really want to visit, James, did you go to this while you're there? It's not in Reykivik, but the Museum of Sorcery and Witchcraft. Unfortunately, we got stuck behind a landslide,

which meant that we lost half a day, which meant that we couldn't go. But I have always wanted to go there because I want to see the necropants. The necropants, they sound incredible. The necropads. So from the 17th century, they are a pair of trousers that are made of human skin, of human corpse, yeah. And they were supposedly used by, you'd have to have permission from a dead man to skin him afterwards,

his skin as the trousers. And then the idea is that they were a money-making device. They would provide money out of the trousers for you to become rich. So you had to, in order to access the money, get a coin from a widow, and put it in the front of the trousers. But from then on in, it sort of produces more and more coins. It's astonishing. I don't know if it really worked. You've got to match yourself up with a friend who's going to be the right side. If you're a big fat guy, you don't want a dead skin. mini guy to make trousers out of. That's true. And if you're meeting someone

as a friend for the first time and they're kind of looking at your legs going, hmm, sizing you up. But it's a curious thing because traditionally witches around the world, if you think about the Pendle which is in this country and you think about the Salem witches in the United States, it's traditionally it's been women, but I believe the Icelandic

witches are predominantly male. That's right. Only one of all there, there were 21 Icelanders. who were burnt alive for being witches in the 17th century, and only one was a woman. Wow. But it's unusual, it's unusual. A blow for equality there.

I know, right, finally. Yeah. The first person to be executed for witchcraft was a guy called John Johnson, who admitted having used farting runes against a girl. Sorry, farting... Farting roons. So you kind of toss them,

and then you do a bit of... magic and then someone just starts farting all the time. Oh, so you call someone to fart? Yeah, it's like a curse or a, yeah, magic spell. Death by farting. Wow. And then... Is it okay, James, to suggest I feel you've lowered the tone?

With your penises and you're farting. I'm just going to say, I'm just going to... I think you might be right. We had quite erudite conversations about underground rivers and... I saw a quite a fun thing that Iceland's doing at the moment as a sort of of global mental health incentive, and it's that the tourist board has made it so that all of us, all four of us here, anyone listening over the world, can go to a website and scream at it, as loud as we want, and they will play your scream in one of seven locations in Iceland at the

moment, where they've parked these giant speakers into these vast empty quarters, either looking out to the ocean or inland, and you just, it's a primal scream thing where they just want you to vent all this pented up anxiety and depression from the lockdown period out onto their website and they'll bung it out into the open airs of Iceland. And that's the thing that if you go to their website, you can actually just record that scream and have it played out there. I think a few of the locals aren't that sure about the shouting thing though, Dan, because let's say you have some nice puffins sort of living around the speaker.

They're just hearing people yelling into them. I went to this lagoon. It's called the iceberg lagoon. And the glacier, the biggest glacier in Europe kind of comes to the edge of the sea and bits of it break off and you see these icebergs on the water. It's quite amazing. But a few years ago, do you remember there was a Bond movie where they drove cars on ice? I can't remember. Is it tomorrow Never Dies or something like that? It's one of the really bad, it's the last Brosnan one. It's the last Brosnan one.

I think it's the Madonna Die Another Day. It's a real stinker. So they filmed that on that lagoon. But to do so, they needed it to be. quite thick ice. And so they dammed the lagoon so no sea water could go there and it froze to like about six feet deep or maybe even deeper. And I was talking to the guy who was showing us around. I said, was that not quite bad for the, you know, animals, the seals and birds that live here. He's like, yeah, yeah, that was pretty bad. And apparently it used to be owned, privately owned that area and they damned it off and so they could film this. And then as soon as that happened, the government went, we're going to have to buy this off you because we can't be having this kind

thing happening in our country and, you know, killing all our animals just so you could get a good scene in a bad movie. Yeah. Not one seal's life is worth giving up for the film Die Another Day. I think we can all agree with that. I mean, I'd have that on a T-shirt.

That's right. Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter. accounts. I'm on at Schreiberland, James, at James Harkin, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

And Sandy, you're on Twitter, aren't you? I've absolutely no idea. You are, you have a big following and she's at at Sandy Toxwig. Or you can go to our group account at No Such Thing or our website, no such thing as a fish.com. We have all of our previous episodes up there. Until then, we hope you're all safe. We hope you're all doing well. Do say hi to Sandy on Twitter, and we will be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.