No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Fishman

Episode Date: November 23, 2018

Dan, James, Anna, Andy and special guest Stephen Fry discuss frogs with regional accents, Canada's official tagline, and streaking in museums.

Hi guys, just before we start this show, we wanted to let you know we've got a really exciting guest on today. We were really looking forward to recording with this person. It's a new up-and-coming comic and creative talent called Stephen Fry. Ooh, yeah. I've not heard of him. Well, I think you will have in a couple of years. You know, he's new on the scene. Cool. Okay. Well, that's very exciting. And he has this new book out, which is called Heroes. It's a fantastic book. It's all about the Greek heroes. So Jason and Hercules slash Heracles. and Pegasus, all these familiar characters, but written in the incredible comic wit and

stylings of Stephen Fry. It's really funny. It's fantastic for kids. And if you're an adult who just wants to revisit these stories, I highly recommend it. There you go. That's Heroes by Stephen Fry. And then please do also by Book of the Year by us. And we should just say this is a special extended version of the podcast because Stephen had so much to say and we wanted to hear it. We figured you guys would want to hear it. And so enjoy this episode of No, Such Things a Fish Plus. Okay. On with the show.

And welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Chazinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkand, and a special guest, and the man who gave us the name, the QI elves. It's Stephen Fry. 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, Stephen. All right, yes, I have a fact here. There was a make of toilet paper in Victorian England that was so posh, every sheet had a watermark to deter counterfeitors. And as he was so posh, it wouldn't have been called toilet paper, it would have been called lavatory paper.

If you remember, toilet is deeply non-ew. As is the word posh, so in fact it was probably the make of lavatory paper that was so classy that every sheet had a watermark. But anyway, that's the point. And what does that tell us about the Victorians and their bathroom habits, I wonder. They're ablutionary customs.

Well, this was one of the first toilet papers, old lavatory papers, wasn't it? What was used before that then? We know all the stories of swansnecks and goose necks. Corn cobs? I think we mentioned before, yeah. I just wonder what, so for example, this is in the 19th century. So this was well after, for example, Jane Austen died.

So what are the regency gentry? Or just the middle classes? I mean, I can't imagine Jane Austen using a corncob but it's all I'm trying to say. More like a condoli. Lace. I know the French used lace. No. Which is weird because it's got holes in it,

but apparently they did. I know that in many Middle Eastern customers the hand was always used and that's why you don't use the cack hand, literally the shit hand, if I may say so. I thought that. Yeah. Cac handed.

And it's interesting. I don't know. Many people have watched Peter Jackson's reconstruction of, you know, recolorization of some of that extraordinary imperial war museum first world war footage. They may remember seeing those men perched on a bar having a poo with their bottoms sort of hanging over. Yes.

It's a reminded one, obviously, of the very everyday nature of war includes naturally the very everyday nature of emptying the bowels. And there, I think one of the comments was from a veteran speaking that there was no paper. So our grandfathers and great-grandfathers who fought in that war and survived would have all had that same experience. And we don't talk about it. Was the Wipers Times? was that? That's a good point. That wasn't designed for...

It wasn't. It's just a classic Tommy mispronunciation of Ibrun. Oh. It's not... Did you think that? I thought you would read it and then wipe your butt with it. Well, that may be a full ami, as they say. But a very happy one, yes.

So there is a First World War toilet paper fact, which is that both sides printed toilet paper with propaganda on it. So the Germans issued sheets with a series of lying reports by our enemies and British manufacturers did the same thing. thing. And drop them on the other side? No, just for you to wipe your bottom with British propaganda.

And I can offer a fact, because you know how when we were young, and I don't suppose cartoonists still do it, but escaping prisoners always used to have suits with arrows on government property arrows. Well, when I was a young and unfortunate criminal, convicted and inside a prison, the lavage of paper there was in those sort of boxes with their rather crispy leaves intertwined and interleaved, in fact. And they had those arrows on, as did Or did the cigarette rolling papers that you've got from the shop. They all had those arrows. HM prisons only plus the arrows.

Wouldn't that tempt you to take some when you left as a cigarette? Exactly. To show you'd done your bird. Yeah. In America they get like little tattoos, don't they, to show what they've done? Yes. You just have a piece of arrow on toilet paper. It doesn't the same job, doesn't it?

Well, have we mentioned that they used to... So before toilet paper was invented, they used to wipe their bums on the farmer's... Olmaniac, didn't they in America famously? And the Sears catalogue and they both used to come with a hole in them so you could hang it up and then use it as Lou Rolls. That right? Yeah, and I was actually listening to a podcast which was

saying there are two reasons that suddenly Lou Roll was necessary and was taken on. One was that we invented plumbing so suddenly you can't flush a call on the cob down the loo. And the other was the Sears catalogue started coming laminated, started coming with glossy glossy paper. Oh right. It didn't work

anymore. It was absorbing but not absorbent. An important distinction. It's true. I find Waitrose food illustrated very uncomfortable every month. But this does bring us to a sensitive point about the wiping bottoms. Most people never taught her to wipe a bottom, I assume, unless there's some Tim memory of a mother during potty training actually explaining it.

But there was a new story just the other day about the fact that women are being told how to wipe their bottoms. And some people on social media were very angry at being told. But the answer is, and you know, you know, This is all too distressing to hear it, turn away. But that forwards to back is the correct female way. As a woman, you just are told that. You chant it practically.

Front to back. I think I'm right and saying, guys, we don't do that, do we? I go the other way. Exactly. You go back to, yeah. But it doesn't matter for you, obviously. No, exactly. We don't have the other, the little.

You'd have to really miss your target to get it up your breakthrough. Oh, my God. There we are. It's important. be frank and open about these things. Absolutely. So it's a health issue for women, obviously, you know. I'm so glad you're here, Stephen.

I'm not. Bring the levels up. Educate us on women's health. But it's interesting, we say bringing the levels up and everything. To an alien species looking at us, they would be very puzzled at the fact that we have these very normal and necessary actions that are part of every day, like eating and drinking and having a poo and a pee, and indeed making love.

in order to, whatever, or cohesion or whatever one wants to call it, in order to propagate the species. And those are the very things that have the taboos. Whereas murder and cruelty, we can use those words. We can say, I was in the traffic, it was actually cruel. Oh, God, it was murder. You think, well, hang on, murder kills people. That's the thing we should have a taboo about.

Whereas if you say it was shitting bad traffic. But don't swear. Hang on. There's kids in the car. Which frame of reference is the dangerous one? Not the poeing. And so I'm sure to the, you know, the very useful Martian watching that this should teach us something about how completely screwed up we are.

It's so wrong to be obsessed. Well, I think wasn't the people who invented Lou Role on a role for the first time, in fact, invented it in the 1890, I think, and they didn't admit to it. And they did it under a shell company. They only admitted to it in 1902 because it was such a shameful thing to have invented. Oh, I met someone who worked for Doulton, the Portrait of the Portrait of the Portals. company in Staffordshire and I asked him to party and I said oh it was a picturing he did Staffordshire dogs or something that go on mantel pieces you know nice little sort of ornamental

things I said what sort of things do you specialize and he said rather coyly heavyware I didn't quite know what heavyware was and I sort of worked out what he meant was bathrooms and lavatories ah nice being the proper porcelain oh really just speaking of the late 1800s and which way to wipe I saw the patent for the first toilet roll. And it sort of answers the question of which way you meant to hang the roll. Does the paper come down underneath

or does it go over? So which do you think it is? Well, I thought forward so you can grab it and that's the way hotels do it because they do a little coy provocative peak. Yes, fresh paper. Yes, unused. Yep, that's correct.

It's that way in the patent. Not a great question. But the thing about the little peak is supposed to be having worked in a hotel. it's so that the housekeepers can tell if the room has been serviced. So it's the last thing they do. And so if that's done, it means they know that it's fine. So if I was a housekeeper, I'd just do that.

Yeah. Yeah. So if they got in and they saw that they were sort of swan towel positioned and little mince, they'd be like, well, that could have just been the person staying here. Let me check the bathroom. So there was a, sorry, no, I was just thinking, so, yes, the first company to make Lurl disclaimed it or hid it, I wonder when it was first advertised then, when it was first allowed into magazines

and then into television. We're all familiar with Andrex and his puppy and everything. And I'm old enough to remember the Hullabaloo when it was allowed to have female sanitary products, as they call them, advertised on TV, and everyone said that was the beginning of the end. It's disgusting. I don't want to see that.

But presumably, there may have been a similar moment when lavatory paper was first advertised. Well, but bizarrely, you still never see Lou paper or sanitary pads with the thing on them that they're supposed to. to clear up. I wonder if men think that we have blue periods. Because the only thing you see is a drop of blue water. That's only Picasso has a blue period.

There is one that says for your bums, isn't there? There was one that has... But yes, I thought... I remember my friend, you and I, we wanted to do... When we were heavy voiceover performers in the 80s and doing all kinds of adverts and things, we thought, why don't they do that? It'd be brilliant.

Wipes your bottom beautifully. It's all you need. It just wipes your bottom. Brilliant. So this company is Scots who did this new role And they couldn't advertise I know that much at least And they sold it under the counter in the chemists So you'd have to go in and they were just kind of

They wouldn't even put it on the shelves It's technically actually It should have been placed over the counter According to the patent Yeah And the outside loo would be a string with newspaper in this You say the holes in the CSC account Yeah

I found a man This is a two years ago This is in 2016 It was a man who was fined in court After paying for a takeaway with a £10 note that he had printed onto some toilet paper. It's incredible chutzpah.

He used his computer and he just used a desktop computer and a normal printer and he just put the Lerol into the printer feet. His defence barrister said this is going to be the most expensive takeaway of Mr Coburn's life. Is the great achievement of Peter Bazalgett

and not Peter but is Joseph, I mean, is the great achievement of Joseph Basilgette to be undone by the arrival of moist lavatory paper because this seems to be now considered unflashable and yet everybody uses it. Do you? Do they? Yes. Yeah.

And there was a report just recently saying there is, they did tests, there is no style of moist paper or wipe that is suitable for our, for our sewers without creating blocks that cost millions. The fat birds. Yeah. Everything, you know, everything has a, everything casts a shadow in this world. There is no sort of things of free lunch. and there's a free bottom wipe. It's got up somewhere, hasn't it? It was the number one cause, I think,

they found of those big fatbergs that they were finding in the sewers, as in if you took percentages of what made it up, the wet wipes, which were largely, I think, more for babies than they are for adults, for cleaning nappies.

That's what they found. And I read that, we basically have KFC to blame for that. Colonel Sanders is the person who took the wet wipe and first introduced it into restaurants, and that's spread around the world. Yeah.

So before we were... Give me the moist lemon-scented cleansing square. I think that's what you mean. I think another voiceover's coming back to you. They do make sense, though. I mean, it is bizarre, and I think people in other countries think we're bizarre

that we use dry paper to get rid of that when it makes no sense not to apply water. I mean, we wash our hands if we think there might be one bacteria on it, and we cover our bottoms with poo. Forward the bidet. Yes.

Well, indeed, yeah. That's the answer, but not everyone has room for a bidet. but what they do have room for and these are becoming more and more popular. A little installation says are now quite cheap of a Japanese style. You know the kind of thing? Yes.

You join into your plumbing. It's a seat and you have a remote control and you press buttons and it oscillates a jet up the jacksy and it has a female setting and a male setting. And it can also offer a hot air to dry, sir or madame's backside. And these are becoming more and more popular

and consider very healthy. And of course there is no. Nothing goes into the sewer except once you've dropped in there. Great. In nature's way. So there is, obviously it costs energy because they're electric. But those are going to be more and more popular. It's so funny, just because your voice is so perfect for talking and selling things, as you did that, I thought, your voice would be fantastic for that.

Would sir or Madame Enjoyer? A jet of the jacks. There's a great story about one of my heroes, one of my cinematic heroes as well. Many people's cinematic hero, Billy Wilde of the great show. Oh, yeah. director, you know, some like it hot. Yeah. Those, Sunset Boulevard, whatever, many, many great films.

And I think he was in Paris with Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon and trying to keep control, particularly of Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe. And his wife, Audrey, whom I met, fun enough, she told me this story was true, had said to him, honey, I want you when you're in Paris to get a proper Parisian bidet. Because the, you know, the Walcats have got one or whoever it was, some family that she used. sort of keeping up with the Jonesed with and she felt that they want to and he said, sure honey, I get to you, I get to it, no problem, no problem. Anyway, he was so busy

in Paris that he just didn't get whole, he didn't even have time to look at a plumbing supply shop and have a bidet shipped over from Paris to Beverly Hills and on in the car, on the way to Wasi or whatever the airport was then in Paris he suddenly remembered and he stopped off at a Bureau de Post to send a telegram

to prepare her for disappointments. And honey, tried everywhere, no bidet's in Paris, suggest doing handstand in shower. So that would do it, man it. I love bidet, which you might all know this, but is named after a small extinct donkey or horse. I didn't know. Did you not?

Yeah. So a bidet is French for this species of small horse and so small that the idea is with a bidet. you'd be straddling it like this little... Wait, is it a real animal? In Italian, the word for B-Day translates as hygienic little horse. There you are.

Same thing. Yeah. Yeah. But I didn't think it was based on an extinct real animal which people rode to clean. No, no, no. No, like a burrito looks like a little donkey. But it doesn't mean people at donkeys in the way they eat burritos.

God, time travel is when you go back, open the toilet and there's a corner. of Cobb and there's a donkey. What am I meant to do here? This toilet paper that we were talking about, the main fact, it was shown at the 1878 Paris Exposition

and it won the highest prize. It was seen as such an innovation in anti-counterfeiting, in actual quality of lavatory, lurole. So the watermark was the maker of the, it wasn't that you could have it in your own family crest. It was the watermark of the manufacturer

of the role. Bromo, that's right. Bromo, exactly. Yeah. That's the best they made. Because they had amazing inventions in the Victorian era. I know, the Traveilator, I think, was there.

Yeah, sometimes it's the simplest inventions that are the best, though, isn't it? You're right. We do still all use, Lou Role. We don't use. There was a period when they called themselves medicated, which is, I suspect, not a legally enforceable, meaningful word.

Aizal medicated we had at my prep school, which was the hideously tissuey one, and bronco. they claimed to be medicated, what they were mitigated with, I don't know. TDT problem. The first package toilet paper was made by Gaietti, Joseph Gaietti, and he called it the therapeutic paper. Some were it named after Queen Victoria. What an honour.

Victorian brands of toilet paper, I just found a list of a few, and they included things like Bulldog and Sampson and Virilla, which is great. But there were also others called Victoria and Queen and Gloria Victus. Good. That's quite. Yeah. Can I tell you about one, because this is a Victorian invention. Oh, yeah. And a Victorian invention that actually was made that I had never heard of before.

But bifocals for horses. Do they got these? Really? So this was in the 1880s, 1887, someone went into a pharmacy and said, my horse has gone short-sighted. I'm a cab driver. I need some glasses. But the thing is, he likes to read the paper.

He kept walking into things. He's not going to. as many tips as he used to. And it was actually tried out, and there are pictures of this horse. There are photographs of this horse wearing these bifocals, which apparently it didn't like at first, but then it refused to go without them. And it got taken up by handsome cab drivers,

because what they actually did was make the road seem like it was rising up in the horse's face. And so they used to pick up their hooves much higher, and that looked, you know, that was quite posh. Exactly. Wow. So they started wearing them. So that actually happened. It actually happened.

By focal, as we know, were invented by Benjamin Franklin, weren't they? Yes. But not equine one. That's rather interesting. Another bit of a bizarre invention from the Victorian times. They used to, if you went to a pub or any kind of restaurant, the opposite of today, smoking, the smell of smoke was actively encouraged, and it made the place feel like somewhere you wanted to be, somewhere that was happening.

So a lot of the problem was if a restaurant started its day, it was not full of smoke. So someone invented an automatic smoking machine. The machine would have lit cigarettes. Sort of bellows. Exactly. And it would come out. And so the idea is that it would sort of cover the restaurants in this mist of smoke. And you'd go, oh, fantastic.

What a happening restaurant. Wow. Do we know if that got made? No, I mean, it got made, but I don't know if it was, I don't know if they made more than one. Oh, but they made a model of it. That is amazing. Yes, yeah. They used to have competitive smoking in pubs in the UK in the early 20th century.

Did they? Yeah. you would have a pipe and you'd have to keep it. Oh yes, that went on way to my lifetime. Oh, really? In America, they had it to, yeah. Everyone had an identical clay pipe. The whole point was it had to be sort of controlled.

The clay pipe had an identical quantity of pipe tobacco. And it was their job to light it and keep it going for as long as possible. And staggering how long. You or I would have just kind of be able to go out in seconds, but they would keep going for hours and hours, putting their fingers over the top of the bowl and just loads. It's a lost art.

It is. I was the very last pipe smoker of the year ever. Oh, way. Yes. It used to be a very popular thing. Every year there was a big dinner

at the Savoy Hotel sponsored by Alfred Dunhill who in those days were primarily tobacconists. Yeah. Fashion House, of course. But their shop in German Street was filled with huge jars of tobacco

and they were called your sort. Snuff and tobacco were called a sort. So you'd hear someone. come in and they go hello your grace as i come in for ever got any of my sort in at the moment and their sort would be a mixture of cavendish in these strange names that these particular types of tobacco had and um anyway i i uh it was actually q i it was the very first q i agreed to do uh an interview for for the independent i think it was to to publicize q i as a new program and um i went to the groucho club and at the time i had decided

to try and cut down cigarette smoking, but I always carried a pipe with me. I always loved smoking pipe, the first pipe of the day I really enjoyed. So I had a pipe, and I really felt like smoking, and at those days you could smoke anywhere. And so I lit the pipe, and the photographer was taking pictures on me,

and it was on the front of the Independent that next day or whatever the following week. And immediately I got a letter from the pipe smoking that shows how desperate they were. Finally! Because the old days they had Harold Wilson and Eric Morse. Hawkeham and all these kind of people who could be the pipe smokers of the year,

but it was running thin on the ground, Russ Abbott. And finally, and I said, well, I don't really regularly smoke. And they made me a special pipe, which I still have, which is in the shape of a BBC microphone. You can disassemble, like the man with the golden gun. Oh, wow. Apperators and turn into a pipe. Wow.

That's so great. Yeah. It was really, really fun. So are you technically the raining? I am. Yeah. Yeah, I think they gave a very special lifetime pipe award to the comedy writer Lawrence Marks,

who was also on the board of the Pipe Smoking Association. And obviously, we all deprecate smoking now, and I don't smoke anymore, and I haven't for 12 years, I think it is. But I sometimes think, you know, when I had a bit of a cancer scare earlier this year, I kind of think, well, if I got my death sentence, I would probably just order a pipe online and a great, you know, big, great vat of...

of tobacco and just carry on again. But I probably wouldn't actually. It would probably taste horrible in my mouth, but it's a memory of that. But I'm old enough to remember smoking cinemas, smoking in the tubes, smoking on buses, smoking absolutely everywhere, even in church. You know, there were grand families,

had their box pews with brass, brass, so the squire could have a cigar while listening to the sermon. But it was short, it was really, I mean, apart from pipes, you know, we think of Walter Raleigh, it was really Oscar Wilde's generation that made cigarettes popular and they were considered very decadent and extraordinary and that was in the 1890s but by 15 years later

virtually old 20 years later it was the middle of the First World War everybody I mean it was just everybody but we've only had about a century of it basically and now of course it looks weird you see people doing it in you know like again that Peter Jackson thing

you just saw all those Thomas smoking away I love those things which is like throughout all of history no one smoked and then for what hundred years, everyone smoked. And then for the rest of time, no one will smoke again. So it's just this, even though to us it's a normal thing, it's completely unusual

in the history of... There's that amazing moment as well that America experienced, and it's covered in an Adam Curtis documentary, Power of Nightmares, I think, that the documentary is called. And the idea was that they realized in America that it was only men smoking, and they needed women to smoke as well. Oh, this is Freud's brother-in-law, isn't it? Yes,

it is, yeah. And the idea was that they empowered the women of America to start smoking, saying that they were, Something like sticks of freedom or liberty. Liberty. The famous photograph of them, he paid for them to walk down Fifth Avenue with cigarettes. Yes. It's a very famous picture.

I think, yes, it's the same member of the Freud family who invented bacon and eggs, I suppose. That's right. Right. He was the father of the advertising. A father of healthy consumption. Of course. Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that in 1972, a Canadian D-Jew,

held a contest to choose a Canadian national simile like as American as Apple Pie. The winning entry was as Canadian as possible under the circumstances. So they don't know what similes are for a star. Yeah, this was a DJ called Peter Zarski

and he was a great Canadian broadcaster and he hosted shows for decades and lots of aspects of Canadian life he analysed and examined. And he hosted this. competition and a 17-year-old student came up with that slogan as Canadian as possible. And weirdly, Zarski, just speaking about smoking, he once wrote an essay called How to Quit Smoking in 50 years or less.

Brilliant. I like it. Yeah, humorists and Canada, lots of those Stephen Leekock, obviously is famous writing humorous, but all those comedians like Dan Aykroydon and Bramoranus and so many of them. Yes. Yeah, they have an unfair reputation, don't they? they for being dull, given that they, which I'm not saying

I believe, but it is a reputation they have. Is it? I think nice, nice but a bit dull. I remember when I first went to Toronto, years and years and years ago, and I called up my friend and colleague we were working together all the time then, Hugh Lorry, and he had never been at that point to.

And he asked what he was like, and I said, I think probably, I can best describe how Toronto is by saying that I asked at the front desk what attractions they were, to see and they said well there's a the Bally footwear museum down the street

and we laughed at that and then two days later I said I can give you a clearer idea of Toronto now I had nothing better to do than go to the Bally footwear but in fairness to Toronto it is improved enormously in that regard The foot museum or the whole city

he won the World Series twice in a row of the Blue Jays and it became a you know and now it's yeah it's a pretty I just spent three months in Niagara on the lake, which is a beautiful town, just right on the American border. Oh, really? And that was stunning. And they are very aware of how the world looks at them.

And they know that they're a bit over-polite and a bit over-s, you know. And do you find they are actually factually like that, aren't they? I mean, there was a study done looking at people's Twitter feeds, and it was only comparing American and Canadian Twitter feeds, but the preponderance of words on American Twitter feeds were negative things, so like hate and damn and bored and annoying. And then on Canadian feeds, they're all just saying words like favorite and gorgeous. Who even says gorgeous anymore?

Great, amazing. In Ontario, they have the Apology Act that came in in 2009, and that's because people apologise all the time. And their law now is that an apology is not allowed to be considered an admission of guilt. Because what would happen is you'd have a little car crash or something. Everyone would go, sorry, sorry, sorry. and they go, well, he said, sorry. That's an admission of liability, and of course it is just a natural instinct.

That's so good. Just on the boredom thing, there is a town in Canada called Okotokes. Has anyone been? No. Well, they had a slogan, a tourist slogan, and it was, there are a number of things to do in Okotakes. Very nice. And that number is zero.

My friend, John Sessions, did his. post-graduate doctorate at a university in Canada and he waxes very, very miracle on his contempt for some of the more dull sides of it. Back then in the 80s I guess or in late 70s even in his case

and I happened to be in Oxford at the Oxford I was filming there and there's the Oxford University press shop on the high or the broad or whatever and I was ordering the new Oxford English Dictionary the second to of the whole thing and it was there was a special price for for for early buyer of it and it wasn't in the shop it was in the Depository in Northampton and they would send it to any address and and it was I don't know 1200 pounds or something

It's a huge number of volumes of this massive dictionary and I was terribly pleased with it and then I was looking around and I saw One of those Oxford books of you know you have Oxford books of the quotations and so on this was the Oxford book of Canadian political anecdotes. And I thought, I must send this to John Sessions. It was insane. How could you fill a book with Canadian and the antidote? Anyway, I thought it was very

amusing, so I took it up to the front of the desk. And then who should come into the shop? Jeremy Paxman had been across the road at all souls having a lunch because he was doing a book on the British establishment. So we wott hoed and said hello and I sort of vaguely knew him. I said, look at this book

I've got here. So it's the Oxford Book of Canadian. in political anecdotes and he said, oh, he said, and then the assistant behind the desk said, that'll be 1,217 pounds. What?

And Jeremy Baxter could only see that book. He said, what? And I said, oh yes, very rare book. I mean, Canadian political anecdotes, Jeremy, come on. And he was going, are you mad?

And the assistant, bless him, he joined in and said, oh, yes, yes, very, very rare. So I signed it, and Baxman went off, pulling at his hair, doing all those Paxmany, sort of expression.

And then it wasn't until two years later. I was filming again in Oxford and I'd been asked to do this spectator diary, you know? And so I told that story in the spectator diary and about two days later I got this furious led from Jeremy Baxon. I have been dining out on how mad you are.

No, I discover. Something else Canadians are very well known for is saying A. Are you right? weather today, A, but not in that accent, in a Canadian accent. The Canadian alphabet A, B, A, B, A, B, A, B.A. Exactly. So the University of British Columbia has an official A-Lab, which is, it's their syntax of

speech lab, it's where you go if you want to study the linguistics of that kind of thing, and it's called the A-Lab. Oh, very good. Yes, and I think it's first, so it goes back a long time. It goes back to before Canada was a country at all, so 1773. It appeared in an Irish play and, you know, Irish people went to Canada and then it appeared in a book in the 1830s

that was completely littered with it. But, yeah, it's weird. Do we know why they might do that? So I think there's been a suggestion that there is a small bit of England where there's a similar inflection and I can't remember where it is actually but people took it from there.

Because the accent is not dissimilar as it creeps over the border into Wisconsin and North Dakota. You think of that movie Fargo and the wonderful Francis McDormon performance. They've got to question your police work there. Kind of it's got that similar kind of slight and there

the reason is supposedly the Scandinavian input into Wisconsin and that part there. They're all called Sorensen and in fact the Bill Macy character was called Gunderson I think wasn't he? They've all got names like that. The other thing is just the size of the place. Canada's fast. You think of America's

big but Canada fans out into a greater width and up into the Arctic circle. There's a great story isn't there sort of like a gap year where a woman writes to her sister who's Canadian and says, my son, your nephew's got his gap here and he'd be landing in Newfoundland. What if you could pick him up? And her sister lived in British Columbia.

So she sent her reply back, and why don't you, you're nearer. We are nearer here in Britain to that coast and to Labrador. That's so good. I was reading about lumberjacks, classic Canadian. I love that a female lumberjack is a lumberjill. I think that's a lovely term. But I've discovered there's a thing.

The clothing, I was reading about their clothing, and there have been lumberjack trousers invented, which I've never seen before. And the idea is that they are chainsaw proof. You can't chainsaw through them. And there are videos, yeah, on YouTube of lumberjacks showing you. And they all start the video by going, do not do this at home, do not do this at home, do not do it.

And they rev it up and the chainsaw gets going, and they just slam it down onto their trousers. And the fabric, it's eight layers of a plastic that are, there's a whole science video you can watch about the beauty of the science of how it works. And you can watch it immediately get chewed up in the trousers and stall the chainsaw immediately. It's extraordinary and scary. That's been the first person to try that. And yet it can sell a tree. Yes, exactly.

But imagine the facts of that, you know, you were going out and you're also lumberjack wife and put out your other pair of trousers that morning. Just off to them a filming, honey. Oh, great. Have fun. So I was looking up other slogans in Canada and place name slogans. So Ottawa launched a new slogan in 2001, and the slogan was technically beautiful. Despite what you're looking at. What they were trying to say is that it's technologically advanced to this great technology city.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, they responded saying, response to the slogan might be described as technically mixed. I do have to share with you just on the basis of that. Sorry to interrupt, but this thing of getting yourself a phrase, a logo, a, you know, a strap line, what if you want to call it, as a country, a city, a state. And when I was touring across all the American states for a BBC documentary years ago, you noticed every time we crossed the state line that they would say, welcome to Mississippi, and it would have its official name, you know, the Magnolia State.

and there'd be some phrase like come play or something like that you know and the one that I really wanted to congratulate was Kentucky Kentucky is probably known for two things I mean the bluegrass state is its official nickname but they wanted a kind of one that expressed what it was to be a Kentucky and you think of two things you think of the Kentucky Derby and you think of bourbon and they came up with a two word phrase that incorporated both that both of those two things And it's beautiful. Horse throat, because you'll have a horse throat if you drink bourbon, and they have lots of horse. It's unbridled spirit. Isn't that?

Isn't that? Genius. Whoever thought of that. Better than yours, Andy. I'd say, did it have the case of makers' march? Yours would have been runner up. It doesn't have been run better than horse throat. Good.

You've got the idea. They're weirdly interstate identity. aren't they though? And state slogans. And it really took off in the 20s and 30s, I think. And they've all got state symbols. And in fact, I've put down here Mexico, but I think I meant to write New Mexico,

because Mexico is not a state of America. New Mexico is the only US state that has, and it's legally enshrined, a official state question. And the state question is red or green. And do you know why? Is it a game show or something? No, it's because Chile is very important.

in their cuisine. And apparently, you know, you're asking a restaurant red or green, and that's what you go for. So they've got a state question. That's good. We could have, like, tomato sauce or brown sauce is the British one. As Danny Baker does on his show every week. And I embarrassed myself by saying,

I'm afraid I've never had brown sauce. And I wasn't making a point. I didn't disapprove of brown sauce. Many of my very closest friends who I admire regularly buy it, I just had never tried it at that point. Have you since tried it? I've never watched strictly come done soon.

It's just one of those things I've never got around to, and I've a very strong feeling I never will. It does upset some people because they're very excited. Did they bring you brown sauce to try? I have since tasted it, and it's perfectly nice. It's slightly vinegory for my taste. But it makes me cough a bit when you first breathe in, you know. I think it's because that's two quintessentially British things.

Yes. Stephen Fry and Brown sauce. It feels like they should be together, isn't it? Well, you see, this is it. Whenever there's a binary question, like, you know, tomato ketchup or brown sauce, immediately assume there isn't or say mustard.

Really annoy people. Some more Canadian things perhaps. It's very cold in Canada, famous. Well cold. Their coldest they've ever had is minus 62.8 degrees and that was in a place called Snag in Yukon. And the residents would walk around

like zombies because if they walked too fast they would get out of breath. And something to do with the way that the air went meant that you could hear things from a massive distance. So it's very, very dry air and very, very dense air at one point in. So, like, as in underwater, travel. Yeah, absolutely.

And it meant that you could hear people talking from five kilometres away. You could overhear their conversations. Oh, no, with a lot of fallings out. Neighbors bitching about people in the next town. You're walking so slowly that you can't get to them to say, hey. I have not put on winter wait, thanks very much. I did a film in Winnipeg once, and then, okay. gets to minus 40, which is very, very cold.

I told my father that, and my brother, who's there, said, is that centigrade or Fahrenheit? My father, who's a physicist, brilliantly came back straight away. So it doesn't make any difference. My brother was very cross about this. What do you mean it doesn't make any difference? My father doesn't make any difference. He said, but that's ridiculous.

Of course it makes a difference. And my father just happened to know and was not giving it away that minus 40 is exactly the same. It sounds great. And Farronite, it's the one point where they're identical. So when it's minus 40, it doesn't make anything. Which you're using Celsius or Fahrenheit. I hope he never revealed the reason.

No, he was the kind of person who, if you've got cold in the kitchen, would open the fridge, you know, like a true physicist. Oh, really? To warm the room up. And those of us who are superstitious about these things, we go, but surely he's going to make the room colder. You go, don't you know anything about thermodynamics? You can only make it warmer.

I was wondering about national stereotypes and across the world and how old they are, and partly because I'm reading, Martin Chalwick at the moment, which has amazing descriptions of Americans in it. And it's just so interesting that his descriptions are hilarious and exactly what you describe. Very satirical. It's so satirical. So it's brilliant. So one of my favorite scenes is where Martin has just gone to America, a spoiler.

And he's hanging out with Americans for the first time, and he's astonished at how much they eat and how fast they eat. And I just loved his quote that said, the poultry. There was a turkey at the top, a pair of ducks at the bottom and two fowls in the middle, disappeared as rapidly as if every bird had had the use of its wings and had flown in desperation down a human throat. He was sadly disappointed in America, though, Dickens, wasn't it? In as much as there's that wonderful bit in Chuzzewit. Do you remember, have you come up to it yet, the Water Tost Society? Yes, I'm just at that.

The Water Tose Society is an American Fenian Society, a home rule for Ireland society. And Chazard has invited him as someone who apparently believes in home rule for the Irish. All the Americans say how cruel the lion of Albion with its paws and its claws tearing at the throat of the free Irish and the Water Toast Society exists to spread the gospel of freedom for all people. And Chuzzlewick got up and said, yes, and I know you must all feel the same about your slaves and your Indians. And there was a terrible silence. Yes. And they burn the water toast meeting all down to the ground.

And the society's never heard off again. And as Dickens really having a go at the fact that Americans were all very good at saying how, Tut, tut, tut, look at you in Ireland. But the moment the torch was thrown back on them. Yeah, the hypocrisy of it is amazingly. Didn't he as well, just speaking of in the first fact about anti-counterfeit measures of the watermark, wasn't a large part of his life dominated by stopping the copying of his books and the reselling? and that took a huge part of his and a large part of his hatred for America again because that's where it was and he tried to get Twain and all sorts to...

Even his very famous book when he was a young man who had never been heard of and he was just doing the text to a famous illustrator and he did the text of the proceedings at the Pickwick Club and slowly it just took off and everyone said, who is this writer the right? Yes, the drawings are very nice but the writing. Before it had even finished its serenized form there were the Pinklewick Papers, the Piggywick chronicles. There were so many of the... these pirate versions floating around, and Dickens was always furious at that. Yes, yeah. I love the idea of sort of back alley editions of Dickens.

You think you're buying some uncut pickwick. You get at home and open the papers, and it turns out you've got some pinklewick. If you read the diaries of the James family, for example, Henry James and his brother William, the famous senior psychologist or psychologist, I mean, and the Alcots and all the New England literary families, they would gather together on a Sunday.

and the previous Saturday one of them would have gone down to the docks to get the latest dickens and they would arrive in bundles and they would be cut open and you would race home with it bring as many people around who are similar literary bent

or are excited and read the next chapter and it was like the most exciting thing and Henry James talks about remembering this as a boy sitting under the table and in particular the one that we now most laugh at or is probably least regarded as a great Dickens novel is at the old curiosity shop. Partly because of Oscar Wilde's famous comment

is that you have to have a heart of stone to read of the death of Little Nell without laughing. But they were so excited about Little Nell that there was a riot at the docks in Boston. Everyone shouting, is Nell dead, is Nell dead? And it was like, you know, later on there was the J.R. in Dallas and there have been such things and I guess people want to know what the finale

of this Game of Thrones episode is but really nothing touched that. Thank you. And am I right in saying? People on the ship actually announced it was even the point of taking it home and reading. Someone said... Total spoiler. Yeah, the ultimate spoiler.

Yeah, little male dies. Bill Hayden is the mole. Carla defect. Horrible experience for our listeners there. Don't broadcast those. You need to get a new captain of this ship. This guy is ruling everything. There's the narrator in the murder of Roger Ackroyd who does the murder.

Oh, God. The policeman in Hercorporeau's Christmas. Stephen, I'm going to put somebody unwined. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Chazinski. Yes, my fact this week is that the scholar who first discovered that the Noah's arc story predates the Bible, got so excited by it that he stripped off his clothes and ran naked around the British Museum. And this was just how thrilling it was. This was in 1853 and this amazing discovery was made,

which was basically the palaces of this great Assyrian king and the Library of Nineveh. And this person found them, and then this scholar called George Smith back in the British Museum, who was a very devout Christian, translated this tablet and realized this is the Noah story. And freaked out. And apparently took some clothes off and ran around the museum.

But it was fair enough because it was a big deal. Yeah, the excitement was so great for him. That was his only way of expressing. He wasn't a nudist, basically. It was just too much in the moment. I was certain he was completely starkers. I think you took off some clothes, some sources say, you know, maybe he kept as Willie in.

I tell you what, though, they get excited about things in very odd ways at the British Museum. I have a friend who James and I know, and I think Stephen you might have met him. He's called Irving Finkel. Yes, the great wedge, the Kuneiform. Cuneiform, yeah. And I was behind the scenes with him at the museum,

and he showed me a sort of a cast of the tablet, the Keneiform, Noah's Ark tablet, that he used to study because he actually studied it further, decoded certain aspects of it that had not been seen before, which was the actual measurements from Noah's Ark, and they recreated it, which is amazing. But while we were sitting there, at the very beginning of our meeting,

he suddenly got an email and jumped up from a seat and he went quick, run, and we ran through the corridor. I was chasing him. Were you naked at the time? No, all bits of clothing. He's a magnificently bearded individual by the way. Yeah. So he sort of ran down the corridor and then he cut into the kitchen and we stopped.

What happened? And he said, there's just been an announcement. There's orange juice in the fridge for any member of a staff. And he said, you've got to be quick. Everyone gets to it before I do. And we quickly had two cups and went back into his room. That is classic academic. When I first went to Cambridge to do an interview at Cambridge,

I saw these two old dons in black gowns, and I thought I'll follow them, and I'll hear them talking about Aristotle or something really, really intellectual. And one of them was saying, no, no, it comes in a small packet about the size of a single play record, a 45 RPM record, and it's full of communeuted little pieces that come to life when you pour boiling water in them. And I assure you, it's singularly toothed.

A chicken noodle. The company is called Nore with a K, a silent K. And that's what they were talking about. They were thinking, wow, that's not what I expected. But it was very pleasing to something. So this academic, what was his name? George Smith. George Smith.

And was it the cognitive dissonance isn't quite the way? Was it the shock that the Bible might not, story might not be true or that it is true, but not as the Bible tells it? It's confusing because he was pleased. Whereas I would have thought, yes, how shocking. But I think it was almost like good. This is verifying that the Bible was the truth, perhaps. He was obsessed with these tablets. Yes.

Because, of course, the Greeks also around the same time, they had a flood myth, Dukalian Empire. Yes. And the same thing. They had a wooden chest. It's called in the way it's translated, but it might as well be called an ark, because an ark is a chest as much as it is anything else.

The Ark of the Covent is a chest, after all. It's a strange word. And so the Dukalion and Pira, Pira was the daughter of Pandora, the first woman. So it's a very early thing that mankind displeased the gods and they sent the flood. And Ducaulian and Pira survived because they were warned about it. And then when they landed, it wasn't on, well, we think now Mount Ararat, supposedly the Ark landed. Don't they say many people believe Noah's Ark was on Mount Ararat?

But it landed somewhere. And they were told by Athena, I think it was. They were told to throw the bones of their mother over their shoulders. shoulders and they didn't know what that meant and they were very confusing they said no the bones of her mother it's the stones mother earth so they threw stones and wherever pira threw a stone over her shoulder a woman sprang up her to the ground and wherever dukely and a man sprang up her so it's one of those you know autochthonic stories um but you don't want to take that literally accidentally but it's a similar thing of you know of a punishment and and and the um philemon and balkis stories is also another flood and so they exist you know they're least two versions in Greek myth, many other Mediterranean myths, Samarian, Acadian, I think. Babylonian, yes. I mean, I think these guys stole a lot from the Babylonians,

in fact, the Assyrians, so they probably got it. But, yeah, they all have been passed down from one another. Is it like that 5,000 BC was it when there was all those civilizations, the Mayans and all these cities suddenly were evacuated, these great, there seems to have been a plague that was common across early civilizations. How amazing is that that's passed down? Yes. And of course, yeah.

But this myth is particularly bizarre. So this is how the Assyrian myth had it in the library at Nineveh when they found it. And I didn't realize this is in the epic of Gilgamesh, so the very famous discovery, most famous discovery that was made there. And the belief, the story as it was told was that there was this huge flood. And before the flood, then God had delivered all his messages to people via these fish, these weird fish creatures. So they were right near the Persian Gulf. And the idea was these huge fish creatures. used to come out on the Persian Gulf in the day and they'd go and they'd tell the Assyrians what to do.

They'd be like, don't drink that, be nice to your mom, etc. And then this huge flood came and it basically poisoned the fish creatures so they never came back. And after the flood, there was lots of disease because floods will cause disease. And it was thought that was part of the God's punishment. And from that moment onward, the God stopped visiting them with these fish creatures. And so, yeah, that was the thing. And that was why you had to have human scholars who were the ones who then received messages from the gods via strange cryptic ways.

And in the Hebrew myth as well, it's the same thing. God provides a rainbow at the end of the, as a covenant, that he will not interfere again. So it also marks the slight withdrawal of God from the people of Israel, he's chosen people. At that moment, he's slightly more distant, apart from a few prophets.

It's like a show creator handing over, you know, Russell T. Davis to Stephen Moffert in the Doctor Who series. So is the vibe not, all right, fine, if that's how you want to do it, I'll leave you to it. Is it a bitter kind of God saying, fine, whatever, get on with it then? There's still some things that are punished. And in the same way that the real punishment is a transgression of Zenia in Greek mythology, which is the guest friendship and the honour you do as a host to a stranger who comes to your door.

And that's really what the story of Philemonobakis is about. And that's why they're visited with a flood because everyone in the village turns away Zeus and Hermes who appear as travellers, except this old couple who welcome them. And that actually is closer to the story of Lotton, his wife, in the city of the plain, Sodom and Gomorrah. If you remember, angels come, you're looking puzzled as if you haven't read the Bible. Front to back, many times.

That famous story is the way to do it, isn't it? You certainly have heard of Sodom and Gomorrah. And what happens is angels come, go to, they hear about what wicked city, the cities of the plain are at the bottom of the Dead Sea. still see signs when you travel down the road there to Jordan saying Sodom that way. It's very pleasing. But anyway, yeah, the angels arrived and were treated very, very rudely and even more rudely by one particular citizen of Sodom who wanted to know the angel.

And that is where the phrase to know them in the biblical sense comes from. In other words, you try to seduce this angel. Hence Sodomis, Sodomite and the whole idea that Sodom was this place, because that one reference in the Bible of someone who wanted to know the angel. And they punished the city with fire. And except for the holy couple, just like Dukkhanian and Berkes, who were, I mean, Philemonibikas, who were lot and his wife. And they were allowed to do. But they mustn't look back.

And it was exactly the same in the Greek myth. There's no new stories. They're all boys dealing with each other. Well, Stephen, you said that they have the rainbow at the end of Noah's. Yes, he sends that as a covenant, doesn't he? Yeah. He then, according to Genesis, he began to be a husbandman and, planted a vineyard.

Noah's vineyard, yes. Famously the first wine. He then drank the wine and was drunken and he was uncovered within his tent. So he basically, once he finished, he got drunk and got naked. That's what you do. Well, you see finally a story in the Bible to which everyone could have done a Noah. You know the fish creature that you're talking about? So I'm going off memory here, but depictions I've seen of it is it's a sort of reverse mermaid.

It's a fish head with legs. So it was a partial human. based thing and it's used as those ancient alien kind of things that that was a higher knowledge that was coming to educate and create these amazing civilizations at the time yet no one keen on that line of chat great all right there's no such thing as a fish man it's interesting though because of course all the evangelists who who became part of the temperance movement at the end of the 19th century believed everything in the bible but they had to they had to rule out wine and wine is unquestionably approved of throughout the Bible

not only is Noah the first example of it but Christ's first miracle is turning water into wine at the wedding of Canaan so it is clear and indeed obviously the last supper and everything that becomes so it's quite difficult to if you're to believe in all the Bible but decide that alcohol is

terrible because it clearly vindicated There's some translations where they changed it to grape juice and things like that yeah. Yes it's magic Bible. I imagine what kind of bore you'd have to be to make the Bible less sexy very well having to talk to these people

this guy George Smith who decipher the quinaeform so he's an amazing guy because he left education at the age of 14 he became an engraver of banknotes at the Bank of England so as a result he had an incredible

eye he could detect incredible details in banknotes that he was engraving that other people couldn't spot and also he was obsessed with these cuneiform tablets so he he, firstly, you know, he delivered this lecture saying the Noah's Ark story is a Hebrew adaptation of a much older story,

which created huge controversy because it was quite soon after, on the origin of species. It was another way of, it was another... Geology was also doing its damages to undermine everything. Yeah. Yes, was it Ruskin called Those Damned Hammers. Yeah. Chipping away at every truth that was understood. So he was kind of a controversial figure,

but then the amazing thing was, in this tablet that he had translated, of the Noah's Ark story, there was a section that was missing. There were about 17 lines that were missing from the tablet just ended there. And the Daily Telegraph offered a thousand guineas to whoever found this missing 11 lines of Kuneoform tablet. Obviously with him in mind because he was the expert. He knew all about it. And he went there.

He went to what is now Mosul, which is where the library. And it was where the library had been of King Senekerib. Is that it? It was Ashabana pal. Sorry, where the library of King Ashra Benapal had been. And he got to the site of the library. It was a huge site. It was about three miles across the whole city.

And so it was like looking for a, you know, it really was needle and haystack stuff. He looked and he went to the pit of the old libraries, the likeliest place he'd find it. And he found it had been used as a quarry and it was a complete mess of rubble. You know, different fragments from all over, all different centuries.

But he started looking. And the amazing thing was he found it. He found a tiny... He must have... Only he could have found it. Yeah, exactly. He found the 17 lines which completed the Noah's Ark story

and he brought it back. Did they see a naked man running back out of the quarry? Wow. Fabulous. Yeah. Imagine that feeling. Wow. Yeah.

And also, that's kind of a nice mirroring of actually what happened in terms of collecting the information for the library at the time. So in the Assyrian culture. So this is like 3,000 years ago and Ashabana Pal wanted to collect all human knowledge ever at that point.

And he'd collect all these tablets and got scholars to write them. And if there was something missing, he'd say, oh, there's this story that I've heard about and I don't have it. He'd put a call out to everyone in his kingdom saying, everyone go hunting. So all the Assyrians knew what he was looking for, and there'd be a reward, and they'd just go scouting out for it and bring it. And it's one of the biggest kind of kingdoms that had ever existed, right?

It was all of North Africa, all of Middle East, all the way across. Yeah, it was huge. And Seneca was after him or before him? Before him was his father, I think. He was destroyed. There was that famous Byron poem, isn't there? The destruction of Sinakrabah. The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold.

His co-weds were shining in scarlet and gold. Oh, really? How was he, what he was killed? That's called the destruction of Sanakarib, I think. Oh, really? Someone listening will know. Aren't the Assyrians named after Noah's grandson? Isn't Asherian?

Asher. Isher? Isher. Isher. Isher. Isher. Isher. And that's where Assyria or Assyrian comes.

comes from. So there's staring us right in the fresh. Cemite is from Shem, of course, seamite. So, and as in Hamsham and, and if you're anti-Semitic, technically it means you don't like Arabs as much as anything because they are before the split from between Abraham and Ishmael, who were the patriarchs of the two different peoples. There was Abraham and Ishmael. Ishmael went out and founded the Arab people, as it were. And Abraham was the patriarch of the Jewish people. Wow. So you're even more prejudiced than you actually thought

if you say you're anti-Semitic. They also had with the kineiform tablet something interesting. They were used constantly, so they wouldn't fire them and make them a solid because they wanted to reuse them. So once a tablet had been read, they could remold it and make it better. But what that meant was if they were ever attacked,

the Assyrians, and let's say their places were burnt down, by burning down their libraries, they were actually preserving their information because the clay would be fired up. Baked. Yeah. So they would be bent. The information into it.

That's the whole reason. The whole library and innervert, the reason it survives is because of that. It's such a funny irony. And it's such a good thing because the Assyrians were eventually taken down by the Babylonians. And the, I think it's, they're like from the Iranian area, current day Iranian, the needs. And the Babylonians, yes. Meads, yeah. Meads. Meads. Meads and Persians were the two groups that made up the Karmor Iran. As in Dorothy Park is famous remark.

One man's mead is another man's Persian. Oh, well, maybe she'd argue. I think it, I can't remember who was saying this, but the Meads weren't particularly cultured. So the Babylonians would have taken these tablets and preserved them and gone, I'm going, my God, this is learning. But the Meads just went, sod it, let's burn the whole thing down. And then ironically, they managed by doing that to completely preserve them forever.

So in your face, mees. And they're so revealing, aren't they, about what it is to be human. Because like almost all ancient forms of writing, 95% of it is taxation and accounting and storage of grain. But then you get this fabulous bit that Irving Finkler is so excited by the children's, the equivalent of the exercise book, where you have the little clay tablets that he has in the British Museum, which you can go and see,

which are children writing insults about their teachers. That's not practicing. I mean, it's just delicious. Yeah. Real insight. It's just fabulous. There is one story, which I haven't found any. I've found it in one source only, and it's, so I think it's not true,

but it's of a clay bottle, and there was an apprentice at the British Museum. who would not rest until he had deciphered this inscription on the bottle, and it turned out to read, please replace stopper in bottle. I'm 90% sure it's a joke. It's like that wooden post that had Tote Emel Esto written on it, four letter words, Toti Emul, E-M-U-L, E-M-U-L, E-O-E-O-E-M-O.

And it sort looks Latin. Simul, it's a white emol, but E-O-T-O-O-E-T-O is not quite. right, late Latin, maybe pig Latin might have esto, toti, or something, and someone pointed out and said, no less, to tie mules to.

Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that the rarest frog in England has a distinctive Norfolk accent. Very pleasantly now. I've heard of birds having local accents.

That's a frog. Well, actually, there's a... I'm sure you can tell us about the Californian Western literal frog. Oh, the one which you hear in Hollywood. Yeah, the only frog that actually goes ribid. Because it was used by sound recordists to do backgrounds for the jungle and everything, wasn't it?

Is that right? That, I believe that. I think I saw that on QI was. I think it was on QI. That's my memory. So this is the northern pool frog. It was extinct in England, in Norfolk, and they found out doing 10 years of research that they had this distinctive call, which is common to the Norfolk area.

It's a unique accent. And that and some genetics made them realize that it was endemic to Norfolk, which meant that they could bring it back. And they've just recently put it back into some pools in Norfolk. Wonderful in the broads or the fens, presumably. Yeah, in the broads, yeah. I'm very satisfied. And does it bear any resemblance to the human Norfolk accent?

It's just a slightly deeper rivet, I think. One single comment about it being fond of its sister than most. And I will be very cross indeed. So humans can tell if frogs are excited or not. This is a really interesting thing. So humans can tell basically if almost all vertebrates really are excited or not. So this was an experiment done by a scientist. They played recordings of aroused and non-aroused frogs.

And aroused just means not sexually. It's not sexually. Yeah. Nervous. Yeah. something. Exactly, yeah. And this was people who spoke different languages as well. So it was, I think, some English and some Mandarin and some of a third language. And 90% of them could tell which the aroused ones were. And the reason that we think this is is because we think there are universal vocal elements. So when we're excited or as we speak higher and faster, and frogs do the same thing. So we think there are vocal signals that are the same, even in different taxa. which is weird but frogs are a sort of

index species for all kinds of the health of wetlands and everything and there are tens of thousands of and there's a there's a rani whatever it is a rani form virus at the moment that's threatening from everywhere I believe

absolutely Arabisad yeah yeah they're all dying out like everything is and also we're running out of ponds yes in the UK let alone yeah it's natural wetlands the good old suburban ones do you mean

yeah there are half as many ponds in the UK than there were 50 years ago. Really? Norfolk has lost 8,000 ponds since the 1950s. Have you known my parents have a pond in Norfolk? Excellent. Does it have frogs? It does have frogs and they'd frog spawn and it's always rather amazing and they try and protect the frog spawn from the various predators that like to eat it.

But if you combine two ponds into one larger pond, you have technically destroyed a pond. So is it possible there are... It's just one massive lake. I know it seems unlikely, yeah. I don't think that's what's happened. I don't think Norfolk is now one huge lake. and no other ponds. When I was a boy, definitely, I mean,

sort of virtually, I don't my brother and I have, you had nothing better to do, would go and hunt for sticklebacks and nukes and all those sort of creatures. Well, every village would have a pond, and most farms would have a pond, because it's where you would get your water from. That's right. Yeah, like a Titty-Tibang-Bang one, you know,

the one that Truddy Scrumptious gets stuck in her car, that sort of one, you know, with ducks. Was it in Norfolk where there's that myth about a lake where the reflection of the moon is in it? And the myth was that they used to tell visitors to the area that they've been trying to catch that big white thing in the middle of the lake for years and they should have a go because they just couldn't get it and it was their trick they played

I think it's in Wiltshire and Wiltshire potato potato and Somerset It's one of those ones that's in whichever country you happen to be talking about Don't confuse Norfolk with the language with Norfolk Which is N-O-R-F-U-K which is a language spoken on Norfolk island Oh Oh, just off Australia. In the Pacific, yeah.

And it's a blend of 18th century English and Tahitian. Is it? That sounds good, doesn't it? Don't confuse it. Do you think people are showing up? Hey, you got a light bulb? That's the wrong action for it. On the Bald City.

You know where you can find a Norfolk accent, not in Norfolk, is in parts of New England. Because so when the Pilgrim fathers went over and said there, a lot of them are from East Anglia, a lot from Norfolk. And there are certain quirks of the accent, New England accent, that are only seen in Norfolk. So I think, and a few phrases. One of them was good on you, apparently.

Good on you. Another one was, how much did you give for it? As opposed to how much did you pay for it, which apparently is a quintessentially Norfolk thing. And the do you, the, I don't know what that sort of progressive presence is really peculiar. Do you not as a question, but as an invitation or even a command? Do you sit down, meaning sit down? Yeah, that's weird.

You come in. Do you come in? Oh, you must be cold. Do you come in. That just means come in. Yeah. All there's do, meaning if, which is a very strange Norfolk thing. You want to come in, do you'll get cold. Really? The do means if you don't. Oh, my goodness. Oh, wow. Lest. Yeah. And my sister's nanny was from Norfolk and she, I used to enrage her. No, not really. She was over. But, you know, sort of tease her and things like that. And she said, you stop behaving, do, I'll tell your father.

do I'll tell you oh really it's very extraordinary I read a really funny blog on the British Library website so the British Library

have done this amazing thing which is they want to preserve dialects before they all disappear so they've got loads of volunteers over the last few years

to go and record things that they say in their own local dialect and they've kept these recordings so you can go online it's brilliant go to it

it's called the evolving English word bank but it's really great the only problem with it is the kind of people who are going around the British Library and volunteering stuff

are you can tell when you listen to the recordings they're not the kind of people who are using the street slang of the modern day so you have a listen to one it's so good it's this obviously really sort of learned, nervous sounding nerdy old man says I've got two examples of words

that like preserved that are used by pupils at a school in Oxford where I'm from the first word is bear spelled B-A-R-E which now means a lot and the second word is jokes, that is jokes, which is now used as a word meaning fun.

And then he gave an example, he said, so a pupil in school recently wrote, I am a seed, he was learning about germination, I am a seed, and when it's winter I don't sprout because there's bear, snow on the ground, but if I wait until it's warm, everything will be jokes. And it's just if that's what's preserved as how people are using bear and jokes in the future. That's wrong. There is an amazing book, which this is more just for people listening right now. Susie Dent.

Oh, wonderful, Susie Dent. Yeah, she wrote this one. Yeah. She wrote a fantastic book recently, which was she went to every sort of, she went to hang out with builders and people who work and transport. And the current slang being used by all of them, she documented down in this book. So it's sort of fresh slang preserving a time. It's really beautiful book. Oh, good for her.

Very important, that. Because I love books on Thieves Can. and those sort of slangs of the 17th century and onwards. And I want to just memorialize the great Dennis Norton because you reminded me of a story he told. You remember the great comic writer and who died in his late 90s just recently. He told me this fabulous story. When he was at school, he had a very good English teacher,

very advanced for his day. I mean, this is way back in the 20s and 30s, 20s, I guess. And he said, right, we're going to do words. that reinforce meaning class and they're going to reinforce what so. You know, London, it's a pretty poor ordinary school in the East End where Dennis grew up and he said

I'll illustrate this by telling the story of these two road builders navvies, you know, and one of them sees a poster on the wall and it says, one man, one vote. He goes, what's that about it? And his mate says, well, I mean it means one man one vote, didn't it? I don't get it?

One man, one vote. How does that? I don't say that it means you got one man? He's got one boat. No, I, now I stumble out going to. One fucking man, one fucking vote. Oh. That's amazing. Good way to seem cool in front of your pupils telling that story.

As soon as you drop a swear word as a teacher, you've got their respect. Yeah. Well done. Because every generation thinks they've invented it. Yes. That's the extraordinary thing. You know, the idea that one's grandfather was saying, the F word all the time in the trenches.

Which I remember being so shocked by and I read all goodbyter to all that, you know, the Robert Graves. And he thought he'd heard all the swearing he could ever hear at school, you know, in the showers as it were, after the rugby game. And he said the first moment he was, you know, training with other cadets and listening to NCOs and Sergeant Simmel. He'd just never imagine people would swear that much. Grown arms.

And of course that's, you don't see that. Yeah. It's a sanitised version, just as you don't see them wiping their bottoms away, shouldn't you? We've got better things to do, obviously. But it is important to remember because certainly someone of my generation thinks of the First World War as one's grandfather's generation. Obviously, most people listening are far too young to that. There'd be your great-grandfathers, possibly even great-great-grandfathers.

But I knew people. At my school, there were people who fought in the First World War. And to my eternal shame, I remember this man, Mr. Sorden, who shook his hands all the time and slightly gaped with his mouth. and he was the brother of the headmaster's wife. And we teased him mercilessly. And then one day, one of the masters said, you do know, he won a military cross in the First World War.

It was one of the bravest men who will ever meet. He was destroyed by watching a whole trench of his friends blown up in front of his eyes. And I just remember thinking, oh, dear. I was mocking him and doing his early imitating. Yeah. Trembling hands. And so you think of them as a very extraordinary generation, but you don't think of them as just like us.

It's so important. We do think that. They did swear. They did live colorful lives as Peter Jackson shows. Literally colorful in a sense. Yeah, that was brilliant, wasn't it? Peter Jackson thing, if anyone didn't see it.

It's amazing when you see war suddenly with a blue sky. Yes. Yes. So counterintuitive, you just thought it's going to be mucky and dark. But, yeah, they fought on sunny days. We should wrap up shortly. We can. We can do one last thing.

Go on, Andy. Yeah. Got a frog. cool frog and I didn't want to mention the frog. Have you heard of the northern spring peeper? No. Okay, so it's very cool. It's

it lives in ponds and the temperature frequently drops below freezing problem but the frog hibernates and it has a, it has evolved a way to stay alive while it has frozen. The temperature inside it, if it gets to minus two or three

Celsius, the frog can survive because the water inside it is super cool. So it's still liquid. If it gets any colder than that, it's still not a problem. The water under the frog skin freezes, and its stomach becomes a solid ball of ice. So about half the water inside the frog freezes. It can survive for a week like this. And it's because, so normally the problem is you get ice crystals inside your cells and the cells rupture and you die.

That's, you know, what happens. Yes, yes. As soon as the ice crystals start to form inside the frog, the frog's liver goes into an emergency rapid response. it produces a load of glucose and it spreads it throughout the body and it prevents the crystals forming in the cells but the glucose levels in its core organs shoot up 50 times as much as soon as the first-size crystal forms the frog's liver goes

ah we're freezing react I wonder if you get an alcoholic frog who's got liver damage whether it's less good a bad Incipient diabetes as well Wow well I'll I mean I've got a story to tell about a frog And it is your compass because it's really not very very sound. But it's

a librarian who's busy and she a hen comes in into the library and goes bock and the library thinks okay and grabs a book

and gives it to her and the hen goes off and then the hen comes back really quite you know a few hours later and goes bock bok bock it gives her three books

and two under one wing and one under the other and off goes the hen and then the hen comes back and goes bok bok bok bach and it dumps the three books that had been given and so she gives another six

books and it's lunchtime and the library thinks I've got to see this extraordinary literary hen and follows it down the street down little alleyways and then up up into a door and the door's left open and so the librarian watches the hen with these books tucked under its wing going

all the way up to the top of the stairs and into a room the door's closed but the librarian kneels down and looks through the keyhole and there on the bed is a frog with a little spotty bandage around its forehead and a thermometer in its mouth and the hen takes the muddraud and reads it and then hands a book to the frog and the frog says red it oh that's a fantastic fact to end on um who story okay that's 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 andy at Andrew Hunter M. James. At James Harkin. Stephen. At Stephen Frye. I get some followers

after this. I'm hoping. And Chisinski. You can email podcast at QI.com. Yeah, where you can go to our group account at No Such Thing or go to our website, no such thing as a fish.com where we have all of our previous episodes. You should also go to bookshops and to Amazon

and wherever you can get books to get Stephen's new book, which is Heroes. It's the story of the Greek myth. It's an amazing book. And yeah, definitely get it for everyone for this Christmas. That's all right. Okay, that's it. We'll be back again next week.

We'll see you then. Goodbye.