No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Chihuahua Dog Sled Team

Episode Date: May 4, 2018

Live from Dublin, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss the monumental conception of Victor Hugo, when North Korea is the safest place to be, and why you should bring 600 pairs of shoes to a dog sled race.

Hey guys, just before we begin this week's show, we have a little announcement to make, which is that we have something for you to look at. That's a bit disgusting, aren't you? Well, it's, I wouldn't say so, Jane. It's inappropriate. No, it's a wonderful kind of behind-the-scenes video of life on tour. Oh, you're talking about a documentary behind the gills. Yeah, behind the gills, exactly.

Then why aren't you wearing any trousers? We don't have time to get into that now, Anna. The point is we've released this thing. And it's our tour, isn't it? We filmed loads of stuff for it. it, loads of behind the scenes interviews and videos of us backstage getting ready. Yeah, it was super fun. We had a great time on tour and we just filmed some of the chats we had, some interviews

where you can learn some deep, dark secrets from our pasts. Childhood photos, that kind of thing. Yeah. So it's been available in the UK for a little while. So hopefully all you guys have got it, but if you haven't, then get it now. But the big news is it's now available in America. So if you go to Amazon, if you go to Google Play, if you go to iTunes, you'll be a able to get hold of it now. That's true, or you can just go to QI.com slash gills where you'll find all the links.

Okay. Where are my trousers? On with the show. I'm sitting here with Anna Chisinski, Andrew Hontemarri, and James Harkin, and once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you. Chisinski. My fact this week is that every competitor at the world's longest dog sled race brings about 600 spare pairs of shoes with them. And they're for the dogs.

This is amazing. So this is the I've Ditterrod race, which happens in Alaska every year. It's very long. It's roughly 1,000 miles through Alaska. And yeah, the dogs have to wear shoes. And so by the rules of the game, they actually have. have to bring eight extra shoes on the sled with them. So at any one time, there have to be eight pairs of dog shoes on the sled.

I was going to say, Anna, a pair of dog shoes is that four shoes or two shoes? Oh. Yeah. I didn't know how to word this. But it's, so it's a pair is for the front pair. And then you have a second pair for the back pair the way I see it. But it basically... Do dogs have different foot sizes on the front sets to the back sets?

They actually, they can do. They actually can do. Yeah. Sometimes they do, yeah. So if you're buying, if you're buying, if you're buying your... your dog shoes, then number one, you're insane. Well, number two, you have to get both sides measured.

What's the biggest difference between the backshed? Like, there's some dogs with tiny, tiny front paws and then massive back paws. That would be good. Like a penny farthing in dog form. Like a kangaroo on all fours. Yeah. Yeah. I believe not. And facts get in the way of it, but otherwise,

pleasing bit of whimsy. so I didn't actually look that much into the size range of the dog's shoes I will say that the mushes who are the guys are we calling them mushes or mushes? Mush. Someone's like mush over there. I call them mushes.

So these are the dudes who are riding the sled. This is the guy who's riding the sled or the woman who's riding the sled. They usually make the dog's shoes themselves so I guess they can tailor it to each dog's foot size and like I say in the rules per dog you have to have eight extra shoes on board the sled and so yeah they usually bring over

a thousand pairs of shoes, like 13,400 shoes. And then the dogs have to drag the weight of those shoes as well, don't they? Yeah, they do kind of change them like that, though. So you know in Formula One, you have pit stops where you can get filled out with petrol, but that's what happens. You have your pit stops on the sled race where you go and you have to change your dog's shoes. That's amazing. They bring in the guys at the side, they bring in 16 trees for the dog to piss again.

I'm with that some drivers, or mushers rather, they bring 3,000. little booties for the course of the world. Because you've got 16 dogs pulling each sled. I think that's right. Is that 64 feet? Yeah. Yeah. What happens? Do they lose their shoe on the run or do they wear through? Why do they need to change so much? It gets worn through because so the reason they have shoes. It's not because of the cold or anything. Dogs feet are very good at managing the cold. So it's totally covered in ice and snow. But the reason they need it is for the kind of lumps and bumps and the grit and the sharp bits of ice that might get stuck in their pores. And so that wears away at the and just, you know, they're running pretty hardcore.

That's cool. I read a really cool thing about the, because this is a big event that happens annually, and it brings people from all over the planet to come and compete. And in 2010, the event saw its first ever Jamaican team entering it. Yeah. Yeah, he's called Mushanmon. That's what he calls himself.

And he, yeah, he's been competing for years. That's a nickname, isn't it? Yeah, no, it's his. He calls himself that. That's his nickname. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah.

Because I thought there was one guy called Newton Marshall. That's him. That's him. So, you know the amazing thing about Newton Marshall? It's such a cool story. So basically, in 2014, there was another sledder called Scott Yanson. And he came off his sled and he was really, really badly injured. But he was off the track.

And he didn't know if anyone was going to find him. And Newton Marshall came by on his sled. And he noticed that this sled had been overturned and that someone was really badly injured. Like, he'd been seriously can. cast, he'd broken his ankle. And so he went and he saved him, this guy called Newton Marshall went and he raised the alarm and he sort of made him a little bed in the snow and they waited for him to be saved. And he was rescued. He was fine. So that was what Newton Marshall did. But the bizarre thing about this is that two years earlier in the same race, Scott Janssen's dog

had collapsed and he'd had to revive him with mouth to snout resuscitation. So he'd been as good as dead for five minutes. And Scott Jansen is a funeral home director. So he said, I know what dead looks like. That dog was dead. But he gave him out this now and the bizarre thing about this is that the dog was called Marshall. So he saved a

marshal. What are you suggesting? I genuinely don't know. I think what I'm clearly suggesting what's clearly happened is the dog Marshall has been reincarnated in the person Marshall who's then come to save him as a thank you for saving the dog.

But only if the dog had subsequently died. I know. And then the pewman will be, you know, a one-year-old. He wouldn't be in... We don't know all the answers. Also, I find it a bit weird that just because he works at a funeral home, this guy, that he should be good at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. On people brought in and he's like, we can still save him.

Give me five minutes. I wouldn't trust that guy. My favorite musher is a guy called John Souter. and he thought, you know what, all these guys are doing it wrong with these huskies.

I'm going to do it with poodles. Wow. And so he got some poodles to carry his sled or to pull his sled along. He brought them up with huskies

so they kind of learned what to do with the huskies. But unfortunately they all got frozen feet because the huskies have got special padding, haven't they? And now it's banned

and you have to have only certain types of dog that you're allowed. It used to be that you could have any dog you wanted. But surely, there weren't many winners from the Chihuahua team.

So do you know what the Iditarod is based on? It's based on an event which happened in 1925 called the Great Race of Mercy. And this was a real crisis. So there was a town in Nome which had an epidemic of diphtheria. And it was beginning. And it was, you know, people were starting to die. A few people had already died. And the nearest antitoxin was a thousand miles away.

In 1925, there were only three planes in the whole of Alaska. And there were elderly unreliable biplanes. so they couldn't be guaranteed to get there. So they went with dogs. And there were hero dogs and hero musherers who got the antitoxin a thousand miles to the town of Nome. And the guy who approved this, the governor of Alaska who approved this,

his name was Scott Bone. So there's a coincidence. I'm not saying he was a reincarnated dog. And afterwards, the lead dog, Balter, he became a celebrity. He was as famous as Rintin Tin or Lassie or all these other celebrity dogs of the 1920s. And the mayor of Los Angeles awarded Baltho a bone-shaped key to the city. Oh.

I've got a couple of favorites, favorite races. So this is two people, a guy called Dallas and a guy called Mitch, their father and son. And they seem to have this ongoing rivalry. So in 2012, Dallas C-V became the youngest winner. He was 25 years old and he won it. In 2013, his first. father became the oldest ever winner. This went on, so Dallas

kept on winning it year after year. In 2016, he broke the record for the fastest time it's ever been done, so he did it in eight days and 11 hours, and in 2017, the following year, his dad broke the record again. Did it in eight days and three hours. And actually, that year, the son,

Dallas's dogs, turned out to be doped. Now, they were weirdly, they were doped with Tramadol, which everyone agreed would not be of any benefit at all. Surely they'd get a nice night's sleep at the end of the day. But yeah, I should say his father was not a suspect

for doping his son's dogs or anything. But this year he decided he didn't want to do it, right? Because he got... They said that basically he doped his dogs. He said, I definitely didn't do it. Someone else must have done it. And he wasn't happy about it. And now he's kind of pulled out.

Is that why he didn't do it? I believe so, yeah. And it was done so much slower this year. It was like nine days something. It was rubbish. Yeah, what they did... But actually, I should just say, A lot of people don't like the dog sledding,

don't they? They think it's kind of cruel because a lot of the dogs get sick, some of them die. We all die. How do you like to pull a sled? Well, we all die. You might as well just pull a fucking sled.

I'm just saying life is hard. It's a lot harder if you're pulling a sled. Good point. Sorry, yeah. Well, the other thing is there's lots of things that can happen. I mean, they do die. One of the worst things they get is scrotal and peanut. frostbite. Wow.

Yeah? You celebrate for it? No, I'd like to announce I'm pulling out of the next year's additional. And then I thought I would check to see if humans can get frostbite on the penises. That's a huge. That's why you went to Iceland. Not why mum shopped there.

Well, apparently, according to the internet, the classic education. count of humans getting frostbite on their genitals is from the New England Journal of Medicine in 1977 and there was a doctor called Melvin Hirschkowitz and he went running in very cold weather and he got that and it's notable the paper is notable because at once he writes about what happened and at one stage his wife comes home and finds him standing legs apart in the bedroom nude below the waist holding the tip of his penis in his right hand and turning the pages of the New England Journal of Medicine. I was just looking up weird dog competitions

and there's a magazine called Veterinary Practice News and it has an annual X-ray competition awarded to dogs who've eaten the weirdest things. And so recently one of the winners was Lola a seven-kilo tortoise who'd eaten a turtle pendant. But I think... Turtuses aren't dogs, are they? No, sorry, it was just pets.

It's just pets. Oh, right, pet. But my favourite one was the rot lollola. I want to see one pulling the sled. My favourite one of these winners was the Rottweiler who had swallowed her owner's wristwatch But the alarm was still on telling her when to take her insulin So she had to listen to the dog

To find her to take her pills It is time for fact number two And that is my fact My fact this week is that 3,000 feet up a mountain in France Is a block of sandstone Commemorating the exact spot Where the author of Victor Hugo's parents

conceived him. Yeah, this was revealed that that was the spot where it happened in a letter written by his dad who bragged about it a lot. It was at the top of this mountain called Mount Donon in France, and he made it to the top. And it was years later, this wasn't done in his lifetime, but years later, a museum curator thought, I've got to commemorate this and brought a sandstone, and it's there to this day. It was kind of a prank, wasn't it, by the guy from the museum. in the 60s, was it?

I think it was like a practical joke in the 1960s. But did you know that Victor Hugo denied that that was where it happened? Because he was kind of ashamed of this mountain, being a mountain that wasn't super famous, not everyone knew about it. So whenever he retold the story of when he was conceived, as we all do, he made lots of little changes.

So there'd been a Celtic temple on Mount Donon, and he changed that to a Roman temple of love. And he changed the mountain range to the Alps, because everyone's heard of the Alps. and he made it Mont Blanc because that's 3,000 feet taller. And so his version, he was a storyteller. That was what he did. Yeah.

You're running the risk of frostbite to the scrotum if you try to conceive at that altitude. He was, he did, he told a lot of stories, obviously, namely limited. Yeah, fine, fine. He claimed that he and his stories, obviously, namely, limited. his wife, Adele, had sex nine times on their wedding night. And the telegraph wrote that apparently she lost her taste for intercourse after that first night.

And I'm not surprised. Well, he was a sex addict, wasn't he? Yes. He was constantly going to brothels. He almost had a sort of like breakfast sex and then lunchtime sex and dinner sex. It was almost a menu on a day-to-day basis with Victor Hugo. To the point that he was so popular amongst the brothels of Paris that when he died, the brothels of Paris closed down for the day

so that everyone working there could come to the funeral procession to pay tribute. I read one account, and I'm not sure this can be true, but the prostitutes of Paris draped their vaginas in black crape paper. That's according to a guy called Edmund Goncourt, who was there at the time. Wow.

How did he know? He can't have tested them all. But what happened was, when he died, everyone thought he was going to die and then he kind of stuck around for a few weeks and so people came to Paris expecting for him to die and they were going to celebrate his life but it went so long more and more and more

people came and in the end there were a crowd of 2 million people at his funeral which was more than the normal population of Paris. Wow! It was rammed and everyone because he was like a famous sex addict or whatever and you know he was a partier

everyone just got drunk, everyone had sex there was this story that always happens that people say that nine months later there were loads of babies born. So people were saying that, you know, during the funeral, everyone was just having sex everywhere. There was a parade at his funeral, and it took six hours for it to get to the end. And there were delegations of different professions there.

So there were veterans, civil servants, writers, animal lovers, school children, suffragettes. Sorry, can we go back? What? Who's animal lover a formal profession? Who's paying for that? But apparently the suffragettes got really annoyed because they were behind the gymnasts in the department stores.

They said, we deserve better than this. Wow. But it was just after his 79th birthday. So he had an 80th birthday party on his 79th birthday as he was entering his 80th year. And for that one, half a million people just walked past his house as he sat outside waving at them. And then the next day, because that was his apartment in Paris,

they changed the street name from where he was living. So it got changed to become Avenue Victor Hugo. So his remaining days, he lived on the street named after him. And he would say that we wanted all the future mail that came to him to be addressed to Mr. Victor in his avenue, Paris. And that would make it to him. He said he wanted a pauper's burial, a pauper's funeral. And he obviously had the complete opposite. it, but I'm not totally convinced

he wants it. There's one biography of him, which kind of seems to suggest that he's obviously famous for being a proponent of helping out the poor, and Les Miserables is all about the awful conditions people lived in, but he really liked people to know it. So, for instance, apparently, he liked people to ask him why he was wearing his

coat inside out, because then he'd say to them, I just wear it inside out rather than buying a new one, and then I can give that money to the poor. And he really he really liked to invite this kind of thing. What a wanker. I know, right? Apparently, according to this person,

he actually left in his will what the biographer describes as an exiguous sum, a very small amount in his will to the poor, because he knew how rumours work, and he knew that that would become an enormous amount within a short amount of time. He was so famous when he was living in Guernsey that admirers would save the pebbles that he walked upon

when he was walking across the beach. Wow. So they were like, he's still on that one. I'll take that. Wow. Yeah. Apparently. I mean, it doesn't sound very true, does it? Is it from, did he tell us that?

It's hard to tell, isn't it? He was paid in a very unusual way for Le Mise because he said, I think, to his publisher, his publisher said, how much do you want? And he made him quite a high offer. And he said, no, that's not enough. And he said, I think he said, I'd like to be paid more than anyone else

has ever been paid to write a book. And I'll give some to the poor. But the publisher didn't have the money to pay. I think the equivalent of about three million pounds, which is a huge amount of money, and the publisher didn't have that money, so he had to borrow all of that from a bank. So it was kind of a private finance initiative novel, basically,

and then the publisher just borrowed in the assumption that it would pay off, and it did. Yeah, it was huge, wasn't it? When it was published, people turned up with wheelbarrows to buy copies of it. What? How big was it? It is a big part.

And wheelbarrows at the time were very small. But what happened is you would go in. If you were a worker and you could get some time off and you can afford to get the book and you could queue up and get there in time with your wheelbarrow, then you could sell it to your friends and you could make a massive profit on it. It was like ticket-talenting kind of thing.

Yeah, wow. He was quite arrogant though, wasn't he? He wanted to be paid all the money in the world and he used to, he was a party animal, so he apparently used to have 30 guests surrounded in every single night right up until he was 80 when he died. But he then did at these big, dinner parties, he used to spend the whole time talking about how great he was, he would say,

there is only one classical writer in this country. One, do you hear? Me, I am the only one. I know the French language better than anyone else alive. And then he was... Sorry, I just asked if you wanted red, red, old white wine. And then he'd catalog all, like, Bulzac and Racine and all the other great writers and explain why they were not as good as he was. There was one time when he wouldn't talk about himself in these parties and that was when he did his party trick which was putting a whole orange into his mouth and then thrusting as many pieces of sugar as possible into his cheeks and then scrunching it all up swallowing two liquor glasses of kish and then opening his mouth and saying i've just eaten it all so that was his trick he could eat an orange and a load of sugar really

quickly um awesome and people still talk about his novels we're going to have to move on very shortly the guy who wrote the lyrics for the musical of Le Mise, he was a guy called James Fenton. He wrote the first lyrics, lots of people who had it, had to go out of the lyrics. But when he was given the book and told, hey, why don't you have a look at the lyrics for this, turning this novel into lyrics?

He was on a three-month trip looking for headhunters in Borneo. And it was a really heavy book. And he said that he spent three months in a canoe reading Le Miz. And every time he finished a chapter, he threw it to the crocodiles so he could save a bit of weight in the canoe. That's very cool.

Did you know he trended on Twitter in 2014 for a kind of related reason. So he trended on Twitter and not in a good way. It turned out, the BBC reported this, that he was suddenly, Victor Hugo, was receiving all these death threats on Twitter, and he was being called lots of stuff. He was called the son of a prostitute. His daughter was called a big bitch.

And it turned out what happened was one of his poems had been set in a French baccalaureate exam, and they were so annoyed about it, because it's so imagine that all the students got online afterwards. They got him trending. Wow.

I think you know you've made it when you're getting death threats on Twitter 200 years as you died. Okay, it's time to move on to fact number three and that is James. Okay, my fact this week

is in the event of a zombie apocalypse, only one country will survive. And that country is North Korea. Really? Yeah. So this is a study by some mathematicians in Brazil. And they've kind of done a model of what's going to happen.

And it's going to be like a straight fight between human and zombie. And the zombie's always going to win. But if you get a human with a gun, like in the army, then the human might win. And they've worked out that what you're going to need is 47 soldiers per 1,000 capita

in order to survive. And there's only one country with that many people, and that is North Korea. And they have also the advantage of being completely separate from everyone else. So it's going to be difficult

for the zombies to get in. The borders are very, you know, guarded and stuff like that. So if the zombies come, that's where's the best place to go. Oh, right. In all of the circumstances, don't bother. I was reading, my assumption is as if you were killed by a zombie, it would be through your brains being eaten and you being attacked. According to Max Brooks, Max Brooks is an author who wrote the zombie survival guide.

He wrote the movie World War Z, the book rather, World War Z, which was made into the Brad Pitt movie. So he studied in a very serious way what he thought would be the way that you would be most likely to die in a zombie apocalypse. And his main reason for anyone's death is that you would die from explosive diarrhea.

And it's because water would become so scarce that you would be forced to drink from puddles. Puddles are very dangerous to get water from. You can see why they don't make most of the zombie films about the whole explosive diarrhea puddle issue. Yeah. I wouldn't watch them. I did look up, because there are so many zombie films,

and they're quite cheap to make, obviously, because all you need is some willing extras with a load of makeup on, and a load of them are quite low quality. But I went through a list of all the zombie films I could find online. I just wanted to share a few of the titles, because they're great.

So, I mean, there are classic things, like boy eats, girl, very clever. There's erotic nights of the living dead. There's flights of the living dead, which is a plane-based zombie film. my favorite one I like the explosive diary one

shites at the living therapy yeah I've got a third one it's not as good as that it's called Paltry Geist Night of the Chicken Dead

I'm a tiny little nugget about the World War Z movie by the way that was made which is just a cool bit of trivia which is that one of the actors in the movie was Peter Copoldy

and Peter Copoldy was cast as a World Health Organization doctor. So he was a Who doctor. And what it was is that the filmmakers had inside knowledge that he was going to be announced as the doctor. This was before Doctor Who. And so it's a subtle Easter egg, yeah. Oh, and none of us guessed based on that.

We should have known it was staring at the face. People at scientists and people at universities are always kind of writing analyses of what happens in a zombie apocalypse. It happens really in a lot of places and I think it's kind of a way of engaging people when making something sound fun when actually it's a paper about statistical projections. That can be fun, Anna?

Which for a lot of people is fun. But one example of this was the University of Ottawa a few years ago published a paper with an equation in it explaining how fast we'd have to deal with the zombie apocalypse. So the paper's called When Zombies Attack, Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection and one of the paper's authors, the professor in charge was called Robert J. Smith question mark.

And it turns out that the guy who wrote this paper has put a question mark on the end of his name. And I looked him up, and if you go to his academic page on the website at the university, he says, yeah, that's not a typo. I really do have a question mark on the end of my name. Do you have any idea what it's like to live with such an incredibly common name that you'll never ever show up on Google?

I had to do something. How do you think he pronounces it? Is Robert Smith? Yeah. Or he might just say question mark at the end, maybe. Yeah. But he then also says, I did go to his page. I saw this as well.

He then follows up by saying, how do you stick out on Google? He then goes, actually, you still don't stick out on Google when you put in question mark. So it hasn't really worked. I like the other one who he wanted to stick out against, who is Robert Smith. I've got a bit of good news in the zombie war to come.

We're going to win. It's going to be fine. It's going to be absolutely fine. We're going to win within about a week, guys. Okay. Did someone boo? We're going to win the zombie war. How about the priorities, mate?

So there's an article by a scientist called David Mizzajewski, and he said that nature would destroy zombies before they could destroy us. So obviously all animals will be packing away at them. They're dead. They're not very fast with their reactions. But the main thing is, organisms would go to town on them.

Bacteria, fungi, moulds, insects, flesh-eating beetles, you name it. I think it's a bit cocky for you to say we're going to win in that situation. Our allies in the microorganism worlds will join us in a coalition of the live. That's really good point. That's such good logic. They can decompose a rabbit right down to the bones in a week.

So they'll go to town on these things. But, Ms. Yovsky, he did say that, in his kind of world, animals can't get the same disease that humans were getting. Do you know what I mean? So the animals can't become zombies in his kind of idea. If the animals can become zombies as well, then it's a whole different ballgame. Sure. If you're getting attacked by zombie microorganisms.

That is not a great movie either, I must admit. There's someone else who's published advice on how to escape zombies, how to survive a zombie attack, is the CDC, the Center for Disease Control in America. and this is obviously kind of a PR thing to try and get people actually onto their website so they learned how to survive genuine crises. But it's quite funny because if you do go to the site now, they've got a zombie preparedness page,

a zombie preparedness blog, they've got a zombie preparedness booklet for educators that they will send out. But they don't really conceal their true purpose very well. So the tips they give are things like stock up on water, food and other supplies to get you through the first couple of days before you can locate a zombie footprint,

free refugee camp, brackets, or in the case of a natural disaster, it will buy you some time to get to an evacuation shelter or until utility lines are restored, closed brackets. It's always like,

you know, first aid supplies in case that horrible zombie bites you also will come in handy in a tornado or a hurricane. One other thing that might help us if the zombies attack to win is the reverse zombie tick.

Okay, this is an animal, a little take. and if it bites you, it makes you allergic to meat. And so the idea is what we might do is kind of work out what makes that happen and then we can inject it into the zombies, make them allergic to eating us, and then we're saved.

But just because the zombies got hives doesn't mean that you're not then a zombie. Yeah. Hey, do you guys know that zombies make an appearance in Amazon's terms and services conditions? You know that when you go and you sign that massive 26,000 words. Yeah, we all read it. Well, then this won't be a surprise.

Someone did read the whole thing, and they discovered that there's a passage in it which reads, however, so that it just comes into this. However, this restriction will not apply in the event of the occurrence of a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that cause human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh,

blood, brain or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of organized civilization. That's in Amazon's actual terms. That's very funny. In conditions, yeah. It feels like they're testing us to check we're reading them. Exactly. And as the news of the last two months has taught us,

nobody has read any of this. We need to move on shortly. There is, just on animal zombie sort of parasites and the way they spread, there is a flight called apocephalus borialis and it lays eggs inside bumblebees and the amazing thing is that the infected bee then stops working and it starts acting like a moth it starts being flying around lights and this kind of thing while the parasite is preparing to burst out basically but that means

that there are zom bees yes good good everybody very cool it's a very forgiving audience tonight is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy. My fact is that the 1930s actor George Arliss once booked himself into the left luggage office at Charing Cross as a parcel in order to escape people who wanted his autograph. What a guy. I'd never heard of this guy before, but he was very famous at the time, and he wrote in his memoir that he was being chased by people who were desperate for his autograph, and so he said, with presence of mind worthy of a great general, I thought of the left luggage

office. It was just behind me, close to the platform. I turned to the man in charge and demanded the right to book myself in as a parcel. I paid my two-pence and the man took me over the counter and I was saved. He took him over the counter. It's amazing what you could get for two-pence in those days. He was, I hadn't heard of him either and he was very famous in his time. He was the first British actor to ever win an Academy Award for leading. actor, yes, he won it as well for playing Benjamin Disraeli, the British Prime Minister, and he then won it again a few years later for playing Benjamin Disraeli. He played the same role and got given it twice. He was the first person to do that, reprising a role and getting it

a second time. And was that one was silent, wasn't it? And then the other one was a talkie, yeah, that's right, yeah. And he also, Victor Hugley was very egotistical as well. He was, He had to do a court appearance once. He was called to just a court hearing and get to give a testament. And he called himself the world's greatest living actor. And to explain his statement, he said, you see, I'm on oath.

So he was a real kind of dick. I really like Victor Hugely. There was one other instance of his egotism that I read about was in a film called The Man who played God, which was about, a concert pianist who then fell on hard times. But he stuck to the script totally, except there was one bit of the script

where the line was, someone came up to the pianist after the show and congratulated him on the performance. And the line was, so glad you liked it. And he changed it to so glad you liked me. Someone's just gone through the script in the film and gone, oh, he changed that, didn't he? Wow. Man.

So on autograph hunting, and autograph collectors, I didn't know this. magazine called Autograph Collector, which is all about collecting autographs, how to do it, how to get different people and various tactics and things like that. And they do a lot on the history of autograph collecting too, because some people sell them, obviously. Some people collect loads and loads of them at the same time. Yeah. And they described one incident in 1934 when the Australian cricket team came to England. And in those days, they had to get the ship to England to play the

ashes and so on. And the junior batsman, Arthur Chippenfield, had to spend almost the entire journey on the steamship forging on bats and on sheets of paper the signatures of the rest of the team who couldn't be asked to sign his a paper. Luckily, that was the last time the Australian team did anything fraudulent. And we will be touring Australia in May. Tickets are...

They weren't available, but some have now come available. It's really odd. Wow. There was autograph hunter, quite a famous one in his little area. he was called Tommy Scullion. He was an Irish grocery driver. And his family are in tonight.

He devoted his whole life to getting autographs. He had more than 40,000 in total. He had Picasso, he had Franco, he had Charles Manson, he had the Great Twins. Oh, so he wasn't discriminating in the whole Good v. Evil metric. I'll be honest, there's not much good in this list. But he left a will, in the end, he died quite recently, he left a will and he bequeathed his collection to the village museum. Unfortunately, in his hometown, there was no village museum.

So they auctioned it instead. They have these people, have been around so much longer than I imagined autograph hunters. So they were particularly prevalent in the late 19th century, early 20th century. And they were thought of as a total scourge. So if you look back an old newspaper, from the early 1900s. They're written about in such an awful way. There was an article in New York Times in 1901

that said autograph hunters excel in ways that are dark and tricks that are vain. Mark Twain hated them. Mark Twain had a letter pre-printed that explained his refusal when people wrote to him for an autograph and the letter explained that if he answered all these requests he wouldn't have time to get anything else done. And also the asking for an autograph is asking for a sample

of his writing and he's a writer. So you're asking for a something. example of his own work. And he said, it wouldn't be fair to ask a doctor for one of his corpses to remember him by, would it? What? What a stupid analogy?

Corpses are not the work that doctors produce. Well, some very bad doctors. I just made this. So if we were going to try the mouth to mouth, the mouth to mouth, we'll love it. Two more things about your statement. Oh, God.

Firstly, sometimes artists can help people with their art. There was a, I read that Mozart used to when he was walking the streets. If he came across someone who was homeless asking him for money, there's one instance that's recorded where he didn't have anything on him, but he was so quick at writing music that he got a paper and pen, composed a new piece, gave it to the person, and said there's a music publisher that will give you money for this, so take this there.

That's point number one. Point number two is that that's amazing. Mozart. Yeah, Mozart. Juvius, yeah, someone shouts it out Jubius. But no, the other thing is that, so you said that Mark Twain said this, sent them this letter saying, I'm not going to sign you a signature. Steve Martin, the comedian, actor, he does the same thing, but in a positive way.

So he doesn't do signatures either. What he does is if you meet Steve Martin, he gives you a card, a business card that's pre-signed, and on it is written the words, this certifies that you've had a personal encounter with me and that you found me warm, polite, intelligent, and funny. That's great. And that's what he gives everyone who needs it. Last year, there was a collection of Beatles' autographs which sold for £2,000 even though three of them were fake.

Okay? And the reason they sold for £2,000 is that they were all done by John Lennon. Oh, really? Cool. Because in the early days, sometimes they weren't all there or only one of those who would just fake it. Yeah. That's cool. So he was doing a prank at the time, presumably.

Well, he kind of got them almost all right. He got George Ringo bang on, but he didn't. didn't really bother with Paul. Even in the early days, the signs were there of the cracker. I went on to eBay to look for the most expensive autographs at the moment. The most expensive one when I checked, which was a day ago, was 351,493 pounds and 85 pence. And it was, it was, it's alive or dead?

Is it alive or dead? Male or female? Male. Hancock. Hem of the eighth? No. God. God, God, God.

You've tried the two biggies. George Arliss. You're just not going to guess. Oh, okay. Who is it? Actually, I think he's dead. Hugh Heffner. Yeah, he died last year.

350,000? Yeah, yeah. So he's 300. He's a number one edition of Playboy, with his signature on. But that is 351,000. Bob Dylan signed handwritten lyrics to Like a Rolling Stone,

only 140,000. 597 pounds and 54 It's still a lot of money guys Don't be too outraged Okay It's going oh Sure I lose change But a fifth

A fifth the price of the Hugh Hefner one For 70,000 You can get the Apollo 11 Space Floon US flag Signed by all three astronauts On the Apollo 11 All right That actually we could share between us

All of us We've been in a ten or each We can do it And then we'll have to have An incredibly complicated time share and the lowest prices, 75P, an EastEnders signed photo of Simon Williams who plays Hugo in EastEnders.

He's actually got an exclamation mark out of it. Actually, I never heard of him. We, ages ago, when our vinyl came out, we went to a record shop and did a signing at a record shop, and we did a few signatures on ones that they hence sold that they were going to keep online in their store. So we checked if they were still in stock online. They were.

The unsigned vinyl was £19.99. The signed vinyl was £20. We are worth between us, one penny. Wow. I will be signing after the show tonight. Just on the astronauts, Apollo 11 thing, One of the things that was a contingency for the families of the Apollo 11 space mission was that Neil Armstrong Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins signed a lot of signatures to give to their family

so that if they didn't make it back, the families could sell the signatures to make money to keep the family going okay. They signed hundreds of signatures going, if we don't make it back, sell these and this will help my family continue. Stephen King. That's very sad. It's not sad. They were okay. Oh yeah, they were fine. Oh, don't spoil it for me.

He's only washed tape for 30 years. He's only on Apollo 10. The next one's really good. It is one of the few where the sequels get better and better. We're going to have to wrap up shortly. There's one amazing story about autographs that Stephen King tells. I was watching him give a talk on stage. about this thing that happened when he was 26 years old.

And he'd never been recognised and asked for an autograph before. It was in his early days. And he was in a restaurant. And he was really sick. He was really ill. He had some kind of horrible stomach bug. And so he had to be really close to the bathrooms at all times. And at one point he had to rush to the bathrooms.

And he went in. And I don't know what kind of weird restaurant this was, but there were no doors on the bathroom, on the toilet stalls. So he just had to have his stomach complaint in full view of the rest of the bathroom. And so he went in and he sort of explosively shats all into this toilet. It's on me. He's on me. Telltale sign. And he did this and he's feeling terrible.

He was saying he was on this toilet, the door open, things can't get any worse. And there was a toilet attendant in there who he said was about 108 years old. And while he was in the middle of this awful experience, the toilet attendant came up to him with a powder paper and a pen and said, aren't you Stephen King? Come up your autograph, please. mate. So Stephen King gave his first requested autograph on the loo while having diaries. 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 have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shreiberland, Andy, at Andrew Hunter, James. James Harkin. And Chisinski. You can email podcast at QI.com. Yep. Or you can go to our... group account, which is at No Such Thing. We have a Facebook group as well. No Such Thing as a Fish. Or you can go to our website. Noseuchthingasafish.com. We have everything up there from our tour dates upcoming, from the book, the link to our book that you can buy. We're also got a link to our new tape that we've just released, and we're about to give one away here in Ireland. And you guys sent

in your fact at the beginning of this show. We've picked our favorite facts. So the winner is going to get this. So Andy, I believe you've picked the fact. Yes. The winning fact tonight is from Kieran Dowling. Are you in? Great? The fact is, the fact is that Adolf Hitler's brother, Alwa, used to work at the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin, where he was known, where he was known as Paddy Hitler.